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1. Background Information for The Longest Memory by Fred
D'Aguiar Prepared by Anne Williams and John Condon, November
1999
2. After kidnapping potential slaves in Africa, merchants
forced them to walk in slave caravans sometimes as far as 1,000
miles. Shackled and underfed, only half the people survived these
death marches.
3. Those too sick or weary to keep up were often killed or left
to die. Dr. Livingstone tells how he saw groups of dying people
with slave yokes around their necks, near the road where he
travelled.
4. Along the west coast of Africa Europeans built some sixty
forts that served as trading posts. Those who reached the coastal
forts were put into underground dungeons where they would stay
-sometimes for as long as a year.
5. European sailors seeking riches brought rum, cloth, guns,
and other goods to these posts and traded them for human
beings.
6. This human cargo was transported across the Atlantic Ocean.
A typical crossing took 60-90 days but some lasted up to four
months.
7. On the ships, people were stuffed between decks. The heat
was often unbearable, and the air nearly unbreathable. Women were
often used sexually. Men were often chained in pairs, shackled
wrist to wrist or ankle to ankle. People were crowded together, and
often had to lie in each other's faeces, urine, and, in the case of
dysentery, even blood
8. Diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever spread like
wildfire. The diseased were sometimes thrown overboard to prevent
wholesale epidemics.
9. This ship's cargo hold was empty except for twenty or so
Africans whom the captain and his crew had recently robbed from a
Spanish ship. The captain exchanged the Africans for food, then set
sail.
10.
11.
12. The term Mason-Dixon Line was popularly used to designate
the line that divided the so-called free states from the slave
states. The term is still sometimes used to mean the boundary
between the North and the South. Mason-Dixon Line
13. "All servants imported and brought into the Country...who
were not Christians in their native Country...shall be accounted
and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this
dominion...shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his
master...correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in
such correction...the master shall be free of all punishment...as
if such accident never happened." 1705 Slave Codes, the Virginia
General Assembly
14. Slaves needed written permission to leave their plantation;
slaves found guilty of murder or rape would be hanged; for robbing
or any other major offence, the slave would receive sixty lashes
and be placed in stocks, where his or her ears would be cut off;
and for minor offences, such as associating with whites, slaves
would be whipped, branded, or maimed.
15. Slavery became a highly profitable system for white
plantation owners in the colonial South.
16. If slaves were accused by their masters of insubordination,
or of eating more than their allotment of food, they might expect
to be fitted with an iron muzzle. I had seen a black woman slave...
who was cooking the dinner, and the poor creature was cruelly
loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one
particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she
could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink.
17. "If you're a white authority, you're constantly trying to
figure how tightly you want to impose the lid with respect to
people running away. How fierce should the punishments be? Should
it be a whipping? Should it be the loss of a finger or a hand or a
foot? Should it be wearing shackles perpetually?" - Peter Wood,
historian
18. A slave owner who sought to break the most rebellious of
slaves could do so, knowing any punishment he inflicted, including
death, would not result in even the slightest reprimand
19. Carolina authorities developed laws to keep the African
American population under control. Whipping, branding,
dismembering, castrating, or killing a slave were legal under many
circumstances. Freedom of movement, to assemble at a funeral, to
earn money, even to learn to read and write, became outlawed.
20. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ex-slave Narratives: Africans in America
American Memory All Collections Search Slavery and Sectionalism :
Colonial Virginia Encarta 1999 Microsoft.