Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and
sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. Those who enslaved her
there named her Rosalie. Her later efforts to escape slavery were
the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and
three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. "Freedom
Papers" sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the
background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth
century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and
the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.
Freed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter
Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. A few years later, Elisabeth
departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques
Tinchant. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of
color, they left for France. Subsequent generations of Tinchants
fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's
state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic
tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial
asset. Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when,
a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-Jose was
arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.
"Freedom Papers" follows the Tinchants as each generation tries
to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom
and respect. The strategies they used to overcome the constraints
of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives
of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent
epoch."
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