Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865

By Nik Ribianszky

In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.

Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America's system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one's status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual's continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.

Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together—by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies—these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their
successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property—including that most precious, themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820360119

Nik Ribianszky

NIK RIBIANSZKY is a lecturer in history at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Social History and the Journal of Mississippi History.

Book preview

GENERATIONS OF FREEDOM

Early American Places is a collaborative project of the University of Georgia Press, New York University Press, Northern Illinois University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press. The series is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.earlyamericanplaces.com.

ADVISORY BOARD

Vincent Brown, Duke University

Cornelia Hughes Dayton, University of Connecticut

Nicole Eustace, New York University

Amy S. Greenberg, Pennsylvania State University

Ramón A. Gutiérrez, University of Chicago

Peter Charles Hoffer, University of Georgia

Karen Ordahl Kupperman, New York University

Mark M. Smith, University of South Carolina

Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

GENERATIONS OF FREEDOM

Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779–1865

NIK RIBIANSZKY

© 2021 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Portions of this work have appeared previously, in very different form, in the Journal of Mississippi History and the Journal of Social History.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed digitally

Library of Congress Number: 2020952833

ISBN: 9780820360126 (hardback)

ISBN: 9780820360119 (ebook)

To parents who show their children they love them by their words and actions. It makes all the difference in the world.

CONTENTS

List of Tables

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Movement and the Community of Free People of Color in Natchez

2 Sexual Violence and Community Creation in Natchez

3 Gendered Violence as a Mechanism of Control

4 Challenges to One’s Most Intimate Property: Themselves

5 Threats to Property

6 Networks of Friends and Family

7 Movement across the Color Line: Racial Passing as Resistance

Conclusion

A Note on Methods

Notes

Bibliography

Index

TABLES

1.1 Population of Natchez and Adams County

1.2 Known voluntary migrations

1.3 Known source of freedom

1.4 Manumission by free Black family members

1.5 Known birthplaces for the Natchez free Black community

2.1 Population demographics of childbearing-age adults in Natchez

2.2 Race of mothers manumitted in Natchez

2.3 Known ages of enslaved mothers at birth of first child

4.1 Population of enslaved and free Black people in southern states, 1820–1860

6.1 Heads of households with free Black members, 1820–1860

6.2 Age and sex distribution of free Blacks in white households, 1820

6.3 Age distribution of free Black females in white households, 1830–1860

6.4 Age distribution of free Black males in white households, 1830–1860

6.5 Free Black heads of households by sex, 1820–1860

6.6 Free Black heads of households with children by sex, 1820–1860

FIGURES

1 Pilgrimage brochure, Bontura, 1941

2 The William Johnson House

3 William Johnson portrait

4 Anna L. Johnson, ca. 1880

5 Collot Map of Natchez, View of Fort Rosalie, 1796

6 James Tooley, Natchez, on the Hill, from the Old Fort, 1835

7 Forks of the Road Historical Marker

8 Johnson, Amy v Hunter, Alexander, 1816

9 Kyle House

10 Bontura exterior view, ca. 1890

11 Ann (or Mary Ann) v. Kempe, James, 1818

PREFACE

Natchez is a small southern city perched on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in southwest Mississippi across the river from Concordia Parish, Louisiana. Tourists have historically flocked to visit the town’s large collection of antebellum houses during what is known as Pilgrimage, when white women in hoop skirts open their doors to the public and tell tales of bygone days to visitors. Until quite recently, public history in Natchez largely omitted the stories of those who created the massive wealth generated by cotton cultivation. This was a glaring oversight considering that Natchez and Adams County had a population of more than 14,000 enslaved African Americans compared to some 6,000 whites in 1860. Free Black people in the census that year numbered 225, the largest population in Mississippi, but nonetheless a tiny fraction of the total. Public historians and institutions in Natchez have increased attention toward the stories of Black history as evidenced by the local Museum of African American History and Culture, an interpretative display for the historic slave market, the Forks of the Road, and other commemoration sites of Black Natchez. In many ways, though, the story of Natchez’s history remains lopsided.¹

