1This is the story of a man who was sold many times over, and of the price he paid for himself. He wrote it down with his own hand when he was grown, and what follows is as he told it.
2He was born, he said, in a green valley far inland in the country of the Igbo, many weeks' walk from any sea. His father was an elder of that place and bore the mark of it cut into his brow. They named him Olaudah, which means one who is favoured, one who has a loud voice and is well spoken.
3In that valley, when the grown people went out to the fields, the children were left together in one yard, and one child climbed a tree to watch. For there were men who came through the woods to steal children.
4He was eleven. On a certain day he and his sister were alone in the house. Two men and a woman came over the wall. Before either child could cry out, hands were over their mouths. They were tied and carried into the forest.
5They walked for two days. At night the brother and sister slept in each other's arms and wet each other with their tears. On the third day the men pulled them apart. He clung to her and screamed, and it made no difference. She was led away down one path and he down another.
6He was sold from hand to hand. Once, months on, in a town near a great river, he saw his sister brought into the same house. They ran to each other and could not speak. That night they slept on either side of the man who owned them, holding hands across his chest. In the morning she was taken away again. He never learned what became of her. He looked for her face in every crowd for the rest of his life.
7After six or seven months he came to the sea. He had not known there was so much water in the world. On it lay a ship at anchor, and he was carried aboard.
8There were men on that deck with red faces and loose hair, speaking a tongue like no tongue he had heard. There was a great copper pot boiling. There were black people of every nation chained together, and every face among them was a face of despair. He looked at the pot, and at the red faces, and he believed with his whole heart that he had been brought there to be eaten. He fell down on the deck in a faint.
9They put him below. Of that place it is enough to say this. People were laid on shelves, so close they could not turn. The heat and the stench were such that many sickened and died of the air alone. The cries of the women and the groans of the dying were in his ears day and night. He was sick, and wished to die, and would not eat. For that, two of the white men tied him across a beam and flogged him.
10Nets were hung along the ship's sides. He learned why. One day when the sea was smooth, two men who were chained together got through the netting and leapt, and a third after them. More would have followed if the crew had not driven them below. Two of the three were drowned. The third they caught, and flogged him without mercy for having chosen to die and not to be sold. The boy saw that. He understood from it what he now was. He was a thing with a price, and to throw oneself away was a theft from the owner.
11He was landed in an island of the western sea and not bought, being small. He was shipped on to a tobacco farm in Virginia. There an officer of the English king's navy saw him, and paid thirty or forty pounds, and took him to sea.
12The officer gave him a new name: Gustavus Vassa, the name of a king of Sweden. The boy said he would be called by the name he had. He was struck until he answered to the new one.
13He was a ship's boy then, through seven years of the great war between England and France. In a sea fight off the coast of Portugal he ran the length of the deck, back and forth, carrying powder to the guns, while the shot came through the ship's side and men fell to the right and left of him.
14For he had seen that they had a great magic, and he wanted it. His master and a white boy who was his friend would hold an open book before their eyes and seem to hear it speak. When he was alone, he would take up a book, and talk to it, and then put his ear down close to the page. It never answered. He was very much grieved that it stayed silent to him.
15The friend taught him his letters, and two kind sisters in London sent him to a school when the ship was in port. He was baptised in a church in Westminster. And he came to believe, from the talk of the sailors and from his master's own manner, that when the war ended he would be given his freedom, and his share of the prize money like any other seaman.
16The war ended. The ship came up the river to London in December. He had his books and his chest ready.
17His master came on deck and ordered him into the barge. He said he would fetch his things. The master said that if he moved, he would cut his throat. They rowed him down the river against the tide, from ship to ship, until they found one that was outward bound for the sugar islands. There the master sold him to her captain, across the cabin table.
18He stood up then, a boy of seventeen, and spoke. He told the new captain that he could not be sold. He said he had served his master many years, and that his master had taken all his wages and all his prize money. He said he had been baptised, and that by the laws of the land no man had a right to sell him.
19The captain told him he talked too much English, and that if he did not hold his tongue there were ways aboard to make him. His old master took his money, got down into the barge, and was rowed away. The boy watched until the boat was out of sight. Then, he wrote, his heart was ready to burst.
20The island they carried him to was called Montserrat. It was a place where men were worked in the cane with the whip from before light until after dark, and the life of a field hand was reckoned at a few years. What he saw done there he set down in his book plainly, so that it could not be denied.
21He was not sent to the cane. He could read and reckon, and he was bought by a merchant named Robert King, of the people called Quakers. King set him to work as a clerk and on the small ships that carried goods from island to island, under an English captain named Thomas Farmer.
22And now see what a mind does that will not be a thing.
23He had three pence. It was all he owned in the world. On a voyage to a Dutch island he bought with it one glass tumbler. In Montserrat he sold the tumbler for six pence. On the next voyage he bought two, and sold them for a shilling. And so on, voyage by voyage. He traded in the corners of the hold, in whatever space the captain would wink at, between his own duties.
