In the wake of abolition and the Civil War, African Americans relied upon the family bonds that had been disrupted by enslavement. One way to understand the significance of this transition for families is through the exemplary story of Susan and Venus. Neither Susan nor her mother, Venus, married at the end of the war. Family was the two of them: an African woman, captured and smuggled into the South after the end of the legal international trade, and her mixed-race daughter. They lived as enslaved people, and then as free, in Alabama and Mississippi. Susan and Venus left their captor’s farm in 1865, immediately after learning of their freedom.

Initially, the two women worked together as sharecroppers. By 1870, Susan was working as a domestic.[1] She was an experienced child nurse, and had more work opportunities than her mother. Venus continued to sharecrop, and sometime during that decade, the two reunited and moved again, this time to the nearby hamlet of Enterprise, Mississippi.[2] Recalling the 1870s and 1880s, Susan observed how difficult it was for freed Blacks to succeed. 

This was a racially turbulent and violent period. “De Kloo Kluxes was out nights,” Susan explained to a WPA worker in the 1930s. “I heard tell about ’em whippin’ people.”[3] She also learned, probably from those in contact with the Freedmen’s Bureau, that Blacks were supposed to receive some kind of formal assistance. In the end, however, Susan decried that “dey never got nothin’ to my knowledge, ’cept de government let ’em homestead land.”[4]

Homesteading was why the two women went to Enterprise. Venus tried to take advantage of the Southern Homesteading Act of 1866. This act was meant to distribute public land to Black and white southerners who lived in Mississippi and other lower southern states.[5] It proved to be useless for the women since it was a full two years before Mississippi even opened a land office and much of the available land was unfit for cultivation.[6] Sometime before 1880, they relocated to Meridian.[7] The city’s location at the junction of two major railroad lines made it a keen spot for New South industrial development. It was a place where at least Susan could find steady work as a child nurse and domestic.[8]

Despite the economic opportunities Meridian might have offered, it was a dangerous place. In 1871, Meridian had been the site of a deadly race massacre where thirty Blacks were killed and numerous Black women raped.[9] Venus and Susan may not have been living there at the time of the riot. But they certainly had heard the stories of its racialized and gendered violence. They must have hedged their bets carefully. Should they remain in the countryside where they could not make a living and face lynching or rape without any hint of justice to be had? Or should they move to Meridian and at least have a chance at gainful employment? They chose Meridian.

The families of formerly enslaved southerners, like that of Venus and Susan, faced multiple and complex obstacles that sometimes kept them apart, undermined their livelihoods, and sometimes even threatened their lives. Still, most survived and some were even able to enjoy stable families. Venus and Susan are just one example of how dogged determination allowed for these success stories.