The Price for a Pound of Their Flesh Review
The vision of a frightened African-American woman on the auction block clutching her child to her chest equally the behest commenced renders an iconic epitome that has ofttimes served 
as a powerful ingredient in fiction to conjure up the helplessness and hopelessness that beset chattel slaves in the antebellum south. Such every bit:
Adeline reluctantly stepped up on the cake amongst a crowd of unfamiliar onlookers. Arms crossed, head covered, she gripped her young to her chest to shield him from the spectacle of shame they were virtually to feel. The audience admired her dark olive skin and her evidence of fecundity. Her x-week-old son was living proof that she was a child-bearing woman. Adeline had "a very fine forehead, pleasing countenance and balmy, lustrous eyes," while her son was a "light-colored, blue eyed curly-silked-haried [sic] child" Positioned on the Columbia, Southward Carolina, courthouse steps, the two awaited their fate. "Gentlemen, did you ever see such a face, and caput, and class, every bit that?" the auctioneer inquired, taking off her hood." She is only eighteen years erstwhile, and already has a child [who] volition consequently make a valuable piece of property for someone. The bidder and Adeline struggled with her hood as he praised her skill. "She is a first-class housekeeper and seamstress," he connected. Past this time, tears filled her optics, "and at every licentious allusion she cast a look of pity and woe at the auctioneer, and at the oversupply." As the sale continued, the auctioneer took Adeline'due south hood off three more times to evidence "her countenance" and every time, she rapidly replaced it. When he was exposed, her son "cast a terrified wait on the auctioneer and bidders," each fourth dimension his face was revealed. Perhaps at his immature age, he sensed his female parent's terror. Within minutes, the auction was complete, and Adeline "descended the courthouse steps, looked at her new master, looked at the audition, looked fondly to her sweet child's face, and pressed it warmly to her bust," while the auctioneer jeered, "that child wouldn't trouble her purchaser long." The threat of separation followed enslaved people to the sale block. [p10-11]
Yet, the foregoing is not an overwrought scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin or a sensationalist TV movie, but rather the report of an actual slave auction from the opening chapter of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. In a remarkably original contribution to the historiography of African-American slavery in the United States, Daina Ramey Berry, professor of history at the Academy of Texas at Austin, reminds the states that Adeline and her infant were subjected to this humiliating dehumanization on those long-ago courthouse steps for a specific reason: they each held a tangible value associated with real dollar signs for the heir-apparent and the seller. Adeline especially was worth something because, as we learn from this business relationship, she was an attractive young adult female, she had household skills, and she was fecund. Adeline in this sense was not a human being, merely property, plain and simple, and property has a value.
In a well-written, thought-provocative, and strikingly innovative addition to the existing body of scholarship on American slavery, Berry sets out to locate what that specific value was and how it was rationally determined, non only for Adeline simply for all of the many millions of those once held in bondage: men, women, children, infants – even the expressionless. In this slim volume, based on extensive research, she largely succeeds, but even more significantly her piece of work profoundly alters the style historians volition conceptualize the slave-person ever afterward. In Maps of Fourth dimension, "Big History" scholar David Christian aptly dubs slaves equally human batteries. That is a useful construct. Berry's construct is equally useful, as she hangs a dollar sign effectually every cervix and demonstrates how, in the peculiar version of African slavery that developed in the The states, some human being beings, bought and sold just like batteries adapted for specific utilizations, came to be worth more others, and how that value changed over a lifetime.