24He had no law behind him. In one port two white men took the bags of fruit that were his whole stock, and laughed, and told him to complain if he dared; for a black man's word could not be heard in any court of those islands against a white man's. He followed them and begged. They gave back some. He went on buying and selling.
25One day his owner told him that he had paid forty pounds sterling for him, and that if ever he could bring forty pounds, he might have his freedom.
26He took that promise and kept it like a coal. It took him three years of trading in all. Then there came a morning when he had forty-seven pounds, wrapped in a cloth.
27He asked Captain Farmer what to do. The captain told him to come on a certain morning, when he and the merchant would be at breakfast together.
28He went in to them with the money in his hand and his heart beating so that he could hardly speak. He made his bow. He reminded his master of the promise.
29The merchant drew back. Give him his freedom? Where had he got the money? He answered: very honestly. The captain said that it was so, he had earned it with great diligence. Robert King said that the fellow got money faster than he did himself, and that he would never have made such a promise had he thought it would be paid so soon.
30It was the captain who moved. He clapped the merchant on the back. He said, as the book records it, "I think you must let him have his freedom."
31Robert King looked at the coins. Then he said he would not be worse than his promise. He took the forty pounds, and told his clerk to go to the register office and have the paper drawn.
32He went along that street, he wrote, hardly touching the ground. It said that Robert King, merchant, for the sum of seventy pounds in the money of that island, did set free a Negro man slave named Gustavus Vassa. And he who was named in it could read every word.
33He set down afterward how that day had been. "I who had been a slave in the morning, trembling at the will of another, now became my own master."
34Think what had happened in that room. A man had bought himself. He had paid a stranger the price of his own hands and his own breath, which the stranger had bought from another stranger, who had bought them from a thief. There was not one honest link in that chain back to the wall of his father's yard. And yet the only door the world had left him was to pay, and he paid, and went through.
35He was not safe on the other side. A free black man in those seas was free only as far as the next ruffian chose, and within a year men tried to seize him in a southern port and sell him again. He escaped by his wits. In time he came to London. He found, in the faith of the plain chapel-goers of England, a peace he kept until his death. But he did not find rest, for he had seen too much to rest.
36Now hear about the ship Zong.
37She was a slave ship, out of Liverpool, and on a crossing she ran short of water, or her captain said she did. There was sickness aboard. A slave who died of sickness was the owner's loss. But a slave who was thrown into the sea to save the ship was cargo lost by necessity, and for that the insurers must pay, thirty pounds a head.
38So over three days the crew brought up more than a hundred and thirty living men, women and children, and put them over the side. Some were in chains. One man caught a rope and climbed back aboard.
39When the ship came home, the owners claimed their insurance. The insurers would not pay. It went to court in London, and the lawyers argued it. They did not argue it as murder. No one was charged with murder. They argued it as a question of goods: whether the loss of the cargo had been needful.
40He read of it in a newspaper. He was the one who carried it, the next morning, to a stubborn Englishman named Granville Sharp, who had spent his life fighting such cases, and the two of them tried to have the crew tried for the killing. They failed. But they made London look at it. Until then a man could say that the trade was hard but lawful, a trade like any other. After the Zong he had to say, in so many words, that a hundred and thirty people were bales.
41Then he did the thing for which he is remembered. He sat down and wrote his life, from the wall of his father's yard to the forty pounds, in clear strong English. He put his own name on it, his first name, the one he had been beaten out of, beside the other. He had his picture set at the front, a black man in a good coat, holding an open book.
42He carried it himself from town to town, through England, Scotland and Ireland, for five years. It went through nine printings while he lived. There are some who say now that he was born not in Africa but in the Carolinas, and learned of the valley and the crossing from those who had lived them; the old papers do not agree, and the matter is not settled. What is sure is that he was a slave, that he bought himself, and that every part of his book that can be tested is true.
43It was the first time most who read it had heard the thing told from below the deck. They had been told that Africans did not feel as others feel. Here was one who remembered his mother, and had put his ear to a book. A reader had to close the pages and say he is not as I am, or keep them open and say he is. A great many kept them open.
44He did not live to see the end. He married, and had two daughters, and died in London in the spring of a year when the ships were still sailing. Ten years after his death, the Parliament of Britain forbade the trade.
45That was not his doing alone. It was the work of thousands, and of the enslaved themselves, who rose again and again in the islands. But his book was one of the lamps they saw by.
46In the year it came out, it lay for some weeks on a table in a bookseller's shop beside the great church of St Paul. A young woman who wrote for the bookseller's monthly paper took it up to review it. She had no money, no husband, and no one's leave to think. She read the story of a man who had been told he was a thing.
47She knew something of that. Now hear the last story of this book, which is hers.