Transcripts For CSPAN3 Tamika 20240706

All right, we are at times thank you for attending this session. Thanks for coming dr. Nunnally is associate professor of history with courses in Research Focus on the history of slavery, africanamerican woman and gender in history and the early republic and the American Civil War at Cornell University in ithaca. Her first book, at the threshold of liberty woman slavery and shifting. It ends in washington, d. C. , was published by North Carolina press in 2021, which reveals how africanamerican woman enslaved fugitive and free imagined new identities and lives beyond the repressive restrictions intended to prevent them from experiencing liberty, selfrespect and power. She consults a varied variety of 19th Century Newspapers and government documents as a way of thinking about it, pursuing the intellectual history and ideas of africanamerican women at the time. In her second book, the demands for justice in slave woman capital crime and clemency in early virginia, 1662 to 1865 is published again with North Carolina press and this book examines the clemency, the legal cases that involved enslaved woman accused of capital crime in early virginia. In these legal encounters, we not only see a system that worked to define and affirm a commitment to legal paternalism that upheld rule of law. But decades of responses made by countless enslaved woman accused of capital offenses. The demands for justice examines how these responses constitute the makings of an intellectual history of an, say, woman, womans articulation of justice. Shes published several articles with the journal southern history the william and mary. William and mary. Mary quarterly, the journal of womens history and the journal of american and legal history, as well as the journal of the civil war era. So todays questions are going to be speaking specifically about her second work, the demands for justice right here. Dr. Nunnally, my first question for you is, how did this project start and how do you define the capital crimes in this particular 17 century virginia . Absolutely. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you all for being here. After lunch, you know, i know thats no small feat. And so i appreciate your. So this book started i was doing archival research. I was working on my first book about black women in dc, which at the time required me to look at virginia cases too, because dc used to be also connected to alexandria right before retrocession and in 1846. So i looked at a lot of virginia records as well, and i started coming across a lot of cases that involved enslaved women who had murdered their enslavers. And then i also worked at the Prince William county Historic Preservation division, trying to restore the courthouse there. And we were trying to figure out how to tell a story about a woman named agnes, who was housed in the brownsville legal complex in the jail for murdering her enslaver. So i began to sort of think about these women. I was finishing up my first book, but i was kind of still always thinking about these other women in virginia more broadly. And i became i became interested in sort of what does all of this mean . You know, when you think about an enslaved woman who commits a Violent Crime against her in slavery, you automatically assume that shes going to die, right . Shes going to be executed. And what i found is actually that wasnt always the case that many of them were granted clemency. But whats interesting is that clemency didnt mean that you were free, you know, to free from slavery. Right. Free from your enslaver. Clemency meant that you were sold to the deep south at best. Right. And so if thats the case, what is clemency and also what is justice, right. Under this legal system . Right. And i began to sort of probe deeper into the origins of justice in our american legal system. So Flash Forward december. Of 2019, my students are preparing for their final exams and i have about a week in between exams and classes. And i said, you know, i should go back to virginia and collect the rest of those cases. And so i collected all of the cases i could from all the virginia counties and from the library of virginia and then i came home, right, celebrated the holiday, started the new semester and boom. March 2020 happens. Needless to say, i had a lot of time on my hands and i ended up writing this book on the porch and i wrote this book. I had an urgency when i was writing this book because this is also during a time when we began to see a lot of antiblack violence, Police Brutality with george floyd and Breonna Taylor and many of us were organizing and marching. And i was organizing marching in cleveland. And and part of me was kind of when i was marching, i was thinking to myself, what are we doing . What are we all doing here . Right. Part of me felt a little helpless, right . Because, you know, at the time, you know, there was a president in office, you know, who was kind of adding fuel to the fire. And i was trying to figure out we are all here because theres something insufficient about justice as it exists in our current legal system. Were marching because we want to realize a more fuller, expansive reach of justice and then i began to ask the question, how long have we been doing this . And then i, i assume that weve been doing this since we got here. And then i think my assumption was right. Right. And so as i began to write this history, i began to look at the actions of enslaved women who were committing capital crimes, not merely evidence of their violent behavior, not merely evidence of what slavery was, but also evidence of black women and girls, articulations of justice, that somehow, by their responses to their enslavers as they were acting upon their own economy, their own set of values around what was right and what was wrong. And so a lot of these women in this book were brought to sort of the brink of desperation, where they said, you know