Although this project was motivated by a recent statistic reported from the 2020 election in the United States, I’ve been reading about slavery since I was a kid. But, first, I watched Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) and A Woman Called Moses (1978) about Harriet Tubman (twice!). Although I was too young to stay awake through a whole episode of the mini-series Roots (1977), I tried (and fell asleep on the couch, every night).
By then, I’d visited Uncle Tom’s Cabin so many times that the visits blurred together, once on a school trip but mostly with family—all before I knew anything about Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Although my mother’s copy of the book came from the museum’s gift shop.) Uncle Tom was a confusing figure for me (as an adult, I see how that could make for a whole ‘nother reading project within a reading project) and I didn’t understand how the man who had lived in the cabin I’d visited was also part of the movie The King and I. (I’m still unclear on this! Heheh)
All of that to say, what I learned about slavery didn’t come from books, not first off. But, eventually, I discovered Barbara Smucker’s Underground to Canada. Originally published in 1977, it’s also been published around the world, under different titles. It came into being because the author worked as a children’s librarian in Ontario and decided to write the book in response to students’ requests for project research. And, since, some have criticized the caution she exercised in depicting the horrors of slavery; others (like Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes) have noted that it’s written for young readers.
It mustn’t have been very scary, because I was an anxious young reader and I remember staying up late more than once to finish rereading this book, right before bed. (Then again, maybe I stayed up BECAUSE I was scared, and I needed to have the tidy resolution before I went to sleep!)
When I started reading for #280898 in mind, I thought I might go back and reread some favourites on the subject—like Barbara Smucker’s and Lawrence Hill’s—but, instead, I’ve been overwhelmed by new fiction and non-fiction.
Like Keisha Bush’s debut novel No Heaven for Good Boys (2021), which considers the lives of two young boys in Senegal, six-year-old Ibrahimah and his slightly older cousin, Etienne. These Talibé are away from their families, ostensibly to study the Koran with Marabout Ahmed for one year; in reality, they have entered a cruel cycle of begging in the streets by day to support Ahmed’s luxurious lifestyle and servicing his every need and whim by night. (Check out Empire des enfants for more information.) This was all new information to me, and presented in the context of story, I was swept away in these boys’ lives.
While reading Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, I came across this quote from Saidiya Hartman’s memoir, Lose your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, which succinctly offers another reason for exploring and examining the legacy of slavery:
“If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygonedays or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery-skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.”
Cicely Belle Blain’s Burning Sugar (2020) is doing this kind of math too. This is their first collection, presented in three parts: Place, Art, and Child. There’s talk of family history, art and activism, loss and discrimination. They attend Kahlil Joseph’s art exhibit, write verse-letters to MLK and Philando Castile, and refer to other Black artists and thinkers like Faith Ringgold, To-Nehisi Coates and Tracy Chapman. Beneath the surface, the legacy of slavery: in one poem, “we are nothing more than shells trying to fill ourselves with meaning / tears, salty like the waters that brought us here / ships passing in the night we once were” and, in another, “I felt cotton between my bare toes.” (Another work that fits with this project, discussed in the most recent issue of Quarterly Stories—Jacqueline Crooks’ 2018 collection The Ice Migration.)
And Saidiya Hartman’s latest focuses on young women, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019). She was “hungry for images that represented the experiments in freedom that unfolded within slavery’s shadow” and the photographs in the text reminded me of Sebald’s, uncaptioned and striking. She considers how the “plantation extended into the city”. Her short piece musing on the idea of wayward appears more than two hundred pages in, by which time you’ve experience wayward enough times that you wonder at the need for a definition. Then her definition makes you wonder how you did without it. It begins with situating the term etymologically, in the family of “errant, fugitive, recalcitrant, anarchic, willful, reckless, troublesome, riotous, tumultuous, rebellious, and wild” and ends: “It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”
Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire (2013) knits the bygonedays with the present. Her style is immensely readable, occasionally poetic, and she offers succinct explanations of complex matters (from the distinctive features of sugar cane to the reasons that Barbados was the most popular choice for English colonization centuries ago). Although her personal connections to the island are interesting, and the waterfall of ‘greats’ does bring a human side to the history—Sugar in the Blood is a story of global significance. We are reminded that sugar was once “so precious it was bought by the ounce instead of the pound”, that Barbados was the ”first society that was entirely organized around its slave system”, and helped to “invent the concept of ‘whiteness’ and the privileges intrinsically connected with it”.
