Under slavery, the basic conjugal units of father / mother / children faced constant pressure of disruption. Traumatic ruptures of kin emerge as a defining theme of this project. These recurrent trauma were experienced within distinct locales, at sites structured according to the needs and desires of powerful white figures. This section introduces five worlds, each with its distinctive texture and dynamic, which the main characters of this project inhabited.

The Lick Creek household assembled in the 1820s by Andrew Baskins Stephens offers both an originating story and tales that stretched deep into the 20th century. A spacious house lot in the nearby town of Crawfordville, founded in 1826, is then sketched, with an emphasis of the enslaved dependents of the Rev. Williamson Bird. Bird’s male heirs departed (along with a sizeable number of slaves in his estate) to the southwest cotton frontier, obliterating what had been a precarious community. Those who remained at Bird’s town dwelling developed new ties to Alexander Stephens, who had been a boarder at the house a full decade before he acquired it and tried to fashion it as a showplace of his hospitality.

In his regular journeys to Congress, Stephens relied on a series of Black Georgian men; the most notable of these were named Allen, Pierce, and Aleck. Those sojourners gave rise to a fascinating community that included a figure named Garland, who in 1860 successfully fled from his master, the Georgia Senator Robert Toombs.

The 1852 marriage of Linton Stephens to a wealthy plantation widow from Hancock County brought together a sizeable, fractious community of the enslaved. These labored at several cotton-producing sites adjacent to Sparta and then, in the 1860s, in the “Old Town” neighborhood near Louisville in Jefferson County, Georgia. Several of those under Linton’s sway regularly interacted with the Black dependents of Alexander Stephens.