Freedoms on their minds: Post–civil rights narratives of slavery

Abstract This chapter examines how post–civil rights narratives of slavery emerge from cultural and artistic demands to reimagine slavery and its legacies through Black perspectives. It analyzes Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, and other influential works shaped by the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance to demonstrate how post–civil rights narratives of slavery contest dominant “master” narratives and expose the psychological effects that slavery had on those who endured it and their descendants. In addition to showing the ways that the past, present, and future are connected, the chapter underscores how the texts manage slavery’s psychological impacts and serve as models for individuals and the nation to respond to slavery’s ongoing effects.