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Middle Passage


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             Also, the ship's crew often treated the Africans badly; they often whipped them because many of the people resisted and tried to escape from the cargo ship. .
             On the cargo ships, there were people from various African tribes. According to Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, there were many different ethnic groups among them, the Congo, the Edo and the Yoruba/Nago, just to name few.2.
             During the Middle Passage and in the initial stages of life on the plantations, many slaves who came from different ethnic groups united together to resist bandage. (It happened many times throughout history; often people who were enemies united to fight for a common goal.) The slavery for Africans was the uniting factor, allowing them to become friendlier with enemy tribes. In the Americas, slaves became like a family, there was a bond that kept them together in resistance to their common enemies -- the slave owners. .
             The work on plantations was very hard to endure. Many slaves had to work from morning till dawn and there were very few breaks. Most slaves spent their time picking cotton from the plantations, bending down toward the land all day long. Men had to perform harder tasks, such as cutting sugar cane and working in the mill. Most plantation slaves worked in the fields; others were craft workers, messengers, and servants. .
             In the book The Biography of a Runaway Slave, Miguel Barnet recorded the narrative story of 105-year-old Esteban Montejo. Montejo was a runaway slave who fled from his master. Montejo describes the life of slaves "life was hard, and bodies wore out quick. If you didn't escape early on into the forest to be Cimarron, you had to be slave." 3(Barnet, 40) Slaves often faced terrible treatment for minor misconduct, "many of the horrors of punishment during slavery."4 (Barnet, 39) In order to provide with more evident mistreatment of Africans, Montejo describes the cruel and inhuman treatment toward bonded people, "the most common type of punishment was whipping whips were also made of hemp from any old branch in the woods it sung like the dickens and tore skin into little strips.


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