The more time I’ve spent reading about slavery this year, the more often I’ve discovered references to it in unexpected places. (Looking to catch up? Here are all the links to the previous posts this year.)
For instance, in Fred D’Aguiar’s memoir Year of Plagues (2021): “When I think of the [cancer] treatments that involved radiation, what comes to mind is history.” He writes about the poem by Guyanese poet Grace Nichols—with the title ‘I is a Long Memoried Woman’ in which she imagines the Middle Passage from a woman’s perspective, terrain previously the domain of male poets and writers. There are many intriguing aspects that resonate for me; for instance, ‘it isn’t easy to forget / what we refuse to remember.’
There were so many great selections ahead of me, deliberate and accidental, that I could afford to be choosy. I only dabbled in Vanessa Riley’s Island Queen (2020) because there were others in my stack that better suited my mood. Based on the life of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, who began life enslaved in 18thC-Monserrat but gained power and influence throughout her life and secured her freedom, it’s a compelling story. Riley’s research and her author’s note are fascinating (she had to reconcile, for instance, Thomas’ transition to slave-owner too). And the short chapters are vivid and scenic, but I was longing for a different kind of story (and one that wasn’t 600 pages).
Instead, I turned my attention to LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes (2021)with its beautiful bayou cover art (which turns sinister when you spot the threads of blood leaking out of the letters, à la Killing Eve). Beginning with a phone call from a girlhood friend, who is eager to have Mira be part of her bridal party, the set-up for reflecting on the past is immediate. Mira, Celine and Jesse grew up near the abandoned Woodman Plantation, hearing different stories about the events in its past. “Black people focused on the revolt.” Whereas “white members of the town told their own stories about the Roman family. Stories of horror that grew more macabre with each retelling.” The contraptions, corpses, concubines, torture rooms are no longer visible but the events of the past, both personal and historical, have a way of resurfacing. Especially when Celine announces that her wedding is to take place on the grounds.
Which reminds me of Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season, which centres on a restored and refurbished plantation that also hosts events like this. I loved her debut novel Black Water Rising when it was included on the Women’s Fiction Prize longlist and had long meant to read on with her work. (Also, Empire is a lotta fun!) When I picked up The Cutting Season (2012), I was looking for a great story—contemporary and suspenseful—but its heroine’s ancestors having been enslaved on the Belle Vie plantation made this an exceptionally complex situation.
Her characterization is rich, her relationships complex: Locke pushes the boundaries of genre conventions and reminds readers that marketing categories are less relevant to readers than the capacity to ensnare readers in a storyteller’s net. And, speaking of capture, power dynamics are unavoidable in a story that opens with a violent death. Underneath these characters’ present-day trouble, there’s a disturbing pattern of timeless exploitation: “Anywhere there is work to be done, someone somewhere will be standing with a boot to the neck of the one who must get down in the dirt and do it. Cane, cotton, rice…it is all of it the same.” Locke keeps you turning the pages and engages your mind and heart throughout.
Edouard Glissant’s Mahogany (2018; Trans. Betsy Wing, 2021) presents Martinique in such a way that you can feel a sense of universal power in landscape and, simultaneously, that there is nowhere else like this island. In under two hundred pages, there are passages which feel dense and descriptive like a classic novel, polished and poetic segments that feel distinct and fresh, and easy exchanges of dialogue and repartee: even on a first reading, you know this is the kind of book that’s meant to be read again. “The same telling, changed by what it says, comes back to this same place in this same country and suddenly the place too has changed just as the earlier perception of it, or the established chronology of what happened there has changed. Trees that live a long time are always changing as they endure.”
What’s sustained and how it’s named, what’s cultivated and curated, and maybe more than anything, what’s altered: “Yet there was a growing heat rising from the past that was no illusion; it was as if its still lively atoms, rubbing against each other, created an outrageous hullabaloo.” The narrative voice is every person and no person at all, so some assembly is required. And, time? “Dates can be like the lines of hopscotch—we can jump around between them. The thing they are useful for is this: discovering the hidden order. After that they vanish.” This is the kind of novel that makes think less about the story and more about what I expect from a story and whether I shouldn’t think more about that than I do.
Published more than a decade ago, Chocolate: A Global History (2009) offers a glimpse of the fine fiction writer that Sarah Moss was about to reveal herself to be. Somehow she makes even the technical aspects of production interesting, so that I find myself reading how percentage of fat content influenced the market ebb-and-flow, without pause. Perhaps all the illustrations help? Like Jean-Etienne Liotard’s “The Chocolate Girl”; if I’d been a servant girl in the eighteenth-century, I would’ve thought I’d’ve wanted to be a chocolate girl, except it’s all about serving other people chocolate drinks, not drinking them. Moss summarizes centuries of change succinctly and does not sugar-coat the industry’s dependence on slave labour. Through the nineteenth-century, her acknowledgment of these practices seemed to ebb, though other topics (e.g. how race is portrayed in twentieth-century marketing, questions of sin and indulgence and darkness) are also fascinating. The volume does update accurately, however, by boldly stating the industry’s continued reliance on enslaved labour in the twenty-first century. She also discusses how brands with higher price-points capitalize on the emergence of ethical companies’ product lines (that pay workers fairly) so that consumers can tell themselves that paying more means doing less harm. Bottom line, chocolate is a luxury. If your chocolate doesn’t say it’s slave-free, it’s probably not.
