Week 3, Response



Dear Annette Gordon-Reed,




Thank you for this deeply meaningful, nuanced and searing book. And thank you for not reducing the particular human tragedy of slavery that you write about to simply its measurable economic conditions. Your book is testament to everything that numbers miss. You also pointed out that a reduction of slaves to numbers is what the slave-owners did in the records they kept, and that that narrative must be fully rewritten now from another perspective where the depths of the experiences can be reclaimed. You write, 

Each day when we broke for lunch or refreshments, I could hear murmurs of concern about the way things were proceeding. By the end of the conference, one participant, angered by what he perceived as the coldness of historians talking about slavery in terms of “the numbers of people sent here” and “the numbers of people sent there,” erupted. The conference, he charged, was devoid of feeling and emotion. Where was the scope of the human loss? Where was the sense of the bottomless tragedy of it all?


Your book touches the depths of “the scope of the human loss,” “the bottomless tragedy of it all.” This sense of immeasurable resilience too was captured just as strongly in your writing.

Immeasurable resilience and hope in times of bottomless tragedy and loss.

Thank you for that. And thank you for calling attention to the “echoes of that world” and helping your reader “understand that its effects are still present.” The past continues to ghost America’s present, and the ghost cannot be exorcised by merely changing the surface level appearances of institutions and laws.

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