Listen

Center For Black Diaspora At Depaul University, “The Sounds of Stillness: Dwelling in the Visual Archive of Diaspora,” WBEZ, April 14, 2013, https://www.wbez.org/2013/04/14/the-sounds-of-stillness-dwelling-in-the-visual-archive-of-diaspora.

Reads

• Emily A. Owens, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

• “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” National Archives, August 15, 2016, https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau.

• “No Pensions for Ex-Slaves,” National Archives, August 15, 2016, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/summer/slave-pension.html.

• Alexandra Shahin, “They Struggled and Fought, with Courage Fraught,” 64 Parishes, March 1, 2026, https://64parishes.org/they-struggled-and-fought-with-courage-fraught.

• D. Ryan Gray, “Memories of Black Indian Materialities in Colonial New Orleans,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8, nos. 1–2 (2019): 78–109, https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2019.1647662.

• Kristina Kay Robinson, “Down River Road,” Burnaway, February 18, 2020, https://burnaway.org/magazine/letter-from-new-orleans-down-river-road/.

• “One of the Most Resilient Trees on Earth Is Dying in Droves,” Premium, August 15, 2023, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/forest-bald-cypress-climate-change-sea-level-rise.

• “Ecotourism Could Help the ‘Amazon of North America’ Recover. Here’s How.,” Travel, April 16, 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/the-amazon-of-north-america-is-disintegrating-visit-mindfully.

• “Fish Flee for Their Lives in Rare, Chilling Video of Bottom Trawling,” Environment, May 9, 2025, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/bottom-trawling-effects-seabed-ocean.

• David Joshua Jennings, “Documenting Louisiana’s Surviving Old-Growth Bald Cypress Trees,” Louisianalife.Com, May 1, 2025, https://www.louisianalife.com/documenting-louisianas-surviving-old-growth-bald-cypress-trees/.

• Fatima Shaik, “Economy Hall, the ‘Carnegie Hall of Jazz,’” accessed April 27, 2026, https://hnoc.org/publishing/first-draft/what-do-you-know-about-economy-hall-jazz-fest-tents-namesake-was-once-.

• Heather Timmons and Sruthi Gottipati, “Woman Dies After a Gang Rape That Galvanized India,” World, The New York Times, December 28, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/world/asia/condition-worsens-for-victim-of-gang-rape-in-india.html.

• Chris Turner-Neal, “Widow’s Mite,” 64 Parishes, May 31, 2022, https://64parishes.org/widows-mite.

• Sean Michael Chick, “On the Eve of War: New Orleans, Louisiana,” Emerging Civil War, April 12, 2021, https://emergingcivilwar.com/2021/04/12/on-the-eve-of-war-new-orleans/.4ee

• “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina From the Federal Union,” Digital History, accessed April 28, 2026, https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/south_secede/south_secede_southcarolina.cfm.

• Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Univ of North Carolina Press, 1996).

• “‘With Malice Toward None...’: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (U.S. National Park Service),” accessed April 28, 2026, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/-with-malice-toward-none-lincoln-s-second-inaugural.htm.

• Gabrielle Dean, “Scribbling Women: Zora Neale Hurston, Lost and Found,” Sheridan Libraries, September 10, 2020, https://www.library.jhu.edu/news/2020/09/scribbling-women-zora-neale-hurston-lost-and-found/.

• Valerie Boyd, “Zora Neale Hurston: The Howard University Years,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 39 (2003): 104–8, https://doi.org/10.2307/3134393.

• Mary Niall Mitchell, Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery NYU Press, 2008).

Documents

• “Transcript of the Emancipation Proclamation,” National Archives, October 6, 2015, https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation/transcript.html

• “Proceedings in a Case between an Alabama Freedwoman and Her Employer’s Son, March 24, 1866,” accessed April 27, 2026, https://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Sanford%20case.html

• “Proceedings in a Case between a Tennessee Freedwoman and Her Employer, May 24, 1866,” accessed April 27, 2026, https://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Boyd.html.

Watch

Projects

“Cultural Family Photo Exhibit,” Economy Hall, accessed April 27, 2026, https://www.economyhall.com/descendants.

Economy members served in the Battle of New Orleans and Civil War, died in the New Orleans Massacre and “Battle of Liberty Place,” worked in the Reconstruction government and post-Reconstruction politics and much more. Their hall hosted public debates, theater, concerts, recitals, and balls.

Following are the names of the people who created the Economy Hall’s community: the 1836 founders and men who were members of the society in 1874 and 1876 when the Economy re-incorporated to include Les Amis de l’Équité—the Friends of Equity. Also listed are classical and jazz musicians; activists and politicians; and mutual aid, philanthrophic and labor organizations that came to Economy Hall.

The Cultural Family of Economy Hall is this community—linked over 200 years by history, culture and a commitment to equal rights and social parity. All cultural and biological descendants are welcome to join with the general public to celebrate the Economy family in June 2023 at Xavier University of Louisiana. .

(In)Visible Architects of Freedom Digital Archive https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/education/invisible-architects-digital-archive.htm

Primary sources, maps, timelines, and other educational resources for use in your classroom!

Explore this database of sources about the development of the Black American community of Lënapehòkink (known today as Philadelphia) dating from the 1600s through the 1800s.

Primary sources include petitions, newspaper articles, letters, objects, friendship albums, and images organized by eras, people, places, and events.

“Photos,” Roudanez: History and Legacy, June 24, 2015, https://roudanez.com/photos/.

The Cabildo de Regla Project: A Digital Archive https://archipelagosjournal.org/issue07/gelbard-cabildo.html

Scholarly practice in the 21st century is marked by an existential demand to break down the walls of academia and work more closely with communities on the ground. Of the many shapes that this outreach can take, one of the closest to our traditional practices is the re-shaping of the cultural record to include historically marginalized voices in a close dialogue among equal partners. The Cabildo de Regla Project: A Digital Archive provides us with a model of how a scholar, completely new to digital humanities, has used their growing knowledge and access to resources to document and amplify the practices of a Caribbean afro-religious community with crucial historical and present-day significance for the region. The below exchange highlights the project’s growth, always in dialogue, always in relation.

Affirmations and Beatitudes

Dissent

Block em.

Freedom struggle

Divine Nine Says No

Ask me: what do i remember?
What do I remember?

Horses big, brown, tired, seeing
too much between the trees. i remember

to put the blackberries in a jar, taste
with smashed fingers, remember

their breaking, the wet mud, slick.
Eighteen sixty three, remember?

"God damned Yankee army," he'd hissed
while i prayed black and remembered

red watermelon flesh, fresh cut grass, smelled
pistol-blood on leather that remembers

three years isn't long enough.
(But the shame is not mine. Remember.)

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On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The “Freedmen’s Bureau” was a critical resource for ex-slaves as they battled ex-Confederate soldiers, former owners, planter legislatures, and extra-legal violence. The Freedmen’s Bureau assisted formerly enslaved women, children and men with emergency food, clothing, medical care and education. They mediated labor disputes, criminal disputes between freedpeople and between freedpeople and their owners, and civil ceremonies like weddings.

The Freedmen and Southern Society Project has worked for years to make the massive documentation generated by formerly enslaved available for all to see, read, research, and learn from. Learn more here.

