Towards a More Intimate Understanding of Black Female Lives in Slavery

Historians working on slavery always must perform a balancing act between narrating the atrocities of oppression and the possibilities of resistance to and escape from it. The three books under review all do a wonderful job in showing us a way out of this conundrum. Jessica Johnson and Sophie White do so by analysing the intimate lives of enslaved women in early modern New Orleans and West Africa (Johnson) and enslaved women and men in Louisiana (White), while Stella Dadzie looks at the means of resistance taken by the enslaved in the British Atlantic world. Their work allows us to better understand the historical reality of slavery as it applied to at least 15 million people, while stressing the notion that the historical actors whose voices were recovered, were first of all humans, all of them different, and all of them, in their own way, able to deal with the horrors imposed on them - by being intimate with their peers, by running away, or by fighting their oppressors.