Punching the Air (2020) by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam (of the Exonerated Five) is a YA verse novel about Amal, who’s wrongly convicted and sentenced at sixteen years old. One of Omar T. Pasha’s illustrations, brushstrokes in the shape of like Africa, underscores Amal’s realization that the doorway out of the courtroom is like the Door of No Return: “It’s where slaves had to go through / to get on a ship sailing to America / It’s where African people lost everything / and stepped out into a future they didn’t know.” The artistic touches in this volume are a pleasure to discover, like the recurring motif of chains (whether the linked arms in a classroom of prisoners who are discovering the essential power of expressing themselves through art or the author’s discovery of literature, “each idea is a link on a chain / that we are breaking / one by one / and two by two”. And I particularly loved sharing in Amal’s discovery of books and stories that would help him break free.
John Keene’s Counternarratives (2015) landed on my stack thanks to the David Naimon “Between the Covers” interview. These stories and pieces recast a few hundred years of history in a few hundred pages and, particularly in the beginning (with works like “An Outtake from the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution”) they felt integrally connected to this reading project. He reminds me of George Saunders (for the sharpness and eye askance, exposing the irony at work) and Clarice Lispector (for some elements of strangeness and a sense of maybe-he’s-too-smart-for-me) and James McBride (for his capacity to situate readers so deftly in other times and places). In “Rivers” he writes: “Yet the mere mention of that boy’s name, one I seldom think about, not even in dreams or nightmares, retrieves the sole two times since those years that I saw his face.” That boy is Huckleberry Finn, and you’ve likely heard a mention of his name, but this is Jim’s story with a grown Huck and a grown Tom, and this is no raft-ride down a waterway.
In Ana Isla’s Climate Crisis, I learned how the indigenous populations in Peru resisted the devastating effects of Pluspetrol’s oil production practices, and how companies like this routinely force these people to work as indentured servants just to continue inhabiting their homelands, while forcing them to contribute to their environment’s degradation. The essay “Indigenous Andoas Uprising focuses on a 2009 judicial case; it’s detailed and occasionally technical, but I focused on the resilience and courage.
Amelia Pang’s Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America’s Cheap Goods (2021) exposes China’s laogai system of labour camps, first opened in the 1930s and still operating as prisons, camps, and various extralegal detention centres. From the building of the Great Wall to the Grand Canal, the legacy of slavery in China is longstanding. Today the residents of these camps include political prisoners, ethnic minorities (like Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs), petitioners, migrant workers, juvenile offenders, adult criminals (including petty criminals and sex workers, 14 years of age and older), and practitioners of outlawed religions. In the last decade, The Laogai Research Foundation (no longer in operation) identified more than fourteen hundred camps and prisons in operation, factories producing the cheap giftbags and decorations, household goods and toys, clothing and gadgets. “When we are standing in the familiar space of a store or in front of the gentle glow of a computer screen, we don’t feel the agony of the workers who made our products as deeply as we feel our desires.” Gang rape, 24-hour-long shifts, prolonged and unmitigated exposure to toxic materials, whippings, starvation, water deprivation, organ harvesting: you won’t want to believe it, but nearly fifty pages of supporting documentation demands that you do believe.
