This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the hub.

Today I'm going to break down another portion of the half has never been told as part of my one person book club.

And if you haven't gotten a book, please go get it.

I'm not going to read every single chapter.

Today I'm going to focus on the chapter entitled Left Hand,

because it's in this chapter where we first meet Patsy,

the woman that I often talk about from 12 years a slave,

the book by Samuel Northrop.

Early on in the chapter, Edward. the book by Samuel Northrop.

Early on in the chapter, Edward Baptist talks about torture.

He talks about the whip and how the whip was mightier than the machine,

that the whip was mightier than the machine, that the whip was able to exact more cotton from

enslaved people than any machine that was developed.

Enslave people were picking more cotton than any cotton gin could ever do and it was directly as a result of the whip.

So he writes, the whip, 10 feet of plaited cowhide dangling from a weighted handle was, Ball realized,

different from all other whips that I've ever seen.

The impression it made would never leave him. Many other migrants

reported the same feeling of shocked discovery. In Virginia and Maryland, white people

used cat-in-nine tails, short leather whips with multiple thongs, these were dangerous

weapons and Chesapeake enslavers were creative in developing a repertoire of torture to force people

to do what they wanted. But this southwestern whip was

far worse. In expert hands it ripped open the air with a sonic boom tearing

...