ABSTRACT
Denied personhood by the laws that saw African American slaves and women as constitutionally nonpersons, Louisa Picquet, no doubt like many other slaves, invents her personhood, in fact, multiple selves, in conjunction with the mobilities and immobilities, both forced and chosen, that shape her life and her life’s story. Demonstrating the extent to which self-identity is implicated in place identity, Louisa Picquet goes from being daughter to concubine to mother to free wife to solicitor of her mother’s freedom with the various movements or “removes” her narrative recounts. As well, Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life by Hiram Mattison (1861) demonstrates the multiple movements or circulations of African Americans during the antebellum period, both within and outside of the slave system, illustrating the fluid definitions of self, travel, and nation embedded in women’s slave narratives despite the nation’s laws and practices that attempted to affirm African Americans’ legal nonpersonhood.
