I especially appreciate these two observations from Henry Wiencek:
* "[I]n the 1990s 'enslaved' was coming into wide use, and I initially
disliked the word as a trendy, PC affectation; but the more I thought about
it the more sense it made. It makes us stop, think, and realize that a slave
was not a slave by nature, but was actively compelled into enslavement ...
."
* "Slavery and all its infernal manifestations deformed our language and our
ways of thinking."
And I like Mr. Wiencek's adjective "subversive" for the quotation marks that
the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto calls "scare quotes" -- a phrase
that has its own Wikipedia entry. (Excerpt: "to distance the writer from the
material being reported, to indicate that it is someone else's terminology,
or to bring attention to a word or phrase as questionable ... .")
But because I assume, unlike Mr. Wiencek, that it is plainly obvious that
the book reviewer means the quotation marks subversively on the word
_owner_, I'm afraid I need help to follow Wiencek's judgment about their use
on the word _legitimate_. It seems to me that the reviewer, maybe feeling
trapped by residual denotative necessity, is indeed being subversive about
words that meant what they meant whether or not we like it, including in the
sentence now in question: "Liz has taken a musket ball to the head, killed a
dog with her bare hands and been captured -- not by 'legitimate' slave
catchers, but by a criminal gang run by Patty Cannon, an engaging
anti-heroine based on an actual person." Have any such brutal kidnappers
with any motivation or any degree -- or lack -- of legal authority ever been
legitimate under any standard besides the slavery era's perverted laws and
deformed ways of thinking? And aren't the book reviewer's attitudes and
opinions about that actually pretty clear? If not, then why didn't he simply
leave that crucial word unadorned?
Steve Corneliussen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Henry Wiencek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2008 11:13 AM
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Slave owner or slave "owner"?
If you take another look at the review you will see that, in context, the
quotation marks around "legitimate" are actually legitimate and have nothing
to do with the reviewer's attitudes or opinions. It is not quite clear to me
why the reviewer put the marks around "owner," but I suspect it is to
emphasize that the ownership of human beings was not just morally wrong but
illegitimate, in the eyes of the reviewer. So they're subversive quotation
marks.
As the author of two books about slaves and slavery, with a third on the
way, I wrestle with these linguistic problems every day. When I was writing
"The Hairstons" in the 1990s "enslaved" was coming into wide use, and I
initially disliked the word as a trendy, PC affectation; but the more I
thought about it the more sense it made. It makes us stop, think, and
realize that a slave was not a slave by nature, but was actively compelled
into enslavement by owners and the legal system. In my writing I use both
"slaves" and "the enslaved." I think the latter is very useful and
accurate. I know it puts some people off, but so be it.
As Doug Deal writes, "these are not simple questions." Slavery and all its
infernal manifestations deformed our language and our ways of thinking. In
writing about Jefferson, for example, what does it mean to say "white
Jeffersons"? Obviously, that's shorthand for "members of Thomas Jefferson's
family." But Eston Hemings (a slave, Sally's youngest son), was a Jefferson
(DNA proved it) and he was white--he passed for white. So are he and his
offspring "white Jeffersons?" This defies the common understanding of the
phrase, but it is literally true. The even simpler phrase "white people"
loses its clear meaning in slavery time because many people who were
enslaved were white. So we cannot use the phrase "white people" to denote a
class of Americans in slavery time who shared a common status, point of
view, etc. And we really can't retreat behind "you know what I mean" if we
want to be--have to be!--accurate.
Henry Wiencek
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