Emancipation comes during the course of the events of the novel, but the Black female figures still face significant constraints that not even the legal end of enslavement can remove. While many of the Black female characters discover that being free doesn’t guarantee true freedom, the experiences of Doralise and Emily illustrate that truth the most explicitly.

Doralise, who is Suzette’s godmother before Emancipation, is a free person of color, but she still experiences moments of powerlessness and danger despite her legal status. When Suzette appeals to her godmother for help in ensuring that Philomene’s future is brighter than Suzette’s, Doralise makes it clear that she has limited power to protect the baby. Doralise’s lack of agency is made explicit many times to Suzette, including when she hears Doralise’s husband screaming at Doralise outside the church and sees Doralise’s blackened eyes: the results of her partner’s abuse. These details make it clear that Doralise cannot advocate for herself and will have little power to advocate for someone else. It takes the intervention of a white man, Eugene Daurat, for Doralise to be granted a divorce and to become a woman of property. Her freedom only goes as far as men allow, and the version of freedom she achieves grants her only partial agency.

Emily Fredieu is another “free” Black woman, but despite her birth after the end of enslavement, she also encounters distinct limits to that freedom. As a child, she is subjected to the whims of adults, as when her father sends her to school and places her under the guardianship of a man who marries her when she is still a teenager. Emily’s relationship with Joseph Billes occurs in the context of Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction, when a grim combination of violence and unjust laws allowed white people to continue to exercise social and legal control over formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants. Emily is married to Billes in all but name, but as a Black woman, she has no claim to her home in Billes Landing, and this is made clear when Joseph Billes evicts her so that he can move his white wife-to-be into the home that he originally built for Emily. Her willingness to allow Joseph to be a part of her life and her children’s lives causes disruption to the racial order in Cane River; threats to her person and family limit her ability to exercise control over her property, and they prohibit the possibility of her marriage to Joseph. These details show that freedom is complicated at best for the “free” Black women in Cane River.

In her interaction with the census taker, Elisabeth observes of the people in her family a movement from “from coffee, to cocoa, to cream, to milk, to lily. A conscious and not-so-conscious bleaching of the line” (382). The phrase “bleaching of the line” is a reference to colorism: the act of valuing people whose skin tone more closely approximates whiteness over those who have darker skin. Colorism represents one of the enduring marks of enslavement on the bodies and psyches of the women (and some men) in the book. The “bleaching of the line” (382) actually begins with Suzette, but it occurs offstage. It may be that Elisabeth’s “bleaching of the line” is a conscious decision, inasmuch as she chooses Gerasíme. Suzette, whose skin tone is the “cocoa” in that metaphorical progression, gives birth to Philomene, making Eugene Daurat the author of that “bleaching of the line” (382) through rape. In these cases, there is no agency involved.

After the end of enslavement, colorism once again comes into play despite the greater agency accorded to Elisabeth’s daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter. Despite their freedom, these women nevertheless find themselves hemmed in by racism that affects their survival and their economic mobility. Because of these conditions, the women consciously use colorism as a survival strategy. When Elisabeth accuses Philomene of being “color-struck” (310), Philomene makes it clear that her children’s very light skin is a currency that they can spend to gain higher social status. However, Elisabeth responds to Philomene’s belief that lighter skin is purely beneficial by warning her that “passing” as white destroys Black families because members who can pass abandon those who cannot. Thus, the novel makes it clear that this form of conscious “bleaching” comes at great personal cost. Emily, for example, loses her son Eugene forever when he leaves Cane River so that he can live as a white man.

Try as they might, these women discover that colorism, a hold-over from the time of enslavement, is not a viable strategy if one remains among one’s people, for one can never be light-skinned enough to actually be seen as white and gain access to the social advantages that come with such a perception. This reality is borne out when Lola labels Emily’s children using racist slurs associated with people who have both African and European heritage; her abuse is perpetuated despite the fact that these children are indistinguishable from white people, as evidenced by the photos included in the book.

Notably, T.O. is the only one who inverts the damaging logic of colorism. When T.O. chooses Eva Brew and brings her home to Emily, he sees it as an effort to “break the chain” and “strengthen the blood of his own children” (508). He values Blackness and associates it with positive traits that can help him and his family survive—unlike Emily, who unsuccessfully tries to pass as white at the end of the novel. In this scene, she still isn’t white enough to be served in front of a woman who is recognized as white or to be served in the café through the front door should anyone recognize her. During this era, Jim Crow laws, the legal successor to enslavement, were still designed to oppress Black people and force them to adhere to the unjust and arbitrary social divisions based on race. Tademy’s choice to present this picture of Emily counters her family’s myth-making of her ancestor as a gracious lady, and the novel’s conclusion thus points out the ultimate bankruptcy of colorism as a survival strategy.