In her work Fine Black Boy For Sale, Williams writes about the way in which slavery ripped families apart, causing tremendous difficulty for children. The author wrote this because he believed that much literature had neglected the human side of slavery. When most people discuss slavery in the abstract, they fail to focus on the actual effects of slavery to the little boys and little girls who were ripped from their families to be put to work. Of this, the author wrote, “Sale of this child would almost certainly result in separation from his family” (Williams). The goal, it seems, was for the reader to understand fully that though this child was a piece in an economic transaction, he was more important than that. He was an actual child, just the same as any other child, and that the horrors of slavery were seemingly lost on the people who were making money off of it. That a child could be sold as a commodity like this illustrates the true evil of slavery, according to the author.
The devastation of slavery is something that is not covered properly in much literature. There has been an effort, it seems, to whitewash the history of the United States to remove the reality of slavery from view (Adamkiewicz). It is not clear what the goals of the people who do this happen to be, but their efforts ensure that the pain of people is reduced and that Americans in general do not come to understand exactly what happened in their own country. Slavery is treated like an intellectual question often times, and the horrors of slavery—like a little boy being sold to another human being for the purpose of work—are sometimes glossed over in favor of bigger, larger, and more abstract themes that allow people to shed responsibility in a way that is corrosive.
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- Adamkiewicz, Ewa A. “White Nostalgia: The Absence of Slavery and the Commodification of White Plantation Nostalgia.” Aspeers 9 (2016).
- WILLIAMS, HEATHER ANDREA. “Fine Black Boy for Sale: Separation and Loss among Enslaved Children.” Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, 2012, pp. 21–46, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807882658_williams.4.
