Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland. by Jessica Millward (review)

Scholarly engagement with legal records has led several historians to write microhistories based on cases that explore the experiences of people once hidden from view. In this fashion, Jessica Millward came to write Finding Charity's Folk following her encounter with Charity Folks, "a ghost of slavery who refuses to be silenced" (xvii). In 1797, John Ridout manumitted his (approximately) forty-year-old slave Charity Folks by deed. Within ten years, she had successfully navigated the boundaries between slavery and freedom to secure the freedom of her five children as well. Millward uses her story to illuminate the ways that enslavement and the pursuit of freedom affected African American women and thereby offers a singular contribution to the growing literature on manumission in the postrevolutionary era.

Millward's understanding of the seminal event in Charity's life, her manumission, is strengthened by a feminist analysis of nearly fifteen hundred manumission papers, journals, and cases and effectively builds on the gender-neutral studies of leading scholars Eva Sheppard Wolf and Stephen Whitman. In many ways, Charity's manumission was intrinsically tied to her reproductive capacity. Her owners waited until her childbearing years had ended. Yet motherhood shaped her pursuits as a free woman, as it did those of other African American women. Charity managed to purchase all five of her children, just as a significant number of other African American women had purchased theirs. Although Millward cannot establish whether Charity or her mother, Rachel Burke, ever had sexual relationships with white men, she echoes Annette Gordon-Reed and speculates that several African American women entered into such relationships to enhance their prospects for freedom.

Millward is most insightful, however, in her examination of a path toward manumission not taken by Charity. Petitions that claimed freedom on the basis of descent from white women depended on the storytelling among African American women who in turn provided the evidence admitted to support such claims. When the Maryland legislature attempted to limit manumissions in 1809, it crafted a law that gave masters the authority to define the status of children born to enslaved women as they completed the terms of their manumission agreement. Enacted one year after the end of the Atlantic slave trade, a measure that meant the reproduction of slaves became the primary means of increasing the slave population, this law further reinforced the ability of owners to enslave the progeny of all children born to any woman owned by them.

Millward also explores the womanist strategies that helped African American women navigate the ambiguous lines between slavery and freedom. Enslaved women participated in their community of fellow bond-women as they built lives outside their owners' households. She explores the range of motion provided by the work roles of women. For instance, many enslaved women used market days to catch up with friends and family; a handful of women, such as midwives, were often authorized to travel well beyond the boundaries of their owners' households. This kind of space enabled Charity to pursue a relationship with Thomas Folks, a man enslaved by shopkeeper and tavern owner John Davidson. The boundaries of the spaces were unclear, as Charity began her family with Thomas while still enslaved by Ridout. He fathered her three youngest children and treated the two older children, fathered by an enslaved man with the surname Jackson, as his own. As a free woman, Charity relied upon the community of African American women in Annapolis to strengthen her household. In this regard, Charity Folks was especially successful. She and her husband established their own household. By the time of her death, Charity owned four different parcels of real estate in Annapolis. Throughout the nineteenth century, hers was among the wealthiest and most respected free black families in the state of Maryland.

From Millward's own admission, she struggled with the holes in Charity's biography and...