Block

As a teacher at the high school on the island of Rotuma, I had to come up with a Wednesday afternoon club activity that was extra curricular. For the first term, I ran a rugby club and taught interested boys the rudiments of rugby on the dusty sports field in front of the school. This was back in 1972/73.

For the next two terms, I formed a singing club that became ridiculously popular. It attracted half of the school population. It was standing room only in my classroom.

After a few weeks, I was struggling to come up with new songs we could sing together. I found one in a songbook I had put in my luggage. It was, I believe, a slave song from the southern states of America and it was called "No More Auction Block". I learnt it and played it to the singing club, accompanying myself slowly on acoustic guitar.

Soon the entire singing club were joining in and for whatever reason they loved it. Their Polynesian voices interlaced in natural harmony. Beyond the unglazed classroom windows the deep blue Pacific Ocean reached north to the Ellice Islands - now known as Tuvalu. Drifting over the ocean deep, the song began like this:-

No more auction block for me

No more, no more

No more auction block for me

Many thousands gone

As those young Rotumans grew older, I suspect and hope that the song endured, absorbed into the island's lyrical repertoire. 

In the intervening years, I hadn't really thought too much about the term "auction block" but then I spotted it in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" which I finished reading in January of this year. The author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, referred to literal stone or wooden blocks on which slaves would be displayed as bidding commenced in marketplaces. 

Families were often ripped apart. Bidders inspected the slaves' physical condition - the brightness of their eyes, their teeth, their muscle density. It was like trading in horses or cattle. The owners wanted the best prices they could get and the bidders wanted bargains. The slaves had no say in this awful business. Standing on that auction block your destiny was in the hands of those white men. No wonder the slaves fervently desired "No More".

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/8VpbWCd