Murder in the Cassava Patch
Encyclopedia
Based on a true story, Bai T. Moore
's Murder in the Cassava
Patch is Liberia's best-known novel. Published by Ducor Publishing House (Monrovia
) in 1968, it remains required reading for every Liberian high school student, and is widely regarded as the one real Liberian literary classic in a very small literary tradition.
(less than 16 thousand words, divided into three chapters) deals with the relationship between Gortokai, a young Liberian man, and Tene, the girl he hopes to marry. We learn on the first page that Tene has been murdered most horribly, and that Gortokai is in jail for it. The story promises "to piece together all the circumstances leading to the violent storm which nearly tore off the roofs from many houses in the Dewoin country
one bright Sunday morning in the year 1957." The story begins in the fictional village of Bendabli, off the Monrovia-Bomi Hills road, but the action is quite wide-ranging, ranging from Gbarpolu County
in the west as far as Gbarnga
and Sanniquellie
in the north, while places such as Bomi Hills
and Firestone
feature offstage as the source of the hard currency that proves such a lure to young girls such as Tene and her sister.
Taking the form of a first person narrative, with a narrator (Gortokai himself) who is fairly unreliable
, the novelette makes use of Liberian English
and Liberian customs, and deals particularly with how those customs came under pressure in the 1940s and 1950s as young Liberians adapted to the prospect of material advancement offered by the western world
. As an indigenous Liberian who had been educated in a US university, Moore was well-placed to explore the tension between these worlds, but he does so in a way that is critical both of materialism and of traditional local culture.
. The laborer returns to Liberia disillusioned with his work, and finds himself bartered as a slave between various owners. Until the very end of the book, it remains unclear quite how or why this slave's child (Gortokai) came to be fostered by a family from Bendabli.
Gortokai is accordingly raised by old man Joma and his wife Sombo Karn, alongside their daughters Tene and Kema. According to Gortokai, he is unaware that he is not his parents' "real" son until Tene herself tells him during a game of "Mama and Papa": "...suddenly Tene came up to me and asked me to hold her tight in the waist. I shivered and recoiled. Gortokai, can't you see that we are not brother and sister? It's a secret Mama told me."
Gortokai describes himself as his foster family's main source of support: farming rice, making oil from palm nuts, setting traps for crayfish, hunting meat, and so on. He also takes short-term bush-cutting contracts to earn money for the family's tobacco, salt and annual hut tax.
- which in Liberia's case, the prospective groom is required to pay the bride's parents. In addition to the question of potential incest, the acceptable size of the dowry is the subject of further speculation for the village gossips. On being assured (by Kema) that Tene really loves him, Gortokai
agrees to pay "the full forty dollars that is required for all virgins".
To earn the money, Gortokai takes a job clearing a rubber farm faraway in Suehn. Having spent most of his first pay check on presents which he sends to the two girls, he hears nothing from them by way of thanks. Despondent, he injures his toe with his machete, and uses his convalescence as an opportunity to invite Tene to visit him.
Tene and her sister belatedly arrive in Suehn, blaming others for not delivering messages to them, and bringing Gortokai gifts of country bread and fried chicken. Gortokai's employer, whose wife calls Gortokai their "stranger son" (a Liberian term referring to the informal "adoption" of a non-blood relative) throws a party for the two girls at which they drink fifteen dollars' worth of rum. The following morning, Tene both invites, and coyly rejects, Gortokai's advances. Nevertheless, Gortokai presents her with a pair of gold earrings, and she repays him with a "rare" compliment: "Kai, I love you. You are so thoughtful."
Before the two girls leave Suehn, Gortokai gives Kema $23 towards the dowry - a dowry which has now risen to forty dollars, plus three dollars for various ritual niceties, plus two sets of clothes for Tene's parents.
Gortokai accordingly visits a country doctor by the name of Bleng. Bleng uses magic to tell Gortokai that Tene's affections are divided, and explains that the remedy will be strong love medicine. Naturally, this will cost a lot of money, but Bleng has further peculiar requirements: "For instance, I need right away, a braid of Tene's hair, a piece of her garment, three of her toe nails, a piece of otter skin, particularly from the breast section, some gun powder and other odds and ends. But some of these I believe I can get locally. The immediate needs are the hair, nails and garment."
