Johnson locates the beginnings of freedom in intimate acts saturated with power, and in the particular oppressions borne by African women and women of African descent. Slavery in the Americas grew as an institution but also through the body and through reproduction; fantasies of domination fed by that bondage seeped into every relation, between husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and worker. Intimacy bound the enslaved to owners, and it bound black women and the children they bore to men, European and African alike.

Working from documents held across three continents, written in several languages and mostly by colonial officials and slaveholding men, Johnson reassembles the lives of black women from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue, Spanish Cuba, and the Gulf Coast, with New Orleans as the central case.

Free status, she argues, took on meaning through what these women did with kinship and intimacy, aggressively and sometimes without success, and their attempts shaped the emancipation struggles that followed.