what, this is enough. We cant do this anymore. Right. And so these stories, for those of you who have read it, know that these stories are pretty, pretty heavy to think about, because it really shows sort of the more extreme cases of of sadistic violence that many of these enslaved women and girls experienced that kind of brought them to these violent responses. But what it also tells us is that clemency is not what we tend to think about when we think about clemency. Clemency was something different. Clemency was really about the American Government wrestling with its own limitations of justice. The people who made the laws knew that clemency wasnt sort of a purest form of justice. They knew. Right, that this form of clemency was serving the slave economy. And so historians have typically treated this as, oh, you know, these early legal folks were really preoccupy side with justice. And i was like, yeah, they were. But not in the way that we think they are. Right . They were within the context in which they were making laws. And a lot of that had to do with slavery and its in its significance in the local political economy. Thank you. Thank you. That leads beautifully into our next question. As you explored county court records. You focused your attention on unearthing the voices of enslaved women. What is revealed by recentering their voices, bringing their experiences to the forefront . You know, its really hard. To do that kind of work. And i dont know if i did it well or not, but i certainly tried. You know, these legal cases and these legal documents are problematic because there is a dynamic of power in their creation. So if a deposition is being taken, its taken by someone in power who has power in authority over the person whos being deposed. And that in and of itself is going to skew the kind of knowledge and information that we can get from that source. And one of the things i say in the book is that, you know, im going to use these court cases and try my best to really find and locate the voices of enslaved women and try to ponder and invite the reader to ponder what could have happened in this instance where there are gaps, where there are silences. What could have filled those gaps and silences without really being able to defend a definitively answer . What happened . And so i make it clear that these sources are violent in and of themselves, right . That they commit a particular kind of violence because they they are silencing black women. But i do my best to try to to not decide but to sort of invite the reader into an intellectual exercise of what could have been right, what could be at work here. Here are the possibilities. Heres the broader Historical Context in which this act is happening. These are the local dynamics on the ground, and this is what we know. So what do we take away from this right. And so in some ways, its very challenging. And it feels very unsatisfying sometimes because some stories appear more substantial with more detail and others appear more with just a name and an incident to write or charge. And so in that sense, those those court cases were very difficult to work with. But what was it specifically about virginia thats unique, that provides a unique historical study to think about lend leniency and clemency, particularly in relation to paternalism . Absolutely. I mean, virginias so interesting because virginia is this very elite southern space. It has tremendous significance politically during the early 19th century and throughout the 19th century. A lot of the laws that were enacted during that early period became a model for other states in the south. And so oftentimes virginia served as kind of a model Slaves Society for other Southern States in the union. So with the end, it has this long political lineage, right . With madison, with jefferson, with all of these sort of political elites. And so in that sense, it became really kind of an interesting test case to think about this struggle between how do we make real justice but accommodate the interests of slave holders. Because that is the thing to do politically, right . In the south and i think virginia captured that tension very beautifully. And like what you said, accommodate the interests of slave master slave holders while still kind of grappling with the limitation of the justice system. How do you see that tension reconciling or if it can be reconciled with clemency being used as a way to continue to maintain the institution of slavery . Mm hmm. I mean, i think that right. The the economic interest. Right. And the role of capitalism throughout the 19th century is really a powerful force in politics. And also in the law. And so a lot of the sort of legal technologies and innovations that we see in the south are connected to the institution of slavery in upholding the economic rights, the property rights, in particular, of of enslavers. And so these people who are enslaved dont have those same rights. And these sort of dueling theyre not really dueling interests. Right. Because this is the Interest Rate and enslaved women are seen as the property right. Of these enslavers. And so it became clear that the states function right was to to make sure that there was jurisprudence that reflected that interest in investment in end slavery. So specifically, how does demand for justice depart from the dominant legal is geography that historians in aground and think about in terms of as you mention, the state functioning its efforts to preserve, protect and continue. Hmm. You know, i think that many histories of virginia and the south have looked at the Legal Technology of clemency as evidence that there is sort of a almost sort of a legal period to the legal system. Right. That there is justice, there is room for justice. That justice is capacious. During this early period. And i think sort of my treatment of clemency, the really looks at, okay, whats the best case scenario, right. For an enslaved woman