The questions I want to ask historians, about the magnitude of the magnetization of death and slavery, are as follows: Is there something unrepresentable about slavery—about the deaths of slaves, their experiences, their longings, their fears, their prayers, their grammar of suffering—about slavery’s institutional logics, and slavery’s historical rupturing? Is this why death enters not only as an object for historians but also as an interpretative schema? Is it because both death and slavery represent limits in a certain imaginative enterprise—that which is “inexpressible, inscrutable, unmanageable, horrible”—that they are drawn together? Are death, slavery and blackness connected because of an analogous “unspeakability”? If this unspeakability is located within a social process, then the historical structure of analogy itself has a history, and the slave historian would be tasked with uncovering this fantasmatic interplay, and further still, tracking the ways that the legibility of the analogy may have been written in the incipient gestures of slavery, a condition of possibility for the structuring of slavery itself. A tension, between death derived from a system, and a problematic of death that drives a system, points to a doubling of death as it dances through the details each historian takes up. Does the (very political) division between life and death reflect other divisions like white and black, master and slave, present and past, or work to sustain (and even generate) the racialization of social positionalities and possibilities? What is the causality of a casualty?