To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War

The title of Hunter’s work is taken from the words of Julie Tillory, a formerly enslaved woman who walked to Atlanta with her children in 1866. When asked by a missionary woman from the Freedmen’s Bureau why she left the security of her former owner’s plantation, her response was that she left to “‘joy [her] freedom’” (2). While women like Tillory were intent on living lives beyond work, former owners wanted such women to stick to the restrictions imposed during slavery. Hunter argues that this dynamic existed before the end of slavery.

The chapter opens with the story of Ellen, a house slave in Atlanta punished multiple times for using her mistress’ toiletries during the Civil War. Actions like Ellen’s showed owners that they could no longer expect absolute obedience from enslaved women. Although masters thought they could maintain control just as they had before the war, the truth was that conflicts over work and obedience would only increase. As the war continued, African Americans openly contested slavery. Slave owners felt betrayed but were forced to accommodate small acts of disobedience. Hunter argues that while these concessions seemed harmless, they ultimately contributed to ending slavery.

Hunter uses Atlanta as her central example of how urbanization set the stage for the erosion of control over enslaved people. Prior to and during the Civil War, Atlanta was an atypical part of the South because of rapid population growth, the composition of its elite, and its strategic geographic location. The city’s power structure was controlled by entrepreneurs, merchants, manufacturers, and business interests instead of slaveholding planters. There were also class conflicts among whites with competing interests.

Despite the damage the Civil War did to commerce, it cemented Atlanta’s role as a key distribution point for manufacturing, distribution, and the Confederate military. These changes in Atlanta’s economy brought with them an influx of whites and African Americans, doubling the population from 1860 to 1862. The large population made slavery just one of many labor forms, making it harder to control enslaved African Americans.

Hunter next compares urban slavery to rural slavery. Both urban and rural enslaved women were subject to sexual exploitation. Urban slaves were separated from their family members and other slaves as they worked in individual households. They were frequently expected to carry the workload of several slaves. Nevertheless, there were some advantages to being in an urban setting. Urban slaves frequently had more freedom of movement, as they were often responsible for finding separate living quarters from their owners. The city had such poorly funded government resources that laws designed to restrict their behavior and movement could not be enforced. The patchwork of civilian and military lines of authority also made enforcement difficult. The influx of the slaves of refugee owners also undercut control over slaves, as some used this opportunity to run away.

Most slaves, Hunter points out, “remained on plantations or in white urban household until the wars end” (15). However, even these slaves engaged in overt and covert acts of rebellion. Some masters responded by accommodating these actions, while others responded harshly in an attempt to preserve their eroding authority.

The arrival of General Sherman’s army in May 1864 “shattered the last remnants of slaveholders’ authority and control” (18). The white women left behind were unable to manage slaves properly. The slaves ran away in large numbers when Sherman arrived and destroyed all manufacturing in the city. Hunter notes that “Black residents in the city were not left unscathed by General Sherman, whose contempt for them was well known” (20). Nevertheless, slavery was destroyed in part by the actions of slaves in the city, setting the “stage for the renegotiation of labor social relations for many years to come” (20).

Between 1860 and 1870, the African-American population proportion in Atlanta doubled, with most of the population made up of women. These women primarily worked as household workers in Atlanta. As ex-slaves, African-American women in Atlanta insisted on “their rights to enjoy the fruits of their labor and reconstitute their lives as autonomous human beings” (22). Their employers had other ideas.

The struggle over African-American women’s labor took place in the context of the reconstruction of Atlanta, whose elite “aspire to construct a city in the New South” (22) in the image of established cities in the North. In the wake of Sherman’s destruction of the city, however, there were many challenges to rebuilding. While industry in the city was quickly rebuilt, the black and white inhabitants of the city were poor and forced to deal with a city government incapable of meeting their needs. African Americans also contended with vagrancy laws that required them to work under unfair labor contracts for former slaveowners or the Freedmen’s Bureau, or face arrest. These poor conditions in the city were still better than living in the countryside, where African Americans were more vulnerable to abuse.

In the city, the jobs allocated to African Americans were primarily unskilled and poorly paid. Most African-American women worked as domestic staff or laundresses (a job that at least allowed more time to take care of the family and participate in their community). No longer bound as slaves, African-American women constantly fought for fair relations with employers. Employers could no longer rely on slavery to coerce African Americans when it came to compensation and completing their tasks. African-American women had the freedom to quit when they found the demands of employers to be unreasonable or when they needed time out of the labor force to take care of family or community responsibilities.

Frustrated with their African-American employees’ freedom to quit, white employers turned to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal government, and even the local government to gain the upper hand. While local and state governments complied by passing repressive black codes, these efforts were ineffective, particularly since most white employers were unwilling to cooperate with each other if it meant giving up free access to workers who moved from employer to employer. White employers nevertheless had plenty of leverage. They sometimes physically or sexually abused their African-American workers, killed them, or even provoked the Ku Klux Klan to punish uncooperative workers.

