Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois Page A

were assigned the
    hardest agricultural tasks: digging canals, tilling the soil, planting cane, and harvesting it. A second group of children and older slaves, as well as new
    arrivals from Africa who were often weak from the middle passage and
    more prone to disease, took on more varied tasks, such as growing provi-
    sions, fertilizing planted cane, or trimming cane plants. Field laborers
    started work at five, stopped for a few hours at midday, then returned to
    their labor until sundown. The grueling work of harvesting, worsened by
    the danger of cutting oneself with a machete or on the sharp stalks of the
    cane, usually lasted from December through July.22
    Harvested stalks of cane were fed twice through a mill—usually driven
    by mules, and sometimes by water—that crushed them to release their
    juice. This task, usually assigned to women, was particularly dangerous. If
    the slave was tired or distracted, and allowed even a finger to be pinched in the grinders as she guided a stalk into the mill, “the finger goes in, then the hand, then the arm and the whole body except the head.” Since during the
    harvest season the grinding of cane was often done all night in successive
    shifts of slaves, exhaustion was common. Many lost their arms, and some
    died of tetanus.23
    The juice from the cane was boiled in a series of vats heated with fires
    made with the bagasse —the dejuiced sugarcane stalks—which had been
    gathered in the mills by children or old women. A white maître sucrier
    (master sugarmaker) oversaw this boiling process, assisted by trained
    slaves who were among the most valued and well-treated on the planta-
    f e r m e n ta t i o n
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    [To view this image, refer to
    the print version of this title.]

    Engraving of sugar processing from the Encyclopédie, 1751. This image shows a very advanced machine for crushing the harvested cane stalks and collecting the juice, driven by a water mill. A woman is performing the dangerous job of feeding the stalks into the machine. Courtesy of the Michigan State University Library.
    tions. Their work required a great deal of care and precision. So did the
    work of other “elite” slaves—the artisans who made the barrels to transport
    the sugar, and those who drove the wagons that transported the cane from
    the fields to the mills and also took care of the horses and mules. Another
    group of relatively privileged slaves were the domestics who worked in the
    master’s house. Among them were laundresses who washed clothes in
    nearby streams or rivers, cooks, valets, and coachmen. They were clothed
    and fed better than the field slaves and could take advantage of their posi-
    tion. Some cooks collaborated with field slaves, using leftovers from the
    kitchen to raise livestock. Laundresses sometimes sold the soap given to
    them and washed the clothes with plants or fruit instead. Daily proximity
    to the master could be an advantage. Along with drivers and artisans, do-
    mestic slaves were the most likely to be emancipated. But they were also
    isolated from the other slaves and more subject to sexual exploitation by
    their masters.24
    Coffee harvesting and processing was also difficult work, and involved
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    av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
    some periods of night work. But on coffee plantations the labor was more
    varied and in some ways less difficult and dangerous than that on sugar
    plantations. Even large coffee plantations were generally smaller than
    sugar plantations, so there was more contact between masters and slaves.
    These plantations were also much less often in the hands of absentee own-
    ers. Coffee planters often assigned their slaves piecework, in which they
    had to harvest a certain amount of coffee and would get a small monetary
    reward if they picked more. A prisoner of the insurgents in late 1791
    claimed to have noticed a contrast between those who had been slaves on
    the sugar plantations of the plain, who were “enraged,” and those who