something queer going on

I'm temporarily suspending my rule about focusing on happy stuff to link you to this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates about a ca. 1865 photograph of freed slaves from New Orleans. The photograph was taken and distributed to raise money for the education of former slaves, and it was accompanied by a letter giving information about the lives of all the people depicted in it.

It's a powerful image, encapsulating the brutality of slavery (Wilson Chinn was branded on the forehead with the initials of the sugar planter who bought him; Mary Johnson suffered 50 lashes for being half an hour late with the morning coffee) and illustrating, with extraordinary vividness, the one-drop rule in action. Any child of a slave mother was a slave; any person with "one drop" of "Negro blood" was considered black. Because of the systematic sexual abuse of enslaved women by white men, a lot of black slaves looked indistinguishable from the white slave-owners who were, in many cases, their close blood relatives. This sentence from the letter accompanying the photograph says it all, really: "[Augusta Boujey's] mother, who is almost white, was owned by her half-brother, named Solamon, who still retains two of her children."

Just to be clear, I don't mean that slavery is somehow worse if the enslaved people happen to look white. My point is about the sickness of slavery culture that enabled people to, apparently without a pang of conscience, own their children and their half-siblings as slaves; it's also about the arbitrariness of racial definitions.

The post is one of a series by Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine, in "honor" of Virginia's recently-declared Confederate History Month; I'm going to look at the others now.