[…] I did follow up BIP’s review of Butter Honey Pig Bread by Nigerian Canadian Francesca Ekwuyasi – which inter alia contains some interesting stuff about Black history in Canada – and a review is in the works. May even be my next post if I can get away with not working this weekend. And then there’s her recent post on Black slavery in the Americas (here). […]
Thank you for writing this important post, BIP. I haven’t read any of them, but I have read quite a LOT of books written by black writers. I want to specifically read books about slavery. The more I read your blogs, it occurs to me that I need to approach reading in an organised fashion. Right now, I feel like a child in a carnival, being distracted by every bright stall. I am going to draw inspiration from your Reading Projects, and work on a plan to get to some books which I have been meaning to read for so long. Many thanks for all the book-love you share, BIP! <3
Thanks, Dee: if I apologized for adding to your TBR you wouldn’t believe me anyway.
I imagine there must be a whole ‘nother set of slavery/indentured servitude reading materials available to you. Here, even though I keep meaning to focus less on the American historical aspect, and make room for a wider variety of narratives, the list of interesting titles and authors about the United States keeps pulling me back into that vein. I’ve just started reading a mystery by Attica Locke that I thought was just “for fun” but the main character works on a restored Southern plantation, where her ancestors were enslaved generations before. Seems I can’t get away from this subject!
Your whimsical plan seems to suit. But you could try just a single project, alongside, and see if it gives you a sense of accomplishment or simply makes you feel like you want to read everything that’s not on your list!
I’m listening to Tessa McWatt’s book right now in which she talks about the sugar industry in the West Indies. Her ancestry is so interesting.
When the kids were younger we used to try not to buy anything that had been made in China, but it got harder and harder to get them what they needed as they grew older. Now we just try to be careful in general not to buy stuff we don’t need. We don’t always succeed, but we often do. But it’s always good to be reminded of stuff like that – it’s so easy to let it slide.
That sounds like a perfect match…I’ve only read a couple of hers and I would love an excuse to do a deep dive-such an astute observer and thinker!
Yah, I feel like it was in the news more in the past, which is ironic (but maybe not?) because that was all before the Dollarama DollarStore BuckOrTwo swell, at least in Ontario. (Not that those are the only chains complicit in this trade.) Hopefully awareness increases via Pang’s research; it’s clear that this is not only a matter of unfairly paid labour but systemic abusive practices to prioritize profit over all else.
I love this project! My wife Genie is reading Sugar in the Blood right now, as it happens. There’s a similar book about tracing a family’s history of slavery called Blood Legacy by Alex Renton, in case you’re looking for ideas for future installments.
I found the way she enmeshes the universal history with the personal really worked for me; I hope Genie is “enjoying” it too. Thanks for the rec: not only did I not know about it, but I wasn’t familiar with Alex Renton and am now keen (although, unfortunately, he’s not easy to find in this library system ATM, but I’ll keep a lookout). I thought 32 books would be a struggle to reach, but I’ll reach that target easily before the end of the year, barely making a dent in my reading list. (But please continue to share rec’s as I’ll keep reading!)
Will do! I haven’t read the Renton book yet, but I listened to a preview of the first couple of chapters, and I really liked his honest approach to his family slave-owning history, his own privilege, and the responsibility he feels to reckon with that history and make it publicly known.
TY! These individual stories of truth and reconciliation are so inspiring. It’s hard to face up to the privileges we’ve inherited…so much easier to just call it “good fortune”.
So much here to take in, I’m not sure I can comment sensibly. I have been interested in slavery in the US, since learning about the Civil War in school history. I have read a bit of history over the years, and of course, Toni Morrison’s Beloved which is such a standout book. I have also read a few pieces from the Library of America by or about slaves.
Here in Australia, there is increasing discussion about the fact that Indigenous people were enslaved – forced to labour, unpaid for that labour, or poorly or improperly paid for that labour, and so on. They may not have been bought and sold, in the manner that they were in the USA, but what did happen to them is now accepted by most as slavery, and Indigenous Australian writers are starting to address it as such.
Thanks for commenting despite the challenge and breadth of the subject matter. S’True, there would be a good deal of material, now online because out of copyright, that I hadn’t considered (partly due to trying to reduce not expand my screen time LOL). I didn’t intend to highlight the institution of North American slavery, but relying on the library, that’s certainly at the forefront in their collection. That’s an interesting connection you’ve shared about Australia, too, thank you.
Historically, it seems as though disadvantaged communities were more likely to recognize opportunities in other communities’ increased disadvantages (i.e. they could move “up”, while others were forced “down”) than recognized similarities, and it’s true about the U.S., too, that particularly in the south, the body of enslaved peoples was not homogeneous and the struggle for freedom was shared by many. I’ve got a couple of books on the indigenous enslavement on my list for this year, but even over twelve months, I’m sure I won’t get to everything.
What a fascinating post. Reading about slavery can be hard, but we need these stories nevertheless. Glad to hear you’re reading Roots, I remember watching the TV adaptation many years ago.
Did you know that they “updated” it in 2016? I don’t think Liz is planning to watch either one, but I’m curious to see the original in full and then compare it to the newer project.
I loved the stories from your childhood. I’ve never heard of that Uncle Tom’s Cabin site! At the risk of seeming contrary, the one that most appeals to me from this second set is Made in China for surveying something a bit different but still a form of slavery. Though I’ll read any contemporary poetry I can get my hands on (not that much; only whatever my library acquires and NetGalley has for download), so would be keen on Burning Sugar, too.
Thank you for saying so; I hesitate to include personal stories. I grew up in that area and know a few of the historical sites well. I hope you can read Amelia Pang’s book; I’m itching to discuss parts of it and have already regaled MrBIP with many excerpts. Hah. You’ll probably find it harder to choose among the third of these installments then. If you’re willing, I’d love to hear about how you learned about slavery growing up in Maryland, whether you have the sense that your experience learning in that state might have differed from other states (if you had friends in other regions, or heard things about different schools’ approaches). I’ve been trying to remember when it entered my school curriculum, and I don’t think it was until my last year of high/secondary school, and only tangentially.
Gosh, I’m not sure I remember any details, but I’m sure it would have entered into my elementary school education through Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, always featured as part of Black History Month. Maryland and Virginia have a lot of former tobacco plantations and some of the attached mansions are still available to visit, so those are the sorts of places we would go to on field trips, and there would always be signboards about the slave experience at their quarters / by the fields.
Black History Month has only been a thing for about a dozen years here, but I can see where that would introduce fresh elements to a classroom. Visiting Uncle Tom’s Cabin included exhibits about slavery in the context of Canada providing a refuge (when I was young, maybe it’s changed now), but I had to learn about enslavement in this country outside of the school system. When your classes visited the plantations, was the focus on the household and the upper-class residents, with just a signboard where the quarters would have been? Or did it seem like there was equal attention paid to all aspects of the system? I’m curious because my vague understanding of states suggests that Maryland is kinda “between”, a more liminal state in regards to slavery than, say, the south’s Georgia and the north’s New York?
Maryland is technically in the South and was slave-holding, but in culture it is borderline, as you say. I don’t have a clear memory of the kind of information that would be provided at the manor houses. The discussion of slavery was never tokenistic, but neither was it a main or equal focus. This all may have changed since my elementary school days, though. Such places could probably do with a visit from the Office of Historical Corrections (à la Danielle Evans’s novella).
Thanks for clarifying for me, from an American perspective. I’ve been thinking about how, when I’ve toured a couple of Ontario “castles” and estates, the lives of the servants were always the most interesting parts to me and sometimes there would be very little known/imagined about them–sometimes those parts of the buildings wouldn’t’ve been restored even, just a rope barring entrance to those spaces. Haha, yes, that’s true; I just heard her in an interview on 1A about “Millenial” writers.
I also enjoy your personal stories! I don’t remember much at all about how I learned about slavery. I’m pretty sure the school taught us about the underground railroad, but I don’t remember at what point. My first real memory about learning about it is when I read Roots in high school. My mom told me to read it.
