The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to
retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and
their futures.
The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate
acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced
by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the
self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their
bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's
rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The
intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and
colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into
every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject,
master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied
slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to
European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie
Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship
ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in
the Atlantic world.
Johnson draws on archival documents
scattered in institutions across three continents, written in
multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial
officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences
from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the
swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the
quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of
freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women
and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through
active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship
practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures,
outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for
the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the
New World.