One of these Black public history sites centers on the life story of the free Black barber of Natchez brought to light by the scholars William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis in a 1954 publication of the same name. Davis and Hogan also published and edited what they called William Johnson’s Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary of a Free Negro, Johnson’s remarkable diary kept from 1835 to 1851. In 1990, the National Park Service acquired and renovated the house that Johnson’s family owned up until 1976. In 2005, they opened the William Johnson House as a museum. Tourist literature also frequently references Johnson and links him to other historic sites around town. Because William is the most well-known of the Johnsons, the Johnson name and Black freedom in Natchez have been represented by a male countenance. Shifting the focus from William to the women in his family, however, reveals that his rise to prominence was built on a feminine foundation. This change in perspective allows us to ask new questions about the Johnsons: How did the Natchez of his mother, Amy Johnson, differ from William’s Natchez? Or his daughter Anna’s? How does the Johnson family—and the role of women in it—compare to other free families of color?²

Figure 1. Pilgrimage brochure, Bontura, 1941. This image is a typical depiction of the public history that was historically presented during Pilgrimage. Its name, up until recently, erased the full history of the house, which Robert Smith, a free man of color, had constructed. It has since been renamed the Smith-Bontura-Evans House to more fully capture its history. From the William E. Stewart Collection, courtesy of the Historic Natchez Foundation.

Figure 2. William Johnson House, photo ca. 1906. The home remained in the family until it was sold to the Ellicott Hill Preservation Society, which then donated it to the National Park Service. It is now a museum. Dr. Thomas H. Gandy and Joan W. Gandy Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.

The chronicle of Amy Johnson and her family showcases a mercurial rise from its origins stained by sexual exploitation and punctuated by periodic violence to becoming one of the leading free families of color in Natchez, Mississippi. Amy was born enslaved in Natchez around 1784. When she was in her early twenties, she gave birth to a daughter, Adelia. Three years later, she had another child, William. Her owner, William Johnson, was the father of both her children. In 1814, Amy and Johnson traveled across the Mississippi River to Concordia Parish, Louisiana, where she was manumitted at the age of thirty. Five months after she was emancipated, a white man beat Amy in the typical fashion that an enslaved person might experience violent punishment: he whipped her with a cowhide on her shoulder and breast. He then went one step further and threw her to the ground, beating—kicking, and stamping to her very great injury & damage.³ Amy went on to experience several other violent public beatings by both Black and white men within the first five years of her newfound freedom. Her children remained enslaved until the ages of eleven and thirteen, when their father also freed them.⁴

Figure 3. William Johnson. There has been some question as to whether this photographic portrait shows Johnson himself or one of his sons or grandsons. Courtesy of Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.

The Johnson family thrived economically in the years following their transition to freedom, in part because Amy peddled goods to support herself and her children. In the 1820s, James Miller, a young free barber of color, journeyed from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to build a career in Natchez. After a period of courtship, James married Amy’s daughter, Adelia, and shortly thereafter, the couple departed for New Orleans to seek better opportunities. Before they left, James trained the young William in the lucrative profession of barbering and sold him his thriving business. Over the course of his life, Amy’s son married a free woman of color, Ann Battles, and the couple raised ten children. They acquired a home in town, a plantation, and three barbershops, leaving a visible footprint on the landscape in which they lived. Amy’s family were also enslavers, owning more than thirty men and women at various times prior to the Civil War. They also enjoyed security and protection against the sporadic hostility that most other free people of color endured in periods of community-wide witch hunts that often ended with free Blacks imprisoned, deported out of the state, or reenslaved.⁵

Figure 4. Anna L. Johnson, ca. 1880. Ann and William Johnson’s oldest daughter, born in 1841, took charge of the family after her mother’s death in 1865. She and her younger sister, Katherine, were both schoolteachers in their adulthood. Courtesy of Dr. Thomas H. Gandy, Natchez, Mississippi.