On September 25, 1866, just three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Rhoda Ann Cody “came into this office” of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Griffin, Georgia and delivered testimony about a brutal rape by eight soldiers that occurred at her house, while her husband “had gone to the watermelon patch.” At least one man, she “supposed to be an ex-Confederate soldier,” because he was on crutches. They threatened to kill her because her husband fought for the Union Army. The the men beat her daughters, ransacked their cabin, stole clothing and other items, and left. “There were concerned in this affair eight men,” she stated, “none of which could be recognized, for certain.”

Recognizable or not, Black women seized the right of testimony where it was available. And whether it yielded safety or not, Black women demanded their story would be told. And whether officers believed them or not, whether it was safe to tell or not, they were determined to be heard.

This offering is for the power of testimony. And memory.

I offer a ghazal, a form of poetry that has a tradition of love and loss, to struggle with what love means in a world of slaves, what love means in the afterlife of slavery, with loving Black womanhood and mourning the suffering that stalks us and loving how we give testimony anyway. With the five senses of the body (see, touch, hear, taste, smell) and what it takes to be in our bodies despite and because and in the face of.

Ada Pinkston, artist and cultural worker, created the performance piece pictured to reconsecrate sites of Confederate monuments around Baltimore City. The LandMarked project is at the link.

May light lift up the souls and spirits of Rhoda Ann Cody, but also Cerina Fairfax, Shaneiqua Pugh, Nancy Metayer Bowen, Lisa Grier, Barbara Deer, the many named and unnamed.

We remember and will remember. The shame is not yours.

Texts:

• Brittney Cooper, “The Shreveport Mass Killing Isn’t Just About ‘Mental Health,’” The Cut, April 20, 2026, https://www.thecut.com/article/shreveport-killing-shamar-elkins-mental-health-patriarchy.html.

• Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Hoodrat Praxis in a Time of Love and Fury,” in More Than Our Pain: Affect and Emotion in the Era of Black Lives Matter, ed. Beth Hinderliter and Steve Peraza (SUNY Press, 2021).

• Treva B. Lindsey, America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice, (University of California Press, 2023).

• Emily A. Owens, Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans (The University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

This is offering #11 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing above.

I am always receiving, seeing and gathering critical and anti-Ai material on social media (IG). For those who don’t know, I direct an ecosystem of labs that has a Critical Ai manifestation doing incredible work. So I also get a lot of material from across academia and the tech-academic-policy nexus as well.

Read more

Listen

Reads

• Justin L. Mann, Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2026).

• “The Underground Railroad by William Still, 1872 (U.S. National Park Service),” accessed April 16, 2026, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/inde-underground-railroad-wstill-1872.htm.

• Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman; an Anthology, with Internet Archive ([New York] New American Library, 1970), http://archive.org/details/blackwoman00toni.

• Beer P. Prakken and Lauren Smith, “Black Resistance, Struggle, and Agency on Canal Street’s Neutral Ground: A Washerwomen’s Case Study, 1837-1841,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 66, no. 4 (2025): 415–50.

• Zach Blas et al., eds., Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025).

• Edward Jones Corredera, ed., Supplicant Empires: Searching for the Iberian World in Global History (Brepols Pub, 2025).

• Department of Arts of Africa Americas Oceania, and the, “Nok Terracottas (500 B.C.–200 A.D.) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” October 1, 2000, https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/nok-terracottas-500-b-c-200-a-d.

• por 90 Grados, Desarchivar La Mirada: Una Exhibición Para Revisar Las Visualidades Del Arte Puertorriqueño Del Siglo XX. – 90 GRADOS˚, March 16, 2026, https://90grados.com/arte/desarchivar-la-mirada-uprrp.

• Jane Dailey et al., eds., Jumpin’ Jim Crow (Princeton University Press, 2000).

• Toni Cade Bambara. “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” in Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, 240. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009).

• Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology Simon and Schuster, 2010).

• Rebecca Snedeker, “Once the Levees Break,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 14–29.

• Sara E. Johnson, “Wonder as Creative Act: Methodological Approaches in Encyclopédie Noire,” Journal of Haitian Studies 31, no. 2 (2025): 225–42

• Karen B. Graubart, “Disassemblage/Reassemblage and the Archival Problem,” Journal of Haitian Studies 31, no. 2 (2025): 216–24

• Manuel Covo, “Decentering the Author, Recovering Voices: From Moreau’s Encyclopédie to Périès’s Histoire,” Journal of Haitian Studies 31, no. 2 (2025): 213–15

• Elise A. Mitchell, “L’Utilité de Cette Espèce de Science”,” Journal of Haitian Studies 31, no. 2 (2025): 208–12

• Leslie M. Alexander, “Untelling/Retelling Black Lives: A Reflection on Sara Johnson’s Methodology in Encyclopédie Noire,” Journal of Haitian Studies 31, no. 2 (2025): 198–207.

• Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (UNC Press Books, 2023).

• “Major Update in Our NEH Lawsuit - AHA,” Https://Www.Historians.Org/, accessed April 17, 2026, https://www.historians.org/news/major-update-in-our-neh-lawsuit/.

• “Humility of Things,” What Did They Eat? Where Did They Stay? Black Boardinghouses and the Colored Conventions Movement, n.d., accessed April 17, 2026, https://coloredconventions.org/boardinghouses/humility-of-things/.

• “Traditional Origin Story,” The Meeting That Launched a Movement: The First National Convention, n.d., accessed April 17, 2026, https://coloredconventions.org/first-convention/origins-1830-convention/traditional-origin-story/.

Documents

• List of Anthony Thompson’s Negroes (with a line item for Ben, Harriet Tubman’s father) https://www.mdhistory.org/resources/list-of-anthony-thompsons-negroes-sic/

Watch

Black Diasporican Archives Event

Hosted on site at CENTRO, The Latinx Project presented a panel curated by this year’s Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow Daniel Morales Armstrong. The program offered a retelling of the emancipation story in Puerto Rico through the archival records of the formerly enslaved people who redefined the meaning of freedom in the colony. The presentation was followed by a conversation with Ashley Coleman Taylor (UT Austin) [via zoom], Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez,

Projects

“My Bondage and My Freedom” Digital Exhibit, Amistad Research Center, https://g.co/arts/fxSw7shBQ28krfuJA

Jen White-Johnson, https://jenwhitejohnson.com/

Jennifer White-Johnson is an Afro-Latina disabled artist, designer, educator, and activist. White-Johnson was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and currently lives and works in Baltimore. Her mother was raised in Ponce, Puerto Rico, before moving to D.C. and meeting her father, a Black man from the South Side of Chicago. White-Johnson, who self identifies as Afro-Latina, was raised around colorful art—her mother liked making arts and crafts, and her father once painted an entire mural on his DC apartment wall. (source: NMAAHC Artist profile)

Affirmations and Beatitudes

Because what even is research, if not this?

Diaspora

I love you

Grown Woman

How it feels to trust a Capricorn

See you next week….

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

The series was canceled, but the mark on the culture was real.

