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The Slave Ship
A Conversation with Marcus Rediker, winner of the 2008 George Washington Book Prize
Q: How did you hope The Slave Ship: A Human History would change the way the history of slavery is discussed in this country?
A: I wanted to make our understanding of the slave trade concrete, to see it as a human history—hence the subtitle of my book -- because I believe that the human capacity to live with injustice depends to some extent on making it abstract. The existing scholarship on the slave trade is outstanding, but a lot of it is statistical, which can occlude the horror of what one group of people is doing to another for money.
It's like the death penalty. As long as capital punishment is enacted out of sight, most people can live with it. But make executions public again and they would be abolished in a split-second.
I also wanted to use the history of the slave ship to illuminate the present, as a group of activists, "prison abolitionists" they call themselves, has done: they've taken a detailed cell by cell diagram of a modern supermax prison and superimposed on it an image of a slave ship with its precise body by body arrangement. It's a powerful juxtaposition of images of unfreedom, and it asks us to consider the relationship between the two. The 18th-century abolitionists knew that if they could make people understand what happened on slave ships, outrage would follow. I have taken a similar approach. I hope that readers will be agitated when they see in concrete, human terms what the slave trade was, and that they will want to address a great historic injustice. We still live with its consequences.
Q: What are those consequences?
A: The slave systems of the New World created the greatest planned accumulation of wealth the world had yet seen, as C.L.R. James pointed out long ago. The creation of that wealth demanded an ideology of racism, which survived the abolition of slavery and shaped new forms of exploitation and oppression. We still live with the radical inequality and injustice of slavery and racism, but we often pretend that we do not. I tried to make a horrific history as real as I possibly could so we might think about the human costs of the slave trade past and present.
And of course there are still a lot of slaves in today's world. Slavery is not the same as it was 200 years ago, but 20 to 30 million people are effectively enslaved in the global economy, whether in sex trafficking or child labor or other ways of making wealth that depend on keeping people in place by the threat or reality of violence. Slavery persists and is still often linked to race.
Q: How is it linked to race?
A: This question gets to the origin of the book. In the late 1990s I was visiting people on death row in Pennsylvania, which has the fourth largest death row population in the country, after California, Texas and Florida. This was a profound experience. Why are African Americans 60 percent of those on death row in Pennsylvania while making up only 12 percent of the state's population? The death penalty has been applied unfairly to people who are poor and black, in Pennsylvania and around the country. I do a lot of public speaking about the death penalty, and I often ask, "If you were facing charges for capital murder, would you rather be rich and guilty or poor and innocent?" Nobody I've ever asked has said "poor and innocent."
"Death row is a place of terror and is meant to be a place of terror. I asked myself, "What is the history of the relationship between race and terror? Where did it all begin?" And I realized that it began on the slave ships—that's where race and terror were first put together—and I thought, "I could study that." I'd already done a lot of research in maritime archives. But it took me several years to decide to do it, for two reasons. First, I had to believe I could do justice to the people who were on those ships, to their lives, the violence they suffered and the resistance they offered in response. A subject like this carries a strong moral responsibility. And, second, I had to ask myself if I wanted to live with this horror for several years.
Q: So what made you decide you could do it?
A: I was never sure I could do it, but I felt that the dangers of not doing it might be greater than the dangers of trying and failing. I felt that by writing such a book to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade (this year, 2008), I might contribute to a public discussion about the legacy of slavery.
Q: And what was it like, living with it?
A: It was horrible. My emotions ran the gamut—day to day and week to week—from rage to almost unbearable sorrow. I never really got used to it—and thank goodness for that. Of course this is why it's such an emotional subject for so many people. It's a situation of extreme violence, and yet it's also the origin story of African America, so it has a sacred quality for many people.
Q: You do such a good job of drawing the reader into every point of view. Reading about one ship's captain, I found myself actually concerned with his problem—how to maintain control.
A: I wanted to understand everyone on the ship: how they came to be there and how they saw the horrific situation of which they were a part. This doesn't mean I was equally sympathetic to everyone aboard, but to say that good history contains all the complexity of human motivation and understanding. Some of those ship's captains are grimly fascinating people who had to control large numbers of people under difficult circumstances. Their lives depended on it, as did the profits of the world economy.
Q: Was there ever a time when it was too much for you?
