When Marcus encounters Pauline on the road in the quarters in Ernest Gaines’ Of Love and Dust, he becomes angry at Pauline for ignoring his advances while she accepts Bonbon’s advances towards her. He asks, “What’s the matter with you? . . . I been working up there all night like a slave, like a dog — and all on ‘count of him. What’s the matter with you?” Here, Marcus refers to Bonbon working him “like a slave,” and his choice or words here stands out, especially if we consider Marcus’ position in the novel. Marshall Hebert bonded Marcus out of jail in preparation for the upcoming trial, and Marcus must work on Marshall’s plantation to pay off Marshall’s bail payment.

A similar conversation takes place in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple when Sofia gets bonded out of jail after standing up for herself by slapping the white mayor. Like Marcus, Sofia goes to work for a white family, in their home instead of on a plantation. Working for the mayor’s wife, Sofia lives at the home, unable to see her children or leave. Talking with Celie, Sofia relates how Mrs. Millie, the mayor’s wife, asks Sofia if she knows how to dirve and can teach her. Sofia responds in the affirmative as she was, as Sofia puts it, “slaving away cleaning that big post they got down at the bottom of the stair.”

Sofia’s oldest son overhears his mother, and he tells her. “Don’t say slaving, Mama.” Sofia asks him why he has an issue with her use of “slaving” to refer to the work that she does. She tells him how they have her “in a little storeroom up under the house” and how she must be at their “beck and call all night and all day,” not even allowing her to see her children. She tells her son, “I’m a slave,” and then she asks, though, “What would you call it?” He responds by saying he would call it “[a] captive.”

We are reading these books in my course this semester, and the exchange between Sofia and her son grabbed my attention today. What caught my attention was the fact that her son doesn’t want her to use “slave” or “slaving” when she refers to the work that she does at the mayor’s home. Instead, he wants her to use “captive.” When I thought about this, I thought about the similarities between the words, specifically that both represent involuntary positions for an individual. However, they differ, as a student pointed out, in a few ways. The student mentioned that when they think of “slave” they think of people as property and when they think of “captive” they think of individuals as hostages.

While we can argue the differences in connotations when we use the term “slave” or “captive,” the main point that Marcus and Sofia make with their statements is that the legal system enslaves them, allowing individuals to bond them out of jail so they can work for those individuals. But wait, you may say, slavery ended following the Civil War and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. It reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Yes, the Thirteenth Amendment “ended” chattel slavery; however, the clause “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” opened the door for a new form of slavery, the convict lease system which Marcus and Sofia experience in their situations. Michelle Alexander notes that this practice arose following the Civil War, playing into the “punishment” clause of the Thirteenth Amendment, and individuals, in order to pay off their debts, would “labor on plantations and farms.” Both Marcus and Sofia get arrested, essentially, for acting in self defense, yet they cannot pay to get out of prison before their trial or they don’t have that opportunity. So, they become part of the convict lease system, getting let out of prison only to work on Marshall’s plantation or in the mayor’s house.

As “convicts,” Marcus and Sofia had no legal rights and no means to redress their situations. Instead, they existed as slaves of the state. This phrasing comes from the 1871 Virginia Supreme Court case Ruffin v. Commonwealth where the court ruled that Ruffin was, in fact, a slave. They stated,

For the time being, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being the slave of the State. He is civiliter mortuus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man.

The court’s opinion in the Ruffin case, coming six years after the Civil War and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, states that Marcus and Sofia, due to their imprisonment, should be considered “for the time being the slave[s] of the state.” Even though they have not, at the time of their imprisonment and leasing out been convicted of any crime, they experience civiliter mortuus (civil death) and relinquish, not through their own volition, their civil rights as citizens.

With no means of recourse or ways to pay any fines or debt they accrued, individuals such as Marcus and Sofia would be, as Alexander points out, “sold as forced laborers to lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, farms, plantations, and dozes of corporations throughout the South.” So, other entities, not the prison/legal system used them for work and labor, and, according to the court decision in Ruffin, they were considered slaves.

If we return to Marcus’ comment and the exchange between Sofia and her son, what word or term should we use to describe their situations? Is it slavery? Is it captivity? Is their a difference? It is useful for us, considering the history and the wording of the Thirteenth Amendment to use the term “slave” or “enslaved” when referring to Marcus and Sofia. While they do not exist within a system of chattel slavery where an individual owns them as property, they become, in essence, “property of the state” due to to their incarceration and thus are forced to become enslaved to the state which strips them of their civil rights and citizenship, even though neither one has been convicted of anything.

What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.

For more, watch Ava Durveney’s 13th.