Former slaves valued free time over higher plantation wages

Evidence

From the beginning of the insurrection, many slave insurgents had issued a demand for three free days a week for the slaves. In the wake of Polverel’s late-1793 emancipation decree, which had maintained the sixday work week of slavery, many slaves had demanded they be given at least two days a week, rather than just one, to cultivate their own plots. Polverel sensed that this was an important, and potentially explosive, issue. He gave plantation workers the choice between a six-day and a five-day work week, but provided a substantial incentive for them to choose the former: on plantations where workers chose a six-day work week, they would receive one-third of the plantation’s production. If they chose to work five days per week, their portion would be cut in half, to one-sixth. It was a dramatic difference for one day a week less of work. But the laborers on several plantations—again led by women—nevertheless chose more free time and less pay. They had more faith in the revenue they generated themselves from their garden plots than in the salaries they were promised from plantation managers. Plantation workers struggled in other ways to maintain control over some of their own time. Two women laborers refused their manager’s request that they work at night, announcing that if anyone worked in the cane fields after dark, it would be he. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 641

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of post-emancipation labor coercion echoing across the Americas (travelers in the same chapter), and to the reader’s grasp of freedom’s contested meaning in the Haitian arc.
• CANDY: The women workers’ retort — if anyone works in the cane fields after dark, it will be he — is a punchy, memorable quote.