TO WALK ABOUT IN FREEDOM

The story of Priscilla Joyner (1858-1944) and other African Americans who claimed new freedoms after the Civil War.

Drawing primarily on oral testimonies collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, history professor Emberton examines Joyner’s complex identity and its relevance to the social history of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. A mixed-race child raised by a slaveholding White woman in antebellum North Carolina, Joyner straddled perilous cultural divides. As Emberton rightly affirms, an attentive consideration of her subject’s experiences, along with those of others whose lives intersected with hers, “[allows] us to see the grandest sweep of history through the intimate, personal stories of everyday people whose search for freedom focused on achievements that rarely make the history books.” The author movingly and instructively conveys Joyner’s aspirations as an adult seeking her place in postbellum America. Among the most fascinating chapters are those that assess, with remarkable sensitivity, her decadeslong efforts to create a stable family life within emergent Black communities. Emberton’s description of the importance of romantic love for freedpeople, and its relevance to Joyner’s own marriage, is particularly affecting. Another strength of the book is the author’s alternation of commentary on its central figure with analysis of the broader social context in which she lived: the expansion of opportunities for establishing personal autonomy in private and public life, the routine threats posed by those hostile to racial equality, the need for continual resistance to injustices entrenched in the nation’s institutions. Emberton creates an illuminating view of the daily struggles and triumphs that characterized African Americans’ “long emancipation.” In the epilogue, the author connects Joyner’s narrative to the contemporary moment for civil rights and aptly contends that “slavery’s long shadow continues to hang over the American political and cultural landscape.”

An insightful, poignant consideration of a representative figure’s negotiation of liberty in the decades after Emancipation.