Slaves were isolated from their bodies, yet they manipulated the slave market. Being presented as commodities in the South, they grew accustomed to being looked at and touched. However, looking out for each other, assessing the buyers who prodded, and choosing how the slaves presented themselves, they had some power to guide a buyer’s decision-making process.
Information was traded off from buyer to slave and vice versa, and the slaves noted these details to tell each other whenever the hour was free to do so. Slaves and buyers had one thing in common: they relied on the perception of the other. Slaves would pay attention to the conversations buyers had with the traders, the clothing they wore, and their demeanor. Slaves were slaves and did not necessarily stand out from one another like buyers did. The buyers, on the other hand, were all distinct. The clothing the buyers wore indicated their wealth. The conversations and negotiations buyers had with the traders gave the slaves information to work with. Listening for keywords like “city” versus “plantation” meant either a decent life or a more difficult one, boiling in the heat. The more questions that the slaves were asked, the easier it was for them to finagle their answers.
Slaves had the opportunity to manipulate the buyers, because buyers would ask questions and perform examinations. Histories of sickness and scars were asked of the slaves. Buyers were never utterly sure if the traders or the slaves were telling the truth. Part of the job of the buyer entailed being able to figure out the correct answers to the stories they were told by the traders. If lies were found out, punishment was in the near future for the slave who told the truth to the buyer, if the truth were not wanted, punishment was still a possibility for that slave. Questioning the slaves gave buyers insight to the truth, but little did they know that the slaves were using these questions to their advantage.
The way the slave market worked allowed the slaves to know how the traders wanted them to act and what the buyers were searching for. How the slaves decided to represent themselves could turn into a risky situation. Slaves shaped their sale. Whatever the buyers asked of the slaves gave them a chance to construct themselves. Slaves had told each other stories of who had or had not been bought for whatever reason/story, and they learned to choose their buyers based on this information. Because the truth was only sometimes told, buyers and traders had difficulty trusting slaves. Slaves were just playing the game of survival through resistance and manipulation.
WC: 442
Pledged: Kendall Gasner
Johnson, Walter. "Acts of Sale." In
Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, 162-88. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999.
You raise such an important point here: Although slaves in the Transatlantic Slave Trade were undoubtedly exploited, commodified and stripped of their ‘natural born rights,’ like all humans, they made choices. It is crucial to acknowledge the ways in which slaves made these decisions/what they were—from choosing exactly what to say to a slave owner (ultimately manipulating them into doing what the slave wanted), or listening carefully to the buyers’ and traders’ conversations (and figuring out ways to resist based off those discussions), slaves made many choices that ultimately guided their fate, and built their individual identities. Through acknowledging and understanding these choices, we stray away from a simplistic and ultimately dehumanizing view of slavery and people of color in America. By leaving the set of various complex choices slaves made out of our discussions, we discredit their agency and humanity.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a fertile ground for interpretation and deconstruction: how exactly did construction of the self happen (keeping in mind agency of black folk and white folk). For instance, as you point out, this was the place that constant and changing self-definition happened (both for the slaveholders and the enslaved people). For every buyer that passed, an enslaved person would have to decide what they were going to be like at that moment; of course, though there was probably a due amount of nihilism in this setting, this was also one of the few spaces in which black folk had control over their own fates, and as such, they used this to their advantage, defining themselves as irreligious, religious, hard-working, ill, subservient, rebellious, and everything else. Depending on the eyes looking at their bodies, enslaved people in these spaces had control over their bodies and used that control to redefine themselves over and over again (almost constantly).
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