Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/150

Rh will thus be conveyed to those who are dear to her in the mother-country, and will bear to them a salutation from her. The corpse of a suicide-slave has been seen covered with hundreds of such tokens.

I am told here that nothing but severity will answer in the treatment of slaves; that they always must know that the whip is over them; that they are an ungrateful people; that in the disturbances of 1846, it was the kindest masters who were first massacred with their whole families, while, on the other hand, the severe masters were carried off by their slaves into the woods, there to be concealed during the disturbances. I am told, that in order for a man to be loved by his slaves he must be feared. I do not believe it; such is not human nature; but there is a difference between fear and fear. There is one fear which does not exclude love, and one which produces hatred and revolution.

The slaves have here, in a general way, a dark and brooding appearance. They go to their work in the sugar-fields sleepy and weary. As they drive the oxen to and fro, I frequently see them sucking sugar-cane which they are very fond of, and of which they seem allowed here to have as much as they like. This is, at all events, a refreshment. They are not fed here on rice, but principally upon a species of root called malanga, which, it is said, they like, but which seemed to me insipid. It is yellow and something like the potato, but has a poor and somewhat bitter taste; each slave receives a portion of such root boiled for dinner, and eats it with his salt meat. They have for breakfast boiled maize, which they bruise and mix with wild tomatoes, the fruit of the plantain, or vegetables; for they are allowed a little land on the plantation where they may sow and reap for themselves, and besides this, each family has a pig, which they kill yearly and sell.

Sunday, March 17.—It is the sabbath, and forenoon;