The Weeping Time

This is a great book with masses of detailed scholarship presented in a readable format. This should be basic reading for anyone interested in American history. Fundamental to the experience of America's development into a modern nation was slavery. This book gets at the nature of being a commodity and chattel as a human being, a sencient individual and one that has family that you are being seperated from. How can a family be sold?

This book is excellent. The author does wish you to suffer and her constant repitations leave you a little sad for her. This is a subject that she is objective enough to present as a clear and comprehensive account of the implications of the slave auction, but not one that she can or would seperate her obvious trauma in dealing with this material. Perhaps she is right to do so. This is not a subject you can ever deal with in a cold and logical way. You have to feel out traumatic this is through the generations to gain any insight as to why it is relevant now.

On the other hand you might feel the author is not quite aware of how she is presenting this, as she is so caught up in the emotions. Also her idea that one way of healing is for America to be more Christian. This seems somewhat paradoxical not only biblical precedents and acceptance of slavery but also the history of the USA as being deeply religious since its inception until today.

Anne C. Bailey must be congratulated as a brilliant scholar who makes history matter, and matter in a fundamental way. She is also hopeful of a way to reconcile a society so divided by its history, even if she is not clear how.

The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History by Anne C. Bailey focuses in a very illuminating fashion on a huge slave auction held on a plantation on an offshore island in Georgia. It took two days, March 2nd and 3rd in 1859 to auction the 456 persons held as slaves on the Butler Plantation, including not just men, women and children (who were put to work in the fields at around six years old) but thirty babies. The owner of the plantation Pierce Butler lived in Philadelphia in grand style on the earnings of the plantation, the labor of the slaves. He was a gambler and a stock market speculator and got himself in serious financial problems. He decided to sell the bulk of the slaves on his plantation to raise funds. Most of the slaves had lived on the plantation all their lives.

Bailey lets us see the terrible trauma and degradation of being treated like livestock, examined, prodded and commented upon by the auctioneer. One of the greatest fears was being sold away from your families, never to see them again. Married couples were kept together but non-married couples, siblings, parents and grandparents had no such protection. Young women were judged as breeding stock and sly comments were made about "the lucky master" who bought them. The main business of the plantation was growing rice, a very labor intensive enterprise. Cotton was a sideline. Of course there were house hold slaves also. At the auction a slave would be briefly described by their Occupation and condition.

The owner of the plantation married, in Philadelphia, a former Shakespearean actress who was opposed to the institution of slavery. Bailey shows us how this divide in thinking wrecked the marriage, just as it was to nearly destroy the country in a few years.

Bailey covers a lot of ground in her work, from marriage customs, African heritage, music and religion. I learned something about my own heritage in her discussion of food. Long ago, pushing sixty years ago, my grandmother would serve on New Year's Day a mixture of rice and black eyed peas she called "hoppin John". It was explained that this was thought to bring good luck in the coming year. I did not until I read Bailey's wonderful book realize that this was a dish derived from African food traditions, that the black eyed pea much beloved by my ancestors (since my grandmother passed long ago no one has the time or will to shell the peas) and the rice we ate every day came from seeds brought from Africa. Bailey tells us the slaves were fed rice as the thinking was they would be more docile if they had familiar food.

Bailey goes into details about the lives of the once auctioned and now free slaves after the civil war, she lets us see how hard the formerly enslaved worked to reunite with loved ones and keep their families strong. She extends her story up to the current day where the consequences of slavery are still strongly impacting American society.

I really have just one change or addition I would have appreciated in this book. When we are told a prime rice worker was sold for $1200.00 we don't have a frame of reference for what that amount of money represented in 1859. Just a brief presentation of the costs of items in society would have helped me a lot.

In reading Bailey's book I learned a lot about Southern USA history. This is an academic work, meticulously documented, but fully accessible to general readers. I totally endorse it to all interested in slavery, African American history, or the old south. You cannot begin to understand American history without understanding the role the slave trade played in the country.


ANNE C. BAILEY
is a writer, historian, and professor of History and Africana Studies at SUNY Binghamton (State University of New York). In her works of non- fiction, she combines elements of travel, adventure, history, and an understanding of contemporary issues with an accessible style.  She is a US citizen who grew up in Jamaica, WI and in Brooklyn, New York.
Bailey is committed to a concept of “living history” in which events of the past are connected to current and contemporary issues.  She is also concerned with the reconciliation of communities after age old conflicts like slavery, war and genocide. Her non-fiction book, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Beacon Press) and her current work,  The Weeping Time: History, Memory and the largest slave auction in the United States, (forthcoming Cambridge University Press, fall 2017) reflect that commitment. From annecbailey.net

Mel u
Rereadinglives.blogspot.com