A brilliant microhistory focusing on the lives of enslaved and free women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados. Fuentes has expertly mined the archives for both the information they can provide and that which they cannot. ( )

This book is really heavy with jargon, only about half of which is useful (I think that if you’re going to use “elucidate” or “delineate” more than once a chapter, you should be really really sure it is the best word for the job, and it often wasn’t). The underlying theory and stories are both really interesting: Fuentes is trying to reconstruct the lives of enslaved women in Barbados through a historical record that bears essentially no direct traces from them, while the people who did make records about them had incentives to distort reality. So the book is about the necessity of imaginative leaps and honesty about the distortions in the historical record. It’s also about specific stories: the women runaways identified in newspaper ads by the scars on their bodies, testifying to the horrors inflicted on them which are now (additional horror) also the only remaining traces of their existence. Fuentes reconstructs how runaways and other enslaved people accused of crimes were publicly punished—whipped and executed—in towns in order to terrify other enslaved people. She tracks the story of one mulatto woman, born into slavery and freed by her sexual partner, who died a wealthy hotel-/brothel-/slaveowner, and reads her will to explain how that woman’s “agency” was always under threat and required the subjection and sexual violation of other enslaved women, because that’s how oppressive systems work versus individuals. She reads the deposition of a white woman in a case about adultery to suggest how white women’s sexual purity was constituted in opposition to black women’s inherent violability. The case involved a young enslaved boy dressed in women’s clothes—which allowed him to move about at night more easily—and carrying a sword—which could have gotten him the death penalty—who was sent from the house of the man in the affair to the house of the adulteress. It’s not clear, but the boy seems to have been acquitted of the crime of carrying a weapon because the white male jury accepted the idea that his enslaver sent him to kill the husband and of course he could have been killed for refusing that order. Fuentes also discusses the fact that enslavers were entitled to compensation from the colony government when an enslaved person was executed for a crime, which even then some people noted encouraged them to endeavor to have unproductive slaves executed for crimes. The house of horrors that was slavery can often only be seen in its fragmentary reflections; despite the annoyance I felt at the presentation, I learned a lot. ( )