if we really think about that, then it becomes clear how, you know, the legal terrain of justice is not capacious. Actually, its quite narrow. Right. And its and its designated for a select privileged few. And so in that way, my book departs from the traditional scholarly literature. It also departs and how i read the sources right. And so i read the sources not with sort of the lawmakers at the center are not with those who are actually creating the documents at the center, which is traditionally how the history has been done. And im not saying that thats a wrong thing to do. And in fact, they probably think that ive done the wrong thing because ive read a lot into the actual actions. And in the crimes that enslaved women were charged with to to recreate their world and to reconsider their world and to center them in that work is requires some intellect, full risk that is not always certain. Thats not always. Supported substantially by the source base because nobody is deposed enslaved women, because they care about what they think. Right. And so if we know that, then my aim to try to center their voices, this is going to be very complicated. Absolutely. So one comparing enslaved woman who served, who were able to sue for their freedom with women and girls who were charged with capital crimes. You assert that an intellectual histories needed to understand this intersection between race, gender and law. Mm hmm. How so . How do we think about the intimacy between those connections in a way that damages ravi doesnt necessarily address . You know, i think the historiography does do a good job, particularly black women historians who have really thought carefully about the reproductive lives of enslaved women. Slavery was inherited through the bodies, through the wombs of enslaved women from a law passed in 1662. In virginia. And that very much altered their sexual lives and also informed a lot of the violence that we see in the book. And so if if thats the case, right, gender then creates another sort of mode of analysis for understanding why how these systems work to continue to extract labor from from enslaved women, their reproductive labor, their physical labor, their mental labor. And so if we began to look at what their lives really looked like and we look at how they responded. What we can get is a completely different way of understand what slavery was and a completely different way of understanding what the south was. And in that way, i think that these cases help us begin to locate an intellectual history that has been articulated by enslaved women who said enough. Absolutely. So what would you like people to take away from reading the demands for justice . If you could take two things concretely, definitively, what would they be . Youre asking a historian to do that we are not concise, as youll read. My hope for the book is that it will spark conversation. I am not the kind of historian that feels like i need to have the last say. I hope that it triggers some conversation and some questions. I hope scholars after me will build upon or completely trash the work and do something better. More than anything, i just wanted to really center the conversation in on enslaved women and girls and kind of shift the focus a bit to see what we could come up with. Can you give me a little bit more . But she said, you wanted me to be concise. But as i think about the way you recenter their voices, their experiences as a way to understand the way they endured and experienced slavery. But again, that you talked about a little bit more about how we then see that through the use of clemency as a way that limitations of the state, the state and laws have created. Mm hmm. Theres a tension that emerges between this articulation for justice and autonomy and selfrespect. Mm hmm. In relation to then what the state and how slaveholders demand and expect to receive. Mm hmm. So, as you think about or as you situate the scholarly work within the larger discourse. What do you see as being foundational, instrumental to that process . I think whats foundational to that process is questioning the purity of american law. I mean, if you look at the lives of black people, we are we been on a constant liberal struggle since we got here in and in that liberation struggle, we have intellectually been trying to expand the reach and access of justice because theres something insufficient about our legal system as is as it exists right. And so thats thats kind of the foundational premise of it. Beautiful. All right. So i have a couple of questions about your writing process and your experience in writing. What was one of your greatest accomplishments during the writing process . And a couple of your greatest struggles . The greatest accomplishment is that its done. Now on to the struggle. I, i mean the struggle. Well, the struggle is. You know, in full transparency, the struggle is being a descendant of enslaved people and having to every day revisit the horror and the trauma, the violence and the pain that people have endured under this system. When thats your lifes work, you kind of need some lighter stuff on, you know, in your life, too. And so in that way, it was challenging to kind of keep it together. And the reason why i say that is because if if sometimes you dont kind of take a breath, it impacts your ability to read the sources, you know, and it impacts your ability to to really kind of consider that time and place for what it was. Right. So in that sense, i struggled. I also struggled with sources. Right. Like i said, nobody cares about what black women feel and what they think in those moments. And so i take a lot of intellectual risk in posing questions. Perhaps this person might have felt this way and they could have thought this way, or maybe this shaped their decision. And so theres lots of that language in there, lots of uncertainty which may or may not be frustrating for the reader. So, yeah, there are lots of