A Black Women’s History of the United States

In A Black Women’s History of the United States, Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross provide readers a telling of the nation’s history by way of the writings, testimonies, and cultural expressions of Black women——as well as the often buried and fragmented traces of their voices in the archives. This retelling is, as described by the authors, a “richly textured portrait” (xi). It sits within a gallery comprised of works like Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sharon Harley’s The Afro-American Woman, Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter, Darlene Clark-Hine’s Hine Sight, and Deborah Gray White’s Too Heavy a Load —a formative body of literature that chronicles Black women’s history through time and across place. The present work’s engravings not only reintroduce and integrate the herstories gathered by the existing literature, but its brushstrokes also broaden and thicken the historiography. This book was released shortly after the conclusion of 2019. Months before, in August, Black communities and public institutions commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of the disembarkment of Jamestown, Virginia’s first human cargo—“20. and odd Negroes” from West Central Africa. 1619 has become widely regarded as the year the United States and its dependency on Black slavery was established. The year and the African peoples forced to tend to the soil of the nascent country also bore African America. Yet, distinctly, Berry and Gross locate the inception of Black women’s lineages in America a century earlier. These foregrounding women were the daughters of “African male explorers and indigenous, Spanish, or Mexican women,” traversing present-day Southwest America in the mid to late 1500s (12). Moreover, they were free. “The first Black women who stepped foot onto what we consider American soil,” Chapter 1 asserts, “were not enslaved” (10). Although most go unnamed, documents such as the travel journals and ship registers of Spanish and Portuguese explorers, allude to the presence of Black women within their expedition parties. As these crews traversed and invaded indigenous occupied land in search of riches, trade routes, and territory, Black women acted as “interpreters, explorers, and servants” (11, 15). Coupled with long periods without water, physical exhaustion, volatile cultural clashes, and death—they often endured sexual assault at the hands of the men they traveled with.