Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson is incredibly thorough in its description of slave markets. The chapters are incredibly hard to get through as the acts described are so heinous, but the effort is worth it, as I learned several enlightening, new pieces of information on the subject. The point that stood out the most to me was one about why enslaved people’s histories were so systematically erased. I knew that when enslaved people don’t know their history it makes them have less of an identity and supposedly makes their bonds to others not as strong, which makes them easier to subjugate. What I learned through this reading was that when enslaved people’s histories are erased, it makes them easier to sell at markets. Since their is no known history of these individuals, they can’t be linked to a certain place, the history of their health can’t be reported, any problems that could potentially run in their family would be unknown. When an individual has no known record, they are a mystery and thus can be sold at the slave market …show more content…
Because of this missing history and knowledge, a mythology developed based on other factors to “indicate” to slave buyers a potential slave’s history and capability. The main part of this mythology was that skin color could be an indicator of other qualities of an enslaved person. Darker skin indicator a better field hand, while lighter skin meant an enslaved person was more intelligent and often resulted in the enslaved person learning a craft or skill. This is just another example of the rippling repercussions that erasing an individual's history and to the greater extent a group of hundreds of thousands of people’s histories,