The Slave History You Don't Know

Last year, when James F. Brooks was an assistant professor of history at the

ALSO SEE: Colloquy Live: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with James F. Brooks, the author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, about the book, which recently swept the top awards in history.

University of California at Santa Barbara, he published Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press). Around the time the book appeared, he got tenure.

The very day he learned of that decision, Mr. Brooks made one of his own. Politely declining the promotion, he finished the semester. Then he moved with his family to Santa Fe, where he became director of the press at the School of American Research -- an institution with a puzzling name, given that it has neither faculty nor students.

It is, rather, a think tank for interdisciplinary studies in the humanities and social sciences. Resident scholars and visitors with fellowships discuss topics such as bioethics, material culture, and the slippery concept of community. Showing a visitor around the adobe buildings on the property, Mr. Brooks seems quite at home. Santa Fe figures prominently in his work on Southwestern history. And the school's interdisciplinary focus is very much in keeping with his scholarship -- which has, over the past few months, won him sudden acclaim.

This spring, Captives and Cousins made an unprecedented sweep of the history profession's top prizes. Mr. Brooks received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, honoring the work of a first-time author writing on an important aspect of American history. He shared the Bancroft Award, given by Columbia University each year to two authors of distinguished works in American history and diplomacy. (See "Verbatim" for the other.) His book also received the Francis Parkman Prize, given by the Society of American Historians "to promote literary distinction in historical writing."

Winning the Parkman automatically makes Captives and Cousins a selection of the History Book Club. "I guess that means my book will sell two more copies," says the author in a sardonic moment, "since it's not about the Civil War or the Nazis." Indeed, his topic has almost completely disappeared from America's historical consciousness, not to mention its coffee tables. Captives and Cousins reconstructs more than four centuries of the slave economy taking shape in the deserts and flatlands of what is now the Southwestern United States.

Accounts of slavery in America tend to begin in 1619, with the first shipload of Africans sold in Virginia. "People think of it as something that mostly existed in the Black Belt," says Mr. Brooks, referring to the region of the Deep South where African slaves worked the land. "And people assume that it ended in 1865." But a different form of bondage emerged in the 1500s, when Spanish invaders encountered the indigenous people of North America. A "distinct slave system," as Mr. Brooks calls it -- similar to chattel slavery in some ways, but distinct in others -- grew out of ethnic conflicts and commercial exchanges in the region that came under Spanish influence. And it existed until well after the Civil War.

Captives and Cousins is so recent that only a few reviews -- overwhelmingly favorable -- have appeared in scholarly journals. But something of the enthusiasm it generates among readers may be discerned from the comments of Catherine Clinton, a scholar at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, who says her policy nowadays is to ignore every new publication she possibly can while finishing her own book on Harriet Tubman. While staying at a friend's place, Ms. Clinton noticed a copy of Captives and Cousins and started to glance through it.

"Because I'm under deadline," she says, "I don't read anything unless it is directly related to my research. But I opened up this book and could not put it down. I was just knocked out by the fact that someone could be writing about slavery in such a new and totally fresh way that expands our horizons geographically and chronologically. It's so rare that you get bowled over by a work in your own field."

Virtual Unknown

In the 44 years that the Bancroft, Parkman, and Turner awards have run concurrently, it has occasionally happened that a single book received two of the prizes -- but never, until now, all three. Until winning this triple-header, Mr. Brooks was unknown beyond the circle of those interested in Southwestern history. At the annual convention of the Organization of American Historians, in April, scholars wondered just who this prodigy might be.

Bits and pieces of an answer emerge from conversation. At 48, he is not, strictly speaking, a young scholar. Yet he is still at a fairly early stage of his professional career, having taken some detours on his way through academe. Mr. Brooks grew up in Colorado, where he lived and worked on a ranch. He got his GED after dropping out of high school, then went to college. But his undergraduate studies were interrupted for about 10 years as he built an advertising and graphic-design studio in Boulder, Colo.

In his early 30s, he sold the business and finished his B.A. at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1989, he entered the history program at the University of California at Davis, where his dissertation was an early version of Captives and Cousins. He spent some postdoctoral time at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., among other places, and won a number of prizes for his scholarly articles. His decision to leave the professorial track at Santa Barbara to enter the world of academic publishing -- motivated in part, he says, by Santa Fe's lower cost of living -- seems even more anomalous given that he continues to conduct the occasional seminar at his old department. Mr. Brooks may well be the only academic ever to pass up a tenured position in order to become an adjunct at the same university.

"I always chafed against the 'gotta write the book to get tenure' rule," he says. The narrative finesse with which he handles archival material in Captives and Cousins seems almost like a reproach to the familiar plodding style of much historiography. So does his extensive use of material from anthropological journals. "The political economy of academic life rewards specialization," he says. "But I found that the kinds of questions historians asked seemed boring, while the ones that anthropologists asked were a lot more interesting."

A Different Kind of Slavery

It was, Mr. Brooks says, a French anthropologist's analysis of slavery in Africa that opened his eyes to how the culture and economy developed in the American Southwest. In The Anthropology of Slavery (1986) -- which Mr. Brooks read after the University of Chicago Press published it in English translation in 1991 -- Claude Meillassoux provides a neo-Marxist interpretation of slavery that challenges many of the assumptions that grew out of the experience of the Atlantic slave trade.

The chattel slavery practiced in the American South defined the slave as, in principle, an object available for sale -- to be purchased as a source of labor. But the notion of the slave as commodity, said Mr. Meillassoux, worked only in a society characterized by advanced market relations. It didn't apply very well to cultures in which slaves tended to be prisoners taken in combat. Besides their labor, those slaves had symbolic value as proof of a tribe's power and honor.

