Millward, Jessica
Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland
University of Georgia (Athens)
2015
OUR SYNOPSIS: Jessica Millward engages the story of Charity Folks, a formerly enslaved Black woman from Annapolis, to build a collective narrative of the experiences of African American women in Maryland. She focuses on their resistance to enslavement by analyzing motherhood, pursuits of legal freedom, purchasing family members, household successes in freedom, and free labor.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How did gender impact individual and family experiences of freedom from slavery through manumission or emancipation?
How can we most considerately and empathetically approach human trauma in the archive?
What does Charity Folks’s success in freedom after manumission clarify about the relationships between gender, slavery, and capitalism?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Charity Folks is a ghost of slavery who refuses to be silenced.” (i)
“This book draws its inspiration from the life of Charity Folks, an enslaved woman from Annapolis, Maryland, but it is more than a biography. It uses the fragmented archive of Charity Folks’s life as a window into the ways in which slavery, freedom, and liberation intertwined in African American women’s experiences. In particular, it explores how enslaved women moved across and beyond the boundaries between slavery and freedom and ultimately changed those boundaries.” (1)
“Although the home was a site of freedom for African American women, slavery’s tentacles still intruded. Some women harbored rage and resentment from their years in slavery. Others mourned children who were still enslaved. Still others, however, possessed moments of joy at having survived, although that joy was tempered by laws that aimed to circumscribe and control the free black population.” (66)
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