Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

The low life expectancy, combined with an infant mortality rate that was ten times the rate for white infants, had one bright spot. On rice plantations, the high risk of catching malaria, yellow fever, or other contagious diseases meant the white people didn’t bother their enslaved as much as they did on other types of plantations. Unlike those in many other slave societies, South Carolina’s enslaved worked on the “task system.”18 Enslaved people were responsible for their own food, clothing, and even their medical care. Each captive had a required amount of work they had to complete, and once they were done, they were released from their enslavers’ oversight to work in their own gardens, sew their own clothes, or make their own money. Charleston even had an elaborate “tag” system that allowed enslaved people to sell goods and food at the market. From this white-man-free vacuum emerged a new culture and language that was a hybrid of those of the Africans from the Caribbean colonies and the Baga, the Fula, the Kissi, the Kpelle, the Limba, the Mandinka, the Mende, and the Wolof of West Africa. They balanced the memories of their motherland on the bridges of their noses and hid them on the tips of their tongues. Their collective souls merged and became the Gullah-Geechee, a cultural force that no white person would ever have power and authority over.

I had no idea - task system (Gullah-geechee)