Did she have that hardcover bookclub edition that seemed to inhabit every bookshelf in every home? I also remember seeing the massmarket paperback all over the place, stuffed in those spinning metal racks that populated second-hand shops. I think there must have been stories about the underground railroad in readers, but I don’t have any memory of a classroom unit or project (I remember a lot of those only because we had to draw titlepages for each unit and I was a t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e illustrator, so each unit was an opportunity to feel ashamed LOL) and it only emerged tangentially in an elective history class in grade 13 (yes, 13! talk about revealing personal stories LOL).
I think it was the mass market edition! And I think she still has it. I have my own now, though, of course. Maybe I will join your readalong!
How did non-readers our age ever learn about it I wonder?
Back then everyone was reading all the same books, I guess. And watching all the same mini-series. You don’t have any memories of watching or of your parents watching?
No, I don’t think so!
Your little note at the end is a smart idea-not everyone can handle reading about slavery, but it’s important we seek out black voices in other forms if that’s the case. Ugh, the Made in China book looks horrific, as does the No Heaven for Good Boys. There’s a stat that I heard on the CBC that rings in my mind every so often, I’ve never forgotten it. Apparently 30 million people are still slaves, right now, or whenever I heard this stat, probably 2018 or something. The numbers are probably even worse during the pandemic.
Is there a book you would recommend, to add to that note?
Made in China is, surprisingly (?), a compelling read. You would get hooked by the first chapter, I’m sure. The impetus for the book is in the subtitle.
It’s over 40 million now. About three-quarters female. And one out of every four enslaved individuals is a child. (Anyone careless with the provenance of chocolate and coffee is implicated in child enslavement and an expensive product does not equate to slave-free production.) I learned from Kevin Bales’ writing about modern slavery how (relatively) simple it would be to eradicate this practice, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Ugh over 40 million? That’s just awful. I was feeling hopeful based on the comments on the climate change book, but now I’m sad again-this world!
I’m excited about this new book that’s coming, The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. S&S is sending me a copy soon. I really loved Queenie from last year too! Race is still an issue in these books, but it’s also about just being a woman, and their perspective on things, so it’s an ‘easier’ read than Yellow Wife in some ways.
Working to resolve the climate crisis will also work to reduce the number of enslaved people in the world, because with the pressure to migrate and leave areas with civil unrest and areas which can no longer sustainably house and feed residents people are on the move and very vulnerable without a homeland and other kinds of support. I’m sad too, but learning helps me discover ways to make changes in a positive direction.
I’m super excited about The Other Black Girl too; maybe this weekend. Queenie! Do you ever think about reading a book so often that you start to believe you’ve read it? I”m going to put it into the stack and make that happen!
Yes that has definitely happened to me! And you are probably in the same boat, that when you read so many books, you forget if you’ve actually read it or not. That’s one of the main reasons i keep my list haha
My list is also partly for memory, as I used to be devoted to series and would forget my “progress”. Some authors I consistently muddle too (“middle-brow” English women on my Virago Classics shelves, where I’ve got several but have only read one). But mostly it’s titles and dates that I forget! Which makes it hard to discuss. LOL
Interesting set of books & important. But who knew escaping Underground to Canada involved tracksuits, bell bottoms and 70s hair!
Heheh Well I checked my personal copy, which I thought was properly historical (I couldn’t find the image online) and the girls are wearing dresses and the bottoms of the men’s pantlegs fade out…but not before there is the tiniest of flares below their knees, so maybe the bell-bottoms were actually a thing. 😀 It certainly does bring meaning to the Hartman quotation though. (Might as well lean hard into the anachronism, eh? LOL)
Really interesting post. So pleased that you and Liz are reading Roots for 1976 – I am not likely to get to it, but am glad it will be featured and look forwarding to hearing both of your views on it!
Thanks for the nudge to finally read it. The kind of book we thought would be nice to have company with–although it’s always nice to have a co-reader of course.
I might join in for Roots as well–I saw some (all? probably not) of the mini-series at the time, but I’ve never read the book.