Until he started covering the fishing beat, journalist Michael Field thought that words like ‘human trafficking’ and ‘slavery’ were just words bandied about in the media; The Catch (2014) details his growing awareness and understanding of the lives (and deaths) behind that language. The book’s endpapers are maps and, appropriately, mostly water, with Australia a grey mass to one side. Many islands I’ve heard about, like Samoa, but never situated in my mind (Field has also written about colonization in Samoa); many islands appear as pin-pricks of ink. All around here, atrocities occur. Not occasionally, but routinely.
Field is on location sometimes, subsisting on muesli bars (because the food served is inedible, although some kind men offer to share their vodka—a necessary coping mechanism), other times relying on other writers’ research and experiences. Ian Urbina’s style is slightly more engaging, but Field’s prose is clear and direct: abuse, corruption, deceit and plunder are not exceptional, they are policy and procedure. Living in the middle of a continent on the other side of the world, this could be dismissed as something happening elsewhere, but the migrant workers who keep Ontario’s farms in production are usually indebted and indentured as well. Those of us who rely on others to fill our plates make a choice with every bite. If slavery is tough to swallow, make another choice.
Safia Minney’s Slave to Fashion (2017) landed in my stack because I could not put down Elizabeth Cline’s Overdressed (2012). It was one of the books that ignited my interest in modern slavery. What I didn’t realize is that Minney’s book is a New Internationalist publication; reading it reminding me how much I appreciate that magazine. (My subscription has lapsed but, meanwhile, I realized that I could borrow issues from the library.) Not only the plethora of colour photographs, but also the clever use of fonts and text-boxes and other media interspersed in the text, make this a pleasure to browse. Pleasure? When so much of the subject-matter is grim? Well, yes, because knowledge is a step towards making change. And, further, there are stories here about how the effort to shift towards fair wages also offers opportunities to workers who previously had none.
There are many stories of 14-year-old girls, who struggle to work the heavy machinery they’re responsible for operating, but there are also stories like Mina’s; she works in the red light district of Kolkata as a social worker, where she offers women currently earning via the s*x trade fairly waged factory work. There are also stories of designers (too many to single out just one) who are making ethical choices to afford consumers affordable alternatives. Hello, internet: if you can afford to shop for clothes online, you’re just a few clicks away from doing so without giving your money to a company that relies on abusive labour practices. The movie True Cost is also an excellent introduction to the subject.
Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed (2021) is a contender for my favourite books in this reading year. Which is why projects are such a boon: at first, undertaking to study does whisper of homework, but a book like this reminds you how inspiring it can be to discover a thinker whose words expand your understanding and experience of the world.
What I love most about Smith’s writing is his capacity to balance that line between the personal and the historical. When he’s talking about travelling I-10 West from New Orleans, he’s travelling the road that led to Boy Scout camps, soccer tournaments and family members’ homes; he’s also talking about the road to the Louisiana State Penitentiary aka Angola Prison. When he writes about his experience of it, he includes the items for sale in the gift shop (including a mug with a silhouette of a fenced guard tower with A GATED COMMUNITY below); he also includes what the tour guide excludes (for instance, that the prison, once called “the bloodiest prison in America” is built on a former plantation, along with the statute changes that made it easy to guarantee a steady supply of labour even after slavery was officially abolished).
Smith draws connections in strategic places, illustrating systemic injustice so clearly that it seems impossible for anyone to have overlooked them in the first instance (and he’s not afraid to admit when someone else has pointed out an aspect of reality that he previously overlooked himself). When I first learned and comprehended that adage about needing to understand history so we could avoid repeating it, I was thrilled by the idea; Smith’s writing ignites that old fire and reminds readers just how much there is yet to learn, even about the pathways we believe we’ve trod often enough to be bored.
(This article, also, considers the past and future of antebellum properties. And, if this vein intrigues you, perhaps you’d also be interested in other ways in which structures preserve the legacy of slavery via segregation: check out Rich Frishman’s photography in Ghosts of Segregation, his gallery and information about his installations and continuing creative and activist work.)
Survivors of Slavery (2014) wasn’t what I was expecting; Laura T. Murphy’s style is accessible, compelling and even though you can imagine it being used in a classroom, it’s more because of the amount of information than the style of her writing. Each chapter situates the reader, often launching from an historical context; for instance, she presents a 19th-century slave/abolitionist and draws connections with present-day practices and experiences, which then lead to the content of her subtitle: Modern-Day Slave Narratives.
These case studies also have additional context –helpful because the people being interviewed are simply talking about their everyday life and experiences, so they aren’t going to offer information like, say, the average wage in that time/place for someone who’s not enslaved. Some of these stories are pulled from survivors’ applications, others were inspired by the call for submissions on the topic. From brothels to factories, from kidnappings to bonds: these stories are galvanizing and inspiring.
