Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavry, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Book

I'll admit this was a tough read for me, especially the first part. The academic writing style was difficult, which is on me: I don't have the educational background that would probably have made it more accessible. I regret that, because I'd be better able to summarize, share, and discuss the vitally important topics Hartman analyzes.

I found Part 2: The Subject of Freedom to be astonishing and compelling. The concept of emancipation and the plain language of the Thirteenth Amendment was just the beginning of a truly American wave of backlash, retaliation, and enormous effort on the part of white America to maintain and exploit black subjugation, only with the pesky legalistic definition of "chattel slavery" having been legally discarded. Hartman's study of the efforts to fit the newly freed people into a system that comfortably (for whites) replicated antebellum norms is amazing. "The lessons of conduct imparted in freedmen's primers refigured the deference and servility of the social relations of slavery...Clearly, these lessons instilled patterns of behavior that minimized white discomfort with black freedom. The regulation of conduct lessened the discussions of the war by restoring black subordination on the level of everyday life..." (148)

The failure of Reconstruction, the acquiescence of the federal government to the creation and passage of state Black Laws, the concept that legal freedom need not intrude on local definitions of acceptable behaviors (at the expense of achieving social equality for black people), the rise of Jim Crow, the decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, and the fact that all of this was enforced by legal and extra-legal terror and violence, all of it reminds me that my early education about slavery and Emancipation pretty much ended with just that: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, blah blah blah, then Brown v. Board of Education...American exceptionalism.

No, no and no. I totally recommend this book. If, like me, you find it challenging at first, keep going. I may not have been able to process or understand everything I read, but I value what I learned. This is one of those books that changes everything.