The Ethics of Narrating the Past – Sherri V. Cummings

What are the ethics of narrating the past?

I often wrestle with this question while researching the quotidian lives of African women and their daughters, in slavery and precarious freedom, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Saidiya Hartman, in her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” reminds us to respect the “shrieks, the moans, the nonsense and the opacity,” of their experiences despite the want, or rather the need, for an ideal end.¹ Hence, a reclamation takes place as I try to envision what these women and girls experienced, their version of events. I would be mendacious if I said it was (emotionally) easy.

Figure 1. Unnamed African girl. Sherri Cummings, “Rendered Useless.” AI generated art. December 10, 2023.

Take for example–a legal case between a prominent slave merchant and a wig maker in Newport, Rhode Island. At the center of the case is an unnamed sick African girl who arrived in the port city in the fall of 1751. She is an enigma, pushed to the background of a legal case that centers on her labor and monetary value. As I worked my way through the documents I wondered, how did her young mind make sense of her enslaved reality, away from her home and in a world that she did not comprehend? Because the Debt Recovery Act of 1732 allowed for the land, horses, chattel, and slaves of debtors in the colonies to be utilized in the satisfaction of debts, it may have allowed for the seizure of the sick African girl as payment of a debt owed to the slave merchant. Further, there is another question that we will never have the answer to, did she survive her distressing ordeal?

For the most part, during the colonial era enslaved girls were reduced to the bare labor their young bodies could provide. They were subjected to a social death that was very different from what enslaved adults experienced. This social death was facilitated by the severing of kinship relations, the prescription of slavery, colonial laws that categorized them as chattel property, and an apathetic, biased archive. My research involves asking questions such as: what conditions in West Africa caused her enslavement? What laws in colonial New England stripped her of her humanity, making her chattel to be bought for labor and traded to settle a debt?

This line of questioning allows for a more nuanced methodology that considers African cultural and historical elements affected by the transatlantic slave trade, the subsequent bondage of the young girl in Rhode Island and the trauma children faced due to the prescription of slavery that was placed upon them. Moreover, this line of questioning removes the colonial and archival lens that subjected her young life to the violence of abstraction, reducing her to a mere notation in a merchant’s account book or judicial petition. Asking these questions brings her to the fore, opening the chance reclaim her humanity and innocence so that a new narrative can emerge and the historical record can be challenged.

Sherri V. Cummings is an Assistant Professor at Rhode Island College. Her research interests focus on the Atlantic World, Early African American History and Africana Intellectual History. Within this context, she is interested in the lives of African women and their descendants throughout the African diaspora.