In The Toll for Their Pound of Flesh, it is clear that there were a whole host of values for human chattel slaves that are usually overlooked. For instance, there was an appraised value, which was frequently noted in account books and wills. There was as well a market place value, which but like in an automobile or a abode could pointedly differ from appraisal. Rarely acknowledged, there was besides the value placed upon a slave when insured confronting loss by their possessor, and the premium that was paid, over again just like a car or a firm. Some of this value was based upon what office the slave holding could perform. A strong man who could work in the fields was worth X. A competent woman who could run up or continue house was worth Y. A young adult female who was fertile and could exist bred like livestock was worth Z. If she was bonny, like Adeline, and could serve as an object of the mankind for her owner, all the ameliorate, and her value increased. Age was also a stiff determinant in assigned values. In an era of high infant and child mortality, babies and pocket-sized children were worth very little, but each year that they survived their assessed value increased until at fourteen they accomplished something like developed status. Slaves had the greatest value during their prime years, driven by capability and productivity. Berry articulates this in a spooky passage:
Sellers prepared the enslaved for display determined the condition of their health and sometimes rated them on a five-signal scale of 0 to 1 in increments of 0.25. Prime number or full hands had a rating of 1 or A1 Prime, which represented a projection of the amount of work a person could perform in a given day. Prime hands, typically between the ages of fifteen and thirty, were the strongest laborers on farms and plantations . . . Other enslaved people had their rates set at iii-fourth hand, half paw, or for those unable to work or contribute to the plantation economy, zero. This rating system resembles Usa Section of Agriculture (USDA) meat grades, in which beef undergoes a "composite evaluation" to determine quality. [p68]
Naturally, supply and demand and transportation costs all factored into the cost. Slaves could also exist rented out to others, and their labor valued in fractions, much as they were famously assessed as fractional persons for the purposes of representation in the Constitution of the United States. [p84] Value diminished every bit the slave aged past 40. The writer dubs the elderly and by-their-prime "superannuated," and this grade saw their value drop with great significance.
Surprisingly, slaves also had a certain value after expiry, what Drupe terms their "ghost value." A slave executed for a crime by the state, for instance, had an assessed value that was paid to the owner for his loss in being deprived of their labor. [p98; 112] And the skull and skin of the infamous, such as insurrectionist Nat Turner, commanded a premium on a clandestine market for such goods. [p102-105] Much more amazing, however, was that the corpses of dead slaves (as well as grave-robbed costless blacks!) served as currency for the cadaver trade to medical schools, north and s. With an inspired sense of optimism layered over the revulsion that each of these valuations implies, Berry adds 1 more than value that restores a sure dignity to the dehumanized humanity that she chronicles: "soul value." The soul value, she underscores, is the value the human slave person placed upon their own life, a value that could not be bought or sold, a value that led ane ringleader of a slave revolt to bound from the gallows with a rope around his neck and dice on his ain terms rather than expect for the trap to drop. [p146]
This is an outstanding volume that nevertheless suffers from a handful of flaws. Showtime of all, as Drupe assigns boilerplate values for her subjects throughout the volume, it soon becomes articulate that the exceptions to the rules far outnumber the rules. In other words, values clearly are far less quantifiable than she would suggest. That hardly diminishes the quality of the theme, but nevertheless frustrates the reader every bit she repeatedly notes what the values should be at the head of the chapter only to detail scores of values that fail to fall into these ranges. In another arena, Drupe risks damaging her historical scholarship by repeated attempts to draw assuming lines between the slave experience and the contemporary African-American feel and the Black Lives Matter movement. While there is merit to these insights and my own politics happens to coincide with hers, there is no identify in a piece of work of history (beyond the preface or epilogue, etc.) to innovate such editorials.
Finally, in a personal quibble, I must admit that I always abrasion at the reducing of the greatest debasing directed at African-Americans by plantation owners and latter day racists to the euphemistic Northward— or Northward-give-and-take. I realize the word is offensive. It should be! Just as a famous curse loses all power when rendered every bit the F-discussion, so too does a word used to denigrate human beings lose the ability to shock and repulse when abbreviated and euphemized this way. As the tardily George Carlin noted with striking political incorrectness, it is all about context. Rap singers and urban youth, black and brownish, use the give-and-take every bit kinship, even equally a term of endearment. Slave auctioneers used it to dehumanize. Spell information technology out. Make us wince. Nosotros should wince. We should feel the passion and the pain.
Simply as we are repulsed past the ordinary, mundane, striking normalcy in the colorless bureaucrats who were the cogs in the wheels of the Nazi death camps, so besides are we as readers struck with revulsion for the complicity of all those who participated in the institution of human being chattel slavery likewise as those who did non object, or objected too little, north and south. The genius in Drupe's work is that by assigning values as she has in this fine narrative we are far more moved by the plight of those otherwise anonymous millions who were valued and used equally meat, rather than dignified as unique humans. We can see and experience their soul values, even if they were largely denied these in life. Nosotros can honor them farther past reading this fantabulous book and sharing its message.
[Note: I received this edition as function of an Early Reviewer's program.]
Source: https://regarp.com/2017/02/11/review-of-the-price-for-their-pound-of-flesh-the-value-of-the-enslaved-from-womb-to-grave-in-the-building-of-a-nation-by-daina-ramey-berry/
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