struggles, you know, theres lots of tension in it and i think im okay with it though, right . Because, you know, when youre when youre writing and when youre producing work, its kind of a lifelong process, right . You know, and so thats why i say i hope future generations come and just tear the whole thing up in do something better. Or how about build upon what they can build . Or they, you know, i may not have anything to build on, right . You know, and i and im excited about young people and the kinds of questions that they have about this time period. Thank you. All right. Now we have about 20 minutes for questions. Please walk up to the microphone and speak directly into the microphone so we can hear you. One, i want to congratulate you on having the courage to write this book. It had to be extremely painful and hurtful. Mm hmm. To read about black women and the struggles of, say, slavery and. What their purpose was, was just to use more, maybe more labor anyway. And it caused me to think of whats happening today. Mm hmm. That white women are going to start feeling the pain. Mm hmm. And the lives that black women lived during slavery. Because our reproductive freedoms are being taken away. Mm hmm. From white women that never had to really worry about it. Mm hmm. And it is now because its coming. All those freedoms we had for 50 years of having. The right to make decisions about our bodies. That is being has been taken away. And reproductive Birth Control is going to be taken away, too. Thats next. Yeah. So youre book is going to be foundational, i think, for women to understand what that means. And i hope your book is going to be read widely. I hope so, too. Yes. And ill do my best. Just spread the word. Thank you. All right. Thank you for that. Yeah. I. I wrote a piece in the Washington Post this year about that very issue of thinking about sort of our contemporary. Our contemporary moment in the ways in which weve really narrowed down. Right. Are reproductive rights. And theres a very real resistance against that. Many, many states are now are starting to criminalize lots of things. Right. And Birth Control being one of them. Right. And, you know, one of the lessons i think that we can learn from this is that legal precedent doesnt have to always be our go to when we are thinking about our legal futures. Right. And i think theres a tradition there that sort of looks back and sort of reify as the law. And in the law becomes this very sort of glorified feature. Right. One of the biggest accomplishments, right. Of american history. But it still has. Right. Its shaped in particular ways that have consequences for women, for immigrants, for black people, for lots of folks. Right. And so thinking about the law as a technology that we are constantly either reconstituting, repackage or advancing or innovating. Right. Can be helpful. You know, moving forward, how much does legal precedent really matter . How much do these older laws really apply to our contemporary moment . You know, in the article im talking actually about reproductive technologies, right . And how theyre becoming kind of problematic. And judges are actually reflecting back on slave laws in order to decide cases involving fertility. You know, technology. Right. Why we still use a slave law. Right. Like literally, like we cant over intellectualize ourselves into foolishness. Right. And so at some point, we really do need to step back and ask these questions. And i know theyre more complex. The answers to that are much more much more complex. But i do think the premise of that question is right. Right to kind of question, is this the right posture legally to take . And or is there an opportunity here to really think creatively about our moment . What technology does in relation to the body and also in relation ship to the market. Share that. Yeah, i like three questions, but theyre not good. So all questions like good. Ive been told you be the judge. So the first one was at the women in your book, which im going to be in a sign in line. So because you very piqued my interest. Thank you. But what was their perspective of clemency at that time . And then and was there one case or a couple of cases that kind of stood out to you that just made you like put everything down . You had to take a walk and come back to it . Yes. Yes. Those are great questions. What did enslaved women think about clemency . It depended upon the women. Now, we dont have a full picture of that. And so i have inferred that it depends words. Right. If you are enslaved on a plantation and you share very important family or relationships and now youre going to be sold to the deep south, never to see those people again, clemency is going to have a profound effect. If you were one of a handful of enslaved people in that place was just filled with so much torment. Right. That you tried to murder your enslaver. Youre probably not trying to go back there right. Just knowing about the deep south and what the slave market was like made everyone afraid of being sold because everything was so uncertain. Youre traveling, you know, hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles across the country to a completely foreign place. You have no ties to anybody and you dont know who this enslaver is about to be. Right. And if youve committed a crime, the enslaver who buys you is going to know that you committed that crime. And theyre going to think that youre rebellious and that you need to be put in jail. Right. So you can only imagine the kind of strategies. Right. That were used, you know, once an enslaved woman or little girl arrived to that plantation. So it varied right. And for them, theyre not thinking about and this is what i wanted to convey to his story is theyre not thinking about, you know, the the. Integrity of justice, of of clemency. Right. Theyre like, where am i going . Right. Who in in the words of my cousin, who are going to be there. Right. And for some. Right. They