Despite these efforts, African Americans focused on the business of rebuilding their lives as a free people. They reconstituted families broken by slavery or created families based on nonblood ties, expanding the definition of kinship. Largely illiterate because of laws forbidding slaves to learn to read and write, African Americans established community schools and associations to educate themselves; these efforts were deeply linked to “the demand for political rights” (41) and thus received little support from state or local governments. African Americans elected to office during this period of Reconstruction were of little help since they were outnumbered by the Democrats, who tended to uphold white supremacy. They also sought “the security of a decent livelihood without the sacrifice of human dignity or self determination” (43).

In the post-Reconstruction period between the 1870s and early 1880s, Atlanta continued to rebuild. The reconstruction of the city proceeded along lines that benefitted the rich instead of African Americans and poor people. Rail lines, organized like spokes on a wheel that radiated from a city center, chopped the city up into triangular districts. The inner city comprised a Central Business District (CBD) and wealthy white residential areas. African Americans were not concentrated in the inner city or tucked behind the homes of whites—the pattern in other Southern cities. They instead lived in clusters within every ward of the city, making complete racial segregation virtually impossible. Regardless of race, Atlantans contended with inadequate sewage, water, street maintenance, and waste removal.

Starting in the 1870s, poor people and African Americans were increasingly pushed to the outskirts of the city, to the low ground where waste drained and the city dumped its garbage. When the city began building gas and water lines, these services only served the CBD and the homes of the more affluent Atlantans in the inner city. Trolleys and streetcar lines, when they did finally arrive in the 1870s and 1880s, created well-served communities like the affluent Peachtree Street neighborhood or provided access to the industrial districts for working-class whites who worked there.

Real estate agents influenced the residence patterns of African Americans by “directing them towards certain areas of the city – those least desirable to whites” (48). African Americans and New England missionaries nevertheless created viable African-American neighborhoods by building churches, schools, and colleges that served as anchors. “By the 1880s, more than a third of the African-American population was concentrated within these largely black enclaves” (49), a growing sign of segregation.

Women—“the majority of the black residents, and half of the black wage earners” (49)—bore most of the responsibility of caring for families and communities. Wages were so low that both spouses were forced to work to support most families, although smaller family sizes in the city eased some of this burden. The majority of African-American women workers were domestic workers, while others took in laundry. Young and single women worked as maids and childcare workers, while older and married women took on cooking and washing work because it “gave them more time and flexibility” (51) to take care of their own families.

These women endured hard work and working conditions. Wages were low and stagnant enough that even working-class white families were able to afford a washer woman. Employers sometimes unilaterally decided not to pay workers, to substitute goods for pay, or dock wages.

African-American women had access to just a few kinds of work. General domestics were expected to do an overwhelming number of tasks and to “respond to employers’ constant beckoning to satisfy their wants” (54). Child-nurses cared for their white employers’ children all day and did whatever extra tasks their employers demanded; white children learned their earliest lessons about white supremacy and black subordination in these interactions. The work of a cook required the ability to improvise, be creative, and plan; the kitchen was also “prime social space” (56) for white children, so cooks also participated in child rearing.

Laundering was hard physical work, but it allowed women to work in their homes and neighborhoods, as well as take care of their own children. By 1880, “The washer woman was the archetypal domestic labor in Atlanta” (57) and “laundry work engaged more black women than any other single category of domestic work, and washerwomen outnumbered male common laborers” (57-58). Laundry work allowed women to live separately from employers, giving them more autonomy.

Autonomy was important to African-American women as they sought to negotiate wage labor relations with their white employers. Quitting, pan-toting (taking home food or food scraps from employers with or without permission), “[s]tealing breaks, feigning illness, and sloughing off at work” (61) were other ways that African-American women laborers asserted autonomy.

Even though autonomy was important, community was even more important in the lives of African-American women laborers. Laundresses in particular worked in communal spaces that “foster[ed] informal networks of reciprocity that sustain them through health and sickness, love and heart aches, birth and death” (62). Their support systems extended to providing childcare for each other, salvaging resources such as food and fuel from the environment, and tending to backyard gardens or livestock that were crucial sources of food.

Despite their hard lives, African-American women devoted time and energy to leisure—shopping, watching entertainers, and dancing. They joined churches and secret societies “which provided other outlets for social, spiritual, and political expression, as well as economic cooperation” (67). Churches in particular plugged African Americans into city and state organizations that were training grounds for political leadership, allowing them to pool financial resources and engage in social reform movements. Despite their large role in churches, women were usually still subordinate to men, who took most of the leadership roles. Secret societies included mutual aid that might provide unemployment or death benefits to members, labor unions, or political leagues.

Hunter notes that the secrecy of these groups makes it hard to estimate the number of members involved before slavery’s end. Their rapid growth after slavery indicates that they built upon “pre-existing values that stretched back over many generations, across time and space” (73). Whites sometimes marked the elaborate rituals of these groups as efforts by African Americans to imitate whites. Such critics also understood the “subversive implications of the collective culture that sustained domestic workers” (73). These groups formed the basis of collective action for workers as they faced increasing challenges in the labor market.