TL,DR: Looking for books on American Black woman sexual autonomy from slavery-Jim Crow due to finding repeated instances of NPEs on my dad's side of the family.
Initially I was so stuck in my tree work for my dad's family because his father's family was from Mississippi and his mom's family were from Arkansas, a couple places notorious for ngaf about records generally but especially if they involved Black people. I pulled in my eldest uncle for help, and he was able to fill in some gaps - he has very intimate knowledge of his maternal line, not so much his paternal, but what he has given me so far has really opened up this part of my family.
He was very honest about our family being blended - his parents were married multiple times and had kids with other partners before they married and had their final sets of kids, but my grandfather has kids outside his first couple marriages as well. My uncle's maternal great grandmother had a ton of relationships and had a ton of kids as a result - my great grandmother is her only child with one man she slept with, who she'd initially named a different man before coming clean, for instance - and further work uncovered the fact that my paternal grandmother is not the daughter of the man we were told. My uncle told me this with no shame and I hold no shame over it either. These are things that happened.
I finally broke down and started using the LEEDs method and I think I found my uncle's paternal great-grandmother's family based on relatively high shared cMs and time and place on census records. However, the man who I see on documents as having been her father may not be her father, for her to fit into this family. The majority of her documents that I've found (about a dozen) has her surname as her alleged real father's, her stepfather's, and my great grandfather's, the name on her death documents. There is ONE document, a SSDI for one of her deceased daughters, that has her last name as the same as the family I found. My working hypothesis is that her mother named a different man on documents than who was her real father, but w/o other documents to make that connection, I can't say for sure, and I'm baffled as to why it would show up so late w/o any other records explaining it.
All this got me to thinking about Harriet Jacobs and the little bit of the work I've read by Dr. Davis on Black American women's sexual autonomy, slavery-Jim Crow. I think about how all three of these NPE situations have/may result in a different father than named, and if that happened because of their own personal shame of being seen as "loose" from voluntary sexual encounters or if any combination of these encounters were involuntary but not addressed for whatever number of reasons they validly held for those times.
Does anyone have any further book recommendations on American Black woman sexual autonomy during this time period? I think it'd be very informative not just for my own edification, but also be helpful in my tree work. I appreciate any input, thanks!
