Trail Sisters - (Plains Histories) by Linda Williams Reese (Hardcover)

About the Book

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of their slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. As if Removal to ...

Book Synopsis

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of their slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. As if Removal to Indian Territory weren't cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly they were freed, but had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribal oversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers. Remarkably they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as no lesser pioneers of the American West than their Indian or other Plains sisters.

Review Quotes

Trail Sisters is particularly informed by the invaluable oral histories collected in Oklahoma during the New Deal era . . . rich documents that Linda Williams Reese has brought to life. We hear the voices of those many women who personally witnessed upheaval or became repositories for the stories their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers passed on so that all could learn, and remember. -John Wunder, from the Plainsword

In this riveting story, Linda Reese focuses on the epic journey of what some Oklahomans endured as their status changed from being enslaved, freed, and then, finally, free black women. Faced with the violence of slavery, civil war, and post-war segregation, they find comfort and security in work, families, black towns, and black women's clubs. A fascinating and profound way to understand what journeys of this type mean for all of us. --Joan Jenson

Linda Reese's Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890, is a long-awaited and much needed addition to the literature on black women enslaved by the Five Tribes and freed by the Civil War. Taking advantage of a surge in sophisticated scholarship over the last decade which provides deep analysis of the complex relationships between native people and their African bond servants, Reese explore the nature of those relationships, reminding us that black women in Indian country were at once enslaved servants, sexual objects, wives, daughters, and sisters of their owners who were far more integrated into their societies at the most intimate level than their counterparts in the surrounding slaveholding states. Equally important, she explores the contradictory nature of freedom that challenged those earlier relationships with Indian people while simultaneously introducing them to the cultural attitudes and practices of both white and black settlers who flooded into the Territory after the Civil War eventually overwhelming both the Indian and freedperson population. --Quintard Taylor, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History, University of Washington, Seattle

About the Author

Linda Reese is a retired history professor who has taught at the University of Oklahoma and East Central University. She is the author of Women of Oklahoma, 1890-1920 and coeditor of Main Street, Oklahoma, A Twentieth Century Story (forthcoming) and has written scholarly articles, book reviews, and Internet entries on women's history, the West, and Oklahoma. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma.