To walk about in freedom The long emancipation of Priscilla Joyner

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.)

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

The story of Priscilla Joyner (1858-1944) and other African Americans who claimed new freedoms after the Civil War. 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.