Scenes of Subjection

Although emancipation was the end of slavery, it was not the end of bondage, and Hartman describes the freed individual as “nothing if not burdened, responsible, and obligated” (221).

Debt, almost inevitable for emancipated people, now authorized violence. Hartman cites Nietzsche in her consideration of debt as a morality measurer, linking the affects of guilt and obligation with the relation between creditor and debtor.

The intellectual and social work required of emancipated people was enormous. How does one live a new existence within the break from slavery at the same time that emancipation reconfigures the plantation system’s abuses? Ironically, the Freedmen’s Bureau assumed not the enormous intellectual and physical labor that freed people took on but, instead, the “idleness” of emancipated people, who, after laboring under the extreme violence of slavery, it was assumed, would not voluntarily labor, even for themselves.

The mobility of emancipated people was particularly threatening to whites; alongside the physical violence of slavery was its insistence on restricted mobility. With emancipation, however, freed Black people moved. This mobility reflected the search of emancipated people for stability but also reflected a lack of material accumulation, which was read as a lack of “responsibility.” All was interpreted through the