Floating Tombs
For enslaved Africans, the Atlantic crossing from Africa to the Americas meant confinement, physical violence, and sexual violation. Slave merchants packed their vessels with hundreds of naked, weak, and distressed men, women, and children.
Restrained in chains, many of them did not know where they were going. The dark and suffocating hold of the slave ships was frightening. African captives were exposed to extreme heat, humidity, and cold. They shared sweat, saliva, urine, feces, blood, tears, and all kinds of secretions. But even facing trauma, human beings are resilient. African captives were husbands, wives, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, warriors, farmers, healers, and traders, who spoke a variety of languages, belonged to various lineages, lived in several villages, and worshipped distinct deities. Even if the experience of confinement in the floating tomb was designed to erase their individual stories and transform these men, women, and children into numbers, the slave trade machine was never successful in smashing these individual stories. During the dreadful voyage, enslaved people created bonds of affection and solidarity. Many resisted, revolted, and survived. Still, the number of African captives who perished during the Middle Passage is staggering, and even more men, women, and children died after arriving in the Americas, before being sold. Chapter 5 tells their story.