My Life as a Slave

Today we have a guest blogger. Her name is Belinda Daniel and she was once a slave on a Haitian plantation. She started out in the fields but then became a housekeeper in the master’s house.

My name is Belinda and I’m here to tell you about being a Haitian slave. It was hard work in the fields. Rows and rows of sugar cane stretched as far as the eye could see. I was young when I first started field work so we had work like weeding and topping the cane before harvest. The work never seemed to end always something to be done day in and day out especially around harvest.

Many slaves went into the sugar works and came out missing an arm or leg, some even died. Sugar harvest was one of the saddest times of the year for the plantation slaves. We lost many good people to the sugar works.

When I was about sixteen, my mistress needed more help in the house for a big party she was throwing. I had helped our cook sometimes when she needed a few extra hands so I was taken out of the fields and put into the big house to work. I learned how to scrub floors and make beds and shine silver ‘til you could see your reflection in it.

My mistress knew exactly how she thought everything should be done and if you did not obey orders she would slap you so hard it would make your head spin. I tried to follow every order and do everything just like she liked it so I would not get hit. When mistress got in a bad mood, it was best to stay away. When she felt cruel, she would give the servants so many chores that there was no way to complete them all. Then she would beat us and call us stupid and lazy. Mistress’s most common form of torture was pinching. Anytime she felt like it, she would pinch me and remind me to be a good slave. Sometimes I went home at night with huge bruises from her pinches.

Since I worked in the big house, I received better food and clothing than the field slaves because mistress needed the house slaves to look good for company. I wanted to learn how to speak better and learn correct grammar so I listened to how the whites talked and tried to imitate them.  My desires to better myself lead the field workers to resent me and say that I was uppity and thought that I was better than everyone else.  I knew that I was not any better than any other slave, but my dream was to runaway and I believed that the more educated I seemed the more people would help me. I knew that it would be hard but I wanted to make it to a maroon community where they could protect me and not send me back.

I never had a chance to run away the revolution came before I could make a break for freedom, but that’s another story. Thank you for listening!

Sources:

Glymph, Thardia. Out of the House of Bondage. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress, New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.