"Carried to the Swamp": Race, Place, and Geographies of Infant Death in the Post-Emancipation American South.

This article examines infant abandonment, death, and burial in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American South, focusing primarily on South Carolina, with comparisons to Georgia and North Carolina. It explores how physical and imagined geographies—particularly marginal and liminal spaces such as swamps, wells, and outskirts of towns—were used by Black and white southerners to conceal infant deaths, linking these spaces to ongoing racialized power dynamics in the post-emancipation South. The research highlights how these sites of infant disposal served both as places of marginalization and as forms of Black resistance against white domination of bodies and landscapes. By analyzing legal, medical, and archival sources, the article reveals the complex interplay between race, place, and power in shaping experiences and responses to infant death during Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.