This chapter provides a challenge to enduring arguments about the unifying nature of resistance by enslaved people in the US South by emphasizing intergenerational conflict in the context of fight or flight. Scholars have commonly argued that, while not as likely to flee themselves, elders were elevated and praised for their roles as guides in offering advice and support – both moral and practical – or by simply upholding the solidarity of the slave community. This chapter reveals instead how elders were held up as negative influences by those who chose to fight or take flight. Whether in counselling against direct resistance, appearing resigned to bondage, or actively conspiring against rebels and runaways, enslaved elders could be portrayed by their younger peers as people who had been unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. These were men and women who had survived slavery, but they had not resisted, and this distinction had personal and political implications for contemporaries.

This chapter moves from physical contests to consider those who took alternative routes toward enforcing the respect they believed was owed to them in old age. Rather than rely on physical force, some elders wielded the cultural and spiritual force associated with conjuration, hoodoo, and root-work to solicit respect, even fear, from others in the community. This was a route available to enslaved women and men, and this chapter moves beyond the gendered dimensions of physical competition and age to address wider generational power dynamics in community life. Conflict presented in the context of conjure offers another window into – and reveals the significance of – intergenerational strife among the enslaved, and shows how age operated as a contested relation of power that ran alongside, but sometimes superseded, gendered beliefs relating to power and authority. The chapter shows the existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting belief systems that were understood as marked by generational differences, as well as the impact of this for notions of solidarity among the enslaved.

Enslaved people commonly claimed they sought to protect the aged from the excesses of their abusers, and were raised to respect their elders. Most scholarship on the topic reinforces this position, with an emphasis on support based on shared oppression and as a form of collective cultural resistance. This chapter, however, considers the consequences when enslaved people appropriated, internalized, or simply shared a belief that old age equated with diminished value and declining powers in work. Respect predicated on agedness was not always meant seriously nor received positively, and the transition to elder could be taken instead as an enforced relegation from the people one had once imagined as peers. The aged party sometimes resented and even resisted the imposition of such a label and its associated narrative, with such tension reflecting broader complexities surrounding age as a chronological, functional, and relational category and identity. People seen as elderly, but who struggled with this categorization of themselves, were forced to make choices – to accept, adapt, or to resist – and this could come at no little cost.

Leisure time and social affairs were of paramount importance for enslaved people; in these spaces they developed positive personal identities and meaningful relationships with others. The significance of competition in leisure activities, however, with its attendant emphasis on contest, and even conflict, meant the identities forged in these spaces were neither static nor fixed in time. Competition involves putting your reputation on the line and, regardless of any sense of shared honor through participation, to lose is to be publicly revealed as having been mastered by another. Enslaved people who had valued their physical prowess or mental aptitude as allowing them to demonstrate themselves as the best in the community might struggle in the face of challenges from younger rivals or simply from time itself. Younger members of the community might see in their elders a rival to supplant, and, in doing so, a hierarchy they might stand atop. Such conflicts demonstrate the necessity of intersectional analysis when exploring enslaved social dynamics and identities, wherein age must be incorporated as much as the well-studied categories of gender, class, and race.

In 1823, Bessy Chambers filed a complaint in the St. George’s slave court in Jamaica. Chambers, along with twenty-four unnamed enslaved people from the New Layton estate, charged that the overseer had forced her to work despite her pregnancy, causing her to miscarry. While her story contests notions of a benign system of slavery in its twilight years, the multidimensionality of Chambers’ gendered freedom claims also disputed the limiting vision of abolition reform for the enslaved, and for women in particular. Chambers and other enslaved women who had a long history of engaging in distinctly gendered struggles against slavery refused to accept the new subordinate roles abolitionist envisioned for them, although they could not always escape its oppressive reach. In going to court, Chambers revealed a right to self-determination as essential to her conceptualization of womanhood. Her pursuit of legal personhood must therefore be viewed as a dual fight against slavery and the restricted freedom abolitionists proposed.