The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Content Warning: This section discusses the system of race-based slavery in the United States, the commodification of enslaved people, execution, sexual assault, rape, and trafficking in human corpses.

“Rather than follow a chronological structure, the book is organized around the life cycle of an enslaved person’s body.”

Berry centers the life cycle of enslaved people not only thematically but also structurally. The stages of life largely (but not entirely) determine the respective monetary values that are assigned to enslaved individuals.

“Untangling what I call the domestic cadaver trade, I also address some aspects of enslaved people’s ideas about the afterlife and their preferences for specific burial rituals, even when doctors wanted to harvest their bodies for dissection.”

Doctors approached enslaved people’s corpses as crops that could be “harvested,” with a blinding focus on what could be gained in the penetration and exploration of bodies they stole or bought, without consent, that has contributed to the continuing inequities in public health. They did this without concern for enslaved people’s burial rituals and communal traditions of mourning.

“Value is used here as a noun, verb, and an adjective. It is active, passive, subjective, and reflexive.”

Berry explores the question of value as a number ascribed as well as the action of ascribing that number. In addition, value is something that is subjective and experienced and considered internally by enslaved people, both in their cultivation of their own valuing of themselves and also in their felt experience and thinking about imposed commodification.