Slaves carved out customary garden plot rights as a core negotiable claim

Evidence

Despite the deeply unequal relationship between masters and slaves, life and labor on the plantations was the product of constant negotiation and adjustment. The enslaved resisted in small ways as they worked in the fields, and they developed, and defended, customary rights. The most important of these was access to garden plots of land on the plantations. The Code Noir required masters to feed their slaves with a set number of provisions each week. Relatively quickly, however, many masters began using a practice borrowed from Dutch colonies, in which slaves were given a small plot of land to cultivate rather than being given weekly provisions. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 174

Categorization

• XREF: The negotiation of customary rights against legal codes echoes the landlord-tenant negotiation dynamics in A Midwife’s Tale and theories of everyday resistance.