The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

by Daina Ramey Berry

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives--including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death--in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle," historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating "ghost values" or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry's exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples' experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, Economics, Anti Racist, American History, Historical

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 24, 2017

About the author

Daina Ramey Berry is an associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies, and the George W. Littlefield Fellow in American History, at the University of Texas at Austin. An award-winning historian, she is also a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

Author photo: Brenda Ladd Photography

Reviews

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really tough one to get through. I had to put this down several times and read something else just for my own mental health. That being said, Berry does some impressive research into the history of the American slave trade and tells the story through an interesting narrative structure. For her, there were four distinct moments in the life of a slave where their value be assessed. These were from birth to adolescence, from adolescence to roughly age forty, from age forty to death, and death itself. All of these cycles in the life of a slave were filled with terrifying and unpredictable changes that would often rip families and communities apart for the most banal reasons. Perhaps a slaveowner would in place of cash, wager their slaves in a card game. Perhaps the slave was a little to familiar with someone in their family and forgot their place. Or perhaps they knew their slaves value was depreciating so they would sell them before it happened.
Reading these stories, I felt a kind of helpless rage at how cruel and senseless it all seems. Even in death, slaves rarely had any respite from their masters. There is the story of the slaveowner who upon his death had his will specify that he wanted his favorite slave who had passed away, exhumed and reburied at the foot of his grave because he wanted him to serve his needs in the afterlife as well.
Even more disgusting was the trade in cadavers. Slave masters who would sell the bodies of their dead slaves to medical colleges desperate for corpses to dissect using what the author calls their "ghost value".
This is not a perfect book, (I found her repeated use of the phrase "soul value" to describe a slave's value to their community a little awkward considering how much of the rest of the book deals with very quantifiable and disturbing facts rather than vague terms like this) but it is meticulously researched and valuable for an understanding of what atrocities humanity is capable of.

[Aqura (engineersreadtoo) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Berry examines the value of slaves from infancy to postmortem- spiritual and financial. The amount of thought that went into putting a value on the enslaved- based on their age, gender, physical attributes, behavior, and health- to do everything that their enslavers couldn’t while concurrently failing to treat them as the brilliant humans they were is actually mind blowing.

This book is an academic style of writing that has a solid structure, allowing the reader to thoroughly understand the soul, appraisal, market and ghost value of enslaved peoples from the time they were conceived and living in their mother’s womb until their afterlife. The way that Berry was able to account for the perspectives of the enslaved by including excerpts of actual conversations that proved they knew their monetary value couldn’t even measure up to their soul value was incredible; much like Ta-nehisi was able to do with The Water Dancer.

[Never Without a Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m emotional drained. The book shook me to my core. 5/5 stars.


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[BMR, LCSW · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got an advanced digital copy, uncorrected proof from the publisher for review.

This was an incredible book about the economics of slavery, examining the assessed value and sale value of Black bodies at all ages, in utero to corpse.

Unsurprisingly, women were worth less than men at every age...some things never change...

It was fascinating to see HOW the property was assessed, how humans can be valued less than hogs and cattle. How slaves were insured, how slave owners were reimbursed when their slaves were killed by raging mobs, how the bodies were disposed of without any consideration of family wishes.

Black bodies were worth more in slavery than they are in freedom, that too hasn't changed. :(

[Alex Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Important if horrifying subject matter but the writing style is very academic and somewhat repetitive.

[mad mags · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult yet necessary read.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through Edelweiss. Trigger warning for violence related to slavery, including racism and rape.)

"This book is written in a historical moment that historians have not yet named—a moment when black persons are disproportionately being killed and their deaths recorded. We witness the destruction of their lives via cell phones and dash and body cameras. The current voyeuristic gaze contains a level of brutality grounded in slavery. I call this moment the historic spectacle of black death: a chronicling of racial violence, a foreshadowing of medical exploitation, a rehearsing of ritualized lynching that took place in the postslavery era. African Americans and their allies respond by rejecting the devaluation of their bodies with the phrase #BlackLivesMatter. This book, however, argues that the historical record is clear: #BlackBodiesMatter."

Dear wife, they cannot sell the rose
Of love, that in my bosom glows.
Remember, as your tears may start,
They cannot sell th’ immortal part!
(A poem carved by an enslaved black man named Mingo, on the beam of his cell, as he awaited trial and execution.)

Whether it's some rando on a plantation tour, or a nationally syndicated talk show host, it always boggles my mind when people insist that some slaves were treated well: "like members of the family." I guess this means they weren't flogged on the daily, forced to live in unheated shacks, or forcibly bred? Idk, given that women and children were largely considered the property of their husbands and fathers; the first case of child abuse wasn't prosecuted in the United States until 1874; and marital rape wasn't a thing in all 50 states until 1993, forgive me if I don't find this argument terribly compelling. But I digress.

I may have received the same sanitized, whitewashed public high school education as everyone else - but it doesn't take an especially critical thinker to realize that, at the end of the day, slaves were property. In the eyes of the law, they were more somethings than someones: more like a television set or CD player (or, to use more contemporary examples, a banjo or a milk pan) than a human being. Some enslavers may have been less cruel than others, sure, but that doesn't negate the power differential one bit. To borrow an example from this text, kindly patriarch Dr. Carson may have provided medical care for his slaves, and worried about their well-being after his death, but if he had had a bad day, there was nothing preventing him from taking his frustrations out on one of them. As his property, it was well within his right to punch, whip, stab, shoot, starve, dismember, rape, or molest them. And therein lays the problem: when you dehumanize and objectify others, especially but not only by relegating them to the status of property, it excuses any and every abuse imaginable. Slaves exist at their captors' mercy.

This also ignores the economics of slavery: slaves were a costly investment. At their prime - adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood - healthy slaves were typically valued at $15,000 or more in today's dollars. Only the very wealthy could afford to keep families intact, and more often than not, economic interests trumped basic human compassion. Husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, cousins, friends: bonds were ruthlessly and routinely severed, even by the most (comparatively) benevolent of enslavers, and sometimes even in death. #YesAllMasters.

