An aberrant social contract in American was created when the first British ships set sail with their cargo of slaves packed like spoons belowdecks, a repository of bilge and rotten rations and the stench of sweat and feces and corpses and stillborn infants and raped women who killed themselves by chewing open their veins. My ancestors, an elite group, profited from those ships. Culpepper's Cockney ancestors did the dirty work. They threw their souls over the gunwales, along with the corpses they pulled with ropes out of the hold every morning, and later were the custodians of the whip and the branding iron in the sugarcane fields where I grew up, and forever after were taught by the oligarchy that Black people were their enemy, lustful, subhuman, idle and mendacious, respondent only to the pillory: the only human beings lower than themselves and, at the same time, the only creatures over whom they could have total power, and none of that has changed, no matter what we tell ourselves.
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