My aim in this paper is to cast a new light on enslaved Africans in the mid 19th century Ottoman Empire, “ silent and absent” as they have been characterized, by focusing on a specific set of issues: their every day life, their relationships to the social environment in which they lived, their desires and emotions, and their experiences of exploitation. I seek traces for these in the records of the Nizamiye court for the few criminal cases concerning enslaved Africans, which had been referred to them. I will take one example, the case of a young runaway enslaved woman, which includes her interrogation reports. This woman called Zeyneb tried to escape from bondage, by running away from her masters, but she fell victim to an unscrupulous couple, neighbors who deceived her by raising in her false hopes, but then instead of helping her shut her in a hidden cell in their house for about five months, and when she was not docile they admonished her reminding the grim legal sentence she would receive if she was caught, and if that did not work threatened to kill her. Nevertheless, Zeyneb did not give up and one day when the trap door was forgotten unlocked, she broke free and took refuge in her neighbor’s house. The records do not make clear whether Zeyneb sought justice or was one of the defendants in the case and therefore the case found her. What we find clearly revealed, however, is the desperate and hopeless search for freedom of one young enslaved woman, and the vulnerability and loneliness which made her easy prey for predators who stoke her craving for freedom but pounced on her at the moment she thought she was getting away, in order to re-enslave her.