slave life and resistance to the dominance of their masters. In their
daily lives they strove to reconcile the demands of survival with the
impulse to assert their autonomy. They struggled with persistence
and ingenuity to create and maintain a life of their own in a situation
where, in the nature of things, a large part of their lives could never
be their own. They hated slavery but could not maintain total hatred
of slave owners and their families. They could fight or take flight or
they could lapse into complete submissiveness, but for most of the
time most slaves steered a complex, devious, opportunist, occasionally
inconsistent, sometimes bewildered, often subtle course between
those two extremes. While bracing themselves to support the crushing
weight of the master's authority, they succeeded in creating out of
their African heritage and their American environment a distinctive
African-American culture and life-style, with its own institutions, its
own pattern of relationships, and its own communal bonds.

Lawrence Levine has highlighted some of the more acute paradoxes
of slavery for both masters and slaves.

Slaveholders who considered Afro-Americans to be little more than
sub-human chattels converted them to a religion which stressed
their humanity and even their divinity. Masters who desired and
expected their slaves to act like dependent children also enjoined
them to behave like mature, responsible adults. . . . Whites who
considered their black servants to be little more than barbarians,
bereft of any culture worth the name, paid a fascinated and
flattering attention to their song, their dance, their tales, and their
forms of religious exercise. The life of every slave could be altered
by the most arbitrary and immoral acts. They could be whipped,
sexually assaulted, ripped out of societies in which they had deep
roots, and bartered away for pecuniary profit by men and women
who were also capable of treating them with kindness and consid-
eration and who professed belief in a moral code which they held up
for emulation not only by their children but often by their slaves as
well. ¹

In their sharply different ways, whites and blacks, masters and slaves,
learned to live with slavery by learning to live a lie. They divided their
lives into compartments, did not prize consistency too highly, evaded
rather than confronted some of the inherent contradictions of slave

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