Enslaved people were branded anew with each sale in Saint-Domingue.

Evidence

For those Africans who survived the horrors of the middle passage, arrival in Saint-Domingue was followed by another torture: branding. Masters marked their ownership by burning their initials into the flesh of their human property. For some, this was a second branding, as slave traders sometimes branded the captives loaded onto their ships. And each time a slave was sold, the process was repeated. According to one seventeenth-century priest, one man “who had been sold and resold several times was in the end as covered with characters as an Egyptian obelisk.” — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 144

Categorization

• CANDY: The Egyptian obelisk line is a memorable, easily retold image of cumulative dehumanization.