Born into slavery in 1858 North Carolina, Priscilla Joyner came of age at the dawn of emancipation. Raised by a white slaveholding woman, Joyner never knew the truth about her parentage. Drawing from Joyner's oral history for the Federal Writers' Project and the interviews of other formerly enslaved people, Carole Emberton uncovers the stories of Joyner and other members of freedom's charter generation, and challenges us to think anew about the consequences of failing to reckon with the afterlife of slavery.