“Our body parts were the trademark, we believed, of a sacred, majestic people. Now the ugliness of our situation made us begin to loathe the body we’d once loved. It was a gradual occurrence at first, more a thought than a truth, but we knew that once planted, a seed soon reveals all that it bears.”
This powerful statement regarding the conception of race expresses how slavery and its cruelty bred feelings of inferiority among the African captives. African people had always held themselves as majestic people in their homelands, but the ideas of servitude imposed on them by the white populace ruined this sentiment. The ill-treatment simply because of one’s color of skin made them hope they were different for the first time in their lives. The first generation to be forced into slavery harbored these thoughts but as new generations were born into servitude it became ingrained, thus inferiority complex and self-hatred.
“We were the Fon, the Ibo, the Hausa, the Ashanti, the Mandinka, the Ewe, the Tiv, and the Ga. We were the Fante, the Fulani, the Ijaw, the Mende, the Wolof, the Yoruba, the BaKongo, and the Mbundu. We were the Serere, the Akan, the Bambara and the Bassa. And we were proud. We knew our ancestors by name. They”
Black accentuates on the diversity and heritage of the African people in the novel hence through research manages to capture the essence of the different tribes. In the assertion, the narrator names the different tribes found particularly in the Western African region where most slave trading took place. The common misconception is that African slaves originated from or possessed a similar set of cultures. But the novel emphasizes the distinct tribes with completely different rituals, teachings, religions, and cultures.
“Our names told us who we were. They told us why we’d been sent. What was expected of us. We were not confused. We were not ashamed. We were not perfect, but we were excellent.”
The assertion emphasizes how the captives put an effort to hold on to their heritage through their names that gave them hope and sense of strength. Subjected to slavery, all was lost in terms of freedom but through their customs and names they still had a connection to their homelands. This made the African captives be hopeful in times of complete hopelessness as they endured brutality and denial of any human dignity. Furthermore, the pronoun ‘we’ stresses the collective self in that they found unity despite individual identities and through this they find pride.
“They could justify our abuse simply because we were something they were not. At least in appearance. And such difference, particularly in color, undoubtedly equaled a fundamental inequity in their minds. None”
The narrator deliberates on how a trivial thing like skin color could rationalize such a scale of cruelty to a whole group of people. The statement encompasses the primitive concept that the captors utilized to justify their racist acts of slavery. In that simply by Africans having a different skin color it rationalizes imposing forced servitude on them. It puts the entire practice into perspective thus renders it as completely absurd since its whole basis is difference in appearance, not even values, ethics or philosophy.
