History and Social Death

Abstract

? take my text from Orlando Patterson's SUvery and Social Death:All slaves experienced, at the very least, a secular excommunication.Not only was the slave denied claims on, and obligations to his parents and living blood relations, but such claims and obligations on his more remote ancestors and on his descendants. He was truly a genealogical isolate. Formally isolated in his social relations with those who lived, he also was culturally isolated from the social heritage of his ancestors. He had a past, to be sure. But a past is a heritage. Everything has a history including sticks and stone. Slaves differ from other human beings in that they are allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of That they reached back for the past, as they reached out to related living, there can be no doubt. Unlike other persons, doing so meant struggling with and penetrating the iron curtain of the master, his community, his laws, his police men or patrollers, and his heritage.1Patterson bases this and other conclusions on his review of significant slave societies in every clime and in every time, so we hear about the culture of slavery in the Philippines, in China, in Brazil, among the first nations of North America, in the West Indies, everywhere. He buttresses his case about the powerlessness of the slave by reference to such statements as those by the Tuareg of North Africa, that without the master the slave does exist and that all persons are created by God but the slave is created by the Tuareg. He also quotes a student of slavery in ancient Greece: master was everything to him: his father and his God . . . There is nothing that made for the social person.Patterson shares with us his take on the origins of slavery and the non-social existence of the slave. Enslavement, according to Patterson, is the substitute for death in war, the master or enslaver buying, theoretically if in reality, the life of the slave and therefore having the right of personal power over him. Having no social existence beyond that which he has with his master, the slave can then be described as 'socially dead'. (By this reasoning, most of us would have been two centuries ago 'socially dead'. What are we now?) One aspect of this 'social death' is that the slave, whether in ancient Rome, Africa, China or the West Indies, has no claims on those who made him biologically, live or dead, or those whom he made. I have spent countless hours over the past three years trying to track down Markland Edwards, whom I met in the slave lists for 1817. Where else but in the master's files would he be found? And the master lists him in terms of what would interest him, and the sire is one of those things, thus no father is mentioned, nor am I able to decipher from this list the names of the beings, if any, that Markland made. Not only is he genealogically isolated, he is culturally isolated as well. The slave I am pursuing and other slaves are isolated from the heritage of their ancestors, and most significantly - and herein I think is the distinction between history and heritage - were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory. This state is what Patterson calls natal alienation.2Logic would insist that a person or people who can access the heritage of their ancestors, who can integrate their experience of reality into their lives to help them to interpret today's reality, attach the present to the memories of the past, would no longer be natally alienated, no longer socially dead; no longer a slave. …