This chapter covers the story of three enslaved people who used various poisons to slowly murder their owner in colonial Massachusetts.

The introduction presents an overview of the book’s argument and the theoretical framework that guides the project. It also lays out the contributions the book will make to the historical literature of slave resistance. The argument is that enslaved women resisted slavery with lethal force and when they did so, their own ideas about injustice were a central motivation. A new Black feminist theory is introduced and outlined: the Black feminist practice of justice. The core tenets of this philosophy includes the women prioritizing their perspective and how they defined justice, understanding the stark lack of justice in the judicial system, Black women’s rationality and prior planning, proportionality, a concept of “just deserts,” and their resignation to accept their fates for exercising lethal force.

This chapter centers on a plot by three generations of slaves, led by the elderly matriarch, to murder their owner. This Virginia enslaved family used an ax, shovels, and fence posts to end their owner’s abuse.

This chapter examines the case of a teenaged term slave named Cloe who used her hands to strangle her owners’ young daughters a week apart in rural early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.

The final chapter covers the life of Lucy who killed her mistress with a blunt instrument and threw her body down a cistern in Galveston, Texas, in 1858.

This chapter examines the curious case of a group of enslaved people who used a featherbed to smother their owner to death in colonial North Carolina.

This chapter is about Jane Williams, an enslaved woman who hacked her owners and their infant daughter to death with an ax as they slept in Richmond, Virginia, in 1853.

This chapter centers on the actions of Rose Butler, a teenaged term slave in New York. Rose and her accomplices set her owners’ home on fire in 1818 to avenge her mistress’s poor treatment.