A Terrible Intimacy

Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South 

Henry Holt & Co., forthcoming Spring 2026

A Terrible Intimacy tracks six criminal cases in Prince Edward County, Virginia, from the 1820s to the Civil War.  Witnesses of both races talk vividly about an astounding variety of interactions between enslaved Black people and whites.

The reader follows these unfolding stories as local people in the antebellum courtroom did.  Historian Melvin Ely situates witnesses’ captivating, sometimes eloquent narratives in the context of the times.  When mysteries arise, he invites the reader to walk with him as he seeks answers through historical detective work.  

The intense interracial encounters that these trial witnesses relate could take place because so many Black residents of Prince Edward, like fully half the enslaved people of the South as a whole, lived not on sprawling, impersonal plantations, but on smaller properties.  Households that included five, ten, or fifteen enslaved folk were commonplace. 

Callousness and exploitation were baked into the system, but slavery on this scale also required physical closeness between white and Black.  The exploiters and the exploited knew each other personally, sometimes intimately. 

Even as white society fed on and promoted racial stereotypes, whites regularly talked about enslaved people as distinct personalities—complex, diverse human beings.  Meanwhile, Black folk drew on their intimate knowledge of the white people among whom they lived to meet the challenges that confronted them. 

Ely takes us deep into a southern landscape of rolling hills and woodlands; of sweltering summer days with Black (and white) people toiling in fields of wheat and tobacco; of pitch-black winter nights that were sometimes cold enough to freeze a person to death; of life along the winding Appomattox River, where the survival of the nation would be sealed in 1865.  

Wealthy planters, small farmers, and poor whites, free and enslaved Black people, men, women, and children shared religious beliefs, perceptions of the natural world, workplaces, foodways, and more.  People of the two races spoke similar varieties of English and measured the passage of time by watching the sun and by referring to the rhythms of seed-time and harvest.

Trade between whites and enslaved people took place routinely—to the irritation of some slaveholders.  Whites of modest means sometimes played cards, drank whiskey, or had sex with Black people; interracial families were not rare.  Occasionally, Black and white people committed crimes together.  

Yet whippings happened often; enslaved families were split up casually, and sometimes out of spite.  And in 1861, most whites in Prince Edward proved ready to fight in defense of slavery. 

Capturing true stories of people in times of calm and of crisis, Ely innovatively shows how historians uncover evidence and struggle to interpret what they find.  He intervenes head-on in the culture war currently being waged by those who insist that our schools shouldn’t teach, nor should we discuss, inconvenient truths about the history of race in America.  At the same time, Ely offers striking new insights to those who rightly deplore racial exploitation without necessarily realizing how complex life in the old South actually was.

A Terrible Intimacy drives home a fundamental American truth:  the most appalling horror of slavery may well be that whites in any number of ways recognized the humanity of Black folk every day, yet they remained full, even avid participants in a system that abused and often terrorized those very people.