Description
How Black women’s everyday choices in personal adornment tell a story of navigating racial and sexual oppression after EmancipationEven amid the racialized servitude, sexual exploitation, and economic disenfranchisement of the post-Emancipation era in the American South, Black women dared to adorn themselves by styling their hair with combs, wearing necklaces crafted out of glass beads, and dyeing coarse cotton fabric with indigo-berry and sweetgum bark. In The Will to Adorn, Ayana Omilade Flewellen examines the material remains of Black women’s sartorial strategies in these decades and argues that such “small finds” as beads, buttons, hairpins, brooches, and lace bobbins compose a new historical narrative of how Black women and girls navigated a society conditioned to view them solely as commodities. Flewellen looks at the lives of three Black women of the era through personal belongings. Nancy, an enslaved seamstress, escaped the Hermitage Plantation in Tennessee during the Civil War, taking her bedding and clothing—valuable items at that time. Sarah Williams, among the first Black landowners in Texas, maintained a thriving farmstead with her husband and nine children, leaving behind a story told in shoe button hooks and fragments of leather soles. Finally, Lorena, lost in the documentary record if not for her copper wire name pin, offers an example of defiantly individual personal adornment. These objects and others like them, Flewellen shows, provide rich evidence of who these women were, who they wanted to be, and how they wanted to be seen.