BOOKS:

...While Time on the Cross authors Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman relied upon com-puters and the skills of economic histor-ians to reach such positive conclusions about institutional slavery that one re-viewer dubbed it the "jolly institution," humanist historians were challenging new materials and asking new ques-tions...

...The manner in which slaves asserted their rights and the means by which they preserved their self-respect are themes which Genovese returns to throughout the book...

...No less concerned with black sources and slave society is George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Com-munity (Greenwood, 1972...

...Not inci-dentally, slaves frequently lived in single family dwellings and consumed their usually adequate food portions at fam-ily meals...

...A privilege or re-ward once granted by the master was frequently assumed as a right by the slaves-the right to garden plots, to free time, to work incentives, to elabor-ate funerals and weddings, to holidays, and ultimately and cumulatively, the right to shape their own world...

...The two books reviewed here support the judgment that it has been a profitable and bountiful decade for students of slavery...

...Rivaling religion for its supportive role within the slave community was the family...

...Adding to a new consensus, Genovese suggests "that the slaves cre-ated impressive norms of family life, including as much of a nuclear family as conditions permitted, and that they entered the post [Civil] war social sys-tem with a remarkably stable base...

...Religion was thus indispensa-ble in preventing the slave process from being complete...

...A few examples will suffice...

...Rice, which emerged as the staple crop of plantation South Carolina by the early 18th century, was not grown by white immigrants in Eur-ope or by local Indians...

...but the slaves added to the relationship "their own doctrine of reciprocal rights...

...Religion played a dominant role within the slave community, for while it developed as a vehicle of accommoda-tion it was also a tool of resistance and a means of sustaining self-respect...

...Acceptance of that paternal-istic relationship by both masters and slaves implied reciprocal duties (e.g...

...Genovese is at his best when pointing out the contradictions in the slave sys-tem...

...The norms were not those of a permissive and disjointed sub-culture but rather a community of assertive and loving mothers and fathers, of children who were allowed to play out their roles as children, and of a set of family and community standards which provided for orphans and the aged in a manner which left self-respect intact...

...Both were ignorant of such matters...

...It provided slaves with a "sense of their own worth be-fore God and man," the one thing nec-essary to prevent transformation into Sambos...

...Less speculative is the result of the juxtaposition of these two elements: during the pe-riod when rice began to dominate South Carolina's economy, "the African portion of the population drew equal to, and then surpassed, the European por-tion...

...When the tour is completed, we reflect, and come away convinced that the slaves did indeed go a long way in making their own world and did pave the way "for a separate black na-tional culture while enormously enrich-ing American culture as a whole...

...Most sig-nificant, Wood proposes that some of these skills may have been learned from the Indians or otherwise acquired in the colony, but most were "carryovers"- skills brought to the new world from Africa...

...Carolina's black laborers' awareness of their con- awareness of their con...

...South-ern laws defining slaves as chattel con-flicted with planter paternalism which made them not only human but part of the plantation family...

...Slavery there, at least during the pio-neer period, was not unlike what Geno-vese describes for the late 18th and early 19th century South...

...Nor are the slaves' neigh-bors ignored, those people with whom they interacted and on a day to day basis-overseers, yeoman farmers, lower-class whites, planters, plantation mistresses, and free Negroes are all sketched...

...they were also active in agri-culture and in the fur trade, particularly in negotiating with Indians...

...providing food, clothing and shelter in exchange for labor...

...but the contributions they made gave them a status and a numerical ma-jority which eventually prompted anxious whites to gradually structure chattel slavery into a rigid and repres-sive institution...

...The relationship between black la-borers and white rice personifies the contradiction...

...The foundation for Genovese's sym-biotic slave system is not racism, as it has been for many historians in the past, but rather it is a class relationship based on paternalism, which, he argues, by its nature recognized the humanity of slaves...

...Rejecting the thesis that Afro-Ameri-cans were stripped of their African re-ligious cultures while being forbidden full access to a European one, he con-cludes that they drew from both to produce their own distinctive pattern of religious beliefs...

...In Black Majority, which treats the development of slavery in the lowlands of colonial South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono rebellion in 1739, he proposes that Africans brought to that frontier area "distinctive strengths and skills" neces-sary for the survival and growth of the colony...

...slave religion sus-tained black self-respect, but it also was part of an accommodative posture...

...the strain of rice which finally generated a staple crop was also a probable African import...

...We are given an exhaustive, pro-vocative, and, at times, brilliant tour of the slaves' world: housing, food, cook-ing, clothing, jobs, working conditions, religion, education, language, morals, wives, husbands, children, concubines, Nannies, accommodation, resistance and revolution...

...While the slaves accepted paternalism and thus "an imposed white domination," "they drew their own lines, asserted their rights and preserved their self-respect...

...David Brion Davis will publish this year The Problem of Slavery in The Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Cornell Uni-versity Press), a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell University Press, 1966...

...Peter Wood is no less sensitive to the contradictions in slavery...

...John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life In The Ante-Bellum South (Oxford University Press, 1972), relied heavily upon pre-viously slighted black sources when writing about the community which bondsmen created and then successfully utilized as a buffer against harsher plantation realities...

...The knowl-edge and skills necessary for successful cultivation and harvest of rice in the Carolina lowlands most likely came from Africa...

...Cattle raising, which sustained the colony economic-ally until rice came to the fore, was dominated by slaves...

...they monopolized skilled jobs in the forest and related industries, in the building trades and in fishing and water transportation along the coast...

...They tended the cattle on open ranges, and butchered, cured and packed meat for export (in slave-built barrels...

...Gen-ovese devotes one of four parts of the book to "The Rock and the Church...

...African skills and an African crop generated an African majority in colonial Carolina...

...During the first generation of settle-ment and colonization, South Carolina was a frontier which required pioneer qualities of its laborers...

...Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll is nicely subtitled The World the Slaves Made, for that is the essence of the book...

...BOOKS Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1970 Through the Stono Rebellion PETER H. WOOD Knopf, $10 Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slave* Made EUGENE GENOVESE Pantheon, $17JO C. PETER RIPLEY The controversy surrounding Time on the Cross: The Economics of Amer-ican Negro Slavery (Little, Brown, 1974) should not obscure the fact that the past few years have been produc-tive for scholars of slavery...

...house servants were usually the best treated and most trusted, but they were frequently the first to desert the planta-tion during the Civil War and immedi-ately after...