Menacing (Re)Production

The Commodification and De-Commodification of Incarcerated Black Women’s Wombs and Work

TALITHA L. LEFLOURIA

On January 5, 1892, Eliza Randall gave birth in prison.1 Camp Heardmont prison plantation in Elbert County, Georgia, the place where Eliza was set to serve out her life sentence, was not built with pregnant women in mind. Though she was a new mother, she was also a felon, and this was a space made for punishment, not procreation. And incarcerated women were expected to produce labor, not laborers.

According to Bud Hilley, a former guard at the camp, “No time could be spared for a nursing mother.” So, on the standing order of the lessee, William H. Mattox, Randall’s newborn was taken from her arms, carried through a field, and thrown in a river.2 Randall resumed her work, running the sawmill and cotton gin and performing half of the blacksmithing for Camp Heardmont.

After the Civil War, black women’s wombs lost their worth, and their productive labor was intensely commodified. In previous decades, slaveholders expected enslaved women to “have plenty of chillum”; the viability of the Southern plantation economy rested on their ability to produce labor and laborers. Nevertheless, the prison systems of the postemancipation South viewed pregnancy and childbirth as deterrents to economic growth. In places like Georgia, infants were routinely killed or vanished, and hard labor was prioritized in a way that resulted in the wounding and permanent impairment of imprisoned women’s reproductive bodies. Even beyond the carceral realm, motherhood and reproduction was devalued and viciously undermined. Pregnant women were sometimes lynched, and imprisoned women were occasionally sterilized. Amid the countless examples of gendered violence that litter the Southern prison archive, Eliza Randall’s case stands out as a vivid illustration of this phenomenon—what I call “menacing (re)production.”

The plight of working-class incarcerated mothers in the post-Civil War South, and the shifting value of black fecundity in freedom, remains an understudied subject. This essay makes a significant contribution to the study of gender, sexuality, slavery, and the carceral state. It builds on the work of Dorothy Roberts, Priscilla Ocen, Harriet Washington, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, and Deirdre Cooper Owens by showing the shift in reproductive exploitation in what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “the afterlife of slavery.”3

Before and after the Civil War, childbearing in bondage was a consequence of oppression. It stripped enslaved and incarcerated women of their reproductive control. Whether forced to produce children for the plantation economy or having their ability to reproduce taken away by the state, captive black women were treated as objects incapable of regulating their reproductive lives.

While giving birth during slavery was frequently an expression of one’s lack of control over one’s reproductive autonomy, after emancipation the right to reproduce, or not, was an expression of one’s independence. For the first time, black women could claim legal rights over their wombs and control their reproductive lives. In my view, this was a unique way for black women to exercise their right to citizenship, especially because voting was not an option for them. Being a mother and a wife was in many instances all the political currency black women had.

This essay shows how biological oppression was used to impede black women’s ability to express their rights to citizenship through reproduction and motherhood. It shows how the carceral regimes of the postwar and Jim Crow South used menacing reproduction to control and end black lives.

The role of the black family in freedom has figured prominently in historical discourse. Scholars have long emphasized the desire among ex-slaves to tighten loose family structures through marriage and self-governed sexuality, reproduction, and childrearing. Historians have also shown how black family independence was undermined by racial violence. What is missing from the literature is a discussion of the ways in which the penal system was used to obliterate family bonds, especially the mother–child attachment, and to eliminate black children through corporal destruction. In her pioneering study, Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865–1900, historian Mary Ellen Curtin analyzes, for the first time, the inner lives and intimate realities of Alabama’s female prisoners. She maintains that Alabama officials adhered to gender norms that existed in the areas of both labor and maternity. Imprisoned women worked as cooks, seamstresses, laundresses, and the personal servants of male wardens. They were exempted from mining and other forms of masculine labor. When they became pregnant, whether through consensual sex with male prisoners or sexual assault by guards, they were allowed to care for their young. Without diminishing its barbarity, it is safe to conclude that the Alabama penitentiary system accommodated black femininity and maternity.

