Creating Mindful Heritage Narratives: Black Women in Slavery and Freedom

Abstract

Attempts to complicate New England history and counter the amnesia of northern slavery must be done in ways that responsibly account for the diversity of experiences throughout the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This transitional period from slavery to emancipation laid the foundations for how slavery is remembered and how race is understood, even to this day. Reading through the historical and archaeological records allows a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms by which captive and free Blacks were marginalized in New England's landscape and historical memories through gendered and racialized processes of erasure. This article examines the experiences of three women from early rural Massachusetts through a lens of Black feminist theory with the goal of creating mindful narratives of what it meant to be Black in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century.