Although he has some misgivings (having heard rumors that Bleng too is a drunkard, whose powers are on the wane), Gortokai is keen to produce both the money and the necessary snippets of Tene's hair, nails, and clothes. At the same time, he receives a message that his stepfather is seriously ill, and decides to return to Bendabli.
Arriving early at the village, he decides to conceal himself in order to spy on Tene and perhaps steal a lock of her hair. However, he also overhears a conversation between Tene and her family in which it is clear that Tene believes that "a girl should be given a chance to look around before she decides on one man". She also describes her recent visit to Bomi Hills, where it is clear that she has had several amorous adventures, and is no longer "the same beautiful little girl" she used to be.
That night, Gortokai steals into Tene and Kema's shared room, with a view to taking some of Tene's hair, nails, and clothes. With great difficulty, he achieves this (pretending to be a rat as he cuts her toenails in the dark) but not before the girls have raised the alarm at the intruder in their room. Miraculously, he manages to escape without being identified.
Forgetting about his dying stepfather, he returns swiftly to Suehn, where he gives the ingredients to Bleng, along with ten silver dollars for the powerful love medicine. Bleng tells him to put this powder in Tene's food - and so he returns to Bendabli to carry this out.
Although he feels like setting the village on fire, he decides instead to travel first to Monrovia, then to Tapeta, and on to Sanniquellie
. On his travels, he learns more about the complicated relationships that people have in modern-day Liberia.
They return to Bendabli to find their family house in a state of disrepair and Joma and his wife too old and sick to do much about it. Gortokai sets to putting things right. He is promised Tene as his wife, and lives with her and accepts her child as his own. He repairs the house and plants a large vegetable garden.
However, after four months in Bendabli, Gortokai again receives bad news over a glass of cane juice
. This time he hears that Kema is planning to move Tene and her parents to Firestone
. The old couple deny this. Tene is receiving expensive gifts from a man in Firestone whom Kema wants her to marry, but she denies receiving these gifts, claiming she made the money by selling gari.
. Kema invites Tene to come and join her with the moneyed workers of the Firestone plantation.
The following morning, Gortokai takes a knife and cuts up a parcel of expensive clothes which he has intercepted, and scatters the pieces around town. He also asks Tene to prepare for him some domboy (mashed cassava), telling her ominously: "I like to plan everything I do ahead of time." When Tene goes to the cassava patch to prepare the domboy, she finds Gortokai waiting for her.
of incest
in the relationship, beginning with Gortokai and Tene's first game of Mama and Papa. Gortokai claims that Tene makes the first move, and that he himself is initially repulsed by the idea of a sexual relationship with her. Taken at face value, this appears to be a game between children of a similar age, in which Tene is the more knowing child both sexually and literally, in her knowledge of Gortokai's true parentage. Gortokai also appears to accept without question that his being adopted makes the relationship perfectly acceptable. It is worth noting that this view is not shared by everyone in the village: "Some felt that my desire for Tene was immoral, but they could never convince me on what grounds."
Incest is the most obvious reason for the villagers' objection. However, there is also a considerable age difference between Gortokai and Tene, to which he never directly alludes. Gortokai joins the Poro
society in the third harvest after the outbreak of the Hitler war
, which means late 1942 or early 1943. Thirteen years later (1955-6), he begins to look for a wife, at which point Tene is thirteen years old. In other words, Tene was born at or around the time that Gortokai was in the bush being initiated into the Poro, and he is older than his intended bride by precisely the age he was at the time of his initiation.
One may be initiated in the Poro at quite a young age. However, the internal evidence suggests that this was not the case for Gortokai. His Poro initiation was "something every young man in Dewoin country looks forward to", and he is initiated into the Zowolo - the highest Poro degree achievable. All of this suggests that he could not have been much younger than eleven years old at his Poro graduation, and is probably at least a year or two older than that. This would make him in his mid twenties when he begins to look for a wife. It also means that their game of Mamas and Papas takes place when Tene is a pre-pubescent girl, and Gortokai is in his early twenties. (This is confirmed by Gortokai's remark to Kema that "Your sister's armpits are no longer those of an innocent child... The hairs under there show sign of maturity, I swear to God.")