In The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Ramey Berry explores the commodification of black bodies from the womb to the grave, with an emphasis on the views of the enslaved themselves (when possible). She examines four values: in addition to the expected appraised and market values (i.e. sale price), she considers the soul value of slaves - that is, their sense of self-worth, or the respect afforded them by their friends, family, and extended community - as well as their ghost value, or what their dead bodies - or pieces of them - might be worth to others. The discussion is structured by life cycle, with separate chapters devoted to "preconception" (i.e., wombs and fetuses), infancy and childhood (0-10 years), adolescence and young adulthood (11-22), adulthood (23-39), the elderly/superannuated (40+), and postmortem (dead bodies and body parts).

An associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies, and the George W. Littlefield Fellow in American History, at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Berry challenges us to consider the economics of slavery - the cold hard numbers - through the eyes of the enslaved, who were all too aware of the value imposed on them. Unsurprisingly, enslaved blacks were worth more than free blacks, men were valued more highly them women (despite the latter's ability to birth new slaves at little/no cost to her enslaver), and those in the prime of their lives - adolescents, young adults, and adults - were valued more than children (in investment yet to come to fruition) and the elderly (an investment whose time had already passed).

Yet the details paint a much more complicated picture than you'd expect. For example, fertile women were valued more highly in the South, where large plantations necessitated a large work force. In contrast, Northern slave owners - who only had need of a few house slaves - saw "breeding wenches" as a liability. Appraised and market values, then, fluctuated over time and were closely tied to geography. A slave's skills, health, and obedience (as judged by the number of scars borne on his or her body) also influenced his or her value.

The exploitation of black bodies continued even in death. In her chapter on "ghost values," Dr. Berry explores the underground cadaver trade. Medical schools needed fresh bodies for dissection, but most states outlawed the practice unless done on the cadavers of criminals executed by the state (some of which were slaves). Despite the dearth of bodies, "between 1760 and 1876, medical students likely participated in anywhere from an estimated 4,200 to 8,000 dissections." Many of them were stolen, exhumed from fresh graves and trafficked up and down the Eastern seaboard, tracing some of the same routes used to traffic live human bodies. While some of the unlucky subjects were poor whites and free blacks, others belonged to slaves buried in public cemeteries, or those sold by their owners. Even in death, enslaved families did not have any say over what happened to the bodies of their loved ones.

While The Price for Their Pound of Flesh has an obvious academic bent, it's still accessible and engaging. I appreciate how Dr. Berry centers the testimony of slaves, allowing them to speak to us from beyond the grave wherever possible. Her case studies - of Nat Turner and the fallout of his rebellion; the John Brown raid at Harpers Ferry; Joice Heth, an enslaved woman displayed by P.T. Barnum as George Washington's former, 161-year-old nurse; and Grandison Harris and Chris Baker, enslaved men who labored as "resurrectionists," digging up the corpses of poor whites, free blacks, and other slaves for use in medical schools - are especially interesting and compelling.

On the downside, there is a fair amount of repetition, which bogs the discussion down at times. For example, the idea of ghost values often bleeds into earlier chapters; the mutilation and commodification of Nat Turner's corpse is covered in depth in Chapter 4, Midlife and Older Adulthood, which is a little distracting. There are also a few threads I wish Dr. Berry had followed up on; for instance, she notes that castration was sometimes employed as a punishment in lieu of execution, so the state could avoid paying reparations to the slave's owner. Yet such an option didn't exist for women: "We know from the Southampton rebellion that women were beaten and raped; one woman named Lucy was hanged. But what does the historical record reveal about gendered rates of compensation?" But we never learn the answer.

Likewise, the section on ghost values primarily focuses on grave robbing, with little mention of how slave owners might have personally capitalized on a slave's corpse. Did enslavers tip off grave robbers to a fresh body and look the other way when the grave was robbed for a price? Or did they sell bodies and parts openly, without any pretense? What did the law have to say about the disposal of enslaved people's corpses?

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is a difficult read, but one that deftly dispenses with the myth that slavery is anything but an abhorrent institution that dehumanizes and objectifies those trapped within it. In other words, a very necessary read, even today. Especially today.

 


Table of Contents

Preface ix
Author’s Note xi
List of Images xv

INTRODUCTION - The Value of Life and Death 1
CHAPTER 1 - Preconception: Women and Future Increase 10
CHAPTER 2 - Infancy and Childhood 33
CHAPTER 3 - Adolescence, Young Adulthood, and Soul Values 58
CHAPTER 4 - Midlife and Older Adulthood 91
CHAPTER 5 - Elderly and Superannuated 129
CHAPTER 6 - Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values 148
EPILOGUE - The Afterlives of Slavery 194

Acknowledgments 198
Appendix A: A Timeline of Slavery, Medical History, and Black Bodies 202
Note on Sources: A History of People and Corpses 205
About the Author 213
Notes 215
Index 250

 


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[Lissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was eye-opening and incredibly sad. It is absolutely disgusting to read how fellow human beings were treated and commodified under slavery. The author has obviously done quite a bit of research and presents her case well. My only criticism would be that the author spends a great amount of time on one subject in particular, that of the "ghost value" (or value after death) of slaves. That subject was addressed in every chapter of the book, and after a while it took over and became a bit repetitive. Otherwise, brilliant.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important, groundbreaking, illuminating work examining the commodification of and economic value placed upon enslaved people though all phases of their lives and their deaths.

[Mortisha Cassavetes · Rating 3 out of 5]

review to come

[Petite Clementine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The basic premise of this book describes how humans were viewed as literal chattel during the slave trade in the Americas. As such, the book describes acts that can only be described as grotesque and abhorrent in today's day and age. Back when I read the book, there were a few quotations or sections of the book that stuck out to me, where I felt the need to pause and flesh out my own thoughts on the matter. Below are these compiled (and edited and clarified) thoughts. As such, this will be less of a review and more of the reflections that I had when I read the book.
~
Cultivating a corpse: "[S]ome early American physicians did part of their training in Europe, where members of the upper-class elite killed and dissected poor citizens who had few legal avenues of protection."

This sentence is shorthand for "murder," if that wasn't already clear. As everyone knows, doctors are supposed to treat ill people and try to maintain their health, Hippocrates oath and all. They're obviously not supposed to go around slaughtering them. This incongruity can be further characterized when you see that medical students willingly (some, even with their own hands) began illegally obtaining cadavers, eagerly anticipating deaths by execution to obtain them. While I understand the necessity for dissection and learning the anatomy of the human body, and the lack of avenues for doing so, such behavior is still appalling and particularly inhumane for a specialty dedicated to preserving humanity and saving people. That top tier medical schools all over the United States relied on such a trade exposes a deep, festering sore in the history of American medicine. How can institutions so reliant on and with such firm foundations in an ignominious institution like slavery, be the cornerstone, the supposed hallmark of compassion and learning?