Alabama’s willingness to allow for the preservation of black womanhood as expressed through feminine labor and childrearing was not shared by its neighbor Georgia. On the contrary, prison camp officials forbade mother–child bonding. In my book, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South, I provide an alternative way of understanding how reproductive exploitation and labor abuse factored into the lives of black women and girls held in the penal regimes of New South Georgia. In this state, black women prisoners were compulsorily defeminized and made to labor in ways that incarcerated women in other states, such as Alabama, were not.4

Convict leasing was more economically diverse in Georgia than in any other Southern state. Indiscriminate occupational demands were placed on female prisoners who were forced to labor in a wide variety of industries. The profit-driven penal economy, and the distinct demands it imposed on Georgia’s female felons to perform male-oriented industrial labor and to match the output of their male peers, left no space for maternity. Suckling babies threatened to drain the lessee’s earnings by consuming their mother’s time and energy. They were considered costly and disposable.

Looking at the experiences of incarcerated women draws attention to the intersecting carceral states that speak to their experiences. It is important that we gender the study of the carceral state and promote an intersectional understanding of incarceration. For me, gendering the carceral state involves closely examining how African American women have experienced punishment across time and space. It includes questioning how black women’s bodies have been made to serve what Michel Foucault calls the “carceral archipelago” and taking into account the special burdens pregnant prisoners face. This essay places the vilification, control, and punishment of black women’s reproductive bodies in a historical context. It analyzes the peaks and decline in women’s procreative worth and worthlessness from slavery to (un)freedom and answers all-important questions about how incarcerated black women have experienced the effects of menacing (re)production in the U.S. South.

Seeds of Slavery

The control and commodification of black women’s reproductive bodies began in slavery. With the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade to the United States in 1808, slaveholders came to rely on natural reproduction as a way to replenish bound labor forces. Enslaved women’s reproductive value increased as a result of the closing of the trade. And slaveholders came to possess an even deeper economic investment in the future reproductivity of bondwomen.

The perpetuation and growth of the plantation economy relied on enslaved women’s ability to supply labor and laborers. It was cheaper to produce slave children than to purchase them at the market. In their attempts to extract more wealth from the enslaved, some slaveholders used breeding to populate their estates.5

Breeding was a form of reproductive sex involving the forced coupling of an enslaved male and female who were made to have intercourse under the threat of violence. Historian Daina Ramey Berry refers to this practice as “third party rape”—an “indirect form of rape where powerless enslaved males and females became the victims of reproductive abuse to which they did not willingly give their consent.”6

According to William Ward, a former slave, “Dey [slaveholders] uster take women away fum dere husbands an’ put wid some other man to breed jes’ like dey would do cattle. Dey always kept a man penned up an’ dey used ’im like a stud hoss.”7 On the Brown plantation, where Ward was enslaved, Joseph E. Brown (a former Georgia governor, U.S. Senator, and lessee of convicts after the Civil War) “placed every two individuals together that he saw fit to.… The slaves were allowed no preference of choice as to who his or her mate would be.… These married couples were not permitted to sleep together except when the husband received permission to spend the night with his wife.”8

Slaveholders such as Joseph Brown presided over the intimate lives of their enslaved laborers. They arranged marriages, which in some cases referred to forced living arrangements between two nonconsenting parties for sexual purposes. It is important to note that enslaved people referred to unions of love and forced unions as marriages. However, one cannot assume that amorous feelings existed between all married couples. The archival record has made it crystal clear that marriage did not always equal love for the enslaved.9

Some enslavers used punishments and rewards to persuade unwilling partners to reproduce. As stated by Sylvia Watkins, a former slave in Tennessee, “Durin’ slavery if one marster had a big boy en ’nuther had a big gal de marsters made dem libe tergedder. Ef’n de ’oman didn’t hab any chilluns, she wuz put on de block en sold en ’nother ’oman bought. You see dey raised de chilluns ter mek money on jes lak we raise pigs ter sell.”10

So, just how much was a woman of childbearing age worth, and how much money could an infant command at auction? The average sale price of a fecund woman was $515.00. The average value of a young child was $247.00, with the price increasing as he or she aged.11 A fertile woman commanded a higher price than an infertile woman. And although men were generally appraised higher than women, on some plantations a woman’s worth was significantly more than a man’s during childbearing years.12

