Day 6/28 — “Parcels of the Dead” (Laurens letterbook, 29 June 1756)
Amadu Massally
Hello compatriots and friends,
Day 6 in my February archive series centers on a letterbook copy from Austin & Laurens to Richard Oswald & Co. (Charles Town, 29 June 1756), reporting the arrival of the sloop Carlisle and recording the line that collapses death into ledger allocation:
“He does not distinguish to which parcell those belong’d that are dead.”
On the same spread, the letter also quantifies procurement by node (“120… ship’d at Bance Island… 26 only at Gambia”), notes “Nine priviledge Slaves,” and, in the same breath, states they are beginning the sale of a cargo per the sloop Hare from Sierra Leone—two ships, one merchant desk, one vocabulary of valuation and accounting.
Question for discussion: When these documents use categories like parcel, privilege, and node-based origin accounting, what is the cleanest way to frame this as operational language without flattening human experience into the same terms?
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“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
—Dr. Paul Farmer
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