Something else this book shows is how fundamental slavery was, not just to enslavers, but to all of American society as well. Americans were dependent on slaves agriculturally, from their food to the clothing on their backs. American doctors, professors, etc.--virtually every non-abolitionist southerner with any say in government and/or prestige and power owned slaves. The enslaved cooked, they were janitors, some even were skilled at certain trades. All of this generated profits and revenue. But for whom? Certainly not the enslaved, who did not receive any recompense for anything they toiled for. Instead, the benefit was for the free Americans, and more specifically, the wealthy white American men controlling everything.

Valuation of elderly adults in life: "In 1850, blacks lived an average of 21.4 years, compared to whites, who lived about 25.5 years"

This quote is a little bit random in that it's less relevant to the actual book, and more so a personal gripe I have. I see this type of statistic everywhere. I really do want to clarify to anyone who sees this statistic--this does not mean that most people didn't live over the age of thirty during this time, which is the definition that used to be handed to us students by our primary and secondary teachers. Those who passed the age of five were likely to reach to old age, reaching their 60s (and sometimes even older). However, infant mortality rates, childbirth, death rates from illness, war, etc. lowered the average age so significantly it appears that most people would drop dead after reaching their 20s. Children were most susceptible to infectious diseases, hence the low rates of life expectancy. Another common reason involves infant and maternal mortality rates during childbirth, which were (and still are, in many places) one of the most prolific killers of mankind. Apart from that, most people who survived childhood tended to live beyond 21. To address the actual quote, inherent in this statistic is the inequity that blacks (free or enslaved) dealt with compared to whites (poor or wealthy).

In terms of monetary valuation, slavery always impacted the genders of the enslaved differently. For one, women were almost always consistently valued less, at every stage of their life. Even when women were at their prime, they would consistently be valued hundreds of dollars fewer than men. Women could be seen as either a liability or an advantage, depending on the enslaver. Enslavers who didn't want "breeding" women considered them to be hassles and sold them. Enslavers who wanted to expand their numbers of slaves oftentimes wished to do so domestically. This would mean making American slave women "breed" oftentimes forcibly, as slave men and women didn't have any agency in regards to having children. Of course, having a high value as a slave is not some sort of accolade by any means, but it certainly goes to show how misogyny seeped into every corner of life.

While enslaved men and women were affected differently by slavery, their experiences represent a conscious, deliberate effort as to how best to rob their humanity. For women, it was by forcing them to sever ties with their own blood, those who they had themselves given birth to, nursed, and helped raise. It was by raping, assaulting, and by enslavers imposing themselves sexually to render mute these women, to show they had no power in any single facet of their lives. Not over rearing their children, nor over their own bodies. This does not mean men were not affected by sexual violence. Some men, too, faced rape and sexual assault. Others, when protesting or trying to prevent the rape or assault of their female loved ones, suffered as a result. They were executed, murdered, mutilated, lashed, beaten--all sorts of humiliating, degrading tortures were inflicted upon them. Of course, when the women tried standing up for themselves, they would meet the same gruesome ends. One instance depicted in the book describes the attempts of the lady who killed her continual rapist. No slave could fully escape from these traumas dispensed on them; their psyches were permanently scarred.

Ultimately, the book is yet another proof of how the institution of slavery in America robbed the humanity of all those involved. It's something that is should have been antithetical to American values. This whole "all men are created equal" creed that we hear about all the time? Doesn't seem like it was an aphorism that was truly held by so many of those who loudly proclaimed these words, unfortunately. Even the Founders, the very same people who penned such stirring sentiments, exposed their hypocrisy by allowing slavery to continue. In the end, slavery was a system that wrought havoc on all those involved. The slaves and many of their descendants experienced unfathomable cruelty and pain, alongside everything else I've mentioned above, and much that no one can ever put to words. It's a ridiculously long stretch of blight in our histories, one that continues to have ramifications. The degradation of these people was thorough, it was complete.

[Krystina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found out about Daina Berry and this book from a lecture from the LOC's (Library of Congress) YouTube page (link below). It took me a while to finish this book for various reasons. One being I borrowed it from the library and had to borrow it twice. Second, it was painful to read; however, I'm glad I did. I think this is a book that everyone should read. It is well-researched, and it talks about another aspect of slavery that is hardly ever discussed, the clandestine cadaver trade.

In addition to this book, here two books I recommend reading:
- "Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery" by Heather A. Williams
- "Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century" by Tera W. Hunter

https://youtu.be/7HBqxNuNrVo

[Martha Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books of 2017 on the subject of slavery. Berry has done stellar research and she refuses then to be boxed in by existing or trendy interpretation. She takes seriously that enslaved people were regarded as both property and persons, and then she goes a step further to show us how enslaved people saw themselves, their circumstances, and their worlds.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard this author speak in the NYT Book Review podcast and on NPR. I thought the book may be interesting or perhaps dry because it was based on records and data. I found it to be very thoughtful and brought slave trade records alive. Because slaves were property, slavers kept thorough records of their slaves and their worth throughout the slaves lives. Debt was common among planters and slaves were their greatest assets so were often sold off and traded after the owners’ deaths. A big story that was well known at the time but often forgotten was how slaves bodies were sold or stolen after death to medical schools for research. Medical advancement in the United States often can be credited to slave cadavers who were used to further the science of medicine. While slaves were often considered to be mere animals during life and bred and owned as animals often were, they were considered to be quite human in death. The author, Diana Ramey Berry also goes into the use of slaves as bred animals during their lifetimes after the slavery trade was banned in 1820. Women were highly valued as breeders of slaves and men were used as studs. Children under 10 were often undervalued and left with mothers but sold once they reached an age where they could be used in hard labor. The average slave life span is unclear but averages to about 25 in available records. Older slaves were not valued at the auction block but highly valued by fellow slaves and often the enslavers as uniting members of the community. Berry also looks at famous slaves such as Nat Turner whose body parts were cut up and collected as souvenirs by whites. A recent mayor of Gary, IN admitted he owned Nat Turner’s skull and DNA samples are being done to confirm it. Fascinating book I appreciated reading. Disturbing and insightful.

