The Price For Their Pound Of Flesh: The Value Of The Enslaved, From Womb To Grave, In The Building Of A Nation, by Daina Ramey Berry

If one wants to know what one is getting from this particular book, it is worth giving a few samples of what makes this book distinctive, if not often in a good way. It is one of the few books on history where heresy happens to be an issue–all the more surprising given it is about the valuation of slaves–given the author’s certainty that black slaves have immortal souls and that those punished in slave rebellions are assured the resurrection of the blessed. The general tone and historical value and worth of this book can be gauged pretty accurately from the introduction, where the author affirms her belief in BLM (expanding it to “Black Bodies Matter”) nonsense and where she whines about how traumatic it was as a child for children to be curious about her hair, which was different from other kids. Given that the fuzz on top of my head has also drawn the curiosity of children who see almost baldness and find it interesting, which is not at all a traumatic experience for me personally, I find the author’s fragility to be unsuitable for someone who seeks to be a serious social historian about the serious issue of the assessed, economic, and “soul” value of blacks. Similarly, this is a book that seeks to be judged as a work of serious statistical social history, but its statistical apparatus is woefully inadequate for the sorts of conclusions based on gender and age that the author wants to draw, seeing as she averages across time periods without any counting for the different purchasing power depending on the timing of sales. There are simply too many confounding factors for the sorts of explanatory power that the author wants to draw from the numbers available, and the author is simply not skilled enough to manage the data properly.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 200 pages long in its material. After an author’s note, preface, and a list of images, the book begins with an introduction about the value of life and death in the author’s eyes. This is followed by six chapters that seek to divide the experience of slaves into six periods of life. This begins with a chapter on preconception and the author’s discussion of women and the value of future increase (1), which the author in general finds to have been decisively different in the aftermath of the banning of the slave trade in 1808. After that the author discusses the value of slaves during infancy and childhood (2), adolescence and young adulthood (3), midlife and older adulthood (4), the elderly (above 40) or superannuated slaves unable to work any longer in the fields (5), as well as the ghost values of slaves and free blacks (and poor and criminal whites, though she does not focus on this much) after death in the black market for cadavers for medical research (6). This is followed by an epilogue on the afterlives of slavery, acknowledgements, an appendix that contains a timeline of slavery, medical history, and black bodies, a note on sources, an index, and information about the author.

The one thing that keeps this book from being entirely worthless is the author’s genuinely interesting narrative history of the cadaver trade and its role in medical research and education, which was staffed heavily by blacks who served as graverobbers in obtaining fresh corpses for dissection on behalf of professors on the east coast. And even this history, which is generally interesting, is marred by the author’s lack of interest in white bodies involved in the trade, given her nearly exclusive racist interest in black bodies. The author’s strident and misguided Marxism prevents her from recognizing the moral superiority of capitalism, where the cruelty of authorities can at least be mitigated by a recognition that people have at least economic value to life, as opposed to the universal experience of misery and mass murder in Marxist nations where political enemies have no value, and hence can be liquidated in industrial amounts for the benefit of corrupt regimes. Given the author does not have a consistent basis of life that she respects for whites, blacks, and everyone else, her continually harping on the way that blacks were apparently not sufficiently valued for their nearly infinite soul value grates on the ear. Only those who care about my soul value can demand that I care about their own.