He could imagine decades of work, possible resale value, and even future generations who might be compelled into the same system.
Under slavery, such calculations were made possible by the legal treatment of human beings as property.
Ownership created financial claims over people's labor and profoundly restricted their choices.
For enslaved women especially, pregnancy and childbirth could take place within conditions where owners claimed economic interests in the children they bore.
For men like Roque, stories of reproductive exploitation reveal another dimension of the same institution.
The person at the center of these calculations had little meaningful power to reject the role imposed upon him.
This is what makes the traditional account of Pata Seca so unsettling.
It is not simply that a slaveholder allegedly wanted him to have many children.
It is that the desires, consent, feelings, and relationships of the people involved were subordinated to the interests of ownership.