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The years and years of research Dr. Berry did for this book is really shows. I have such an appreciation for that... so many archives, the topic must have weighed heavily! I learned so much, particularly in the last chapter about the monetary value placed on slaves even in death. This is something I never considered before because it’s so easy to assume a soul was finally free after death, but certainly we can see that nothing about a slave is free even in death. The very personal stories of those bought and sold bring the facts to life in such a touching way.

The thoughts I’m having now after reading the text is how can we use this information as a way to calculate reparations?

Anyway, this was a fantastic work of history and for anyone wanting to learn more about the inner workings of American slavery, this is a book you need.

[Stan Prager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of: The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, by Daina Ramey Berry
by Stan Prager (2-11-17)

The vision of a frightened African-American woman on the auction block clutching her child to her chest as the bidding commenced renders an iconic image that has often served as a powerful ingredient in fiction to conjure up the helplessness and hopelessness that beset chattel slaves in the antebellum south. Such as:
Adeline reluctantly stepped up on the block amid a crowd of unfamiliar onlookers. Arms crossed, head covered, she gripped her young to her chest to shield him from the spectacle of shame they were about to experience. The audience admired her dark olive skin and her evidence of fecundity. Her ten-week-old son was living proof that she was a child-bearing woman. Adeline had "a very fine forehead, pleasing countenance and mild, lustrous eyes," while her son was a "light-colored, blue eyed curly-silked-haried [sic] child" Positioned on the Columbia, South Carolina, courthouse steps, the two awaited their fate. “Gentlemen, did you ever see such a face, and head, and form, as that?” the auctioneer inquired, taking off her hood." She is only 18 years old, and already has a child [who] will consequently make a valuable piece of property for someone. The bidder and Adeline struggled with her hood as he praised her skill. "She is a splendid housekeeper and seamstress,” he continued. By this time, tears filled her eyes, “and at every licentious allusion she cast a look of pity and woe at the auctioneer, and at the crowd.” As the sale continued, the auctioneer took Adeline’s hood off three more times to show “her countenance” and every time, she quickly replaced it. When he was exposed, her son “cast a terrified look on the auctioneer and bidders,” each time his face was revealed. Perhaps at his young age, he sensed his mother’s terror. Within minutes, the sale was complete, and Adeline "descended the courthouse steps, looked at her new master, looked at the audience, looked fondly to her sweet child’s face, and pressed it warmly to her bosom," while the auctioneer jeered, “that child wouldn’t trouble her purchaser long." The threat of separation followed enslaved people to the auction block. [p10-11]
Yet, the foregoing is not an overwrought scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin or a sensationalist TV movie, but rather the report of an actual slave auction from the opening chapter of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. In a remarkably original contribution to the historiography of African-American slavery in the United States, Daina Ramey Berry, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, reminds us that Adeline and her infant were subjected to this humiliating dehumanization on those long-ago courthouse steps for a specific reason: they each held a tangible value associated with real dollar signs for the buyer and the seller. Adeline especially was worth something because, as we learn from this account, she was an attractive young woman, she had household skills, and she was fecund. Adeline in this sense was not a human being, but property, plain and simple, and property has a value.
In a well-written, thought-provocative, and strikingly innovative addition to the existing body of scholarship on American slavery, Berry sets out to locate what that specific value was and how it was rationally determined, not only for Adeline but for all of the many millions of those once held in bondage: men, women, children, infants – even the dead. In this slim volume, based on extensive research, she largely succeeds, but even more significantly her work profoundly alters the way historians will conceptualize the slave-person ever after. In Maps of Time, “Big History” scholar David Christian aptly dubs slaves as human batteries. That is a useful construct. Berry’s construct is equally useful, as she hangs a dollar sign around every neck and demonstrates how, in the peculiar version of African slavery that developed in the United States, some human beings, bought and sold just like batteries adapted for specific utilizations, came to be worth more than others, and how that value changed over a lifetime.
In The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, it is clear that there were a whole host of values for human chattel slaves that are commonly overlooked. For instance, there was an appraised value, which was often noted in account books and wills. There was also a market value, which just like in an automobile or a home could pointedly differ from appraisal. Rarely acknowledged, there was also the value placed upon a slave when insured against loss by their owner, and the premium that was paid, again just like a car or a house. Some of this value was based upon what role the slave property could perform. A strong man who could work in the fields was worth X. A competent woman who could sew or keep house was worth Y. A young woman who was fertile and could be bred like livestock was worth Z. If she was attractive, like Adeline, and could serve as an object of the flesh for her owner, all the better, and her value increased. Age was also a strong determinant in assigned values. In an era of high infant and child mortality, babies and small children were worth very little, but each year that they survived their assessed value increased until at fourteen they achieved something like adult status. Slaves had the greatest value during their prime years, driven by capability and productivity. Berry articulates this in a chilling passage:
Sellers prepared the enslaved for display determined the condition of their health and sometimes rated them on a five-point scale of 0 to 1 in increments of 0.25. Prime or full hands had a rating of 1 or A1 Prime, which represented a projection of the amount of work a person could perform in a given day. Prime hands, typically between the ages of fifteen and thirty, were the strongest laborers on farms and plantations . . . Other enslaved people had their rates set at three-fourth hand, one-half hand, or for those unable to work or contribute to the plantation economy, zero. This rating system resembles US Department of Agriculture (USDA) meat grades, in which beef undergoes a "composite evaluation” to determine quality. [p68]
Naturally, supply and demand and transportation costs all factored into the price. Slaves could also be rented out to others, and their labor valued in fractions, much as they were famously assessed as fractional persons for the purposes of representation in the Constitution of the United States. [p84] Value diminished as the slave aged past forty. The author dubs the elderly and past-their-prime “superannuated,” and this class saw their value drop with great significance.
Surprisingly, slaves also had a certain value after death, what Berry terms their “ghost value.” A slave executed for a crime by the state, for instance, had an assessed value that was paid to the owner for his loss in being deprived of their labor. [p98; 112] And the skull and skin of the infamous, such as insurrectionist Nat Turner, commanded a premium on a clandestine market for such goods. [p102-105] Much more astonishing, however, was that the corpses of dead slaves (as well as grave-robbed free blacks!) served as currency for the cadaver trade to medical schools, north and south. With an inspired sense of optimism layered over the revulsion that each of these valuations implies, Berry adds one more value that restores a certain dignity to the dehumanized humanity that she chronicles: “soul value.” The soul value, she underscores, is the value the human slave person placed upon their own life, a value that could not be bought or sold, a value that led one ringleader of a slave revolt to jump from the gallows with a rope around his neck and die on his own terms rather than wait for the trap to drop. [p146]
This is an outstanding book that nevertheless suffers from a handful of flaws. First of all, as Berry assigns average values for her subjects throughout the volume, it soon becomes clear that the exceptions to the rules far outnumber the rules. In other words, values clearly are far less quantifiable than she would suggest. That hardly diminishes the quality of the theme, but nevertheless frustrates the reader as she repeatedly notes what the values should be at the head of the chapter only to detail scores of values that fail to fall into these ranges. In another arena, Berry risks damaging her historical scholarship by repeated attempts to draw bold lines between the slave experience and the contemporary African-American experience and the Black Lives Matter movement. While there is merit to these insights and my own politics happens to coincide with hers, there is no place in a work of history (beyond the preface or epilogue, etc.) to introduce such editorials.
Finally, in a personal quibble, I must admit that I always chafe at the reducing of the greatest pejorative directed at African-Americans by plantation owners and latter day racists to the euphemistic N--- or N-word. I realize the word is offensive. It should be! Just as a famous curse loses all power when rendered as the F-word, so too does a word used to denigrate human beings lose the power to shock and repulse when abbreviated and euphemized this way. As the late George Carlin noted with striking political incorrectness, it is all about context. Rap singers and urban youth, black and brown, use the word as kinship, even as a term of endearment. Slave auctioneers used it to dehumanize. Spell it out. Make us wince. We should wince. We should feel the passion and the pain.
Just as we are repulsed by the ordinary, mundane, striking normalcy in the colorless bureaucrats who were the cogs in the wheels of the Nazi death camps, so too are we as readers struck with revulsion for the complicity of all those who participated in the institution of human chattel slavery as well as those who did not object, or objected too little, north and south. The genius in Berry’s work is that by assigning values as she has in this fine narrative we are far more moved by the plight of those otherwise anonymous millions who were valued and used as meat, rather than dignified as unique humans. We can see and feel their soul values, even if they were largely denied these in life. We can honor them further by reading this excellent book and sharing its message.


