Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America by Karen Cook Bell (review)

Karen Cook Bell's Running from Bondage recovers the agency of enslaved women as they confronted the injustices of slavery and reclaimed their lives by exercising the "most ubiquitous" form of antislavery resistance—running away. Situating her study within a body of scholarship that includes authors like Woody Holton, Gary Nash, Cassandra Pybus, Hebert Aptheker, and Marisa Fuentes, Cook has offered an invaluable historical service in "mining the forgotten" to recover the long history of "Black resistance" (4).

Bell considers how enslaved women during the long revolutionary era, which included not only the American Revolution but also the Haitian Revolution and the War of 1812, took advantage of how war disrupted social and economic habits and "created spaces for [women] to invoke the same philosophical arguments of liberty that white revolutionaries made in their own fierce struggle against oppression" (3). Fueled by revolutionary language "to boost their own arguments for freedom," Black women, literate and illiterate, understood the power of such rhetoric that came to them through existing communication networks. They also recognized the legal ramifications of revolutionary ideology as they pursued emancipation through the courts. The 1772 Somerset Case, for instance, which essentially found that no existing law in Britain required the return of a slave to America, "inspired enslaved women to run away" (62).

But the experience of Black women's desire to escape did not originate strictly from the disruptions caused by war. Reasons for flight centered on how white owners attempted to alienate slaves from their own bodies through direct physical violence (e.g., brandings, whippings), labor exploitation, and sale (whereby owners viewed slaves as commodities with an exchange value attached to them). Slaves, of course, practiced daily acts of resistance within such oppressive system: feigning illness, destroying tools, and physically confronting owners and overseers. Escaping to avoid sexual assault, however, cast the experience of Black women in a unique light. An additional value was added to women slaves because of their reproductive capabilities, which distinguished them economically from male slaves. Even before the revolutionary period, African women were cast as "unwomanly," since they did not match up to the visions of "true" womanhood in the eyes of whites (22). Slave women were uniquely valued for their ability to produce more slaves. Their bodies and their potential offspring were commodified by their oppressors. Enslavers worked to protect their "investments," augmenting slave labor, through forced reproduction, especially in light of the fact that many slaves—"seasoned Caribbean slaves"—had come "from turbulent, fragmented societies where flight was common" (39). Slave women were aware of such strategies and worked tirelessly and courageously to reclaim their bodies, which often included limiting the "number of children they bore" through a variety of abortive methods (29). "By running away," Bell argues, "enslaved women took ownership of their bodies and resisted sexual assault and White men's claims to unlimited access" (33).

Along with being a "method of fighting against an oppressive system," therefore, running away revealed the material—specifically, spatial—dynamics of identity formation. An important aspect of the dynamics of self-ownership and identity formation through escape rested on the geographies of resistance that transgressed enslaving spaces. Fugitive slaves used places outside the slave system—"rival geographies" that Stephanie Camp defines as "alternative ways of knowing and using plantation and southern space that conflicted with planters' ideals and demands"—to fashion new lives for themselves, part of an effort to take control of their lives (45). These "rival geographies" included urban centers like Baltimore, war-time proclamations that kept runaways in proximity to the British army, and maroon societies, swamps along the periphery of slave economies. In this way, readers should be reminded of Ira Berlin's discuss of the societies created along the Atlantic littoral or the spaces of resistance (e.g., ships and taverns) emphasized...