The stark reality for the Johnson family, notwithstanding their material success, was that violence was an ever-present specter in their lives. For Amy’s children, Adelia and William, and for at least one of their spouses, Ann, violence laid at the heart of their very existence. All three were conceived when their enslaver fathers sexually exploited their enslaved mothers. The memory of violence, then, was literally imprinted onto their bodies in their biracial skin tones.⁶ Their freedom was thus built on a foundation of violence. Gendered and racialized violence was a commonplace occurrence throughout Amy’s life, the lives of her family members, as well as in the larger community within which she lived. Ultimately, violence even ended her son’s life when William’s neighbor, a free man of color who was passing as white, murdered him in broad daylight over a property dispute, with William’s son as a witness. In a bizarre twist of fate that underscored the disadvantages that free people of color faced due to racism and structural inequality, the family was unable to successfully press for a conviction against William’s murderer. Amy died two years before her son, in 1849, and did not live to see this miscarriage of justice. In the face of this tragedy, the Johnson family dealt with their grief in their own ways but continued to flourish under the management of the women in the household.⁷

The narrative outline of Amy Johnson’s family, captured by their personal experiences and interaction with others, demonstrates critical themes of movement, gendered violence, resistance against oppression, and perseverance across the generations. These same themes often intersected in the lives of free people of color in communities across the Deep South. Individual family stories, like the Johnsons’, illustrate the power of using existing personal written documents coupled with traditional public records to recover a glimpse into the multifaceted lives of free black people, who, like the enslaved, usually left behind only scant memoirs.⁸ As the Johnson story makes clear, freedom and slavery were not mutually exclusive for people of African descent in North America. Throughout the period of enslavement, free people of African descent experienced a contested freedom throughout the generations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I write these acknowledgments in the summer of 2020 in the thick of continued global protests calling for racial justice and a reminder that Black Lives Matter, I ruminate on the observation that William Johnson made in his diary in 1841, Oh, what a country we live in.¹ He made this remark during the period in Natchez, Mississippi, that he called the Inquisition in which free Black people, some of whom had lived in the town for decades, were forced before the Board of Police to prove their freedom and good characters. If they failed to do so, they were at risk for deportation from the state, imprisonment, or reenslavement. Sadly, while finishing this book, I have been struck by how the uncertain futures of free people of color do not sound dissimilar to those of the Black and brown people now residing in the US. The end of slavery did not translate into unconditional freedom in 1865. People of African descent constantly have had to contend with severe disparities in employment, health outcomes, educational opportunities, voting rights, wealth, and countless other factors persisting to this day. And, from the colonial period to 2020, they live under a dual criminal justice system that subjects them to heavier policing, racially biased traffic stops, searches and seizures of their persons and vehicles, imprisonment, violence, and even death at the hands of the state.

Much has changed in the twenty-five years since I began this project. I now watch these events unfolding in the US from across the Atlantic since I moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2017. My eyes are trained back to the country of my birth, and I have been deeply saddened and angered by developments within it since the election of 2016. Free people of color in Baltimore noted in 1826, We reside among you and yet are strangers; natives and not citizens; surrounded by the freest people and most Republican Institutions in the world, and yet enjoying none of the immunities of freedom.² The immunities of freedom have indeed been elusive for people of color.

I have incurred a multitude of debts along the way in the writing of this book. So many people have helped me immeasurably, and without their support, the journey would have been infinitely more difficult. This is a short list of the people to whom I am deeply grateful who helped me to tell the stories of these individuals who lived in the netherworld between enslavement and freedom. I apologize for any omissions.

At the forefront of my mind in terms of their immediate impact on the publishing of this book are the two editors I worked with at the University of Georgia Press. I fortuitously met Walter Biggins, the executive editor of UGA Press, when I was on a panel on slaveholding women at the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic in 2016. I sent him my manuscript, and he worked with me patiently from that time until March 2020, when he took a position at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Although I hated to lose such a good support, my book fell into the capable hands of Nate Holly, the acquisitions editor. Between the two of them, they answered my countless questions, soothed a million fears, and moved my book through all the stages, generously allowing more than a few extensions. I am also incredibly grateful to the two anonymous readers who gave me insightful comments that caused me to think differently about some key issues and undoubtedly helped shape this into a stronger work. The copy editor, Susan Murray, shared critical advice and sharpened my writing in myriad ways. The managing editor, Tim Roberts, demystified the process of completing the manuscript and generously fielded questions. Any shortcomings of the manuscript are entirely my fault and not from a lack of effort on their part.

