Everyday choices made by slave men and women such as remaining with the same spouse for many years, naming or not naming the father of a child, taking as a wife a woman who had children by unnamed fathers, giving a newborn child the name of a father, an aunt or an uncle, or a grandparent, and dissolving an incompatible marriage contradicted in behavior, not in rhetoric, the powerful ideology that viewed the slave as a perpetual 'child' or a repressed 'savage.'