Keeping Hannah

Abstract

This paper is about Hannah, touted by early twentieth century tourists as America’s last black slave held by the Florida Seminoles until 1921. Symptomatic of a tendency to privilege racial caricatures over cultural complexities, these tourists overlooked key cultural nuances that complicated her servility. This paper restores that complexity to light. In tracing the shifts of Hannah’s enslavement over time, this paper illuminates how she moved between various states and degrees of slavery. Reconstructing this dynamic experience we see how her life was built, culturally blended and bound to her enslavers. To truly remember Hannah is to look beyond race and embrace complexity in our public memory of slavery.