Book Review: To Walk About In Freedom

 

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!