When I heard the internets summoned Misha Green’s TV series Underground from the archives, I went into the hard drive archive for material. And it just so happened that, this week, in Black Freedom Struggles, we discussed Black visual archives of slavery, along with watching Underground (season one, episode one) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. We walked the arc of Black visual narrative from hieroglyphics (Egypt) and Nok sculptures (Nigeria) to lithographs, prints, and sketches of the early eighteenth-century travelogue era to the paintings, portraits, and political cartoons of the nineteenth century. We ended with the rise of monuments (Confederate and emancipation) and photography in the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century.

This tenth offering is a mosaic laid at the altar of slavery’s visual archive. It is dedicated to Misha Green’s chaotic and perfect vision of whole Black people (especially Black women and girls), to Toni Morrison’s Black Book, to the genius and challenge of seeing Black life, and to the way we who are Black, with all of our cool and all of our bite and all of our body, even in the time of slavery, were ten times more interesting than [redacted] and we remain so.

Seeing is never just believing, but our eyes are information.

A note: This post is too long for email. Click the title to go to the newsletter page and view the entire post. The images and videos below are worth it, I promise.

This is offering #10 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing above.

…and now, a bit of a tangent, in honor of Underground:

The Black and Indigenous freedom seeking practices and solidarities….

Rosalee and William Still below. Truly, the second season was elite.

Misha Green, if you ever read this, please know the North remembers and we will continue to hold a candle for this show that was killed before its time. Ashé.

"They were determined to have liberty even at the 
cost of life." Despite "abridgements" and "omissions," one
day, you go. From Norfolk, Delaware, Maryland, cross
rivers, with tears, they wrote (and spoke) letters home to kin:

"Dear Mother" I am writing you, loving you, "hounds was
on my" skin but I am safe, Mama. I am free here "where
they would never smell my track" I am "free as she is and
more happier" this Northern "air was precious" Mama! "A
secret passage" on "one of the steamers running be-
tween Philadelphia and Richmond, V.A." I fled
the "barbarism of slavery," I, woman, man, child
neither slave nor sibling, human, agent, bright star.

Will wrote it all down. Took a drink. Wet his pen. Began again.

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This past weekend, I had the pleasure of experiencing a Julia Mallory writing workshop. There she introduced participants to the “hai-ju,” a poem in thirteen lines, thirteen syllables each line and the thirteenth line offering “a closure or revelation.” This is my haiju for William Still, the author and abolitionist, who collected the narratives of Black freedom seekers riding the Underground Railroad to freedom out of slavery.

This week’s offering is dedicated to the fury and labor of the witness, and therefore to him, but also to Julia Mallory, all the women and gender-expansive souls who attended the “Whats the Plan?” Toni Cade Bambara weekend in Baltimore, and Toni Cade Bambara, ibae, who, was also a witness, whose writing offered testimony on Black culture, and Black cultural work.

The Toni Cade Bambara: School of Organizing documentary, directed by Louis Massiah and Monica Henriquez, offered various “lessons” inspired by Bambara’s life. One of the lessons was: “Be responsible for your eyes.”

Be responsible for your eyes.

Grateful forever.

This is offering #9 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing above.

Shoot me a line, let me know what you’re reading these days.

Texts:

• Rashauna Johnson, Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

• Toni Cade Bambara, Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009).

Header Image: View of incarcerated women from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, West Feliciana Parish, working in a field, with a correctional officer or guard observing (Article). This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.

Kitchen Table History on Bookshop

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But that's it. That's the research post. Between trips out of town and hosting events, I am inhaling this book and nothing else!

If you are in town, come to the Parkway tomorrow. Let Toni Cade Bambara bless your life.

Check the IG for the travel and event updates. Check the lab newsletter for project and event updates.

Enjoy the weekend.

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Text:

Rashauna Johnson, Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Header Image:

Photograph of unidentified woman related to the Armant/Flint family of New Orleans, c. 1900s, Prosper L. Flint collection, Amistad Research Center

How should we address you?

He called you Minty. The white man with the doctor for a son. He owned your father. He owned your mother. He cared enough about you being born to pay the midwife for her services--which is to say he cared enough about his property to make sure you arrived whole, full, sane enough to lift, throw, push, and pull on the land he called a farm, but should be called a plantation. Over one thousand acres, over forty enslaved people. This was no small enterprise.

Language is strange here in Maryland. No romance for the wicked, but no real acknowledgement either of the damage done, the role slavery played. I’m a Chicagoan, I can empathize. Those Old Northwest black laws don’t sound nearly as sexy fine as “Land of Lincoln” after a man who wanted to send newly emancipated women, children, and men to Africa because the political cost of integrating Black people into the body politic seemed too high.

I digress. And I shouldn’t. Because we, Marylanders (am I one?) do acknowledge YOU.

In 2023, a scientist found your father’s home on his former owner’s land.

How many times did you run back there? Not to free him (he was freed by the time you left), but to visit him, your Baba, sit at bended knee, feel his hand on your forehead. I have a daughter now, she has a father, and their bond is intense, exquisite, pristine. How many times would she return just to look in his eyes and see herself reflected back?

The answer is forever. The answer is say less.

The white man who called the midwife didn’t call you by your full name just like he didn’t call your mother by her full name. What is it about white mastery that can’t pronounce a few extra syllables? You became Minty. She remained Rit.

And you worked. Domestic. Field hand. Dock worker. Lumberjack.

These are not names. We can’t call you by your labor. And we can’t call you by “girl!” which is probably what some overseer, supervisor, paddy rollers called you. As in “hey girl, stop him” which may have been what the overseer called out when he came after Barrett. Why Barrett left the plantation, not sure we know. But we can imagine. Fall season. Harvest time. Plenty to do. Sometimes you just want a break. You could understand that and even if you didn’t agree, you knew who the real enemy was. You knew that you don’t help enslavers if you can avoid it. If you have a good reason not to.

“When the slave was found, the overseer swore he should be whipped, and called on Harriet, among others, to help tie him. She refused, and as the man ran away, she placed herself in the door to stop pursuit. The overseer caught up a two-pound weight from the counter and threw it at the fugitive, but it fell short and struck Harriet a stunning blow on the head.”1

The blow, the visions, the fainting spells that followed would continue for the rest of your life.

Who knows what you saw in that blinding light.

You named yourself Harriet when you married that man John, the one you would leave when you ran for freedom, the one you came back for. Harriet and Tubman. A married name. A married woman. When you came back, though, he wouldn’t leave with you. He was free, you see, and he’d already re-married. You married a...well, grace can be given. It’d been two years.

And he didn’t know what you knew—that you were God sent and had more than purpose. You had vision.

In any case, you left that man and kept his name. And went to find your niece to take with you instead.

Thirteen times you went back and forth, crossed hell’s gate and returned. Over seventy people, across these trips. We imagine what those trips must have been like, but we can’t really know. To describe those journeys in text in the years before the Civil War, before the Thirteenth Amendment, was to court death.

At the beginning of Night Flyer, Tiya Miles unearths one scene for us to chew on in the present day:

“The storm was coming. She sensed its approach in the shift of the wind, the click-clack of branches, and the eddies of sea-moistened air. She craned her neck to view the sky, dark through a scaffold of winter-tree canopy. Wrapping her arms across her chest, she pulled her woolen shawl close, then knuckled one hand to her heart and curled the other around her revolver. Ever watchful of nature’s signs, the woman waited....

