So I had a whole chapter on flogging as perverse pedagogy. Because there’s so many passages in slave narratives where they talk about the first whipping — “That was my education.” They don’t teach you to read and write, they write on your back with the whip. You become the text. You are prohibited from reading the text, but you become a text; a text that others will read.
I found this amazing quotation that I use at the end of that chapter. It’s an obscure narrative and this man says: “I would like if I could to will the skin of my back when I’m dead, will it to the United States government. So that the skin of my back could be used to bind the Constitution, so that the Constitution will be bound in the hide of a slave.” I couldn’t make that up. That was there. I mean, it was a completely realized trope; at the same time, that was his reality. His back was marked with the whip. He was written on. He was the text.
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