No Longer Yours:
Aspects of Slavery and Freedom Seeking in North Carolina

Earth-Family- Adoption, Extended Family, and Surviving

The sale of family and the movement of enslaved people were frequent enough for the enslaved community to develop a proactive response to sale or death through a mutual aid system, and sometimes the enslaved person left a verbal will for those who should take care of their children. The loss of a parent or guardian could make children feel isolated and alone. The slave community had to “work against isolation,” as it could lead to individualism. As a result, children without parents were adopted into another family, or the closet kin took over guardianship responsibilities.
James Curry’s mother took in other children. Curry noted, 

“Among the slave children were three little orphans, whose mothers, at their death, committed them to the care of my mother. One of them was a babe. She took them and treated them as her own. The master took no care about them. She always took a share of the cloth she had provided for her own children, to cover these little friendless ones.”

The extended family was, first and foremost, a survival technique. The family was critical to the survival of enslaved persons. Even adult enslaved people who did not have families or was sold to a plantation without family often “lived in common with others.” The mutual aid grounded the slave community and in a society that set blacks, in general, and enslaved people, in particular, outside of the “human” family, enslaved people had each other. 

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