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Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.
“Rebels, that’s me,” he said. “Tories, that’s…are you a Tory?” “What precisely is that?” “You talk fancy, for a nigger,” he said. “You better not be a Tory. It’s war now and we shall have freedom.” “Freedom? For the slaves?” “Niggers, nothing. I’m talking about us. Rebels. Patriots. We shall be free of the British and their taxes. Never again shall we be slaves. Are you with the rebels or the Tories?”
MORE SHIPS LEFT NEW YORK CITY until the final day of the British occupation. On November 30, 1783, I was rowed out to the George III, inspected for the Book of Negroes by men who did not know me, and allowed to leave the Thirteen Colonies. I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. There was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains.
loved every inch of my daughter and worshipped every beat of her heart, but I was not a playful mother. I did not have a lot of fun in me. I fed her, clothed her, taught her to read before her third birthday and took her everywhere I went, but I was too busy and too tired for games.
“Do you hate me?” he asked. “Should I?” “Might you not hate all white men indiscriminately? You would have good reason.” I poured myself more water from the carafe. “If I spent my time hating, my emotions would have been spent long ago, and I would be nothing more than an empty cowrie shell.”
The voice of Falconbridge shook me from my reverie. “You would have reason for hating me. Do you believe in redemption?” Sometimes it amazed me how direct white people could be.
love Africa. Wish it didn’t have to be this way, but if we weren’t here, the French would take over this fortress in the blink of an eye. And everybody’s doing it. The British. The French. The Dutch. The Americans. Even the bloody Africans have been mixed up in the trade for an eternity.” “That doesn’t make it right.” “If we didn’t take the slaves, other Africans would kill them. Butcher them live. At least we provide a market, and keep them alive.” “If you stopped, the market would wither.” “You have not been to England, so let me tell you something. Ninety-nine Englishmen out of one hundred
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and this is why i fight
“Look,” said Armstrong, “was the experience so terrible for you? Here you are, a picture of health, comfortable clothes, food in your belly, with a roof over your head and abolitionists fending for you in Freetown. Most of the world doesn’t live that well.”
“You have no idea what I have lived through. Every waking moment is a nightmare for the captives you hold right now, on the other side of these stone walls. You have no idea what they endure, if they will even survive in the ships, no idea of the thousands of humiliations and horrors waiting at their destinations.”
in 1807, the British Parliament passed legislation to abolish the slave trade the following year. In the United States, abolition of the slave trade also took effect in 1808. It was not until August 1, 1834, that slavery itself was finally abolished in Canada and in the rest of the British Empire. Another thirty-one years passed before the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution officially abolished slavery in the USA in 1865.
