Deviating slightly from the material-culture-focussed history that she is well known for, Sophie White’s newest book, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Longing, and Labor in French Louisiana, returns to the Mississippi river, but this time takes detailed court testimony as its main sources rather than the estate inventories and textile fragments of her previous work Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians (2013). This turn to the document footprint produced from the colonial French legal system was also present in the edited monograph with Trevor Burnard, Hearing Enslaved Voices (2020). While both strategies of document and material-culture history subvert and mine the archive for the very enslaved people dehumanized by slavery, here White flushes out the complexity of life, relationships, labour, and dress from the meticulous testimonies produced by scribes and dictated by the enslaved themselves. For sites where such sources exist, like the Danish West Indies explored by Gunvor Simonsen’s Slave Stories (2017), White offers another thorough examination of how to interrogate, unthread, and expand upon the court testimony archive of slavery.

Sophie White offers readers full transcripts from the court testimonies translated into English and in original French or Creole French. She accessibly and clearly explains to readers problems in translation and meaning in passages, as transcripts flip from third to first person. Additionally, she informs the reader that the word femme has meanings both for a woman or a wife when used in a possessive form. White also continues to leave certain terms untranslated, such as negre, négresse, or sauvage(sse) as gendered and racial qualifiers. For example, attempts to translate someone briefly described as une négresse as “an enslaved Black woman or girl” would both hinder the narrative and risk inaccuracy to that person’s gender, age, and status as free(d) or bound, although their race and complexion are secure in both descriptions. This makes sense in keeping with their rank and treatment in the slave society but also prevents scholars from assigning incorrect or inaccurate identities or qualifiers.

Themes of love and the social histories of relationships under slavery are intensely difficult subjects to pull from the archive, yet White sheds light on this through testimony, dress, gift giving, analysing the built environment, and much more. The promise to deliver on love and longing is empathetic and careful through its attention to masculinity, femininity, and familial and romantic relationships. Noteworthy are the enslaved woman Marguerite, who describes the separation from her partner as if she was locked up like a nun “in a convent” like the Ursulines in New Orleans, (1) and the lovers Kenet and Jean-Baptiste, who run away to Mobile for a life together on their own terms before being caught. Both chapters and case studies explore what was accepted, tolerated, and encouraged by enslavers with regard to marriages and courtship of the enslaved. Much like Simonsen’s use of court testimony for relationship analysis in Slave Stories, White is attentive to the domestic arrangements and labour gained from coupling through stories like Kenet and Jean-Baptiste. Both scholars provide fascinating details about the ways the enslaved conceptualized marriage and what roles, responsibilities, chores, and labour they gained from partnerships, particularly as Kenet was inaccurately described as “staying at the cabin” or that she “did nothing” (202). The legal agency to marriage was granted to enslavers in the Code Noir and encouraged pro-natalist policies after a 1731 import ban. But White demonstrated how the enslaved circumvented what was romantically permissible through strategies like flight or possibly polygyny.

The chapter on the laundresses Louison and Babbette, assaulted by a drunk soldier who was fended off by one of their husbands, opens questions about material care, prostitution, alcohol, degrees of submission, and the hierarchy of whiteness. Sophie White untangles this from the several testimonies by expanding on each section and detail to enrich our understanding of the aspects implied, stated, and unspoken by witnesses. The two women enslaved to the Ursuline hospital refused to launder the drunk soldier’s handkerchief as an inferred intimacy, and Louison was treated for bayonet wounds at the hospital’s apothecary, where her husband was likely an assistant. From the prevalence of alcohol in the military garrisons and the connotations of sexuality in bodily secretions and laundering, White flushes out Louison’s religious and self-righteous testimony of events.

