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
In Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Stephanie Camp’s central argument revolves around the notion of movement within confined spaces as well as the “rival geography” that existed between the enslaved and their owners during the antebellum era. Although Camp claims that her book revolves around the struggles of bondswomen and their everyday resistance in the Old South, Closer to Freedom covers both the actions and roles of enslaved men and women when it comes to resisting white authority in the Old South. While slaveholders in the Old South exercised control over their bound laborers through the use of restraints from “passes, tickets, curfews, and roll calls [that] all limited slave mobility” (pg. 13), enslaved men and women operated against their oppressive owners by etching out forms of mobility for themselves in the face of constraint. By engaging in a practice called truancy, enslaved people sought temporary escape from their owners to spaces such as woods, swamps, and even slave cabins where the enslaved could essentially exercise more autonomy than the fields that they worked in and other open spaces on the plantation. According to Camp, truancy “disturbed and in some cases alarmed slaveholders… [It] never became an acceptable part of plantation life in planters’ minds. Rather it was the source of a fundamental conflict of interest between owner and owned” (pg. 36).
I agree with both Andrew and Taylor that Camp tends to shy away from using the word “slave” in her book. By using the words “enslaved” or “bondpeople,” she undeniably gives the people she writes about more agency as it not only “implies the active historical process involved in subjugating those who where enslaved… [but also] connotes a status rather than a state of being” (pg. 143). On the other hand, I also appreciated Camp’s attention to geography and movement especially when it came to exploring the ways in which enslaved people resisted and conducted their life under “white rule” through areas of open space. I personally thought Camp’s thesis created an in-depth picture of the ways in which enslaved people carved out lives for themselves using “rival geography,” which provided slaves a “space for private and public creative expression, rest and recreation, alternative communication, and importantly, resistance to planters’ domination of slaves’ every move” (pg. 7). In the end, not only was Closer To Freedom an ambitious work that gives further substance and depth to the experience of slavery from the perspective of both enslaved men and especially women, it also discloses several features of slavery and Southern society that are normally not made explicit. Instead of merely touching the surface of the ways in which slaves coped with their existence in the South, Camp humanizes the enslaved in the process and fundamentally connects their efforts to the dramatic events following the American Civil War.