[Note: I received this edition as part of an Early Reviewer’s program.]


Review of: "The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave," by Daina Ramey Berry, is live on the book blog https://regarp.com/2017/02/11/review-...

[Smileitsjoy (JoyMelody) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a must read.
It is heavy; however, it is necessary. Berry writes with urgency the things we should have long been discussing in the conversation of slavery: the monetary values assigned Black bodies.
Her attention to even the tiniest of detail makes this book a vital in furthering our understanding of far reach of America’s past into our present.

There was barely a page that I didn’t highlight something or write in the margins.

[Ronnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a bloody damnable book. It is riveting..nauseating and unforgiving. I heard about this book a few weeks ago. The author well documents the price/value that the enslaved occurred by those who enslaved them. From babes to the elderly. The owners had prices on their slaves/chattel .. And if that isn't enough the owners had insurance on the slaves. Compounded this is the buying selling of the bodies to the doctors for learning about the structure of the human body. I don't recommend that you read parts of this book before lunch because you will lose your appetite . Don't read it before going to bed...You will have a sleepless night.It is a very troubling book. One that had to be written. Too much information about those days has been swept away. It needs to be read and understood. My question is those families ....those banks...those insurance companies ...those schools who were part and parcel of this fucking outrageous behaviour.....how will they be censured for this. Diana Ramey Berry has done a remarkable job. I am indebted to the Leominster Pubkis Library for being able to get this book.

[Ms211]

Daina Ramey Berry. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press. Boston, MA. 2017.

 

               The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is a study on human bondage and the economic value of black bodies.  In her research, Berry has illuminated the monetary value of enslaved people during the 1850s from sources in plantation records, sales, and life insurance. Each stage of a slave’s life is commodified and placed into today’s dollars at the beginning of each chapter. In her research, she investigates the social and economics of slave value in the nineteenth century. The book addresses not just the sole value of humans as commodities but also their “soul value.” Berry explains soul value as the intangible thoughts that the enslaved people felt for their self-worth. As a social historian, Berry does an excellent job using oral narrative sources to help the reader understand how it felt to be sold as a commodity, how it felt to be separated from your family, and how it felt to fight for freedom.

In the first chapters, Berry is focused on the thoughts of enslaved women, children, and adolescent awakening to commodification. Black women, Berry’s focus in these initial chapters, were valued based on how many children they could produce as slaves. In the United States, breeding women like cattle to achieve new slaves as assets was unique to our system in the early 1800s. Because children have no true primary sources, we can only understand their point of view through adult oral narratives. Regardless, Berry's strongest work is in these chapters. She has a singular focus on the living, not the dead.

In later years of adulthood, Berry reveals that enslaved men were worth on average three hundred dollars more than women. Women are less valued because they are unable to work during childbirth and recovery. As the womb was an important commodity pointed out by Berry in the first chapter, this topic should have been further expanded. Slave men were valued more due to their fieldwork abilities.  Berry is most effective in her argument of the commodification process based on a multitude of sales and plantation records for slaves. She does not analyze the economic history of slavery itself, but this is due to her focus on the emotions of the enslaved.  In these same chapters, Berry starts discussing the last chapter of her book on medical history and dead black bodies. She clarifies that most historians have not analyzed the outcome of slave rebellions with the desecration of slave bodies after death.  It is completely distracting to the reader from her previous chapters.

Berry’s important work on the commodification impact on a person’s “soul value” is best explored in the chapter on the elderly. Berry poignantly outlines the value of the human spirit while living in bondage in each chapter, but her research is more solid on the social history of the elderly slave. The elderly tied slave communities together, helped raise grandchildren, and still yearned for freedom even after years of bondage. Berry ends this chapter with a slave who led a small rebellion.  At the hanging platform, the slave steps off the stool to end his own life. In execution, he chooses his own time to die.  In Berry’s narrative, she focuses on the fact that his grave is not desecrated.

The last chapter focuses on the sordid medical history of grave robbing in the dark ages of medicine. Grave robbing was not just on the enslaved. She regards early medical students' efforts to learn anatomy as equivalent to modern news about the black market in harvested organs. She focuses on the value of black bodies after death and states “black bodies matter.”  Berry discusses her six years of research on medicine in the antebellum era that should have been a separate book on the history of grave robbing for medical schools and medical experimentation on the enslaved.