Although enslaved women were economically valued for their reproductive labor, productive work was still their primary day-to-day function. Female slaves were expected to cultivate children and crops. They were not spared from plowing fields, sowing seeds, and harvesting. Most were expected to do as much work as possible without compromising their health and future (re)productivity or the health of their unborn children.13 Nevertheless, some women were given lighter workloads or reduced work hours in their final months of gestation. Because complications could prove costly, some slaveholders felt it better to accommodate pregnant women in the short term to increase the labor force in the long term.14

When enslaved women gave birth, some slaveholders adjusted their work routines to allow them to breast-feed their young. Sometimes rules were put in place to manage the nursing and weaning of slave infants. As outlined in one Georgia slave narrative, “sucklers” worked close to their babies and were allowed time to “visit their children until they are eight months old, and twice a day from thence until they are twelve months old.”15

Certain planters allowed mothers to nurse their babies because it was economically advantageous to do so. As they fed their children, enslaved women fortified the plantation economy. However, new scholarship by historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers has shown that black women’s wombs and breasts were commodified under slavery. Their roles as workers and producers were further entrenched by the practice of forced wet nursing.16

White Southern women relied on the milk of enslaved women. It provided sustenance for their offspring and afforded them a sense of power and authority over bondwomen. In her study of black and white women in the plantation South, historian Thavolia Glymph convincingly argues that gender discrimination did not unify white and black women—quite the reverse. White women used their power to inflict physical violence against enslaved women.17 Plantation mistresses brought a uniquely gendered form of domination to bear over black women by forcing new mothers to sacrifice the nourishment of their babies to feed the babies of white slaveholding women.

Bonds between enslaved women and their children were preserved only to the extent that they were profitable. Family ties were habitually broken through separation and sale. According to Julia Brown, a former slave in Georgia, “Slaves ware treated in most cases lak cattle. A man went about the country buyin’ up slaves lak buyin’ up cattle and the like, and he was called a ‘speculator’, then he’d sell ’em to the highest bidder, Oh! it wuz pitiful to see chil’en taken frum their mothers’ breast, mothers sold, husbands sold frum wives. One ’oman he wuz to buy had a baby, and of course the baby come befo’ he bought her and he wouldn’t buy the baby; said he hadn’t bargained to buy the baby too, and he jest wouldn’t.”18

Fruits of Oppression

The value assigned to black women’s reproductive bodies under slavery did not carry over into freedom. Formerly enslaved people, in general, declined in material worth once they ceased to belong to a slaveholder. Freedwomen, freedmen, and their children were met with extreme violence in the aftermath of emancipation.

White Southerners used violence and lynching to terrorize black families and communities, to vitalize white supremacy, and to reclaim authority over black lives. Black women were hung from trees, shot, and burned. The “offenses” that motivated these killings were vast. Some were murdered for assaulting or killing a white person (usually through self-defense). Others lost their lives for destroying and stealing white property, issuing verbal threats against white assailants (male and female), resisting rape, and daring to testify against white men.19

Books such as Crystal Feimster’s Southern Horrors (2009), Julie Armstrong’s Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (2011), and Kidada Williams’s They Left Great Marks on Me (2012) have advanced the study of lynching in America by centering black women. Although much has been said about the impact of mob violence on black men, relatively little has been said about the lynching of black women. Even less has been said about the lynching of pregnant women. And nothing has been said about the unborn.

On December 20, 1918, Alma House was “taken from the little jail at Shubuta [Mississippi] and lynched on a bridge over the Chickasawha River.”20 She was hung next to her sister, Maggie House, and two friends, Andrew Clark and Major Clark. An NAACP investigation revealed that the four victims were lynched after having been suspected of murdering Dr. E. L. Johnston, a dentist and farmer.

When the lynching occurred, Alma was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Her sister, Maggie, was also pregnant. The NAACP reported that Alma was so far along that “it was said by an eye-witness at her burial on the second day following, that the movements of her unborn child could be detected.”21 Given that a child cannot live in the womb for two days without oxygen, it is likely that Alma was in the active stages of postmortem birth, or what is referred to as “coffin birth.” The pressure from the decomposition gases in her body were causing her to naturally expel the nonviable fetus.

