Slavery
Soul by Soul, written by Walter Johnson, is an account of life in the New Orleans slave market in the years before the Civil War that leaps from disengaged historical judgment to social and psychological conjecture about the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. The book traces the human history of the slave trade in the United States. The central notion of the book is the slave pen; a sort of jail modified for the peculiar needs of the trade and located in downtown New Orleans. Outside the pen, slaves were publicly displayed, dressed in blue suits and calico dresses in the hopes of attracting buyers. Within its confines, slavery was privately negotiated and, according to Johnson, not merel
Traders displayed enslaved African Americans for inspection in genteel showrooms, set apart from the slave pens in which they were imprisoned. Johnson's pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery. "In the slave pens, writes Johnson, "the yet-unmade history of antebellum slavery could be daily viewed in the freeze-frame view of a single transaction on its leading edge - a trader, a buyer, and a slave making a bargain that would change the life of each. And it was in these showrooms that sellers and buyers displayed their knowledge of slave bodies, reading them for signs of punishment and disease, extrapolating character traits and physical abilities from their faces, hands, limbs, and breasts, and all the while defining through these acts their own honor, manhood, and mastery. Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class-consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the "peculiar institution" in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. That culture produced a durable mythology of Southernness - and its racist heritage continues to tyrannize the post-Civil War South. Far from the image of the "slave auctions" that figured so prominently in abolitionists accounts, the slave markets cloaked their transactions in civility as they clothed slaves to reflect buyers' desire. I think what really sets the book apart is when Johnson begins by asserting the importance of seeing the moment of sale through the eyes of the people who were sold and not just through the eyes of the slave owners and traders. In conclusion, I think, where Johnson succeeds is in using the New Orleans slave market, its contents and its customers as a way to understand a culture that no longer exists. " Chains, in a manner of speaking, were always in the process of being imagined and reimagined, manacles broken and reattached in a three-way chattel dance among seller, master, and slave. By placing enslaved African Americans at the center of analysis, Johnson shifts the scholarly focus on the slave market from aggregate numerical measures to the chilling day-to-day commerce in human beings.
Common topics in this essay:
African Americans,
Civil War,
Orleans Outside,
South Johnson's,
Walter Johnson,
slave market,
Soul Soul,
slaves slaveholders alike,
enslaved african americans,
orleans slave market,
lives slaves slaveholders,
orleans slave,
slaveholders alike,
slave pens,
slaves slaveholders,
african americans,
lives slaves,
enslaved african,
antebellum slavery,
|
Acceptance Essays