may not even be thinking about any of those things at all because theyve endured so much trauma. How does one think about ones future when youve had a past that looked like that . Right. And so thats kind of how i write. Right. Its like i dont have a full diary of of an enslaved girls reflections on this, but i try to kind of situate my mind in that place as best as i can in a in a spirit of vulnerability and humility, try to consider what the possibilities might have been. Is there a story that kind of there were lots of stories, but there was one particular story in the last chapter, an enslaved an enslaved girl named peggy was enslaved by her father. Whos who tried, you know, to to rape her. Right. So her father tried to rape her and would chain her to a rock in front of the house and and torment her and would have other enslaved men hold her down while he tormented her. And then one day, she got those same guys and they said, lets get rid of them. And so they tied him up in the house and they beat him with the ax. They went back outside, took a whole pile of hay, threw it in the house with him tied up in there and said, that house on fire and then in that i had just such a range of emotions after reading that i was just sitting there like, you know, okay. Right. You know, theres so much to unpack in that, right . You know, theres so much to unpack. And and what is just what is just is like, you know, at some point im just kind of like wincing at the idea of justice, even existing in this context because im like, well, you know, this is kind of in your face. Right. Horror. You know, you talk about terror, right. And so. You know, theres a certain kind of historian that would look at that act and say, yeah, these are criminal legal cases. And it it it a right. Im like, is that a crime, though . Like what . Like, lets unpack that. Right. And thats kind of how that was the my point of departure for the book was like, are these crimes or are these like Something Else going on . And and so kind of sitting with it and sometimes taking a break from it and then coming back to it and asking questions has been kind of my process. Okay. Weve been drawing parallels, chilling parallels between today and previous centuries. Attitudes. So i would like your comments on to popular phrases today, stand your ground and qualified immunity. Can you expand upon that . Qualified immunity primarily for law enforcement. Mm hmm. So its okay if you got on a uniform and a match to shoot anybody, you feel threatened about, even if theyre not armed, yelling. I think of sandra bland. Yeah, absolutely. And stand your ground, you just step on somebodys doorstep. Yeah. Or medgar made the mistake of turning them out in their driveway. Mm hmm. And they can shoot. Mm hmm. And that seems to me the. The right of the dominant tribe. Mm hmm. Over anybody they claim to feel threatened by. And so i draw a parallel between that and slaveholders who were automatically raped in so many ways. Mm hmm. Back in the day. And god forbid, if it was a woman who was challenging. Yeah. So if you could comment about that, about the historical connections between those. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, i think that policing authority. Right. Legal authority holds a particular place in our society and how its organized. Right. And so whats interesting about the early 19th century is that you didnt have to be an officer. You could just be a local or part of the local white militia. Right. You know, and be operating in an official capacity. Right. And so, if anything, things were even more informal. Right. During those earlier periods in time. But what i think the through line here is is right. The antiblack violence that has become so normalized in our Society Today and also the disposability of black bodies. Right. This idea that body, black bodies can be maimed, can be killed and that becomes sort of normalized ized in our our dynamic and how we relate to one another and how we think about power in in Society Today. And so, you know, modern day contexts are also complicated, too, because not every officer is white. Right. And so it gets even more complex. And so whats the role of the state in inflicting that violence . Authorizing that violence and never having to account right for for that violence, right for that life that is lost. And so it really is right. This sort of continued protest against Police Brutality that is reflected of earlier protests, informal protests, right. Of enslaved people to challenge how power is organized in society. And so i think that throughline is absolutely is absolutely there. Are these women that you write about. Must be so brave and courageous. I just ive not read your book, but im going to i was just wondering, are there dissenting voice of these wonderful, brave women that we could find out about and and a way to celebrate these womens lives . I just wondering if theres a way to trace their parents or descendants and see what they think about these women, their descendants. Thank you for that question. I you know, i imagine that there are descendant community. Is there hard to, though, because if these women were not if they were executed, its hard to know if they had children that remained in virginia. But there are actually lots of highly organized descendant communities in the south and in local communities. Right. And so that we have for us. But the thing that we have working against us is that those who were granted clemency were sold to other parts of the south. And oftentimes we dont know where. Right. They were oftentimes sold by the state of virginia to a dealer. And that was the last we heard. Right. And then the dealer then takes them to different parts of the south to be sold. So in that sense, descendant communities are difficult to find and locate. But for those who remained in virginia, i think chances could be higher to locate descendant communities. And its important to do