The Book Woman's Daughter

The laws of rural Kentucky were known to be unfair and hard to avoid. This is partially the result of the 13th Amendment only abolishing slavery outside the prison system. Throughout the South, racial laws recreated the unpaid labor structures of the prewar period. At the same time, Appalachia, the mountainous region spanning north and south, had a distinct political and social character. The Black population of Appalachian areas was much lower, but Jim Crow laws—laws imposed to control Black individuals and groups—were often adopted in those areas.

Specifically, “miscegenation laws” worked to resist integration or hybridization of ideas of whiteness and Blackness. Passed less than a year after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Kentucky’s “miscegenation laws” were some of the strictest in the country, notably defining “miscegenation” as marriage between a white person and a Black person. Blackness was defined along the lines of the “One Drop” rule, which meant any Black ancestry meant strict Blackness under law. In 1894, the Kentucky legislature redefined “miscegenation” as marriage between a white person and a person of color, including American Indigenous peoples and people with Asian heritage.

In the novel, “Blues” are considered people of color. Honey and her family are called “Blues” because their skin condition, methemoglobinemia, causes their skin to turn blue; thus, they are not considered white. This means that Honey’s parents—a white man and a “Blue” woman—break the “miscegenation law” with their marriage, and they are imprisoned for this crime. Honey, too, faces explicit discrimination. There is no historical evidence for “miscegenation laws” being enforced against the real families who suffered from this condition. On the contrary, there is extensive evidence of the Fugates, a well-recorded “Blue” clan in Kentucky, marrying into white families. Similarly, there is evidence that some families of diverse ethnicities could marry into white families in Appalachia; while not all ethnically diverse people enjoyed the same levels of acceptance, it is undeniable that more visibly Black individuals were subject to blatant racial violence.

Anti-Black laws were not the only biases present in Kentucky at this time. Kentucky, like many states at the time, allowed marriage between children, and between a child and an adult, on the basis of nothing more than parental consent. Boys and girls as young as 13 were regularly married off even into the 21st century. Marriage law as a whole considered children property, and they lacked legal self-determination. Paradoxically, a married child had more legal rights than an unmarried one, assuming they were not trying to act against their spouse. Devil John Smith and others encourage Honey to take advantage of these laws; were she to marry, she would not have to worry about being sent to juvenile prison.

Related to this is the law surrounding emancipation, or the release of parental rights over a child, empowering the child with legal self-determination. One case mentioned in the novel is Rounds Bros. vs. McDaniel, a 1909 case wherein emancipation was not a deliberate act by the father, but an act of omission. The father letting the son work, earn wages, and pay his own rent and board was sufficient to prove emancipation, which leads to the case in the novel. Honey wins her emancipation by pointing out that she already lives an adult life, as she has a job and successfully cares for herself.

Notably, the tightening of child labor laws has made emancipation more contingent on parental consent. In the novel, the imprisonment of Honey’s adoptive parents makes the court unwilling to consider their consent, leading to a lengthy battle.