A Terrible Intimacy

Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

De: Melvin Ely

From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory new account of slavery, recovering the lives of those who lived in small households, in close and intimate proximity to their enslavers

A white man hosts a wedding party for his enslaved servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer ends up dead after getting drunk with a slave; a slaveholder courts a Black woman owned by his neighbor and starts a family with her.

A Terrible Intimacy recounts six criminal cases in one Virginia county in the years preceding the Civil War. Witnesses of both races describe a startling range of relationships between white and Black.

Contrary to our common assumption, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in these households of five, ten, or fifteen people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and complex domestic dynamics. White and Black people drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend their right to own other human beings.

These relationships between slaves and enslavers make clear that white Americans recognized the humanity of Black people, even as they remained committed to a system that abused and often terrorized them. Offering striking new insights into the true complexity of life in the old South, A Terrible Intimacy reconfigures our understanding of this darkest of histories.

©2026 Melvin Ely (P)2026 Macmillan Audio