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.

Celeste builds an essay around a figure she names the wailing black woman: the mourning mother whose public grief is offered as evidence of injustice. The starting point is Rihanna singing about wanting to scream, which Celeste hears as an expression of frustration shared by black women across the diaspora whose footing with the state and society remains insecure.

The essay tracks how that figure has been represented over time before settling on the reality series The First 48, which films victims' relatives at their rawest. Celeste takes up sociologist Herman Gray's invitation to examine what media images make audiences feel, treating the sentiment that collects around coverage of people of color as a form of labor.

Two questions organize the argument: how the wailing woman is enlisted in familiar stories about black death, criminality, and citizenship, and what her affective labor might disrupt. She appears both as a warning the program issues and as a potentially oppositional figure.