The biggest challenge for Robert Cooper would have been learning how to govern such a large and recalcitrant workforce. Luckily, advice was readily available. Just as cattle farmers had evolved many theories for raising a healthy herd, so the West Indian planters had written manuals—the product of over a hundred years of practical experience—about how to manage their slaves. For example, in 1786 a group of prominent Barbadian slave owners published a pamphlet in London entitled “Instructions … offered to the Consideration of Proprietors and Managers of Plantations in Barbados.” It outlined a number of factors that the estate manager should consider in his daily manipulation of the black workforce in order to achieve high levels of productivity and social stability.
The West Indian proprietors had evolved an organizational structure that was extremely hierarchical and it was this system that Robert Cooper inevitably implemented at Burkes. At its summit was the planter, Robert Cooper, who ruled like an absolute monarch, and his wife and child, who enjoyed the privileges of any royal family. Here he was master of a large community of slaves over whom he literally had the power of life and death, since for most of his time as a planter the murder of a slave was punishable only by a fine of £15. So when Robert Cooper rode across Burkes in his planter’s uniform of jodhpurs and white frock coat with shiny buttons, wielding his whip or gold-topped cane, the work rate would have quickened while every eye surreptitiously followed him, fearing to draw his attention or displease him.
His role as head of the plantation was crucial, for just as one could not run a country without a head of state, so it was inadvisable to run a plantation with someone who did not have its long-term interests at heart. On islands such as Jamaica, where the percentage of absentee planters was high, individual plantations tended to be more unruly and less profitable in the long run, and the island itself was more violent and unstable. Indeed, Jamaica had more rebellions than the rest of the British islands put together. As the Gothic novel writer turned Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis noted, the declaration “You belong no massa” was one of the most contemptuous remarks that one slave could throw at another. Lewis mistakenly put this down to the slaves’ desire to be ruled, rather than a recognition of how dangerous it was to live on a plantation without an ultimate authority figure. There was virtually no protection for its black inhabitants under the law, which meant that workers’ well-being was utterly dependent on the nature and values of those in charge of them.
Beneath Robert Cooper were a handful of white men, including clerks, attorneys and bookkeepers, who tended to be a transient, disgruntled community. They frequently found the work lonely and dispiriting and quibbled ceaselessly about wages and conditions. The most important of them were the overseers, who were responsible for slave performance; they spent most of their time directly supervising slaves in the cane fields or in the boiling house. As de facto deputies, these men were also in charge of the plantation when Robert Cooper went away.
Overseers were often second sons who had no other way of making a living, or poor boys from Britain who hoped to make their fortune in the colonies. But their wages were not usually sufficient to fulfil their dreams of establishing their own plantations. These men were frequently a source of aggravation to planters because so few of them were reliable or efficient. Poorly educated and frequently pickled with drink, they were usually unmarried—planters felt that wives were a distraction—but virtually never celibate. Indeed, they were notorious for their rapacious attentions to their female slaves, whom they assaulted in the cane fields or co-opted as their mistresses. Some were too interested in fornicating to keep their minds on the job, while others were either too lenient or too harsh to get the best out of the workers, though excesses were rarely curtailed unless it affected production.
One such case occurred in 1824, when the Martinican planter Pierre Desalles noted in his diary that his slaves had been lobbying for many months against a vicious overseer. They told him: “Your negroes are giving in to despair … nothing amuses them, they no longer get dressed, and when they think of M. Chignac, the hospital fills up, and they let themselves die.” In the end the planter gave in and fired the man, admitting: “All our misfortunes were caused by the slaves’ hatred for him.” Desalles understood, as Robert Cooper eventually would, that a good planter had to be responsive to the subtle shifts in the interpersonal dynamics on his plantation in order to neutralize potential conflict.
