18 Jan Slavery and the movement of bodies

Yesterday, i wrote, “Interestingly enough, there were only about 10,000 slaves in the Louisiana territory under French rule in the 1760’s.” Only. I shuddered. There is something wrong when the world “only” can be used to describe 10,000 lives in chains and the many 10’s of thousands more who were affected by their enslavement. The rest of that paragraph:

This number was nearly tripled by the end of the Spanish colonial rule (1763-1800). In 1860, the number of slaves peaked at 331,726, under American rule (Rodriguez 2007, 2:377). By contrast, the French were importing 10-15,000 African slaves a year between 1764-1771 to Saint Domingue. That number surged to 27,000 – 30,000 in 1786, and then to 40,000 a year in 1787. By the time of the Revolution in 1791, there were more than 500,000 slaves in Saint Domingue (Harris 2001; James 1963). The discrepancy between the number of slaves imported to the number of slaves at the time of the Revolution is attributable to the practice of divesting in reproductive labor. Slave overseers calculated that it was cheaper to work slaves to death and replace them with new slaves from Africa than it was to provide homes and time for reproductive labor.

I can’t quite describe how appalled i am by the way that slavery is often written about. There is a cool and calculated way that the forced migration of millions of people gets written about. Statistical analysts share G’ numbers plotted clumsily on badly designed graphs, then painstakingly describe each and every plot point, dryly, uncritically. People’s bodies are reduced to numbers and places, meaningless until they are extraordinary.

And by extraordinary, i mean, for instance, Macandal, a Mandinka slave who became a Maroon and lead an army (of sorts) in Haiti for 20 years before being captured and burned alive in 1758. I stumbled on the story of Macandal because of a single line that is repeated in many of the histories of migration between the Caribbean and Louisiana during the 17th century. Each sentence was a variation of:

The migration of enslaved Saint Dominguans to Louisiana was first discouraged and then outlawed in 1763, because of fears of their rebelliousness, probably due to the Macandal Rebellion.

And that would be all that was written – very little explaining either the law or who Makandal was (however, there is a wonderfully written undergraduate paper, by Mark Davis, under the tutelage Michel Laguerre, “Francois Macandal: The True Story, Facts, Myths, and Legends“; see also, Carolyn Fick’s Making Haiti: Saint Domingue Revolution from Below). He is, by many accounts, the real progenitor of the Haitian Revolution – the memory of his courage and strength in leadership stayed with the Haitian people and helped to fuel their uprising. He was once on the 20 gourde coin in Haiti. Today, that 20 gourde banknote holds the picture of François-Dominique Toussaint l’Ouverture.

I follow a Facebook feed called Occupy the Hood. They post, people flame. I stay out of it. But yesterday, they posted an article about a Wisconsin High School’s American Diversity class that was coming under fire from parents. There was, as usual, the typical maelstrom of responses,

“It’s not white people, it’s society, like the media and the government.”

“Blacks sold other blacks into slavery.”

“While its great to see history being taught more truthishly, white guilt is a product of an overactive black nationalization produced during the rebellious sixties. This neo nazi, nationalist, indo caucasian hating nonsense being spilled today is overcommodified dissent taking the form of actual history.”

“This is human nature…So yeah, white people are oppressers, but so is everyone else and given the opportunity most advanced race/class/species would probably do the same. Why people freak out then they see or read something like this is silly. These terrible habits are also some of the ways humanity survived for as long as it has.”

“The greatest disservice a historian can do to his craft is to judge men and women from another era by his current day standards. You can’t possibly begin to understand the many political, cultural, racial, and financial influences placed upon any person of any color or social standing from another age – and to believe so is pure folly. “

That last one tickled me a little. Not in a good way. I hate being tickled. In fact, i will kick a person who tickles me. I remember reading about slavery in school – it was the same dry, uncritical, White Man As Savior story that movies like Lincoln (the overwrought bit of drivel that i couldn’t make it past the first four minutes of) get lauded for. Ask any classroom full of teenagers what kind of slave owner they would be, and they will inevitably imagine themselves as emancipators. We’re all Saviours in our imaginations.

As i was trying to understand this relationship b/w the U.S. south and Haiti, i stumbled on the papers of Thomas Jefferson. Well known for his anti-slavery stance, and his attempts to ban the importation of new slaves, he was also still fervently racist. When he heard of the uprising in Haiti, he wrote to then Governor Monroe in 1793:

I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India Islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Patowmac) have to wade through, and try to avert them (Jefferson et al. 1950, 26:503)

Three years later, he wrote to St. George Tucker:

I become daily more and more convinced that all the West India Islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of the whites sooner or later take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Patowmac) have to wade through, and try to avert them (Jefferson et al. 1950, 26:503)

Not much has changed. When the earthquake occurred in Haiti in January 2010, the first response by the U.S. government was to step up the Coast Guard (who are the only branch of the armed forces to come under Department of Homeland Security, as of 2003) patrols of the waters between the island and Florida. And although TPS was extended to Haitians already residing in the U.S., only 3/4 were granted. Deportations continued in the aftermath of the earthquake, were halted for six months, then started back up during the height of the cholera outbreak. They were halted when three men died within 10 days of returning – while still in jail. If you read the offenses of the men (all men, the first 21 to be sent back in January 2011), they are benign, or even non-crimes. Just like the 1763 law, some Haitians were allowed to stay – the ones who performed their citizenship status within the confines of appropriate citizenshiphood. The rest were slated to be deported – back to a devastated land wracked by a deadly epidemic. One government choosing who lives and who will die of another government’s people – without regard for the sanctity of individual life. Merely bodies moving – numbers and places – in relation to an imagined landscape of nationhood.