The enslaved man Francisque was a fascinating case study of decorum and sumptuary acceptability. He was accused of theft, flaunted his fine dress, and courted women through gifts, antagonizing the rest of his Black male community. This intergroup dynamic is heightened by the fact that Fancisque was a runaway slave and self-described Englishman from Philadelphia, with past lives possibly as a sailor, attendant, or cook which took him around the British, Spanish, and French colonial or West Indian worlds. Here the attention from femininity turns to masculinity, opulence, intercolonial trade, and Black fur trade voyageurs. Francisque was bound or likely leased as a rower to a fur trade batteau which he left and set fire to (143–44). His theft and his ostentatious displays of attention at a slave dance drew all he wrong attention to a man on the run, which the enslaved men Démocrite and Hector used to delineate social and sexual boundaries through his prosecution. This chapter, along with Louison’s, is where White seems to employ the use of material culture and dress analysis most heavily, although it is present in a more passing regard throughout the book. This tactic identifies ways descriptions and inferences about dress can be used as a tool to further illuminate the unsaid and quotidian details of life under slavery.

The most fascinating chapter is the third, which follows the enslaved pregnant woman of African descent Marie-Jeanne, and an enslaved Indigenous girl, Lisette, in the Upper Louisiana region of Illinois. Not only is this a wonderful exploration of the ways Black and Indigenous people coexisted in bound labour regimes, but also White opens tensions between the women as conflicts over authority and domestic responsibilities were evident. When Marie-Jeanne testified that she fell unconscious, presumably in delivery, Lisette counters that she saw her strangle an infant and found small body parts in the garden. White explores the intersocial tensions of the women, the enslaving estate, and judicial travel from Illinois to New Orleans more so than situating the pregnancy and alleged infanticide within a larger history of slavery or of eighteenth-century conceptions of health and “generation.” Despite this missed opportunity to elaborate on the women’s social history, the chapter is unique and White ties a comparative analysis of sexual predations to the Indian Ocean world and the plantation regimes of Mauritius, something she brings out in other passing instances. Sophie White’s illumination of the women and their tense relationship she summarized as archetypal of a “childless woman” and a “motherless child” created under transatlantic and Indigenous slaveries (99). White does not linger longer on Lisette, described simply as Ottawa and in other documents as an “esclave indienne” or a “petite sauvagesse.” The topic of her pathway to enslavement and Indigenous slavery is a much larger issue than the chapter can manage, which White leaves unsatisfactorily developed. Lisette’s role in the text is more about her limited language skills, her communication through gestures, her disobedience, and the tension or motivations between herself and Marie-Jeanne in their narrative of events.

White concludes with François Xavier, who witnessed a soldier commit bestiality with a mare and provided a damning intellectual critique of the institution of slavery. Xavier testified that he was appalled that slavery put him into a subordinate position to not intervene in the act. Consequently, slavery was turned onto him by the soldier to imply that all enslaved people were untrustworthy in their word. Thus Xavier exposed the logical fallacies of slavery and the supposed piety of the region’s colonial project, something that was present in the testimony of the laundresses as well. Both François Xavier and the two laundering women were at odds with a presumed obedience to lower-status military whites. In this way, their religious beliefs and morals were tested by the corrupting society and perverse whims of the world around them. They implored language and piety to denounce slavery and uplift themselves proudly to the courts.

Overall, the book is an enjoyable and illuminating exploration of the Louisiana region, the interactions of gender and slavery, judicial procedure, and detailed minutiae of eighteenth-century life. For others interested in aspects of these social histories, passages would be well received and great texts for instruction well beyond the scope of New Orleans, Mobile, and Illinois. As mentioned, White’s attention to the built environment and material world of the enslaver colony is still present, but less emphasized except for a few specific chapters with overt dress themes. Readers of the entire monograph may find certain explanations about criminal procedure repetitive, and the generous transcriptions in multiple languages are at times bulky. However, for scholars who do French-language research, the texts and translations are a lavish source and demonstrate a transparent process. White, like others, artfully explores slavery through the remarkable testimonies of the enslaved that survive.