Zanüba answered very clearly the questions about her actual position in this whole affair. In his own defense, one of the traders had claimed Zanüba was not his slave but his wife. Zanüba countered, in her own testimony, “I am not his wife, and I am not his freed slave. I am a slave he brought here to be sold for money.”All the papers quoted verbatim this startling declaration of identity, this clear assertion by a slave of being a slave, but one accompa- nied by no claim of connection, or belonging, to any master. She had refused to go along with the subterfuge of his claim of marriage. She thus indicted the traders, but her assertion still kept her strangely unsituated.

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 697