Closer to Freedom

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses—often in graphic detail—slavery, white supremacy, killing, sexual assault and rape, torture, surveillance, and other forms of violence. Source materials also include racist and sexist language.

“Enslaved people were many things at once, and they were many things at different moments and in various places.”

Stephanie M. H. Camp begins her Introduction with an emphasis on the paradoxes of life under enslavement. Enslaved people were both people and property, and the specific paradoxes of their lives shifted from moment to moment, in the motion of living.

“That enslaved people were willing to risk gruesome punishments for the sake of a degree of mobility speaks volumes about its importance to them.”

This often-repeated description of punishment in the context of having sought a semblance of mobility is one of the best sources of evidence of mobility’s value to enslaved people, speaking more loudly, even, than direct proclamations of mobility’s value.

“It entailed the strictest control of the physical and social mobility of enslaved people, as some of the institution’s most resonant accouterments—shackles, chains, passes, slave patrols, and hounds—suggest.”

Camp acknowledges that slavery entailed a host of atrocities, including commodification, the constant threat of violence, the almost inevitable separation of family members, the pain of forced labor, and the material deprivations of lack of food, sleep, and proper shelter. However, her focus is on geography and the specific deprivation that was constricted mobility. This control of mobility entailed great effort on the part of enslavers, who employed the physical restriction of weight (shackles and chains), passes and tickets that allowed only for authorized movement, patrols that surveilled in coordination with these passes, and dogs that were themselves abused and constricted, “kept” only to be unleashed to curtail the mobility of enslaved people.