"middle passage". Smallwood closes the book with an account from a slave named Sibell, noting: "Sibell's remembered experience cannot fit into the neat temporal and spatial categories that frame my narration of the 'middle passage,' with its orderly narrative progression from African captivity through Atlantic commodification to American slavery...Sibell's narrative suggests that the slave ship charted no course of narrative continuity between the African past and American present, but rather memorialized an indeterminate passage marked by the impossibility of full narrative closure" (164). To the African on a slave ship, there was nothing about the ordeal on a slave ship that implied linear progression to a known end. Rather, every moment was a rupture—a complete disintegration of previously understood experience. She calls the slaves' time on the ship an "experience of motion without discernible direction or destination" (122). Slaves had little idea where they were being taken or what was to be required of them when they arrived. Thus, to talk about the Atlantic slave ship experience as the "middle passage" does not correspond to the lived experiences of slaves themselves. Diaspora Smallwood reveals the stop-and-start nature of early diasporic attempts by African slaves. In the process of being removed to the Americas, slaves were deprived of the kin relations through which many African societies established the identities of their component members. Without connection to their kin structures or their ancestors' homelands, these Africans were unable to create a continuity of their lives with those of their ancestors. In addition, these Africans, especially the early slaves that Smallwood speaks of in the period 1675–1725, were unable to raise children of their own in the New World. She writes, "Their only heirs were those who trailed after them on the returning slave ships, to take the place of dead and departed saltwater laborers…" (160). Deprived of the ability to put down roots in the New World, these slaves were doubly robbed of identity: that of the one they left behind and that of the one they could not create in the Americas. Not until the 1720s were slaves able to raise American-born children and establish a surviving, sustainable community. Form Smallwood's text engages with the most fundamental difficulty for any person who attempts to write the history of the Atlantic slave trade: very few accounts of the slaves themselves are extant. Instead, we must use the accounts of Europeans in order