ATDTDA (3) The way it happens, 91-96

[Monte Davis]

> One of the constant themes of Pynchon is slavery,
> and the great waves of social change left in the wake
> of emancipation and other attempts at freedom.

A fact I came across the other day in a review of _Amazing Grace_, the movie
about Wilberforce and the British slave trade -- had seen it before in  Adam
Hochschild's book Breaking the Chains, on the same subject:

In the 200 years before 1820,~3 milion Europeans emigrated to the New World
-- and more than 8 milion Africans were taken there as slaves. (A horribly
large fraction of those went to the sugar islands of the West Indies, where
mortality was so high that slave populations rarely maintained their
numbers.)

So (speakin as a honkie here) our default picture -- even the one we might
get from M&D -- of slavery as an ugly chapter of a grand story needs some
adjustment. In quantitative terms, the grand story was the appendix.