“Petite with a slender build and still limber in her late thirties, she pressed her back against the bark of a thick tree. This might have been a loblolly pine, the species that coated the old-growth forests along the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. A companion to the stranded woman who stood barely five feet tall, that evergreen would have cast a net of protective crystalline needles.

“As Tubman waited, “night came on and with it a blinding snowstorm and a raging wind. She protected herself behind a tree…and remained all night alone exposed to the fury of that storm.” Tubman took shelter against the tree’s trunk, shivering through the evening as other warm-blooded creatures, like fox squirrels and snow geese, skittered, burrowed, or folded frigid, ice-tipped wings.”

Miles asks:

“What was it like to tuck into the dark depth of the winter woods? What was Tubman thinking as she shrunk beneath the branch-umbrella, listening for animal sounds behind the screech of the wind? Was she worrying about the fugitives who had not come yet, fearing the hunters trailing them and the trackers always searching for her? Was she turning over in her mind the cascade of events that had led her here to a test of her mettle and the silent company of this tree?”

Of course, you might answer with:

“I just asked Jesus to take care of me,” Harriet explained to the questioner, proclaiming that divine intervention had protected her from freezing that night.”

William Lloyd Garrison would call you Moses, eventually. The name fits, of course. Except Moses never saw the Promised Land. Maybe Garrison never believed enslaved would either. Oh, he hoped. Prayed. But even Douglass eventually parted ways with him because he wouldn’t go far enough.

Enslaved knew there could be no compromise in the fight for freedom.

You knew it too. As you guided them by hand through the woods, as you dodged dogs and patrols and rocks and rivers, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed (1850). It required everyday citizens to help capture slaves who had run away. Federal commissioners were appointed to special commissions that decided who could stay and who would be sent back South. Sheriffs and judges were paid more money for slaves caught and returned ($10) than those released ($5), incentivizing grift, fraud, and kidnapping of free Black people. Anyone who helped runaways could be fined or imprisoned and everyone living in the North became implicated in the immoral acts of the Slave Power (however agnostic they felt about Black peoples cranial capacities or biological fitness for citizenship).

For white people, citizen or not, slaveowner or not, after 1850, the line in the sand was clear—you are either for freedom or you are an enslaver.

Meanwhile Dred and Harriet Scott waited for the decision on their case (1854), Celia killed her rapacious owner (1855), and Margaret Garner killed her daughter (1856).

You knew that convincing white people, with their millions of dollars invested in white cotton and Black bodies, in international slave trades, and in all the ancillary and related industries (insurance, printing, clerking, real estate, transportation, fabric factories, even corn production—because, of course, what must the enslaved eat) was not a battle you wanted to fight.

You didn’t mind John Brown’s acts of bloody violence in Kansas, you didn’t blink twice at his follow up attempts to lead an uprising against Harper’s Ferry. He was executed for his efforts, but he set the bar for white solidarity. We know these co-conspirators, white activists and actors who have been killed because they dared to reject the status quo of Black death, genocide, and occupation. Renée Good and Alex Pretti and Heather Heyer, Viola Liuzzo would also be killed.

Which makes me wonder: Was Moses was a name you tolerated, even used, especially to spread the message of abolition? A useful narrative device?

Did you like General more? After all, when the time came, you fought. You worked for the Union army as a domestic (again), but also a spy, a teacher, a scout. You helped organize, lead, and execute the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina, which freed enslaved people up and down the rice plantation corridor.

You did not shy away from war. Your God wanted peace, but he knew that sometimes you needed to rise up to get it.

There is another reason I’m not so sure if I should call you Moses, a cheekier one, perhaps.

You named yourself Harriet, when the time to marry John came. You kept Harriet when you married again. Nelson Davis, twenty five years old. He fought in the war as well. Purrrr.

“We do not consider her second marriage to Nelson Davis, a younger man, her Tea Cake, a marriage that remains a grossly understudied site for thinking through Tubman’s erotic subjectivity. Although this second marriage supports a framing ofTubman as invested in sustaining a heteropatriarchal family structure, one could also consider the sexual agency she exercised when deciding to partner with a significantly younger man. We do not ponder what it means that they met during the Civil War but would wait to be married until after the battle dust cleared, when she had time, when she returned to New York, when John was dead.

“Despite her first husband’s rejection, one could reflect on feelings of longing and desire for romantic satiation that Tubman may have endured during her separation from John, before meeting Davis. We indulge a bit in the details of her first wedding as a freedwoman, the church where it was held, the announcements registered, the dignitaries present (Clinton 2004). We do not take the same pleasure in envisioning her wedding night. We do not envision her wedding night at all-or twenty years of nights thereafter. We lack imagination. The archive demands imagination.

“Instead, she is Black Moses. Undefiled by carnal desire, she is a black revolutionary body impervious to human needs and wants. She is a trope to be used and deployed, refashioned from being into memory and elevated to icon.”2

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You did not shy away from freedom. The end of the war, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Reconstruction era, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan—whew, you saw that the Promised Land and it needed work if it was going to fulfill its promise.

And that was okay by you, because you had a vision. Of a home.

They denied you pay as a soldier; you collected on Nelson’s after he passed away. They denied you military recognition for one hundred and sixty one years. You talked about your service anyway. Not until 2024, under its first Black governor, Wes Moore, did the state of Maryland commission you to the rank of brigadier general.

You would have liked the pension, the recognition, for sure, if only for the financial support they might have brought you. But you had a vision. Of a home, for the most vulnerable. For the girls who are sick, as you were sick when that two pound weight struck you in the head. For the elders who needed a safe place for repose, as your father and mother deserved, a just reward for a life lived at labor. For the freedpeople who found themselves stuck out in the cold because of landlords who would refused to rent to Black people, employers who only hired freedpeople as domestics and laborers, landowners who would only parcel out plots on shares and paid only in plantation scrip.

Even in the North, white people refused to see the truth—that the slave trade was the gravest crime against human rights the world would ever see, that the entire structure of the nation had been built on the backs of the half million enslaved recently freed by constitutional amendment and their fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, great-grandfathers, and great-grandmothers. A spreading web of lost and taken kin. Many thousands gone.

You allow your biography to be published (1868). You take care of your family. Nelson dies, but you continue organizing, speaking on behalf of women’s suffrage as well as the needs of the freedpeople. You eventually receive a pension.

In 1896, you buy land in Auburn, New York. You use the proceeds from your autobiography (now in its second printing), your pension, Nelson’s pension, and you fundraise to make it happen. But you do.

On that land, you build the freedom that you’d dreamed of: a safe place, a place of repose, a place of healing. A home and hospital for indigent, aged, and sick Black people.

You live to see it all, eyes wide open. You built the freedom you needed, step by step, brick by brick.

And then you die, an elder, at that home, in 1913. Your tombstone would read Harriet Tubman Davis.

This year, Pauline M. Copes-Johnson, one of your great-great-grand nieces passed away at the age of 98. She was born fifteen years after you passed away. You only just missed her. We know the first fugitives you helped liberate from slavery were your niece, Kessiah Jolley, and her children. We know kinship pulled you back South again and again. We know you took aunt-ing very seriously. Never in the diminutive “auntie” way. Always in the Black love is Black wealth “Auntie” practice of one who loves their nieces and nephews and knows they are their own.

