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Daina Ramey BerryThe Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapter 5-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Elderly and Superannuated”
This brief chapter focuses on enslaved people 40 and over. The opening auction scene begins with Ponto, an enslaved man claiming to be much older than the 32 years his auctioneer claims he is. It is unknown how often enslaved people interrupted their own sale in an attempt to influence it.
The average life expectancy for an enslaved person was 25, while the average white person lived to 39. Most studies of market prices do not consider enslaved people beyond the age of 35. Enslavers, however, often did monetarily value what they referred to as “superannuated” enslaved person.
Berry argues that there are generally two ways that enslavers thought about older enslaved people: They were either highly regarded or disregarded. When disregarded, they are often described as being “turned out,” as Moses Grandy describes. When monetary values decrease to the point where enslaved people cannot be sold on the market for profit, however, they are sometimes able to secure manumission or buy themselves. In these cases, Berry contends that the external value “converged with the internal” (132): “[B]ecause their financial value was so low, enslaved people did not have to compete against the price tag on their bodies” (132).
Some enslavers, like Dr. Carson of Cane Brake Plantation, made provisions in their wills for the care or freedom of older enslaved people. However, Mississippi law stipulated that liberated enslaved people had to leave the state, which meant that some older people would have to leave their families behind if all were not liberated at once.
The chapter concludes with Isaac, a 40-something enslaved person who attempted to lead a rebellion in South Carolina in 1816, on the witness stand. Berry writes that “Isaac had a soul value, and it was evident to all who interacted with him. This internal, self-constructed value manifested itself as confidence, resolve, and belief in freedom” (144). The narrative regarding Isaac, however, is provided by way of John C. Vaughan, a Kentucky newspaper editor, not Isaac himself. Vaughan records that when Isaac is hung for attempting to liberate his family and community, his final words are “I’ll die a freeman.” According to Vaughan, he then jumped up as high as he could. Berry describes Isaac as jumping “to his death on his own terms, not because the floor fell from under him” (146).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Postmortem and Ghost Values”
Chapter 6 opens with the public autopsy of Joyce Heth in 1836. Heth had been part of Barnum’s “Freak Show,” and Barnum made $42,000 off the display of Heth while she was alive. Barnum claimed that she was 150 years old, and the public spectacle of her autopsy revolved around determining her age and was another money-maker for Barnum.
The chapter more broadly examines the “postmortem journeys of deceased enslaved people” whose bodies were used, without consent, by medical schools (152). Almost all of Berry’s sources are from the physicians who trafficked in these bodies. This “journey” is one that few scholars have studied.
Between 1760 and 1876 medical students dissected between 4,000 and 8,000 human bodies. The only bodies that could be legally obtained were those of executed criminals whose bodies were not claimed and those of enslaved people (with the enslaver’s consent). The history of how these bodies were obtained is particularly difficult to determine, and Berry states that her focus is on the bodies in circulation.
Most states did not pass anatomy acts until the 1880s, and many teachers robbed graves to procure dissection “specimens.” Some professors paid what were called “resurrectionists” to steal bodies from cemeteries at night while these resurrectionists worked as janitors at the medical school by day.
Berry approaches the domestic cadaver trade by way of an analogy to agricultural production, as the trade followed a cyclical calendar in which “body snatching” happened during cooler months to avoid decomposition. For a short distance, bodies were placed in cotton cadaver bags, but when longer distances were involved, bodies were preserved in casks filled with either whiskey or brine and sometimes grain.
Berry argues that the enslaved “corpse-turned-specimen” was approached as more human than when alive. At the same time, this procurement of bodies demonstrates a “disrespect of African American life” and other lives, too (156). Some of the most prominent scientists of the time were directly involved in this disrespect.
Medical schools were involved in a complicated infrastructure that did not only involve the grave robber but a network of agents and brokers, chemicals, and material needed to transport bodies. Both Southern and Northern physicians collaborated to enable the trafficking of these corpses.
“Resurrectionists” were generally enslaved men, though many of them remained in their positions post-emancipation. Many resurrectionists could dig into a grave and get a body within 30 minutes or so, breaking open the head of the coffin, and then hooking the body under the eye or chin, and pulling it out.
