Death Before Slavery

What did Africans know about slavery or to what extent did they know about slavery in The United States?  Would their decision differ if they knew about slavery in the United States?  Suicide or killing one’s family in order to escape slavery, the unknown, was a common practice.  In class a question was asked whether death was favored in comparison to slavery.  The answer was that this depended on each person and was a personal question.  In Homegoing and The African Americans, the unknown remains the largest factor in contemplating suicide. Suicide became so common amongst slaves that sharks would follow in the wake of slaver ships to eat the dead bodies in which some resulted from suicide.  While we may never be able to understand the thought process of these slaves in understanding the factors that lead to the ultimate decision of death or slavery, the unknown seems to play a large role in defining death. Suicide became a common practice amongst the readings and to many slaves was the more favorable outcome than the unknown.

“The white men. That is what my sister says. She says the white men buy us from these soldiers and then they cook us up like goats in soup” (Gyasi 2016, 44). Homegoing describes the unknown felt by many of the captured Africans in regard to their fate.  If they were being sent to their death, suicide may seem a more favorable outcome instead of waiting for the inevitable fate.  Furthermore, dying before being enslaved would just seem as a quicker and less painful choice for some. This question of death before slavery, extended to that of parents as well.  Killing one’s children instead of subjugating them to a life of brutality, slavery, and the unknown to some was the better choice.  In Soul by Soul,  “Lewis Clarke, in answer to a question commonly asked on the antislavery lecture circuit, remembered ‘a slave mother who took her child into the cellar and killed it. She did it to prevent being separated from her child’” (Johnson 1999, 34).  There are many questions and factors that play a role in deciding death before slavery.  However, these decisions remain solely to the individual. 

How do we know what is the better option? There is no understood better or worse option.  Death before slavery was a personal choice, one chosen by a parent or oneself that sought the least amount of pain.  While one can speculate that in many cases death was favored in comparison to slavery, each individual had their own decision at hand based on the factors in their own life.  Death before slavery may be a choice for many slaves.  The unknown and the known both may lead to death as the known, slavery, is just as bad as the unknown in many cases.