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Authors: Edward Baptist
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brutally at the hands of mobs with or without badges. No wonder so many African Americans saw no chance for freedom but to leave. 14
Still, there were things that for all their power, even the pre–Civil War enslavers themselveshad not been able to control. They could create a system that seemed to reduce African Americans to body parts: feet walking like a chained machine, hands on the block and hands picking, minds and nervous systems yielding revenue, providing entertainment and pleasure. Yet therewere two ways to look at the body of African America, sutured together in the trauma of slavery’s expansion. The bodyhad two forms, two instances. One profited enslavers, and in fact, white America, North and South, had again and again agreed to co-exploit this body, which was the new slavery of the cotton fields. This African America, created by expansion, was marked by vast suffering. In it, hundreds of thousands of people died early and alone, separated from their loved ones. Millions of people were lost bymillions of people. By the water’s edge, they parted.
But tongues also spoke words that enslavers did not hear. Lungs breathed a spirit that would not yield. Enslaved men and women watched and guarded and stilled their blood, and trained their seed to wait. Even when enslavers realized, in particular moments, that enslaved people had created something else, an identity, a political unity, a commonculture, a story, and a sense of how it shaped them and made them one, enslavers had forgotten, or willed themselves to forget. So people survived, and helped each other to survive, and not only to survive but to build. Thus, another body grew as the invisible twin of the one stretched out and used by white people. Eventually, the waiting had its reward. The body rose. African Americans tookup arms and defeated the enslavers.
Survival, and this kind of survival, made victory possible. Unlike its predecessors on the North American mainland, and unlike counterparts in most of the New World, the African-American culture that emerged from the crucible of nineteenth-century forced migration within the United States had no alternative but to think of itself as a political unity. Assimilation,sought by enslaved Africans and their descendants in both Brazil and in many Spanish-speaking societies, was impossible. Escape through individual manumission, an option pursued by enslaved strivers throughout the rest of the New World, was usually impossible. Escape through revolt, relying on old African identities and concepts—the Haitian option—was likewise impossible. All of these optionsclosed, enslaved African Americans had to develop a sense of unity or crumble. And they did develop that unity, bending a narrative of history that bound them together around a clear-eyed assessment of their situation as victims of a vast crime. They had to recognize that without solidarity they would live only at the whim of a set of structures and practices designed to exploit them in everypossible way.
The political agenda that enslaved people developed, and that they exported in the words of survivors and runaways, was not assimilation, not manumission, but destruction for the whipping-machine and everything that made it work, and the transformation of America into a place that wouldredeem its thefts. This agenda, smuggled north in the minds and on the tongues of an intrepidand lucky few escapees, resurrected a dead antislavery movement in the United States. This agenda set a group of progressive whites on a political collision course with the slavelords and their many northern allies. Even as that political trajectory unfolded, in spaces sacred and secular, during the day and during the night, in pain and in joy, enslaved people were still finding new ways to protectand defend the human soul in the midst of the still-unfolding chaos of creative destruction. They made survival and form out of terror, theft, and death. They learned to be fast but
Still, there were things that for all their power, even the pre–Civil War enslavers themselveshad not been able to control. They could create a system that seemed to reduce African Americans to body parts: feet walking like a chained machine, hands on the block and hands picking, minds and nervous systems yielding revenue, providing entertainment and pleasure. Yet therewere two ways to look at the body of African America, sutured together in the trauma of slavery’s expansion. The bodyhad two forms, two instances. One profited enslavers, and in fact, white America, North and South, had again and again agreed to co-exploit this body, which was the new slavery of the cotton fields. This African America, created by expansion, was marked by vast suffering. In it, hundreds of thousands of people died early and alone, separated from their loved ones. Millions of people were lost bymillions of people. By the water’s edge, they parted.
But tongues also spoke words that enslavers did not hear. Lungs breathed a spirit that would not yield. Enslaved men and women watched and guarded and stilled their blood, and trained their seed to wait. Even when enslavers realized, in particular moments, that enslaved people had created something else, an identity, a political unity, a commonculture, a story, and a sense of how it shaped them and made them one, enslavers had forgotten, or willed themselves to forget. So people survived, and helped each other to survive, and not only to survive but to build. Thus, another body grew as the invisible twin of the one stretched out and used by white people. Eventually, the waiting had its reward. The body rose. African Americans tookup arms and defeated the enslavers.
Survival, and this kind of survival, made victory possible. Unlike its predecessors on the North American mainland, and unlike counterparts in most of the New World, the African-American culture that emerged from the crucible of nineteenth-century forced migration within the United States had no alternative but to think of itself as a political unity. Assimilation,sought by enslaved Africans and their descendants in both Brazil and in many Spanish-speaking societies, was impossible. Escape through individual manumission, an option pursued by enslaved strivers throughout the rest of the New World, was usually impossible. Escape through revolt, relying on old African identities and concepts—the Haitian option—was likewise impossible. All of these optionsclosed, enslaved African Americans had to develop a sense of unity or crumble. And they did develop that unity, bending a narrative of history that bound them together around a clear-eyed assessment of their situation as victims of a vast crime. They had to recognize that without solidarity they would live only at the whim of a set of structures and practices designed to exploit them in everypossible way.
The political agenda that enslaved people developed, and that they exported in the words of survivors and runaways, was not assimilation, not manumission, but destruction for the whipping-machine and everything that made it work, and the transformation of America into a place that wouldredeem its thefts. This agenda, smuggled north in the minds and on the tongues of an intrepidand lucky few escapees, resurrected a dead antislavery movement in the United States. This agenda set a group of progressive whites on a political collision course with the slavelords and their many northern allies. Even as that political trajectory unfolded, in spaces sacred and secular, during the day and during the night, in pain and in joy, enslaved people were still finding new ways to protectand defend the human soul in the midst of the still-unfolding chaos of creative destruction. They made survival and form out of terror, theft, and death. They learned to be fast but
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