At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. by Tamika Y. Nunley

Abstract

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. by Tamika Y. Nunley Elizabeth Wood At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 254. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6222-0; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6221-3.) Scholars studying African American women before the Civil War have long documented their resistance to slavery and racism but have found it more difficult to elucidate their intimate and interior worlds. In this first study of African American women living in Washington, D.C., from the city's founding through the Civil War, Tamika Y. Nunley draws on a rich body of evidence to reveal clues about how they envisioned their lives beyond slavery and circumscribed freedom. Nunley uses the concept of self-making to examine ways these individuals sought to "define and preserve a sense of self in a society that supported a narrow definition of what it meant to be a black woman" (p. 2). [End Page 378] She argues that navigation was critical to processes of self-making, as women made calculated as well as improvised choices to traverse the sometimes vast physical and ideological distances between their circumstances and their imagined selves. African American women did not achieve equality, even after emancipation, but Nunley demonstrates how their ceaseless claims to liberty in the nation's capital challenge what we know about enslaved women's resistance and laid the foundations for continued self-fashioning and activism after the Civil War. Nunley uncovers an impressive array of women's experiences as she carefully examines federal and municipal records, financial transactions, newspaper articles and advertisements, diaries and private correspondence, and even the words of Black schoolgirls. Though the city was founded to govern a nation shaped by the highest ideals of liberty, African American women's labor was crucial to Washington's early growth; and the nature of urban slavery there, along with a burgeoning slave market, created immense unpredictability through kidnapping, sale, and hiring practices. Nevertheless, enslaved women made the District of Columbia contested terrain as they "carved out pathways of escape" and asserted their identities through practices such as self-naming (p. 42). Other women turned to the courts to pursue their visions of freedom, demonstrating their understandings of kin and community, even as navigating the courts became increasingly complicated. Free African American communities emphasized educating girls to understand moral virtue as a weapon against stereotypes assigned to Black women and as an "expression of racial progress" (p. 106). Outside the middling classes, women turned to economic self-making in the street by more openly engaging in prostitution and leisure culture during the chaos of the Civil War—a practice both lucrative and perilous. Throughout, Nunley reminds readers that claiming liberty was no easy feat, even as emancipation laws were passed, but that Black women articulated their understanding of rights as they transitioned from enslavement to citizenship. Nunley provides nuance and correction to existing scholarship on antebellum Black women and girls. She carefully outlines the parameters of enslavement in the district and cautions us not to overstate the flexibility of urban slavery, since Black women's work as domestics placed them in the intimate spaces of white control. Nunley challenges the understanding that kin obligations prevented enslaved women from taking flight by showing how networks of relatives and friends inspired and facilitated running away. Her chapter on education for African American girls in a slaveholding city adds to a growing body of work on antebellum Black childhood and demonstrates an early community commitment to racial uplift that both shaped girls' self-understandings and prepared them for white hostility to their achievement. Finally, Nunley emphasizes that just as restrictive laws could have limited scope, so could beneficial ones. In the face of enormous obstacles, African American women claimed citizenship and challenged "the notion that liberty stopped at legal emancipation" by growing their institutions and building new ones dedicated to the expansion of freedom (p. 187). At the Threshold...