The murder itself takes place in 1957, when Gortokai would be in his mid-to-late twenties, and Tene would be just fifteen years old. She already has one child to look after and one broken marriage behind her when she is murdered by her much older lover.
The book presents no simplistic view of domestic slavery, however. The son of an indentured laborer turned slave, Gortokai is accepted as a "son" by one freeborn family and as a "stranger son" by another. Old man Jomo seems willing to accept this slave/son as a potential son-in-law, and Kema seems willing to accept him as a potential brother-in-law - provided the price is right. This greed for money - which is shown by the girls, their parents, and even by characters such as the fortunetelling country doctor - is stronger than any prejudice about indentured workers, and it is also at the heart of the domestic slavery system itself.
Bai T. Moore
Bai Tamia Johnson Moore , commonly known by his pen-name, Bai T. Moore, was a Liberian poet, novelist, folklorist and essayist. He also held various cultural, educational and tourism posts both for the Liberian government and for UNESCO, and was the founder of Liberia's National Cultural Center...
's Murder in the Cassava
Cassava
Cassava , also called yuca or manioc, a woody shrub of the Euphorbiaceae native to South America, is extensively cultivated as an annual crop in tropical and subtropical regions for its edible starchy tuberous root, a major source of carbohydrates...
Patch is Liberia's best-known novel. Published by Ducor Publishing House (Monrovia
Monrovia
Monrovia is the capital city of the West African nation of Liberia. Located on the Atlantic Coast at Cape Mesurado, it lies geographically within Montserrado County, but is administered separately...
) in 1968, it remains required reading for every Liberian high school student, and is widely regarded as the one real Liberian literary classic in a very small literary tradition.
Plot introduction
This noveletteNovelette
A novelette is a piece of short prose fiction. The distinction between a novelette and other literary forms is usually based upon word count, with a novelette being longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella...
(less than 16 thousand words, divided into three chapters) deals with the relationship between Gortokai, a young Liberian man, and Tene, the girl he hopes to marry. We learn on the first page that Tene has been murdered most horribly, and that Gortokai is in jail for it. The story promises "to piece together all the circumstances leading to the violent storm which nearly tore off the roofs from many houses in the Dewoin country
Dewoin District
Dewoin District is one of four districts of Bomi County, Liberia.As of 2008 the population was 12,782....
one bright Sunday morning in the year 1957." The story begins in the fictional village of Bendabli, off the Monrovia-Bomi Hills road, but the action is quite wide-ranging, ranging from Gbarpolu County
Gbarpolu County
Gbarpolu is a county in the northern portion of the West African nation of Liberia. One of 15 counties that comprise the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has six districts. Bopulu serves as the capital with the area of the county measuring...
in the west as far as Gbarnga
Gbarnga
Gbarnga is the capital city of Bong County, Liberia, lying north east of Monrovia. Bong County is one of the over 13 political subdivisions of Liberia known as counties. During the First Liberian Civil War, it was the base for Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia...
and Sanniquellie
Sanniquellie
Sanniquellie is a city and the capital of Nimba County and Sanniquellie-Mah District, Liberia. It is located in the north-east of the country at coordinates 07°21'49" N 008°42'40" W...
in the north, while places such as Bomi Hills
Bomi County
Bomi is a county in the northwestern portion of the West African nation of Liberia. One of 15 counties that comprise the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has four districts. Tubmanburg serves as the capital with the area of the county measuring . As of the 2008 Census, it...
and Firestone
Firestone District
Firestone District is one of four districts located in Margibi County, Liberia. It is home to Duside Hospital....
feature offstage as the source of the hard currency that proves such a lure to young girls such as Tene and her sister.
Taking the form of a first person narrative, with a narrator (Gortokai himself) who is fairly unreliable
Unreliable narrator
An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...
