Black men having sex with white woman at parties

My friend Miranda has accompanied me here for moral support. We scale a no-frills metal staircase at the end of an alleyway behind the high street, where a weary blond woman is ruling a domain of coats, cash and lists. She has a defeated manner, like the only sober person at a party when everyone is drunk. I have no idea why I decided to make myself look so dowdy. Miranda is doing much better; she has obediently put on a basque, along with a skirt much shorter than mine, and boots that elongate her long legs.

A history of sex between white women and black men in the nineteenth-century American South is also the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in the United States. When in the U. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting marriage between people of different races were unconstitutional, sixteen states had such laws. Decades later, the legacy of this history remains evident, notably in the modern-day annals of white violence, in both North and South. Researching this book, I never found whole stories in the archives. Rather, I found shards and bones, parts of conversations, and laconic responses to frightening questions. Sometimes I wondered, why not write a work of fiction on the same subject?

Suddenly single at 52, I had a lot to learn about dating. But nothing prepared me for the casual racism. I had been with my partner for six years when she announced, abruptly, that it was over.

Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation.