In 1890, the Mississippi re-segregation constitution became the governing instrument of legal racism. In that same year, of the nine million African Americans in the United States, seven million lived in the South. From 1888 through the 1890s, the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad was selling land in Sunflower County at $5 an acre, on installment plans. The opportunity for wealth-based farming and land ownership brought the Byrds from Sumter County, Alabama, which itself was a settlement originated by Seminole Indians, to Sunflower County, Mississippi, some 205 miles away.

“Blood after Isaac” reads the binding of Isaac, where some interpreters see blood, although the story never mentions it. This chapter introduces the pattern that blood seeps in where it seems not to belong. The little word "na," untranslated in English versions of the story, in modern Hebrew means simply "please," but in the Hebrew Bible indicates irony, as in "say, go ahead, see if I care." The chapter argues that the story of Isaac is best understood in terms of divine irony, God imitating Abraham as a trickster. Why does Abraham not catch on?

This essay examines accounts of child killings in Egyptian monastic culture through the lens of various textual and visual sources: the Greek Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), paintings of the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter and the averted sacrifice of Isaac at the monasteries of Saint Antony on the Red Sea and Saint Catherine at Sinai, and exegesis of the same biblical narratives by the Egyptian monk Shenoute and other ascetic authors. The textual and visual representations of these killings or attempted killings are paradoxically theologically, politically, andsocially generative. They reaffirm priestly authority and theological orthodoxy in the monasteries at the same time as they invite male monks to identify with both male and female exemplars. Child sacrificerepresented not merely an ascetic injunction to abandon family, but, perhaps more radically, an ascetic reproduction of monastic community and genealogy.