Enslaved families experienced sale as a death-like separation

Evidence

We didn’t understand what it would be like, couldn’t think beyond the panic, the prying, the crying, the begging, and the screaming, the endless screaming from the mouth and beyond. Sounding through the whole body, breaking the heart with its volume. A blood keen. But the ones that owned and sold us was deaf to it. Was unfeeling of the tugging the children did on their fathers’ arms or the glance of a sister’s palm over her sold sister’s face for the last time. But we was all feeling, all seeing, all hearing, all smelling: We felt it for the terrible dying it was. Knowed we was walking out of one life and into another. An afterlife in a burning place. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 526

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘terrible dying’ framing of forced family separation could support the sacrifice-essay’s theme of grief — although here the grief is inflicted rather than offered — so it’s a potential contrast/follow-up point.
• XREF: connects to: Southern law did not protect enslaved families from forced separation by sale — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1343