This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”

This chapter provides a challenge to enduring arguments about the unifying nature of resistance by enslaved people in the US South by emphasizing intergenerational conflict in the context of fight or flight. Scholars have commonly argued that, while not as likely to flee themselves, elders were elevated and praised for their roles as guides in offering advice and support – both moral and practical – or by simply upholding the solidarity of the slave community. This chapter reveals instead how elders were held up as negative influences by those who chose to fight or take flight. Whether in counselling against direct resistance, appearing resigned to bondage, or actively conspiring against rebels and runaways, enslaved elders could be portrayed by their younger peers as people who had been unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. These were men and women who had survived slavery, but they had not resisted, and this distinction had personal and political implications for contemporaries.