Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Abstract

Jessica Marie Johnson's innovative and impassioned work places Black women—both those born in Africa and their descendants—at the center of an Atlantic history that seeks to understand how these women understood and practiced freedom in an eighteenth-century world that was increasingly defined by slavery. Focusing on lived experiences and quotidian actions, Johnson follows the stories of individual Black women through the problematic archive to better understand how these women experienced major transformations on the ground—like the rise of Atlantic slavery and French colonization. She reveals how they made sense of these transformations through carefully planned actions, particularly the creation of intimate relationships and kinship networks.Johnson argues that African women and women of African descent “used intimacy and kinship to construct and enact freedom in the Atlantic world” and that these women created new iterations of these practices of freedom depending on the context in which they found themselves, including coastal West Africa, the city of New Orleans, or the Native-controlled Natchez region, farther up the Mississippi (1).Her research is based on sources from three different continents in multiple languages, with an analysis of sources in Senegal, France, Louisiana, and the Caribbean. Johnson builds on the work of Marisa Fuentes, who encourages historians to approach the archive to find voices of women in marginal notes, in silences, and omissions. Johnson analyzes sources written mostly by white male colonists, but finds that “snippets of black women's lives” will eventually emerge (5). A particularly effective way of placing Black women's experiences at the center of this monograph is Johnson's writing style. She begins and ends her chapters with individual, named women, even if their stories are truncated, incomplete, and fragmentary, as they appear in the archive. In a work steeped in such sophisticated theory, it is both refreshing and poignant that these Black women's stories begin and end each boldly written chapter.Building on the already robust historiography on the African influence in colonial New Orleans and the Caribbean, Johnson uses a gendered racial framework to connect the experiences of African women and women of African descent across imperial boundaries, from West Africa to New Orleans. Hers is a more inclusive, complete story of freedom, in which freedom was made and remade in public and private spaces, by free women and enslaved, as the eighteenth century wore on and the institution of slavery became stricter. Johnson argues that there was no blueprint for how to define or practice this new type of free status, though Black women sought to define, maintain, and keep these definitions and practices of freedom in response to the rise of chattel slavery as an institution in the Atlantic world.Johnson connects the stories of Black women in New Orleans with the Caribbean and West Africa to tell a more complete story. Her work begins in coastal Senegambia, more specifically in the fortified comptoirs in cities like Saint-Louis. Johnson finds that African women, in particular, gained prestige and status through their control of hospitality in these trading forts. African women developed the terms of engagement between themselves and French traders and even enforced them. These women maintained their practices of freedom through acts like baptisms and godparentage for their children within the Catholic Church, to ensure their kinship networks over space and time.Johnson argues that although the Atlantic slave trade—la traversée—disrupted and changed the lives of African women, they had a precedent, in which they constantly searched for security and safety, which would serve them well in a changing Atlantic African world. Indeed, Johnson is one of several scholars rethinking the Middle Passage not as one single event that began in a coastal port city in West Africa and ended in New Orleans but as a longer, more complex process. African women and women of African descent experienced the long Middle Passage beginning in West Africa, in Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, in New Orleans, in the upriver Natchez region, and disparate places in the Lower Mississippi River Valley. Each time women and girls were forced to leave the familiar and start over somewhere new, they cultivated intimacy and kinship networks to make sense of the ever-changing larger geopolitical contexts over which they had no control.Johnson's inclusion of the Natchez Revolt to demonstrate the long Middle Passage is one of the best examples of her methods, especially for scholars of the Native South. As Johnson notes, historians already know about the violent and bloody revolt in 1729 at the Natchez colony, only a decade after the first ships carrying enslaved laborers docked in New Orleans. But how did African enslaved laborers, some of whom had arrived to the Louisiana colony only months earlier, experience and make sense of this imperial contest in which they were caught? Johnson interprets the Natchez revolt from this marginalized perspective, a historiographical feat in itself. For African men and men of African descent, the result of the Natchez Revolt could prove positive; indeed, Black men who joined the French colonial militia and took up arms against the Natchez were often lauded for their bravery, and sometimes even received freedom in exchange for their service. Similarly, the creation of the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans for injured and displaced French and Indigenous women gave women a safe space for convalescence. But for African women and women of African descent, the Natchez Revolt offered fewer options. They experienced the Natchez Revolt and its aftermath as being moved from place to place in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, perhaps as a war captive of the Natchez, or a slave of the French, torn away from their homes where they had carefully created kinship networks. These women crafted new practices of freedom—relying on baptisms, manumissions, property accumulation, or even intimate pleasurable moments—that continued apace in the eighteenth century.Johnson powerfully demonstrates how to engage with a problematic archive—one that was structured to erase Black women's stories—and creatively weaves these fragmentary pieces of evidence together to center Black women's experiences. Johnson provides a methodological framework to ethically engage and tell a more inclusive history, one that encourages historians to rethink our terms, like freedom and slavery, and what they meant to the most vulnerable—yet proactive—people in eighteenth-century Atlantic society.