The field-hand's day begins just before sunrise with the clamour occasioned by the blowing of a conch-shell. The first gang is led out to the fields by the black drivers and a white overseer, a procession of dark dreamers taking with them all they need for breakfast and work. Their most treasured and important movables are the hoe, the machete, and the agricultural fork. The list of names is thereafter called, and the names of all absentees noted, whereafter they work until nine when a break of a half-hour is permitted for the consumption of boiled yams, plantains and other vegetables seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper. By this time most of the absentees have made an appearance and are rewarded with a few stripes of the Head Driver's whip. After breakfast they continue with their labours until a bell calls them at noon, when they are permitted two hours of rest and refreshment. For the negroes this generally consists of squatting on sooty limbs while stuffing the belly, men slumbering swollen like a pig. At two o'clock they are once more summoned and at this time usually manifest signs of greater vigour and animated application until sunset, when they are released to their rum and revelry.
For hours the men will indulge themselves in gambling, pitch and toss being a favourite, a game occasioning loud and excitable responses, which very much suits the negro temperament. On these fine tropical nights it is possible to watch from the piazza as the negro women cook the supper and tell stories to one another. The chief meal consists of what the negroes grow and cultivate for themselves, supplemented by the two pounds of excellent salt-fish which is weekly served out to adults, with children receiving an allowance of a pound and one half from the day of their birth, and drivers a princely three pounds. Not for the hungry negro a simple cold mess to conclude a day's labour. The scent of fresh bread often flows from their ovens, and I am told that the tea they boil using the soiled waters of the nearby turbid stream is surprisingly palatable. By far the greater number of negro children happily display themselves in a state of nature. Their common form of recreation is to dance all about, after which, along with their elders, they will retire for the night unconscious of any harm until dawn, when again they are driven afield to labour. Once they reach the cane-pieces there is one strange custom which the negro seems determined to indulge in. This involves tearing off their shirts and secreting them under a bush when threatened with even the lightest rain. In this state they are wont to continue their labours, for the rain runs quickly from their oily skins. Should a negro allow dampness to enter his clothing he will almost certainly contract the tremors and fall swiftly into a decline.
Work is carried on daily except for Sunday and every other Saturday, when the slaves are free to raise their own provisions such as plantains, yams, eddoes and other tropical vegetables. They also keep hogs, rabbits and such livestock. On their free days, and the holidays of Easter, Whitsuntide and Christmas, they visit the market to sell and trade what they have cultivated. They have a keen eye for fancy articles of little practical value, and they love their free time in which to gossip on trivial matters, investing them with an almost absurd gravitas. On Sundays and holiday occasions the negro will cap his festivities by indulging a passion for dress, a love of which is curiously strong in these people. Male or female, they show the same predilection for exhibiting the finery of their wardrobes, and will generally adorn themselves in the following manner. The dandified males sport wide-brimmed hats and silk umbrellas, and promenade in windsor-grey trousers (which are generally embroidered about the seams with black cord). They complete the spectacle with white jackets, and shirts with stiff high collars. The sable-belles are no less extravagantly modish in their ornamental silk dresses, gauze flounces and highly coloured petticoats which, though of the best quality, display patterns more commonly employed in England for window-curtains. Those who sport bonnets blend the fiercest shades in a close companionship with each other, so that these rainbow-hats dazzle one's eyes at a mile's distance. Others seem to imagine their Sabbath toilet complete only when combs are stuck into their woolly heads, although the poor implement would be doomed should it attempt to conquer their coarse ungovernable hair. I for one take greater comfort in viewing the negroes, male and female, in their filthy native garb, for in these circumstances they do not violate laws of taste which civilized peoples have spent many a century to establish.
During the crop season those who are chosen to work in the boiling-house often drudge long into the night, and some clean through until dawn without even a momentary suspension of labour. But this is the only real variance from a pattern which the average English labourer might consider luxurious, especially if he were to view the quarters of the plantation blacks, their cottages surrounded by trees and shrubs, the interiors often plastered and white-washed, the roofs matched with palm leaves, and the floors of the best rooms board. Their bedding is for the most part a sack filled with dry plantain leaves, which I am led to believe can prove exceedingly comfortable. Some negroes find it advantageous to drape their narrow nests with the mosquito-net so as to hinder these creatures, whose kiss is more powerful than of any English gnat or harvest-bug. Although the family is deemed the basic social unit, marriage is a mere charade and unfaithfulness a matter of course. But let not this one small sadness disguise the fact that for the negroes this is indeed a happy hedonistic life, with ample food, much singing and dancing, regular visits to the physicians, hospitals a-plenty, good housing, healthy labour, and an abundance of friendship.
I have been led to believe that in the past there was some tension between the Africans and the Creoles. Disputes between these different types of slave were regularly initiated by the Creoles, who held in contempt those closer to Africa as being the produce of Guinea-men. Bonds tighter than family were often struck between the offspring of two men who travelled to these shores in the same bottom, and such bonding would often lead to resentment among the creole blacks who had long forgotten, if indeed they had ever known, the true nature of their origins, over and above some loosely imagined fabrications relating to times long since past. These days, now that the acquisition of fresh African slaves is no longer legal, the breeding system has acquired a greater significance than hitherto. I observed a negress who, having enriched my father, held up her new-born child with the words, 'See misses, see! Here nice new nigger me born to bring for work for misses.' And her sentiments are by no means unusual. High status is granted a woman who can bring forth many Creole children to populate the plantation, and it has not been unknown for a woman to be rewarded for such labour by being granted her freedom. Stella's own sister explained to me that she had 'twelve whole children and three half ones', by which she meant miscarriages. And should one chance to hear of a 'one-belly woman', she will be labouring under 'the pleasing punishment which women bear', and is therefore discharged from all severe labour, except of course the terrors and agonies of the labour of child-birth itself, which in these parts is no simple matter.
It is generally the elderly and most obstinately ignorant women who attend the breeders at the time of child-birth. Their tampering has in many instances led to the mother or child or both breathing their last before the mortal nature of the confinement is recognized, and a proper medical attendant can be summoned. Happy is the mother who survives this harpy-trial; her issue is added joyously to the list of the slave population in the plantation-book. But sadly, her joy will not endure beyond a few weeks, for these women are soon pressed again into service and driven afield. I heard complaints from one such bearer who claimed, 'Misses, me have pickaninny two weeks in de sick-house, den out upon the hoe again and we can't strong that way, misses, we can't strong.' On the mothers' return to the fields their progeny are lost to the charge of these self-same midwives. It is only to be expected that before long the pleasures of field-gossip far outweigh the burdens of that weary duty known as motherhood. In short, these mothers soon prefer their pigs to their own children. To conclude, I sometimes believe that the black woman can produce little atoms at will, and when they are barren, it is so only because they are discontented with their circumstances (as a hen will not lay her eggs on board ship). However, the pleasures and benefits that accrue to these breeders lead some dissemblers to insist, for many months more than is generally required to replenish the human race, that they are in 'a state of goodly hope'.