To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner (W.W. Norton), by Carole Emberton

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"To Walk About in Freedom" by Carole Emberton

Priscilla Joyner, born into the slave society of the Old South, was still a child when the Civil War ended. She became a footnote in history when, in the 1930s, she told her story to reporters from the Federal Writers Project gathering interviews for a local history series. Now, historian Carole Emberton has examined the full transcript of Joyner’s interview and tries to imagine her life as a Black woman in To Walk About in Freedom.

Joyner’s story was unusual but not unheard of. She was the child of an unknown Black man and a white, slave-owning mother. Legally as the child of a white mother she was “free,” but was made to feel inferior nonetheless because of her color. With Emancipation came the promise of freedom followed by its denial. “White southerners were determined to make sure that although slavery might be dead in name it would live on in the workings of their daily lives,” Emberton writes. Joyner married a laborer who was half-brother to the white man whose farm he worked. The color barriers hardened under Jim Crow and the ever-present threat of white violence.

Joyner and her husband worked hard, managed the money they earned and bought a house. She was among the more fortunate members of a generation newly “free” in a society determined to hold them down. To Walk About in Freedom can find little about her beyond what she told the Writers Project interviewers but imagining her life in context casts a ray of light into the history of African Americans after Emancipation.