Martinique continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 58

cassava-bread for the slaves; a row of tile-roofed rabbit hutches; a sugar-mill, a refinery and a workshop
for making rum-barrels.
These are followed by a long catalogue of 'heads' of slaves—' Vente de têtes d' esclaves '—with their
numbers, names and estimated value. The first on the list is 'Item, le nommé Petit Médas, âgé de 38
ans, infirme, non estimé .' There are five other slaves 'unestimated and infirm.' The first slave with an
estimate of value is 'No. 6, Théodule, 70 years, 3,000 livres ,' followed by a string of other names, male
and female, of which many are odd or characteristic; their value varies between 1,000 and 4,000 livres
a head: Apolline, Zabeth, Désirée dite Dody, Pierrette, Léocade, Victorine, Gertrude dite Yaya, Mignon,
Hyacinthe, 'Guillaume, incommoded by a rupture,' 'Eloi dit Gros-Jean,' 'Lucette, the mulatto-girl,' Ul-
darix, 'Frederick the cooper,' ' La Petite Scholastique , aged 20,' Modestine, Eulalie, Charlemagne, Ulric,
Ovide, 'Olympe aged 14,' Radégonde, Bibiane, Simeon and Narcisse, aged 11 and 15, Angesse, Chryso-
stome, aged 7 (1,200 livres ), Laurencine aged 5, Sabine aged 2 (400 livres ), and finally, cheapest of all,
poor little 'Franchine, en nourrice , 100 livres .' The list is ended by Zachary, Siriaque, Clovis, Grise and
Sévérine, 'five new Negroes aged 20, priced at 3,300 livres per head.'
These must have been jet black and brawny new-comers, kidnapped on the African Coast and freshly
shipped to the Antilles, probably from different tribes and thus unable to communicate with each oth-
er or their new associates; they were certainly ignorant of Créole. The strangeness and misery of their
predicament comes to one even after so many years. They were some of the early fruit of Napoleon's
re-establishment of the slave trade, which had been abolished by the Convention. It is recorded that this
measure was put through at Josephine's entreaty, in order to stabilize the revenues of her mother in the
distant islands rather than have her clamouring for cash in Paris. That may be so, but Napoleon's bias
against the coloured race is well known. He broke the military career of General Dumas, the novelist's
father, because of his black blood (Dumas was the son of a Negro woman and of a French marquis from
Sainte-Domingue); he sent his own brother-in-law, Pauline's husband Leclerc, to quell the Negroes of
Haiti, and behaved towards Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Haitian hero, with extraordinary cruelty and per-
fidiousness.
It will be noticed that the list contains no surnames. These were adopted arbitrarily after the eman-
cipation of the slaves. Unfortunately, no records remain of the system, if any, that dictated the choice
of the strange and charming Christian names. Slaves were often separated from their parents as soon as
they could walk, and bought and sold, as the beginning of the inventory indicates, with the same indif-
ference to ties of blood as poultry or livestock. Even small boys and girls worked in the fields all the
daylight hours under the surveillance of mounted overseers who wielded the whip without mercy. French
and English chronicles tell horrifying tales of punitive floggings for the most trivial faults: punishments
which, not infrequently, were the cause of death. Slaves with professions—carpenters, barrel-makers,
blacksmiths, gardeners, etc.—were, of course, in a better position. The easiest jobs, and the most coveted
for their advantages in respect to food, lodging and clothing, were those of the slaves employed around
the persons of the planters in their houses. The ' Da ,' in particular, a French Negro equivalent of the Eng-
lish nanny, or the Mammy of the Southern States, occupied a position of great prestige, and even of au-
thority. One feels, somehow, that 'Mignon' can't have had too bad a time….
The slaves are easily the most valuable items in the inventory. The old lady left 132 in all, estimated
at a total of 267,000 livres . [2] They are followed at once by 28 mules (34,320 livres ) and five horses and
a mare (5,320 livres ).