Or rather, the honor of its men. For, as Mr. Meillassoux's analysis suggested, the role of slavery in Africa was ultimately inseparable from the rules governing gender. Male authority was exercised over both enslaved captives and the tribe's "kin" (the women and children). An enslaved captive might even be transformed into kin, through marriage or adoption -- unlike the situation on the Southern plantations, where the line between master and slave was fixed and immutable.

The interaction of violence, honor, and kinship in African slave systems struck Mr. Brooks as key to understanding the zone of contact between the Spanish and Native American groups in the Southwest. Well before the European invasion of America, the lives of indigenous peoples often included the practice of raiding, with members of one tribe enslaving the women and children of another. The importance of the captives went well beyond their ability to toil -- or even their value as status symbols. Slaves provided valuable information about the language and way of life of the tribe from which they had been kidnapped. The captors might ransom slaves back to their kin -- an exchange that could also serve as the occasion for other useful economic transactions, to the advantage of both groups. Or a slave might be fully assimilated into the captor tribe.

"It sounds like 'soft' slavery when an enslaved person can become kin," says Mr. Brooks. "But it actually perpetuates the system. When a slave becomes kin, you lose that unit of prestige that comes with ownership. If you intend to remain a high-prestige person, that means you have to go get more slaves."

Familiar Territory

When the Spanish arrived, they were by no means shocked at the indigenous captivity system. On the contrary, it was the one thing about the New World that looked familiar. In Spain, Roman Catholics and Muslims alike had been seizing captives from one another for generations -- according to analogous codes of manly honor -- resulting in similar forms of economic exchange and cultural cross-pollination. Mr. Brooks recounts a story from 1541 involving an Indian slave whom the Spanish dubbed El Turco ("The Turk") because of his resemblance to Islamic captives they had known back home.

"Indian slavery was prohibited again and again by the Spanish crown, which was quite sensitive about this compared to the English," says Mr. Brooks. While Catholic theologians remained undecided on whether or not Africans had souls, they had concluded that Indians did -- which made enslaving them a problem, at least in theory. "On the ground, of course, it could be accomplished in any number of ways," says Mr. Brooks. "The subterfuge to develop alternative forms of slavery, without calling it that, was very sophisticated."

What to the ungenerous eye could look like a purchase of slaves from an Indian tribe could be rationalized as an act of Christian charity -- their "rescue" from captivity. "Then they would spend the rest of their lives working off the cost of their ransom."

The government in Mexico City -- and later, Washington -- tried to suppress the slave trade in the Southwest. But captivity was deeply rooted in indigenous folkways, and the growth of ranching fueled the demand for slaves to take care of livestock. The region's relative isolation gave it a degree of cultural and economic autonomy. Only in the late 19th century, as it became more fully integrated into the rest of the country, did the slave system finally disappear.

"We have long understood that when Indians took Spanish captives or when Spaniards seized Indians, these belligerent acts increased tension between the two societies," says David J. Weber, director of the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. "Brooks explains how the seizure of captives also brought Spaniards and Indians closer together."

Back to the Future

The memory of captivity in the Southwest has faded, but its traces are still visible to Mr. Brooks, if not to the untrained eye. One of Santa Fe's popular tourist destinations is the Church of San Miguel, built in 1650. "It's advertised as the oldest church in the country. What they don't usually tell you is that it was built in the heart of the slave community."

Some readers are almost certainly going to be offended by Mr. Brooks's attention to the ambient violence of the history he recounts. The Indians that he portrays aren't New Age icons -- peaceful, egalitarian, in touch with the deeper rhythms of the cosmos. The pre-Columbian slave system was by no means as horrific as the Middle Passage, but it was violent even so. And the rape of female slaves by male slave owners may be the one trans-historical invariant across all cultures.

"That's where James is taking something of a risk," says Donald Lee Fixico, a professor of American Indian history at the University of Kansas. "It might be safer not to look at the brutality between the two races, but he's quite willing to go into that gray area." What impresses Mr. Fixico is way Mr. Brooks treats all parties in the conflict "as equally dynamic, with one side not really subordinate to the other."

"What's innovative about his work," says Clifford Geertz, a professor emeritus of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, "is that he focuses on a field of relationships -- the intermixture of people, involved in each other's lives in various ways, so that the usual concepts applying to the various groups don't work very well. I think that's really quite extraordinary."

Mapping a field of relations, working out the terms of engagement for groups that are otherwise distinct. ... That sounds, in fact, rather like the task of someone overseeing the work at an interdisciplinary research institute, such as the School of American Research. The analogy, Mr. Brooks suggests, goes even further: His work on the slave system is part of a larger concern that he is exploring in a new project -- a book called Nations, Tribes and Cultures: Borderland Peoples and a History for the Twenty-First Century, now under contract with Harvard University Press.

"There is one question that really interests me," he says. "How do people of diverse backgrounds get along -- or not get along -- in a landscape without a strong state?" The interactions recounted in Captives and Cousins took shape in what he calls "nondominant frontiers, volatile cultural borderlands in which no one group could assert a monopoly of power."

In his work in progress, Mr. Brooks calls the 20th century a time of "stable national borders, homogenous national populations, monopolies of violence, cultural and political hegemonies" -- all of which, he notes, "seem to be vanishing in the solvent of global capitalism." The history of the coming decades may, he says, resemble the 19th century more than the 20th.

"You may be done with the past, or think that you are," says Mr. Brooks, "but it's never really finished with you."