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When author Kristal Brent Zook first published Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain, nearly 20 years ago, the reality of so many Black women's lived experiences was not widely discussed in mainstream media. Two decades later, after much social change in the United States, including national media attention on Black women following the police murder of Breonna Taylor and the #SayHerName movement, the election of the first Black female vice president, Kamala Harris, and massive political and social backlash because of these gains, the timing for a refreshed look at these women's lives has never been better.

The stories in this collection invite readers into the intimate spaces of ten African American women from all walks of life, in cities and towns across the country. Twenty years later, we revisit them to learn how their lives have evolved. There are fresh new codas at the end of each chapter that illustrate how the women have fared over the last two decades. Did they achieve their dreams? What twists and turns did they meet along the way? These stories highlight the complex, nuanced, and passionate lives that Black women lead, often requiring ambition, ingenuity, and creativity to survive and thrive in the United States. This collection is a testament to the fact that the past repeats — and we remain, each of us, still, connected. 

Questions traditional assumptions about power and agency in slave women’s everyday lives.

Through their open defiance, women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth had a significant impact on the institution of slavery. But what of the countless other women who did not commit public or even private acts of resistance? Are their stories worthy of our attention? While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-that emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.

In Ghosts of Slavery, Sharpe introduces a wider range of everyday practices by examining the lives of three distinctive Caribbean women: a maroon leader, a mulatto concubine, and a fugitive slave. Through them she explains how the diasporic experience of slavery enabled black women to claim an authority that they didn’t possess in Africa, how concubines empowered themselves through their mimicry of white women, and how less-privileged slave women manipulated situations that they were powerless to change. Finding the highly mediated portrayal of slave women in the historical records limited and sometimes misleading, Sharpe turns to unconventional sources for investigating these women’s lives. In this fascinating and historically rich account, she calls for new strategies of reading that question traditional narratives of history, and she finds alternative ways to integrate oral storytelling, slave songs, travel writing, court documents, proslavery literature, and contemporary literature into black history. Ultimately, this layered approach not only produces a more complex picture of the slave women’s agency than conventional readings, it encourages a more nuanced understanding of the roles of slaves in the history of slavery.