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

Abstract

In The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Ramey Berry has produced a rich compendium of hidden transcripts documenting how American slaves viewed their lives. The book “is organized around the life cycle of an enslaved person's body” and examines each stage of a slave's life from “preconception” (i.e., the unborn children of expectant mothers) to “postmortem” (i.e., the cadaver trade) (p. 3). Her method is more qualitative than quantitative. Berry has worked to reconstruct not just the monetary value of black bodies as capitalists saw them but also the lived experiences and self-actualized personal value posited by the slaves themselves, their internal spiritual or “soul value” (p. 6). Indeed, while she pitches the book as a contribution to “a new economic history of American slavery,” Berry is more concerned with the slaves' inner lives (p. 5). Her “goal is to highlight the voices of the enslaved,” which she pursues wherever evidence can be found, however fragmentary (p. 9).

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