At the Medical College of Georgia, faculty depended on Grandison Harris, an enslaved man, to procure their bodies. Faculty members each owned one-seventh of Harris and could sell their share of him if they left the school. In various university records, he is referred to as a teaching assistant and generally valued for his anatomical knowledge. Though enslaved, he was paid and received room and board. After many years, the dean of the college purchased Harris’s wife and son. The Black community itself had “mixed feelings” about Harris. In 1989 construction workers found the remains of over 400 bodies in the basement of the Old Medical College, some of which were certainly obtained by Harris.
At the University of Virginia, Professor John Staige Davis insisted on at least 25 bodies a year. The underground trafficking in the domestic cadaver trade was especially vigorous in the region between Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, and Berry examines the trade routes between them specifically. Though separated by only about 70 miles, the trip took two days by carriage. Davis of the University of Virginia worked in close coordination with physicians in the Norfolk area, who kept track of Black funerals so that bodies could be snatched and shipped to Charlottesville for medical students. They were often packed in bran and moved by ship to Richmond and then by rail to Charlottesville.
Similar to Grandison Harris at the Medical College of Georgia, Chris Baker was an enslaved resurrectionist at Virginia Medical College (now Medical College of Virginia) in Richmond, where he lived and worked in the building known as Egyptian Hall, where he was purportedly born. His father had also worked for the university and may have instructed him. Like Grandison Harris, he also remained in his position after emancipation. In 1882 he was indicted with two other people for grave robbery, briefly jailed, and then pardoned by the governor. He remained at the university until his death in 1919.
Berry contends that people, no matter what their race, had “mixed feelings” about Baker, as they had about Harris. Members of the medical community write with praise of Baker, but Black parents purportedly told their children to hide whenever they saw him coming. Baker was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Richmond.
An anatomical review board was established in 1884 to regulate cadavers. With the institutionalization of the cadaver trade, universities had to begin keeping careful records, which “eerily mirrored plantation ledgers” (186).
The cadaver trade was so strong in the 19th century that many physicians who participated in the trade were worried about their own bodies being stolen after death. These physicians, though, had the means to ensure that their bodies were safeguarded, and some chose cremation, newly available in the late 19th century.
Berry concludes by describing the ways that, even after death, bodies and parts of bodies often remain in circulation, hoping that “the bodies and souls uncovered here rest in peace” (193).
Epilogue Summary: “The Afterlives of Slavery”
Berry turns to enslaved people for “the final word,” quoting Elizabeth Keckley’s belief that “at the grave, at least, we should be permitted to lay our burdens down” and Lucy Turner, a descendant of Nat Turner, who stated that “there is a Victory in the Grave” (194).
The Epilogue then moves to the discovery of the remains of 26 unidentified African Americans that Chris Baker likely collected at the Medical College of Virginia. As with remains discovered at the Medical College of Georgia, these remains were sent to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, for forensic study. In 2014 the Virginia General Assembly issued a joint resolution “recognizing the training of nineteenth-century physicians in Richmond” and the work of Chris Baker (195). The medical college is also working to create a memorial to “commemorate the contributions of Richmond’s African Americans whose bodies were stolen for anatomical dissection and the furtherance of science and medical research” (195).
Berry ends with Mingo, an enslaved man imprisoned for attempting to liberate himself. She concludes by stating that “enslaved people’s understanding of their soul values transcended the external values placed upon their bodies. And with this realization, their souls were at peace” (197).
Chapter 5-Epilogue Analysis
Berry brings crucial information to light regarding the alliance between enslavers and scientists in her lengthy and information-dense final chapter, and this is perhaps the most important contribution of the book. The exploitation of both humans as well as nonhuman animals “for science” has a well-documented history, and Berry adds an important dimension to this, contributing to both slavery studies and scientific studies.
More specifically, Berry repeatedly states that the corpse, in becoming a specimen, acquired a human status that had been denied when enslaved people was alive. The corpse was desired, after all, because it was recognized as human. This status, however, is in tension with what she calls the “disrespect” of grave robbing that facilitates this very recognition of humanity. In the Epilogue Berry repeatedly quotes enslaved people as offering “the final word” in stating the importance of burial and a final “resting” place. Further analysis of the relation between this “disrespect” and human recognition is an important topic for future scholarship.
