No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
As recounted in Lucy Delaney's c.1891 slave narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, in 1829, Missouri Supreme Court Judge Robert Wash, began to shatter her small family. As executor of the estate of his wife, Fanny Christy Berry Wash, the judge sold Delaney's father to the deep South. Delaney's sister Nancy and her mother Polly Wash were given to one of Fanny Wash's daughters from her previous marriage, Mary Berry Coxe. Still a child, Delaney was sent to live with a Mrs. Underhill--probably to be trained in housework. (1) Polly Wash, though, had registered a solemn vow that her children should not continue in slavery all their lives.... (Delaney 15-16). This essay traces the fulfillment of Polly Wash's vow. Specifically, it shares a range of archival and contextual information on the freedom suits of Polly Wash and Lucy Delaney. It builds from Robert Moore, Jr.'s landmark discovery of basic records of Lucy Delaney's freedom suit, the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project's move to make freedom suits accessible to researchers, and a set of my own discoveries--including the fact that Delaney actually filed two suits tied to questions of her enslavement (one discussed in her narrative, and one not discussed at all). Through recovering these contexts, the essay takes initial steps toward a richer and more historicized understanding of Delaney's narrative. To date, critical work on From the Darkness has been limited, in part because, like many Black women's narratives, Delaney's was generally ignored until the late 1980s, when Hazel Carby included a brief consideration of From the Darkness in her landmark Reconstructing Womanhood. Critics seem also to have struggled with the fact that Delaney's narrative deals primarily with events in the 1840s (contemporary with antebellum slave narratives) but was not written and published until the 1890s (and so contemporary with works like Iola Leroy). Thus, most discussions of key issues in Delaney's book, such as the textual representation of African American bodies and the physical space of the US courtroom (Lindon Barrett's essays are illustrative), remain fairly abstract and emphasize relatively ahistorical comparisons to antebellum slave narratives. Similarly, most work that places Delaney in dialogue with the events of the 1880s and 1890s--Frances Smith Foster's discussions and especially P. Gabrielle Foreman's fascinating but brief consideration of Delaney are illustrative--set aside the local contexts of Delaney's narrative and generally elide the fact that Delaney was writing about real events, was remembering, and was shaping those memories rhetorically. While a full-scale reading of From the Darkness that addresses these absences is beyond the scope of this essay, by offering a better sense of the foundations of those memories, I hope to spur renewed discussion of Delaney's strategic retelling of her freedom suit--discussion that sees that re-telling as part of a multifaceted resistance to slavery and racism. The essay thus also calls on us to recognize and consider the fact that Delaney's account addresses a phenomenon--the freedom suit--considered in no other slave narrative in such depth and with such power. As such, Delaney's narrative must be recognized as a rare representative of the untold stories of hundreds of slaves who engaged in such actions and as a key text in the study of gender, race, and rhetoric in slave women's narratives. I. Polly Wash Suits like Polly Wash's, and later like Lucy Delaney's, are a phenomenon that has been surprisingly understudied. (2) Close to 300 case files for such suits, including the initial actions in both Dred and Harriet Scott's freedom suits, were only rediscovered in the late twentieth century, and several case files, including one of Delaney's two case files, remain missing. Such suits often relied on an 1824 state law (built from 1807 territorial statutes) that held that persons unlawfully enslaved could sue for their freedom--specifically, That is shall be lawful for any person held in slavery to petition the circuit court . …
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.