Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route

Hartman describes the underground dungeons in which enslaved people were held before being shipped out. Enslaved people lived in their own excrement, which over time formed a layer of soil more than a foot deep for archeologists to discover. “Waste is the interface between life and death. It incarnates all that has been rendered invisible, peripheral, or expendable to history writ large, that is, history as the tale of great men, empire, and nation” (115), Hartman relates. She expounds on this idea, comparing the loss of humanity—of becoming a tradable thing—to death: “The lesson imparted to the captives by this grand design was that slavery was a state of death” (111).

Another version of death arises in a common slave narrative describing the fear of being eaten by whites. Enslaved people become food, like any other captured animal, and thus “[c]annibalism provided an allegory for usurping and consuming life” (114), Hartman explains. “[T]he slave was the prey hunted and the flesh eaten by the vampire of merchant capital” (114).

Hartman is struck by the absence of any accounts of what it was like to survive the castle and its dungeons. “No one imprisoned in the dungeon of Cape Coast Castle has ever described it” (121), she notes.