1974: THE SLAVE DANCER by Paula Fox, with illustrations by Eros Keith
In a hanged wooden box upon the top of which was carved a winged fish, my mother kept the tools of her trade.
Kurt Vonnegut's bleakest novel, 1982's Deadeye Dick, is a tough one to crack, mainly because it doesn't feature the same humanism I like reading in all of Vonnegut's work. It's set in the same city as his best novel, Breakfast Of Champions, but Vonnegut returned to the fictional Midland City, Ohio after a decade away, with a heavy and fragmented story about a gun accident and a unsuccessful play and the event that gets mentioned obliquely through the story and finally stated outright in the last few pages: a neutron bomb levels the entire city, killing thousands. We never learn whose bomb it was or why it was pointed at Midland City, but a group of political activists called the "Farmers of Southwestern Ohio for Nuclear Sanity" is starting to put forth their own theory in the final pages of the novel:
"... that the United States of America was now ruled, evidently, by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone…’They aim to bring slavery back,” said the farmer…‘They never gave up on it,’ he said. ‘The Civil War’ wasn’t going to make any difference in the long run, as far as they were concerned. Sooner or later, they knew in their hearts, we’d get back to owning slaves…What we figure,’ said the farmer: “These slaves aren’t going to be Americans. They’re going to come by the boatload from Haiti and Jamaica and places like that, where there’s such terrible poverty and overpopulation. They’re going to need housing. What’s cheaper - to use what we’ve already got, or to build new?’ He let us think that over for a moment, and then he added, ‘And guess what? You’ve seen that fence with the watchtowers [surrounding the fallout site]. Do you honestly believe that fence is ever coming down?’”
I want to assure you that Vonnegut wrote several novels after this - Bluebeard, Timequake - that were much more positive and possibly even life-affirming. Deadeye Dick is so bleak that Vonnegut put recipes in the middle of the text to break up all of the sadness. And that bleak prediction the farmer made was followed immediately by the narrator’s own theory:
“My own guess is that the American Government had to find out for certain whether the neutron bomb was as harmless as it was supposed to be. So it set one off in a small city which nobody cared about, where people weren’t doing all that much with their lives anyhow, where businesses were going under or moving away. The Government couldn’t test a bomb on a foreign city, after all, without running the risk of starting World War Three.”
Deadeye Dick’s world, in which the Government kills people just to see what would happen, or to grease the skids for bringing back slavery, is not our world. I am not some crank that believes that the government is deliberately killing us just so we can get numb to the idea of mass death. Unfortunately, I do think the government and the media are doing a lot of stupid stuff that has the unintended effect of making everyone numb to the idea of mass death. Like, if you wanted to kill a bunch of people very quickly and start bringing back the institution of slavery, you’d probably want to push a narrative that there was a massive labor shortage caused by the laziness and entitlement of, uh, poor people, and that this shortage would require us to loosen our standards and judgment on things like child labor. And, if you happened to be managing the government through a three year mass casualty event that happened to be the largest mass casualty event in American history, you would want to discourage any sort of policy choices that would minimize death, and just let the death happen, but discourage everyone from thinking about those deaths and just urge them to live their lives as if nothing unusual were happening.
And you would, in theory, want to start teaching people, early in life, that maybe slavery wasn't actually that bad, and that maybe even the slaves picked up some useful skills from the whole thing.
Despite what the state government of Florida is telling me, I am really coming around to the idea that the slave trade was, in fact, not a super fun time for all involved. 1974 medalist The Slave Dancer is brutal and visceral, detailing the story of a Creole boy who is kidnapped from New Orleans and press-ganged into service for a slaver captain. Young Jesse travels with the pirates to Africa to pick up a shipment of slaves, and on the return voyage, Jesse’s job is to play the fife and “dance” the slaves - in other words, force them to dance to keep them fit before they arrive in the Americas. This one is also very bleak, one of the heavier slavery narratives I’ve ever read, among books for adults or for children; it’s certainly a lot more difficult to read than Amos Fortune, Free Man.
Probably the most brutal novel about slavery that I’ve ever read - and I don’t think this is a particularly surprising pick - is Octavia E. Butler’s famous 1979 novel Kindred, about a Black woman in Los Angeles who gets inexplicably sent back through time to an antebellum plantation in Maryland. What makes Kindred such a wrenching read is not just the vividly detailed brutality, but also the fact that it’s being experienced and witnessed by a narrator who knows how bad slavery is, just like you do. Without the time travel element, Kindred would certainly still be well-written, but wouldn’t carry the same weight. It’s not just the horror of chattel slavery, it’s that it’s still horrifying a century later, that the horror still weighs on the Black narrator even though slavery is far in her past, until it’s suddenly not in her past anymore.