Just below overseers in the pyramid, and almost as valued, was a group of slaves known as rangers or drivers. Notable for their physical strength and vigour, these men were chosen to help the overseer impose discipline in the fields. Armed with whips and sometimes even knives and guns, they were allowed to administer ad hoc punishment to field slaves who were not working fast or hard enough. With a punch in the face or a well-aimed kick, they urged the exhausted slaves onwards. They even had permission to apply whippings—usually a preset number sanctioned by the overseer—to slaves they believed had misbehaved. Their power extended beyond the canes; at night they rampaged through the slave settlement like pirates, stealing food and possessions or grabbing a woman or girl.
At the top of this group was the head driver or ranger, who traditionally was an unusually strong and impressive figure. He had authority from the overseer to direct all the slaves in each gang, and to instruct them in the tasks that he believed to be necessary. He was also the conduit between the slaves and the white managers, a role that demanded that he be an excellent negotiator and possess the ability to inspire both fear and respect in the slaves. This position was so important that a bad or indifferent head driver could seriously compromise the success of the plantation.
The 1786 manual also stressed the importance of carefully handling slaves of special ability, partly because of their potential contribution to plantation life but also because they were the biggest challenge to an estate’s equilibrium and could easily turn their energies towards subversion. The canny planter provided such slaves with privileges and authority, selecting them for management roles: alongside the driver and rangers were artisans like carpenters, masons and blacksmiths and specialists who worked in the sugar factory such as boiler men. Women too were sometimes elevated to more privileged positions, as skilled domestic labourers, such as cooks, nurses and launderers, as well as midwives or healers.
At the base of this pyramid, and supporting the entire edifice, was an army of Africans who did the work of planting, harvesting and transporting of the cane. They were organized into a gang system. The first gang was for the strongest slaves, both male and female, who undertook the most strenuous jobs on the plantation such as the sowing and harvesting. One planter described them as “the flower of all field battalions, drafted and recruited from all the other gangs as they come of age to endure severe labour. They were drilled to become veterans of the most arduous field undertakings … They are the very essence of an estate, its support in all weathers and necessities.” The spectacle of these slaves at work awed outsiders. One visitor to the islands wrote in 1812: “It has often occurred to me that a gang of Negroes in the act of holing for canes, when hard driven, appeared to be as formidable as a phalanx of infantry by the rapid movement of their hoes … while I have been astonished how such habits could enable beings to persevere, so many hours in such violent effort.”
The second gang was responsible for the weeding and clearing; it included mothers of suckling children, youths aged between twelve and eighteen, and elderly people who were still strong enough for field work. They cleaned up the fields and cleared the floor of crushed cane and trash in the factory. The third gang was comprised of the most vulnerable people on the plantation: the very young and the old, the frail and recuperating. They did the light work of clearing weeds and rocks, as well as taking care of the other gangs and the animals, hence the sight of youngsters running up and down the canes carrying buckets of water, or feeding the cattle hay.
The plantation system provided a strong blueprint,
but each estate had its own history, set of relationships and mix of characters, so no single strategy could ever be successful. An effective plantation was one where all the levels of this hierarchy worked in functional harmony. While this could and did accommodate a high degree of brutality and discord, there was a tipping point beyond which productivity was impaired.
The daily life of the plantation had a distinct rhythm in which the slaves played their part and the planter his. Plantation dwellers tended to be early risers, but Robert Cooper was woken by his body slave, who, after rousing him, padded around the room opening the jalousied windows that overlooked the manicured grounds of the great house. Then the slave ferried vat after vat of boiling water upstairs from the kitchen fire to fill a bath, where he washed Robert Cooper’s hair and soaped his back. He dried him meticulously, helped him dress and finally arranged his hair.
Breakfast followed. This was usually a prodigious affair, particularly if guests were staying. One such visitor declared that it was “as if they had never eaten before.” And no wonder, as the meal that she was treated to comprised “a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hock negus; then Madeira, sangaree, hot and cold meat, stews and fries, hot and cold fish, pickled and plain, peppers, ginger sweetmeats, acid fruit, sweet jellies—in short it was all as astounding as it was disgusting.”
