to us by the
boys. The salt fish made us always thirsty, but no other drink than
water was ever allowed. However thirsty a slave may be, he is not
allowed to leave his employment for a moment to get water; he can only
have it when the hands in working have reached the ditch, at the end
of the rows. The overseer stood with his watch in his hand, to give us
just an hour; when he said, 'Rise,' we had to rise and go to work
again. The women who had children laid them down by the hedge-row, and
gave them straws and other trifles to play with; here they were in
danger from snakes; I have seen a large snake found coiled round the
neck and face of a child, when its mother went to suckle it at
dinner-time. The hands work in a line by the side of each other; the
overseer puts the swiftest hands in the fore row, and all must keep up
with them. One black man is kept on purpose to whip the others in the
field; if he does not flog with sufficient severity, he is flogged
himself; he whips severely, to keep the whip from his own back. If a
man have a wife in the same field with himself, he chooses a row by
the side of hers, that, with extreme labor, he may, if possible, help
her. But he will not be in the same field if he can help it; for, with
his hardest labor, he often cannot save her from being flogged, and he
is obliged to stand by and see it; he is always liable to see her
taken home at night, stripped naked, and whipped before all the men.
On the estate I am speaking of, those women who had sucking children
suffered much from their breasts becoming full of milk, the infants
being left at home; they therefore could not keep up with the other
hands. I have seen the overseer beat them with raw hide, so that blood
and milk flew mingled from their breasts. A woman who gives offence in
the field, and is large in the family way, is compelled to lie down
over a hole made to receive her corpulency, and is flogged with the
whip, or beat with a paddle, which has holes in it; at every hole
comes a blister. One of my sisters was so severely punished in this
way, that labor was brought on, and the child was born in the field.
This very overseer, Mr. Brooks, killed in this manner a girl named
Mary; her father and mother were in the field at the time. He killed,
also, a boy about twelve years old. He had no punishment, or even
trial, for either.

There was no dinner till dark, when he gave the order to knock off and
go home. The meal then was