The Price for Their Pound of Flesh – Daina Ramey Berry
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of Enslaved, from Womb to Grace, in the Building of a Nation. By Daina Ramey Berry. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017. 212pp. Cloth, $27.95, Paper, $18.95.)
The most succinct expression of Berry’s argument comes in the Notes on Sources. Berry writes:
My work merges the economic patterns of enslaved appraisals and sales with the testimonies of the enslaved. It illustrates the ways in which black people were commodified from birth through death – and beyond (some enslaved bodies were harvested as cadavers for nineteenth-century medical education). I also argue that enslaved people held internal values, soul values that often escaped commodification.
This the point where I confess that I am not a scholar of slavery, just someone who has an abiding interest in the subject. If I was a scholar of slavery, I might be able to tell you how this books fits into the historiography of slavery and in economics and medicine. The most striking chapter in The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is chapter 6, “Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values.” Berry demonstrates that the bodies of the enslaved continued to retain value even after death, both monetarily and as scientific subjects through the abhorrent use of their bodies in medical schools. To me, this subject, mentioned in passing in other works, is laid bare in careful detail missing from previous studies. Berry provides an expanded explanation of how medical schools stole slaves from their graves to conduct medical experiments on them. She also demonstrates how even the bodies of the enslaved executed for rebellion or other “crimes” became commodifiable objects passed down through generates as a macabre keepsakes.
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is an important supplement to books like Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul. Berry’s book mixes economic and cultural history to present a well-rounded history of how enslavers and enslaved thought about the monetary valuations of their bodies. Importantly, by vesting their life with their own culture and values, slaves managed to appraise their bodies in non-monetary terms, as something that transcended economic value. That is an novel and important component of the how we should view how enslavers and enslaved struggled over how to value slave’s bodies.
