How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #7
So now they were coals, firewood, dismembered/branches, not men. They had left their remembered/shadows to the firelight. Scratching a board/they made the signs for their fading names on the wood,/and their former shapes returned absently; each carried the nameless freight of himself to the other world. (XXVIII.ii.150)
This is the violent re-shaping of individual identity that took place on the journey from Africa to the New World. The idea of namelessness is particularly poignant for Achille and many others, who never knew the true names of their parents or anything of the lives they left behind them in Africa. Note that without their names, their language, or the tribal units intact, these people become "freight," a lifeless version of their former selves.
Quote #8
[…] and I thought of the Greek revival/carried past the names of towns with columned porches,/and how Greek it was, the necessary evil/of slavery, in the catalogue of Georgia's/marble past, the Jeffersonian ideal in/plantations with its Hectors and Achilleses,/its foam in the dogwood's spray, past towns named Helen,/Athens, Sparta, Troy. (XXXV.i.177)
The narrator travels through the southern U.S. on his search for another dispossessed people—Native American Indians. It is a double sorrow to him to note that slavery has scarred the landscape and left its mark in obvious ways (poverty and remnants of the Antebellum past) and not-so-obvious ones (the Greek connection).
Quote #9
[…] Negro shacks/moved like a running wound, like the rusty anchor/that scabbed Philoctete's shin, I imagined the backs/moving through the foam of pods, one arm for an oar,/one for the gunny sack. Brown streams tinkled in chains./Bridges arched their spines. (XXXV.i.178)
The narrator's journey through the southern U.S. reveals to him a landscape decimated by slavery. He sees the suffering endured by the slaves etched on the environment and buildings around him—clearly, something that can't be erased by the passage of time.