Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel (review)

Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America is a narrative history of the tumultuous life of a slave-born woman, Henrietta Wood. There are two reasons why the book mesmerizes its readers. The first is Wood's life story. Born into slavery in northern Kentucky, Wood was sold twice before being brought down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Like many other slaves, she could not know her exact age and was separated from her mother and siblings after being sold. In 1848, at the age of around thirty, Wood was emancipated by her mistress in Cincinnati, where Wood had been hired out as a slave for domestic work. However, her freedom was never guaranteed, even in the free state of Ohio. Five years later, deceived by her employer, she rode in a carriage across the Ohio River into Kentucky. There Wood fell into the hands of a man by the name of Zebulon Ward, who sold her again into slavery. She was taken this time to Natchez, Mississippi, a center of cotton production in the Deep South. Wood recalled later, "'I sowed the cotton, hoed the cotton, and picked the cotton'" (p. 111). When the Civil War began, her master fled Natchez and moved to east-central Texas, taking Wood and his other slaves. After the war and emancipation, Wood finally returned to Cincinnati and courageously filed a lawsuit there in 1870 against Ward, the perpetrator of her kidnapping and re-enslavement two decades before, asking for $20,000 in damages and lost wages. Wood won the case, much to everyone's surprise, although the verdict allowed her to receive only $2,500. Still, the ex-slave Wood made Ward, a powerful man who built a fortune from convict labor as a lessee at state penitentiaries in the South, pay for her enslavement.

Second, Sweet Taste of Liberty is fascinating because of author W. Caleb McDaniel's meticulous research and lucid yet engaging prose style. McDaniel takes up the lengthy interviews Wood gave to two newspapers after she sued Ward for restitution. The author also uses a variety of other sources, such as slave owners' documents, newspaper articles, and court records, and fashions them into a narrative presented within a thick and broad historical context. Despite the dearth of records about Wood herself, McDaniel painstakingly traces her life experience during and after slavery, which covered a vast geographic area. Although filled with detailed descriptions of people, events, and contextual information, McDaniel deftly organizes the entire book into short chapters, which makes it easier for the reader to follow the stormy path Wood took. Aware of the great difficulty in reconstructing an enslaved person's life, McDaniel has made many of his "sources and archival notes available online," so that interested readers can look into the process of historical thinking and writing themselves (p. 257). The appendix, in that sense, is not to be missed, since it provides useful information on how McDaniel has tackled the sources to come up with his interpretation.

The analytical potential of the book is somewhat limited because the author only briefly discusses what the story of Wood and restitution could mean for the contemporary talk of reparations for slavery. According to historian Carole Emberton, whom McDaniel cites in the epilogue, scholars have argued only about the degree of freedom given to ex-slaves after emancipation, assuming that the Civil War was fought for freedom and that what happened afterward was an inevitable march toward justice and freedom for the emancipated. Emberton criticizes such a historical synthesis as "the freedom narrative" and calls for its fundamental "unwriting" (Carole Emberton, "Unwriting the Freedom Narrative: A Review Essay," Journal of Southern History, 82 [May 2016], pp. 377–94). In fact, the recent surge of racial violence and continuing racial discrimination have led scholars...