My time at Michigan State University (MSU) throughout three degrees in history marked me indelibly, and I owe sincere thanks to a great number of people. As an undergraduate in 1989, I could not wait to take a class on the history of the US South, a region in which I was deeply interested. Dr. David Bailey’s enthusiastic lectures on the fusion of diverse people in the creation of the South’s foodways, music, language, and culture in general drew me in. His class in 1990 was the first that actually engaged with the history of African Americans, and I owe his memory the deepest debt for beginning the process of opening my eyes to what had largely been omitted in my K-12 education. I continued to take classes with him as a master’s student as well as during my PhD degree and am still inspired by his creativity and intellectual curiosity.

I first wrote about free people of color back in 1995, when I took my first two graduate history classes at Michigan State University before formally applying to a master’s program in history. Richard Thomas blew my mind with his class on race, poverty, and uneven development throughout history using Detroit, Michigan, as a case study. He challenged me to look with different and more analytical eyes at the state in which I had been born and raised. When I began my master’s program in 1996, fortune smiled upon me and paired me with him, and I became part of the Multi-Racial Unity Project that he and Dr. Jeanne Gazel had assembled the year before on the heels of the OJ Simpson verdict that unsurprisingly revealed the deep racial chasm in the US. Becoming part of this team of people was one of the most life-changing and formative experiences of my life. I have tried to keep it at the forefront of my mind every day of my life, and it absolutely guides my overall philosophy and teaching. The class that Wilma King taught on Black women’s history first introduced me to free women of color, and she gave me much encouragement to investigate the archives in Nashville, Tennessee, and write of their experiences in property ownership in that city. These three foundational professors in particular so profoundly influenced me to choose a life in academia examining the critical topic of race relations, and I am infinitely fortunate to have had the benefit of their expertise.

It is to my thesis and dissertation adviser, Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, that I owe my deepest debt of gratitude for her continuous and invaluable support. She gave solid and frequent advice, wrote letters of support, encouraged me to present at conferences, and made herself available, even after moving to the University of Texas. She talked me through every step of the way of the program: from classes to comps to dissertating to job market. My other dissertation committee members—Dr. Peter Beattie, Dr. Pero Dagbovie, Dr. Erica Windler, Dr. David Wheat, and Dr. NiCole Buchanan—logged in many hours working with me in and outside class, pushing me to think in meaningful ways about my project. Additionally, I was a teaching assistant to the following professors: the late David Bailey; Daina Ramey Berry, Pero Dagbovie, Kirsten Fermaglich, Lisa Fine, Helen Veit, the late David Walker, and Erica Windler. Observing their teaching styles and pedagogies profoundly influenced my own practices.

The folks at the Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade project through MSU’s Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Science, have been incredibly supportive of this work. While attending and presenting at the Enslaved conference in March 2019, I was surrounded by brilliant academics who work on enslavement, and it was a wonderful place to learn about cutting-edge digital scholarship and database technology. Matrix’s Dean Rehberger, Catherine Foley, Walter Hawthorne, Duncan Tarr, and Daryle Williams have generously offered technical expertise in refining and including my database on the free people of color in Natchez in their larger shared digital platform, linking it with many others on slavery and the slave trade. I am also working with them as an editor for their Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, so, indeed, it seems for me that all roads have led back to MSU in one way or another since I began undergraduate studies there in 1989.

It would not have been possible to complete this book without the support of my current institution, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). I taught for six years at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC), and because my schedule left me little time for writing, I despaired that the manuscript would remain trapped on my computer. In 2017, luck smiled upon me, and I got my dream job teaching in Northern Ireland. The School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy, and Politics (HAPP) at QUB funded a few trips back to the US to enable me to hit the archives. HAPP also provided money for a research assistant, my daughter Solstice, to help me transcribe Natchez court cases. Had we not made the leap across the Atlantic, without doubt this book likely would have taken much longer to finish.

Another organization that has been essential in supporting my work throughout the years has been the Historic Natchez Foundation (HNF). Going back to 1996, when I first visited Natchez’s archives, the former executive directors of HNF, Mimi Miller and her husband, Ron, helped me by patiently locating court cases and giving me new directions in which to follow. They have continued to share information and resources throughout the years. Although Mimi is always up to her eyeballs in projects, she graciously sat with me on more than one occasion to offer insights, most recently when I spent time researching in the summer of 2019. It was at that time that I had the pleasure of meeting current Executive Director Carter Burns, Chase Cludagh, and Nicole Harris. They had initially agreed to come on board as partners, along with Matrix, on a grant for which I applied in 2018 and have served as important contacts since that time. Nicole tirelessly pulled court cases for me so I could photograph them, and Chase has sent me images of maps, people, and places for the book. I would not have been nearly as successful at digging up the nearly one hundred court cases I photographed and transcribed in 2019 had Ed Baptist not shared the database cataloguing court cases and people in Natchez. This saved me immeasurable time and energy.

