The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

“Untangling what I call the domestic cadaver trade, I also address some aspects of enslaved people’s ideas about the afterlife and their preferences for specific burial rituals, even when doctors wanted to harvest their bodies for dissection.”

Doctors approached enslaved people’s corpses as crops that could be “harvested,” with a blinding focus on what could be gained in the penetration and exploration of bodies they stole or bought, without consent, that has contributed to the continuing inequities in public health. They did this without concern for enslaved people’s burial rituals and communal traditions of mourning.

“Value is used here as a noun, verb, and an adjective. It is active, passive, subjective, and reflexive.”

Berry explores the question of value as a number ascribed as well as the action of ascribing that number. In addition, value is something that is subjective and experienced and considered internally by enslaved people, both in their cultivation of their own valuing of themselves and also in their felt experience and thinking about imposed commodification.

“They went to market as real and potential mothers.”

Women were valued in relation to their children, both present and possible. This commodification of the capacity and potential of women’s reproduction also created a system that commodified potential children before they were even conceived.

“Her story confirms that marital ties created bonds that warrant attention equal to the bonds of motherhood.”

One of the most insightful moments in Berry’s analysis of women’s lives comes in this brief analysis of the manifestations of soul value in a woman named Tamar, enslaved in North Carolina in the early 1800s. Tamar repeatedly escaped her enslaver to return to visit her partner, focusing her energy on reuniting with him rather than with her children.

“The terms breeder and breeding wench had broader, perhaps less offensive meanings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than they did in the antebellum period.”

Berry distinguishes between the term “breeding” used to signify pregnant, nursing, and also child-rearing enslaved women in the 18th century from its mid-19th-century signification of exploitable reproductive capacity, monetized by way of the “production” of children and thus the accumulation of more enslaved “stock.”

“Through conversation, Adams learned that the seller faced financial difficulties and had to sell Rachel’s mother before she gave birth.”

Berry approaches the situation of a mother sold while pregnant. While the mother had been sold, her previous enslaver had not sold the fetus. Once born, the child was removed from her mother and “returned” to her enslaver so that she could then be sold for cash. Additionally, this is one of numerous instances throughout the book where the writings of white witnesses speak to enslaved people’s lives. Finally, the question of the constraints of the enslaver (“the seller […] had to sell”) seems to originate in the source material but goes unchallenged by Berry.

“Enslaved people were liquid forms of property, easily converted into cash.”

The use of enslaved people was flexible: They could either remain as a potential financial asset, exploited for their labor and other attributes, or they could quickly be sold for an injection of cash. Unlike other “investments” that passively accumulate interest, enslaved people were constantly and actively building the wealth of enslavers through their labor and, in addition, their monetary value, which could be collected at the enslaver’s whim.

“The sale price was a different form of valuation than an appraisal. It reflected the market value of a person at a specific moment.”

External valuations included appraisal for the purposes of insurance and other forms of monetary compensation in the event of the death or injury of enslaved people as well as the market value determined at the moment of sale. Commodification involved the assessment of physicians, the work of insurers, and, if actually sold, the infrastructure of the system of trading and marketing enslaved people.

“Enslavers recorded appraisals in accounting books like The Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book, by Thomas Affleck, produced in the nineteenth century. These books contained preprinted columns for enslaved people’s births and deaths, crop production, and appraised values.”

Berry provides a glimpse of the experiences and intellectual lives of enslavers in this brief description of the preprinted organization of their accounting books. The commodification of humans and crops—and humans AS crops—seems to occur “naturally” within the preprinted columns that prescribe this normalized way of thinking. Commodification was the default.

“For enslaved children, the reality of their commodification was clear by age ten.”

The question of both the experiences and intellectual lives of children remains debated by historians. Many “slave narratives” discuss painful and pivotal moments of awakening to the reality of enslaved commodification, but the quality of life before this understanding of enslavement is much debated, with some scholars and many enslaved narrators, though perhaps surprising, describing it as joyful.

“The relationship between physicians and enslaved people has been written about in the literature on slavery, but the emphasis is on medical care rather than physicians as enslavers.”

Berry points to scholarly work that focuses on physician-enslavers, which usually approaches these individuals as physicians in isolation, almost forgetting that they are simultaneously enslavers. The harm of enslavement is trumped by the ostensible care that a physician is supposed to provide in such an approach. This scholarly separation of the worlds of medicine and slavery becomes particularly relevant in later chapters, where Berry refuses this separation, insisting on the collaboration between medicine and slavery that is developed in the domestic cadaver trade, and more broadly, in the exploitation of African Americans in the “name of science.”

“Soul values, which came from deep within a person’s heart, were often felt in childhood, yet not fully articulated until the early teens.”

The cultivation of internal value, or soul value, begins with its felt experience in childhood, which then develops into an intellectual understanding of soul value in resistance to external value. This development from experiential to intellectual is important to Berry since she is attempting to write an “intellectual history” of enslaved people.

“These years generated outsiders’ interest in their bodies, especially the interest of medical professionals and enslavers who actively sought ways to maximize their profits.”

