Rosetta's Child, Not named, Dead:' Slavery, Grief, Maternal Loss

Enslaved mothers and their children enter the archives in little more than fragments. Snippets of their lives, loves, and losses emerge from records imputed with the possibility of yielding profits. Miscarriages and deaths record financial loss. What of a mother’s grief? How did enslaved mothers grieve their children’s deaths? An archive that transformed people into marketable commodities restraints what is recoverable of the intimate lives of the commodified. Even when enslaved women had some opportunity to disclose their innermost pain, to abolitionist for example who were interested in exposing the viciousness of slavery, enslaved women kept secret the most intimate aspects of their lives: love, pleasure, grief remain an enigma. Yet it is possible uncover some secrets of the archives by exploiting what Saidiya Hartman suggests are the capacities of the subjunctive and the rhetorical to tell stories through questioning, doubting, expressing wishes. The Nameless and the Forgotten engages with archival fragments using a rhetorical strategy to tell a story of enslaved mothers’ fear, grief, and apprehension while calling attention to the challenges of such narration. Utilizing this “two fold attention,” to use Lisa Lowe’s framing, allows an affirmation of what is possible historically while apprehending what is loss and irrecoverable in the archives.