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

had
    been slaves in the mountains, who were less ferocious.25
    Enslaved women confronted particular challenges on the plantations:
    they were responsible for both production and reproduction. Excluded
    from the most prestigious occupations—drivers, sugarboilers, and arti-
    sans—most of them worked in the fields. Those who worked as domestics
    were in particular danger of rape and other forms of abuse by their mas-
    ters. And those who were mothers faced particularly wrenching and dif-
    ficult struggles and choices. During the second half of the eighteenth cen-
    tury, some planters became concerned about the low birthrates among the
    slaves and instituted incentive programs to encourage women to have chil-
    dren. The manager of the thriving Gallifet sugar plantations in the North-
    ern Province gave monetary rewards to mothers—one for giving birth, and
    another, probably larger, for weaning the child two years later. Programs of
    encouragement were often accompanied by new and cruel forms of pun-
    ishment for those accused of having had abortions. In the Southern Prov-
    ince some women suspected of having them were forced to wear a human-
    shaped figurine symbolizing the lost baby around their necks. Women who
    had had abortions were considered to have deprived their masters of a
    piece of human property. In the late 1790s legends circulated about a mid-
    wife named Samedi who during the time of slavery took advantage of her
    profession to kill the children she delivered. She wore a belt with seventy
    knots, each a reminder of one of her victims, for whom, she proclaimed,
    she had been a “liberator.”26
    Enslaved women were prey to sexual exploitation and assault by mas-
    ters, managers, and overseers. Although some resisted, they had little power
    to refuse predatory men who legally owned their bodies. Sometimes long-
    term relationships developed between enslaved women and masters or
    managers. The slaves involved in such relationships were rewarded with
    f e r m e n ta t i o n
    47
    better clothes and food, and sometimes gained liberty for themselves and
    their children. In seeking to understand these relationships it is difficult—
    perhaps impossible—to disentangle emotion from interest, sex and senti-
    ment from power and coercion. The little insight we have into them, as
    with so much of slave life, comes from the sparse and distorted writings of
    whites.27
    Despite the deeply unequal relationship between masters and slaves,
    life and labor on the plantations was the product of constant negotiation
    and adjustment. The enslaved resisted in small ways as they worked in the
    fields, and they developed, and defended, customary rights. The most im-
    portant of these was access to garden plots of land on the plantations. The
    Code Noir required masters to feed their slaves with a set number of pro-
    visions each week. Relatively quickly, however, many masters began using
    a practice borrowed from Dutch colonies, in which slaves were given a
    small plot of land to cultivate rather than being given weekly provisions.
    They were also given all or part of Saturday, in addition to the free Sunday
    they already had, to cultivate these plots. This arrangement was a way for
    planters a way to save money, although it could backfire if slaves were un-
    able to grow enough food to feed themselves, as was the case especially in
    times of drought.28
    On most plantations the enslaved were fed through a combination of
    common provisions, cultivated by groups of slaves taken from other
    tasks under the command of a driver, and food they grew on their own
    small plots. From the common grounds came potatoes, manioc, and other
    staples, while from individual plots came squash, spinach, cucumbers,
    peppers, and sometimes tobacco. Slaves also chewed bits of sugarcane
    taken from the fields, and drank tafia —rum—which masters and managers sometimes handed out when the work was particularly hard. Some supplemented their diets in