27 pages • 54 minutes read
Walter JohnsonSoul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999A 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 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Reading Bodies and Marking Race”
Joseph Holt Ingram’s 1835 The Southwest by a Yankee discourses on topics including “African Inferiority.” Historian Barbara Jeanne Fields argues that racism was a “byproduct” of Southern production. Visual stereotypes were a way of vindicating hierarchies and designating value: “Prime” age for boys and men differed from women and girls. Skin color was interpreted as “a sign of a deeper set of racial qualities” (139). Height, weight, and build were measured and touted. Female slaves were bought as “breeders” (144), while slaves scarred by the whip were considered recalcitrant and fetched a lower price. Violation of black bodies justified veneration of white ones. Pale-skinned male slaves were thus a threat to owners, but light-skinned female slaves were preferred as domestic servants. Their whiteness was presumed to make them unfit for the physical exertions of cotton picking. Whiteness was associated with “interiority,” “intelligence,” and “vulnerability” (155). Physical details were emphasized to mark the boundary between blacks and whites (156). A system of racial signs was developed in the slave markets to facilitate the categorization and sale of human beings.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Acts of Sale”
Unsurprisingly, many slaves dissociated from their bodies. They were forced to enact their assigned roles and would do so to exert control over their buyers. If “character” of a slave was routinely assumed to be discernible in his physicality (165), slaves also sized up potential buyers, about whom they would often know a considerable amount. Slave trader L. M. Foster remembered Eulalie for speaking French to her family over the buyers’ heads. Savvy slave buyers would attempt to discern a slave’s true intentions, just as the slaves manipulated perceptions and deals. Slaves also marketed their skills and feelings, even participating in the fiction that buyers were there to rescue them from the slaveholders (181). Dissimulation was a necessity if a slave wanted to exert any control over his or her life. Slaveholders claimed that returned slaves were using the law to their advantage, which may have been the case. The dreams of the powerful were embodied by slaves (188).
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Slavery was its own language, and slaves stood for and symbolized that which white people wished to disavow. Johnson argues that slaves’ bodies became encoded with the meaning given to them by the system, which became legible to their buyers: “[T]he buyers began with the physical coordinates of the people who stood before them in the pens” (138). Beyond age and gender, slaves were grouped according to skin tone: “negro,” “griff,” or “mulatto.” The language that grew up around slaveholding encoded these human beings with new meaning, erasing their identities. Slaveholders “suggested that slaves’ skin color could be read as a sign of a deeper set of racial qualities” (139).
Color became a register for the meaning prescribed by the slave trade. It was readily apparent and allowed slave traders not to register the slaves’ alternative identity as human beings. The very psychological depth of human beings was used against them: that which was not physically displayed was disbelieved, making slaves a tabula rasa, ready to receive the projections of his or her masters. Fallacious meanings were attributed to physical characteristics such as skin color: “[T]he ‘blackest’ slaves were the healthiest” (139). Scars left on the skin of slaves by the beatings of their oppressors were another form of impressing new meaning onto these human beings: “[S]lave buyers created whole stories for the people who sit stood stripped in front of them: perhaps if the scarring was very light the offense had been minor […]” (144). The buyers’ insistence that they could read slaves like books revealed the needed force to rebrand slaves with an alternate identity and history: “[B]uyers thought they could read slaves’ backs as in codings of their history” (145).
Visual codes were integral to the act of purchasing a slave. By relying on physical features alone, the buyers could impart their own interpretation and take possession of the meaning made from these humans’ lives. Yet the slaves themselves turned this mirror on their buyers, sizing them upon appearance alone in the absence of more detailed information. Former slave Charles Ball wrote of one buyer, “[H]is conversation corresponded with his physiognomy” (165). Enforced mass migration confronted two unfamiliar populations with each other, heightening the reliance upon appearances over more in-depth forms of knowledge. Somewhat absurdly, slaves were attired to express their individuality in a pastiche form that observed the conventions of the slave market. Johnson refers to this performance of personality in the slave pen as a “visual grammar” (166).
In such a visual or surface culture, the act of looking itself became eroticized. Voyeurs peeked in at the slaves through windows in the pen, and “the purchase of a slave was a public occasion—a spectacle” (201). This moment of mutual looking and sizing up was performative for all involved: “[S]laves learned about slaveholders’ system of slave-buying signs; as the buyers looked them over and asked them questions, the slaves looked back and came to their own conclusion” (171). In order to manipulate this system to their advantage, slaves cultivated a duplicity in their comportment: “[S]laves could manipulate ever subtler signs to guide [buyers]” (163).
While engagement in the semiotics of the slave pen offered slaves a modicum of control over their destinies, the dissociation required must have had profound consequences: “[T]he daily routine of the slave pens […] alienated slaves from their bodies” (163). Slaves were forced to engage in the destruction of their own identities, participating on a level, in the violence done to them. It is not surprising that many slaves became sick in such circumstances. Nor is it shocking given the normalcy of dissembling that Louisiana court records show extensive litigation over the veracity of such ailments among slaves. Justice was certainly in question.
