“A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South” presentation at MPAAGHS Monthly Meeting

September 12, 2026

Middle Peninsula African-American Genealogical and Historical Society (MPAAGHS) will hold its monthly meeting virtually on Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. The meeting will feature a talk by acclaimed historian Melvin Patrick Ely on his latest book, A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South. Published in April of this year, this revelatory new account of slavery uncovers a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of “master-slave” dynamics.

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 households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and complex domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites 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, Virginia, were ready to fight to defend their right to own other human beings. These webs of interaction make clear that white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them. Offering striking new insights into the true complexity of life in the old South, A Terrible Intimacy expands our understanding of this darkest of histories.

Melvin Patrick Ely is Professor Emeritus of History at William & Mary. He previously taught at Yale University and at universities in Israel and The Netherlands. In addition to A Terrible Intimacy, he is the author of The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon and Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, both of which were featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. A study of free Black people in Virginia before the Civil War, Israel on the Appomattox won the Bancroft Prize and the American Historical Society’s awards for the year’s best book on the history of the Americas and the best book on the African diaspora.

MPAAGHS 2026 dues ($25) are now due and may be paid online via MPAAGHS’s Payments webpage or by mailing checks made payable to MPAAGHS to:
MPAAGHS
4114 Tidewater Trail
Jamaica, VA 23079

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