Closer to Freedom

“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.

“Surprisingly, it was not the outlawed that most concerned the assembly, but the outlying.”

The Virginia Assembly passed several laws in the 1700s punishing the unauthorized mobility of enslaved people. The more severe punishment is applied to outlying activity (or truancy) and not outlawed activity (fugitivism). This reveals that the greatest concern lies not with the illegal mobility that produced permanent escape, but with the unauthorized mobility that lingered in truancy, which was punishable by death.

It was better for mobility to succeed in reaching a final destination that ended this movement than to chronically hover—or influence others—signifying the deep desire of enslavers to maintain control.

“In the decades after the Revolution, proslavery ideology shifted subtly from the patriarchalism of the colonial period to paternalism, a form of social control more consistent with the humanitarian ideals of the age.”

Camp refers to the shift in the management of enslaved people in the late 1700s and early 1800s that espoused a “soft” exploitation in response to the more egalitarian ideologies of the American Revolution. Rather than apply the weight of shackles and chains to manage enslaved people, enslavers hoped for slaves to become docile and discipline themselves out of gratitude for the “kindness” of paternalistic enslavement. The “style” of control may have shifted, but enslavement itself and its insistence on restricted mobility remained.

“Passes gave some bondpeople permission to go to some places some of the time. Passes also prevented most enslaved people from going to most places most of the time.”

A pass’s authorization of mobility is a sleight of hand: It seems to open up possibilities for mobility, but the requirement of a pass shuts down all mobility that cannot secure a pass, thus restricting mobility much more than fostering it.

“With little or no rest, enslaved people worked and worried; the bondman ‘fear[ed] he [would] be caught lagging through the day; he fear[ed] to approach the gin-house with his basket-load of cotton at night; he fear[ed], when he [lay] down, that he [would] oversleep himself in the morning.”

Camp quotes Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave and his explanation of fear as an ever-present experience in slavery and also as a controlling principle: No matter what an enslaved person did, whether work or sleep, he was afraid. He worried that he would not labor and produce too little and that he would sleep too much, mirroring slavery’s insistence on excessive production and the enforcement of deprivation (here, of sleep).

“The consolidation of patrol activity during the nineteenth century was a part of the violence and coercion that buttressed planter power and complemented paternalism.”

The slave patrols were expanded under paternalistic enslavement in the 19th century, stepping in to ensure a systemic control that did not depend on individual enslavers. The labor of maintaining control was thus outsourced to the patrols, who then performed the labor that enslavers once did but no longer desired to exert. Individualistic control was replaced by police control.

“Black overseers, called ‘drivers,’ were also drafted into informal policing. As a means of ensuring their cooperation, drivers were sometimes held to account for the truancy of their charges.”

While the mobility of enslaved people was controlled, so too was the mobility of drivers, who were forced into the surveillance activity of the patrol through fear, their racial identity weaponized against both them and enslaved people.

“‘I suppose that was an end to your stay in the woods?’ she asked her informer. ‘No, madam,’ Smith said, ‘I did not stay more than a month before I ran away again. I tell you, I could not stay there.’”

Octavia Albert’s interview of Sallie Smith in Albert’s book House of Bondage speaks to the high value of mobility for enslaved people in Smith’s correction of Albert’s assumption that the punishment she received for her truancy would condition her to become more restricted in her movements.

“Perhaps men actually ran away less readily than women because their conceptions of manhood mandated more stoic responses. But it just as likely that ideals of masculine behavior muffled reports of men running away from abuse.”

There is a pattern within enslaved narratives that openly and frequently speaks of women engaging in truancy to escape violence, but men are almost never part of such a narrative. Camp, then, has to interpret these patterns within source materials to determine if this is a reflection of lived reality: She questions whether norms of masculinity disciplined men into not leaving, or if such norms simply prevented them from admitting it. While gendered rhetorical conventions may more readily describe women’s experience of violence, they may not reflect men’s actual responses to violence.

“Even as they evaded work, visited, rested, and engaged in independent activities, truants spent much of their time simply surviving.”

Though truancy offered a limited amount of mobility and autonomy, it ensured an extensive deprivation and often depleted enslaved people. Despite this heightened deprivation, this small amount of mobility and autonomy psychologically sustained many enslaved people.

“Most truants were neither captured by slaveholders’ hunts nor caught by patrols nor turned in by other enslaved people. Instead, they usually returned on their own because they always intended to do so. Absenteeism was, by its nature, a short-lived event.”

Enslaved people went into truancy with the clear understanding that they would return to the plantation, often subjecting themselves to violence upon doing so. This is yet another psychological burden that this limited mobility entailed and that many enslaved people decided to take on. This again underscores the necessity (rather than “luxury”) of some level of mobility for many enslaved people, who would rather be punished than restricted.

