Saidiya Hartman poses a series of questions in her essay “Venus in Two Acts.” She asks how one can “revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence” and why one would “risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence?” (Hartman 4,5). Indeed, why subject anyone now to a third order still? Relatedly, Katherine McKittrick’s, in her “Mathematics Black Life,” asks why we must follow empiricist limits on history, confining our attention to the data provided through thoroughly biased archives of this past and how we can avoid using them in a way that rekindles its traumatic memory.
While we hope the SLIDE database allows some access into the institution of enslavement in St. Louis, we acknowledge it is nonetheless fundamentally limited in scope. In these archives enslaved persons are displayed as commodities. In most cases, no name is recorded; we are provided instead an age, a sex, and a skin tone. The records contain only the information found useful and necessary by the people and systems that benefited from and perpetuated their enslavement. This cannot be changed.
One way we attempted to avoid replicating the grammar of violence was by reorganizing the archival information in an effort to push enslaved individuals to the forefront. We did this by separating lines that contained multiple enslaved persons on them, restructuring documents that were organized by enslaver rather than enslaved persons, and preserving familial connections wherever possible.
We hope SLIDE can be used not to reiterate the violence against and commodification of the human lives it records, but, rather, to provide data points from which to begin to understand more completely the lives of the people mentioned in the data’s cold and comodified rows and columns. Marisa J. Fuentes’ book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is an example of how such narrow footholds can sustain upward progress in the effort to understand those lives. For a similar attempt to read behind the records, but grounded in Missouri, read Melton A. McLaurin’s gripping detective work in Celia: A Slave. To learn for yourself how a single court case can provide incomparable insight into the lived experience of individuals in enslavement, as well as the history of city, state, and country, visit the Revised Dred Scott Case Collection at Washington University in St. Louis.
For some student projects that have grown out of SLIDE, check out some final projects our Fall 2020 Practicum in Digital Humanities: Enslavement in St. Louis. Scroll through Adam Teich’s story-map of Lucinda Patterson’s remarkable life, from a disrupted “slave sale” to the founding of St. Louis’ first black schools (this essay won the CRE2 prize for Outstanding Student Paper about Race in St. Louis). You should also visit Julia Feller’s compelling account of Esther’s escape from Henry Shaw, founder of the Missouri Botanical Garden, in an infamous and ultimately tragic “stampede” across the Mississippi. These essays show how the meager crumbs of official records can be transformed into insight into the lives and experiences of the people and into transformative insights into the forces that have shaped St. Louis and America generally.