Berry consistently categorizes enslavers and medical/scientific professionals in the same category, as both groups exploit enslaved people, in life and death, and often overlap. Berry’s insistence on the medical/scientific exploitation of enslaved bodies for the “pursuit of science” differentiates her research and thesis from many scholars of US race-based slavery.

“Imagine this scene from Spence’s perspective. How might he have experienced this trade? What was it like to watch his father bid on him? Was he proud? Did he even remember his father? Did it matter?”

Berry repeatedly asks questions regarding the intellectual experience of enslaved people that are speculative and that cannot be answered fully through her historical research. Here, she inquires about the thoughts of an enslaved boy, Spence, long separated from his father, but whose father is now desperately attempting to purchase his son at auction.

“With this in mind, it is no surprise that sexual abuse created racial and gender lines, even if we cannot always know the meaning behind such interactions. But what happened to an enslaved man when he was forced to have sex with a woman he did not choose? How did he respond to the ‘sex on demand’ nature of forced couplings? How did he become aroused enough to perform for his enslavers? What did he do when they wanted to watch? Likewise, how did women experience these shameful acts?”

Berry here explores what she calls “third-party rape” (79), which happened when enslaved people were forced to have sex against their will. This string of questions attempts to imagine the experiential and intellectual lives of the men who experienced this rape, questions that need to be posed, especially in light of the lack of sources as well as historical work on this subject.

“Some enslaved men spoke more readily about women’s abuse than their own.”

Enslaved men speak and write about sexual abuse generally happening to women and not themselves or other men, while enslaved women speak and write about sexual abuse happening to them and other women. This may reflect their lived experiences, or it may represent the deep difficulties of men’s revelation of their own sexual abuse. This is another topic that requires scholarly work.

“When an enslaved person died, some enslavers received compensation for their ‘loss’ after they petitioned the state or by way of insurance policies. Direct descendants and family members of the deceased experienced loss, but did not receive financial support.”

The loss experienced in the death of an enslaved person registers economically within the system of slavery, as a loss of labor and potential wealth. An infrastructure of support created through insurance and government aids enslavers “suffering” this economic loss. The real, experiential loss in the death of a family member for enslaved people not only lacks any financial support, of course, but the system of slavery also refuses to register their death as death, an event of moral weight. The lives—and thus the deaths—of enslaved people are not assumed to be morally relevant. With death not considered real beyond its financial loss, the system of slavery assumes that enslaved people are not mournable. This refusal of mournability paves the way for the exploitation of corpses and further refusal of the rites of mourning through the domestic cadaver trade.

“I argue that postmortem commodification disrupted the process of spiritual regeneration, renewal, and resurrection.”

Berry insists that the commodification of the dead continues the exploitation experienced in life and matters because it disrupts the spiritual existences of enslaved people, discounted by science.

“The bodies of deceased adults were evaluated and appraised in an evolving market, one that was taking shape simultaneously with the professionalization of medicine.”

Berry traces the ways that medicine and slavery are mutually supporting. More dramatically, she here suggests that the commodification of the enslaved dead occurs because of medicine’s desire to “professionalize,” which assumes that the dead of the most vulnerable populations have no value in and of themselves or within their communities and should be sacrificed for science’s self-proclaimed superior value as it “matures” as a discipline.

“‘Gentlemen, what will you give me for Ponto?’ At this point, Ponto interrupted him and yelled out, ‘Gentleman, I is a rising 40.’”

This is one of many brief glimpses of enslaved people being auctioned, as recorded by witnesses. There is little known about Ponto other than what appears here, which is either an honest correction at auction and/or a calculated attempt to change the course of his sale in insisting that he is much older than the 32 years the auctioneer claims he is. Ponto may have been hoping to secure sale to someone who could not afford to pay the market price for a younger slave, for example, or trying to avoid a buyer known for exploiting younger workers, forcing them to work longer hours or under harsher conditions than other enslavers. It is unclear how many enslaved people attempted to create the conditions of their sale and external valuation and thus play a role in the determination of their enslaver.

“When he graduated in 1839, Mississippi law stipulated that manumitted enslaved people had to leave the state, so according to the family memory, Carson decided not to free his enslaved laborers until he could provide care for all two hundred of them in freedom.”

Berry refers to James Green Carson, the owner of Cane Brake Plantation, whose records she refers to throughout the book. This glimpse into the life of this enslaved man demonstrates the ways that many states put up obstacles to manumission, suggesting that Carson was not only and ever trying to exploit the people he enslaved. At the same time, it also demonstrates paternalistic presumption in his insistence on keeping people enslaved for “their own good.”

“Although denied humanity while enslaved, after cultivation and manufacturing the corpse-turned-specimen was now more human than before as it was used to understand the intricacies of the human body.”

In a terrible irony, enslaved people are denied humanity while living, only to gain it after death, when the dissection of their bodies signifies a recognition of their biological humanity: Their corpses are desired for the study of human anatomy. The recognition of their biological humanity, however, nonetheless refuses their moral status as human, including the broader community’s practices of mourning and spirituality.

“As chattel property, enslaved people had no ‘rights’ to their burial customs, let alone their bodies.”

Enslaved people are refused autonomy and “ownership” of themselves throughout their life and death.