coffle (kaffle) /KAW-fəl/. noun. A train or chain of humans or animals, usually slaves. From Arabic qāfilah (caravan).
“I was met by a coffle of slaves about seventy in number.” (Mungo Park)
“From the black slave-ship’s foul and
loathsome hell,
And coffle’s weary chain”
(John Greenleaf Whittier)
“Before sunrise she hear them—one, two, three hundred foot hitting the ground and rumbling like slow thunder. They used to wake her and scare her so much that she thought they was a militia marching to hell. The slave coffle.” (Marlon James)
“You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, ‘you know we raised you as we did our own children.’ Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping-post? Did you raise them to be driven off in a coffle in chains?” (Jermain Loguen)
“Behind the men walked several women roped together neck to neck. A coffle—slaves for sale.” (Octavia Butler)
“Then the passengers, the former conference on mental disease and violence in the subcontinent, are roped into a coffle and marched off the road up a footpath. No one on either side has said a word after the initial rough commands. The conferees have left, for a time at least, the domain of speech.” (Michael Gruber)
“Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself in the privacy of his very own home and skull, then TV’s ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cojones will be broken.” (David Foster Wallace)