Volume 10, Number 3 · February 15, 1968
For Wilberforce's Aunt
By J.H. Plumb
Sins of the Fathers: A Study of the Atlantic Slave Trade
by James Pope-Hennessy
Knopf, 286 pp., $7.95
Here it is again—the horrors of the Middle Passage, the callous inspection of the naked human cattle in the slave pens, the dreadful auction by scramble when child was torn from mother. The old stories re-emerge: the young fourteen-year-old Negress flogged to death; the Negro boy of nineteen in his spiked collar, his body covered in festering ulcers, his buttocks mortified through the wounds inflicted by his sadistic master; the ten-month-old baby that was whipped with a cat o' nine tails, scalded in boiling water, and then flung into the sea. And discreetly the sex and the hatred and the corruption get their due—the nubile Negresses handed out to house guests; the secret poisoning in the nurseries for revenge. Boldly painted are the suspicion and fear that loomed like nightmares over plantation society—the suspicion of treachery, of witchcraft, the fear of slave revolt. These pages are alive with pain, heavy with human misery. We hear the sad lamentations, we see again those dark silhouettes dancing against the sky but to the crack of a whip. On and on the book goes until we are bludgeoned into insensitivity by the endless barbarity.
Review, 1167 words
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