02/21/2022
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... 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.)
"Carole Emberton's insightful study of the first group of enslaved people to be emancipated is a necessary, judicious correction to Confederate nostalgia."
Bookpage (starred review) - Priscilla Kipp
"Carole Emberton gives us a powerful new history of emancipation, one anchored in the inner life of an ordinary woman. Beautifully written using overlooked archival sources, To Walk About in Freedom is essential reading, reminding us that freedom was and is a lived experience with deep emotional resonance."
"For Priscilla Joyner’s unsettling but moving story, Carole Emberton uses the historian’s tools to excavate the precious and deeply personal complexities of formerly enslaved people’s lives, including accounting for the multiple possibilities of family histories often shrouded in mystery. This is an important contribution to the history of families and freedom in post–Civil War America."
"Emberton does a masterful job of reconstructing Joyner’s life by acknowledging what the evidence allows her to conclude and where speculation must suffice…The book is ultimately a meditation on the importance of the imagination as a tool in the shaping of a historical narrative."
"In this timely and evocative narrative, Carole Emberton follows Priscilla Joyner and the first generation of formerly enslaved Americans on a search for something more than legal emancipation alone. In their long pursuit of happiness, home, education, belonging, a comfortable old age, and love, they defined what freedom meant in the face of new dangers and continuing traumas. Emberton's 'small book about big things' is equally a big book about the small, intimate things that make every life valuable and unique."
"Priscilla Joyner’s ‘long emancipation’ is a story at once distinctive and collective, a story of the trials, tribulations, joys, heartaches, and struggles that paved the African American road out of slavery, a story of the intimacies, raw emotions, and unanswered questions that have long encased southern life. Carole Emberton tells Priscilla Joyner’s story with sensitivity and consummate skill."
"To Walk About in Freedom is truly a must read for anyone interested in seeing not only the nation’s racial past in a fresh light thanks to Emberton's brilliant re-mining, re-excavation, re-reading, and re-interpretation of the lives of the newly freed, but also in being able to come to all previous renderings of it better informed and to view them with a far more critical gaze."
"Deft and revealing…Emberton's sensitive and sympathetic recovery of Joyner's story speaks volumes on what freedom meant and might mean."
"In this timely and evocative narrative, Carole Emberton follows Priscilla Joyner and the first generation of formerly enslaved Americans on a search for something more than legal emancipation alone. In their long pursuit of happiness, home, education, belonging, a comfortable old age, and love, they defined what freedom meant in the face of new dangers and continuing traumas. Emberton's 'small book about big things' is equally a big book about the small, intimate things that make every life valuable and unique."
02/01/2022
Prize-winning historian Emberton (Univ. at Buffalo; Beyond Redemption ) writes a deft and revealing account of the life of Priscilla Joyner (1858–1944), a biracial woman of white and Black parentage. Joyner was born during the last days of slavery in North Carolina, raised by a white slaveholding woman, and chose to live as a Black woman as she navigated the confusions and limits of her freedom through Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era without losing hope and purpose. Late in life, Joyner recounted her experiences in an oral history (part of the 1930s Federal Writers' Project Slave Narrative Collection), in which she aimed to show the uneven, always contested, and varied routes Black people took to define and defend emancipation on their terms. Emberton's book analyzes and validates Joyner's oral history, and adds rich historical context to fill in and flesh out the lives of Joyner and other Black Americans of that era, who discussed what slavery and freedom meant and made their way by building their own communities through family, church, and school. In Emberton's telling, it is clear that Joyner owned her own story, and thus herself. VERDICT Emberton's sensitive and sympathetic recovery of Joyner's story speaks volumes on what freedom meant and might mean, and why the best way to know a person is to listen to and learn from the stories they choose to tell.—Randall M. Miller
Narrator Karen Murray does a great job with the characters in this speculative look at the post-Civil-War experiences of Black people. She uses accents that suggest class for direct quotations, and her performance of the narrative is steady and well paced. The author employs the story of Priscilla Joyner, a Black girl born into a slave-holding household, to explore the trials and fates of those whose lives were changed so dramatically by emancipation. Because so much about her subjects is unknown, Emberton relies on phrases such as “perhaps” or “may have” to fill in some of the blanks. While this educated guesswork may bother some listeners, it should not detract from the overall quality of Emberton’s research and Murray’s performance. G.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Narrator Karen Murray does a great job with the characters in this speculative look at the post-Civil-War experiences of Black people. She uses accents that suggest class for direct quotations, and her performance of the narrative is steady and well paced. The author employs the story of Priscilla Joyner, a Black girl born into a slave-holding household, to explore the trials and fates of those whose lives were changed so dramatically by emancipation. Because so much about her subjects is unknown, Emberton relies on phrases such as “perhaps” or “may have” to fill in some of the blanks. While this educated guesswork may bother some listeners, it should not detract from the overall quality of Emberton’s research and Murray’s performance. G.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2021-11-30
Drawing primarily on oral testimonies collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, history professor Emberton examines Joyner’s complex identity and its relevance to the social history of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. A mixed-race child raised by a slaveholding White woman in antebellum North Carolina, Joyner straddled perilous cultural divides. As Emberton rightly affirms, an attentive consideration of her subject’s experiences, along with those of others whose lives intersected with hers, “[allows] us to see the grandest sweep of history through the intimate, personal stories of everyday people whose search for freedom focused on achievements that rarely make the history books.” The author movingly and instructively conveys Joyner’s aspirations as an adult seeking her place in postbellum America. Among the most fascinating chapters are those that assess, with remarkable sensitivity, her decadeslong efforts to create a stable family life within emergent Black communities. Emberton’s description of the importance of romantic love for freedpeople, and its relevance to Joyner’s own marriage, is particularly affecting. Another strength of the book is the author’s alternation of commentary on its central figure with analysis of the broader social context in which she lived: the expansion of opportunities for establishing personal autonomy in private and public life, the routine threats posed by those hostile to racial equality, the need for continual resistance to injustices entrenched in the nation’s institutions. Emberton creates an illuminating view of the daily struggles and triumphs that characterized African Americans’ “long emancipation.” In the epilogue, the author connects Joyner’s narrative to the contemporary moment for civil rights and aptly contends that “slavery’s long shadow continues to hang over the American political and cultural landscape.”
An insightful, poignant consideration of a representative figure’s negotiation of liberty in the decades after Emancipation.
