Sites of Violence and Commodification
Separated by hundreds of miles, slave markets in North America, the Caribbean, and South America had many elements in common. For newly arrived enslaved Africans, slave markets were sites of transition, even though captives could remain unsold in these confined sites for several months.
For captives who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and had recently come ashore, markets were sites of continuity. Since their enslavement on the African continent, these men, women, and children had been traded and displaced several times, then confined in slave depots, and eventually imprisoned in the hold of slave ships.American seaports slave markets were another stage in a process that attempted to transform the bodies of Africans into commodities. The slave market was also a site of rupture, the final stage of a harrowing journey because many captives arrived so weak and ill that they perished before being sold. Those who survived were prepared to be sold by the traders and the various agents who worked for them. Traders and their agents provided them with more food and hid their scars and any other possible physical imperfections. Male and female buyers who attended these sales and auctions examined, scrutinized, touched, and abused enslaved men and women. Most Africans were stripped from their families when they were still on the African continent. Yet, when enslaved Africans crossed the Atlantic Ocean with family members, the slave market could be the last station of their torturous passage together.
In contrast, the experience of the slave market by enslaved people born in the Americas or who at least spent a long time in the Americas was different. These men, women, and children were put on sale for several reasons, but probably the most common were debt and the death of the slave owner. These private or public sales often meant separation from family members and other comrades.
Ultimately, for most enslaved Africans and bondspeople born in the Americas, the slave market was the entryway to an entire life under slavery, unless they were able to find a path to emancipation. When sales and auctions were concluded, slaves were transported to the urban residences, farms, and mines of their new owners. All over the Americas, most bondspeople were directed to plantations of sugar, rice, indigo, wheat, tobacco, cotton, and coffee. But as at other junctures of the forced displacement of captive Africans to the American shores and throughout the Americas, even in this most horrible moment represented by slave sales in general and the iconic slave market in particular, enslaved people continued to affirm their humanity by seeking their compatriots, protesting the separation from their loved ones, fighting to keep their families together, creating new bonds of affection, and trying to survive, therefore challenging the attempts of slave owners and slave traders to control their bodies. Following this continuous fight for survival, chapter 7 explores the lives of enslaved persons in these plantation worlds.