On the British vessel African in 1753, William Cooney raped a pregnant woman; she was listed in the log as “number 83,” following a common practice for a kind of deadnaming of captives. He took her “into the room and lay with her brute like in view of the whole quarter deck.”27 In these moments, slave traders were conditioning Africans for plantation slavery. But the captives were also forming a new identity, a diasporic Blackness, forged out of their collective fate, as they found strength in one another with every miserable day that passed.
