But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.
Difficult as it was to hear, slavery has benefited descendants like me - I believe there is a superior athletic gene in us.
If you feel like the beginning of your history is rooted in slavery, that really, I think, messes with your sense of self, your self-esteem, and your self-worth.
Slavery is something that is all too often swept under the carpet.
I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.
I can literally count on one hand how many slave stories have gotten notoriety over the past few years.
The inherited tradition is that we don't tell stories about slavery from the perspective of the slave. It's told through the president or the lawyer.
This and many others only confirmed me in the opinion, planted when I saw the sale of Martha Ann, and growing steadily thereafter, that slavery was an accursed business, and that the sooner my people were relieved of it, the better.
I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.