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24 jazz
The French, of course, were clever and cynical. They had the negroes asked (in a language they didn't understand) whether they would like to come and be "apprentices" for seven years. Whatever they answered was taken as "yes." And so they were "apprentices" and not slaves. After seven years, these "apprentices" would be free; as free men they were useless. So, often, they were deliberately worked to death.
America, of course, passed in 1807 and 1820 high-sounding laws abolishing slave-trading. Having passed these laws, they alternated between preaching at British "colonialists", and jauntily out-smarting the "Limey" anti-slavery patrols. Half a century after these laws were passed, New York was fitting out fast slave ships at the rate of one a week. And a Mr. Lamar of Savannah was boasting of having netted $480,000 on one slaving trip.
Yet, with all this dollar-hypocrisy, America was a free society. And, as often happens, the free state casts up the exceptional individual to deal with the exceptional problem. Such a one was Abraham Lincoln who, when he first saw a slave market, exclaimed: "By God ... if I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard."
"You have to suffer to be beautiful," says the proverb. This was the suffering of negro slavery—the suffering that went into the Birth of the Blues. |
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