The above image is a famous diagram often referred to as "Description of a Slave Ship."  It was used by early abolitionists to illustrate the great horror of the Atlantic slave trade to a public that otherwise was mostly content to enjoy its slave-produced items without thinking of the consequences of its consumption.  I retrieved the image at http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/abolition/gallery/index.asp.  The linked website contains other images in the public domain worth viewing.  A story earlier last year in the Cornell Daily Sun reflects on the power of the image, both in its use in the abolitionist cause and the insights it still holds for us today.  The article is an excellent read and may be found at http://cornellsun.com/node/41076.

The image drives home for me the point made by Sidney Mintz in Sweetness and Power (1985) about the dependence of the transatlantic triangle trades on the "false commodity" of human beings.  Mintz's language about the slaves' being "themselves consumed in the creation of wealth" by the trade routes echoes early abolitionists' claims that in ingesting slave-produced sugar people were drinking human blood (43).  But the image itself of the ship seems to show human beings swallowed up, almost monstrously.  It is hard for me to look at the image and not think about people who were quite literally buried alive in such ships.  If they survived the voyage, they faced a life of hardship seemingly unimaginable for us today: a deathly life.

The shapes in the diagram are recognizably human but also anonymous, which only adds to the image's horror.  Part of being made into a commodity is being stripped of one's identity as a human being.  What I admire about slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass's and Harriet Jacobs' is their power to give a voice back to people who have been made anonymous objects.