Seven months before Alma and her fetus were lynched, Mary Turner and her unborn baby were killed by a mob in Brooks County, Georgia. Hayes Turner, Mary’s husband, was hanged for his suspected involvement in the murder of a white farmer named Hampton Smith. Mary was killed for proclaiming his innocence. She was taken to a bridge, a rope tied around her feet, then hanged upside down. Next, “Gasoline was thrown on her clothing and it was set on fire.” After that, “her body was cut open and her infant fell to the ground with a little cry, to be crushed to death by the heel of one of the white men present.” Finally, Mary’s body was riddled with bullets.22

As seen in the case of Alma House and Mary Turner, lynching was used to destroy the lives of black women and their unborn babies. The killing of Turner and her unborn child, in particular, helps to open up a conversation about the ways in which infant murder served as a way to undermine black freedom and citizenship. It also raises questions about the role feticide played in the effort to silence potential black political power. One is left to wonder if some black women and children were made to pay the price for black men’s short-lived political gains during Reconstruction. Or were they sacrificed in response to black men’s struggles to reclaim political authority during Jim Crow?

Harvest of Pain

In the same way that the noose was used to choke the life out of black freedom, the Southern convict lease system was used to stifle black autonomy and to establish social, political, and economic dominance over African American men, women, and youths. According to Ida B. Wells, the lease system and the “Lynch Law” were “twin infamies.” They worked together to ensure the death of black liberty.23

After the Civil War, the Southern convict lease system was adopted throughout the Southern states. This was a system that permitted plantation owners and private companies to lease felons from the state for a fee. Lessees were responsible for clothing, feeding, transporting, guarding, and treating sick prisoners. They were allowed total control over the lives, welfare, and working bodies of the region’s felony population.24

Each Southern state found its own uses for prison labor. Florida used incarcerated workers to harvest turpentine. Alabama and Tennessee used convict labor for coal and iron manufacturing. In Georgia, the New South’s “industrial capital,” incarcerated workers were forced to labor in multiple industries: brick making, coal mining, lumbering, turpentine production, railroad building, and industrial farming. The expansion of new industries and the growth of the state’s industrial economy were partially achieved with the use of convict labor.

Sexual and reproductive control is what ensured black women’s full participation in the convict leasing system. This system relied on conviction as opposed to conception to supply its bound labor forces. The decline in black women’s reproductive and maternal worth was tied to their increase in productive value. The control of black women’s work was predicated on the control of their wombs.

Georgia’s lessees imposed the most arbitrary use of its black prison population. Its deep reliance on the labor of both female and male prisoners alike makes the state of Georgia iconic in its relationship to the Southern system of convict leasing.25 Women did men’s work and domestic chores. They built railroads, cooked food, sawed lumber, cleaned prison camp quarters, mined clay, laundered soiled linens, fired bricks, plowed fields, and harvested crops. In the course of their dizzying work routines, women prisoners also expended a fair amount of energy fighting off sexual predators and nursing their wounds.

Black women and girls were at constant risk of being raped and becoming pregnant. As stated by Helen Pitts Douglass, progressive reformer and widow of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “one convict for 14 years said that she had had 7 children.”26 Pitts’s findings are verified by the principal physician’s reports dating from October 20, 1884, to October 1, 1890. During this time, fifteen women gave birth at the Chattahoochee brickyard alone. Ella Gamble was one of those women.

At the time of her incarceration in 1884, twenty-two-year-old newlywed Ella Gamble had given birth to two children. By the time she arrived at the Georgia state prison farm in 1899, having passed through four prison camps—two brickyards, a broom-making factory, and a prison farm—Gamble had birthed a total of six babies. All but two of her children were the product of rape.

In 1904, after serving twenty years of a life sentence for murder, Gamble was granted executive clemency. The years of heavy labor and physical and sexual violence laid waste her health. She was left dying from cancer of the womb, bladder, and rectum. Understanding that she was of no further value to the state, Gamble made a final plea to be free:

Judge Turner,

Kind sir I write you and humbly beg you to please send me home. I have been down sick in bed 12 months today Judge. I don’t feel like I will be here on earth very long. I don’t want to die here in prison and I beg you to please Judge for the sake of my poor father who is lying in his grave and my mother and brother and sister who is watching and waiting on you to send me home so I can see their faces.… Judge I am no service to myself and neither the state. Judge please have mercy on me and grant me one kind favor in sending me home for I has cancer in my bowels. Some weeks I bleeds very near to death.… Judge please pity me and let me go home.27

Census records show that Gamble gave birth to four children in Georgia’s prison camps. Two of those babies died. Understanding that children were of no value to the carceral estate, it is possible that these newborns were murdered in the same violent manner as other children killed in the state’s camps or on the lynching fields. Were Gamble’s babies crushed under the heel of a boot? Did they die as a result of trauma that occurred outside of the womb? Maybe the heavy work Gamble was forced to perform caused her to miscarry. Or maybe her inability to access nutritious food caused her babies to die from malnutrition in utero or to be born with deformities or illnesses that did not allow them to live outside of the womb. The answers to these questions remain unknown. Equally unexplainable is the condition of her living children.

What is known of Gamble’s background is documented in the 1900 census. Here, the details of her life (beyond what is mentioned in newspaper articles, a clemency application, and other official sources) are carefully displayed. Gamble was born in Georgia in 1862. When she was imprisoned, she was twenty-two years old. She was forty-two when she was released to die. She was semiliterate, having obtained “1 month” of schooling. She could read but could not write. And Gamble was the mother of four living children.28

As richly detailed as it is, this census record has failed to satisfy my desire to know what happened to Gamble’s babies—quite the opposite. It has made me more curious about the welfare of living children born in Georgia’s prison camps and in prison camps across the South. The questions that I asked in Chained in Silence in 2015 are the same questions that I have today: “Did these children face a lifetime of de facto enslavement, shuffled back and forth between the carceral communities to which their mothers were bound? Or did penal authorities make provisions for disposable infants to be collected from the state’s camps? [Were these children given away?] If so, who were these children bequeathed to? Kin? Childless strangers?”29

Today, I would add to this set of questions by asking how the treatment and valuation of children born of rape in the state’s camps differed from the treatment of illegitimate children born to enslaved mothers. Although it is clear that, typically, the economic value assigned to enslaved infants spared their lives, it is less obvious whether the worthlessness ascribed to children of incarcerated mothers was solely responsible for their premature deaths. I wonder how many black babies were buried so that white men’s sexual indiscretions could be covered up.

While the plight of those children born to incarcerated mothers is unknowable, the condition of their mothers is easier to discern. Imprisoned mothers (and those who were pregnant) worked from sunup to sundown. Not permitted to nurture their young, they were made to ignore their babies’ cries for milk and affection. It is difficult to imagine the weight of guilt and sorrow that saddled these mothers as they trooped into the fields, barns, washhouses, forests, lumber yards, or wherever they were sent to work.

For some, the burden of being an absent mother was too much to bear. One woman (and there may have been others) chose to stand up to an armed guard rather than leave her newborn to starve while she worked. In the words of Progressive reformer Clarissa Olds Keeler, this mother “with her two-day’s-old-babe sat on the ground leaning against a building in one of the camps—the birth took place there too.” A guard saw her and ordered her to go to work. When she refused, the woman was “shot with the little one in her arms.”30

The same hatred that caused lynch mobs to murder Mary Turner, Alma House, and their infants influenced this armed guard to violently kill a nursing mother. This contempt for black motherhood also influenced some prison physicians to sterilize women against their will.

Menacing (re)production was prevalent in postemancipation Georgia. But the historical record shows that it was ubiquitous in the wider South as well. In his report to the Tennessee Board of Control, physician and surgeon, L. W. Edwards listed all of the surgeries performed in the state’s camps between 1915 and 1916. Three “hysterectomies” and one “removal of testicla” were included on this list.31 It is my inclination that these sexual surgeries were in fact sterilizations. This idea is supported by evidence provided in an earlier list of surgical diseases treated in the hospital wards between August 21, 1895, and December 1, 1896. During this time, three prisoners were given “castration” as a treatment. The gender of the castrated individuals remains unknown.

The implementation of the carceral state played a pivotal and new role in controlling and ending the ability of black women to have children. The afterlife of slavery opened new spaces for the state to employ new techniques of domination. These techniques were used by state actors to complement wider efforts to suppress black women’s reproductive freedom.

