How did enslaved people earn money and what did they buy? The answers to these questions depend on where a person was enslaved and what kind of work she or he performed. In the rice-growing lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved men and women usually labored according to the “task system.” Under this scheme, planters or overseers assigned each laborer a daily task, hoeing a portion of field, for example, or pounding so many mortars of rice. Once a task was finished, that person’s labor was complete for the day. Make no mistake: this was taxing work in often stifling and deadly environments, but even so, some slaves were able to complete daily tasks early and earn time for themselves. Where allowed, some slaves grew crops of their own to supplement diets or to barter and truck. Others crafted brooms or baskets. Still others performed extra labor for their masters—often called overwork—or for other white people in the community, earning precious cash or credit for purchases of their choosing. In cotton and tobacco regions, enslaved people more often worked from sunup to sundown under the close eye of a driver or overseer. 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.
What enslaved men and women did with that cash or credit—and what it meant—challenged the institution of slavery. In a world where masters doled out rudimentary food and raiment, enslaved people most often spent cash to augment allotments, introduce variety to clothing or diets, and, sometimes, to acquire goods or participate in activities otherwise banned. Provisioning, then, serves as a framework for understanding slave spending. What slaveholders valued as durable and hearty, bondpeople often characterized as rough and plain. One formerly-enslaved woman remembered that she and her family “ain’t had nothin’ but de coarsest food an’ clothes.” Educator and former slave Booker T. Washington commented on clothing in particular, recalling shirts that were “stiff and coarse . . . as if a thousand needle points were pricking [his]flesh.” Knowledge that masters’ material worlds differed so greatly from their own could worsen discomfort. Slaves rued “old coarse shoes widout no linin,” so stiff “you could hardly walk in ‘em.” Masters, they observed, wore finer cloth and donned shoes made of “soft calf leather.” In food provisions, too, enslaved people noted differences. Bondpeople made their bread out of “shorts,” while the “first grade was always used in the master’s house,” one woman recalled.