Celia, a Slave

Originally published in 1991, Celia, a Slave illuminates the moral dilemmas that lie at the heart of a slaveholding society by telling the story of a young slave who was sexually exploited by her enslaver and ultimately executed for his murder. Melton A. McLaurin uses Celia's story to reveal the tensions that strained the fabric of antebellum southern society by focusing on the role of gender and the manner in which the legal system was used to justify slavery. An important addition to our understanding of the pre-Civil War era, Celia, a Slave is also an intensely compelling narrative of one woman pushed beyond the limits of her endurance by a system that denied her humanity at the most basic level.
The 30th anniversary edition includes a new foreword from Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan. As these two prominent scholars reflect in that foreword, the scholarship on enslaved women has grown exponentially since
Celia was first published. In addition to detailing the "critical mass of gender and slavery scholarship" in a state-of-the-field essay, Berry and Morgan offer their thoughts on how scholars and students might approach Celia's story today in light of three decades of historiography. "Placing Celia in the context of other enslaved women," they conclude, "allows her story to reveal more than it did in 1991."