04 Sold Down the River

MASTERS AND SLAVES

What struck me most clearly, in reading first-person accounts of slavery, is the enormous variety of personal experiences in what was by definition a hideously dysfunctional relationship. Some masters were very nice to their slaves. Some slaves were maliciously rebellious and manipulative.

Some masters nailed their slaves up in barrels and rolled them down hills. Some masters sold families as units and others didn't think twice about splitting them up. Some slaves poisoned their masters, sabotaged farm equipment (though the word "sabotage" didn't exist until the early twentieth century), deliberately injured work animals or their masters' children.

In some ways, Gone With the Wind is as accurate as Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Men and women, both white and black, reacted to these conditions with the entire conceivable (and in some cases inconceivable) spectrum of emotions and behaviors: loyalty, resentment, kindness, patronization, uncaring.

The critical thing about all these accounts is, that if you were a slave, you could just as easily get one sort of master, and treatment, as you could another. What happened to you was entirely arbitrary.

There was nothing you could do about it. And there was no redress.

One of the most amazing things I've encountered in my research on slavery was that any slave, male or female, was able to remain reasonably cheerful, survive emotionally, raise children, sing songs of any sort, and get on with their lives under the conditions described. I am recurrently and repeatedly astonished at the adaptability and strength of the human spirit.

Naturally, in writing a murder mystery involving slavery, I've written about a harsh master who treated his family as poorly as he treated his slaves. If he was a nice person I wouldn't be telling this story. He had plenty of spiritual brothers out there, and plenty of fellow-slaveowners who would have been horrified by his behavior-although quite possibly they wouldn't have considered it their business to do anything about it.

In writing any work of fiction about a condition like slavery (or Nazism, or child abuse, or the enslavement of women) one runs the risk of trivializing horrors by weaving them into the background, by making them part of the scenery-part of the game. I've done my best to portray conditions and attitudes as they were, insofar as I have found them in my studies of the period. If I have offended those whose families actually endured the conditions I've described, or belittled their experience and suffering, I apologize, for the offense was unintentional. I'm not seeking to make anyone into a saint, or anyone into a monster-only to tell a story as it might have taken place, and to stay as close to the truth-and to human nature-as I can.

BARBARA HAMBLY attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer.