To Walk About in Freedom

Emberton does a masterful job of reconstructing Joyner’s life by acknowledging what the evidence allows her to conclude and where speculation must suffice…The book is ultimately a meditation on the importance of the imagination as a tool in the shaping of a historical narrative.—Kevin Levin, author of Searching for Black Confederates and Civil War Memory

Carole Emberton’s insightful study of the first group of enslaved people to be emancipated is a necessary, judicious correction to Confederate nostalgia.—Priscilla Kipp, Bookpage (starred review)

Emberton creates an illuminating view of the daily struggles and triumphs that characterized African Americans’ ‘long emancipation’….An insightful, poignant consideration of a representative figure’s negotiation of liberty in the decades after Emancipation.—Kirkus Reviews

Stirring….Emberton’s astute contextualization of Priscilla’s experiences sheds light on the promise and peril of emancipation.—Publishers Weekly

Deft and revealing…Emberton’s sensitive and sympathetic recovery of Joyner’s story speaks volumes on what freedom meant and might mean.—Randall M. Miller, Library Journal

To Walk About in Freedom is truly a must read for anyone interested in seeing not only the nation’s racial past in a fresh light thanks to Emberton’s brilliant re-mining, re-excavation, re-reading, and re-interpretation of the lives of the newly freed, but also in being able to come to all previous renderings of it better informed and to view them with a far more critical gaze. —Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water

For Priscilla Joyner’s unsettling but moving story, Carole Emberton uses the historian’s tools to excavate the precious and deeply personal complexities of formerly enslaved people’s lives, including accounting for the multiple possibilities of family histories often shrouded in mystery. This is an important contribution to the history of families and freedom in post–Civil War America.—Kidada E. Williams, author of They Left Great Marks on Me

Priscilla Joyner’s ‘long emancipation’ is a story at once distinctive and collective, a story of the trials, tribulations, joys, heartaches, and struggles that paved the African American road out of slavery, a story of the intimacies, raw emotions, and unanswered questions that have long encased southern life. Carole Emberton tells Priscilla Joyner’s story with sensitivity and consummate skill.—Steven Hahn, Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of A Nation Without Borders

Carole Emberton gives us a powerful new history of emancipation, one anchored in the inner life of an ordinary woman. Beautifully written using overlooked archival sources, To Walk About in Freedom is essential reading, reminding us that freedom was and is a lived experience with deep emotional resonance. —Megan Kate Nelson, author of Saving Yellowstone

In this timely and evocative narrative, Carole Emberton follows Priscilla Joyner and the first generation of formerly enslaved Americans on a search for something more than legal emancipation alone. In their long pursuit of happiness, home, education, belonging, a comfortable old age, and love, they defined what freedom meant in the face of new dangers and continuing traumas. Emberton’s ‘small book about big things’ is equally a big book about the small, intimate things that make every life valuable and unique.—W. Caleb McDaniel, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Sweet Taste of Liberty