Clint Smith has a chapter about Juneteenth in his book, too; it and Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth (2021) make excellent companions. Raised in predominantly white settlements myself, I learned when I moved to Toronto about this day on which enslaved people in Texas received the news of the Emancipation Proclamation, officially abolishing slavery: June 19, 1865. Gordon-Reed (best known for her work on the Hemmings family of Monticello) is writing personal and national history here and she blends them skillfully; she breaks down stereotypes in this “story of Indians, settler colonialists, Hispanic culture in North American, slavery, race, and immigration.”
She’s a scholar, so she refers to stories by William Faulkner but also Edna Ferber, but she also writes about Six Flags (an amusement park), and the first time she saw a toucan, and listening to Glen Campbell sing “Galveston”. We learn that she was taught Texas history in grades four and seven, but slavery was not a part of that lesson—family history filled that gap. We also learn that Black people were already inhabiting North America (via Florida, via Spanish colonization) decades before the Jamestown and Plymouth Rock stories. But the learning feels like the way you learn sitting at a kitchen table, while the TV plays in the background and kids play in the yard.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez (2016) was at the top of my reading list for this year’s project, but one of my most recent reads; it was a long wait to read a library copy which, ironically, resulted in my wanting a personal copy to reread and reconsider.
The term ‘other’ here is employed to focus on slavery that targeted Native Americans rather than Africans and involved a range of forms of captivity and coercion beyond officially condoned enslavement. The 1850 Indian Act in California, for instance, did authorize “the arrest of ‘vagrant’ Natives who could then be ‘hired out’ to the highest bidder” and also “enabled white persons to go before a justice of the peace to obtain Indian children ‘for indenture’.”
This is the kind of book that includes general statistics in a paragraph, then sends curious readers to the endnotes for additional sources (in this case, maybe 20,000 California Indians, including perhaps 4,000 children, worked as servants and labourers). Readers are reminded that Christopher Columbus’ first shipment back to the “Old” World included four caravans containing 550 Indians to be auctioned overseas. And that Brigham Young, the leader of the Mormon Church, advised his followers to “Buy up the Lamanite [Indian] children,” to “educate them and teach them the gospel, so that any generations would not pass ere they should become a white and delightsome people.”
For such a rich subject, Reséndez writes and structures deliberately and he reserves more than 100 pages of endnotes to keep his prose clear and deliberate.
Which of these stand out to you? Do you have another book on your stack that would fit with this theme?
These all sound excellent. I’m really ignorant about the extent of modern day slavery although I was aware of the chocolate and clothing industry using slave labour. I definitely want to learn more.
Even though I’m inherently books-first, journalism is an incredibly powerful tool in exposing these practices. The New Internationlist is a terrific print magazine that should be easier for you to get over there than it is here: informative and inspiring. Maybe you’re already familiar?
I’ll second that recommendation, and wanted to add that New Internationalist is also available as an iPhone app, which is how I read it these days.
A great set of books as always – love this series! I particularly want to read the Glissant – I’ve been meaning to read one of his books since I visited Martinique, which I now realise was almost a decade ago now 🙁
Great idea, the app, I mean: thanks! New Internationalist. And I keep forgetting they’re connected with Catapult Books, but that makes sense. They also have a holiday shop with grassroots vendors (for Canadian readers, there is a separate shop, with amazing Canadian options, including really good chocolate I can vouch for personally-ahem).
Glissant is probably one to buy rather than borrow, if one’s able; there are only single circulating copies in the public library and there were wait lists, but I know I didn’t properly absorb his ideas on a single reading. Another mini-project maybe!
I liked the sound of When the Reckoning Comes until you made the comment about it becoming more and more macabre then couldn’t decide if it would be for me. That book about the fashion industry also sounds excellent, a reminder that different kinds of slavery still exist.
The coming-of-age story, I think you’d appreciate, but the idea of landscape-holds-memory trickles throughout the narrative and literally haunts the characters, whose lives have been indelibly marked by the legacy of slavery: it feels very southern Gothic. My hunch is that you (and many other English readers) would find Attica Locke’s novels more rewarding, with even more character development but still story-soaked.
I have the Clint Smith book on my shelf right now – I will move it up on the TBR! He’s so insightful on social media.
Also glad to see love for Attica Locke. The Cutting Season is such a thoughtful thriller. I still need to read her newest books.
I’m really looking forward to your thoughts on Cint Smith’s book because so many of the places he chronicles are places you could drive to, so I bet it’d feel even more powerful.
Isn’t she amazing? It’s so entertaining and engrossing…and also smart and quietly subversive? Have you watched Empire? Deliciously soapy.
Pleased to see a book about fashion in your survey. Not enough attention is paid to the human (and environmental) cost of that. I wonder if some think slavery is a thing of the past but it’s a live issue in clothing, for sure.
Magazines and reportage are also starting to illuminate the fact that it’s a present-day reality in food production too (not just the fishing industry); perhaps, before long, we’ll see books explaining just how reliant agriculture has become on migrant workers who work under “indenture” models. Even though Canadians like to think it’s an American thing, this is true in Ontario (and Covid has made these workers’ lives even more difficult) but rarely acknowledged.