A: I'll admit, I broke down several times. Once I was sitting in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, reading a rare book by a slave-ship physician who was explaining the job to other physicians. He had an unusual quality of sympathy for the enslaved and described their situation in a moving way, so there I sat with tears running down my face, trying to keep them from dropping onto this rare book and at the same time trying to cover my face with my hands so the other researchers couldn't see my grief. Other times I got so angry I had to leave the archive and go for a walk, calm down. This is all part of the usually secret, undiscussed inner life of a book like this.
Q: But you clearly intended to bring these people and their suffering to life, first for yourself and thus for the reader.
A: That was my intention, but it was not easy and moreover it posed dilemmas. I was writing about the hardware of bondage, especially the shackles I'd seen in museums. Then one day I got notice of an authentic set of 18th-century slave ship shackles (from a South Carolina plantation) that were up for auction by an early Americana dealer. I had a debate with myself. Should I buy a piece of evil? Should I get as close as possible to this gruesome artifact and see what I might learn from it? I bought the shackles and soon found that I had to go back and rewrite everything I'd written on the subject, because now they were more real to me. I felt the texture of the metal, how the rod would press against the Achilles tendon, how the loops would rub the flesh raw. In the end, holding those shackles in my hands, even though they made me shudder, enabled me to understand and write about them in a more realistic, even truthful way.
Q: How was living with this for your family?
A: My wife, Wendy Goldman, is a professor of Russian/Soviet history at Carnegie Mellon University. While I was writing about slave ships she was writing about the great purges and death camps under Stalin. There was an unplanned convergence of great human misery in our household, but we survived it.
Q: Are you hoping this book will reach a wide audience?
A: Yes. Over the past generation, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, scholars have done outstanding historical work on the history of slavery. But there is still a great disjuncture between what is known among scholars and what is known in society at large. I wanted to help close the gap. There is a certain openness, now, to talking about it, but there are also limits, expressed for example in how every year a bill is introduced in Congress by John Conyers, Jr., requesting that a commission be established to study the lasting effects of slavery in American history. Every year the bill is defeated. To me, this is a vote against memory, a vote against understanding who we really are. We can pretend slavery didn't happen, but that doesn't mean we aren't shaped by it.
Q: What can we do about it?
A: There are a lot of things we can do, the first being simply to face it, to have a serious discussion. Post-apartheid South Africa established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission; we could do something similar here. One of the big tests of a democratic society is how well it faces the dark pages of history. Can we remember the taking of lands from Native Americans? Can we tell the painful story of slavery? We have made progress but we have far to go.
Q: How does this book fit into your work as a whole?
A: It was the next logical step for me because I had been working for many years in maritime archives and writing about life at sea. The slave ship had long haunted me. In a way it was the ultimate challenge for the kind of history I write, the effort to recover the history of people who left behind few documents. Those millions of people on the lower decks of the slave ships left almost no documents at all. One example: more than a million people boarded slave ships through the African port city of Ouidah in Benin, but only two of them left first-person accounts of their experience. So I had to use the documents produced by their oppressors to reconstruct the history from below.
Q: How did you feel about winning the George Washington Book Prize?
A: It was a tremendous honor, and a surprise. It seems to me that the prize committee decided to broaden the purview of the prize beyond studies of those we call "Founding Fathers," and to think differently about the founding era of the nation. I was the beneficiary of that more inclusive approach. I should add that I grew up in the South, and went to high school in Richmond, Virginia, so George Washington and the Virginia aristocracy have long loomed large in my mind. Virginia is where I first came to understand issues of race and class; I have been working on them ever since.
Q: How have people responded to the book?
A: One of my talks during a book tour in October was filmed by C-Span. Each time they air it I get emails from people all over the country -- from prisoners, soldiers, workers, activists, youth, and people in nursing homes. I've gotten quite a few messages from older African Americans, several of whom have said, "God bless you, son." One person wrote, "Dis book be stompin'." I think that means it's good. And I have gotten a number of stone-cold racist responses from those who detest and resent black history, who are angered by the suggestion that slavery is an injustice that needs to be addressed.
Q: Were you surprised by the racist responses?
A: Not at all. When you write about a subject surrounded by repression past and present—both historic violence and its subsequent denial -- people are going to get angry. I'm prepared for that. A lot of African American folk understand the controversial nature of this topic. They ask me, "What kind of resistance did you get in researching and writing this book? Who didn't want you to write it?" There's a very clear consciousness among African Americans that this is a hidden but crucial history and that we need to deal with it.
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