She applied the Page 99 Test to her book Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping 1680-1807, and reported the following:
Page 99 comprises endnotes from Chapter 3 (‘Voices from the Sea: Documentary Narratives of Middle Passage Voyages’). This is unsurprising, indeed characteristic—this is a lengthy book, with more than 1500 notes supporting its 12 Chapters—but is not, for present purposes, illuminating. So, I have turned back to page 90, the last full page of Chapter 3. This contains an extract from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789): one of very few accounts of the voyage on a slave ship written by an African (though see below), and by far the longest. In fact, I make little use of this famous narrative between Chapters 3 and 11, but the reasons for that are a central discussion point in Chapter 12 (‘The Middle Passage Re-Membered: A Conclusion in Three Objects’), where one of the three objects in question is Equiano’s book. By the time readers reach Chapter 12 they have become very familiar with accounts of eighteenth-century slave ships made by British sailors who had crewed them, and who were questioned in Parliament about their experiences (1788-1792). Crew narratives are at the heart of my book: I draw on them repeatedly in exploring the design of British slave ships (Chapter 5), African understandings of these vessels (Chapter 6), the trade goods they carried (Chapter 7), the African goods they transported home to Britain (Chapter 8), and the Middle Passage as experienced by both captives and crews (Chapters 9-11). Equiano’s account appears rarely in these chapters; not because of a fractious, ongoing scholarly debate concerning his birthplace, and questioning whether his account is a fiction, but because virtually everything he had to say about the Middle Passage had been said before, by someone else. As I argue in Chapter 12, I do consider that Equiano’s account is a fiction; but I make that argument whilst asking why so few detailed African accounts of the voyage into slavery exist. My conclusion is that those Africans who endured the slave ship did not want to remember it; or not, at least, in writing. Their Middle Passage was with them forever but, caught somewhere between the imperative to recall and the need to forget, it was remembered in ways that challenge scholarship today.Learn more about Materializing the Middle Passage at the Oxford University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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