c.2026, Beacon Press $32.00 224 pages
Was she prepared?
She was about to be taken away, a slave, a prisoner. Did she know that shackles would make her wrists ache, that they’d always be too tight? Her home, her children, what else went through a newly-incarcerated Black woman’s mind as she was led away? As in the new book “Searching for Jane Crow” by Talitha L. LeFlouria, would today’s answers be any different than they were in 1845?
Two summers ago, LeFlouria visited the Orleans Justice Center in New Orleans to interview some of the women imprisoned there, to listen and share, and she had an epiphany. She was meant to share “courageous” stories from incarcerated women.
One tale she heard along the way gave her urgency.
A California woman told LaFlouria that when she went to prison, she was stripped and humiliated, physically searched before being dressed in a uniform that identified her as “Property of…” She was given a number, and was chained around her ankles and wrists – echoing treatment received by a million-plus enslaved people bound more than a century ago, “one-third” of whom were women.
That brought LeFlouria quickly up short: “I immediately noticed the deep historical influence of slavery’s legacies on mass incarceration,” she says.
She began researching, and discovered “slave jails” that were basic warehouses for enslaved people. Food was scarce there, she says; the floors were filthy, and space was tight. These jails “originated in the early nineteenth century,” and “played a key role in introducing profit-based incarceration…” as women were held there long-term by their owners, who rented them out for housework, fieldwork, or sex work. There were several large, and very infamous slave jails, LeFlouria says, and the Klan was involved in at least one.
The jails were confusing and frightening. If a woman ever somehow got free, she often feared that she might end up there again. Then, as now, mere freedom didn’t protect her from re-incarceration in the prison system.
“Searching for Jane Crow” is a hard book to pin down.
On one hand, it can feel like an old-fashioned Victorian drama, with embellished twenty-first century floridity mixed with nineteenth-century-based stories. Yes, the original language is authentic but continuing it beyond real documentation gives it an unnecessarily bedecked feeling, especially given the overwhelming severity of the situations that author Talitha L. LeFlouria shares.
And yet, every single point lands square in this book, every bit of research is solid, every story is unforgettable. LeFlouria makes her comparisons clear here, and it’s hard to look away and even harder not to notice other indignities and inequalities. Once you’re good and shocked, then, she shifts to an activism stance, with advice for changing the status quo in the prison system, for helping already-incarcerated Black women to avoid recidivism, and to ensure that children are properly cared for while their mothers are in jail.
Stick with this book, despite its bumps, and you’ll be astounded by a new way of seeing the prison system. Read “Searching for Jane Crow” and just prepare yourself.
