Slave Life in Georgia - African American History

Slave Life in Georgia 101
the day to himself. And so he has; but then he never gets done till night-fall, and
often cannot finish his task at all, and is then so fatigued he can scarcely crawl
to his wretched
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cabin. He is very glad, when he gets there, to throw himself down and sleep.
Many and many a time I have gone to sleep without my supper, quite dead beat
with fatigue: and I am a strong man. Then, again, you are never sure but the
overseer or the master will find fault with your work, and make you go over it
again to mend it, besides giving you a flogging for your negligence. There is
often too good reason for fault-finding; and no wonder. The task is usually so
heavy, that in the hurry to get through the day's work, the ground will not be
clean hoed, or the plants will be broken: faults which never escape severe
punishment. But the system of task-work is not, I think, usual, except on the
smaller plantations, where the master does his own overseering and flogs his
own "niggers;" which some of them like to do. There is an economy in this
system, because it enables the master to do without an overseer. After he has
ascertained the speed of his "niggers" in hoeing, picking cotton, or such like, he
tasks and leaves them. He has then only to go over their work, and can at once
detect if any of the hands have fallen off; and as each had his task, he is in no
difficulty to find out the delinquent. The ordinary day's labour in hoeing,
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at task-work, is about from eight to ten rows across a fifteen acre field, the rows
being about four feet apart, when the cotton is growing. If it is a ten acre field,
there are more rows; if a twenty acre field, fewer. I set, what, from hard
experience, I know to be the average. The task for women is from seven to eight
rows of fifteen acres across, or in the same proportion as the men. It is very
laborious work. It breaks the back, as the body is constantly bent, and the arms
are continually going; the perspiration, meanwhile, streams from every pore of
the body till the whole of it, head, hair, and all, are covered with a crust of mud.
When the cotton is older in growth, the day's labour is increased one-third, or
thereabouts, as by this time the weeds and grass are pretty well under. In North
Carolina and in Virginia, the tasking system is not so bad as in Georgia and in
South Carolina. Where there is overseering, the negroes are driven as hard as
possible, but the work is done less regularly, and by fits and starts. The negroes
will flag and rest if they can get the chance. Whilst they do so, one of the
24.03.2006