Sublime

Hamer’s descriptions were reminiscent of the diverse ways Black women resisted slavery.68 Similar to enslaved Black women during the nineteenth century, Hamer recognized the power of her individual acts of resistance to slowly chip away at systems of oppression. By wearing the white women’s clothing, using their personal items, and inhabiting their

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood. With the surgeries that Dr. Stevens described, Cora thought, the whites had begun stealing futures in earnest. Cut you open and rip them out, dripping. Because that’s what you do when you take away someone’s babies—steal their future. Torture th

with many of the men killed in battle,

Until recently, it was thought that the Dismal Swamp, which stretches from south Virginia through North Carolina, was a modest settlement at best, and that Maroon communities founded by runaways were rare in United States slavery. But recent archaeology has revealed it was a settlement that was sustained over generations. Literally thousands of peo

In Sunflower County, where Hamer had been sterilized, at least 60 percent of the Black women experienced forced sterilizations following pregnancy.72 Deemed “unfit” to reproduce by white physicians and other state officials, Black women who entered hospitals for routine procedures ran the risk of

In those years, the Company of the Indies, a French corporation that managed the empire’s colonies, controlled the slave trade in the Gulf South. Over six thousand Africans, after enduring the Middle Passage, arrived in Mobile, Biloxi, and New Orleans. After Spain took control of Louisiana, in 1762, another four thousand odd Africans arrived. They

What was done to her was done to her many times, by many. What was done to her could not be resisted, was not resisted, sometimes was resisted, which resulted, sometimes, in her being sent away to some far worse place, other times in that resistance simply being forcibly overcome (by fist, knee, board-strike, etc.). What was done to her was done an

when precisely did the author know she was in trouble?