If Abducted is the story of the taking, Enslaved is the story of what was built once the ships landed. The $10,000 bill follows the Atlantic crossing to its destination: American soil, where abduction hardened into a permanent system. This note documents the founding of slavery in the colonies that became the United States, and the centuries it took to formally end.
Here is what is encoded in it.
A note for the racialized
This is a Federal Reparations Note, declared legal tender for all debts, public and private, for individuals enslaved from the Kingdom of Ndongo or any other African nation. The promise printed across it reframes the entire instrument: it will pay to the racialized on demand. The bill argues that race itself was an invention of this system, and so the debt is owed to the population that system created.
That population is named in the banner: The United Slaves of America, an entire people brought into being in the Americas under enslavement, the thread that runs through every bill in the series.
The dates that bracket American slavery
Two series dates set the American timeline:
Series of 1619 marks the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, the beginning on these shores.
Series of 1865 marks when slavery was supposed to end.
Between those dates sits the entire architecture of American bondage, and the bill spells out its scale.
The numbers
The figures 388K, 450K, and 4.4M trace the growth of the enslaved population: roughly 388,000 Africans brought directly to the United States, another 450,000 arriving through migration from the Caribbean, a population that escalated to some 4.4 million by the 19th century. A relatively small number of arrivals, compounded across generations of forced labor, became millions.
20 AM stands for the first 20 enslaved Africans to arrive in America, the seed of all of it.
The places and the powers
Virginia is named twice over, the site of first arrival and the colony that held the highest enslaved population. The bill does not let the trade read as an American invention alone. A seal names Spain, France, the Netherlands, the British Empire, and Portugal, the European powers all bound up in the enslavement of Africans. The theft was a continental enterprise before it was an American one.
The Middle Passage
A Middle Passage memorial seal marks the crossing itself, encoding the roughly 2.4 million Africans who died on the voyage across the Atlantic. Before the labor, before the plantations, there was the water, and the bill refuses to skip it.
The legal end, and its limits
13 A marks the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery, though its exception clause left a door open that other bills in the series walk through. John Conyers signs as Secretary of the Treasury, the author of H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations, installed again on a note he never got to issue.
The hidden details
Even the smallest marks carry weight. Fig leaves, drawn into the design, reference the foliage written into the Constitution and stand for the embarrassment of slavery, the thing the founders covered rather than named. Chains of bondage appear in the ornamentation. And the Kuba cloth pattern from the Congo, modern Angola, runs through the note, the series tradition of grounding each bill in the fabric of an exploited African nation.
The handwritten line names the Future Ancestors of the Diaspora as the rightful beneficiaries, insisting the Black community will become the benefactors of this artwork, the debt reaching forward, not only back.
Why it works
Enslaved is the bill that names the beginning. By fixing the dates, 1619 to 1865, and filling the space between them with the real arithmetic, the 2.4 million lost at sea, the 4.4 million held in bondage, it turns the founding myth inside out. The note insists that American wealth and the American institution of race were built in the same act, and that the receipt was never paid.
And because every Black Stacks sale funds direct payments to community members, the piece does what its own text promises. It begins to pay the racialized, on demand.
Own the piece
The Enslaved $10,000 bill is available in the shop, alongside the full Black Stacks series, each one a decoded document with its own buried history.
[See the Enslaved bill in the shop]
Decoded is the journal of Andre Woolery's studio, where the hidden histories inside the work get read out loud.