Overall, Berry’s book provides an excellent social history on the emotions of the enslaved and their monetary value at each life stage. The medical history of cadavers and her horror at bodies not being laid to rest in the ground derails her stronger narrative about the living.  She has continued the important social and economic historiography of unveiling the dehumanization process of commodification. Berry’s work is an effective follow-up to the colonial commodification of slaves in Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery.  Her book is an excellent addition to the new historiography on the social and economic history of nineteenth-century slavery.  

 

 

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Daina Ramey Berry has written a thought-provoking and extensively researched book about slavery from a brutal economic perspective, compelling readers to look beyond the “institution” of slavery (a term that inaccurately almost legitimizes the practice) and driving home an understanding of the position of the enslaved as an entity consumed by their market value. The unequal balance of the conflict between the enslaver’s lack of consideration of the “soul value” of the enslaved person and that of the enslaved’s own struggle to preserve this intangible value is outlined throughout life events they had little control over.

We often read about the experience of slavery, without comprehending or acknowledging the enslaved’s deep understanding of their commodified existence. By replacing the semantic relationship of slave owner to slave with that of enslaver over enslaved, Berry removes the condition of the slave as the entirety of an enslaved individual’s identity. By focusing attention on their soul value, she brings the reader to a greater recognition of what should be an inherent right of those who have been enslaved to their individuality and the human right of ownership over their own bodies and souls, not merely as property to be owned and therefore commodified as human livestock, even as they advertised by traders as “human cattle.” She brings to light not only their experience as enslaved, but their increasing understanding of their value as property to their enslaver and the structure of her book outlines how this knowledge grows with age.

In the chapters on adolescence and young adulthood and also midlife and older adulthood, Berry describes in chilling detail how particularly vulnerable enslaved women were to abuse by their enslavers because of their potential for “future increase.” For this purpose, the enslaver took on the role as breeder, orchestrating the increase of their enslaved base through forced impregnation and childbirth, a concept we would normally only prescribe to owners of animal livestock. This illuminates belief by enslavers that their slave population was a financial commodity, not a collection of human souls.

By moving from preconception to beyond death, Berry exposes the raw truth of the “lifecycle of human property,” revealing that the inexorable bond of slavery exists before a child enters the world (as they are valued for their potential work and procreative output) and is not released even by death. Berry details the gruesome reality of the “aftermarket” of an enslaved person’s bodily remains, as they are used as deterrents to other’s who might strike against their enslavers to the unethical consumption of their bodies for the medical educational systems.

Berry expands her research with well-documented notes for each chapter, and includes a detailed timeline of slavery, along with descriptions of the source documents. By including appraised values at the beginning of each chapter, both in historical figures as well as current valuations, her research consistently grounds the reader in the reality of how market price over humanity ruled the relationship between the enslaver and the enslaved. Illustrations of ledger entries stating monetary values of their enslaved base, drawings reflecting the reality of the auction block, and broadside advertising upcoming auctions support the reality of the economics of being enslaved.

There is a fair amount of repetition throughout the book, which is the one main detraction I found while reading. These often were found in brief, repetitive explanations of the enslaved’s responses to familial separations, and to their reactions on the auction blocks. But there is a function to such repetition, in that it helps keep in front of the reader the fact that the life of an enslaved person was constantly besieged by separation, loss, lack of individuality, and the eventual loss of hope for freedom. One repeated reality was the knowledge that not even death would necessarily set them free.

There were references made that, in my opinion, begged for greater explanation. For example, the reference to the “unusual birth certificates” of enslaved people (130) made me wonder what differentiated theirs from those of the enslavers and their children. I would have also appreciated a deeper explanation of the fact that enslaved children often had stronger relationships with their grandparents than their parents and that “enslaved seniors represented an important part of the enslaved community” (131). This last could possibly be explained by the cruel and capricious practice of separating families for financial reasons or as punishment, but it was not expanded beyond the paragraph it was written in.

As I am intrigued by the human voice behind the enslaved individuals introduced in The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, I would have appreciated greater contextual details of the documents attached to the specific statements and dialogue that gave a deep human presence to the research. Knowing that this would increase the length of the book and contribute to numerous repetitions, I realize that much of this information is included in both the notes and the source attributions. But I found it distracting to constantly interrupt my reading in order to locate the appropriate chapter and note number in the back of the book for this information. I was often curious about the source of the dialogue—was it information handed down in the age-old tradition of storytelling, was it from written documents from either enslaver or more rarely from the enslaved themselves? If from this last source, the story told is a brave testimony of the strength of human dignity and perseverance in the face of an oppressive system that withheld such basic rights as the knowledge of reading and writing.

Through Berry’s intensive research, we as readers are provided with an unrelenting view of life for a large population of people who were never given the opportunity to rise above a set of conditions harshly imposed under the power of others unwilling to grant the basic considerations of humanity over their blind economic need for a way of life they would not relinquish—life on the plantation. Before reading The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, I had not given great thought to the reality and importance of the realizing the individual’s understanding of their enslaved experience, having been more often confronted with visual depictions the physical brutality of slavery. It is imperative that historical recognition continue in the face of current trends to modify or even deny well-documented facts of the history of slavery.

(Note: this book was received through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program)

[Lawrence Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, informative and thought provoking. By discussing the thoughts and beliefs of the enslaved to their conditions as slaves, the author left me with the impression that white slave owners had to view black slaves as human beings, and not property. The book left me with three thoughts:

(1) Clearly, there is a difference between a white slave owner saying his black slaves are like sheep and cattle and believing it to be true. In all my reading and studying, I have not heard anything about white slave holders frequently participating in bestiality. White slave owners having sex with sheep and oxen would support the idea that black slaves were viewed as “animal” property. Near the end of the book, the author writes that enslaved people made the analogy between slaves and chattel. I suspect it was only enslaved people that characterized slaves and sheep in the same sentence when talking about a slave’s humanity, since owners were not having sex with sheep. If that is a true, then we can discuss the violence directed at slaves to control them, or man’s inhumanity to man, or the exploitation of blacks for economic purposes, BUT those discussion means that we have to acknowledge that slave owners viewed slaves as human beings. Slaves as human beings is not how scholars want to characterize any part of slavery.

