Book excerpt: Scarring and the act of scarring are recurrent images in African American literature. In Scarring the Black Body, Carol E. Henderson analyzes the cultural and historical implications of scarring in a number of African American texts that feature the trope of the scar, including works by Sherley Anne Williams, Toni Morrison, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. The first part of Scarring the Black Body, "The Call," traces the process by which African bodies were Americanized through the practice of branding. Henderson incorporates various materials -- from advertisements for the return of runaways to slave narratives -- to examine the cultural practice of "writing" the body. She also considers way in which writers and social activists, including Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, developed a "call" centered on the body's scars to demand that people of African descent be given equal rights and protection under the law.