Wicked Flesh is a powerful book written from a rare and sensitive perspective.Footnote ¹ It explores the complicated intimate relationships between unfree and free women of African ancestry, and European and Black men across the eighteenth-century French and Spanish Atlantic worlds. More specifically, it explores the ways in which women of African ancestry used these intimate relations to construct their freedom.

Johnson's main argument has the potential to reshape our understanding of the experiences of life in both slavery and freedom. She suggests that the intimate kinship strategies used by women of African ancestry in the eighteenth century reshaped the meanings of freedom, laying the groundwork for Black resistance and abolitionism in the nineteenth century. The story of legal emancipation began in intimate actions, as Black women made choices to secure control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Therefore, in this book, Black women's freedom (or what Johnson calls “Black femme freedom”) is defined as these women's capacity to belong to themselves and to each other, even as slave owners, colonial officials, husbands, white women, and others used their bodies to exploit and violate them. Black women, Johnson argues, challenged these abuses with their own understandings of what, where, and how their bodies should be used.

Johnson draws on archival documents scattered across three continents and written in multiple languages. Because she focuses on the eighteenth century, the sources are challenging to work with: filled with gaps and written, for the most part, from the biased perspectives of white colonizers and slave owners. To try to tell this story through the eyes of the women themselves, she uses Black feminist theory and Black women's literature to inform her reading of the archives.Footnote ²

Because she is attuned to the importance of centering the African continent in studies of the African diaspora, Johnson begins her study in Senegambia (more specifically, in the French comptoirs on the islands of Saint-Louis and Gorée). She then proceeds to follow African women through the Caribbean, and on to French and Spanish New Orleans, Louisiana. The book contains six chapters, which together focus on the experiences of African women of widely different socioeconomic backgrounds, ranging from wealthy merchants in Senegambia to slaves in Senegambia and Louisiana. The meanings of freedom could change dramatically depending on these women's status. For example, for slave women aboard Atlantic slave ships, freedom meant confronting the traders, middlemen, ship captains, and officials who attempted to commodify them (Chapter Three). By contrast, according to Johnson, freedom for a group of wealthy slaveholding female merchants established in Senegambia (often called “signares”) could mean “exploiting enslaved labor, particularly the labor of enslaved women, with all of its attendant violence” (3).Footnote ³ The first two chapters of her book, which focus on Senegambia, will be of particular interest to the readers of this journal.

According to Chapter One, in Saint-Louis and Gorée, the group of affluent free African women in the French comptoirs exercised freedom by defining standards of taste and hospitality, and thereby forming intimate ties across Wolof, Lebu, Pulaar, and European lines. This development is illustrated with the story of Seignora Catti, a wealthy merchant from Rufisque, and the African widow of a Portuguese trader who invited Wolof dignitaries and Frenchmen to her home for lavish West African-style dinners. These African women offered comfort, care, and even their own homes to European men, gaining access to trading opportunities, intimate exchanges with European husbands, and slaves in return. By the mid-eighteenth century, some of these women had gained significant wealth through their labor and commercial exchanges with Europeans. However, Johnson challenges the romanticized image painted by scholars like Pierre Biondi, which presents the signares as seductive women for whom relationships with white men were a source of opulence.Footnote ⁴ Johnson argues that, on the contrary, most African women in the comptoirs did not have access to wealth, and all of them were exposed to sexual violence and coercion. Until now, scholars have paid very little attention to the slave residents of Saint-Louis and Gorée in the eighteenth century. Johnson thus makes an important contribution to the historiography by focusing on slave women and the sexual violence that they faced. She also highlights how African women contributed to the making of the Atlantic world, by facilitating trade and doing work that ranged from providing food and water to company employees, to securing enslaved people bound for the Americas.

As shown in Chapter Two, although some of these activities allowed a few African women to accumulate wealth and prestige, “retaining one's position required creativity, determination, and persistence” (66). Some African women formed bonds of kinship with other African people and European men, as wives, godmothers, and witnesses in Catholic ceremonies, to obtain some degree of security for themselves by building commercial networks. Others protected their own interests when the French trading company attempted to prevent them from inheriting from their European husbands, or unlawfully tried to seize their property (especially their slaves).

As is always the case in studies dealing with fragmented archives, this book involves a degree of speculative labor. Given the underrepresentation of Black female scholars’ perspectives in academia, Johnson's gift for filling archival silences with astute theoretical insights is precisely what makes her work special and precious. For example, she speculates that enslaved and free Black women used sex as a protection “strategy” — this is one of the most interesting claims in the volume.

While some full-length studies centering the Black female experience in the French colonial context do exist, they limit themselves to local approaches rather than embracing the wider focus on the diaspora that we see in Wicked Flesh.Footnote ⁵ In bringing Black women to the fore, Johnson makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature on intimacy, gender, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Wicked Flesh will open new avenues for research in the fields of French and Spanish colonial history, Atlantic History, Gender Studies, and Black Studies.