Abstract
Since the inception of enslavement, the "Black body" and the person inhabiting it has documented the paradox of the vision of American democracy and the reality of racism. Saidiya Hartman suggests that the process of writing about Black women found in the archives of slavery (and by extension its afterlife) is best understood as a form of critical fabulation.6 Marisa Fuentes expands upon critical fabulation by encouraging scholars to read against the binary grain of the archive.7 In contrast to the paucity of documents before the Civil War, scholars such as Tera Hunter, Brandi Brimmer, and Sharon Romeo disentangle the preponderance of documents available in post-Civil War government records to distill a history of African American women that is recognizable, though still filtered through the gaze of the state.8 And, for better or worse, the archive represents society's informal taxonomy of value. Rather than the resistance versus agency binary, "politics of care" allows for a more accurate description of both the motivations and methods deployed by African American women when access to the law was part of their arsenal of survival strategies. Ira Berlin suggests that in the decade following the American Revolution, state legislatures were "flooded" with petitions for freedom from African Americans.9 In New England, Elizabeth Freeman, a midwife and domestic, became the first African American to petition for her freedom in what became the United States.