In the postslavery world, various forces conspired to deny Southern black women their right to reproduce and to deny their claims to citizenship as expressed through their legal right to give birth and raise children. The lynching of pregnant women and their unborn babies; the killing of black mothers and their offspring in Southern prison camps; and the involuntary sterilization of black women prisoners are examples of these forces. As scholars continue to debate the meaning of freedom in the postemancipation South, it will be important to take into account the less obvious ways in which freed people asserted their liberty and had it taken away. Black men lost their lives for exercising their rights with the ballot. Black women were killed for exerting their rights to control their wombs and create new citizens. And black babies were killed because their lives no longer mattered.

Notes

1. “Sentence Commuted: Eliza Randall Not to Be Hanged—The Particulars of the Crime,” Macon Telegraph, February 2, 1888; “A Protest from Quitman County: Against the Commutation of the Sentence of Eliza Randall,” Macon Telegraph, February 27, 1888; “Murdered Her Father: Eliza Randall, a Negro Girl, Found Guilty of the Crime,” Macon Telegraph, December 24, 1887. After her sentence was commuted, Eliza Randall was sent to the Chattahoochee brickyard, where she was leased as a cook. Two years later, she was transferred to the Bolton broom factory. A few months into her term at Bolton, Randall escaped with a male guard. She was caught and returned to the camp and, six months later, sent to Camp Heardmont prison plantation. She was nine months pregnant at the time.

2. Raymond E. Chandler Jr. “Death Comes to the Meanest Man in Georgia,” Georgia Backroads 10, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 46. This case was also documented in Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

3. See Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); Priscilla A. Ocen, “Punishing Pregnancy: Race, Incarceration, and the Shackling of Pregnant Prisoners,” California Law Review 100, no. 5 (October 2012): 1239–1312; Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).

4. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 134.

5. Thomas Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (September 2011): 447.

6. Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 79.

7. “Testimony of William Ward,” Federal Writers Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 4, Georgia Narratives, part 4, 1936–1938, 130, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., hereafter cited LC.

8. “Testimony of William Ward.”

9. For further reading on slave marriage, see Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Random House, 1976); and Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

10. “Testimony of Sylvia Watkins,” Slave Narratives, vol. 15, 1937, LC.

11. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 33, 51, 58.

12. For further reading, see Daina Ramey Berry, “ ‘We’m Fus’ Rate Bargain’: Value, Labor, and Price in a Georgia Slave Community,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 55–71.

13. Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 140. See also Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 24–26.

14. Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 140.

15. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement, series 2, vol. 13, Georgia Narratives, part 4 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 332. Also cited in LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 98. For further reading, see Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “ ‘At Noon, Oh How I Ran’: Breastfeeding and Weaning on Plantation and Farm in Antebellum Virginia and Alabama,” in Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past, ed. Patricia Morton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 242.

16. See Stephanie Jones-Rogers, “ ‘She Could Spare One Ample Breast for the Profit of Her Owner’: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (April 2017): 337–55. See also Emily West and R. J. Knight, “Mother’s Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 83, no. 1 (February 2017): 37–68.

17. For further reading, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

18. “Testimony of Julia Brown,” Slave Narratives, vol. 4, Georgia Narratives, part 1, 1936–1938, LC.

19. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 29.

20. National Advancement for the Association of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1919; reprinted 1969), 27.

21. Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States.

22. Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 26. See also Kerry Segrave, Lynchings of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851–1946, 138–40; and Julie Armstrong, Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).

23. Ida B. Wells, “The Convict Lease System,” in The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Robert Rydell (1893; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 23.

24. For a broader discussion of convict leasing in the Southern states, see Matthew Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); David M. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996); Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Vivien Miller, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida’s Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000); Douglass A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2008); Milfred Fierce, Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict Lease System, 1865–1933 (Brooklyn: Africana Studies Center, 1994); Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Martha A. Myers, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Vivien Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida’s “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Picador, 2010); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

25. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 66.

26. Frederick Douglass Papers, LC, Washington, DC; “Convict Lease System,” Series: Family Papers, 19–20.

27. Ella Gamble, Applications for Executive Clemency, 1904, box 38, Records of the Georgia Governor’s Office, Georgia Archives, Morrow, Georgia.

28. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, Georgia, Baldwin County, Georgia State Prison Farm, June 13, 1900.

29. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence, 99.

30. Clarissa Olds Keeler, The American Bastilles (Washington, DC: Carnahan Press, 1910), 32.

31. First Biennial Report of Tennessee Board of Control, 1915–1916 (Nashville: Baird-Ward Printing Co., 1917), 124, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.