“It is highly likely that in the rural areas, the field-versus-house dichotomy is overly simplistic and exaggerated. As will be demonstrated from the runaway slave ads, there are numerous examples of cooperation between these two categories, and Herskovits has suggested that the life of a house servant was not greatly different from the experience of a field hand. Sufficient testimony exists, however, to substantiate some basis for the dichotomy. Sydnor, in writing on Mississippi, flatly states that house servants lived better than did field servants, and that the former’s lot improved with the size of the plantation. The situation in Louisiana was similar, such that the ‘loyalty and fidelity of the household servant, in particular, were often unquestionable. The mammies, for instance, practically ruled the Big Houses…. Manny was so integrally a part of the family that she was lifted far above the other servants.’” “The solution to whether life for domestics was significantly different from that of field hands depends to a large degree on exactly which hands are being compared with which domestics. A comprehensive study is needed to answer the question as it relates to slavery in general, or to slavery in a given colony/state. However, it is more probable than not that when slaveholdings of similar size are compared, divergence between hands and domestics widens as the size of the estate increases. The experience of a domestic on a plantation of twenty would likely differ from his or her counterpart who is one of eighty or ninety others. The former may have shared more in the agricultural duties of the other slaves than did the latter, whose owner could have afforded to allow domestics to devote their time exclusively to non-agricultural tasks. By the same token, agricultural responsibilities on a farm with less than twenty slaves may have require that all work with the soil, including the slaveholders. But of course, there were other factors that influenced the relative lives of field hand and domestic, not the least of which were the idiosyncrasies of the slaveholder.” Michael A. Gomez “Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South” Page 227
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 17:33:20 +0000
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