7 biggest lies about blacks & love & sex

Ebony, June, 2003 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

By almost all modern accounts, slave marriages were extraordinary institutions, unencumbered by traditional White considerations of property and paternalism. In almost all cases, the bride was a worker who toiled in the fields with her husband and other males. She thus entered marriage as a free spirit (within the confines of a system of equality of repression) and she was free to opt out when she wanted to. The marriage she and her mate consummated was thus a love match in the true sense of the word.

Perhaps the biggest lie about Black love and sexuality is that slave men and women lived a riotous life of sexual debauchery. But a pathfinding study by Professor Herbert G. Gutman (The Black Family In Slavery And Freedom) destroyed that myth and established four points that are central to any consideration of the Black love legacy.

Most slaves lived in families headed by a father and mother, and "large numbers of slaves lived in long marriages," some for 30 or more years.

Fathers were strong and respected members of the family circle, and male children were often named for their fathers.

Premarital sex was fairly common, although the slave community expected a premarital pregnancy to be followed by marriage. The slave community was more open--and more honest--about sex, but it didn't approve or condone indiscriminate mating and begetting. There is corroboration on this point from Robert Smalls, a Reconstruction congressman, who told the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission in 1863 that "if a woman loses her husband, she mourns for him and will not marry for a year and a half unless she is driven to it by want and must have somebody to help her."

In slavery (and afterwards), slave marriage was buttressed by extended family grouping that extended over a wide range of relationships. Slave children, according to a number of sources, were taught to respect and revere older persons whom they called "uncle" and "aunt." It was customary for adult slaves to call each other "brother" and "sister."

The implications of this massively documented testimony are extensive. The Gutman study, based on plantation records, census reports and Freedmen's Bureau records, breaks new ground and underlines the need for a total revision of the traditional picture of broken homes, matriarchal families and unstructured sexual patterns.

There is additional evidence on this point from the behavior of husbands and wives at the end of slavery. According to contemporary witnesses, the roads of the South were clogged in 1865 with Black men and women searching for long-lost wives, husbands, children, brothers and sisters. Some of the searchers were successful, but many families were never reunited. In some cases, if we are to believe stories told afterwards by the freedmen, some Blacks entered into marriage only to discover later that they had accidentally married a brother or sister or some other close relative. This jigsaw puzzle of human components was never completely reconstructed, and it is almost certain that many contemporary Blacks are more closely related than they know.