“According to the customary norms of the rural South, there were potentially legitimate reasons for enslaved men to leave plantations, while there were almost none for women. Planter expectations regarding women’s locations, then, may have been even stricter than those they had for men, and what counted as truancy in women may have been somewhat more acceptable in men.”

Camp digs into the gendered mobility of enslaved people, demonstrating that the very definition of truancy probably changed according to gender. Men were expected to be more mobile than women, and thus their mobility was not only tolerated but condoned, while women were expected to be immobile, with mobility condemned.

“In the context of enslavement, such exhilarating pleasure gotten by illicit use of the body must be understood as important and meaningful enjoyment, as personal expression, and as oppositional engagement of the body.”

Camp explores the bodily pleasure, simultaneously visceral and political, that was experienced in illegal parties. The body’s opposition to slavery’s commodification and restrictions is felt internally and expressed externally. These visceral and expressive pleasures are mutually supporting.

“Bondwomen took tremendous risks in procuring and wearing fancy apparel to plantation frolics and outlawed slave parties, and the extent of the danger to which they exposed themselves is also a measure of the significance of activities and interests that might otherwise appear to be trivial.”

Camp notes that wearing fashionable clothing to an illegal party, in the face of all that enslaved people endured, seems like a trivial activity—a “luxury”—not worth the risk. However, the seemingly insignificant was often essential to enslaved people. These moments of pleasure, felt within the individual body but also experienced communally as a group, revitalized enslaved people.

“The sellers of such items were among the few whites to be included in the transportation of goods in the rival geography.”

The rival geography cracked open a little, and for the first time, to white traders for “such items” as alcohol (for men) and buttons and beads (for women). These items were essential for the gendered pleasures of men’s drinking and women’s wearing of fashionable clothing at illicit parties.

These are not essentials for survival, such as food, firewood, or shoes, but essentials for a good party, otherwise considered “luxury” items. That enslaved people would open up the rival geography to white people for something so seemingly trivial poses the question of whether the “trivial” is not, in fact, also essential, yet another example of the Attenuation of Dichotomies in Slavery Studies.

“Just as the chattel principle described paradoxical, and not opposed, facts of life in the old South, slave cabins encompassed slavery’s cruelties and the internal life of the home; they were both object and subject.”

Camp enacts the attenuation of dichotomies that is one of the hallmarks of the “new” slavery studies in considering the dual nature of the cabins enslaved people inhabited. These quarters were simultaneously spaces meant to confine and contain enslaved people, but also their homes and centers of family life.

“Elsewhere in the South, contamination became a thematic concern. In 1829, the year of Walker’s Appeal, the Georgia legislature strengthened its ‘quarantine’ laws that guarded the waterways into the state, this time identifying a social, not a biological, threat.”

The second wave of abolitionism that began gathering force in the 1830s was powerful, and enslavers, so used to attempting to control Black movement within and moving out beyond the plantation, now tried to refuse the incoming wave of abolitionist material culture, which they viewed as a contagion that could “infect” enslaved people and spread if not contained.

“It is unlikely that any print California possessed showed a liberatory image of black people. To the contrary, the abolitionist prints California owned probably represented enslaved people in degraded, abused, and exploited terms.”

Abolitionist imagery sought to elicit sympathy in viewers and thus relied on representations of the abuses of enslaved people, often positioned in humble postures appealing for help. California would probably not have had direct access to a narrative of Black liberation in these images, but the images provided evidence of abolitionist power and alliance with enslaved people, articulating a communal concern and energy that enslavers wished to quash.

“If we cannot know exactly what images California and Young were looking at, we can nonetheless know what Young saw, for he tells us: ‘Amalgamation prints.’”

Camp is able to determine the general nature of the prints as abolitionist since Young relies on the anti-abolitionist rhetoric of “amalgamation” to describe them. The prints were surely not amalgamationist, however, as California would have had no reason to display prints ridiculing and pathologizing abolitionists as only sexually and not morally driven.

“Though freedom had no specific location within or outside the postwar South and resided at no certain destination, it nonetheless had a spatial nature grounded in one of the same principles that had guided slaves’ antebellum rival geography: motion.”

With emancipation, freedom was not geographically determined. Nonetheless, freedom expressed itself and was felt in mobility, and formerly enslaved people reveled in their ability to move about and also congregate openly.

“[T]he role that slaves played in their emancipation was the product of both northern military victories and a history begun in slavery, in the antebellum tradition of moving beyond the plantation’s legitimated spaces.”

Enslaved people participated in emancipation, Camp argues, through their movement into Union camps and their labor within them. This wartime movement toward the freedom of the camps and ultimately, emancipation, was made possible by the “tradition” of mobility within the rival geography.

“In short, much of planters’ selves was centered in the ownership of slaves.”

Enslavers’ identities were grounded in a false sense of “independence,” in the sense that they were not beholden to bosses, feudal lords, or other figures. However, they were completely dependent on the ownership and exploitation of enslaved people for labor, knowledge, and skills.