Nunley, Tamika Y.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Tamika Y. Nunley “examines the lives of enslaved women accused of capital crimes to understand how slavery and its corresponding laws and social customs worked to criminalize them and limit their access to legal justice.” (1) More importantly, she foregrounds their resistance by showing how “enslaved women employed their own understandings of justice after years of gendered exploitation and violence.” (9) She decenters the legal system from antebellum legal histories, instead amplifying enslaved women’s voices. This is shown by one of her many powerful examples from the archives: “Daphney operated under a set of values that slave law did not allow for. To watch a pregnant woman receive a merciless beating violated principles that Daphney observed about right and wrong. But these guiding norms that led her to defend Nelly thrust her into a criminal justice system that prioritized the demands for obedience and the protection of the white parties involved and normalized the abuse of enslaved women, pregnant or not.” (46) While the law did not respect Daphney’s personal values and individual choices under slavery, Daphney rejected this disrespect through assertive action. Her and other enslaved Black women creatively used the means available to them to resist, for example by poisoning enslavers or violently murdering them by other means. When Virginian authorities strengthened slavery through inheritability, some women responded with infanticide.