Well, your kin claimed you too, though they had to keep some things secret for awhile.

“It was a secret because the confederates wanted her, and although she was dead, they would come after the relatives,” Copes Johnson told theGrio. “They thought I’d give it away because I was very young then.”

Even into the 1920s and 1930s, the children of slavewoners hunted Black flesh.

This offering is for your vision of marronage, of home, and of kinship. It is for the sinew and muscles that kept you moving back and forth across the line to free others as you’d freed yourself. It is for the act of refusal that, even as a teenage girl, you held true to, standing in the doorway of the store against an overseer brutal enough to throw a two-pound weight and risk a child. It is for the love you found and the love you took and the loves you freed from their bonds. It is for the spiritual clarity and focus you demanded of yourself and those around you.

You knew an end to slavery would come and it would only come if we made it happen. You knew wars and laws and amendments might be needed, but freedom would mean nothing if freedpeople didn’t have what they needed to live. You knew the vote was a necessary part of creating the conditions for freedom and so is a place to heal broken bones, weary spirits, and tired souls.

Clear eyes. Clean message. Stay on the path. Don’t look back.

I lied at the beginning. We know how to address you. We know what to call you.

Harriet Tubman Davis, ibae. We call you ancestor.

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Header Image: Harriet Tubman’s Auburn Home, National Historical Park, New York

Readings

• Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (as told by Harriet Tubman to Sarah Bradford), 1869

• Karsonya Wise Whitehead. “Beyond Myths and Legends: Teaching Harriet Tubman and Her Legacy of Activism. ” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 12, no.2 (2014): 196–218.

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs. “Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True. ” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 12, no.2 (2014): 142–52.

• Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024).

• Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 169–95, [PDF here]

• Reuters and The Associated Press, “UN Passes Resolution Naming Slave Trade ‘Gravest Crime against Humanity,’” Al Jazeera, accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/25/un-passes-resolution-naming-slave-trade-gravest-crime-against-humanity

• “Archaeologists: Site of Harriet Tubman’s Father’s Home Found,” Opb, accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.opb.org/article/2021/04/20/archaeologists-site-of-harriet-tubman-s-father-s-home-found/

• “List of Anthony Thompson’s Negroes [Sic],” Maryland Center for History and Culture, n.d., accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.mdhistory.org/resources/list-of-anthony-thompsons-negroes-sic/

• MPT Digital Studios | Maryland Underground: Thompson Farm, n.d., accessed April 4, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/video/maryland-underground-thompson-farm-32i8hu/

• “False Quote on Freed Slaves Wrongly Attributed to Harriet Tubman,” AP News, October 4, 2018, https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-2312300417.

This is offering #8 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

Kinship and Community

Huge congrats and celebration (I will do this over and over) to brilliant scholar, friend, Capricorn kin and writing group comrade Dr. Ashanté Reese!!! Her new book Gather (Norton, 2026) is out in less than two weeks! And she just announced her book tour. Thrilled to celebrate her and catch her when she’s in Baltimore!

And in case you missed it, beautiful artist and mermaid Julia Mallory caught the office hours on Monday and has allowed me to share some of her animation and collage work honoring and engaging the Black press and nineteenth century data portraits. Grateful for you sis!!! See below…

Last, if you are in Baltimore next weekend, check out this lineup of events in honor of the Toni Cade Bambara documentary making the rounds and coming next weekend to the Maryland Film Fest!

LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure

On April 10th &11th, join us for "What's The Plan?" // Toni Cade Bambara in Praxis Weekend: Lessons in Care, Sisterhood, and Cultural Work

Join us! On April 10th and 11th, LifexCode partners with Muse 360, African Diaspora Alliance & Black Women Cultural Workers Archive to honor the life, work, and political imagination of Toni Cade Bambara…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Admin @ LifexCode

Let the wild rumpus of research start!

Listen

Reads

• The Domestic Slave Trade https://www.searchablemuseum.com/domestic-slave-trade/

• Herbert George Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (University of Illinois Press, 2003).

• Jarena Lee and the Early AME https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/jarena-lee-and-early-ame-church

• Shannon Luders-Manuel, “Jarena Lee, The First Woman African American Autobiographer,” JSTOR Daily, December 15, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/jarena-lee-the-first-woman-african-american-autobiographer/.

• Part 1 – Early Settlement and the Rise of Slavery in Colonial Dutch New Jersey, n.d., accessed March 28, 2026, https://www.montclair.edu/anthropology/research/slavery-in-nj/part-1/.

• Vanessa M. Holden, “She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance,” Ms. Magazine, March 26, 2026, https://msmagazine.com/2026/03/26/she-wanted-to-be-free-black-womens-revolutionary-resistance/.

• Desarchivar La Mirada: Una Exhibición Para Revisar Las Visualidades Del Arte Puertorriqueño Del Siglo XX. – 90 GRADOS˚, March 16, 2026, https://90grados.com/arte/desarchivar-la-mirada-uprrp.

Documents

• Abner Abercrombie, “Inventory of Enslaved People Owned by Abner Abercrombie,” Montgomery County Probate Court (Alabama), April 27, 2022, https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern-mcpc/112.

• Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave. Written by Himself https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/brownw/brown.html

• John Brown Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html

• Sally Williams, Aunt Sally: or, The Cross the Way of Freedom. A Narrative of the Slave-life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams, of Detroit, Michigan: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/sally/sally.html

• James Williams Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, Who Was for Several Years a Driver on a Cotton Plantation in Alabama: https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/williams/williams.html

• Theodore Dwight Weld (white abolitionist) American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/weld/weld.html

• Colored Conventions Project Exhibits https://coloredconventions.org/exhibits/

• Maria W. Stewart, Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart: (Widow of the Late James W. Stewart) Now Matron of the Freedman’s Hospital, and Presented in 1832 to the First African Baptist Church and Society of Boston, Mass (Enterprise Publishing Company, 1879).

Watch

SmithsonianNMAI, Nation to Nation, 2015, 04:45,

.Flying Lotus, Never Catch Me

Projects

The Lantern Project

https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/lantern/

The Lantern Project is a collaborative project led by Mississippi State University as part of a coalition of institutions located within Mississippi and Alabama, including the University of Mississippi Libraries (Oxford, MS); Delta State University (Cleveland, MS); The Natchez Historical Foundation (Natchez, MS); Columbus-Lowndes County Public Library System (Columbus, MS); and the Montgomery County Archives (Montgomery, AL).The Lantern Project provides, for the first time, centralized and institutionally supported access to information in legal records documenting enslaved persons, including probate records, court records (orphans court, civil court, criminal court, and others), deeds, receipts, bills of sale, and other documents which were or could have been used as evidence in a trial, from across Mississippi and the Deep South.

Critical Data Visualization with Palladio

https://matthewlincoln.net/mapping-knoedler-palladio/

Palladio is a simple but powerful exploratory data visualization tool built at Stanford University. It runs entirely inside your internet browser. You don’t need a user account, and none of the data you visualize ever leaves your computer. Although it is simple and has some limitations especially with large datasets, it has some very useful features for exploring a new data set and finding its oddities and eccentricities. It is a good intro way to look through a dataset and figure out what might be missing before moving on to more comprehensive tools like Tableau, Python, or R.

