Closer to Freedom

Chapter 4 focuses on the space of slave quarters, which were “extensions of two worlds” (93): places that served enslavers in the containment of laborers while not laboring, yet also places that were private, functioning as homes and as part of the rival geography.

Historically, the chapter grounds itself in the antebellum abolitionist movement. The supposedly sealed space of the plantation was “punctured” by abolitionist opposition beginning in the 1830s. Enslaved people’s knowledge of the abolitionist movement raised hopes of freedom, and the chapter analyzes two cases in which enslaved women obtained and displayed abolitionist imagery where they lived. The “audacity” of women who conspicuously displayed these print materials enabled the documentary evidence now available to scholars.

The first and more developed case study revolves around California, an enslaved woman in Mississippi hired by a man named George Young while her enslaver, James McDowell, was in Virginia. Young decided to move, and, though he did not want to have California and her family come with him, she insisted and “made quite a to do to follow my wife here” (96), Young writes. Camp argues that going on the hiring market would have separated California from her husband, Isaac.