I benefited enormously from the numerous people who gave of their time and expertise by reading papers and chapters for me and who gave comments on conference panels or in other valuable ways. In addition to the aforementioned dissertation committee members at MSU, this list includes Kenneth Aslakson, Jenifer Barclay, Beverly Bond, Sakina Hughes, Tom Hulme, Tera Hunter, Brian Kelly, Lori Lee, Janet Moore Lindman, Sowande Mustakeem, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Deirdre Cooper Owens, Ryan Pettengill, Mary Philips, Assan Sarr, Loren Schweninger, Cedric Taylor, Nikki Taylor, Keira Williams, and the many anonymous readers throughout the years. To all of you, sincere thanks.

My life has had much value added by friendships I have been fortunate enough to make along the way at all the academic institutions I have worked within. At MSU’s History Department as well as the African and African American Studies Program, I added new members to my academic family tree through the institution that nurtured us and the faculty members who helped us produce our scholarship. Sowande Mustakeem, as Daina Berry’s first doctoral student, helped me to find my bearings. I gained many insights from her, and she willingly gave of her time and energy to put things together and to offer her eyes for editing. Jen Barclay, Dr. Berry’s third student, was an unfailingly cheerful supporter and comrade through the dissertating process. We edited for each other countless times, and she listened to me whine many an hour, assuring me that we would make it through intact. She has persisted in reading for me throughout the years and helping me to sharpen things up, including giving me her undivided attention and insights literally the night before the final manuscript was due. Mary Phillips, whom I met while we were teaching assistants for Pero Dagbovie, has been a friend and source of support and commiseration. We have shared many moments together of hanging out, philosophizing about life, politics, and relationships, and she is truly a sister-friend. As is Sakina Hughes, my SIS, with whom I have logged long hours of deep discussions and watching our daughters all grow from children to beautiful women.

There are many other MSU friends I have picked up along the way whom I would like to thank for their camaraderie and friendship during those years and beyond. They are Piril Atabay, Shannon Hefter Baltimore, Ron Byard, Justin Carroll, Njeri Chege, Marcie Cowley, the late Danson Lumumba Esese, Angela Fluorny, Jason Friedman, Lindsey Gish, Rashida Harrison, Leslie Hetfield, Bethany Hicks, Jill Kelly, Lauren Kientz, Jenny Marlow, Rebecca Richie Nutt, Brittany O’Neal, Kelly Palmer, Ryan Pettengill, Fumiko Sakashita, Bala Saho, Assan Sarr, Ibra Sene, Lumumba Shabaka, Micalee Sullivan, Cedric Taylor, Guillaume Teasdale, Latoya Tinean, Stuart Willis, and Richard Yorku.

At GGC, I was fortunate to meet colleagues who shared their expertise and good cheer and made academia an even more welcoming environment. Some of the people who especially supported me both in times of ease and times of stress at GGC include the Newbies (given that we were all hired at/near the same time: Eugene Berger, Ryan Gaston, Michael Gunther, Luke Ryan, Lia Schraeder, and Pat Zander), Susan Bussey, Axel Corlu, Michael Gagnon, Laura James, Seth Kendall, Nate Orgill, Cara Minardi-Power, Richard Rawls, Adolfo Santos, and Mazin Tadros.

