The cane mill’s dangers made field labor a constant bodily threat for slaves

Evidence

The strongest slaves were assigned the hardest agricultural tasks: digging canals, tilling the soil, planting cane, and harvesting it. A second group of children and older slaves, as well as new arrivals from Africa who were often weak from the middle passage and more prone to disease, took on more varied tasks, such as growing provisions, fertilizing planted cane, or trimming cane plants. Field laborers started work at five, stopped for a few hours at midday, then returned to their labor until sundown. The grueling work of harvesting, worsened by the danger of cutting oneself with a machete or on the sharp stalks of the cane, usually lasted from December through July. … Harvested stalks of cane were fed twice through a mill—usually driven by mules, and sometimes by water—that crushed them to release their juice. This task, usually assigned to women, was particularly dangerous. If the slave was tired or distracted, and allowed even a finger to be pinched in the grinders as she guided a stalk into the mill, “the finger goes in, then the hand, then the arm and the whole body except the head.” Since during the harvest season the grinding of cane was often done all night in successive shifts of slaves, exhaustion was common. Many lost their arms, and some died of tetanus. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 166