Keywords
Girlhood
Girlhood is a keyword for Black Louisiana that captures the experiences, struggles, and resilience of young Black girls in the context of enslavement and racial oppression. The historical documents detailing the lives of these girls reveal a complex narrative of growth, resistance, and survival within a system designed to dehumanize them.
Girlhood in this context is not just a stage of life but a site of resistance and agency. Crystal Lynn Webster states: “Black children, especially girls, faced criminalization in the earliest manifestations of criminal disciplines and prison practices. The youngest child ever executed in the United States was a black girl… Black girls received extreme criminal convictions beyond execution including lifetime imprisonment and were disproportionately represented in juvenile reformatories.” Despite the harsh realities of enslavement, young Black girls like Maria Juana, Carlota, and Marie Jeanne engaged in everyday acts of defiance and resilience. These acts ranged from legal petitions for manumission, as seen in the case of Jeanneton and her daughter Marie Jeanne, to the tragic instances of resistance that ended in severe punishment, like Carlota being tried for arson. In the lives of these young girls, we see this fugitive movement in their efforts to resist the confines of their imposed social and legal status.
Girlhood is also a a space of both vulnerability and strength. It includes the defiant acts that young Black girls used to gain autonomy and resistance against systemic racial and gendered oppression. Through their stories, Keywords for Black Louisiana draws on Black studies insights to better understand the individual and communal acts of resistance that defined their lives.
