BY JENNIE K. WILLIAMS, PH.D.

Considering the first line of James. W. C. Pennington’s 1849 narrative, the historian Walter Johnson has written that Pennington, a fugitive slave and abolitionist, intended to “trouble the boundary between ‘the slave trade’ and ‘the rest of slavery.’” Pennington’s point, Johnson tells us, was that regardless of where and by whom African Americans were enslaved, they were never safe from the worst slavery had to offer.

Johnson’s analysis is surely accurate. And yet, I wonder if we have overlooked the significance of Pennington’s addendum, “or relation.” It seems to me, that is, that Pennington’s point was not only about enslaved people’s perpetual vulnerability to slavery’s evils, but about the specific nature of those evils, which violated above all, enslaved people’s kinships and relational identities. According to the laws and logics of slavery, Pennington suggests, the enslaved maintained just one relation—that which exists between property and its price.

Slavery, after all, relied above all upon the cruelest of alchemies: the conversion of kin to commodity. For enslavers knew, as it takes no great genius to know, that property’s every value lies in its quality as unattached.

Thus, for the enslaved, kinship could not be something passively possessed. It was, instead, an identity and practice actively and insurgently claimed. Kinship, by its very definition, was resistance.

…and an ancestral inheritance beyond enslavers’ grasps.

In so many ways, meanwhile, enslavers sought to render African and African American kinship null and void.They separated children from their mothers and fathers…

Yet, in other ways, enslavers sought no much to destroy African American kinship but to warp it into something else entirely, something suited for the ends of mastery and control.

By laying claim to enslaved women’s wombs, for example, enslavers attempted nothing less than the bastardization of kinship itself. They sought, that is, to transform lines of descent into chains of production.

…and exploited family ties to keep enslaved people within their “geographies of control.”

In their assault on African American kinship, enslavers relied on many weapons, including the law…

…the eyes and ears of every white person…

Undergirding each of these things, though, and damning each one as “legitimate,” were documents.Thousands and thousands of documents.

…the same documents we now use to make “data.”