This walkthrough will take you step by step through several tasks in Palladio that you can do on your own before the class meeting. Each step includes a series of reflection questions, both about what we think the data could be telling us, but also what might be missing or mis-represented in the data. This exercise is more about learning how to use Palladio to critically investigate data generated from historical documents than it is about finding new historical insights. You will also likely come up with questions about the data that don’t seem to be answered by the data documentation in this lesson. This is a real-life situation you’ll find yourself in when working with data produced by others. Figuring out what questions you would like to ask of the original data producers is a crucial part of critical data investigation.

Affirmations and Beatitudes

via muse360 on IG:

via bamy_lupis on IG

via nkyinkyim_museum

Editorial on birthright citizenship by and Kate Masur:

Movement for Black Lives responds to the UN’s resolution marking the Atlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity

See you next week!

Press for Freedom: A Collage History of Data Portrait No. 60 brings the history of the Black Press, the design and aesthetic strategy of early Black journalists and activists, and the data portraiture of the nineteenth century into relation together.

I love this animation so much! I am deeply obsessed with the data portraits era, shout out to Britt Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste who published a new edited compilation of W. E. B. DuBois’s data portraits a few years ago and Brittney Cooper who is thinking through data and making over in her Rage Lab at Rutgers University.

And in this moment, when journalists are under pressure and attack, the evolution of on the Black Press in a moment of arson, lynchings, and physical assault unto and including death deserves special attention. Thank you to my colleague Kim Gallon, founder and director of the Black Press Research Collective for all of her work, and the work of others, bringing this history to life!

Thank you Julia for hanging out with me at the kitchen table!!!! I appreciate you so much!

Enjoy the animation and follow Julia Mallory on IG.

Text: Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

I normally save video for the groceries and coffee crew, but sharing this one out to everyone this week, since I haven’t had office hours in awhile.

Light editing on the video, but mostly raw footage of me, feral and excited about Black history, giving a five minute summary of the origins of the National Negro Convention Movement.

Mentioned:

• Colored Conventions Project: coloredconventions.org

• Black Press Research Collective: https://blackpressresearchcollective.org/

The question: What are the conditions for resistance?

Also…

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I spend a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking about what I’ve read and written. Not as much time as I would like. The Sky Babies might need something last minute (or something that isn’t last minute that I just happened to forget about until the day before school). A student needs a meeting or an intervention. Someone in one of the labs has an urgent issue (last week it was travel back and forth from different places, grown perilous with the introduction of ICE into airports). I think every writer/professor/teacher/scholar/reader says they don’t do enough and really we are doing the best we can. I try to be generous and give myself grace. I beat myself up every single time—just dramatic and unnecessary.

Life that I can’t control already disrupts my research time. So nothing frustrates me more than when I have to spend hours at a time looking through my research folders for a note I need or want.

I’m noticing it happen more often as I move out of the realm of sources that I recognize readily and into new work.

My next book project—on Black women, history, slavery, and family—is finally coming full circle. The research for it took me back to Louisiana, of course, where the eighteenth-century documents feel like friends and old foes—familiar, congenial, saucy. Those are archives I know. They are old lovers.

But this new book also took me to other Souths beyond Louisiana, where the archives are less familiar and the enslaved are closer to my own kin.

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Toni Cade Bambara knew this. My good sis Sharayna Christmas has organized a slate of events in honor of the recent documentary, TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing by Louis Massiah. Sharayna sends me text message love notes with Mama Toni’s words that land with authority and shine:

“Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role, can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience–readers and viewers–is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system–as to even what America is. Toni Cade Bambara, “Language and the Writer,” in Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009).

Black sisterhood is a group chat of Toni Cade Bambara screenshots.

Check out my IG for information about the events (jessicamariejohnson_) and I hope you’ll come join us if you’re in the area.

Research bits and bites below.

Listen

Reads

• “Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures,” Neighborhood Funders Group, December 4, 2020, https://nfg.org/technologies-for-liberation-toward-abolitionist-futures/.

• Kristina Kay Robinson, “Down River Road,” Burnaway, February 18, 2020, https://burnaway.org/magazine/letter-from-new-orleans-down-river-road/.

• S. J. Zhang, “What Cecilia KnewReading Reproduction and Marronage in Records of Recapture,” History of the Present 14, no. 1 (2024): 156–73, https://doi.org/10.1215/21599785-10898396.

• Joseph R. Hartman, “Temporal Visions: Hurricanes as Chronotopes in Caribbean Art History,” Miradas-Zeitschrift Für Kunst-Und Kulturgeschichte Der Amérikas Und Der Iberischen Halbinsel 7 (2023): 122–47.

• Manuel Barcia, “Exorcising the Storm: Revisiting the Origins of the Repression of La Escalera Conspiracy in Cuba, 1843-1844,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 15, no. 3 (2006): 311.

• La Cumbre Afro de Puerto Rico celebra la humanidad negra en su quinta edición internacional – Recinto de Río Piedras, n.d., accessed March 26, 2026, https://www.uprrp.edu/la-cumbre-afro-de-puerto-rico-celebra-la-humanidad-negra-en-su-quinta-edicion-internacional/.

• Por Víctor Ramos RosadoPeriodista de Entretenimiento, “Analizarán el racismo en Puerto Rico en la Cumbre Afro,” El Nuevo Día, March 17, 2026, https://www.elnuevodia.com/entretenimiento/cultura/notas/analizaran-el-racismo-en-puerto-rico-en-la-cumbre-afro/.

• Linda M. Rodriguez and Ada Ferrer, “Collaborating with Aponte: Digital Humanities, Art, and the Archive,” Archipelagos, no. 3 (July 2019), https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-mq9x-dd28.

• Jada Similton, “Carlota and Fermina: Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade,” accessed March 26, 2026, https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-126906/”.

• Mailing Address: 67 Kirk Street Lowell and MA 01852 Phone: 978 970-5000 Contact Us, “The Mill Girls of Lowell - Lowell National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service),” accessed March 26, 2026, https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/historyculture/the-mill-girls-of-lowell.htm.

• Diane Jones Allen, “Living Freedom Through the Maroon Landscape,” Places Journal, ahead of print, September 22, 2022, https://doi.org/10.22269/220922.

• Aisha K. Finch, “Cécile Fatiman and Petra Carabalí, Late Eighteenth-Century Haiti and Mid Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, 2020, 293–311.

• Alejandro De la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 339–69.

• Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York University Press, 2016)

• D. Ryan Gray, “Memories of Black Indian Materialities in Colonial New Orleans,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8, nos. 1–2 (2019): 78–109, https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2019.1647662.

• Toni Cade Bambara. “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” in Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, 240. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009).

• Toni Cade Bambara. “On the Issue of Rules*,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, Simon and Schuster, 2010).

• FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

• Mark O. Hatfield, Building a Collaborative Governance Framework: A Five Step Process (National Policy Consensus Center, 2020).

• Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 479–86.

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 142–52, https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.2.142.

• Kim Gallon et al., Voices for Health Equity (Community Health Informatics Data Lab, 2025).

• Karsonya Wise Whitehead, “Beyond Myths and Legends: Teaching Harriet Tubman and Her Legacy of Activism,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 196–218, https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.2.196.

