I'm an African Slave on a rice plantation near Charleston, SC in the early 1800's. What would be my typical day to day life?

by Konkweesta
bewbies-

Wake up before sunrise, and take care of any daily chores or other such things for your family: tend your garden plot, fish or hunt if possible, mend clothes, do some patchwork medical care if needed, or prepare breakfast. Breakfast in a coastal area (ie, a rice plantation) was almost always salt fish, along with some greens, potatoes, or cold corn.

Work for the master began at daybreak. Rice plantations were a bit different from cotton: they didn't require the ridiculous amount of hand labor required to pick cotton, so a fair amount of man-hours were devoted to maintaining the systems of locks and gates that kept the water levels in the rice field correct. Of course there was also the planting, harvesting, and winnowing of the rice, drying and transporting it and so on. You'd do this from sunup until noon-ish, when it was time for lunch, your main meal of the day.

Slave food in general was the cheapest food that could be bought, or alternatively, castoffs from the main house. Peas and corn, root vegetables, greens and tops, leftover fish parts or meat bones and so on. The creativity and hard work that the slave cooks put into creating relatively edible meals with the ingredients given was incredible (and lives on, in some ways in modern soul food). Usually it was a stew of pork and root vegetables, then corn or pea bread, some greens, and if you were lucky, some fresh vegetables or fruit from your garden (watermelon and cucumbers were the most popular). Still, the high contents of saturated fats and starch and the lack of vitamins and minerals caused all sorts of ailments.

You'd get an hour or so for lunch, which got you out of the sun for the hottest part of the day for a bit. The field laborers would eat and then try and relax for a bit, but soon after they'd be back into the paddy finishing the day's work from the morning. Work went until sundown, at which time they'd be released and allowed to go back to their cabins.

Dinner was an important affair: while breakfast was eaten quickly and lunch was communal, dinner was usually just a single family: the only real family time that slaves got. The meal itself was usually leftover bits from the daytime meal. You had a bit of time to tend to your own garden again, hunt or fish, or otherwise relax: singing was very popular, as were games. Pretty much all of the leisure activities were low-energy, for obvious reasons. Bedtime came at dark, as there were no lights (obviously) and fires/candles were heavily restricted. Sometimes in summer, if there was a full moon, there would be work call at night once the moon was up: you'd head out and work for a few hours in moonlight in addition to the 12 or 13 hours you worked during the day.

Some easy sources: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/living/history.html http://www.hushpuppynation.com/what-slaves-ate-in-their-own-words/ http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html