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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
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Politics & government

TO WALK ABOUT IN FREEDOM

Carole Emberton

The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner

To Walk About in Freedom tells the extraordinary life of Priscilla Joyner and her quest - along with other formerly enslaved people - to find the meaning of freedom after the Civil War.

Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged - feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage. Her life story - candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers' Project - captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner's interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom's charter generation - the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities: what to wear and where to live, what jobs to take and who to love. Although Joyner was educated at a Freedmen's Bureau school and married a man she loved, slavery cast a long shadow. Uncertainty about her parentage haunted her life, and as Jim Crow took hold throughout the South, segregation, disfranchisement, and racial violence threatened the loving home she made for her family. But through it all, she found beauty in the world and added to it where she could. Weaving together illuminating voices from the charter generation, To Walk About in Freedom gives us a kaleidoscopic look at the lived experiences of emancipation and challenges us to think anew about the consequences of failing to reckon with the afterlife of slavery. Carole Emberton is associate professor of history at the University at Buffalo. A National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, she is the author of the prize-winning Beyond Redemption. She has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post, and lives in Buffalo, New York.

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Book Published 2022-03-08 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

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.

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 postCivil War America.

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.

Stirring...Emberton's astute contextualization of Priscilla's experiences sheds light on the promise and peril of emancipation.

Emberton creates an illuminating view of the daily struggles and triumphs that characterized African Americans' 'long emancipation'... An insightful, poignant consideration of a representative figure's negotiation of liberty in the decades after Emancipation.

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.

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.

If you want to get up and move around, in fact, you can. Stand up, stretch, wiggle your toes, shake out the knots. Step out and drop in on the space next door or down the street and it's okay. You're not stuck in your chair or this room or even this building, and in "To Walk About in Freedom" by Carole Emberton, you'll get a new appreciation for that ability... Read more...

Deft and revealing... Emberton's sensitive and sympathetic recovery of Joyner's story speaks volumes on what freedom meant and might mean.

...To Walk About in Freedom can find little about her (Joyner) beyond what she told the Writers Project interviewers but imagining her life in context casts a ray of light into the history of African Americans after Emancipation. Read more...