Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman, who grew up in Brooklyn, holds degrees from Wesleyan and Yale and is on the faculty at Columbia University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), and her essays have been widely published and anthologized. The piece here is excerpted from Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Hartman lives in New York City.