August Wilson asserted that we were not talking about—therefore, not discussing, exploring, reflecting, and learning from—slavery as much as we ought to. In Patti Hartigan’s biography, published in 2023, she wrote how Wilson objected to the general sense, the general malaise, of people wanting to talk less about slavery, to focus our conversations and lives on other, less heinous realities of humans in this place. I imagine that was a critique that he held for Whites, Blacks, and just about any other race since people use discomfort as a way to stifle essential conversations. Slavery has been deemed taboo since Reconstruction, I’m guessing.
I was reminded of this Wilson adage as I read “Slavery is not a metaphor,” Melanie Newport’s interview of John Bardes, author of The Carceral City, to be released in April 2025. As Bardes says:
vagrancy laws were widely used, both in New Orleans and throughout the 19th-century US, as a way of coercing wage laborers into working longer hours and for less compensation, and as a way of seizing workers for the creation of penal labor crews.
Then to read that such vagrancy laws were banned by the Supreme Court only in the 1970s is astounding:
The US Supreme Court ruled vagrancy laws unconstitutional in the 1970s. We as a society have really forgotten what a tremendous shadow vagrancy laws cast over all working Americans throughout the US throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century. Throughout that time, in most communities, vagrancy was the second most common reason for arrest, after public intoxication. All throughout the country, people were systematically arrested, rounded up, often en masse, on vagrancy charges. For working people, dodging a police officer who was trying to arrest you for vagrancy was a very, very familiar and common experience.
As I read this interview, I paused to see if the book already arises in the online catalog from the library. Not yet.
The first sentences of this interview, of this sort of nonfiction, reminds me of the opening pages of Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns, where I was simultaneously bewildered and enthralled that a historian was presenting stories and data of people, years, and places that made up historical forces that had been little understood, or were absent from the public consciousness. How history and historians are revealing the past to illuminate some truths about how we still live under the strain of our predecessors’ motivations and decisions.
This interview with Bardes makes it seem so clear that the compulsion to imprison is omnipresent even though nobody has looked at the primary sources that sat in dark rooms for 100-200 years waiting to be unfurled in this time.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. I was making a list of men’s values yesterday and I noted that: being anti-slavery is being anti rape. Though I’ve known this for decades, i don’t know that others are realizing a full-throated defiance of and opposition to any and all rape is part and parcel to opposing all slavery—including the 13th amendment.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 