I’m not about to compare The Slave Dancer and Kindred, but author Paula Fox is using a similar technique as Butler does, by having a young boy narrate the story of his time aboard the slaver with unambiguous absolute certainty that slavery is inhuman and horrifying. Nothing that happens on the ship shakes his certainty, certainly not the screams from below decks as the ship begins to head back to the Americas from Africa, packed tightly with human cargo:
“But the stories did not drown out the sounds from the holds. Not all the gabble of the sailors, the sustained flow of the wind that drove us on, could mask the keening of the slaves as they twisted and turned on the water casks, or struggled to find an edge of one of a handful of straw pallets upon which to rest their shackled ankles. I dozed. I woke. Never to silence. Would it go on this way to the end of our voyage? Sharkey claimed they would settle down. Settle down to what?”
The Slave Dancer is the closest I’ve gotten to a Newbery winner that’s just a straight horror story, although, depending on where children go to school, they might have a teacher who is legally required to chase this passage with some commentary about, like, how those screaming bodies - meaning the ones that don’t die of fever or aren’t just thrown overboard at the whims of the cruel captain - actually learned some valuable skills when they were generously brought over as workers to the United States. And, of course, depending on where children go to school, they may not be able to read this book at all, since it might make some of the white students feel guilty about being white. Maybe the teacher could still get away with teaching the passage where a pirate complains to the narrator about how not enough Americans are sympathetic to the Irish, who were also technically slaves if you think about it; this exchange is clearly meant to be grimly ironic against the horrifying backdrop of the slave ship, and “grimly ironic” is the most polite treatment I can recommend for “you know the Irish technically had it worse than slaves” bullshit.
This was the first time I had ever read The Slave Dancer, which is certainly well-written but not necessarily a book I would have sought out, largely because it’s very bleak and very horrifying. If my daughters read it when they are in middle school, they will likely find it very bleak and very horrifying. But how else should they feel when they learn about slavery for the first time?
Jesse eventually escapes the ship after it returns to the Americas, brings a young African boy with him to Mississippi, and gets the boy passage to the northern states via the underground railroad. Jesse himself returns to New Orleans and reunites with his family, and mostly just tries, unsuccessfully, to forget anything ever happened:
“It did not take long, to my surprise, for me to slip back into my life as though I’d never left it. There were sign - brooding looks from my mother, Betty’s way of speaking softly to me as though I was an invalid, and, most startling, the change in Aunt Agatha who treated me now with affection and never called me a bayou lout. My mother guessed that the shock of my disappearance had changed her into what she had once been, a slightly soured but not bad-hearted woman. I was back in my life, but I was not the same. When I passed a black man, I often turned to look at him, trying to see in his walk the man he had once been before he’d been driven through the dangerous heaving surf to a long boat, toppled into it, chained, brought to a waiting ship all narrowed and stripped for speed, carried through storms, and the bitter brightness of sun-filled days to aplace, where if he had survived, he would be sold like cloth.”
Jesse can’t forget. In the final sentences of the novel, he admits that he can’t listen to any music anymore, not after forcing the slaves to dance on the decks. Midway through the novel, one of Jesse’s shipmates tells another story of a former crewmate irreversibly changed by his time aboard a slaver:
“I sailed on a ship with 500 slaves in the hold and 30 crew. At the end, there was 183 slaves alive and 11 crew. The boatswain killed the cook with his own carving knife a foot from a water cask. The rest died of disease. The Captain took his Bible and left that ship - and the sea. I’ve heard tales that he’s a walking preacher now, goes to towns and villages and gets up on a box and tells people the world is going to end any day, and if there ain’t no people, he tells the trees and the stones.”
This history, knowing that this horror happened, it poisons everything. And people in power refuse to admit that it ever happened, or that it was ever that bad. You may as well be living in a world without music or art. You may as well live in a world about to be destroyed by holy fire. You may as well live in the Dark Ages.
The final paragraph of Deadeye Dick reads, in full:
"You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet."
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1925 medalist, Tales From Silver Lands by Charles J. Finger.