To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner

Historian Emberton (Beyond Redemption) draws on one woman’s life story to deliver a stirring study of emancipation’s impact on the “charter generation of freedom, men and women born into slavery who experienced firsthand... [the] extended struggle in which slavery died over many decades after 1863.” Drawing on an interview conducted in the 1930s under the aegis of the Federal Writers’ Project, Emberton relates how Priscilla Joyner was born to a white woman and an unnamed Black father in North Carolina in 1858. Separated from the other Black children on the farmstead, Priscilla endured the bullying of her cuckolded and racist stepfather and half siblings until she was sent away in 1870 to live with people “like her” in the all-Black enclave of Freedom Hill near Tarboro, N.C. Emberton fills in the substantial gaps in Priscilla’s biography with records of other African Americans who lived through slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, enumerating how marriage and families, home ownership, and the creation of Black communities managed “to transform segregation into congregation.” Emberton’s astute contextualization of Priscilla’s experiences sheds light on the promise and peril of emancipation while testifying to the “power of a single life to amplify the contours of history.” Readers will gain valuable insight into the “long afterlife” of slavery in America. (Mar.)