39 pages • 1 hour read
Stephanie E. SmallwoodSaltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Turning Atlantic Commodities into American Slaves”
Smallwood discusses the change that the ship survivors underwent upon their arrival in the American market. She contends that the stimulus that drove the African market was very different than that driving the American market, which was “the final site of retail transaction” for commodified labor (153). Smallwood uses two categories of documentation to extract information about enslaved people’s experience: official business records, such as ledgers and remittances of sales, and the less formal accounts found in correspondence and marginalia.
Commercially, it was in the best interests of the English merchants to “buy cheap on the African coast to sell dear in America” (157). The cost associated with transportation doubled their price. Additionally, the transatlantic voyage made the African people weaker, which, in the eyes of enslavers, diminished the quality of the human commodities by the time they reached America. To remedy this, the American agents had to rely on marketing to transform the malnourished, traumatized survivors of the journey into “the ideal embodiment of labor power” (158). The week after a ship arrived to port was a preparation period. The African people were given fresh food and water for a nutritional boost. Additionally, focus was given to their physical appearance, as they needed to look as though they were robust and in peak health. Oil was often used to provide an illusion of health. However, the best efforts of the American agents often were not enough to disguise the months of suffering and deprivation that the African people experienced.
The potential buyers were brought to the ships to view the “human wares” (161). They were given refreshments while they negotiated the prices of the enslaved people with the agents. Much to their disappointment, many of the ships had too many women and not enough adult men in their prime. In addition to the great proportion of women, there were also many children (those who appeared to be less than 14 years old). They made up 27% of the people shipped by the Royal African Company from 1673 to 1725. It is unclear how many of the enslaved people were elderly, as the agents who kept records of the sales only had four categories in describing the enslaved people: women, men, girls, and boys.
Smallwood maps out the geography of the American market of enslaved people, as there was a “geographical hierarchy of value” that determined where they would be shipped (166). The most sought-after enslaved African people originated from the Gold Coast, and the least desirable were the Biafrans. Barbados was usually the first port of call—the exploitation of the labor of enslaved people had started there approximately 20 years before it started in the other English colonies, and there were no shortages of buyers in the Barbados market. Barbados attracted about half of the ships departing from the Gold Coast due to the buyers’ strong purchasing power. The remaining ships went to Jamaica and the Leeward Islands. Jamaica had a smaller market with less credit-worthy buyers who would not be able to absorb the “dregs of a cargo” once the large enslavers had bought the best-looking enslaved people (171). As a result, many shipments that went to Jamaica divided up the adults into lots that were sold to enslavers at a standard price per head. The cargoes to Jamaica that were not put into lots were often sold to Spanish American buyers, who would transport them to South America for sale to the Spanish American colonists. The Leeward Islands, being less developed, attracted much smaller cargoes; a large proportion of the enslaved people sold there were sold singly or in small groups of five or fewer. The least creditworthy customers, in the eyes of the Royal African Company, were the Virginian enslavers. Enslaved people would be sent there “only if the sale of an entire cargo was guaranteed by prior contract” (174).
There was a market for all cargoes that made their way to America, and every single individual within a cargo would be sold. Even the people who were considered “refuse” were sold in a secondary market, where they were individuals purchased them at low rates, in the hopes that they could be rehabilitated and sold for profit. These deals were usually made at the end of a sale when all other people had been traded.
While these transactions were taking place, the African people were often stunned, frightened, and disoriented after their long voyage. Many were in poor condition due to illness, malnutrition, and mistreatment. Mortality rates at ports were high. Shocked from the ordeal of the Middle Passage, most Africans looked on quietly as they were sold. Those who were loud, aggressive, or experiencing mental health crises were sold for less, if they could be sold at all. African people sought to make sense of what was occurring around them, as they were separated and led off to parts unknown.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Life and Death in Diaspora”
The final chapter of the book discusses the life and death of the enslaved people after they were sold and brought to their new home. Those who survived the transatlantic journey had to engage with their surroundings and make sense of their current situation to face their new reality. Some attempted to find a return passage home and were thwarted by a lack of adequate means of transportation. Others died by suicide near seacoasts or riverbanks in the hopes that “dying by their own hand at a carefully chosen spot in or near the water might bring about their migration to the realm of the ancestors” (186).
Most enslaved people had to adjust and join the extant community that made up a plantation. Depending on where they were in the geography of the market, and where the traders trafficked them from, the diaspora brought together a “constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups” from the Gold Coast (189), Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, West-Central Africa, and the Bight of Biafra. Each community had its own distinctive characteristics, resulting in a composite of Africa that constituted “the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them” (189). These communities were constructed around solutions to problems that arose, and the culture that was consequently created was not a transfer or continuation of how these people had lived in Africa. Rather, it was curated to the specific needs of their new life to allow a sense of agency within the bounds of slavery, establish an identity and a community, and create social networks and relations of kinship to offset the social death that they had experienced. What they needed was “an epistemological means of connecting the dots between there and here, then and now, to craft a coherent story out of incoherent experience” (191).
