ABSTRACT
Most people think about the Middle Passage in terms of its historical dimensions. Approximately 9.5 million Africans made the crossing from Africa to the Americas during the international slave trade (Franklin and Moss 41). 2 From 1518 to 1865, Africans crossed the Atlantic in horrifying conditions, imprisoned in the filthy holds of slave ships. It is estimated that nearly half of the Africans taken captive aboard slavers headed for the West Indies, America, or Britain died of disease, starvation, or dehydration (Mannix 124). As real as the historical facts of the Middle Passage is its travel within cultural memory, even for those African Americans born in the states as slaves or for those who were born free. The memory is not bound to texts that use the term “Middle Passage,” or which include a slave ship. This memory can appear in texts without an explicit reference; it appears in the narrative flow, the selection of images, and the casting of experience. If this is the case, then Carl Pedersen’s call to “widen the symbolic dimensions of the Middle Passage” (“Sea Change” 44) should extend to those who may not have personally traversed the Middle Passage, but whose pens bore witness to its legacy.
