SOURCE: Reid-Pharr, Robert. “Clean House, Peculiar People.” In Conjugal Union: The Body, The House, and the Black American, pp. 65-88. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Reid-Pharr examines the methods that Webb uses in The Garies and Their Friends to dismiss the notion of miscegenation as a viable approach to racial integration.

The book which now appears before the public may be of interest in relation to a question which the late agitation of the subject of slavery has raised in many thoughtful minds; viz.—Are the race at present held as slaves capable of freedom, self-government, and progress?

—Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Race

Even though I have struggled in this study to demonstrate that (black) bodies both constitute and are constituted by domesticity, by households, I do not want to suggest a simple symbiosis between body and house. Instead, I maintain an emphasis on...