“Conduct very bad”: The Agency and Resistance of Black Indentured Children within New York’s Colored Orphan Asylum

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This paper explores the context within which Black indentured children indentured labored, lived, and thought. Contracts and asylum records offer glimpses into the voices, hopes, and expectations of children living in the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, freedom and dependence. Their experiences demonstrate how the ‘in-between-ness’ of childhood was also classed. The (theoretically) moral, spiritual, and educational responsibilities of those who signed indenture contracts reached beyond employment to pseudo-adoption and the partial integration into family units. The work identifies the choices and behaviors of Black children as means of survival, self-preservation, and self-protection, but also as resistance, protest, and assertions of selfhood.