, the novelette makes use of Liberian English
Liberian English
Liberian English is a term used to refer to the varieties of English spoken in the African country of Liberia. There are four such varieties:* Standard Liberian English or Liberian Settler English;* Kru Pidgin English;...
and Liberian customs, and deals particularly with how those customs came under pressure in the 1940s and 1950s as young Liberians adapted to the prospect of material advancement offered by the western world
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
. As an indigenous Liberian who had been educated in a US university, Moore was well-placed to explore the tension between these worlds, but he does so in a way that is critical both of materialism and of traditional local culture.
Gortokai's origins
Gortokai's real father was a slave who had originally been a contract laborer on Fernando PoBioko
Bioko is an island 32 km off the west coast of Africa, specifically Cameroon, in the Gulf of Guinea. It is the northernmost part of Equatorial Guinea with a population of 124,000 and an area of . It is volcanic with its highest peak the Pico Basile at .-Geography:Bioko has a total area of...
. The laborer returns to Liberia disillusioned with his work, and finds himself bartered as a slave between various owners. Until the very end of the book, it remains unclear quite how or why this slave's child (Gortokai) came to be fostered by a family from Bendabli.
Gortokai is accordingly raised by old man Joma and his wife Sombo Karn, alongside their daughters Tene and Kema. According to Gortokai, he is unaware that he is not his parents' "real" son until Tene herself tells him during a game of "Mama and Papa": "...suddenly Tene came up to me and asked me to hold her tight in the waist. I shivered and recoiled. Gortokai, can't you see that we are not brother and sister? It's a secret Mama told me."
Gortokai describes himself as his foster family's main source of support: farming rice, making oil from palm nuts, setting traps for crayfish, hunting meat, and so on. He also takes short-term bush-cutting contracts to earn money for the family's tobacco, salt and annual hut tax.
His engagement to Tene
When he decides to marry, Gortokai sets his hopes on Tene, and asks her older sister Kema to intercede on his behalf. She agrees, but this also introduces the tricky question of the dowryBride price
Bride price, also known as bride wealth, is an amount of money or property or wealth paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom...
- which in Liberia's case, the prospective groom is required to pay the bride's parents. In addition to the question of potential incest, the acceptable size of the dowry is the subject of further speculation for the village gossips. On being assured (by Kema) that Tene really loves him, Gortokai
agrees to pay "the full forty dollars that is required for all virgins".
To earn the money, Gortokai takes a job clearing a rubber farm faraway in Suehn. Having spent most of his first pay check on presents which he sends to the two girls, he hears nothing from them by way of thanks. Despondent, he injures his toe with his machete, and uses his convalescence as an opportunity to invite Tene to visit him.
Tene and her sister belatedly arrive in Suehn, blaming others for not delivering messages to them, and bringing Gortokai gifts of country bread and fried chicken. Gortokai's employer, whose wife calls Gortokai their "stranger son" (a Liberian term referring to the informal "adoption" of a non-blood relative) throws a party for the two girls at which they drink fifteen dollars' worth of rum. The following morning, Tene both invites, and coyly rejects, Gortokai's advances. Nevertheless, Gortokai presents her with a pair of gold earrings, and she repays him with a "rare" compliment: "Kai, I love you. You are so thoughtful."
Before the two girls leave Suehn, Gortokai gives Kema $23 towards the dowry - a dowry which has now risen to forty dollars, plus three dollars for various ritual niceties, plus two sets of clothes for Tene's parents.
Love medicine to keep Tene faithful
Joining Suehn's palm wine circle, Gortokai is dismayed to hear their gossip about Kema. He is told that she is a well-known drunkard with creative ways at inventing strong cocktails. He suspects, but is afraid to ask, that there must also be some unsavoury information about Tene also. His fellow palm wine drinkers convince him that he must buy some powerful love medicine in order to ensure that Tene stays faithful to him.Gortokai accordingly visits a country doctor by the name of Bleng. Bleng uses magic to tell Gortokai that Tene's affections are divided, and explains that the remedy will be strong love medicine. Naturally, this will cost a lot of money, but Bleng has further peculiar requirements: "For instance, I need right away, a braid of Tene's hair, a piece of her garment, three of her toe nails, a piece of otter skin, particularly from the breast section, some gun powder and other odds and ends. But some of these I believe I can get locally. The immediate needs are the hair, nails and garment."
