A fascinating account of history, detective work, and cultural preservation. I Jace read some of the WPA’s interviews Of former enslaved people and Emberton’s focus on one Of the accounts, Priscilla Joyner, presents interesting reading. Emberton also had to sleuth through data, records, archives and the like to fill in the gaps and also provide context for the story.
I love these types of books because they are rich in detail and bring a new story to the table of history, even if I don’t agree with every assertion the author made.

To Walk About in Freedom
The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner
by Carole Emberton
Pub Date 08 Mar 2022 | Archive Date 28 Feb 2022
W. W. Norton & Company
Biographies & Memoirs | History | Nonfiction (Adult)


I am reviewing a copy of To Walk About In Freedom through W.W Norton & Company and Netgalley:


To Walk About In Freedom highlights the remarkable life of Priscilla Joyner and her quest—along with other formerly enslaved people to define freedom after the Civil War.



Born in 1858 in North Carolina Priscilla Joyner came to age at 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 ease.



Priscilla Joyner’s story was 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.



Despite being 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.



To Walk About in Freedom weaves together illuminating voices from the charter generation, giving 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.



I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a realistic recounting of what it was like to live through the Emancipation Proclamation, the struggles, as well as the joys.


I give To Walk About In Freedom five out of five stars!

An insightful, poignant consideration of a representative figure’s negotiation of liberty in the decades after Emancipation. There is nothing more powerful than than reading about the human cause and the strength of the central character is break taking and inspirational .

To Walk About in Freedom is a very useful and informative book. Focusing on the experience of one woman, Carole Emberton traces, as the subtitle says, “The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner.” The starting point for the narrative is an interview Joyner gave as part of the Great Depression Federal Writers’ Program (FWP) oral history project, which captured histories of everyday Americans, including formerly enslaved Americans. Emberton vividly reconstructs Joyner’s life and experience, while walking the reader through a crucial continuum in U.S. history: enslavement, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, as well as the backlashes progress engendered (the plight of sharecroppers, Black migration patterns, Lost Cause mythology, “Redeemer” coups of local and state governments, white supremacist violence, Jim Crow restrictions and disenfranchisement, etc.).

Though published by an academic press, the book is extremely accessible; indeed, it deeply invests the readers in the life, accomplishments, setbacks, and sorrows of Joyner and others navigating freedom. Emberton pauses at key moments in Joyner’s life, filling in the broader context on many topics, such as the devastating effects of TB among Blacks, causing the deaths of at least four (possibly five) of Joyner’s children and one grandchild. That segues into a sketch of the role of Black funeral homes in Black entrepreneurial success. At times, the departures feel more like distractions, though—for example, when Emberton imagines how the white doctor behaved toward the Joyner family’s TB victims and what Priscilla might have thought of him. That leap of imagination is actually not needed to convey the tragedy of the situation or to elicit deep empathy for Joyner and her family. Emberton also conveys the disorienting and dislocating effects of Joyner’s inability to obtain the truth about her parentage. Joyner was raised “neither slave nor free” in a white household by a white woman that she was never quite certain was her mother and who would never reveal the identity of her father, whom Priscilla believed to be Black.

The book also has a fascinating and revealing subplot about the FWP, and particularly the Virginia Writers’ Project (VWP) that led to Joyner’s interview in the first place. The effort by Black VWP field workers to collect the lives of oral histories of former slaves in Virginia led to the publication of The Negro in Virginia, which was the only book of its kind to arise from the FWP. But that book reflects the heavy-handedness of the Virginia project’s state director, Eudora Ramsay Richardson, who rewrote much of the volume to cast whites in a more favorable light and very nearly wrote Joyner out of the story all together. Emberton has written Joyner back in to history.

Priscilla Joyner, born an enslaved person in North Carolina in 1858, was raised by a white slaveholder and did not know the truth about her parents. She recounted her life story for the Federal Writers' Project, which, according to the Library of Congress, "contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume 'Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves.'"

Although the white interviewers were told to respectfully capture the speech and dialects of the African-Americans they were interviewing, many of them disregarded this instruction which resulted in the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and caricatures that are harmful. The author of this book, Carole Emberton, has striven to preserve the speech of the interviewees as faithfully as possible while adding in some corrections in standard English to phrases or words that were twisted by the interviewers.

Emberton notes that when Priscilla was first approached by interviewers to participate in the FWP, to recount what she remembered about being an enslaved person, who her master was, if she was whipped, etc., she hesitated, trying to forget that time. "Were it not for the life history she narrated to Thelma Dunston, she undoubtedly would have slipped into the quiet oblivion that most of us do because we lead ordinary, unremarkable lives."

Full emancipation remains an unfulfilled promise, as the author reminds readers. The charter generation did not experience emancipation as a single event. Freedpeople carried the collective trauma of absences into their futures. In spite of this, Priscilla's story shows how the charter generation found joy, created families and communities, and how they tended to gardens in their yards.

