The Constitutional Chapter of *The American Slave Coast*

You see the quote at the top of this blog from Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) by Michel-Rolph Trouillot? This writer is also a bridge to the section on the slave revolution of San Domingue and what it meant here.  You can't say we've tried to make things easy for ourselves.  The head, it hurts, from thinking, trying to think, to understand, to connect so many dots among hemispheres.

The Constitution chapter of The American Slave Coast is writing the history of the document's silences and absences, in terms of the history of this nation from the beginning until now. It is becoming the centerpiece of the work. It keeps expanding, and we'll be working on it up to the minute before publication, because that's what you do.  We're going to be crucified for it, by the usual suspects.  Doesn't matter that we are quoting the primary documents that were written by the Founders.

This chapter's been building up, layer-by-layer, and then out, bit-by-bit, ever since I went to work on Benjamin Franklin's early writings, and the books recently published on the making of the Constitution.  And the money. Then, there are the paintings.  Then I ran smack into the C.S.A. constitution.

This is really strong stuff we're saying.  We're not the only ones, but we're the ones that are pulling all these elements together (and no doubt others are on the same track as this too -- history and research are like that).  This chapter is a very deep collaboration, of course.  But unlike some of the other parts, this is the one where we can point directly at parts and know which of us brought it in.

OTOH, maybe it's all just balderdash.  I was given a respiratory infection for Valentine's Day and I'm really sick, which mean rilly stupid, dull and unperceptive.