Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/14

12 was ventilated by a front and back door, and two windows, out of which you looked upon a garden or orchard of their own; and, not a very great way off, an acre or two of ground, given to each of them by their master, to plant whatever they pleased, for their own use, independent of the weekly provisions he gave them. They had free access to all the wood they chose to burn, and it is the habit of the negro to keep up large fires all night, winter and summer. As soon as their task was done for their master (and these tasks, I believe, are determined by law), their whole time was their own. My father's negroes generally finished their work in the fields, at two, three, or four o'clock, P M. Every infant child had its own particular nurse, as none of the boys and girls were put to work in the fields, until they were twelve or fourteen years of age, and even then, great care was taken to give them only such moderate tasks as would not prevent their growth, or full muscular development. The employment, therefore, of all the boys and girls, was to be nurses for their mothers' infant children. When the mothers were out in the fields the nurses, and the infants, were all left in the charge of an experienced woman, who was responsible to the master, if anything happened to them, during the absence of the parents. Their every complaint against each other was lodged in his ear; as the passions of the negro are so cruel, so uncivilized, that every planter has to make stringent laws against their fighting on the plantations. By his own wisdom and authority he settles their disputes. I remember a simple-minded African woman, called Binah, on our plantation, whose husband was a smart, rich carpenter, named Toney. They were both our own slaves, and when her husband died, his relatives assumed that he had left all his property to them. She had been a most exemplary wife, and as soon as my father learned the injustice that was to be done to her by Toney's relatives, he called up old Mingo, his faithful driver, and commanded him to see that nothing really necessary to Binah, of her husband's property, should be taken from out of her house. This poor wife was thus rescued from the sharpers, who would have stripped her of all the hard-earned comforts her husband had throughout life surrounded her with. Binah always used to set a table for her husband (they had no children), and she stood up and waited on him until his meal was finished; after he retired, she ate her own dinner. I believe this sort of, at present, unfashionable respect for husbands is common among all genuine Africans.

Almost all the men on my father's plantation owned a canoe, and made money by catching fish, shrimps, and oysters, in their own time.