Tuckey Buzzard Lay Me

This chapter examines sexual exploitation and violence in the antebellum South and what it meant for an enslaved person to have a white father. Evaluations of white fathers varied considerably depending on how that father treated his illegitimate offspring, how slave communities treated mixed-race children (which also varied), and an individual’s sense of identity, which was tied to these other factors. Biracial children at times expressed admiration for the few white fathers who openly acknowledged their children and provided freedom and education. They tended to be more ambivalent about white fathers who offered a privileged status on the plantation but not freedom. African American communities expressed particular disdain for white fathers who violated paternal duty by abusing or selling their own children. Reactions to white fathers highlight slaves and former slaves’ consistent notions of paternal duty. African American communities understood that white people had a monopoly on concrete power, but that did not mean they had honor.

Missing Ingredients

This chapter examines how an African American woman born in 1899 to a black mother and white father, taken by the father's family from her mother, and brought up in a white household, negotiated her place in the racially complex society of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The chapter begins with her recipe collection and moves to her most remembered speciality – yeast rolls. The chapter then explores the place of this bread in contexts of identity, reputation, remembrance, and race.

The White Father: Denial, Paternalism and Community

I argue that one of the reasons why the federal government did not listen is that to listen to these stories necessitates coming to an appreciation of how much the concept of ‘whiteness’ was/ is linked to the genocidal effects and paternalistic rhetoric of government policies regarding Aboriginal people. As I will go on to argue, in its refusal to apologise and in its casting of ‘mistakes’ into a dissociable past, the federal government seeks to maintain a particular view of whiteness that makes it possible to continue with an untroubled investment in it. I would like to revisit the archives and other texts in order to examine the story of the stolen generations from the perspective of an interrogation of whiteness. In particular, I would like to look at the role of the white fathers, both literally and figuratively in the form of government paternalism, with a view to counteracting the ongoing argument that it had ‘nothing to do with us or our parent’s generations’. I argue that dissociation from ‘bad white fathers’ and assimilation of ‘fellow Australians who are indigenous’ now forms the very conditions for Howard’s ‘community’.