Brooding Over Bloody Revenge; Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance by Nikki M. Taylor is a powerful history that EVERYONE should know and should be in every library. I will definitely be purchasing a copy for my own personal library! I was truly thankful to have gotten to read this before most people! I would like to purchase this one for my physical library!

From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance and personal justice. Hundreds of women planned and enacted murder on the people who enslaved, abused and terrorized them.
I often think about enslaved women using everyday resistance to preserve some dignity. For example, insolence, disobedience, feigned illness, absenteeism, work slowdowns, temporarily running away, and poisoning food. But murder was also a tool they used. Despite their actions, the author notes that enslaved Black women were the least violent people in American society during the age of slavery.
This book tells some of their stories through a Black Feminist lens, which the author reiterates throughout. The writing is a bit academic and boring. It felt like a dissertation rather than an engaging book. But the stories need to be told and read. My favorite was about Chloe who lived near me in PA and the author's explanation of Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780, the nation’s first abolitionist legislation.

I am so grateful for Nikki M. Taylor for writing this book. I wanted to read about true resistance from enslaved women, but what we usually have is watered down or written as a one of a kind exception, but of course they would violently rebel.
This is honest, brutal, and extremely well researched.
I thought I knew about execution and the disposal of bodies but I did not know about Gibetting.
Think of the diseases spreading through these old colonies and then they just have bodies hanging around.

All of this is terrible but I love the book and I am so grateful I got to read it. Thank you for the ARC.

This was a difficult read for me, but soo worth it. So often, Black Women’s stories are under told and under represented in U.S. history, and so books like this are so important. The stories are presented within the framework of “Black Feminist practice of Justice”, and does a great job of providing context and humanizing these Women in a way that makes this book very unique and powerful.

The author explains that enslaved women who ultimately chose to kill, did so as a last resort after facing some of the worst torture known to humanity. For this reason, please be prepared to read some incredibly disturbing information.

Powerful and challenging, Taylor’s book adds layers to events largely unreported, deliberately hidden, or given short shrift, particularly by white historians ( and therefore more likely to be male).

In 1970, a high school junior, I wrote a paper entitled “The Peculiar Institution: The Myth of the Happy Slave”. I cringe now at my amateur use of sources, my naïveté, and simplistic analysis, and am depressed that after 53 years, the level of understanding of the horrors of enslavement and racism make as much impression on the white majority as in 1850, Taylor’s books give me some hope that even if we have to smack people with the volumes, we may eventually get somewhere.

Here’s what struck me; I have said to friends that being black in this country must be akin to living under hostile occupation. American enslavement is seldom compared to the Nazi murder of more than 11 million gypsies, Jews, Slavs or political prisoners, and I suspect it’s because essentially it is white on white crime.

We find justifying murder difficult to impossible—unless the accused is combatting cruelty or persecution. And white. Ask yourself why. Read this, and continue to do so.

Perhaps you will learn why it was necessary for my close friends to explain why black women find it difficult to wholly trust white women, among other things. And perhaps you will finally understand deeply why the history of enslavement in this country has left such damage and begin considering how to combat the blindness that accompanies privilege.

The history of enslaved women of African descent, particularly those who have led mutinies and fought back against enslavers, is something that has interested me for a long time. This is also an area of scholarship where there is a gap, because while there are essential and very well-researched books about mutinies and rebellions led by men like Toussaint L'Ouverture and Nat Turner, Black women have often been left out of these discussions with the exception of more prominent figures like Harriet Tubman.

The introduction starts with a story of retribution by an enslaved woman of African descent, Charlotte, against Peggy, the white wife of the enslaver who owned her, Captain James Daniel. Reminiscent of Marie-Joseph Angélique, a Portuguese-born enslaved woman of African descent enslaved in what's now Quebec--as explored in Dr. Afua Cooper's landmark text, "The Hanging of Angélique," she was rumoured to be responsible for setting fire to the house of her enslaver and was hanged. In the case of Charlotte, in Kentucky, in 1812, her story reveals that 'enslaved women were not always willing to resist slavery covertly or nonviolently.' Unfortunately, like Angélique, Charlotte was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Winchester, Kentucky, in February 1812 after confessing to the murder of her enslaver's wife. She, like Angélique, was also hanged.

