W ith Beyonce’s look regarding the cover regarding the September issue of Vogue, the magazine features three issues with the superstar’s character for particular focus: “Her Life, Her Body, Her Heritage.” The language she stocks are deeply individual, and that last component offers a window as a misunderstood and complicated dynamic that affects every one of American history. While opening up about her household’s long history of dysfunctional marital relationships, she hints at an antebellum relationship that defies that trend: “I researched my ancestry recently,” she claimed, “and learned that I result from a slave owner who fell so in love with and hitched a slave.”

She doesn’t elaborate how she made the discovery or what’s understood about those individuals, but fans will understand that Beyonce Knowles-Carter is an indigenous of Houston whose maternal and forbears that are paternal from Louisiana and Alabama, respectively. Her characterization of her history sticks out because those states, like other people across the Southern, had laws that are stringent penalties against interracial marriage. In fact, through the entire colonial and antebellum eras, interracial wedding would have been the exclusion — even though interracial intercourse ended up being the rule.

Within the context of America’s servant culture, such relations as that described by the celebrity — and also the bigger system of cohabitation and concubinage, or involuntary monogamous intimate relations, by which they existed — have already been the topic of much study by historians. Continua a leggere →