Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.

Introduction. The Women in the Water
Chapter 1. Tastemakers: Intimacy, Slavery, and Power in Senegambia
Chapter 2. Born of This Place: Kinship, Violence, and the Pinets' Overlapping Diasporas
Chapter 3. La Traversée: Gender, Commodification, and the Long Middle Passage
Chapter 4. Full Use of Her: Intimacy, Service, and Labor in New Orleans
Chapter 5. Black Femme Acts, Archives, and Archipelagos of Freedom
Chapter 6. Life After Death: Legacies of Freedom in Spanish New Orleans
Conclusion. Femmes de Couleur Libres and the Nineteenth Century
List of Archives and Databases
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Jessica Marie Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.