These narratives are the missing pieces of an incomplete puzzle that for too many years historians have treated as solved by focusing on the lives of the people in power who did leave written records. If we could only know and tell those stories, we would learn much about the subtleties of the culture in which they lived. It is those inner lives that many historians would most like to explore and make a part of the historical record. Instead, what can be known of their lives comes from the people who enslaved them-self-interested and unreliable witnesses on the question of the inner lives of the people they held captive. Owning no property, they produced no deeds, evidence of land transfers, or wills to be probated. The vast majority of them could not write and were thus unable to leave letters their marriages, unrecognized by law, produced no licenses to be maintained as part of an official record. Yet the nature of slavery was such that these individuals were, with few exceptions, silenced. The people who could give the best account of day-to-day life before emancipation were the people most directly affected by the institution: the enslaved. Scholars of American slavery are particularly familiar with this phenomenon. Historians encounter interesting people there whose lives appear in mere snippets, spurring curiosity that can never be entirely satiated. Saidiya Hartman illustration by Johnalynn Holland
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