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.
Themes
The Dehumanizing Effects of Commodification
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses slavery and abuse. This guide uses the word “slave” in quotation only.
From the beginning of the text, Smallwood discusses the various rising powers in the Gold Coast using enslaved people as a possible form of income, either used to obtain European goods or enact physical and reproductive labor. Smallwood uses the abusive and violent details of slavery to convey that this commodification process led to enslavers dehumanizing enslaved people. Instead of viewing them in subjective or emotional terms, enslavers viewed them in quantifiable terms like profit and loss.
Smallwood uses the official business records of the Royal African Company to show that enslaved people were reduced to numbers and statistics. Through the records, she demonstrates how enslavers obtained and incarcerated African people, and how these incarcerated people subsisted on the bare minimum of food and space so the Royal African Company could profit. She highlights how the company disregarded comfort, health, pleasure, and other humanizing factors, and instead treated people as though they were inanimate objects. She therefore suggests that commodifying people is dehumanizing and that dehumanization enabled enslavers and traders to continue their endeavors without moral conscience.
The descriptions of enslaved Africans’ arrival across the Atlantic further highlight the dehumanization process. The deprivation on the ships was even obvious to the buyers, so the American agents did their best to obscure the damage done by malnutrition and disease. Smallwood provides the detail of enslaved people being oiled, suggesting that the agents paid attention to the physicality of enslaved people but not their humanity; that is, they wanted them to appear healthy but did not care whether they felt healthy. This reinforces Smallwood’s point that enslavement led to people being viewed as products instead of humans. Once sold, enslaved people were seen as instruments needed for the colonial production of sugar, tobacco, rice, and coffee.
To emphasize the humanity of the enslaved African people in juxtaposition to these dehumanizing accounts, Smallwood finds subjective details where they exist in the historical record. She draws attention to the sensory experience of captivity onboard a confined ship, and to the feelings of fear, shock, and disorientation when enslaved people arrived in the Americas or the Caribbean. She therefore suggests that paying attention to the subjective experiences of historically marginalized people is a key part of reconstructing and analyzing the immoral process of commodifying other humans.
Establishing Social Structure and Community Amid Forced Displacement
Smallwood describes the transatlantic trade of enslaved people as “the largest international migration before the nineteenth century” (192). Unlike voluntary migrants, African people were severed from their kin and communities when they were sold into slavery. Smallwood repeatedly mentions the “social death” experienced by enslaved people, who were unable to reunite with their family physically or spiritually. She therefore argues that part of the trauma of forced displacement was the severance from their social structures and home communities, and that establishing new forms of sociality and community was crucial for survival.
Aboard the ships, the people held captive felt their social death more acutely, as they were entrapped and carried further and further away to distant, unknown lands. Mortality rates on the ships were high, and the circumstances of these deaths affirmed a complete severance from ancestors and kin. Captives were unable to complete mortuary practices that would allow the deceased to travel to the ancestral realm, thus leaving the soul of the dead trapped among the people held captive on the ship.
The Middle Passage, or the “saltwater” referenced in the title of the book, signified the complete dissolution of everything that the captive African people knew and understood. The Middle Passage initiated the “social death” for these people: Once upon the ship, their families and communities were lost to them forever. They were stored like inanimate objects and were thrust upon strangers. In addition, they experienced temporal and spatial disorientation due to their unfamiliarity with ocean travel. With no knowledge of where they were or where they were going, and with the sole awareness that they would be unable to return home, they experienced an overwhelming sensation of alienation. Smallwood captures the fact that this journey dissolved past social structures and necessitated the establishment of new ones to allow the people being held captive to process what they were experiencing.
Their arrival in the New World did not ease these fears, as their new lives and social order were completely unrecognizable from what they had known before. The system of enslavement was governed by a hierarchy with rich enslavers at the top, and there was a clear difference between new arrivals to plantations and those who had been there for a long time or were born there. Their heirs of enslaved people were the people purchased to replace them, and their biological children were enslaved too. It was not until they established fictive kinship and were able to build communities upon the shared experience of slavery that they were able to put down roots and raise American-born children to begin a new generation.
The Historical Silencing of Marginalized Voices
The evidence for Smallwood’s account in Saltwater Slavery primarily comes from the records of the Royal African Company, including voyage journals, business records, and correspondence. Most of these records were written by white European settlers and traders of enslaved people, and few enslaved people had the means to write or preserve their own records. Smallwood draws attention to the fact that marginalized voices are often silenced in the historical record, and she aims to recenter marginalized voices by finding what evidence there is in the Royal African Company’s archives and by using the few first-person accounts available.
Part of Smallwood’s process involves literally reading the margins of history; that is, considering informal accounts of the Middle Passage found in correspondence and marginalia. She explicitly draws attention to the records she looks at, as she does in Chapter 6, to juxtapose formal and informal records and highlight the fact that the voices of enslaved people are not preserved in more formal records. That these voices seep into informal accounts underscores that these accounts do exist. Smallwood hence makes an implicit case that historical research must involve looking deeper into the records to make sure that not only the dominant voices are heard.
Smallwood uses first-hand accounts to put the voices of enslaved people at the center of their own story. ‘Sibell's account conveys the trauma of the ship on which she was held captive and how strongly it imprinted into her psyche to the point that, years later, she could not integrate her traumatic memory into her diasporic narrative. Smallwood also quotes from Equiano’s Narrative to convey the terror of the Middle Passage. By including these accounts, Smallwood highlights that there are personal records of marginalized voices, however few, and that historical accounts are incomplete without them.
