Kinship ties can be fraught, especially for those born of the transatlantic slave trade. For my ancestors, marriage and parenthood were problematic from the start. The enslaved had no rights that their masters were required to honor or respect. Their children were not their children, and their marital commitments meant nothing because their own bodies did not belong to them. Legal codes ensured that any enslaved woman who bore children, regardless of the father’s legal standing, would pass her enslaved status to her offspring—partus sequitur ventrem. Black women’s wombs paradoxically served as both sources of life and the means to perpetuate enslavement. Their bodies and fertility were rendered valuable only for their ability to sustain the very structures of their subjection.
Under such conditions, my ancestors had to envision kinship relations that served their relational needs, even when unrecognized by the structures determining their lives. Their theology of kinship required them to call on a God who ensured that everyone had shoes: “I got shoes, you got shoes. / All of God’s children got shoes. / When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes, I’m gonna walk all over God’s heaven.”
The woman in the Sadducees’ story faces a different but related crisis. While not property like enslaved women, she remains trapped within systems that deny her full personhood. The Sadducees’ question is simultaneously about the resurrection and about a property dispute. Levirate marriage functioned as a mechanism for transferring women between brothers to ensure patrilineal inheritance—the woman becomes the means for producing an heir for the dead brother. The Sadducees assume the resurrection will simply extend these arrangements into eternity.
