Music, storytelling, and religion provided an emotional outlet and carried on traditions—some from Africa and others forged in years of enslavement. Some people spent their free time visiting other farms or plantations where their spouses or family members lived.
Slave children played with dolls, balls and jump ropes, and also engaged in hopscotch and ring games. But since there was no possibility of purchasing toys from stores, children or their parents made their own. Discarded yarn was used to form balls. Corn husks or sticks and rags were used to create dolls.
Slaves were generally allowed a day off on Sunday, and on infrequent holidays such as Christmas or the Fourth of July. During their few hours of free time, most slaves performed their own personal work.
During their limited leisure hours, particularly on Sundays and holidays, slaves engaged in singing and dancing. Though slaves used a variety of musical instruments, they also engaged in the practice of "patting juba" or the clapping of hands in a highly complex and rhythmic fashion.
Large plantations had field hands and house servants. House servants performed tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and driving, while the field hands labored for up to 20 hours a day clearing land, planting seed, and harvesting crops.
Sixteen to eighteen hours of work was the norm on most West Indian plantations, and during the season of sugarcane harvest, most slaves only got four hours of sleep. The punishment for disobeying an order was far worse than just accepting what was asked.
In the morning, slaves worked in the fields. In the afternoon, they worked in the fields. And in the evening, they could be still working in the fields. This was true for the vast majority of slaves who worked on a large plantation.
Life on the fields meant working sunup to sundown six days a week and having food sometimes not suitable for an animal to eat. Plantation slaves lived in small shacks with a dirt floor and little or no furniture. Life on large plantations with a cruel overseer was oftentimes the worst.
Trafficking is a modern day slave trade. Traffickers use deception or coercion to take people away from their homes. Victims of trafficking are then forced into a situation of exploitation, such as forced labour or prostitution.
Faunal remains in excavations have confirmed that livestock such as pigs and cows were the principal components of slaves' meat diets. Other sites show remnants of wild species such as opossum, raccoon, snapping turtle, deer, squirrel, duck, and rabbit.
Basic garment of female slaves consisted of a one-piece frock or slip of coarse "Negro Cloth." Cotton dresses, sunbonnets, and undergarments were made from handwoven cloth for summer and winter. Annual clothing distributions included brogan shoes, palmetto hats, turbans, and handkerchiefs.
In his 1845 Narrative, Douglass wrote that slaves celebrated the winter holidays by engaging in activities such as "playing ball, wrestling, running foot-races, fiddling, dancing, and drinking whiskey" (p. 75).
Slaves might attempt to run away for a number of reasons: to escape cruel treatment, to join a revolt or to meet with friends and families on neighbouring plantations. Families were not necessarily kept together by those who bought and sold them.
Enslaved children's daily experiences constituted various modes of play in and of themselves. To be sure, these young people played in the conventional sense. They ran, fought, raced, and chased each other as well as some of their white counterparts, but, even then, they always hoped for some sort of reward or benefit.
Music, storytelling, and religion provided an emotional outlet and carried on traditions—some from Africa and others forged in years of enslavement. Some people spent their free time visiting other farms or plantations where their spouses or family members lived.
This meant that Africans were allowed to play music, sing songs, and commune. In places like Congo Square in New Orleans, slaves made use of this allowance to play the drums.
The Australian regime defines modern slavery to incorporate conduct that would constitute an offence under existing human trafficking, slavery and slavery-like offence provisions set out in Divisions 270 and 271 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code.
Historically, there are many different types of slavery including chattel, bonded, forced labour and sexual slavery.
Slaves were punished for not working fast enough, for being late getting to the fields, for defying authority, for running away, and for a number of other reasons. The punishments took many forms, including whippings, torture, mutilation, imprisonment, and being sold away from the plantation.
The average lifespan of enslaved Africans who worked on colonial sugar and rice plantations was seven years.
During the winter, slaves toiled for around eight hours each day, while in the summer the workday might have been as long as fourteen hours.
Ancient slavery consists of a mixture of debt-slavery, punishment for crime, prisoners of war, child abandonment, and children born to slaves.
Although slaves on the Eustatia Plantation often had to work through showers, on many days in the account book, the overseer notes that slaves did not work because of rain.
What exactly is a "potato hole," Liane Hansen asks? "The term comes from slavery days, when slaves had to dig holes in the earthen floors of their cabins," Jones says. "It was the only place they had to keep food cool — and, in some cases, to hide it and store it."
In many areas, however, it was customary for slaves to work Saturday afternoons and Sundays on their own time, devoting daylight hours to cash-earning activities similar to that of their lowcountry brethren.