Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South by Talitha L. LeFlouria (review)

Believing that historians of convict labor have previously operated in a “masculinist realm … where a woman’s worth is least regarded,” author Talitha L. LeFlouria set herself the task “of creating voice” for the roughly 3 percent of Georgia prisoners who were African American women between 1868 and the mid-1930s (p. 189). In doing so, she has tried to force a reconsideration of the meaning of such labor itself. The “silence” of her title refers not only to the voices of female convicts but also to the absences, evasions, and restrictions of the sources.

I remember the shock I felt forty years ago while reading accounts of women incarcerated in coal camps and brick factories, being sentenced to coal mines with a baby at the breast, and giving birth in forced labor camps. I thought that I could never imagine what those experiences must have been like. LeFlouria, however, leaves nothing to the imagination. She uncovers the exact locations of the camps and farms where black women suffered through dreadful sentences, often for specifically “Negro crimes” such as “‘larceny from the house’” and “‘disorderly conduct’” (pp. 21, 33). Her repeated resort to such locutions as “[t]he imprisoned black female body” can feel clinical, almost cold, but her purpose is to render the lives of captive African American women as essentially embodied, black, female experiences—entailing specific medical conditions, maternal obligations, sexual identities, and “psychological issues” (p. 78).

LeFlouria also argues that, in contrast to neighboring Alabama, Georgia made few efforts to separate men and women when it came to labor assignments (with the exception of mining). In Georgia convict labor “transcended gendered borders,” and women “were decisively integrated into the male-dominated workforce” (pp. 9, 8). What was different for women, regardless of what kind of work they engaged in, was their vulnerability to sexual violence. But the author’s claim that black female convict labor, despite being “limited in volume,” was “a fundamental asset” to the development of Georgia’s industrial sector is ultimately unconvincing (p. 6). This statement must mean that industry in Georgia would have developed at a different pace or in another direction absent the labor of black women convicts, a highly questionable and undocumented contention. According to LeFlouria’s own data, between 1873 and 1899 the number of black women convicts leased for labor ranged only between nineteen and sixty-eight per year. Citing Claudia Goldin’s findings that 0.5 percent of black women in southern cities worked in manufacturing during the 1870s, LeFlouria argues that the figure underrepresents black women industrial workers because it omits convicts; however, her own figures show on average only a few dozen black female convicts were working in any capacity in the labor camps, farms, and chain gangs of Georgia’s carceral landscape.

Whether this book will be “foundational,” make “a critical intervention,” or “[open] up a new chapter” and “[carve] out new conjectural categories,” as the author claims, can only be determined by future research—research where the questions themselves will be transformed (pp. 190, 7, 188, 8). In such future studies, Chained in Silence will be an indispensable reference point.