February 2, 2006

By Lauren Heaton

YSHS sophomores James Butler, left, and Drew Stratton were among the 320 students at YSHS and McKinney Middle who squeezed into a space modeled after an 18th century slave ship during an excercise in the school gym on Monday.

The ironic grins on the faces of Yellow Springs High School and McKinney School students on Friday as they lay down in rows across the schools’ gym floor were telling.

Squeezed into a space no bigger than the hold of an average 18th century English ship, 320 students were attempting to experience something of the misery an African slave might have felt on an overseas voyage to the New World. The experiment was, of course, an impossible one.

Aurelia Blake, the language arts teacher at McKinney Middle, organized the all-school exercise as part of a four-week unit eighth graders are studying on slavery in America and the Holocaust.

The ship’s dimensions, covering less than half the gym floor, were taken from a model used by slave traders illustrating how to maximize the packing of human cargo. The chart was released throughout England in 1808 and served as a catalyst for the abolitionist movement, Blake said.

After the exercise, a group of eighth-grade students picked themselves up off the floor and complained that their bodies ached from lying on the hardwood for 15 minutes.

“My back hurt, it was really uncomfortable,” Irving Johnson said.

“It was tougher than it seemed,” Robbie Marion said.

“It’s hard to imagine how it really felt, for us it was just 10 minutes,” Colby Silvert said.

“You know you can’t imagine riding a boat and being like that for six weeks,” Quenthony Freeman said.

It was 10 minutes in a bright, clean gym, where the students were fed and hydrated, healthy and in the company of their friends. Blake said that for them, as for most people, the conditions slaves endured, from their capture to being sold and forced to work, are unimaginable.

“That kind of suffering is unknown to most people,” she said.

During the exercise, Blake read a passage from a novel by Walter Dean Myers about an 11-year-old boy from Sierra Leone who described his journey through the Middle Passage in 1753. Stolen from their families by “dead men who had sold their souls,” Blake read, the shackled slaves fought just to breathe, while “their arms, their bodies, their dreams lay in the darkness.”

Blake called the students to start the reenactment, ordering first the girls of a certain height to line up in order of size, then calling the boys to follow suit. A group of bigger students acted as handlers, leading rows of students to their places on the floor. Some were told to scrunch up side by side on their backs, while others lay head to foot. Some were ordered into the fetal position, and still others were packed more tightly on their sides.

When all the students were assembled, Blake spoke to them as captives of the ship. “This is your point of no return,” she said. “You have lost your identity…as a human…You are now a slave to be bought, sold, bred, beaten, worked to death and then replaced.”

The gym was quiet as Blake said finally, “Welcome to the New World. It is your black blood that will bring wealth to the great democracy of the United States.”

The eighth-grade curriculum also includes reading books about Frederick Douglass and other slaves by local authors Billie Hotaling and Virginia Hamilton, a history of the Amistad slave ship revolt and parts of Alex Haley’s Roots. Students will also complete research papers and writing exercises comparing and contrasting American slavery with the Holocaust, Blake said.

“Both were an atrocity and genocide in the Western world,” she said. “It was in different centuries, but the whole behavior was the same. When you dehumanize people, you can do anything to them.”

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com