Owning People

For most of the time there have been laws, in most parts of the ground, the law allowed one person to own another person — to own them like a tool is owned, or an animal: to buy them, to put them to work, and to take all that their work made. The owned person could not say no, and could not go. Their children were owned from their first day, and their children's children after them.

The boats

About four hundred years before now, this became a bigger business than it had been in all the time before. Big boats carried people from their own countries to countries on the other side of the big waters — more than ten thousand thousand people. They were held below, where no light was, pressed side by side, for months, and many died on the water. The ones who lived were bought, when the boat touched ground, by people who wanted their work: work in the hot sun, in ground where the plants that become cloth grew, and the plants that make sweet things.

Another part of this book says that the things you own have often been inside a boat. For four hundred years, in the biggest business on the big waters, the things inside the boats were people.

Being owned

An owned person worked from when the day started to when it ended, and was given no money — food, and not much of it. Families were cut: a child bought by one owner, the parents by another, and no law helped. In some places there was a law that said: do not allow the owned people to learn to read. The people who owned them knew what reading does.

The owned people pushed back. Some went, when the sky was black, towards countries where the law did not allow owning people. Some took up tools and made the people who owned them fear them. And some went back for the others — like the woman who went from being owned, and then went back to the owning country, ten times and more, when the sky was black, to lead other owned people out.

How it ended

It did not end because the owning people changed. It ended because people ended it: the owned people who did not stop pushing, and people who were not owned but said — this cannot be law. In one big country, ending it took the country's own people hurting each other for four years, inside one country, about this one question. The law was changed in country after country, between one hundred and two hundred years before now. It needed all that time, and very many people dying, for the law to say the thing a child could have said: a person is not a thing.

Not gone

The law in all countries now says that no one can own a person. But laws are one thing and doings are another: there are people held and made to work for no money now, as you read — held where the police do not look, in more countries than you think. The word for it changed. The thing has not ended.

The music

The owned people had one thing that could not be bought or taken: music. They made music in the ground where they worked — music about hurt, and about being their own one day. From that music, after the owning ended, grew much of the music that people in all countries love most. When you hear it — and you have heard it — you are hearing them.