This chapter tells the history of Sarah Conner, an enslaved woman sold through the domestic slave trade from Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana. Conner used money earned through socially reproductive labor to purchase her freedom. Her emancipation was complicated, however, by the man with whom she lived and who legally enslaved her, Theophilus Freeman. Freeman failed to properly register Conner's freedom with the city courts. When Freeman filed for bankruptcy, his creditors attempted to claim Conner's body for payment of his debts, illustrating the ways in which women of African descent, enslaved and free, could be trapped within the sexual economy of slavery. Chapter three also considers the experiences of enslaved concubines more broadly, challenging a sharp divide between accommodation and resistance in their actions and focusing instead on the impossible position in which they found themselves.
To Be Sold: Virginia and the American Slave Trade & Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808-1865