One crucial thing to remember about the FWP was that most of the fieldworkers and interviewers assigned to speak to formerly enslaved people were white Southerners who were used to myths of "happy" enslaved people and "benevolent" masters. The elderly enslaved people were very familiar with the white expectations of this type of exchange, and knew that if they did not tell the fieldworkers what they wanted to hear--things such as that their master was kind and never whipped them--that there would be consequences. They were expected to go along with the white supremacist narrative of what happened to them to assuage the sensibilities of the white interviewers.

Emberton further notes that because of the gaps in the documentary records relating to Priscilla, this is not the entire story. She calls this volume more of a microhistory, "a small book about big things."

Delving into Priscilla's fascinating and tragic history, her parentage, and her early life, Emberton exposes the reality that relations between white women and Black men, although less common, did occur in the early South. When white women gave birth to mixed-race children, this complicated the caste system of racial slavery. It was further complicated by the law of primogeniture, passed in 1662, which stipulated that a child inherited his mother's status. So for instance, if a child was born to an African-descended enslaved woman, the child would be considered an enslaved person as well. If the mother was white, however, the child would not be considered enslaved, and would be a free person of colour or "slaves without masters." Further, the author goes into great depth about the white men who, perhaps wanting to avoid scandal or for other reasons, claimed mixed-race children as their own and therefore legally ensured those children were considered white, as may have been the case with Priscilla.

The book also goes into great depth about the start of the Civil War in North Carolina as well as Priscilla's experiences during this time. As well, the author goes into detail about the Reconstruction Era and what happened to Priscilla's household at the war's end. Her siblings singled her out for abuse. "Children learn the lessons of racial etiquette early, and Reconstruction no doubt reinforced ones they may have already learned about the necessity of violence to keep Black people in their place."

Later on, when Priscilla marries a man named Lewis, they settle near Stony Creek in Nash County and have children. The author chronicles Lewis's work, as well as how taking in laundry/washing was a common way for the wives of sharecroppers to earn an income. There is also a section that chronicles the first Great Migration. Whereas later migrations saw many African-Americans move to New York, Chicago, etc., the first Great Migration was more local, and African-Americans typically moved somewhere else in the South such as New Orleans or Atlanta. Further on, the author goes into depth about how Priscilla's children learned to navigate environments where racialized violence was a regular threat and they were constantly derided for their appearance.

The author devotes a significant portion of the book to discussion the treatment and mythologizing of elderly formerly enslaved people who were "celebrated" as figures in white American culture--every one from "Old Uncle Ned" to Uncle Remus. In other words, they became tokens of white nostalgia and sentimentality, as well as how this fed into the "Lost Cause" myth of the Confederacy.

Finally, the author discusses the implications of the white editorial control over the collection and transcription of interviews with the charter generation, particularly those collected by Roscoe Lewis and his staff. One such editor was the Director of the Virginia Writers' Project (VWP), a woman named Eudora Woolfolk Ramsay Richardson. A former suffragist, she saw herself as the opposite of the "Southern Belle" image popularized by 'Gone with the Wind.' She did not keep her opinions to herself. She believed women were capable and that they should have the same opportunities as men did in education, work, and politics. However, she was also an avid white supremacist who was dedicated to the idea of southern nobility and white paternalism. She, too, longed for an idyllic past filled with "kind masters and loyal slaves." It should come as no surprise then that she supported the Lost Cause. She saw herself as a guardian of Virginia's "noble heritage" and did not want anything that might make her state look bad such as truthful historical accounts of formerly enslaved people. She questioned Lewis's goal of writing American history from a Black perspective and questioned the accuracy of the accounts he collected. Lewis was also Black and as such, Richardson was convinced that he "lacked the requisite objectivity" to conduct the project well. She undermined Lewis at every turn, questioning the fact that some of the people he interviewed had ever been enslaved people. She constantly questioned accounts of formerly enslaved people who recounted the harsh punishments they endured and referred to enslaved people as valuable property that a master would want to keep in good condition such as "a fine horse or good hunting dog" that should be kept fit.

Unfortunately, Richardson oversaw Priscilla Joyner's narrative. She removed the background of Priscilla's (likely) white mother, Ann Eliza, and the possible interracial relationship she had that produced Priscilla. Richardson even rewrote sections of Priscilla's testimony that completely altered her account, re-writing the history to make it look as though Priscilla's "old mistress" was the "best woman in the world." Essentially, she massacred Priscilla's account in an attempt to make it palatable for white readers and to make the white readers comfortable. Thankfully, people like Sterling Brown--the son of a formerly enslaved man and a schoolteacher--battled these false narratives and aimed to restore the true history as accurately as possible. Brown also battled the white interviewers who transcribed interviews with formerly enslaved people in such heavy dialect that they read like Uncle Remus tales.

As an interesting aside, there is also some discussion of Zora Neale Hurston's involvement in the project as well as her approach to ethnography and writing. When Hurston interviewed African-Americans in the south, a number of whom were formerly enslaved, she rendered their dialect as she heard it, a decision that drew criticism from other Black writers and cultural commentators, who argued that this reinforced racist stereotypes and prejudices that whites held about Black people. Others disagreed with that criticism and praised Hurston for capturing authenticity and preserving oral testimonies in written form for posterity.

Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in slave narratives, 19th century social conditions on plantations, and historical accounts from formerly enslaved people.