Jaunty Stevens Underwood: An American Line in Slavery, Law, and Kinship Volume I

Before she appears in any census, before her life is measured in dollars, debts, or court judgments,there was Jaunty.Born into slavery in the early nineteenth century, Jaunty Stevens Underwood lived at the center of anAmerican system that bound families together through law, labor, and forced intimacy. Her lifeunfolded across generations of the same households—Black and white—where kinship was created,denied, recorded, and contested, and where one woman’s life endured long enough to be named.Drawing on original archival research and DNA evidence, Jaunty reconstructs one woman’s life fromthe fragments left behind by slavery’s legal record. Moving from colonial Virginia to the Carolinaupcountry and into Alabama, the book traces how enslaved families endured sale, debt, inheritance,and migration—often remaining together even as the law refused to recognize them as such.This is not a story of abstraction or statistics. It is a human history of motherhood, survival, andcontinuity, told through the lives of women whose names appear only when property was counted,disputed, or transferred.Jaunty is a work of reparative genealogy and American history—revealing how slavery functioned notonly as an economic system, but as a deeply intimate one, shaping families whose descendants arestill reckoning with its legacy. This book restores Jaunty not as property, but as a life--American,documented and remembered. Read more