The most common studies of women in the antebellum south focus on women of color, especially free women of color. The abundance of resources offers themselves to the numerous studies that have been published on the state and ensure there is plenty more for future research. For scholars studying the lives of blacks in Louisiana, they have relied on a wealth of information from numerous sources from which they could accurately depict the lives of the gens de couleur libres or free people of color in New Orleans. One of the critical sources that informed such works was the Code Noir of 1724. In this document, only two provisions applied to the free people of color, the divisions between being enslaved and free, and black and white. For free black women in Louisiana, power was something they became accustomed to in ways the enslaved black women could not. One of the …show more content…
Like many black women in Louisiana, Coincoin was subjected to sexual servitude. While many enslaved people used many venues to gain freedom, manumission, purchase, and flight, Coincoin used her “lot” or sexual obedience and subservience to gain her freedom. Like many historians, Mills zooms in on Coincoin’s agency to frame her narrative. As she gained her freedom, she also gained another status, that of slave owner. While many blacks became slave owners because they were related to slaves they could not free, Coincoin became a slave owner not to free slaves but to make a profit. She used the institution of slavery to improve the lives of her children. Her life is a complicated tale of survival as a black woman trying to combat the oppressions she faced everyday as a black woman in a society that had its strict definitions of what it meant to be black and what it meant to be woman; for those at the intersection of both, they found themselves having to fight a little harder than