Review of Gaspar and Hine's "Beyond Bondage." (2004)
David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine eds, Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (University of Illinois Press, 2004), 344.
Gaspar and Hine have edited a fantastic collection of essential and powerful essays that delve into the role of free women of color in the Atlantic World and how they navigated this world. Though not bound in slavery, these women navigated the complicated place of residing and living within various slave societies across the Americas. Throughout these essays, the authors show how the shadow of slavery is a constant theme in the lives of these women.
Divided into fourteen chapters, Beyond Bondage covers a wide span over temporal (time) and geographical space in the Americas. Each author draws from unique archival, theoretical, and thematic interpretations, which are bound together by the theme of free women of color. Other consistent themes include resistance to slavery and racism, complicated relationships with enslavers and former enslavers, and the need to refocus outside of the plantation and the view that all African descended peoples’ activities fall into the category of resistance.
Jane Landers takes a broad focus to look at women in the maroon societies throughout the Americas. I found this piece insightful for several reasons. First, the author did not shy away from the complexity of maroon societies (for example the violence and raiding). Placing women in the context of these communities makes them more clearly communities and not just war camps. Second, she notes that these communities had high levels of creolization, in part from raids that seized Spanish women. This process of creolization and developing maroon communities was an excellent chapter with which to begin the volume.
Maria Elena Diaz looks specifically at El Cobre in modern day Cuba and the “royal slavery” or the enslaved people own by the crown there. This essay illustrated the messiness of imperial slavery, particularly how the enslaved and free people of El Cobre occupied an odd middle ground between slavery and freedom. She does over emphasize rejection of Christian morality (while certainly this could be one explanation, I am not certain this is the only argument that could be made), however this essay does show a complex way of looking at what freedom actually meant to these women.
Bernard Moitt’s essay of the libres de faitt or a semi-free caste of African descended peoples in the French Caribbean possessions. This place of quasifreedom was in part created by the “casual and economic” approach to manumission. Insightfully, though not explicitly argued, was the idea that though laws were harsh and restrictive, the law was frequently ignored by colonials, both white and Black. Women of African descent, well into the 1830s, pushed masters to allow them to become libres. That being said, this freedom was quasi and never fully free as re-enslavement loomed as a potential issue.
In David Gaspar’s chapter he surveys the role of manumission in British Antigua. This chapter walks readers through how women of color pursued freedom, despite intense challenges to achieving freedom through manumission. As with Moitt’s chapter, the messiness of manumission and the pursuit of freedom are clear emphases.
Exploring the relationship between an enslaved woman named Phibbah and a British task master, he enters a very complex and deeply sensitive area of intimate relationships in slaveholding spaces. As Burnard notes, frequently any relationship between an enslaved woman and an enslaver is framed as sexual exploitation. Burnard carefully, and with numerous caveats, argues that such a characterization removes the agency of enslaved women and their efforts to rise in internal plantation hierarchies and also develop meaningful relationships. An incredibly messy idea, he further pushes back on the idea that creolization was a one way street and instead white enslavers changed as they had intimate and at times, as in the case of Thistlewood (the task master) and Phibbah, developed long lasting and mutually agreed to relationships. This effort to move beyond a simplistic victim (Africans as only victims) or rebel (every act as resistance) narrative towards a more complex agency driven narrative of both enslaver and enslaved. This does not mean that there was not oppression or oppression. Rather, we need to complicate this world of oppression.
Loren Schweninger takes readers to the United States and the history of free women of color interacting with the harsh Black codes of Virginia. While noting that small enclaves of elite Blacks do not always fit the general trends, she argues that most free African Americans were far more connected with enslaved communities than scholars have argued. One of the the interesting notes I made on this chapter was that if southern laws were strictly enforced on free Black Americans, how were there still “tens of thousands of free black women” in the South which all but banned free women of color?
Wilma King further nuances the role of free Black women in the American Republic, noting that place and family were vitally important. She also discusses the need to rethink the hegemonic narrative” of slavery that were advocated by scholars such as Ira Berlin. This more localized and individualized history is inherently more messy, but also allows for a wider array of interactions between slaveholders and free women of color, who as King notes, were in some areas slaveholders themselves. (I frankly was astounded to learn that one in ten free people of color were slaveholders. This is not the narrative of the academy at all.) While King tries to nuance slaveholding among people of African descent, I think her nuancing then ought to be equally applied to white enslaves.. In essence, slaveholders need to be explored less as a hegemonic group and more as regional or temporal groups that change over time (as she notes occurs among free women of color who are slaveholders).
In focusing on free women of color in Paramaribo, located in modern day Suriname, Rosemarijn Hoefte and Jean Jacques Vrij add another ripple to the Black Atlantic by showing how free women’s population growth was tied in part to the growth of manumission and high rates of plantation managers taking a Black mistress. Intriguingly, they illustrate why color codes are not a good way to see the lack of legal unions, as they illustrate that official marriage across races was much lower and that concubinage was by far the more accepted form of partnership by both Black and white colonists.
B.J. Barickman and Martha Few add a fascinating chapter that uses social history techniques to excavate the stories of free women of color in one small town in Brazil. From their work it becomes clear that while these women largely occupy a lower rung of society, there is a complex array of experiences that resist the scholars effforts to group into a single, cohesive narrative. These authors furthermore illustrated the complexities of household formation and slaveowning by these Black Brazilian women.
Turning to Puerto Rico, Felix V Matos Rodriguez notes the substantial role free Black women played in San Juan, including their role as businesswomen and property owners. The high levels of conflict between Spanish officials and these women led to a unique urban landscape where free women of color were further monitored in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution.
Kimberley Hanger tackles the role of free Black women in Spanish New Orleans and their role in building economic growth in the city, including through slave purchases. Ultimately I was struck that Black women up through the Civil War were not a radical element waiting to overthrow the “capitalistic/patriarchal system” (not her quote) of slavery, but rather participated in the larger economy both as producers, business owners, and enslavers. This nuance challenges the broader idea of victim/rebel narrative that has dominated the American academy for decades.
Mary C. Kararsch returns the reader to Brazil, though this time the focus is on the mines of central Brazil. These regions attrached large numbers of free people of African descent, as well as enslaved people. The complex society formed was woven through with various forms of bondage, some skillfully deployed by Black women. Importantly Kararsch traces the growth of Black Catholic brotherhoods that provided crucial community and religious connections in the region. It also should be mentioned (and applauded) that in her footnotes Kararsch has the humility to use her own work as evidence for the need to correct narratives of slavery in Brazil.
The final two essays by Virginia Gould and Alice Wood provide excellent explorations of the Catholic theological world that Black women chose to enter. In Gould’s essay, the focus is on the story of Henriette Delille, an New Orleans African American woman who became a leader in New Orleans Catholicism and was part of a larger Catholic revivalist spirit. Wood’s essay in turn examines the life of two women whose narratives were lifted as examples of saintly piety and faith. Her narrative is key in pushing scholars to see Christianity less as a cover for continued African beliefs, but as something that many enslaved (though not all) people embraced as part of their way of understanding the world.
Overall, this collection of essays was excellent and deeply revisionist. By incorporating free women’s story into the narrative of the Black Atlantic world, the question of agency, belief, and place in society all come into question. While most remained below fellow white colonists in terms of social power, these essays suggest the need for a more careful, and less sweeping discussion of the Black Atlantic world.
Robert Swanson