The enslavers looking to maintain their population of enslaved people perpetuated the Atlantic trade. The enslaved people faced continued high mortality rates upon arriving at the plantations—as many as half of them died within three years of their arrival in the Caribbean sugar colonies. Their rapid demise was brought on by a deadly amalgamation of their traumatic forced migration overseas and the dangers that they encountered along the way, vulnerability to infectious diseases to which they had no natural immunity, and most of all, “the abject circumstances of foreign enslavement” (193). European migrants coined the term “seasoning” to describe the one-to-three-year adjustment period needed for new arrivals to the American colonies. To keep their population of enslaved people from diminishing, enslavers gave up attempting to keep them alive long enough to reproduce and simply bought replacements. The fruits of the labor from the existing population of enslaved people “cycled back to African shores to pull still more captives into circulation” (194).
Smallwood argues that “only by restoring kinship networks could the saltwater slaves hope to escape the purgatory of their unprecedented social death” (195-96). The role that women played in establishing these networks was significant. The plantation labor that enslaved men performed was traditionally seen as women’s work in African societies. Additionally, in African societies, women acquired and prepared food, attended to medical needs, and saw to the rites and rituals of death and mourning. Smallwood postulates that psychological adjustment likely contributed to the higher rates of mortality among African men. The social roles that women played far surpassed the traditional roles that they played as mothers and wives. The “fictive kinship” built from a shared experience in the transatlantic trade of enslaved people paved the way for a generation of American-born enslaved people of African descent. As these communities grew and more generations were established, the stigma of being a “saltwater slave” stemmed less from being African and more from “the ignorance and inexperience that African birth came to symbolize” in a domain increasingly dominated by American-born enslaved people (202).
Smallwood ends the book with an account of saltwater slavery in Barbados from a woman named ‘Sibell, as told to a white man named John Ford. ‘Sibell was sold into slavery by her brother-in-law for a gun and gunpowder. She recounts how she was held in “de long House” until it was full (204). She did not know anyone in the house, but when she was transferred to the ship, she met her country people, individuals with whom she bonded, who were torn away from her upon her arrival in Barbados. Smallwood notes that ‘Sibell’s story, like many of those forcibly removed from their homes and sold into slavery, was marked by “the impossibility of full narrative closure” (207), as the extreme trauma of the Middle Passage prevented those who experienced it from reconstructing the memory to integrate into one’s life story.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
The last two chapters of the book describe the transformation of the people trafficked on the ships into American enslaved people and the lives they led on plantations. The transactions marked the beginning of a new phase in the lives of the ship survivors—separation from those who had shared the trauma of the transatlantic voyage and the beginning of life in America. Their commodification was complete with their arrival on American shores, as they were chosen as “they do Horses in a Market; the strongest, youthfullest, and most beautiful, yield the greatest prices” (158). Much like horses, captives were fed, watered, cleaned, and oiled before standing naked in the presence of prospective buyers. Smallwood’s attention to this comparison of people to horses highlights The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification.
The captives’ final destination was determined by their origin. The Gold Coast had the most desirable enslaved people, and as such, the lion’s share of enslaved people from the Royal African Company originating from the Gold Coast went to Barbados, which was the most established of the British colonies in the exploitation of the labor of enslaved people. Jamaica was second in line (with buyers that were a pipeline to the Spanish American enslaved person market), followed by the Leeward Islands, and lastly, Virginia. While the enslaved people from the Gold Coast were the most desired, “all cargoes ‘found’ a market somewhere in the Americas” (177). All captives were sold, even those considered to be “refuse.” The “engine of their labor” for colonial production propagated the need for more people to be trafficked and enslaved (194). Thus, the cycle of saltwater slavery was perpetuated, setting in motion “the largest international migration before the nineteenth century” (192). Smallwood aims to capture the scale of these atrocities while exploring the more micro elements of individualized experience.
Initially, the mortality rate of those who survived the ships was high: As many as half of those who disembarked died within three years. It took time to adapt to a new environment—the European transatlantic migrants called the adjustment period “seasoning”—and the adjustment was made more difficult by captives’ previous trauma and their present enslavement. The enslaved people experienced “a tale of endless repetition that allows no temporal progression” until they slowly began restoring kin networks and Establishing Social Structure and Community Amid Forced Displacement (202). The communities that were created were not a continuation of how they had lived before, but rather something new to help them cope with the exigencies of daily life in inescapable slavery. These communities were established in large part through the contributions of African women. The emergence from “social death” allowed for the establishment of generations of American enslaved people of African descent. Children born to these “saltwater slaves” survived past infancy into adulthood and were able to have and raise children of their own.
This relative success did not erase the trauma of the pioneering generations of enslaved people, as seen in ‘Sibell’s narrative. She is described as an “Old African Female Slave” in Barbados (202). However, the ordeal of her original captivity is still very much in the present and unresolved for her. By using first-person accounts of enslaved people, Smallwood aims to counteract both The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification and The Historical Silencing of Marginalized Voices by focusing on ‘Sibell’s emotions and making her narrative central instead of peripheral.
