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To Walk About in Freedom
The Long Emancipation
of Priscilla Joyner
The extraordinary life of Priscilla Joyner and her quest—along with other formerly enslaved people—to find the meaning of freedom after the Civil War.
Priscilla Joyner was born into the world of slavery in 1858 North Carolina and came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. She grew up isolated and unsure of who she was and where she belonged—feelings that no emancipation proclamation could assuage.
Her life story—candidly recounted in an oral history for the Federal Writers’ Project—captures the intimate nature of freedom. Using Joyner’s interview and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, historian Carole Emberton uncovers the deeply personal, emotional journeys of freedom’s charter generation—the people born into slavery who walked into a new world of freedom during the Civil War. From the seemingly mundane to the most vital, emancipation opened up a myriad of new possibilities: what to wear and where to live, what jobs to take and who to love.
Carole Emberton is professor of history at the University at Buffalo. An NEH public scholar, she is the author of the prize-winning Beyond Redemption. She has written for the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Photo by Dea Lea
Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (American Beginnings, 1500-1900)
In the months after the end of the Civil War, there was one word on everyone’s lips: redemption. From the fiery language of Radical Republicans calling for a reconstruction of the former Confederacy to the petitions of those individuals who had worked the land as slaves to the white supremacists who would bring an end to Reconstruction in the late 1870s, this crucial concept informed the ways in which many people—both black and white, northerner and southerner—imagined the transformation of the American South.