(2) Reasonably intelligent white slave owners understood through their lived experience that black female slaves would give birth to children via sexual intercourse the same way that white woman would give birth to children. More importantly, the children that were born were not sterile, the way a mule or liger is sterile. A mule is man made. It is the offspring of a female horse and a male donkey. Two different species of animals. It is sterile. Similarly, a liger is the offspring of a tiger and a lion. It is sterile. No generation of white people are so stupid as to not notice that the children of a white slave owner that rapes a black slave, who gives birth to a child that is not sterile (remember there were 200+ years of slavery in the United States with the general population living less than 40 years) can think that black people and white people are two different species.

(3) The aforementioned thought is further confirmed when the author dives in to the domestic cadaver trade: Medical doctors and medical schools robbing graves and stealing cadavers in an effort to study the human body via dissection, and add to medical knowledge. Why would educated medical personal steal black corpses unless the study of black corpses leads to knowledge about the human body (not the black body, but the human body). So, medical personnel are stealing and dissecting black bodies to gain knowledge about white bodies. That doesn’t sound like white people believed black people were something different from themselves.

Slavery was horrific. I imagine from what I have studied that slavery was horrific enough that it doesn’t need to be enhanced or bolstered by attributing nefarious motives to slave holders that they did not hold. Slaves may have been property for purposes of economics like a pimp holds a herd of prostitutes, but the pimp sees the prostitute as a human being, which is why he has sex with her on a regular basis. I suspect given the incidents of sex/rape, the lack of sterility of the offspring and the use of the black cadaver to study white biology, white folks did not thing the black man a non-human.

If that is true, should scholars continue to tout the party line? Hitler did horrific things to the Jews in the concentration camps, but I have never read that he thought they were property, non-human objects. Man can be inhuman in his treatment of another man without any nefarious categorizing to justify his horrific treatment.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ramey-Berry's work in this book is well presented. She writes with a clear authority and easy prose, which makes the experience of reading this book slightly easier than an overly tortured academic stance would impose. The focus of THE PRICE FOR THEIR POUND OF FLESH, depressing enough because of slavery's inhumanity and brutality, delves deeper into the daily life of black slaves. Each chapter centers on a stage of life from Preconception through postmortem. By prefacing each new chapter with a stark price list of Appraised value and Market value for slaves of each age bracket, Ramey-Berry sits us right in the middle of the dehumanization of the enslaved. She reminds us time and time again, through intimate example, of how conscious the slaves were of their value, in part because of the constant fear of being sold away from family and social networks. While Ramey-Berry does a fine job of making this powerlessness spring to life with a hopeless vigor, her scholarship is not minutely focused on the ledgers and account books of plantation owners/overseers and therefore is not as rigorous or innovative.

Where Ramey-Berry's scholarship seems focused and well-documented is in the parts of each chapter where she delves into the afterlife of Slave corpses. At every age of a slave's life, death was a constant - disease, accident, poor health, enslaver murder. What became of the bodies of these dead children, young people, and elderly is the real point of this scholarship. And what emerges is a scathing indictment of the White Medical Establishment.

"Chapter 6 POSTMORTEM: Death and Ghost Values" looks through the horror of corpse procurement for medial colleges - mostly down by "resurrectionists" aka grave robbers. Almost all the corpses harvested for novice doctor dissection practice came from the desecrated graves of slaves or executed criminals. Ramey-Berry re-examines the storied career of Dr. William Shippen who's body snatching lead to great scandal and scholarship around the University of Pennsylvania. By looking at the Northern Medical Schools and contrasting them against the Southern Medical Schools, Ramey-Berry establishes a solid through line that proves enslaved bodies remained the dominion and property of White Supremacy even after death.

The methods of preservation, transportation, and illegal corpse procurement dominate this last chapter. As does the more intriguing participation of African American janitors and grave robbers, usually beloved by the white medical students, but held at arm's length and kept in permanent underclass stature based on race and profession.

This work skirts along the serrated edges of American Medical history, and I wonder what Ramey-Berry would do with more access to medical archives and access to the horrid history of how White Medicine exploited Black bodies for "science and experimentation."

[Susan Storer · Rating 5 out of 5]

We don’t often think about slavery as a business, but it was. Slave labor was critical to much of the American economy long before the American Revolution, and for nearly a century after it. Slaves were commodities, like livestock: they were bought, sold, bartered, and insured just like any other property. The story of their use as commodities is a grim one, and it has been starkly told in a recent book by Daina Ramey Berry.

This past summer I shared a stage with Ms. Berry at the Great Labor Arts Exchange in Silver Spring, Maryland. I was talking about my historical novel, and she was discussing her scholarly work The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation.

She was riveting. Her book is an objective and detailed look at how slaves were treated as commodities, how their value was assessed for the market in the American domestic slave trade. She put ten years of research into this book, and it shows.

Berry’s book makes for difficult reading. Not because of her prose, which is clear and remarkably restrained. The stories and the practices she documents are harrowing. It took me a couple of months to get to the end, only to find out that not even death gave escape from being trafficked as property, as a commodity. Much of American medical knowledge was built on the dead bodies of African Americans used as cadavers. It was legally difficult or impossible to get most cadavers, but the bodies of the enslaved could be bought from their owners, taken from prisons, or stolen easily from the graveyards of the poor. She remarks only briefly on the bitter irony that while African Americans were regarded as less than human while they were alive, they became fully human upon their death, as suitable examples of human anatomy.

She wisely chose to order her book along the chronology of a human life, rather than that of the centuries. She outlines the market prices for enslaved bodies in chapters dealing with a human life cycle from before conception to after death. Yes, there were prices for slaves before conception, because enslaved people were considered as livestock, and the capability of “breeding wenches” was important, especially after it became illegal to import slaves from Africa. Berry cites records showing cases where women clearly did not have a choice as to their impregnator, whether it was their enslaver himself, or a man of the enslaver’s choice.

It goes on, with extensive and documented detail. It's a harrowing read, and I had to pace myself to read it, simply because it brings such a powerful emotional reaction. Well worth the time and disturbance.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and disquieting account of the commodification of human life and human bodies. Although it would be naïve to expect a book about slavery to be anything but disquieting, Dr. Berry’s years of research into and study of the subject and her pairing of the voices of the enslaved juxtaposed with their assessed economic value and their, on average, higher sale price from gestation and into the grave and beyond made this privileged old white male reader quite squeamish—and deservedly so.