Speaking to the theme of The Relation Between Medicine and Slavery, Berry cites recent Virginia legislation that recognizes the 19th-century training of physicians as well as the work of Chris Baker. This legislation, however, does not recognize enslaved people whose bodies were taken and whose families and friends’ mourning rituals were disrespected. Like the recent legislation in Virginia to recognize scientists, the movement to construct a memorial at Medical College of Virginia to “commemorate the contributions” of those stolen for “the furtherance of science and medical research” (195) similarly seems to dismiss what Berry presents as the “final word” of enslaved people. As quoted by Berry, the commemoration casts the nonconsensual use of a corpse as “contribution,” which smooths over the violence of grave robbing and the disrespect for the mourning of the living.
While this attempt at commemoration recognizes that the procurement of bodies was, in fact, stealing, its focus is on the use of the bodies for research and teaching and hence their “contributions.” The memorial, then, focuses on and upholds science as an ethical and progressive means and end rather than upholding the grievability of those stolen (and acknowledging the violence done to the living in disrespecting their mourning). This is another tension that Berry brings to the surface but fails to analyze in light of the testimony of enslaved people that she presents as “the final word.”
In a reflection of the theme of External Valuation (Commodification) and Internal Valuation (Soul Value) Within Slavery, Berry concludes with assurances that enslaved people’s understanding of their soul value transcended external values imposed on them and that, therefore, their souls “were at peace.” It is those people who were most radically resistant to slavery, such as Nat Turner, John Copeland, Shields Green, Dangerfield Newby, and Isaac in which a remarkable confidence and indignant “peace” is evident in their manifestation of soul value.
Yet the assurance that an articulation of one’s intrinsic value enables “peace” remains an assertion that is made questionable by the historical evidence. Berry earlier contends, after all, that enslaved people did not always cultivate and manifest an internal soul value that exceeded the one imposed on them, as she states that some suffered a “social death” within the atrocity of their enslavement. Despite the book’s recognition of the violence of enslavement and commodification, there is arguably an elision of this damage in concluding with the assertion of transcendence over external valuation through internal valuation. Berry desires to focus on this transcendence, yet many in slavery studies have argued that enslavement was crushing in its violence and such “transcendence” was rare or even impossible. It is unclear, too, what the assertion that “souls were at peace” (197) actually means. Nat Turner’s righteous rage was not a peaceful one, after all.
Other complexities that Berry illuminates but does not fully discuss include the ubiquitous participation of enslaved people themselves in grave robbing and the trafficking of corpses. While Berry consistently pauses to ask brief strings of questions regarding the experiences and thinking of enslaved people—revealing her attempt at Foregrounding the Manifestation of Soul Value and Enslaved Intellectual Life—she fails to do so with Chris Baker and Grandison Harris. Did Baker and Harris think that their acts were, in fact, disrespectful, or not? Did they think that they served a greater good in procuring these bodies? And how did they think of themselves in relation to the medical community and the enslaved community? Why did they continue their work after emancipation? Is it possible that they considered their work not only as the resurrection of a corpse but also the resurrection of humanity in the scientific recognition of the enslaved corpse as human? While Berry repeatedly shows the ways that enslaved people appropriated, with radical revision, the language of the enslavers, is it possible that something similar happened for Harris and Baker in their approach to these resurrections? Did “resurrection” mean something different to them than it meant to the white scientists who wanted these bodies for anatomical purposes? Is their work about the creation of external valuation that recognizes humanity in death, and how does this relate to internal valuation?
Along these same lines, are there important differences between those who paid enslavers for bodies and those who dug bodies up from the grave? Did Baker and Grandison themselves think about these methods differently? While we may never be able to answer these questions, the book revolves around the posing of unanswerable questions regarding the intellectual lives of enslaved people, and the lack of these questions in the final chapter is striking.
The purely historical question remains of why grave robbing was necessary in the first place during slavery. It is unclear, for instance, why many enslavers refused to sell the bodies of the enslaved dead when they willingly sold them alive. While not the focus of Berry’s study, the existence of domestic cadaver trade raises questions about how enslavers themselves thought about the commodification of enslaved people and, more broadly, about the relation between enslavers and enslaved.
Berry brings to the forefront important historical information, placing the sciences as professionally profiting off slavery. Her contention that what happens to the dead matters has recently been taken up by philosophers such as Judith Butler, who argues that grievability is the means by which lives are recognized. Thus, when deaths are seen as ungrievable, the lives of that community are devalued. Berry’s work demonstrates an unexpectedly complicated relation to grievability, where enslavers themselves are potentially more respectful of the dead than scientists. This is yet another topic that deserves scholarly attention.
