Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/155

Rh children of bondage. They have brought it with them as an inheritance from their mother-country.

I went from this married pair to the prison cell, in which the slaves are placed after they have suffered punishment—women as well as men—and whilst the mind is still in a state of fermentation, after having endured bodily suffering. They are placed here in irons, made fast to a wooden frame, and here they sit, bound hands and feet—women as well as men—till their minds are again calm and their wounds healed, so that they can again go to their work. They are said to get fat while they remain here! The room was now empty, and inhabited merely by swarms of fleas.

I only wonder that suicide is not of more frequent occurrence among this people. How strong and tenacious the instinct of life must be!

The sugar-mill here affords, in its way, an interesting and picturesque scene. The athletic figures of those half-naked Africans who stand by the furnaces, or by the boiling sugar-pans, in those large, gloomy buildings, or who move about occupied in various ways, produce a singular effect. I cannot behold without amazement and pleasure the savage but calm majesty of their bearing and movement, as well as the dark energy of their countenances. Sculptors ought to see and model from these African chests and shoulders. They seem made to sustain Atlas. And though the Atlas of slavery presses heavily upon them, they are still strong—terribly strong, if the hour of vengeance should ever come; now they are silent and gloomy. The Spanish majorals in their white shirts and with their whips, or short, thin, square staves in their hands, stand or sit here and there on elevated platforms within the building, to overlook the work; and in the morning take the while, their coffee and white bread. They seem to me, as far as form and appearance goes, to be much smaller and more insignificant than many of the