The Diligent

The Diligent gives context and a voice to something that is normally described in one sentence in normal history books - slave voyages. Even in slave narratives, the atrocities that are usually described are the ones that are suffered after the slave has made their way across the sea. Certainly, I've heard the conditions of these ships described, and I think everyone has seen those horrible diagrams of the way that ships were packed full of slaves as though they were barrels of fish, but an actual descriptive narrative? I don't think that I've ever heard of one that focuses almost exclusively on the trip over, and especially not one that focuses on the people that carry them over.

In history, and, more prominently, in literature, slaveowners are given two casts - either two dimensionally evil or angelically kind. The angelically kind people are generally women that are entrapped in the system as well, or men that benevolently own them. If the people that deal with them  - auctioneers, overseers, and brokers - are depicted, it is usually as one dimensionally evil characters. Durand is actually a far more interesting actor, simply because how boring he is. He's a company man, just doing his job. His prose is dry and detached, the same as a modern officeworker doing inventory. It's frightening because this was how the slave trade was perpetuated - through company men just doing their jobs to make a good living.