I'm also reminded of another enslaved woman of African descent, Chloe Cooley, whose story is not widely known. Enslaved in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada, her enslaver forced her violently onto a boat to go across to America and be sold to someone else. Cooley resisted forcefully, and although she went across the river and it's not known what happened to her, that act of resistance helped to change the law in Ontario in the 1790s and ultimately, decades later, in 1834, when Britain abolished slavery, Canada as a country of the Dominion of Great Britain, followed suit.

As the author notes, it is hugely significant to know the stories of enslaved women of African descent who resisted. While it is very heartening to see more scholars come out with these stories and more about enslaved women, there is still a gap in the amount of literature available. Further, it's also very difficult to know for certain how many enslaved women murdered their enslavers 'in the United States before 1865' due to several factors relating to archival records, their availability and existence, the survival of those records if they existed, the Civil War, and more.

The author also calls to attention scholar Rebecca Hall's significant works in these areas, including an article 'Not Killing Me Softly' from 2010, and the graphic novel 'Wake: the Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts.'

Arguing that enslaved women resisted slavery in many cases with deadly violence, the author states that their ideas about injustice were a central motivation, and tells this from the framework of a Black feminist theoretical approach, further framed in the appropriate historical and legal contexts.

Additionally, the author calls to attention the fact that some of the 'confessions' from enslaved women of African descent for murder were extorted by enslavers, such as in the case of Cloe, a teenager, threatened 'with both a beating and hanging to elicit a confession for the death of her owners' children in 1801.' The author further explains the challenges that courts presented during the antebellum era, making it incredibly difficult for Black defendants to obtain justice.

What follows in the chapters of this volume are essential, but also brutally violent, accounts of enslaved women fighting back against an already gruesomely violent institution that threatened their lives on a daily basis. The literature existing about enslaved men of African descent revolting, including Dutty Boukman at the start of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, are absolutely essential. It is even more essential, however, to also know the women involved in these struggles. Too often the history of the Civil Rights movement as well, getting into the 1950s and 60s in America, talks frequently of the hugely significant work and activism of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and many others, but does not speak about the women who supported these men (as discussed in "The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation" by Anna Malaika Tubbs). There is a shift in the scholarship and in books that are now focusing much more on the monumental contributions of Black women who are lesser-known, including female members of the Black Panther party, of women like Constance Baker Motley who was a pioneer in the legal field, and Shirley Chisholm, who ran for President of the United States. It is well past overdue to focus on women like Marie-Joseph Angélique and Chloe Cooley who, while they in particular are not discussed in this particular text, form a cornerstone of Black women's resistance to slavery. This volume is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand more about these methods of resistance, concepts of justice, and more.

Nikki M. Taylor made a major narrative and historical shift in the literature with her upcoming release Brooding Over Bloody Revenge. Taylor is the Chair in the Department of History at Howard University and specializes in nineteenth-century African American History. In Brooding Over Bloody Revenge she gives voice to and centers the Black women who exercised lethal slave resistance in the US.

This history book both tells the stories of these Black women and examines the particulars of why these women chose to use murder as their ultimate form of resistance to being enslaved. She teaches readers about the prior narratives that exist such as Melton A. McLaurin's Celia: A Slave and some of her own that honored the full spectrum of enslaved women's resistance and calls out much of the history in the literature that decidedly left these stories out or told them from the perspective of male slaves who were given much of the resistance credit.

I enjoyed reading her well flesh-out argument that is the foundation of the book asserting that, in her own words, "retaliatory violence is a morally legitimate response to the injustice within slavery."

Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!