that work as historians. Thank you so much for this message. I havent read your book yet, but i to after this discussion. Yes. I want to talk about struggle. The tug of war between the intersection between race and gender. Mm hmm. So there is this fear or i know among my personal circles for black women that when we help the womens liberation, that once we get to the proverbial Promised Land, well look beside and see our sisters. White of other races that will say, okay, thank you for helping us get there, but we no longer need your services or this is, you know, you have and another set of struggles because because in times with sandra bland it didnt seem as if maybe our counterparts were as vocal as we have liked on the flip side of that. Similarly, does the struggle continue for black women on the race side . Once we reach the proverbial Promised Land that when we look beside and see our male counterparts, okay, now know your place as a woman. Because there are some talking points to say, go back to we want to go back to the 1950s. And one time when women couldnt have bank accounts. Will we have a struggle with our male counterparts and continue to struggle in that regard . Well, thats an interesting question. I mean, well, ill just say, personally, i dont struggle with that in the in the sense that i think what has been really wonderful about being a part of my generation is that we we stand on the shoulders of black feminists who have been really great about articulating that tension and thinking about theoretical frameworks from which to embrace our own autonomy as black women and embrace more liberating forms of community that do not have sort of toxic forms of power. Right. But where we can have a mutually existence and a mutual ethic of care for one another, that really helps us thrive as a people. Right. And so i think it begins with really being grounded in an ethics of community and collective care. Right. One of the things that i think about a lot is my great grandmother, she migrated from alabama to cleveland and she got a job through the wpa project to be a seamstress, a hospital in cleveland, and was able purchase her own home. And she had a little apartment on the side and she let somebody rent that out. She had a garden. Anybody who came to the garden could eat from that garden. Nobody on her street ever went hungry. Right. They looked out for each other. They had a christmas savings club. Right. Which was kind of like a sousa, you know, like each of them put a little pot little bit in the pot, you know, and then when one person needed, they got to take from the pot, you know, and then they put it back in the pot and somebody else gets something from the pot. Right. And so i think really kind of getting back to sort of our ethics as a community of care. Right. And kinship and not really focusing sort of on creating toxic power dynamics. I think is our way forward. Right. And so seeing our mutual value, seeing our collective value and humanity and dignity, i think, is really where we have the power to thrive together. Thats when were at our best. I think were at our worst when we try to impose power in a way that is really demeaning. With that, we have exactly 6 minutes left. Any last minute questions. All right. Have a warm one more. One more. Come on. I was just curious. In your research, do do things get worse towards sleeping people in the south as the Abolitionist Movement grew in the north or things always this horrible for enslaved people in the south . Ive read lots. The laws got a lot more strict, got closer to the civil war. Yes. Whats interesting is the laws got more strict and then sort of the clemency rates kind of were about half and about half and half. So about half of the people were executed in the other half were granted clemency. And so that tension manifest itself in weird ways, right . And so it was like were going to reinforce this by creating even more strict laws to govern slavery, particularly because there were rebellion ends and there were sort of dynamic mix of of resistance at play and yet still, there was this preoccupation with appearing evenhanded as well. Right. And so even though evenhandedness is looks a particular way to the lawmakers. Right. It looks even handed to them for the enslaved women. Right. Going, you know, being sold outside of virginia is not doesnt feel evenhanded. Right. So its sort of the sort of political realm thats happening. And theres resistance on the ground. And those things are constantly clashing and virginia lawmakers try to create stricter laws. But how they decide the cases doesnt change as dramatically. And so its kind of intra its really complex and its not what you think it would be, which is what makes history interesting. Right. Because you think it would just be completely skewed in the direction of executions. But it wasnt. Thank you for that question. This is this is a very quick one. Are you the first one to try something about this event of the enslaved women killing there . No, not at all. Not at all. There are historians like wilmot king and Phil Schwartz in that generation of historians who have been thinking about what these violent acts mean legally. Yeah, because i wasnt aware of, you know, other writers about this. And i dont think brown c stevenson included this in his just mercy. Yeah, hes a more contemporary scholar. Yeah, absolutely. The work is definitely connected and i think there is a robust field of scholars who were historians of the south back in the seventies and eighties who really kind of laid the in helping us understand how the laws were changing, how how the courts were also changing, and what these legal sense meant. And i think im a part of a generation of historians who are really sort of centered around a black feminist ethic of centering the voices of enslaved women and girls. Yeah well, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for your question. With that, lets give a war