damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. My feet have been so
cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid
in the gashes.Housing and furniture were, as Douglass experienced, rudimentary in
the extreme. Mary Prince, the first black woman to tell her story, com-
mented that she and other slaves “slept in a long shed, divided into narrow
slips, like the stalls used for cattle.” Most slave quarters were small shacks,
generally a single room. Some were built by the slaves, who followed pat-
terns they remembered from Africa—that is, a wicker frame daubed with
clay or mud. At best, these quarters were protection against rain and wind.
While they were no worse than the lean-tos lived in initially by white
“Indian traders” on the frontier or by Indians, they were often densely
crowded. The slave quarters had no furniture and no bathing or toilet
facilities. Not surprisingly, black slaves had the “strong and disagreeable
odour” that offended Thomas Jefferson.
What I have just described may be taken as the condition of the major-
ity of blacks who were field slaves. But three other categories of blacks
came into existence during the late seventeenth century, and for them life
was more ample and less arduous. They were household servants; skilled
slaves who were allowed to work for their own profit; and free individuals.
For purely practical reasons and in singular ways, they were treated differ-
ently from the field hands.
First, consider the household slaves. Household slavery, wrote Michael
Mullin, was “the dimension of American Negro slavery that changed least
over time.” Most accounts date from later, but two reports come from the
eighteenth century, when much of the South was already a plantation soci-
ety. In the great houses of that society, contact with household slaves was
often intimate. Since some masters saw household slaves, like horses and
carriages, as a public manifestation of their social status, they tended to
clothe these slaves better and to give them the time and facilities necessary
to keep relatively clean.
Male slaves, who often served as butlers and coachmen, were fre-
quently dressed in an American version of the livery in which Americans
thought English aristocrats dressed their household servants. As one rice
Blacks in America 173