smell—were merely the visible manifestations of much deeper differences
in “the membranes, the muscles, the tendons, and... all the fluids and
secretions. Even the negro’s brain and nerves, the chyle and all the humors,
are tinctured with a shade of the pervading darkness.” If the master
believed that Africans were not of the same species, were indeed animals,
how should he handle them? By analogy, the answer was clear: he had to
domesticate them. The key behavioral characteristic of the domesticated
animal as opposed to the wild animal is that it is “broken,” “tamed,” or
“trained” so that it becomes subservient to the will of the master. That is
the essence of slavery.
Being “broken” began with capture at interior African villages and a
march to a port. The captives were at least traumatized and often also
wounded; all their possessions, usually including their clothing, had been
taken away from them; they had seen family members killed or abandoned;
and they had no idea what would happen to them. Then, awaiting transfer
to a ship, they were chained and penned in what amounted to dungeons
and were almost starved. When they were examined by ships’ mates, usu-
ally the first white men they had ever seen, they suspected that they were
being prepared for slaughter to be eaten. Then they were “burned,” as
branding was called. The whole experience to that point must have resem-
bled what happens as people are taken to concentration camps or as
“enemy combatants” are hooded to disorient them. Such vestiges of
humanity as the captives had left were stripped from them. Many died, as
the surgeon of one ship put it, simply of “melancholy.” What he called
melancholy was known in the Nazi concentration camps as becoming a
“zombie.” If not already in the barracoon, then certainly during the voyage,
the captives were already well on the way to being broken in spirit.
It was not only the spirit that was broken. The prisoners were loaded
onto waiting ships, where they were packed, as one account reports, like
“books on a shelf,” fed only enough to keep them barely alive, and clamped
two by two in leg irons. Thus their bodies were also wasted. “Walking
skeletons covered over with a piece of tanned leather” was one description.
Jammed with the sick and dying, with no facilities for hygiene, a slave ship
was a floating cesspool. Smallpox, diarrhea, “the bloody flux,” and other
diseases swept through the ships like wildfire; so bad were the conditions
Blacks in America 165