Transplanting my home base across the ocean, although it was a move I had wanted to make since I was a child, was an exciting yet daunting venture. I came here on a three-year contract, hoping it would extend much beyond that. The warmth and welcome I have found here have made the three years pass too quickly, even throughout the bizarre blending of days, weeks, and months during the COVID-19 lockdown. This process began even before I formally arrived in Belfast as Anthony Stanonis, who was the liaison for the search committee, transmitted important information. Catherine Clinton, who taught here for several years, kindly shared helpful resources and insights along the way. She continues to be a listening ear and to dispense advice. All of my colleagues and students in HAPP have added value to my life in countless ways. A number of them have expended much time and effort in helping me to be retained past my contract during the COVID-19 pandemic. For that, I would especially like to give thanks to Sean O’Connell first and foremost as the history lead and the liaison to the administration. Others who especially helped in this effort include Marie Coleman, Kieran Connell, James Davis, Elaine Farrell, Ann-Marie Foster, Darragh Gannon, Laura Gillespie, Peter Gray, Tom Hulme, Leonie Hannan, Brian Kelly, Ashok Malhotra, Fearghal McGarry, Sophie Noble, Olwen Purdue, Emma Taylor, Diane Urquhart, Floris Verhaart, and Keira Williams. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, and I am grateful for colleagues like you all.

I reserve my most sincere thanks for my family, whose support, patience, and encouragement were indispensable to my sanity and wellbeing. In the last few years, I have truly learned the lesson that blood does not always determine the strength of family ties. We were lucky enough to add a new member to the circle in 2008 when Jasmine Blackie Blythe came to live with us for two years, and she is now a middle school music teacher, along with her husband, Will Blythe. My mother, Jackie Rafferty, has always been my biggest cheerleader and my rock. She has logged countless hours listening to me agonize aloud and stress out about the process every step of the way. She also learned to deftly avoid asking me the provocative question, How’s the writing going? anticipating the answer she would receive from such a query.

My daughters, Mikaila and Solstice, were embedded in this effort throughout much of their lives, suffering with me through grad school’s emotional and financial stress, listening to me reading chapters aloud to them, and fighting to appear interested. I watched them grow from little girls to women during this time. We have added another family to the mix, as Mikaila married Mikey Davis in 2019. This book has always been as much about my children as me. I want them to understand that some things in life are worth struggling for and that passion for doing what you love is worth sacrifice and hard work. I have raised strong, independent-minded girls, and they are part of a continuum of the Rafferty brats who will grow to be women who do not allow challenges to intimidate them but rather to inspire them to work harder.

GENERATIONS OF FREEDOM

Introduction

I had thought only slavery dreadful, but the state of a free negro appeared to me now equally so at least, and in some respects even worse, for they live in constant alarm for their liberty.

—Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Generations of Freedom is a community study that examines how freedom, movement, and violence were inextricably linked through generations of free people of color in Natchez from Spanish colonial rule (1779–95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.¹ This transgenerational approach contextualizes the shifting nature of freedom and maps the complex changes experienced by free communities of color across time and space. In particular, it examines the gendered vulnerabilities free people of color faced that qualified and restricted their basic freedoms, including their ability to own property, find employment, function as parents, lovers, and spouses, and maintain their bodily well-being, among others. Yet that is merely half the story. The most critical aspect of the experiences of free people of color were their efforts to persevere and survive under the most adverse of conditions, precariously balanced on the edge of slavery. Highlighting the coping mechanisms they employed under these conditions and how their lives were affected are essential elements in accurately representing their history. Free people of color staked their claim to freedom through property ownership, court battles, strategies as parents and as partners, and self-definition. In so doing, they etched out lives, families, businesses, and rich traditions. This study explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence informed the experience from one generation to another.

Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. The book grapples with the instability of this boundary by using the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the esteemed work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows me to identify a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed, which could also include parents and their children, as well as grandchildren. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America’s system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding their status at birth as legally free or unfree, each individual’s continued freedom was based upon their compliance with a demanding and often unfair system. Moreover, one’s ability to persist within the vagaries of an ambiguous and often arbitrary freedom was not permanently guaranteed. To highlight the experiences of these various generations, Generations of Freedom analyzes changing demographic structures and the expansion and contraction of individual and collective rights over time.²

By focusing on the role of family in sustaining free Blacks in Natchez, this work adds another layer to the growing historiography of free people of color.³ While some scholarship examines the Johnson family in particular, there is ample space for additional work on courtship, marriage, power dynamics, work, and leisure time among the entire population of free Blacks living in the city and surrounding Adams County. Free people of color experienced a multitude of living arrangements with partners, with those of their own social class, as well as with whites and enslaved Blacks. All of these partnerships were central in shaping the free community of color in valuable ways, whether they were legal marriages or otherwise. Free men and women of color regarded parenthood as one of their most important duties and developed strategies