Equiano

In Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, Hochschild talks about a slave who earned his freedom named Equiano. His particular account of conditions on the slave ships is the most haunting to me as he was not merely an observer but experienced it first hand. Although Equiano had a different experience than many slaves upon reaching the Caribbean his accounts and emotions are invaluable for a reader today to try to understand the emotional impact that these events had on a people. What i found to be most disconcerting was Equiano's reaction to being back on a slave ship not as a slave but picking other people like him to work as field hands which he knew meant certain death. However Equiano does not provide us with a reaction and merely mentions it in his autobiography. Hochschild raises valid questions that perhaps answer his limited reaction. Is it that at this point in history Equiano would have no reason to believe that things would ever be any different? That people like him would always work the fields? His inability to express any emotion about his fellow man is the most chilling part of the book so far. It is also amazing to me that someone who believed that the institution that took him from his home and enslaved him would never disappear was able to be toppled, in a sense, so quickly.