Aspects of Slavery and Freedom Seeking in North Carolina
Earth-Family- Adoption, Extended Family, and Surviving
James Curry’s mother took in other children. Curry noted,
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.“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.”