No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley (review)

In Georgia in 1884, Ella Gamble was arrested, tried and convicted for arson, and sentenced to life in prison. Gamble was sent to the convict labor camp owned by Chattahoochee Brick Company and worked for no pay. By the 1870s, the convict lease system was a major source of revenue for the state. Gamble was later transferred to Milledgeville, where she likely was leased to a railroad company, working alongside hundreds of men and women sentenced for crimes ranging from petty larceny to murder. Gamble likely faced sexual abuse and violence while incarcerated. She suffered from cancer and ultimately was freed when state officials showed "mercy" for her condition after twenty years of hard labor. Gamble was one of hundreds of African American women imprisoned, often on flimsy charges, tortured, and abused in Georgia's brutal prison system. Her story, and those of many others, is detailed in Sarah Haley's No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, a troubling and deeply researched account of the convict leasing system in prison labor camps and on chain gangs, and of the representation of incarcerated black women in popular culture.

Haley uses Georgia's prison system to make an argument about intersectionality, the "mutually constitutive role of race and gender in constructing subject positions, technologies of violence, understandings of the social order, and the construction and application of the law" (pp. 4–5). Though scholars often toss around such abstract jargon, Haley buttresses it with impressive evidence, illustrating and documenting the horrifying "gendered racial violence" of Georgia's carceral system (p. 15). She uses crime and punishment to detail the ways the carceral system "exposed and enforced the radical otherness of the black female subject," thus reinforcing a stable gender identity for white women (p. 5). The carceral system defined black women as violent and primitive, the opposite of the domestic, passive white woman. Race and gender identities, intertwined with systemic violence, produced new versions of white and black womanhood—all immersed in white supremacy.

Terrible conditions in convict labor camps did not go unnoticed. By the turn of the twentieth century, leaders of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) launched a prison reform campaign. Like other Progressive-era reformers, they investigated prison conditions, published reports, and gave public lectures. They aimed to reform prison labor and to transform public images of black womanhood. The middle-class black women who campaigned to end convict leasing contended that black women prisoners were punished by tools of "white supremacist patriarchal terror" (p. 122). The NACW was motivated by self-interest as its members "realized that black women were bound up in a symbolic matrix of negative representation" that tied their fate to that of imprisoned black women (p. 122). The campaign ended with legislation shifting punishment from privately run prison labor camps to publicly run chain gangs. Despite the NACW's good intentions, their achievement can hardly be viewed as penal reform.

What is problematic in an otherwise powerfully researched book is Haley's turn to fiction—what she calls "speculative accounting"—to recount the inner lives of incarcerated women (p. 62). Haley presents a vivid portrait of Adeline Henderson and Nancy Morris, who, the historical record shows, spent nine years together working in the coke ovens of the Dade County Coal Mines and another three years in the fields at Camp Heardmont, an all-female convict labor camp, before Henderson died. The problem is there is no evidence to support Haley's account of their strong feelings for one another.

In the current political moment when truth has become a rare and valued jewel, historians should hold tightly to evidence and stick to interpretation and analysis grounded in archival sources. Without evidence for our claims, we are nothing more than sham artists professing to...