"Slavery, Suicide, and Memory in North America"

I listened to an interesting podcast by the Journal of American History Podcast. In the podcast Ed Linenthal talked to Professor Terri L. Synder about her book "Slavery, Suicide, and Memory in North America". It was very interesting because they discussed a lot about slaves and committing suicide.

It talked about reasons why slaves committed suicide. Many people believe that slaves committed suicide mainly for resistance or because they had emotional problems. Professor Synder has researched a lot about slaves suicides and she looked at the Ecology of the suicide and other possible motives for suicide. The motives consisted of religious beliefs, gendered entitlements, family and household compositions, physical pain, and immediate incarceration.

She explained the difficulty of finding information on suicides because back in the eighteenth century if someone in your family committed suicide it was considered a felony. If the head of household committed suicide then you could lose your property, so people did not talk about suicide and usually buried the body without anyone knowing. I found that interesting because I would have never thought your family could be punished for a suicide but I guess it was a way to prevent suicides.

The other thing that I found interesting was how the whites would look at suicide among their slaves. Professor Synder said that whites looked at it as bewilderment and described their slaves as stubborn, meaning if they were committing suicide they were choosing to fight against their God. Whites did not understand why they would committ suicide and would also thing that they slaves were missing something in their life. As a threat the slave owners would desecrate the corpse of the slave.

I found this to be an interesting podcast and want to look into the book to find out more of what was said about the slaves and suicide.

http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/podcast/