The majority of Robert Cooper’s black charges had an altogether more rude entry to the day. Woken before sun-up by the clamorous sound of the bell atop the mill, the first gang hauled themselves off the floors of their fetid huts and quickly splashed their faces with cold water, before being led to the cane fields by the overseer. When they arrived a register was called and the absentees were noted, to be punished later. Then the slaves, armed with their hoes and machetes, fork and baskets, were set to work until nine o’clock, when they were allowed half an hour to consume their starchy breakfast of food such as boiled yams and plantains, a diet which had not changed much since the time of George Ashby.
After breakfast, the slaves returned to the fields until midday, when they were allowed a two-hour break for lunch, which was yet another starchy meal enlivened with salt fish or pig’s tail, which they received as part of their weekly rations. Desperate to up productivity, some planters gave their charges less time to recuperate, but this was almost always counterproductive as exhausted slaves worked less effectively or fell ill. Then the slaves returned to work under the blazing sun, tormented by rats, snakes and scorpions. Meanwhile Robert Cooper, after his daily tour around the plantation to check on his assets, retired to his study to pore over his ledgers. Then there was usually a substantial cooked lunch and perhaps a rejuvenating post-prandial nap.
Arising refreshed, Robert Cooper returned to his study while his slaves toiled until sunset, when they were dismissed by the sound of the bell, having worked for a minimum of ten hours. The slaves returned to their quarters often worn to distraction, but knowing that their day was not over: there were children to attend to, homes to be cleaned, allotments to be tended and food to be cooked.
It was a point of honour in plantation society that no menial activity was undertaken by anyone but a slave, so Robert Cooper and his contemporaries would do as little for themselves as was humanly possible. Slaves were called to swat flies and lift balls of wool that had fallen to the ground. This “learned helplessness” provoked frequent comment from visitors to the island. One army officer related this tale:
I was one evening … witness to the lazy pride of a creole lady, an opposite neighbour. She was seated at her window, in the true style of Barbadian indolence, and I walking in our gallery. When she wanted some tamarind water, which stood at the farther end of the room, she called out “Judy,” “Judy,” then “Mary,” “Mary”; again in a louder tone, “Here somebody.” Thus she continued until she got a fit of coughing and I laughed heartily … These lazy creoles if they drop a pin, will not stoop to pick it up.
After a generous dinner and a couple of hours either with his family or in the solitude of his study, Robert Cooper climbed the stairs to his room, where his body servant pulled off his boots, helped him out of his clothes, and held the chamber pot for him to piss in. As he clambered into bed, the slave extinguished the oil lamps and said good night. Then the slave slipped out of the room and returned to the slave quarters, or lay down on his pallet on the bedroom floor, hoping that his master would not need him in the night.
Despite his power at the head of this vast organization, Robert Cooper himself served a hard master: sugar. The demands of that crop shaped his hours, days and months, as it did everyone’s at Burkes. In Barbados the climate was sympathetic enough to allow the canes to be planted at almost any season, but a pattern emerged around the harvest, which began roughly at the end of January and continued to the end of July. Since the sugar was simultaneously harvested and processed during these months, this was easily the busiest period, during which the overseer shouted louder, the slave-drivers pushed the workers harder, the drivers resorted to the whip more frequently, and the slaves worked their fingers to the bone, while the master fretted himself to the point of sleeplessness. Frequently the field hands worked all through the night cutting cane in order to get it to the mill on time. If the harvest went well it would finance Burkes for another year; if it went badly the whole plantation might be in jeopardy.