Although he has some misgivings (having heard rumors that Bleng too is a drunkard, whose powers are on the wane), Gortokai is keen to produce both the money and the necessary snippets of Tene's hair, nails, and clothes. At the same time, he receives a message that his stepfather is seriously ill, and decides to return to Bendabli.
Arriving early at the village, he decides to conceal himself in order to spy on Tene and perhaps steal a lock of her hair. However, he also overhears a conversation between Tene and her family in which it is clear that Tene believes that "a girl should be given a chance to look around before she decides on one man". She also describes her recent visit to Bomi Hills, where it is clear that she has had several amorous adventures, and is no longer "the same beautiful little girl" she used to be.
That night, Gortokai steals into Tene and Kema's shared room, with a view to taking some of Tene's hair, nails, and clothes. With great difficulty, he achieves this (pretending to be a rat as he cuts her toenails in the dark) but not before the girls have raised the alarm at the intruder in their room. Miraculously, he manages to escape without being identified.
Forgetting about his dying stepfather, he returns swiftly to Suehn, where he gives the ingredients to Bleng, along with ten silver dollars for the powerful love medicine. Bleng tells him to put this powder in Tene's food - and so he returns to Bendabli to carry this out.
Tene marries a man from Bomi Hills
He is received without enthusiasm, and is told that the girls were recently attacked by a "heart man" who crept into their room one night. He carries out Bleng's medicinal instructions, but Tene nevertheless elopes with a lover to Bomi Hills, two months pregnant.Although he feels like setting the village on fire, he decides instead to travel first to Monrovia, then to Tapeta, and on to Sanniquellie
Sanniquellie
Sanniquellie is a city and the capital of Nimba County and Sanniquellie-Mah District, Liberia. It is located in the north-east of the country at coordinates 07°21'49" N 008°42'40" W...
. On his travels, he learns more about the complicated relationships that people have in modern-day Liberia.
Gortokai and Tene settle in Bendabli
After several months, he returns to Monrovia, and is surprised to hear that Tene herself is now in the capital, where she is selling gari or farina on the street. It's a year since Gortokai has seen her, and she looks different - both darker and poorer. She has a young baby now, but has left her husband and has returned to her parents' house in Bendabli. For the first time, they sleep together, and Tene no longer resists his advances.They return to Bendabli to find their family house in a state of disrepair and Joma and his wife too old and sick to do much about it. Gortokai sets to putting things right. He is promised Tene as his wife, and lives with her and accepts her child as his own. He repairs the house and plants a large vegetable garden.
However, after four months in Bendabli, Gortokai again receives bad news over a glass of cane juice
Rum
Rum is a distilled alcoholic beverage made from sugarcane by-products such as molasses, or directly from sugarcane juice, by a process of fermentation and distillation. The distillate, a clear liquid, is then usually aged in oak barrels...
. This time he hears that Kema is planning to move Tene and her parents to Firestone
Firestone District
Firestone District is one of four districts located in Margibi County, Liberia. It is home to Duside Hospital....
. The old couple deny this. Tene is receiving expensive gifts from a man in Firestone whom Kema wants her to marry, but she denies receiving these gifts, claiming she made the money by selling gari.
Gortokai's revenge
The tragedy comes to a head when Kema returns from Firestone, demanding strong liquor and smelling of expensive perfume. Gortokai eavesdrops on her conversation with Tene, in which it is clear that they have little respect for "this deformed-nose Kai of ours", whose father was once sold as a slave into Lofa CountyLofa County
Lofa is a county in the northernmost portion of the West African nation of Liberia. One of 15 counties that comprise the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has six districts. Voinjama serves as the capital with the area of the county measuring...
. Kema invites Tene to come and join her with the moneyed workers of the Firestone plantation.
The following morning, Gortokai takes a knife and cuts up a parcel of expensive clothes which he has intercepted, and scatters the pieces around town. He also asks Tene to prepare for him some domboy (mashed cassava), telling her ominously: "I like to plan everything I do ahead of time." When Tene goes to the cassava patch to prepare the domboy, she finds Gortokai waiting for her.
