Tied Tobacco

“…And remember, precisely twenty, no more and no less!” my Master, James Smith says before he returns to his wife Victoria and his two kids.  I wish to scream and throw a fit at the way he orders us around like the property he thinks we are.  Although, I have no right to complain, when I saw my sisters, they told me that Matilda was whipped at the time when her stomach was round with Timothy.  I stand with my fellow slaves at the brink of the tobacco field ridden with the green plants that we are sentenced to free from the ground every minute of each day.  I pull the tobacco plants that my father, brother, and the two other slaves living on the plantation with us are yanking from the ground.  The rugged scent of the green leaves which will find themselves browned with the change of this month.  I match the ends of the stalks together and tie them with the twine I was given to use sparingly this morning.  “Ngo- eh, Emma, remember to return with the barrel,” says my brother, he stutters as his mouth yearns to speak my name, my true, Angolan name.  The one that tells others to be wary, reveals our class, not that class matters now, I’m as low as one can be-a slave.  Instead of our regal names, we are pinned with meaningless names that are repeated again and again among the ships that the gentlemen so cruelly order.  They ruin our lives, in Africa I would have a family, be rightfully married, here, my family is divided.  I would be respected in Angola, a wealthy woman of seventeen years, here I am spat on and regarded as the dirt that James plows through each year, tossed about to supply him with crops and wealth.

Out here in the hot sun, the sweltering heat of the afternoon makes our environment feel hostile and very unpleasant.  In front of me lay the fields upon fields of tobacco.  All around are the green plants whose value James and Victoria count on to live off of.  I lean over to touch the rough plants that we spend our sixteen hour days pulling from the ground.  I hear the crackle of the leaves as I place the stalk that Benjamin, the broader of the two slaves who work with us at the plantation, has released in my direction.  The four of them work rhythmically as I bind the plants that I will soon take to the smoke house.  “He’s coming, he’s coming,” my father yells in the voice of our country.  The sound is pleasant and worth the risk of being heard.  He orders us to be silent and work fast to show our master the quick speed we work at.  “Speed up everyone, fast, fast,” I cry out, now we speak in English for fear that our master would catch us uttering words in our Native tongue.  Though the sun is in my eyes, I stare with desire at the home of out master’s family, the brick facade is adorned with three rows of windows, one for each floor.  I glance at the door in its grandeur of wood, the one that welcomes many and shuns the others.  The living space is so large, it is at least 100 times as big as the dwelling that I call my own.  It does not seem fair that a family with only four members has so much more land than a group of five, out of whom only three were previously acquainted.  Across the many acres of land that James and Victoria Smith own I can almost hear the bell calling their two children home from their play.  Each day it reminds them of when it is time for them to eat lunch.  As slaves we suffer, wishing for the cool indoor meal that those children get, instead we look forward to this evening when the sun has left the fields and we are finally able to relax.  We will talk about the meaning of life, whisper insults about our master and not get caught.  However, our day is not yet over when we have finished in the fields.  We have to do the work for our family as well, cook for the five of us, clean our tiny cottage, and care for our little garden in back.

Without the work of the five of us, James and Victoria would be like the middle class farmers, wallowing in their own fields, farming their own tobacco.  They would know what it was like to work nonstop from sunup to sunset, six days a week, from the day I was able to walk.  Being born into slavery from my mother who was brutally forced to make me and my four siblings while working for James’s father, we are indebted to John’s (James’s father) kinship until the day we die.  Every day my siblings and I slave away in the fields, break our backs from the twisted shape we are angled into daily, and yet our master wants us healthy; he pays for the doctor when we are ill.  All slaveowners know that they must keep their servants in perfect condition so they can continue working, day after day until the time we pass to a better existence. They keep us because we all know that we are far more valuable than money.