The day before cutting, the fields were burned to destroy vermin and the top leaves that slowed down the reapers. These conflagrations were astonishing visual spectacles but also made conditions on the plantation uncomfortable for everyone: the sound of the roaring flames was hellish, and the heat made such a furnace out of the fields that it was like breathing in steam, while the ashes that floated down on the crop irritated the skin and the sickly scent of burnt sugar hovered in the air. Then the harvest began in earnest. It was a two-stage process: first the reaping of the cane and then the complex factory process which transformed its syrup into those delectable brown or white crystals that had titillated the taste buds of the world. Robert Cooper would have overseen both these activities, riding up and down the cane breaks surveying his “shock troops” as they worked and liaising anxiously with the overseer about their progress.
Despite the West Indian planters’ rather euphemistic representation of cane cutting as an ancient art—as exotic as pearl diving in Japan or grape picking in Italy—harvesting sugar is both arduous and dangerous. Historian Adam Hochschild claimed that:
Caribbean slavery was, by every measure, far more deadly than slavery in the American South. This was not because Southern masters were the kind and gentle ones of Gone With the Wind, but because cultivating sugar cane by hand was—and still is—one of the hardest ways of life on earth. Almost everywhere in the Americas where slaves were working other than on sugar plantations they lived longer.
Cane cutting has its own technique: the cutter steps forward, wraps his arms around a bundle of stalks and raises the blade up over the shoulder, bringing it down vigorously at the base, then he shaves the leaves off with a quick flick of the machete and piles the canes neatly. The discomfort of this motion means that the field hand has to learn quickly how to swing his blade with the least resistance. Cane cutters, both male and female, tend to have a unique physique, taut-muscled and broad-shouldered like a dancer or professional athlete. The sheer physical exertion associated with the task is such that an otherwise fit person is reduced to a standstill within twenty minutes, bent double and soaked with sweat. For those fuelled by an inadequate diet, as so many slaves were, the work was unimaginably exhausting.
But the physical dangers of cane cutting do not end with fatigue. There is also the ever-present danger of the wrenched back, the twisted ankle, rat and insect bites, pierced eardrums or the eye stabbed by a sharp cane leaf. But most gory of all is the slip of the blade, which is so common that cane cutters across the globe were—and still are—identifiable by the terrible scars on their lower legs. The monotony of the
work is also debilitating, and the labourers must find that delicate balance between being attentive lest they injure themselves, and allowing their mind to drift away lest they go mad with boredom. Trapped within a prison of green and brown stalks, where sound is distorted and distances are impossible to calculate, the slaves must sometimes have been overwhelmed by claustrophobia, which could only be escaped if they kept on cutting.
The only work harder than cane cutting was cane holing. This task, which was usually undertaken in the August heat, first required the slaves to prepare the land for planting by slashing and burning grass, shrubs and old cane; and then, working in pairs and equipped with hoes, they dug holes around eight inches deep and three feet long at very tight intervals. Cane tops were then inserted into the holes and packed with manure. In the French Antilles workers were expected to plant twenty-eight holes per hour, otherwise they were flogged. The work was so arduous that many planters, like Matthew Lewis in Jamaica, hired in jobbing slave gangs rather than use their own people. These slaves usually had a working life expectancy of only seven years before dying, according to one observer, like “overwrought or over-driven horses.”
The cane was transported from the fields to the factory either by mules or on the heads of the labourers. Then slaves fed the lengths of cane through the vertical rollers of the mills, while others cleared away the desiccated trash. Meanwhile, the sweet greyish liquid poured through the gutters straight into the boiling house. In this humid inferno the cane juice was crystallized by evaporation. After being allowed to stand in several large receivers, the juice was initially heated in shallow pans called clarifiers where it was tempered with lime. The calcium carbonate acted as a catalyst, prompting the sediment to sink to the bottom and the impurities to rise to the surface. Slaves continuously skimmed this “crust” off the liquid until it was tempered. Then the juice was boiled in a series of progressively smaller “coppers” until it was ready to enter the “tache” in which it was finally crystallized or “struck.”
Sugar in the Blood Page 19