Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
When we think out about slavery the first thing that comes to mind is the brutality of life on the plantations. The image of the many bounded slaves tolling away in the fields at the hand of their curl masters who seek to gain profit from their misery plays out in our minds. However, what escapes our thought is the resistance that slaves preformed against their master. Yes, we tend to look at the bloody conflicts of Nate Turners Rebellion or John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry however, what we tend to forget the everyday yet simplistic resistance that slaves performed in protest against their masters. One such proponent of unveiling the secret resistance of slaves is Dr. Stephanie M.H. Camp who’s book Closer to Freedom Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South.
Camp seeks to argue that enslaved people had many forms of resistance which were struggles for life without reference to their owners as well as response to their owner’s efforts to deny them from having access to their families or time alone (pg. 7). Although she does not attempt to catalog all forms of slave resistance, she dedicates her work to highlighting the lives and the resistance of enslaved women for which she argues their experiences were significant distinct from those of bondmen (pg. 9) by strengthen the notion that in many instances female gender seems to have served as a license for planter’s full expression of violent rage, exposing women to cruel punishment more consistently than men (pg. 57). Using personal testimonies, “penny papers”, songs, and illustrations Camp creates a narrative in which she tries to establish the notion that even in the harshest conditions any human can endure there will be resistance even if it means turning the plain, uncolored tow, denim, hemp, burlap, and cotton cloth they had woven into fancy, decorative cloth to make their bodies spaces of personal expression and pleasure since the dress reflects something about the perceptions people have of their place in the world, then it would appear that many bondwomen did not concur with the south’s view of them as joyless drudges (pgs. 82-3).
Although the idea of producing scholarly work on slaves resisting their life forced upon them in the south is not new because most students are familiar the famous formers slaves who escaped from their masters like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Camp provides something that most history books don’t mention. As a student who has taken a variety of American history classes once did, we talked about the slave resistance outside of the Underground Railroad, Nate Turners Rebellion, the Plessey v. Ferguson case, or to a lesser extent the Haitian Rebellion. Not once did we ever talk about the notion that if slaves wanted access to the northern antislavery world it was up them to make it happen and if so the slave communities maintained communication networks called a grapevine telegraph (pg. 108). Much like Pekka Hamalainen’s Comanche Empire which strengthen the notion of giving agency to a native tribe to control their surroundings, Camp strengthens the notion that by doing simply things like being truant for work, going to parties, and making their own alcohol they proved they are their own masters.