The Issue of Slavery in Kindred

Did you know that not all slave owners treated their slaves the same way? After reading the book Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, I started to wonder if all the slave owners treated their slaves the same way in their plantations. I started to get more curious when I started to read the places where Dana was sent to work in Tom Weylin plantation and the different expectations he had from her. With the research I did the past couple of weeks, I learned the different ways slaves lived and were treated in different plantations, like cotton plantations, tobacco plantations, and sugar plantations.

I also came upon the different ways slaves were treated in the farm versus the town. The findings of the research I accomplished are very important for everyone to be aware of, especially if all these years you have been very ignorant like me. All these years of my education I figured that all of the horrible information I was given about slave life was true for every black person in the slavery time. Now I came to the conclusion that slaves were treated differently in distinct plantations, the north and the south, and in the fields and in the slave owners homes.

Something that came up in my research was the different major plantations that existed in the slave era, for example, cotton plantations, tobacco plantations, and sugar plantations. The sugar plantations were the harshest of all because no matter the age everyone had something to do. According to the research contributed from many historian organizations, “The toughest work fell to the strongest and healthiest. Less physically demanding tasks were handled by gangs of less robust, younger or older slaves. Even the very young and the old were put to work” (“Plantation Life”). What surprised me from the information of the sugar plantations is that even the very old had work to do, one of the things they did along with the smaller children was to shoo flies away. In some cases slaves worked with a contract, the years of the contract only went up to seven years. In return, the slave owner would free the slaves and give them food, clothes, shelter and sometimes even a piece of land.

The tobacco plantations were a bit smaller than the sugar plantations, needing fewer slaves, but the work was still very harsh. Ron writes, “Slaves did ALL the work to enrich those Virginia tobacco planters with no pay and not even a ‘Thank You for making me rich’ card at Christmas”(“US Slave”) It was harder for the slaves in the tobacco plantations because unlike the sugar plantations they did not get anything in return for the hard work they had done. Henry Clay Bruce one of the slaves in a tobacco plantation comments, “ I was kept busy every minute from sunrise to sunset, without being allowed to speak a word to anyone”(Simkin John). It is hard to understand their slave owners, how are they capable of keeping their slaves at work for so long. In these two plantations, the slave owners treated their slaves ruthlessly and are not exceptional. The one different thing was that in some sugar plantations the slave owners were considerate an in other words paid them for the work they had done with new clothes, food, shelter and a piece of land. When comparing the north and the south I found that the slaves were treated differently.

Plantations in the north were different from the plantations in the south, therefore, slaves lives were different in the north versus the south. In the north, the plantations and farms were way smaller than the plantations in the south. Andrew notes, “Slaves generally were held in situations where they did not do real work, such as might be done by a white laborer,…working as house servants or valets” ( Costly Andrew). Slaves did work hard in the fields but also had easier jobs and were more close to the slave owners because they took care of the slave owners house, prepared their meals and took care of their children. In Andrews words, “ And even those slaves who did the arduous work required in a colonial household freed their white owners to pursue careers in law, religion, medicine or civil service” (Costly Andrew). This is a more deep study that was made, in some ways this was a forceful case of slave labor to be an integral part of the economy. The south was a whole other story. In the south, the plantations were enormous with a large number of slaves and so, of course, it was less likely for a slave owner to personally know all of his slaves. There were a lot of things to do in the plantations in the south. Andrew reveals,“Slaves worked at all sorts of jobs throughout the slaveholding South, but the majority were field hands on relatively large plantations”(Costly Andrew). Everyone served as field hands no matter the age. It’s understandable for people to say that in every plantation all slaves were treated terrible and never had anything good in their life.

A lot of history books have a similar story about slavery. It is understandable why a lot of people generalize those stories to all the slaves in all of the plantations. I was in that situation, where I believed that in every plantation the slaves did very hard jobs for a very long time without a rest and if they did a simple thing wrong they would beat them or make them work for more hours and also that they slave owners never met their slaves. After reading the book called Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, I started to question myself asking myself if what I learned was all true or if there was more to that if it could have been less harsh that was I knew. Later I started to do some research and talking to people and discussing it in class to come to the conclusion that I was wrong and that I had not learned the other part of slavery. Slaves did all the hard labor in the plantations but, some slaves were lucky enough to end up in a plantation that gave them in return for their work or ended up cooking the meals for the slave owner or work closely with the slave owner.

The interactions between slave and slave owner were different in the fields than in the city and houses. Slaves in the towns were most likely not going to have a hard time as they would in the field because they didn’t have to do hard labor. According to the US historians,“Household slaves often were treated better than plantation slaves. They usually ate better and were in some cases considered part of the extended family”(“slave life”). For household slaves did have a decent place to stay, the only thing is that if they had a family it was hard to be working for the same people at the same house. We can see this in some non-fiction movies as well as nonfiction books, most of the time the household slaves did the cooking, cleaning, washing, etc.

There were more close relationships in small farms. In the US historians words,“Slaves that lived on smaller farms often enjoyed closer relations with their masters than plantation slaves” (“slave life…”). It’s reasonable for a farmer slave owner to be closer to his slaves because he worked side by side with them. The US historians point out, “Slaves that lived in towns had greater freedom than those who lived on the farms”(“slave life…). Those white folks who owned shops had slaves to help them in the stores and just like the slaves in the farm they too came close to their slave owners.

A slave’s life was different working in the fields than in a town or working in the north vs the south, there were different types of plantations that required different things from the slaves and slave owners that weren’t extremely repugnant. The history of the slaves was not, all the same, some have it worse than others, it depended for whom they were working and where they were working. Slaves were not all treated the same way in every single place where there was a slave. It’s time for us to learn more, start research of our own and learn a little bit more than what we are handed to read and learn.

Reference

1. Administrator. “Plantation Life.” USI Home Page, 2011, www.understandingslavery.com/index.php-option=com_content&view=article&id=309_plantation-life&catid=125_themes&Itemid=221.html.
2. Costly, Andrew. “Slavery in the American South.” Constitutional Rights Foundation, www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/slavery-in-the-american-south.
3. Ron. “US Slave.” Slavery and Disease on Easter Island, 1 Jan. 2008, usslave.blogspot.com/2008/12/tobacco-slavery.html.
4. Simkin, John. “American History, Slavery.” Spartacus Educational, Spartacus Educational, 2016, spartacus-educational.com/USAStobacco.htm.
5. “Slave Life on the Farm and in the Town.” Ushistory.org, Independence Hall Association, 2017, www.ushistory.org/us/6d.asp.

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