was sold, blacks were treated “like cattle or sheep.” Generally, as in any live-
stock show, the sellers tried to loosen the purses of the buyers by providing
food and drink while they paraded their offerings. The buyers reacted as
they might at a sale of horses, prying open the mouths of the slaves to
examine their teeth, and rubbing their skin to check for sores that might be
hidden by paint, powder, or lead dust. Then the Africans were auctioned
individually, so that relatives were frequently separated. This happened not
only because a buyer might need only one or a few slaves but also because
it was thought that if slaves were cut off from relatives, friends, or speakers
of the same language, they would have less opportunity for revolt or flight.
This moved forward the homogenization process that was to be the hall-
mark of the creation of Afro-Americans.
When they finally reached their destination, slaves were “broken to the
bit” and so transformed from “outlandish” Africans to “new Negroes.” Not
yet knowing English, they were unable to understand orders from their
new masters. Against what the whites regarded as “insolence,” the whip
was the main educational tool. Some rudimentary skills were also taught,
but some of the newly enslaved people came from agricultural societies in
which they had been raising similar crops; so, particularly in the South
Carolina rice belt, farming techniques and tools can often be traced to their
African origin.
Above all in the coastal rice-growing areas, but by no means uniquely
there, little human warmth could be found in the relationship of whites and
blacks. As in the breaking of a mustang, the slave drivers believed that they
had to prove beyond any challenge their absolute power. So most of the
newly arrived blacks were immediately put to work as field hands under
gang bosses. Like domesticated animals, they were fed enough to enable
them to perform the work for which they had been bought, but they were
certainly not given more. Their staple food was corn bread, known as
“pone” (Algonquian,appone). Insofar as records exist, they suggest that
field hands were rarely given meat to supplement their carbohydrate diet;
consequently, various dietary-deficiency sicknesses (pellagra, beriberi, and
scurvy) were as common among them as among the inhabitants of the
Spanish mission towns I described in chapter 3. A “kind” master was
defined as one who allocated small patches of land to his slaves on which
Blacks in America 171