"Berry pays systematic attention to the ways in which the enslaved sought to counteract the ruthless economic exploitation of their bodies and labor. Focusing closely on how slaves were valued from conception to their death and beyond, she gets to the dark heart of southern slavery, the commodification of human beings.
According to Berry, the enslaved were assigned a “monetary value” even before birth and their bodies continued to yield profits for slaveholders after their demise. She traces the fluctuating value of slaves throughout their lives, based on “sex, age, skill, health, beauty, temperament, and reproductive ability.’’...
Berry’s discussion of the value of slaves is not restricted to the slaveholders’ gaze. Instead she deploys a “reverse gaze” looking also at how the enslaved developed “soul values,” or a sense of their own intrinsic human worth, that challenged and contradicted the “exchange values” assigned to them by their enslavers. For instance elderly superannuated slaves saw their exchange values drop even as their soul values in the eyes of slaves increased.
Here her use of evidence is telling and most imaginative. Berry not only evokes slave testimony but also that of abolitionists, who witnessed and reported on the horrors of slavery. Unlike generations of historians of slavery who dismissed abolitionist writings as neo-abolitionist history, Berry successfully mines the literature to recover the experience and worldviews of the enslaved."
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