Commodification & Enslaved People

• Jourden H. Banks, born into slavery, sold three times, escaped twice, and eventually attained freedom.

Banks's Early Life and Epiphanies

• Early life seemed relatively pleasant initially, but changed as he matured.
• Banks realized his difference from his enslaver's son, Alexander, after Alexander started beating him.
• Banks fought back due to his father's warning about enduring beatings.
• Banks kept track of the whippings he "owed" Alex and retaliated in kind.
• Banks understood his "soul value" and separated himself from his enslaver early in life.
• Banks experienced an epiphany when he realized that Alex went to school, while he was sent to scare crows in the fields.

Enslaved People and Death

• Wilma King refers to this realization as "the quantum leap" into the world of work.
• Enslaved youth and young adults learned about their place in the world as they aged.
• Banks's understanding of enslavement was solidified by the sale of his sisters, the severe beating of his mother, and his enslaver's death.
• Enslaved adults knew that an enslaver's death often meant the breaking up of families.
• Banks was put on the auction block in the summer of 1857 and tried to liberate himself by running away.

The Auction Block

• Banks demonstrated defiance during interviews with potential buyers by not revealing information about his health and skills.
• Banks was eventually purchased for $1,200.

Commodification

• Explores how enslaved people recalled and responded to their monetary value throughout life.
• Examines enslaved and free blacks' values, as well as individuals with a vested interest in their fiscal vitality during their lives, at their death, and even after death.
• Intimate ties between enslavers, physicians, and human property show how commodification touched all aspects of enslaved people's lives.
• Addresses an intellectual history of enslaved people's thoughts, expressions, feelings, and reactions to their own commodification.

Book Structure

• Each chapter represents a window into enslaved people's awareness of their monetary value.
• Places them in conversation with enslavers' accounting of their bodies from birth to death.
• Focuses on the life cycle of the enslaved person's body rather than a chronological structure.
• Examines the spiritual and financial value of human commodities before and at birth, and even after death, which forces a reconsideration of the life cycle of human property.

The Life Cycle of Human Property

• Explores the meaning of having a projected or real price from preconception to postmortem.
• Even unborn children of expectant mothers were marked with a monetary value.
• Addresses who would receive money for a body after an enslaved person died.
• Financial value of enslaved bodies was sometimes contested in court, depending on the cause of death.

Exploitation of the Dead

• Death became a monetized value that accrued interest until cases were settled.
• Some dead bodies were cultivated as cadavers and sold to medical schools for anatomy courses.
• Addresses enslaved people's ideas about the afterlife and their preferences for burial rituals, even when doctors wanted to harvest their bodies for dissection.

Experiences as a Fugitive

• Banks was jailed in Smithland, Kentucky, in October 1857 for seven months and two days, in a jail that was more like a place of punishment than a place of detention.
• Jailers tried to extract answers from prisoners.
• Banks found it ironic that the jailers believed that the "worse we were treated the more likely we should be to tell where we came from."
• Banks and fellow captives shared a code of secrecy and prison life was "a trap."

Enslaved as Currency

• The author analyzes slave value as literal currency and worth, with a constant connection to wealth and resources
• Physicians treated the sick, enslavers responded to notices, and two whites came when convicted of murder and other crimes.
• Banks encountered an emaciated man who shared his cell and was near death.
• The doctor who treated his sick cellmate learned that he suffered from tuberculosis and needed care and found out where he came from, as well as his enslaver's name.
• The doctor promised to purchase and care for him.

Valuation of the Enslaved

• The enslaver claimed his property and refused to sell a nearly dead man to a physician who was willing to pay a "price for his pound of flesh" above market value. The slave owner preferred to make an example of him, and asserting that dead or alive, he had use for his enslaved body
• Banks observed that the owners pursue the slaves who escape with a spirit of revenge.
• Enslaved people represented an exchangeable commodity in the eyes of traders, enslavers, and doctors.
• The financial value of human chattel touched every facet of their lives.
• Enslaved people had particular ideas about their value that differed greatly from their enslavers.
• Shifts the way we interpret slavery and adds to our understanding of social and cultural systems that continue to (de)value black life.
• This books incorporates the voices of those traded on the auction block along with the valuations of their captivity.
• Enslaved people speak back through their words and actions. They are inviting the reader to hear their stories, to see them as human beings.
• Explores a journey that hinges upon capitalism and commodification, as well as human emotions and expressions of love, loss, and grief.
• It is the story of human chattel and the duality of their position in life and death.
• Enslaved children announcement was found in form of records ledgers, bills or announcements

Value Metrics

• Monetary metrics of value were assigned to enslaved people to grade them vs personal assessment of worth
• People had special qualities that were graded and published through newspapers as the enslavers's perspective
• As commodities slaves were used in many subjective and reflexive contexts
• Slave's value was graded by its own personal spirit - an internal quality that defies monetization
• This signifies self worth of person, despite a weakening and negotiation to their condition
• Book aims to uncover living soul in the system
• "Flesh and Blood Values" means soul assessment

Death and Burial Rituals

• Unlike normal births death have slaves the opportunity towards redemption
• Some enslaved people were given obituaries if valued- and this provides insights to legacy, service and personality
• Multiple value sets encompass people/ property
• Slave value is also given by others like planters and doctors, and the sale price market
• Slave value also given at death at legal contests
• Once enslaved bodies die and are then used , they are given a ghost value
• They are transported / sold throughout the US at medical schools
• Legal disputes of hiring contracts where the slave also valued after life as deaths needs to be settled
• Enslaved people's history also present on dissection tables to prominent medical physicians
• Dead bodies are also subject to a coroner's inquest to find cause of death
• Limited publicity happens afte raslves die , few places will give coffins for slaves
• Slaves had limited access to rest, or their family
• Africans created an underground disposal system that used human bodies, later exhumed
• Blackely, Sappol, and Washington's research all contributed to black disposal / trafficking
• 1980 and 1990s remains found showing improper remains/ bodies given to slaves
• All led to create new studies to create slave lives, deaths, and the goal of the book is not to dispose like animal remains
• This aims at the idea of a world with death and liberation and valuing towards all souls for their value.

The content delves into the commodification of enslaved people, exploring their monetary valuation, resistance to enslavement, and the roles of enslavers and physicians. It highlights the unique aspects of studying the value of enslaved individuals and explores the factors that contributed to the understanding of the difference between enslaved individuals and others.