Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (21 page)

Sugar Plantations and Slave Life in Brazil

So what was life like for an enslaved African on a
Brazilian engenho? Answering that question requires taking a close look at
sugar production in preindustrial Bahia, the center of the Brazilian sugar
economy. Until the middle of the 17th century, sugar constituted the entire
economy of the Portuguese colony and the primary motor driving the colonization
of Brazil. In late July or early August, the Bahian planters began the
safra
(harvest). Preparation of machinery and building repair occupied the few
weeks before the first day of the harvest. On the day it began, everything and
everybody was blessed by the priest with holy water that was scattered on the
machinery, animals, and workers before the initial canes were put through the
press by the priest or the owner. Without this blessing, the workers refused to
work; some went to special lengths to ensure that a few drops of holy water
fell on them.

The work schedule during the safra called for cane grinding
to begin in the late afternoon and continue through the night till late morning
of the following day. Work in the fields was done during the day. The slaves
worked in shifts but might be required to work double shifts, so during the
harvest period, they were exhausted and might fall asleep almost anywhere. The
safra in Bahia lasted from 8 to 10 months until the end of May. The Bahianos
could harvest longer than the growers in the Caribbean whose climate permitted
a harvest period of only 4 to 6 months. This climatic difference contributed to
a highly efficient exploitation of slave labor in Bahia, as workers produced
income for about three-quarters of the year.

The only breaks for the sugar workers resulted from broken
equipment, including the equipment that brought water to the engenho to turn
the mill wheel, shortages of wood for fuel, rain that made cutting and hauling
cane impossible, and holidays. In the early 17th century, there were 37
Catholic holidays observed annually on the Jesuit engenho Sergipe, and Sunday
was an additional day of rest. This probably represents one extreme of holiday
observance, since Jesuit authorities tried to make sure that engenhos run by
their order observed Sundays and all the Catholic holidays. Private owners
often worked the labor force throughout the week, not observing the Sunday
holiday. Most planters observed Sundays, but many believed that giving the
workers time off encouraged lewd and licentious behavior such as drinking and
dancing.

A sugar estate in the Brazilian
region of Pernambuco, with the
engenho
(mill) in the foreground and the
planter’s
casa grande
(mansion) behind. The image appears on a map
produced by the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu during the 1640s, when the Dutch
briefly controlled the major sugar-producing areas of northeastern Brazil.

Producing Sugar

The production process required work in the fields and in
the mill, supplemented by various kinds of labor to keep the production process
going. Once cut, the cane had a time limit of around 24 hours, or at most two
days, before it soured, so cut cane had to be milled within that time frame.
The requirement of keeping the mill supplied with cane, water, and wood lent
urgency to the work, with the result that the needs of the machinery controlled
the lives of the workers. Slaves participated in all forms of work at the
engenho; not only were they field hands and domestics, but also skilled
workers.

Sugar production began with fieldwork. Workers, men and
women, got up at 5:00 for a morning prayer and went to the fields, some of the
women with babies strapped to their backs. There they worked until 9:00 when
they were given a small breakfast; the midday meal was eaten about 1:00, and
the work lasted until about 6:00. Depending on the time of year, the work might
consist of planting new fields of cane, weeding existing cane, or harvesting
the cane.

Planting new cane involved making a trench in the wet heavy
soil favorable for sugarcane, and it was hard work. A line of male and female
workers with hoes dug a trench for the cane, then the whole line shifted back
to make the next trench. They were supervised by the overseer with a rod to
discipline slow workers. Weeding the cane was not as arduous, but there was the
danger of snakebite and cuts in the skin from the sharp edges of the cane leaf.

During the harvest period, assignments were made in pairs,
a man to cut and a woman to bind the cut stalks into bunches of 10 and load
them onto the oxcart or boat for transport to the mill. During harvest time,
even domestic workers were sometimes assigned to work in the mill in addition
to their domestic work. Often the fieldwork was done as piecework so when the
day’s quota was done the workers might have time to work in their gardens.

After the field workers brought the cane to the engenho, a
team of seven or eight workers took over. Two or three workers, usually women,
put the cane stalks into the rollers to extract the juice. Two carried away the
crushed cane stalks to be thrown away or for use as animal feed. One woman kept
the oil lamps burning; another threw water on the machinery to keep it running
smoothly and cleaned the kettles that collected the cane juice. One worker was
responsible for the hoist that swung the kettle full of cane liquid over to the
boiling house. The work was supervised by the sugar master or general overseer
during the day, and by night, his assistant took over; by the 1700s, this
subordinate was usually one of the slaves.

While the more technical jobs of sugar master and kettleman
were sometimes performed by white technicians, often people of African descent
performed these highly skilled tasks. Transporting the cane, whether by cart or
boat, was also skilled work often done by slaves or free black workers. The
Portuguese colonists found the Africans to be reliable workers, easily capable
of managing the most complicated steps in the sugar production process; over
time, Africans and their descendants took over most of the skilled work at the
engenho.

Most new workers straight from Africa, known as
bozales,
were put to work as field hands since new workers were normally purchased
to maintain or increase the level of production. People of African descent who
had been born in Brazil and therefore spoke Portuguese were more likely to have
the opportunity to rise into the ranks of skilled workers. Sometimes these
crioulos,
Brazilian-born slaves, were the children of the white master, one of the
men in his family or of a white technician at the mill, a fact that meant the
work hierarchy tended to reflect the hierarchy of color on the engenho as
racially mixed people moved up the ladder.

