It is in these scenes, that the link between black flesh and animal flesh emerges. At the sight of her husband being butchered and sliced like an animal to be used to make a kitchen, Tenie is thrown into a smokehouse, built to literally cure and cook food. Like he uses Sandy’s flesh to build his kitchen, Marrabo believes he can fix Tenie’s emotional breakdown by caging her in the smokehouse to cure her of her emotions. Smokehouses are structures meant to preserve meat and involve the salting of animal flesh to dry the meat and prevent further decomposition (“Smokehouse”). By implication, Marrabo intends to suck out Tenie’s emotions and dry her of them – preventing her from decomposing into an unusable object – to change her into an emotionless object which he then intends to preserve her so that he may continue consuming her as labour in the future.
In Our Nig, Frado as a commodity is consumed and possessed by the Bellmont family, primarily
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Bellmont. Frado a free black is given up to the Bellmont’s as an indentured servant but functions as the Bellmont family slave. She is stripped of her name and is called “our nig, our nig!” (Wilson 26) within a few moments of meeting her. Right away, they claim possession of her by labelling her as theirs. They strip her of her name and discard her identity as a human and replace it with “nig” – lowercase