It is 1849, you are a Southern US functionary in charge of the penitentiary in Richmond, Virginia and you have to enumerate your prisoners, divide them into Black and white, make sure the register tallies and accurately document a novel and idiosyncratic crime to sit alongside the others:

In the twenty-first century, this factual record of a novel form of slave fugitivity is now in the archives and survives as a powerful testament to the bureaucratic discourse of the Southern US slave power. It is recorded as a specific form of criminality with its own row in the column. We might speculate with Dionne Brand as to the way such a functionary would undertake his account keeping. She describes how:

The task is to leave a complete record without blemish. The task of the prison guard/plantation owner/slave ship captain/archivist is to make the enumeration everyday, ordinary, so as to dispel any doubt that this is normality. Brand's description of the workaday nature of agents within the panoptical control of the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery articulates the archive's powerful message of a controlled world to which there is no alternative. As Stephanie Smallwood reminds us, such business narratives are often the only evidence we have of individuals who lived everyday lives in the slave system: