Istwa Nou

Brazil used enslaved Africans twice over. They cut the cane, worked the mills and packed the sugar that paid for everything, and in the port towns they were put to a second use. A wealthy Portuguese family kept men chosen for their strength and sent them out under a covered hammock or a sedan chair, carrying the wife and the children on social calls and to Mass. The cloth stretched over the frame was velvet or damask. It kept the sun off the passenger and told every household on the street what this one was worth. Mercenaries writing in the sixteen hundreds describe the practice, and travellers arriving after 1800 describe it still, which puts nearly two centuries between the first account and the last. Saint-Domingue had its own version of the same arrangement. Reading a person's rank off the bodies that carry them is a habit that required no invention in either colony, only a supply of people who could be owned.