The economic value of the slave is given as a capital value, as a piece of farm machinery or an item of livestock would be assessed for property insurance. The arrangement of the book follows the life cycle of slaves from before birth, as the value of a “breeding Wench,” might be higher for a plantation owner wanting to expand his “stock,” and less for a slave owner wanting a domestic worker, where the enslaved woman’s child care duties would be an interruption of her household duties. This fluctuating valuation continues even after death when the mortal remain of the slave would be sold by the owner, or stolen by grave robbers for dissection, a growing trade in the 18th century and a well-established extralegal practice in the 19th. Berry coins the term “ghost value” for this postmortem trade for which medical colleges would pay up to $30 for a cadaver, or $881 in 2014 dollars. She uses another neologism for the value, or self-worth that the enslaved person put on him- or herself, their “soul value.” This was an unquantifiable value.

[rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book for a class, but I'm glad my professor added it to the course as the topic covers issues that are often glazed over. Berry discusses the idea of a 'spectrum of values' for enslaved people, in which one's self-identity is broken into market value, appraisal value, soul value, and ghost value. The recognition of one's own literal dollar value is a haunting idea, but this book shows how it followed enslaved people for their whole life, from birth till after death. The soul value stands as the only individual freedom, "She valued her sole enough to die", the only path fully in ones control. This also made me think of the hypocrisy of this time period in a new light, looking at the wide spread cadaver trade of black bodies that were used to essentially found the study of anatomy, considering black bodies as human only in death. Even looking from an abolitionist perspective, Berry picks apart the performance that many Northerners partook in, in which they were disheartened by the sights of auctions, and yet simply walked away. The entire cadaver trade in which bodies were dug up from graves were primarily performed at the well known schools that still stand today.

I am always a little wary of research texts, but Berry combined source material with longer accounts in a way that made it easy to read and grapple the heavy material. Rather than speaking in broad terms, she highlights specific individual experiences with names and figures, giving light to those that are not often heard.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Extensively sourced and very eye opening. Its chapters chronicle the worth of the enslaved black body pre-birth to post-death, written through a series of accounts from the perspectives of slaves and their masters.

While the writing may be dry and scholarly, it's a recommended read for a broader understanding of slave life.

Accounts include:

- a slave woman's son is taken to auction while she works the field. She returns to find him missing, and her duplicitous owner claims he'll be sure to return soon.

- A slave saves money to buy his son at auction, but is outbid. After giving into grief, three men offer to assist him to make the winning bid.

- A slaveholder reminisces over the time a slave kept his feet warm during a period of extended illness. He makes a note in his will for this slave to be buried at his feet after death, like a sort of household pet.

- Rebel slaves would be defiled by mobs after death; some had their bodies and skins transformed into commodities like wallets, change purses, book covers, lampshades. Enslavers extracted wealth from the bodies – selling off ears, skulls, teeth.

- Slaves' bodies would be exhumed after death to be used as medical cadavers. Some were justified by their criminal history, others were graverobbed and sold within the black market.

[Jessica McLaren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a hard, heavy book to read. In conversations regarding race in America, I've always been most impacted by the space Black bodies occupy. The physicality of being threatened, of having to protest, the unsafe way that so many Black bodies may feel in white spaces. This book approaches the foundation of that, and how and why Black bodies have been harmed, commodified, threatened, valued and devalued in America since 1619. Daina Ramey Berry takes a scholarly accounting of the value of Black bodies to whites, the literal monetary value, and it is a rough go. She approaches incredibly sensitive aspects, without once striking a salacious note. This book is rich with information and research, but fascinating and accessible in its presentation. It is, though, not one to be approached casually or without care. There were passages where I would read 5 pages, and simply set it down again. A lot of processing, reflection and, frankly, horrors exist on each page.

This felt to important to read, both in its applicable information that is evident today, but also for giving voice and living history to generations of enslaved persons, and so much that was taken from them without consent in life and death.

[Delande Justinvil · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Price of Their Pound of Flesh emerges amongst a growing set of literature on social histories of race and science in and after the Transatlantic Slave Trade. However, the diligence and, more importantly, care that Dr. Berry offers in her research on economics of the physical, social, and spiritual lives of enslaved men, women and children is a remarkable gift. This includes scalar attention to detail extends from providing specific details of individual lives before and after their transaction to constructing the work itself to reflect and honor the life cycle of the forsaken subjects of slavery. Dr. Berry has crafted a book that brings to bear crucial insight into an insidious arithmetic imposed on black lives and a restorative justice that affords their souls repose. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the intersections of economics and black bodies, legacies of human commodification, and histories of rac(ial)ist science.

[Tanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I admire the research Berry did for this book, and find the subject matter very compelling. I just couldn't get past her writing style, which reminded me of a not-that-great Master's Thesis, constantly trying to justify why what she was saying was new or important. She has a tendency to restate the obvious over and over, making a point, giving examples, then unnecessarily telling the reader that her examples prove her point. I just found it a little tedious.

For me the biggest take-away from this book is what I learned about valuation of deceased slaves, both in terms of insurance policies (I never realized life insurance on slaves was a thing, though it makes perfect sense) and as part of the market for anatomical specimens. The section on the value of women of reproductive age for breeding purposes was also strong.

Berry very passionately asserts that not only do Black Lives Matter, but Black Bodies have always mattered. 3.5 stars.

[Lex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm so happy I stumble across this book one day. The fact of the matter is, there are more subjects related to Slavery and our ancestors that are simply not researched, not talked about, or acknowledged. To understand how valuable they were from the womb and even after death is an eye opener and more importantly, I appreciate that she took the time to research cadavers and how their bodies were not just mutilated after death, but stolen from their rightful burial places. There was information in this book that truly helped such as laws enacted for enslavers to still consider them property even in death and have the rights of allowing their body to be taken into medical research. Real accounts of women and men who were sold because of sexual reasons were just truly an eye-opener. To expand your knowledge or gain knowledge about a topic overlooked, I highly recommend this book

[Aishuu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating topic, gave me plenty to think on. When reading about slavery, I've always seen economics discussed on the global scale - this gets into the individual level, and uses the stories of individuals to discuss how a "black body" was valued.

I did find some of the language distracting - Berry chose to describe the intangible self-value as "soul values" and discussed the sale of bodies after death as "ghost values." These were certainly important additions to the narrative, but the language was almost too poetic. The book's entire voice is from a 21st century perspective, with modern reclamation/lexicography, and that was distracting in the sense that I think some of the language which is shocking/offensive to the modern ear is diluted and less horrific which I'm sure wasn't the intent.