Word: slaving
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...colluding to forget. But periodically the zeitgeist erupts with flashbacks to a tragedy whose costs are still exacted on the street corners of America, at water coolers, in classrooms, along Sunday pews. Now is such a time. Last month in New Orleans, the name of George Washington, a former slave owner, was removed from a school. This week Amistad, Steven Spielberg's epic about a famous 1839 slave revolt, premieres. Currently in repertory at the Chicago Lyric Opera is Anthony Davis' opera, also titled Amistad...
...there is a spate of new books focused on slaves and enslavers. Velma Maia Thomas offers Lest We Forget (Crown; $29.95), an interactive children's book serious enough for parents. Readers remove slave sale receipts from envelopes and pull back a paper ship hatch to find slaves stacked like cordwood. British historian Hugh Thomas (no relation) has published The Slave Trade (Simon & Schuster; $37.50). Tracking the barter of Africans from 1440 to 1870, Thomas ranges through Europe, Arabia, Africa and the Americas. As societies spin and tug at one another like a warped solar system, a sad message emerges...
Unconvinced, Ball, 39, a journalist, set out three years ago to discover what had happened to those slaves, "to bring the stories of the obscure side by side with the powerful, as they had been in life." He found, of course, violence and the mixing of black blood with white. But the voices rising from letters, family papers and the tea-colored pages of "blanket books"--records of provisions given to slaves--told uglier truths. One Ball ancestor, Henry Laurens, the first president of the Continental Congress, was also the largest slave trader in America...
Many in Ball's family protested the project. "You're going to dig up my grandfather and hang him!" shrieked one cousin. Blacks met Ball with suspicion, sometimes with anger. "The name Ball meant enemy," says Charlotte Dunn, whose rebel slave great-grandmother barely escaped murderous Ball pursuers. Blacks, left with few documents or oral information, can rarely trace their lineage more than a few generations. Ball's discoveries took them back to first contact. The exchange was painful, with stories of stolen 10-year-olds or slaves beaten or killed. "I came bearing terrible tales," Ball sighs...
...recognize that slavery is something far worse than nonfreedom, that it is an institution that grants some men the right to utterly dehumanize other men. It completely justifies the bloody murders that ensue when this figure, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou), frees himself and leads the human cargo of the slave ship La Amistad in revolt. And slammed at us at the start of Amistad, Steven Spielberg's movie about that incident, it signals the director's intention to ignore the principle--lofty sentiments excusing clunky filmmaking--upon which most morally instructive movie epics are built...