The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

In the first decades of the 19th century, enslavers begin referring to slaves as “field hands” (101). This is highly symbolic and has significant ramifications for enslaved people. Turning enslaved people into “hands” means reducing them to their capacity to labor, to their “disembodied hands” (103), mindlessly picking ever-larger quotas of cotton. This is an important move away from older models of slavery, in which slaves “rose in status by learning trades” (103) and where acquiring “[s]kills meant that one could claim some authority over a task and tools, a kind of capital accumulated during a unique past” (104). Under new slavery, enslavers want only “people who [have] no claim to a special status” (102), those who can be used interchangeably and turned “into money” (102) or into “a commodity: alienable, easily sold, and in important ways, rendered effectively identical for white entrepreneurs’ direct manipulation” (101). As such, to be turned into a “hand” means having one’s individuality, autonomy, history, skills, and character subsumed into a new non-identity as a tradable, laboring object. 

When Charles Ball is sold to the Georgia-men, he is forced to become part of a “coffle” (22), a line of slaves chained arm-to-arm and neck-to-neck to their neighbors. Slaves in a coffle cannot fight, run away, or jump from a boat and swim to safety. As such, coffles are the primary mechanism employed by Georgia-men to allow them to drive slaves on forced migrations into new territories. However, they are more than a piece of simple apparatus used to ensure the Georgia-men’s safety and ease. They are effectively the first symbolic step towards the reduction of unique human beings to interchangeable “hands.” In the coffle, enslaved people are no longer people at all but parts of “a machine,” entirely under the Georgia-men’s direction, and able only to “carry the chain forward like a pair of obedient, disembodied feet” (26). As the pushing system does to “hands” on the plantation, the coffle-chain enables Georgia-men to “make enslaved people work directly against their own love of self, children, spouses; of the world, of freedom and hope” (23).

Baptist explains that “Africans toiling in the sugar fields of Saint-Dominique” spread the story of the zombi” (145-46). He then uses this to highlight the psychological effects of slavery and the trauma of being reduced to a “hand.” Telling the story of Lucy Thurston, he explains that when Thurston “dies” she cannot rest nor can “her body […] settle into death on a cooling board” (145). Instead, she must rise “morning after Louisiana morning” and “shuffl[e] into a sea of cotton” (145) to labor all day on the plantation. In her trauma, she disassociates, becoming entirely withdrawn, mute, and vacant. Her loved ones and fellow slaves attempt to “[call] to her” and “[fish] for her spirit” (146) in her seemingly mindless, automated body, but without success. She has, Baptist suggests, become “a living-dead person who ha[s] been captured by white wizards” and so traumatized that her “[i]ntellect and personality” have departed, while her “ghost-spirit and body [remain] in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerer planters” (146). It is only through song that Thurston’s fellows are finally able to reach her.