As PTSD awareness has increased in recent decades, historians have also studied how people experienced the aftershocks of trauma, or how they identified its symptoms. The historical record shows how pervasive PTSD has been throughout history, while also providing insight into the fact that people trapped under similar conditions of oppression experience and express grief, sorrow or pain in vastly different ways.
U.S. history is rife with examples of oppression, but the institution of slavery was unique in its systematic denial of humanity to people of African descent based solely upon race. Formerly enslaved people have left narratives that provide vivid descriptions of the violent acts that caused them and their loved ones great trauma — trauma that didn’t abate over time.
In 1841, Solomon Northup wrote of a woman named “Eliza,” whom he first met in a “slave pen” in Washington, D.C. Eliza had deep affection for her children, but she was inconsolable because she knew their separation from one another was inevitable. Sleep was impossible for her, though she maintained her composure around white people. Eliza’s sorrows intensified when she and her children were taken to the slave markets of New Orleans, where speculators acquired capital by selling human chattel. There her son Randall was callously sold, and Eliza embraced him, cried and kissed him repeatedly and told him to “remember her.”
But Eliza’s sorrows continued as she was soon purchased without her daughter, the event that completely broke her spirit. “Please master,” she screamed, “I can never work any if she is taken from me: I will die.” Eliza did not die in a physical sense until many years after these separations, but Northup writes that for the remainder of her life she expressed signs of severe emotional trauma from which she never recovered. She mourned Randall and Emily day and night, often refusing comfort from even her closest friends, and Northup observed her speaking to her children as if they were present. He suggested her heart broke from a “burden of maternal sorrow,” and it seems clear she was mentally and emotionally damaged.
Eliza became feeble and emaciated, and she rarely completed her tasks to the slaveholder’s satisfaction. Not satisfying the plantation mistress inside the house, she was sent to toil in the field as a punishment. She became indifferent to her fate and was consequently sold to a cruel enslaver who “lashed and abused her most unmercifully.” Eventually, the slave owner bludgeoned her head to put her “out of misery,” but she lived in a vegetative state until she was found dead.
