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In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /351334t 2 SLAVERY IN THE ISLANDS • The spotlight of history, in playing back over the personal world of a child slave, cannot focus on details of character and event. By design of its rulers, the captive society in which the child lived offered no outlets for personal expression, no medium for a personal record to be inscribed on. Though the slave might be kindly treated, he was expected to display more of the responsive nature of a draft animal than the individuality of a human being. If the slave was capable of mental creativity, he had less opportunity to register it than even the most lowly members of non-slave society. Yet in the almost animal environment of slavery, there were cultural forces and accidents of timing that shaped individual characters. Despite the difficulties of narrowing retrospective vision to a well deliniated scene at St. Thomas (Virgin Islands) in 1781, the historian can note that that place and that time were influential in producing a significant individual career. On this West Indian island in this year lived an unknown slave boy whose personality, while it was being ignored by his masters, was inevitably being molded by an impersonal and uncaring world. For want of any record of an earlier name, call the boy "Denmark," the name he later acquired. That part of the slave boy's life story which preceded 1781 remains curtained in mystery. He may have been born of slave parents on the West Indian island of St. Thomas, or he may have been born in Africa and have been brought to St. Thomas as a child.l In the years immediately preceding 1781 the Danes were bringing about 1,200 Negroes annually to their island colony of St. Thomas.2 Since most of the slave cargoes came In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /351334t SLAVERY IN THE ISLANDS 11 from Guinea, it is likely that if the character of Denmark himself was not shaped by the culture of Guinea, his antecedents were a product of this society. The Guinea coast at this time had highly organized kingdoms with well recognized social strata signified by forms of deference and prestige differentials. These were all part of the African native's experience before he reached the New World. Most of the slaves in the Danish colony in 1767 (the year of Denmark's birth, according to a later estimate) had been captured in inter-tribal warfare or through some form of treachery. A few had been sold by relatives to satisfy debts. A very few had been sold as punishment for some crime. They came from all levels of the highly stratified African society.3 Upon their arrival in St. Thomas, the Africans were received by the island slaves with an initiation ceremony in which the neophytes were baptized and prayed over in the Congo tongue. They were given several lashes across the back to atone for their sins in Guinea. This ceremony had no relation to religion but was a part of the introduction of the new arrival to a pair of foster-parents or god-parents who would take some responsibility for his adjustment to his new life. Conditions of life among the slaves of St. Thomas varied according to the nature of their work. Laborers on the plantations lived in crude slave houses which were lined up in rows, with as many as fifty or sixty to the row. These dwellings were primitive huts, their roofs thatched with cane stalks and their walls plastered with mud and cow manure. Each family was allotted a house and a piece of land, which it was expected to till and from which it was supposed to obtain most of its food. Slaves who were skilled craftsmen-masons, carpenters, coopers, tailors, barbers-and the warehouse workers lived for the most part in the town of Charlotte Amalia. Their quarters gradually grew in the savannahs between the hills on which the town was built. The skilled craftsmen, warehouse workers, and house servants enjoyed much more comfortable circumstances and worked shorter hours than did the field...

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