Incest and the age difference between Gortokai and Tene
There is an obvious suggestion of the tabooTaboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
of incest
Incest
Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...
in the relationship, beginning with Gortokai and Tene's first game of Mama and Papa. Gortokai claims that Tene makes the first move, and that he himself is initially repulsed by the idea of a sexual relationship with her. Taken at face value, this appears to be a game between children of a similar age, in which Tene is the more knowing child both sexually and literally, in her knowledge of Gortokai's true parentage. Gortokai also appears to accept without question that his being adopted makes the relationship perfectly acceptable. It is worth noting that this view is not shared by everyone in the village: "Some felt that my desire for Tene was immoral, but they could never convince me on what grounds."
Incest is the most obvious reason for the villagers' objection. However, there is also a considerable age difference between Gortokai and Tene, to which he never directly alludes. Gortokai joins the Poro
Poro
The Poro, or Purrah or Purroh, is a secret society of Sierra Leone and Liberia.-Structure:Only males are admitted to its ranks, but two other affiliated and secret associations exist, the Yassi and the Bundu, the first of which is nominally reserved for females, but members of the Poro are admitted...
society in the third harvest after the outbreak of the Hitler war
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, which means late 1942 or early 1943. Thirteen years later (1955-6), he begins to look for a wife, at which point Tene is thirteen years old. In other words, Tene was born at or around the time that Gortokai was in the bush being initiated into the Poro, and he is older than his intended bride by precisely the age he was at the time of his initiation.
One may be initiated in the Poro at quite a young age. However, the internal evidence suggests that this was not the case for Gortokai. His Poro initiation was "something every young man in Dewoin country looks forward to", and he is initiated into the Zowolo - the highest Poro degree achievable. All of this suggests that he could not have been much younger than eleven years old at his Poro graduation, and is probably at least a year or two older than that. This would make him in his mid twenties when he begins to look for a wife. It also means that their game of Mamas and Papas takes place when Tene is a pre-pubescent girl, and Gortokai is in his early twenties. (This is confirmed by Gortokai's remark to Kema that "Your sister's armpits are no longer those of an innocent child... The hairs under there show sign of maturity, I swear to God.")
The murder itself takes place in 1957, when Gortokai would be in his mid-to-late twenties, and Tene would be just fifteen years old. She already has one child to look after and one broken marriage behind her when she is murdered by her much older lover.
Domestic slavery and hypocrisy in Liberia
While incest or age difference may be a reason for some villagers' dislike of the relationship between Gortokai and Tene, another unspoken reason could be their prejudice against the son of an itinerant indentured worker. Bai T. Moore himself saw the novel's main theme as one of domestic slavery in Liberia. The strength of Moore's writing is in its presentation of an unsentimental view of Liberian life, taking an even-handed view of the inter-generational tension in mid-twentieth century Liberia. The older generation might be hard-working and hospitable, but they can also be duplicitous and hypocritical. The younger generation might enjoy the freedoms of modern travel and the ability to earn money fast, but they are too much in the thrall of this easy money, and are often snobbish and materialistic. Even Gortokai himself, who presents himself as honest, hard-working, and betrayed by treacherous women, is not quite the paragon he would like his reader to think. (He drinks heavily, tells lies, spies on his lover and eventually murders her, neglects to mention his own romantic affairs, and inflicts injury on himself to avoid work. Although he presents himself as an attractive young man, we do not even learn about his "deformed nose" until the final pages.)The book presents no simplistic view of domestic slavery, however. The son of an indentured laborer turned slave, Gortokai is accepted as a "son" by one freeborn family and as a "stranger son" by another. Old man Jomo seems willing to accept this slave/son as a potential son-in-law, and Kema seems willing to accept him as a potential brother-in-law - provided the price is right. This greed for money - which is shown by the girls, their parents, and even by characters such as the fortunetelling country doctor - is stronger than any prejudice about indentured workers, and it is also at the heart of the domestic slavery system itself.