You can find the planters in the great English novels of the 1800s, such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, settled into their English homes and watching, through their account books, how the sugar crop was doing back in the Caribbean. For as soon as a sugar planter made enough money, he took his family and moved back to Europe. To this day, you can find the Great Houses of old plantations on hilltops throughout the Caribbean, and yet the strange thing is that the men who built and owned the homes hardly used them. The furniture was imported from abroad, along with all the other comforts-silverware, silk-covered chairs, white christening gowns, porcelain washing bowls. In the Great House the owners could sit on the verandahs, rest their legs on special chairs made for pulling off high rubber boots, drink their rum swizzlers, while their slaves labored on hundreds and hundreds of acres of cane fields. A plantation owner was a kind of god or king, ruling over his empire of sugar. These grand homes, with their high, cool rooms, their polished mahogany furniture, and their servants flitting between the main house and the separate cooking building, were meant to command attention, to show power and wealth.
The open windows provided a kind of air conditioning, making even the hottest days more pleasant. The owner of a sugar plantation built a home-called the Great House-usually high on a hill, where the tropical breezes blow. Which text evidence best supports the authors' claim and purpose that enslaved people were more than mercilessly treated workers? The dances were a way of imitating warfare without actually defying the master. On many of the sugar islands, Africans created similar dances in which people spin, jump, and seem to menace each other, then, just on the beat, click sticks and twirl away. MaculelĂȘ is danced with sticks or sugar cane stalks, and it looks very much like training for combat. Similarly, in Brazil there is a dance called MaculelĂȘ, which some trace to the sugar fields. As one song said, "The boss does not want me to play the drum." Overseers feared the slaves were using drums to send messages and spread thoughts of rebellion. In Cuba, sugar workers told their stories in the words and sounds of rumba. Instead, they were alive and speaking to one another in movements and sounds that were all their own. But as she moved and swayed, as the drummers "spoke" back in their beats, the workers were saying that they were not just labor, not just bodies born to work and die. A master coming by would see dancing-no words of anger or rebellion. It is a kind of conversation in rhythm involving a woman, the man dancing with her, and the drummers who watch her and find the right rhythm for her movements. (To hear examples of music from the sugar lands, go to In Puerto Rico, bomba is a form of music and dance that the sugar workers invented. The Africans invented music, dances, and songs that carry on the pulse, the beat, of their lives. No one interviewed the Africans who labored in the sugar fields to ask them about their hard labor. Which sentence best states the authors' claim in this passage? Slavery-a practice as ancient as human civilization-was becoming unacceptable, a form of inhumanity people could no longer tolerate. If you wanted the product, abolitionists forced you to think about how it was made. Sugar was a bridge-like the sneakers and T-shirts and rugs that, today, we know are made by sweatshop labor. The very fact that slave-made sugar was so popular made it harder for the English to ignore the reality of slavery. When the English looked at the sugar they used every day, Clarkson and the other abolitionists made them see the blood of the slaves who had created it. Instead, they bought loaves of sugar that carried a label that said, "Produced by the labor of FREEMEN"-the sugar came from India. Some 400,000 English people stopped buying the sugar that slaves grew and harvested.
Now this same tactic-boycotting-was used to fight slavery. The loss of income made London rescind some of the taxes it had imposed on America. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the women of New England refused to buy English products and English tea. But if people stopped buying that sugar, the whole slave system would collapse. Slave labor was valuable because it produced cheap sugar that everyone wanted to buy.