Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

The semiotics of slavery maintained the social acceptability of exploitation through a kind of societal espionage. Subjugation was not a violation of basic human rights, but a social and economic necessity. Things were made to signify something other than what they were in truth. Encoding took place at the level of language in the neologism “likely,” which was used by slaveholders to refer to the likelihood of slaves to perform as desired: The individual slave stood for the fantasy of his or her buyer. The eroticization of slave ownership was encoded in language through the use of euphemisms such as “fancy” (113). The presence of linguistic codes both obscured obscenity and gestured toward it. An even clearer example of the linguistic codification surrounding slavery is David Wise’s shift in pronoun from “her” to “it” while describing a particular slave girl.

Another clear example of the social codification of slavery was paternalism. As Johnson puts it: “Through the incredible generative power of slaveholding ideology, the slave-made landscape of the antebellum South was translated into a series of statements about slaveholders” (102). The purchase of a slave was typically reframed as “investment, necessity, or benevolence” (88). Purchasing a slave enabled buyers to perform mastery: “[T]hrough the exhibition of their new slaves […] these men came into a higher form of public being” (200). Another part of this Eucharistic transformation was slaves’ assumptions of their owners’ surnames: “[A] marker of the extent of slaveholders’ trespasses upon the identities of the people they bought” (100). The slaves that buyers purchased were intended to signify their owners’ patriarchal authority. When slaves failed to do so, slaveholders “maintained their dominance by force,” or were threatened by losing the identity they had bought (206).

Both slave and slaveholders performed in the theater of slavery, with slaves becoming expert at performing the value they were ascribed in order to manipulate their desired buyer into a sale: “[E]nforced mimicry shaded into subversive performance” (157). Society in the antebellum South had become a form of espionage: “[C]onversation had become conspiracy” (73) among slaves, while owners could speak of their activities only in code: “a fancy,” “likely,” “it,” “mulatto,” negro.” Silence surrounded the human rights abuses like a protective wall. Johnson writes, “[T]hus was patriarchy defended by the silence of politeness” (115).

Slave traders believed that they could read their slaves’ bodies, while buyers prided themselves on being discerning judges of “likely” slaves. The abilities and physical characteristics of slaves became code for the fantasies of their buyers. A slave was assumed to be a tabula rasa, awaiting the impression of an owner’s desire. Sadly, the scars on slaves’ backs were “read” by slave buyers as “encodings of their history” (145). Scars were markers of the character of the slave in question, though are more accurately read as signs of the character of those who inflicted them. It was these very scars—the ruined bodies of the slaves—that told an alternative narrative. Called upon to testify to their masters’ character, slaves’ wounds opened up a space for their real meaning to be written into law. The codification that facilitated the slave trade had also sounded its death knell. Slave owners had bought into a fantasy, but reality could not be suppressed forever.