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 Narrated by Pippa Vos

Overview

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.

Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award - from the University Coop (Austin, TX)

Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR)

Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage

Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/05/2016
In this “financial recapitulation of black bodies and souls,” Berry, associate professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin, examines how slaveholders ascribed pecuniary worth to women, men, and children. Slavery took many forms across the antebellum U.S., but all enslaved people experienced their reduction to the status of chattel, bought and sold at their owner’s will. Yet surprisingly little scholarship has examined the monetary value of these individuals, whose worth increased from infancy through adolescence, peaking at the height of their productive and reproductive capacities, and declining steadily to the point where the elderly were considered nearly valueless. Upon their deaths, they might regain some financial significance, as the bodies of many were sold to medical schools for purposes of dissection. Crucially, Berry also delves into the annals of slave communities to explore the emotional strategies by which the enslaved resisted their reduction to an “exchangeable commodity,” centering their lives on spiritual beliefs that defined the soul, rather than the body, as the true location of their individuality. Berry’s groundbreaking work in the historiography of American slavery deserves a wide readership beyond academia. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award, University Coop (Austin, TX)
Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR)
Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage
Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Yale University

“Berry’s groundbreaking work in the historiography of American slavery deserves a wide readership beyond academia.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“In this sharp, affecting study, Berry reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism...A well-researched, effectively presented piece of scholarship that forthrightly confronts slavery’s brute essence.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“...highly readable and addressing the most heartbreaking and starkly gruesome aspects of slavery.”
—Library Journal

“With The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Berry is now seen as a breakthrough writer who completed the herculean task of filling in the blanks of one of the darkest episodes in American history.”
—Essence Magazine

“Brings to light the gruesome history of the desecration and dissection of black bodies after death, especially by professors of anatomy in American colleges and medical schools.”
—Adam Rothman (professor of history at Georgetown University), American Historical Review

“A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country. Rigorously researched and powerfully told, this book tallies the human price paid for the nation we now live in and restores these unrecognized Americans—their hopes, loves, and disregarded dreams—to their rightful place in history. Searing, revelatory, and vital to understanding our nation’s inequities.”
—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

“Daina Ramey Berry’s harrowing account of how slaveholders turned every aspect of a slave’s life into a commodity to be sold on markets—from the reproductive possibilities of enslaved women to the corpses of deceased slaves—is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding American history, or our contemporary dilemmas. Reading The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will leave you with an overwhelming sense of sadness, but also with great anger that we are still failing to fully overcome this history’s legacy.”
—Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Daina Berry has written the richest account of the many ways in which an enslaved African American’s body was bought and sold throughout her or his lifetime. From the cradle to the grave and beyond, enslavers priced black bodies based on their imagined fitness for labor, sexual exploitation, use as collateral, and even their value after death as dissection cadavers. In horrific detail, Berry shows that there was a price tag placed on every pound of flesh. She also shows the efforts of enslaved people to assert that their lives had values beyond the money that could be rendered from their muscles and extracted from their bones. Out of the certainty that their souls were pearls beyond price, black people fought to make room for their own system of human values.”
—Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"Berry treats her subject in a sensitive and open manner, and Robin Eller narrates in a respectful tone." —Library Journal Audio Review

Library Journal - Audio

09/15/2017
Berry (history and African and African diaspora studies, Univ. of Texas at Austin) gives voice to the economic value of slaves in the United States. Slaves led a dual existence: there was their internal personhood or soul value and their external commodity value. Berry describes the external commodity value of slaves at each stage from before birth to after death. Rigorous research underlies the discussion of market value and projected values of human chattel. Projected values of slaves were used in wills, probate documents, mortgages, and insurance policies to protect owners against loss. The rise of professional medical education opened a need for a steady stream of fresh cadavers and articulated skeletons, and the bodies of slaves held value for use in the illegal cadaver trade. Berry treats her subject in a sensitive and open manner, and Robin Eller narrates in a respectful tone. VERDICT Appreciated by scholars of American and African American history. ["Although highly readable and addressing the most heartbreaking and starkly gruesome aspects of slavery, this book doesn't add much new information to the topic": LJ 10/15/16 review of the Beacon hc.]—Cynthia Jensen, Plano P.L., TX

Library Journal

01/01/2017
This first study of its kind follows an enslaved person's life through the lens of their monetary value, from University of Texas at Austin history professor Berry. (LJ 10/15/16)

Kirkus Reviews

2016-10-20
What was the assigned value, the price tag, placed on the bodies of the enslaved?In this sharp, affecting study, Berry (History and African and African Diaspora Studies/Univ. of Texas; Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia, 2007, etc.) reminds us of the cold calculus at the intersection of slavery and capitalism. Assessed at each stage of their lives, in the womb and even after death, the sale price of the enslaved depended upon a number of variables: the needs, desires, and location of the buyer and the particular skills, perceived attractiveness, and sex of the bought. Beginning each of her chapters with an auction and an inventory of the economic imperatives at work, the author movingly vivifies this brutal commodification of the men, women, and children in bondage with the horrid details attending their sale: the male bodies "greased up and groomed for the auction block," the forced breeding that accounted for many family separations, the incomprehension of children sold away, the five-point scale (Berry compares it to U.S. Department of Agriculture meat grades) used to rate the health and utility of the enslaved, and the role of "breeding wenches" in populating the workforce. In addition, the author explores the flourishing cadaver trade, in which black bodies still had a post-mortem value; remarks on the emerging field of gynecology, built on research conducted on enslaved women's bodies; and touches on the matters of insurance, coroners' inquiries, and autopsies, all part of the grim calculation. Most movingly, Berry discusses what she calls "soul value," the deeply personal, spiritual value the enslaved assigned to themselves. From this place came the strength that inspired Ponto to boldly correct his auctioneer, Isaac to cheat the hangman by jumping from the gallows to meet death on his own terms, Madeline to drown herself rather than suffer repeated rape, and Celia to club her rapist to death. A well-researched, effectively presented piece of scholarship that forthrightly confronts slavery's brute essence.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160674216
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/01/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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