• Sarah Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (W. J. Moses, 1869).

• Nikki Giovanni, Poems: 1968-2020 (Penguin Books Limited, 2024).

• Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (UNC Press Books, 2023).

• Henry Marks, “A Slave Emancipation Act in Early North Alabama,” Huntsville Historical Review 4, no. 3 (1974), https://louis.uah.edu/huntsville-historical-review/vol4/iss3/5.

• Jerome Handler, The Old Plantation Painting at Colonial Williamsburg: New Findings and Some Observations | Jerome S. Handler, n.d., accessed February 20, 2026, https://jeromehandler.com/2010/12/the-old-plantation-painting-at-colonial-williamsburg-new-findings-and-some-observations/.

• Sophia Monegro, “Origins of Black Feminist Thought in the Americas: La Negra Del Hospital in Colonial Santo Domingo,” Global Black Thought 1, no. 2 (2025): 289–321.

• James D. Dewell, Down in Porto Rico with a Kodak (The Record publishing co, 1898), https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.downonportoricow00dewe/.

• Kendra T. Field, “The Privilege of Family History,” The American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (2022): 600–633, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac151.

• Joseph C. Dorsey, “Women Without History: Slavery and the International Politics of ‘Partus Sequitur Ventrem’ in the Spanish Caribbean,” The Journal of Caribbean History (Kingston, Jamaica, Jamaica) 28, no. 2 (1994): 165–207.

• George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Praeger, 1977).

• Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, “Right of Return,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 118–19.

• Andy Horowitz, “Another Kind of City: Kalamu Ya Salaam in Conversation with Joshua B. Guild,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 66–75.

• Kristina Kay Robinson, “A Mass For Worlds Pre and Post: Preface to a 918 Volume (304 Children) Suicide Note or Letter to June Jordan on Jonestown Reply Written in New Orleans, 1,392, . . . Official Count,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 120–23.

• Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State Press, 2022).

• Carter Godwin Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 : A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War (New York : Putnam, 1915), http://archive.org/details/educationofnegro00wooduoft.

• Jessica Dauterive and Mary Niall Mitchell, “Save What You Can: Tending Katrina’s Community Archive,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 31–49.

• Andy Horowitz, “Another Kind of City: Kalamu Ya Salaam in Conversation with Joshua B. Guild,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 66–75.

• David M. Stark, “A New Look at the African Slave Trade in Puerto Rico Through the Use of Parish Registers: 1660–1815,” Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 4 (2009): 491–520, https://doi.org/10.1080/01440390903245083.

• Courtney Desiree Morris, “Becoming Creole, Becoming Black: Migration, Diasporic Self-Making, and the Many Lives of Madame Maymie Leona Turpeau de Mena,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4, no. 2 (2016): 171–95.

• Joan Dayan, “Erzulie: A Women’s History of Haiti,” Research in African Literatures (1994): 5–31.

Watch

The Clifton House Baltimore, Scrap Theory: Mali D. Collins in Conversation with Nadejda Webb | The Clifton House, 2026, 01:11:18,

.

Projects

• Digest of the Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo https://nolacityarchives.org/cabildo-digest/#gsc.tab=0

The original Cabildo digest was compiled from the English translations (done by the WPA) of the original Spanish manuscript of the Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo. It was designed, according to its preface, “to classify this information in order that each subject may be found readily in its entirety, in each specific classification.” References are included to the relevant book/volume and page number in the translation (volumes 3 and 4 of the translations were subdivided into several books; the first two volumes were translated without subdivision). The digest, and accompanying Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo, are available on microfilm in the City Archives.

Affirmations and Beatitudes

Edwidge Danticat, We’re Alone: Essays (Graywolf Press, 2024).

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I saw my daughter as she began to think seriously of breaking up housekeeping, and forsaking all to preach the everlasting Gospel. I didn’t judge her. Like her grandmother, I went by water, followed them along the arc of the Tendwa nza Kongo. I saw the ones who stretched their hands out to the sea and the ones who dared to walk on it. Beautiful. I grew pointed teeth that day, gnashed them in my mouth, tasted blood and wondered what it was. That was the first warning and also the first sign that she would survive. Funny how it could be both.

As she moved toward where my mother lived, I forgot the years had passed. But the same light that I saw in the bend of a back became the light that she used to stand up straight, to speak out loud, to sing. She said, “The Lord was pleased to give me light and liberty among the people,” and I laughed at what love a young girl could lavish on old deities, and how silly she was. She thought she’d discovered a new way of living. And I turned to my mother, my mother, who was happy to see me, and the happiness was mutual between us, and we chuckled together. I laughed a bit too hard, I think, because my mother boldly tried to look me out of countenance, but I recovered.

I am so sorry Mama, I couldn’t help it! Don’t our daughters know that the purpose they carry is not new?

Mama smiled at me, rubbed my forehead with rainbows, and said “I have always believed I had the worth of souls at heart but they needed to believe colored people had souls too.”

I did not mind the rubbing, I was grateful for the touch. I did not mind the teasing, I was grateful for the grace.

One night, when I finally did decide that time must pause, just for a moment, to give me a chance to place a pebble of this new dirt in my mouth, roll it around, taste the salt and silica of old hearts and sinew, feet that still remember, that still rub their heels into the moss and grass, I met her there. I could see the circle that formed around her (ah, she truly was my daughter then!) and the way the words she spoke hit the air and vibrated, changed frequency.

She looked up when I walked down the aisle, bent my knee for a blessing, to be anointed, a humble penitent, and in the most friendly manner shook hands with me, lifted me to my feet. She knew me. “The Lord was with me, glory be,” she said and trailed off, fell into my eyes and was lost in the space between the worlds where we had a precious time and much weeping was heard among the people. A lifetime, ten lifetimes in just a moment.

Her hands squeezed mine. “I know you,” she whispered.

I pressed my fingers, still slick with mud and pebbled with dirt, into the flesh of her cheek, an offering of reshaped flesh and singular purpose, an offering of light meeting light across the waters, across worlds.

“You do know me,” I answered, and my laugh was the sound of bells on the air. “You always will.”

She rejoiced much to see me.

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Learn more about Jarena Lee: “Jarena Lee and the Early A.M.E. Church,” National Museum of African American History and Culture: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/jarena-lee-and-early-ame-church.

Text in bold: Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee Giving an Account of her Call to Preach the Gospel, 1849

This is offering #7 of Stitch Open My Eyes a 12-week community offering on history and memory in slavery’s archive. Because the Black freedom struggle during slavery should be a topic of conversation at every kitchen table. Follow along by subscribing below.

Texts:

Kali Gross, Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times (Seal Press, 2024),

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There are two views of this time that haunt me.

The first is what the birds saw.

The bald eagle, the kestrel, the hawk, the falcon. Black lines winding their way along the grassy paths, the beaten roads. Black knots collecting in pockets at crossroads, on mountain ledges, on riverbanks. Black men, fingers raw, holding tight to “a chain fastened at one end to the centre of the bar of a pair of hand cuffs, which are fastened to the right wrist of one, and the left wrist of another slave.”1 Black women, suckling infants they would never see grow old. Black girls on the cusp of menses, Black boys on the brink of big voices. Black adolescence eager to grow in land made supple by the blood and tears of their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers (some back to 1619), but that would never happen.

