JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tueon slave and modern black families in the United States.2 In this vein, Simey, Henriques, and Goode exaggerated the matrifocality and instability of modern Caribbean families as "deviant" results of an alleged absence of family life in slavery, while Smith and Patterson confidently backed up their analyses of modern family with assertions that "the women normally acted as the sole permanent element in the slave family, whether or not the male partner was polygynous," and that "the nuclear family could hardly exist within the context of slavery." 3 Michael Craton is Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
| MICHAEL CRATONIn work published since I973, Higman has proved these assertions to be wrong and thus has reopened the whole study of the West Indian family and its roots. Although concentrating on sugar plantation colonies and the period of slave amelioration and registration (I807-1834), he has shown that family life-even in patterns recognizable to Europeans-was then the norm for British West Indian slaves. Although polygyny and other African practices persisted, the nuclear, two-headed household was extremely common among the African-born as well as Creole slaves. More remarkably, single-headed maternal households were in a minority in every area studied by Higman, save for the towns. The frequency of matrifocal families and the general disruption of slave families had become exaggerated, he suggested, because of the practices of those slaves with whom whites were most familiar: domestics and urban slaves.4The purpose of this present paper is fourfold. It adds to Higman's evidence by using material chiefly from the Bahamas, a non-sugar, largely non-plantation colony. It also summarizes the evidence hitherto gathered, sketches the varieties of slave family from place to place and time to time, and, finally, discusses developmental models. Despite great variations according to location, employment, and ownership (not to mention the difficulties presented by fragmentary and uneven evidence) a consistent pattern does emerge. This suggests both the place that the rediscovered West Indian slave family of the late slave period occupies in the continuum between West African roots and modern West Indian black family, and some of the ways in which the dynamics of West Indian black family have differed from those of the United States and Latin America. As Stephen noted as early as 1824, slave conditions in the