Karen Cook Bell interrogates how Black women in Louisiana and Georgia used Freedmen’s Bureau courts and their knowledge of the landscape to make their own freedom. In both regions, low wages and legal battles placed formerly enslaved women at a disadvantage; however, their labor aided their families and communities. Through the “contract labor system” in Louisiana and access to abandoned lands in Georgia, these women were able to improve their conditions in the short term. While some freedpeople derived marginal economic benefits from wage labor in the immediate aftermath of the war, in Louisiana these newly emancipated women were persistent in their demands for full and fair compensation from the Bureau of Free Labor, which adjudicated a significant number of cases in their favor.

This study chronicles the self-emancipatory journey of two Black female scholars from small, predominantly White liberal institutions in the American Midwest, through narrative inquiry, and by employing an Africana womanist lens. The authors use narrative vignettes to illustrate representative incidents that punctuated and pervaded their trajectories as pre-tenured faculty at their respective higher education institutions. In this reflective analysis, although the authors acknowledge their valuable contributions to the institutions, students of color, and other underrepresented student populations, they make the difficult decision to prioritize their mental, emotional, and intellectual well-being. Grounding their emancipatory process in the Africana womanist tenets of being self-namers and self-definers, the authors connoted a keen awareness of their spirituality, mothering, and wholeness. The authors underscored their imperative to self-liberate while also providing practical strategies to higher education institutions interested in supporting and retaining Black faculty.