Kinfolkology & Freedom on the Move
Freedom on the Move is a database of more than 32,000 advertisements of fugitives from slavery. While authored by enslavers and agents of the state, fugitive advertisements often provide the sort of insights into individual enslaved people’s identities that are difficult to find in other sources. For example, many advertisements mention particular skills or talents enslaved people possessed, reference enslaved people’s families, or offer clues about fugitives’ histories of enslavement. Most importantly, fugitive advertisements testify to enslaved people’s ingenuity, courage, and embodied resistance to slaveholders’ systems of control.
Linking Freedom on the Move to Kinfolkology’s databases will radically alter hundreds of enslaved people’s digital portraits.
Consider, for example, the way these documents—two of the thousands of manifests used to build Oceans of Kinfolk—do violence to the memories of two men: David Taylor and Lewis Butler.
With these records in hand—documents which represent both men as kinless commodities—effort, intentionality and imagination are required to remember David Taylor and Lewis Butler as they ought to be remembered: as complex human beings with personal and interpersonal identities. As fathers, perhaps, or brothers, or uncles. As sons, certainly.
Consider now how this record—one of the thousands used to build Freedom on the Move—guides us toward important truths which the manifests obscure: David Taylor and Lewis Butler were enslaved, yes, but they were not passive recipients of that violence, for their subjugation—like that of all enslaved people—was incomplete and could not be otherwise, for David Taylor and Lewis Butler were, themselves, historical actors always and historical objects never.
This truth emerges as testimony from a record intended to lie the most ridiculous of lies: that if they could only be captured, men would be men no more but “slaves.”
page author: JKW