At the same time, slavery's legal framework of
partus sequitur ventrem (which literally meant "offspring follows belly") subverted European norms so that a child's status followed that of the mother, not the father.
Chapter 3, "The Hold," presents a critical development for In the Wake as Sharpe traces the ways that Black women specifically are, through their bodies and the legal obtaining of their bodies through
partus sequitur ventrem, occupied by the hold of slavery while occupying the hold itself.
(17) A "condemnation of blackness" (to borrow Khalil Gibran Muhammed's apt phrase) taken, now, as so much "common sense" and traceable back to slavery's law of
partus sequitur ventrem that established that the children of a slavewoman inherited the mother's condition.
The progeny of animals are the property of the mother's owner under the maxim
partus sequitur ventrem ("the birth comes from the womb").