Closer to Freedom

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South is an academic monograph written by historian Stephanie M. H. Camp and published by University of North Carolina Press in 2004. The book is a revision of Camp’s dissertation and explores the Attenuation of Dichotomies in Slavery Studies, the Spatial History of American Slavery & The Rival Geography of Enslaved People, and Defiant Displays: The Politics of Enslaved Women’s Bodily & Aesthetic Pleasure in the Rival Geography. Camp was a feminist historian of slavery, with special interests in the study of space, race, and gender within the plantation South. Closer to Freedom won the Lillian Smith Book Award for New Voices in Non-Fiction and an honorable mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize and was short-listed for the Washington State Book Award.

This guide refers to the 2004 hardback edition of Closer to Freedom.

Content Warning: The source material discusses—often in graphic detail—slavery, white supremacy, killing, sexual assault and rape, torture, surveillance, and other forms of violence. Source materials also include racist and sexist language.

Summary

Camp argues in Closer to Freedom that one of the main facets of plantation slavery in the US South was its control of enslaved people’s mobility. The title of the first chapter, “A Geography of Containment,” refers to the way enslavers monitored and restricted Black mobility both within the plantation proper (which included agricultural fields, auxiliary buildings, and quarters for enslaved people) and beyond it. This geography of containment functioned as if the geographical boundaries of the plantation contained doors that were to be opened and closed only by enslavers, maintaining internal control but also extending enslavers’ power through racialized geographies that were panoramic in the South.

This containment is not tantamount, however, to immobility. Enslaved people, especially enslaved men, were often required to leave the boundaries of the plantation to transport goods or communication, but their movements were monitored by way of documents that authorized their movements within specified spaces and times. Even with these passes, however, enslaved people’s movement was dangerous, as patrols were constantly on the lookout for unauthorized movements, the most dreaded of which were insurrection and rebellion.

Camp underscores that enslaved people’s mobility was gendered, and she is less concerned with the more dramatically resistant uses of mobility—such as rebellions and insurrections, the organizers and direct participants of which were almost always men—than she is with the comparatively mundane resistances of enslaved women, whose mobility was much more restricted within the geography of containment than men’s. Women were rarely issued passes or tickets and were thus much more conspicuous whenever they appeared in public, making any of their unauthorized movements beyond the plantation more dangerous for them than for men. Women’s domestic labor, performed as a second shift after the primary labor of the day, also bound them tightly to the plantation, as gender norms held them primarily responsible for feeding and other care of family members. They were grounded in the domestic space of their quarters in ways that men were not. While men were often pulled off the plantation, women were consistently pushed into it.

Nonetheless, enslaved women practiced acts of resistance within what Camp calls the rival geography of enslaved people. This rival geography “rivaled” the geography of containment only so much, however, and did not pose a direct threat to enslavement itself. The rival geography did not provide enslaved people with space in which to experience true autonomy, but it did facilitate conditions in which enslaved people could move about in limited ways. Enslaved people suffered harsh punishments for the experience of this limited mobility within the rival geography, yet they repeatedly sought these experiences, despite the risks. Through the use of source materials, Camp draws attention to the bewilderment of late 19th-century interviewer Octavia Albert regarding her interviewee Sallie Smith’s almost immediate return to truancy after almost being killed by her enslaver for a previous spate of truancy. Camp underscores, by way of the interviewer’s own confusion, how incomprehensibly important the smallest mobility was to many enslaved people.

After an initial analysis of the geography of containment of enslavers, Camp spends the majority of the book exploring a range of everyday resistances enacted by women, and sometimes men, within the rival geography. These include truancy and the organization, preparation for, and attendance of illegal parties. Focusing most of her analysis on bodies’ movements through changing spaces, Camp also examines objects’ movements into the (relative) stability of enslaved people’s domestic spaces, examining the defiance of domestic, abolitionist “décor” that expressed hopes for mobility.

Camp’s attention to the gendering of mobility and the everyday resistances of women within the rival geography relies on a methodology that recognizes the presence of dichotomies in enslaved people’s lives (such as gendered binaries) but also calls for a moderation of dichotomies in slavery studies. Her research aims to complicate facile dichotomies such as accommodate/rebel that obscure the lives of enslaved people and, more specifically, the limited yet profound mobility that enslaved women sought in the rival geography and their everyday resistances, which were neither accommodationist nor rebellious.