"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe"

Download or read book "Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe" written by Daina Ramey Berry and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowland Georgia during the nineteenth century. Mining planters' daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves' experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters' interests in sharing their workforce allowed slaves more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into slaves' internal lives through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation.