A 19th-century legal case and why it matters today
In other words, as Bernstein points out, years before the Civil War, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed forced labor — 'except as a punishment for crime,' as the reads — some Americans were forced to labor for another person's profit.
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'A lot of people think that the 13th Amendment created a new form of slavery, a new form of forced labor,' she adds. 'In fact, what it did was it allowed an older form of forced labor to continue, and that is to say carceral slavery, and that form of forced labor has its origins not in the South, but instead in the North.'
What happened to William Freeman during his five years at Auburn didn't end with forced labor; he endured brutal beatings, including one that left him permanently disabled with hearing loss and likely cognitive deficits. Six months after his release, Freeman went to the house of a white family and killed four people.
His crime, and the public reaction to it, spurred debates about retribution and race. It contributed, as Bernstein details, to a widespread belief among whites that Black youth were inherently criminal. It did not, however, have any effect on the challenge Freeman himself had raised as a teenager. The use of incarcerated labor to produce profits for prisons — the system against which 'he had an entirely rational claim,' Bernstein says — has persisted.
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Telling Freeman's story, Bernstein adds, 'was a really hard needle to thread. One of the commitments I made to myself was that I was going to take everybody's pain very seriously. I was not going to trivialize or dismiss anybody's pain, and that applied to William Freeman, and it also applied to the people that he murdered.'
Robin Bernstein will read at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 19, at the
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Haley Mlotek grew up surrounded by marital strife and divorce — as a kid, she helped out at her mother's marital counseling practice, even typing up couples' complaints against each other as they got ready to split up. But her own divorce forced her to confront the pain she hadn't quite understood as a child. In '
The poet Robert Frost is too often seen these days as a simple sage of rural New England, a bard of snowy roads and not much else. But in Adam Plunkett's new biography, '
Academia, feminism, and affairs of the heart intertwine in Michelle de Kretser's '
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Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section.
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