The skilled workers made the difficult decisions on when to
add the lime, ash, and water required to maintain the proper temperature in the
kettle. Skimming the boiling cane juice also depended on skill and experience.
When the right point had been reached, the liquid sugar was poured into pottery
forms and set aside for the liquid to leak slowly out the bottom. Wet clay was
smeared on top of the forms, and the water traveled through the sugar clearing
it of impurities and creating three different kinds of sugar: the clearest at the
top, the darkest at the bottom, and a medium grade in the middle. Women
normally did many of these tasks, also participating in tamping down the sugar
into the large crates that would take it away to market. Field hands might also
do this work, after working in the fields all day cutting cane.

The last part of the process was supervised by the crater
who managed the packing and calculated the number of boxes of sugar produced.
The crater also totaled up the payment due to any independent farmers that had brought
their cane to the mill for processing, as well as the tithe due to the church.
All these skilled tasks might be done by smart and responsible enslaved
workers. There was an ongoing debate among the engenho owners on whether it was
more efficient to hire skilled wage workers or to train enslaved labor for
these tasks. At times, a slave who worked in a position of skill and
responsibility might be provided a small wage designed to motivate him to work
harder and do his best.

The preindustrial boiling house resembled the early factory
of the Industrial Revolution. In a time before it became customary for machines
to set the pace of work, the sugarhouse must have seemed like an anomaly,
something so unlike anything on Earth that some contemporary observers turned
to biblical images of hell to find a comparison. Clocks were not used to
control the speed and duration of the work until at least the middle of the
18th century. Instead, it was the job of the manager of the sugarhouse to
regulate the work and to balance the speed of various parts of the process in
order to keep production moving at the speed set by the mill wheel. Some mills
ran three shifts, a schedule that required at least 100 workers.

The work was dangerous, and the workers were prone to accidents.
Due to the length of the workday during the
safra,
those who fed the
rollers were at particular risk. If they were sleepy or inattentive to their
job, a hand could easily be caught in the rollers, and the arm or even the
whole body could be pulled into the rollers and crushed. Water-powered mills
were the most dangerous in this respect because of the delay in bringing the
rollers to a halt. Since most feeders were women, it was not unusual to see
women workers on the plantation who had lost one or both arms. Stokers fed the
hot furnaces and faced the danger of falling into the fire; this work was
sometimes used as a punishment for slaves who had run away or been disobedient.
One man who had run away repeatedly finally took advantage of his assignment
stoking the fires and threw himself into the furnace to end his days.

In addition to working as cane binders in the field and
feeders in the grinding house, women tended the lamps in the mill, poured water
on the cogs of the machinery, and worked in the finishing process, spreading
clay over the pots of sugar, separating the final product into the three
different grades, and packing it into boxes. About one-fourth of the women on a
plantation worked as domestics in the main house. There they cared for children,
prepared food, made lace, and stitched clothing for the owner’s family or
worked as servants to the female family members.

In addition to the main work in the canefields, the field
and mill workers were assigned other tasks, depending on the time of year. In
the off-season, between harvests, the slaves spent much of their time cutting
wood to fire the mill during the harvest period, and they worked another four
to eight hours on miscellaneous jobs around the plantation; they mended fences,
constructed and maintained buildings, and ground manioc into flour.

Living Conditions on the Plantation

Life outside the workday was quite limited. For the most
part, workers were restricted to the estate on which they worked; in addition,
by the time they had accomplished their main task of the day, they had little
time left for other activities. The assignment of a quota gave workers an
incentive to finish their daily assignment in order to have time to work on
their garden plots, a feature of the system designed to reduce dallying. Slaves
might sell the excess product of their plots, often to the engenho itself,
which bought it for below-market price.

At night, the average worker returned to a one-room hut
with walls made of mud and roofs of thatch. Huts might be small separate
structures or long buildings divided internally into separate spaces, each
occupied by a different family. For clothing, the workers might receive a few
lengths of rough handwoven fabric. On some plantations, slaves received a new
outfit every other year. One observer reported that the workers on the
plantation he visited were issued a pair of cotton pants or a skirt, two
shirts, and some material to sleep on. Some observers noted that slaves were
naked, but most paintings of the workers of the period show them in simple
cotton clothing.

Throughout the colonial period, descriptions of the
workers’ diets indicate that the food was insufficient in both quantity and
quality to maintain a healthy workforce. Some observers noted that the food was
too coarse to be digested. Some documents include instructions from the
colonial authorities to the slaveholders to feed their workers adequately or
give them time and space to grow food for themselves. A record from 1750 shows
that slaves were given a bushel of manioc flour to last 40 days, along with
salted meat or fish; this diet might be supplemented by bananas and rice. One
slaveholder of the early 19th century who considered himself generous in the
food he provided gave the field hands bread and rum in the morning; a breakfast
of rice, bacon, and coffee; a midday meal of meat and vegetables; and supper of
manioc flour with vegetables and fruit. The fact that the workers preferred to
work their own plots, even when they had little free time to do so, may be one
indication that the food issued by the engenho owner was insufficient and of
little nutritional value.