Author’s Note
Preface
List of Images
INTRODUCTION
The Value of Life and Death
CHAPTER 1
Preconception: Women and Future Increase
CHAPTER 2
Infancy and Childhood
CHAPTER 3
Adolescence, Young Adulthood, and Soul Values
CHAPTER 4
Midlife and Older Adulthood
CHAPTER 5
Elderly and Superannuated
CHAPTER 6
Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values
EPILOGUE
The Afterlives of Slavery
Acknowledgments
Appendix: A Timeline of Slavery, Medical History, and Black
Bodies
Note on Sources: A History of People and Corpses
Notes
Index
About the Author
Daina Ramey Berryis Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a scholar of the enslaved and Black Women's History and the award-winning author/editor of several books includingA Black Women's History of the United States.
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
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