Do you have a copy, or will we be competing in the queues of TPL? chuckles They have many copies. (And I see that the updated TV series is available via Kanopy now!)
You’re safe! in any case. I’ve got a copy I found in a Little Free Library last fall, but haven’t started yet. Being unable to browse bookstores or libraries, I’ve been a terror (or even more of a terror) on the Little Free Libraries of late…
LOL Oh, my–I totally hear you on this. Every day as we leave for our walk it’s “which LFL haven’t we checked lately?” and that’s that. I even checked the website last week to see if there were any (registered) we were missing.
Not to distract from the reading you note, years back I’ve read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Roots (still have the hardcover), and since several others. I see the aspect in a wider sense though, rearing its ugly head in most all of humankind’s cultures. I say most all meaning all major cultures, but allowing for some small sub-cultures that are free of the stain.
That is, I see the aspect of slavery, and various other so-called peripheral subjugations, as a component of human nature varying by degrees in individuals. You might recall I touched on the subject, culturally, economically, and horse-blinkered religious subjectivity, in my book — though more between the lines in deference to cogitative readers.
The problem, I believe, is that we don’t endeavor on the whole to understand the human condition well enough to try to alleviate the consequences — though, it would likely be a tough row to hoe to accomplish in a critical mass in a handful of generations.
That said, for those with the backbone to better understand the human animal, the best reading I’d recommend is Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky.
“[Human nature] is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.”
The author takes an interdisciplinary, and sometimes an interspecies, approach to explaining his points, which makes more sense to me than the blinkered bucket approach of some other so-called influential scientists I have felt were full of themselves.
As you might surmise, it’s not an easy read 😉
I think we’ve discussed Sapolsky’s book before (but that might be in an unfinished email reply, still lingering in my drafts folder Heheh): it’s terrific. Dense and difficult (well, not always, but a lot of the time) but definitely worthwhile. (I read it in 2019. I can see that I added his Primate’s Memoir at some point though, later, and I suspect that was a result of one of our earlier chats.)
Slavery isn’t a comfortable subject to read about even in fiction though, and it shouldn’t be. Even for those of us who have a variety of reasons for reading — say, for broadening horizons, for temporarily inhabiting another person’s perspective unfamiliar to us, etc. — this is not necessarily the kind of reading that we reach for readily (let alone those readers who read specifically and only for entertainment).
Doesn’t one have to first recognize and acknowledge a pattern of behaviour (even at a basic level, for instance, that slavery is not a phenomenon that existed in and impacted only the past) in order to be curious enough about that behaviour to want to read 700 pages about why we are so often awful to one another? Let alone the 7000 notes (kidding).
Maybe someone else who’s troubling to read this post would like to comment on how they have (or haven’t) been inspired to learn/read/think about this topic/the biological impetus for unsavoury behaviours. So far, the stat’s show that even though this is the newest post, it’s not even in the top ten for views today, so I suspect that many see the title and decide against reading, about my project of reading, about this subject. And admittedly, it’s a long post, but it’s barely an epigraph compared to the length of even the shortest book here (Burning Sugar, if anyone’s counting).
I’m not disagreeing with you about the importance of the Sapolsky book or about the value of a broader investigation and understanding–that all makes sense to me, too. We’re both looking for a way, some kind of way, to inspire and share a certain kind of curiosity, I think–even if it might seem as though we’re reaching out from/in different directions.
Made in China sounds like a book all consumers should read before clicking the ‘buy’ button for that cheap dress/toy/pair of shoes. Have you read Andrea Levy’s The Long Song?
For sure! I avoided goods manufactured in China when there was an alternative, based on vague things I’d heard; since reading, I’ve gone without if there’s no alternative. All of us who ponder what we would have done if we’d known about the Nazi camps…here’s an opportunity to prove that out.
Great suggestion: I have read it, and she’s one of my MustReadEverything authors, but I’ll include it when I round up other readers’ suggestions at the end of this project…TY!