cracked and trembled, twisting into a scowl as whatever he was feeling inside broke through to the surface and tears welled up in his eyes. He looked up at the ceiling and inhaled deeply, fighting to control his emotion. I could tell this was a painful memory for him. The chords in his neck bulged as his body tensed, struggling for control. When he looked back down at me, his face was hard and stoic. He forced himself to look me in the eyes, but I knew it was taking a great effort for him to do so. I knew he wanted to hang his head or lower his brow into his hands, anything but look at me. But it just wasn’t his way to show weakness in front of me and giving in to his emotions would have seemed weak to him. I suspect he also knew that it would hurt me more to see the pain on his face as he struggled to suppress it.
“This was the book I picked up. It’s called 400 Years of Oppression . It contains, among other things, detailed descriptions of life aboard a slave ship pieced together from various accounts and historical documents, most of it told by former slaves who traveled through the Middle Passage. It contains slave narratives all the way up to the emancipation proclamation. It follows the life of African Americans from the time they were kidnapped from their homes in Africa, to the civil rights movement, right up to today’s struggles with drugs, crime, and poverty. I cried when I read it. I wept out loud and I couldn’t stop crying even when my mother held me in her arms. I had no idea how bad it was. I had no idea how many Africans they stole from their homes and brought here. In that book, they estimated that about fifteen million slaves were brought here from Africa and at least another five million never made the trip due to disease, malnourishment, suicide, murder, and slave revolts. Then all the hell they went through for more than four hundred years in this country as they struggled to find freedom and equality. I had no idea. You could not imagine what my people endured aboard those ships.”
Kenyatta opened the book and I prepared for the worst. But just as he had been unprepared when he’d picked up the book twenty-five years ago. I was completely overwhelmed by what I heard. I could never have imagined that human beings could have been capable of such cruelty to one another.
“Africans were treated like cattle during the crossing, wedged together below deck as tight as they could pack them in, chained together and stuffed in narrow, three feet high compartments too low for standing. Most of these compartments had no light or fresh air except for those immediately under the grated hatchways. The stifling heat was unbearable, and the humid air nearly unbreathable.
“In the latter 18 th century, most slave ships were “tight packers,” squeezing as many slaves as they could fit into their cargo holds, crowded together in spaces smaller than a grave, stacked on top of one another like spoons, breathing each other’s sweat and body odor. Disease and suffocation below deck were common. Men were often chained in pairs, manacled together in twos and threes, shackled wrist to wrist or ankle to ankle. They were forced to lie on their backs with their heads between the legs of others. This meant they often had to lie in each other’s sweat, feces, urine, and, in the case of dysentery, even blood, covered from head to toe in lice and other parasites, a number of them in different stages of suffocation; many of them foaming at the mouth and in their last agonies, dying of oxygen deprivation.
“The floor of the ship’s hold resembled a slaughterhouse covered with blood and mucus. The confined air was rendered noxious by the sweat, urine, feces, blood and vomit evacuated from their bodies and being repeatedly breathed.”
I didn’t want to hear anymore. I wanted to clap my hands to my ears and scream.
What he was describing was too horrible to have been possible. There was no way human beings could
“This was the book I picked up. It’s called 400 Years of Oppression . It contains, among other things, detailed descriptions of life aboard a slave ship pieced together from various accounts and historical documents, most of it told by former slaves who traveled through the Middle Passage. It contains slave narratives all the way up to the emancipation proclamation. It follows the life of African Americans from the time they were kidnapped from their homes in Africa, to the civil rights movement, right up to today’s struggles with drugs, crime, and poverty. I cried when I read it. I wept out loud and I couldn’t stop crying even when my mother held me in her arms. I had no idea how bad it was. I had no idea how many Africans they stole from their homes and brought here. In that book, they estimated that about fifteen million slaves were brought here from Africa and at least another five million never made the trip due to disease, malnourishment, suicide, murder, and slave revolts. Then all the hell they went through for more than four hundred years in this country as they struggled to find freedom and equality. I had no idea. You could not imagine what my people endured aboard those ships.”
Kenyatta opened the book and I prepared for the worst. But just as he had been unprepared when he’d picked up the book twenty-five years ago. I was completely overwhelmed by what I heard. I could never have imagined that human beings could have been capable of such cruelty to one another.
“Africans were treated like cattle during the crossing, wedged together below deck as tight as they could pack them in, chained together and stuffed in narrow, three feet high compartments too low for standing. Most of these compartments had no light or fresh air except for those immediately under the grated hatchways. The stifling heat was unbearable, and the humid air nearly unbreathable.
“In the latter 18 th century, most slave ships were “tight packers,” squeezing as many slaves as they could fit into their cargo holds, crowded together in spaces smaller than a grave, stacked on top of one another like spoons, breathing each other’s sweat and body odor. Disease and suffocation below deck were common. Men were often chained in pairs, manacled together in twos and threes, shackled wrist to wrist or ankle to ankle. They were forced to lie on their backs with their heads between the legs of others. This meant they often had to lie in each other’s sweat, feces, urine, and, in the case of dysentery, even blood, covered from head to toe in lice and other parasites, a number of them in different stages of suffocation; many of them foaming at the mouth and in their last agonies, dying of oxygen deprivation.
“The floor of the ship’s hold resembled a slaughterhouse covered with blood and mucus. The confined air was rendered noxious by the sweat, urine, feces, blood and vomit evacuated from their bodies and being repeatedly breathed.”
I didn’t want to hear anymore. I wanted to clap my hands to my ears and scream.
What he was describing was too horrible to have been possible. There was no way human beings could
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