Not an obvious place to stop doing TransAmerica, nor did we plan to visit it, either. Due to a change of Canadian immigration law while we were in NY, we need to de-tour to the Consulate.
We use the waiting time to explore the town and end up enjoying Buffalo’s engaging architecture and some of the best soup in our journey, in at the Buffalo Public Library, as unexpected as our pit stop. As we tuck into double mushroom soup, we pour over its life-changing experience.
It is something else entirely to spend one’s life playing with the slavery concept than to see its original ugly face. For in the Library’s Black History Room, for the first time ever, we see the original documents of the Colonial South, slave contracts and certificates.
It is seeing them up-close that shocks us rather thank known historic facts, the ugliness of detail. For we no longer recall history in our minds, we are looking in people’s faces, upfront and personal, and see them listed by name, age and gender and by how skilled their are.
A gang of sixty Negros, field hands, available for purchase, 1/3 in cash upfront, 1/3 in securities, 1/3 over next 2 seasons.
Mary, the only skilled woman in a “reproductive” gang of thirty two.
Four infants.
We study it all in silence, half-believing our own eyes.
We leave thoughtful and transformed. We know deep in our gut that we will never again be able to play with the modern “SM slave” concept – completely different though they are – without the haunting awareness of what the word meant, and still means, somewhere else in the world.
