Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

In this stark depiction of slaves and their ""utter alienation from the most basic norms of everyday life,"" Smallwood simultaneously delivers a lucid popular history and expands scholarly understanding of slavery with a thorough, clear-eyed look at the dreaded Middle Passage and how it shaped the slave experience. She begins by examining the economics, politics and logistics of capturing, and selling Africans. Taking on ""The Anomalous Intimacies of the Slave Cargo,"" Smallwood is particularly adept at portraying, in detail, the unbearable conditions of the slave ships. Disease, violence and death loomed large over the tightly-packed human payload, as did the horrors of the unkown: well aware they would never return home, most were unsure where they were going-many expected to be eaten-and it was common for slaves to jump overboard to their certain deaths. Once on the opposite shore, of course, there were more humiliations to come, which Smallwood examines unflinchingly. Extensive research, much of it from primary sources, forms Smallwood's basis, but she has a storyteller's knack for well-pitched anecdotes and pointed examples, as in the simple, heartbreaking notation from a captain with a diseased, largely unsaleable haul: ""the rest being Refuse and Boys & Girls soe very small that divers of them were under eight years old.""