Taken from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, the eastern seaboard, they would never see their homeland again.

Take me back to Old Virginny. Black feet stamping blood, sweat, and broken blisters into the dirt of broken promises and bitter dreams.

The Second Middle Passage.

Between 1810 and 1820, about 120,000 enslaved women, children and men were sold or taken by their owners down South. Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana. White settlers carved these newest territories and states of U.S. empire from the flesh of the continent, flooding into land Thomas Jefferson purchased from Napoleon on the eve of the Haitian people’s declaration of independence.

Land that little French man never had a right to sell, much less give away, seeing as it wasn’t his.

And so, at first, the Americans “going west” did so illegally. But the federal government backed their defiant maneuvering. Federal agents engaged in political subterfuge familiar to conquistador-settlers since the 1620s. In the end, they engaged in and instigated war between Mvskoke bands of the Creek nation, siding against the Red Sticks (Upper Creek/Mvskoke) in a war waged by upstart military brats, one of whom was named Andrew Jackson.

By 1830, Jackson, now President, had signed the Indian Removal Act into law and then the bald eagle, the kestrel, the hawk, the falcon watched as new lines snaked across the grasslands, as new bodies fell to starvation, stress, and disease, as nation after nation walked at gunpoint from their homeland to a foreign land called Oklahoma.

The scale boggles the mind. Between 1820 and 1830, almost 300,000 Black women, children and men followed their cousins down, down, down southern roads to the delta. They walked on land, two, ten, fifty, two hundred at a time. “About five years ago, I remember to have passed, in a single day, four droves of slaves for the south west; the largest drove had 350 slaves in it, and the smallest upwards of 200. I counted 68 or 70 in a single coffle.“2

They rode on ships, over sea, along the Atlantic seaboard and around Florida before landing in New Orleans, the busiest slave market of all. They rode the rivers, skirting the Mason-Dixon line in steamboats on the Ohio River before reaching the mighty Mississippi and riding flatboats down. When men began laying iron planks down for railroads in South Carolina, Black people road those too.

At night, they waited at depots, taverns, and pens, watched over by white men eager to make themselves rich from a pound of Black flesh. “In the 1820s, Basil Hall, a British traveler, was told that during certain seasons of the year, “all the roads, steamboats, and packets, are crowded with troops of negroes on their way to the great slave markets of the South.””3

All told “...about two million slaves (men, women, and children) were sold in local, interstate, and interregional markets between 1820 and 1860, and that of this number perhaps as many as 260,000 were married men and women and another 186,000 were children under the age of thirteen.”4

And:

“If we assume that slave sales did not occur on Sundays and holidays and that such selling went on for ten hours on working days, a slave was sold on average every 3.6 minutes between 1820 and 1860.”5

And if we remember that slave ships took only about 500,000 Africans direct from the African continent to what would become the United States (compared to about five million who were taken to Brazil), the number two million moved in a domestic slave trade takes on a different meaning.

Two million souls. Land to fill, cotton to gin, thanks to a man named Eli and a contraption that looked like nothing more than a box with a metal gear and metal teeth, but that box became a set of jaws that ATE Black lives.

Two million souls. Mostly children, bid em in, bid em in, bid em in.

The Second Middle Passage. A curse that could never be undone. “Like some great, inescapable incubus, the colossal transfer cast a shadow over all aspects of black life, leaving no part unaffected.”6 The free black woman, the Black and Indigenous man, the child born in a fancy trade house in Charleston, the enslaved grandmother dreaming freedom into the next generation.

The slave trade touched everyone. It galvanized Vesey. It terrified Walker. It chastened Allen. It summoned visions from Nat. It tore Isabella from her son. It forced Harriet out of her garret to Philadelphia.

No one could escape the shadow of the trade.

The second view that haunts me is what the ants saw, the rooster, the palomino, the water moccasin.

The ones who watched the woman who tried, she tried to quiet the child. Who shook when the slave trader “stepped up to her, and told her to give the child to him.” Who “tremblingly obeyed.” The trader who “took the child by one arm, as you would a cat by the leg, walked into the house, and said to the lady, “Madam, I will make you a present of this little nigger; it keeps such a noise that I can’t bear it.”

The ones who heard the white woman say: “Thank you, sir.”7

The wails of the mother.

The horse that brought the Maryland man who survived his coffle from Selma to a new plantation in Alabama. The man who could not restrain himself from responding when the whip came down. Had he been free too long in that Catholic state up north? Had he been treated too well? Did it matter? Negroes don’t talk back in Alabama. When “the man raised his hoe in a threatening manner” the overseer fired. The man didn’t go down easy. “The wounded wretch raised himself once more, drew a knife from the waistband of his pantaloons, and, catching hold of the overseer’s coat, raised himself high enough to inflict a fatal wound upon the latter. Both fell together, and died immediately after.”8

The ant that watched the elderly white woman who traveled with one coffle through Georgia, for company, for safety. A woman’s virtue, after all, is all she has in the South.

That watched the Black girl who traveled with the old woman, as Black girls often did, forced to fetch food and water, forced to dress the aging body, forced to tend the horses, forced to listen to her mistress muse about better days.

The ants eyed the trader who did not dare disrespect the old woman, but, the first chance he could, “forced [the girl] to get up in the waggon with Finney, who brutally ill-used her, and permitted his companions to treat her in the same manner.” The gang rape that “continued for several days.” The fire ants spread word underground of the sale that followed once they arrived in Augusta.9

Like the fire ant, the women in the coffle watched. They had been forced to witness the violence, had witnessed with the girl, knew her violation, knew it and remembered or portended their own. These women talked about the crime on their kinswoman among each other, they “talked about this very much” and, in the talking, “many of them cried, and said it was a great shame.”10 The ant walked on, but didn't forget. (Ants don't, after all. Their memories scale across generations)

This offering is for the sliding scale of violence the human mind cannot accept or imagine, but can feel, can acknowledge, can memorialize. We don’t remember the Second Middle Passage, at least not well. Not in our histories, not in our stories, not in our minds, not in our solidarities.

How could we? When it means sliding from the scale of memories the size of rivers crawling the countryside, violence the weight of mountains? When it means witnessing a Black girl turned inside out and sold on a whim for fraternal sport? When the scale is dizzying, the destruction is leveling, and the mourning on-going?

This offering is belated, but beloved, a ghost and a crisis. It is for the parts of us that lie awake at night searching for lost kin, the parts of our souls seeking ancestors drowned in oceans with chains around their necks or running—always running—from the madness a cash crop made of men.

This offering asks our hearts, our minds, our hands to expand to take it all in and keep them, hold them: the memories, the people, the places, the times. Because they know, and we know, that the only way through the dark of each night—this centuries long night—is together.

The scale is the illusion. We are the baby’s cries and the knife and the witness and the mountain and the crowd of people thick with musk.

We are the shadow of a missing daughter or a lost son.

We are the ones looking up at the hawk, on the hunt for freedom.

We are the fire ant biting down on enslavers’ limbs.

We are the ones refusing to make our memories smaller than, less than.

We are a geological and genealogical menace. Our cause is righteous, our call is just.

No readings today; the footnotes are enough.