Chapter 8: Slave Exploiter (2)
TL: Hanguk
In Mississippi, the cotton harvest usually begins in August.
June and July were the lead-up, the season for laying the groundwork ahead of the harvest, but that didn't mean the labor was any lighter for it.
That last Saturday of June, in the front yard of the ration warehouse in the slave quarters.
"Alright, alright, line up straight! The ration per person is fixed, so don't go thinking you can sneak through for a second helping!"
"Anyone caught defrauding the line gets corporal punishment on the spot!"
On Saturday evenings, when most plantations handed out a week's worth of food, this place was always packed with people.
From the Black drivers who ran the fieldwork, to the women in charge of cooking and laundry, to the blacksmith and the coachmen who handled the wagons and hauling.
Nearly everyone gathered in one place, if only for a moment, and that meant they could exchange a few words without getting caught by the patrols.
"Leo, is that really true? The new Master actually said that?"
"That's right. Looks like he's going to do things a lot differently than the old Master did."
"You lot really believe that? People can say anything they want. It's the same on every other plantation. The owner changes, and it's always 'I'm a reasonable master, I won't hand out more punishment than necessary, as long as you all do your part, nobody gets punished.' They all say that kind of thing, and in the end it's all exactly the same."
The head driver, who held the most sway among the field hands, glanced around to make sure no one was watching before cutting into the conversation.
Under Mississippi law, slaves could not freely gather without the supervision of someone like an owner or an overseer.
Anyone who saw a slave breaking that rule was required to report it to the authorities at once, and an unauthorized gathering at night could even draw suspicion of plotting a revolt.
This time, though, the gathering had been tacitly permitted by their owner, James, so there was no chance an overseer would come near, but Leo deliberately kept that to himself.
If he made a show of being on close terms with the owner, he might be mistaken for a stool pigeon of the Sergent family.
"I'm not trying to say the new owner is some selfless man who has our best interests at heart, either. You asked me my opinion, so I'm just telling you what I went through myself."
"So it really is true, then?"
The field drivers who had drifted over, pretending to collect their rations, looked like they couldn't believe it.
People tend to imagine that slaves, all suffering the same lot, must share some unbreakable bond, but in the end they were human too.
The bond was tight only among those lumped into the same group, and there was an odd distance between the people who worked the fields and the people who worked inside the mansion.
The field hands wanted information, but at the same time they thought the people working in the mansion had it easy and grew complacent, while the mansion workers complained openly that they were all in the same boat, so why split into factions?
Even so, they knew they had to cooperate with one another, so they simply stopped short of fighting out in the open.
"How many times do I have to say it? No, you asked me for information in the first place, and now you're telling me you can't believe it. What am I supposed to do with that?"
"But it's just too unexpected a story."
"It wasn't only me. Sam, who handled the cargo, went through the same thing. Isn't Sam saying there's not a word of a lie in what I'm telling you?"
Leo didn't go out of his way to praise James to the drivers in charge of the fields.
He simply did as his owner had told him and recounted what he had experienced on the trip all the way up to New York.
"So you're saying the new Master paid the ship's crew out of his own pocket and asked them to let the enslaved stretch out and rest properly, and at the hotel he told the manager to clean out the basement where the enslaved would be lodging and checked it himself, and he did the same kind of thing on the train up to New York?"
"Yes, that's all correct. But there was a reason for every bit of it. He said it would be a headache if the enslaved who were supposed to wait on him happened to fall ill. The new Master seemed like the kind of man who handles everything rationally and efficiently."
"You know it yourself, don't you? When that man was young, he didn't have that sort of nature at all."
"He told me that now that he's the head of the family, all of this feels like his own property."
Treating one's own belongings differently from someone else's is only natural for a person.
And if a man takes extreme care of what he owns, it's no strange thing for him to handle his own slave gingerly, so as not to let them break.
The head driver and the other field drivers traded complicated looks and scattered once more.
Of course, they were not soft enough to pin their hopes on this one remark from Leo.
Even hope as faint as a speck of dust, they all knew from experience just how crushing the despair would be when it collapsed.
'But still.'
Watching his kin disperse as though nothing had happened, Leo clenched his fist tight.
Even knowing it was foolish to let himself hope.
'It can't be wrong to wish for even a sliver of sunlight to reach this dark hell, can it?'
He wanted to believe, one last time in his life, in that concept the owner had spoken of: "rationality."
***
The next day, at noon.
After the devout service that preached how gloriously Christian the Southern institution was, and how perfectly it accorded with Scripture, had ended.
I didn't dismiss the people gathered in the chapel; instead, I took the empty spot the pastor had left.
"Good to see you. As you all probably know already, I'm James Sergent, the one who inherited you after my father."
When a plantation changed owners, it was a Mississippi tradition to call the enslaved together and explain, however briefly, the policies going forward.
Most owners ended it with some retreat-camp-counselor speech about how, like, "Whether I become an angel or a devil to you depends on how you behave."
Or, to demonstrate the new owner's authority, some would personally administer corporal punishment to the enslaved who had been rebellious, drilling fear into them.
This time it was neither.
"First, I have a major announcement. From now on, this plantation is abandoning the old inefficient methods and adopting an entirely new operating system."
"Gasp!"
"A new system, does that mean it's going to get harder?"
"Sounds like it. They said the old way was inefficient, didn't they?"
Frightened, anxious voices rose from every direction, but fear must have outweighed the anxiety, because the noise soon died down.
Still, the field drivers, perhaps because of what they'd heard from Leo the day before, were listening to me relatively calmly.
Good thing I had him plant the seed a little in advance.
"First, I'll give you only the broad strokes. If I let everyone ask questions it'll turn into total chaos, so the head driver can ask on everyone's behalf if there's anything you want to know."
"Yes."
"First, the old coercive Gang System is abolished completely. From now on, each team will be assigned an appropriate workload, and any team that falls short will receive a penalty, while any team that exceeds its target will receive an additional reward. That's how it'll be restructured."
The reaction wasn't as intense as I'd expected.
Not because it left them unmoved, but because few of them had actually understood it.
"Master, does that mean it's changing to something like the setup on the wheat-farming plantations?"
"No, only the basic idea is similar; the details are completely different. I tore the whole thing apart from top to bottom and rebuilt it to fit a cotton plantation."
No matter how long I dragged out a tedious, pedantic explanation, half the people here wouldn't understand it anyway.
So let me lead with the conclusion, hammer home the main points, and move on.
"From now on, when you work, there will be no whip and no physical punishment of any kind. And once you've met your assigned target, you can finish work for the day right then and rest."
"What?"
"Oooh!"
"Lord above!"
See, the reaction comes right away.
"Punishment will be carried out only for disobeying orders and for deliberately slacking off. Of course, if someone consistently fails to meet the assigned workload, that person will be sold off to another plantation."
"Ah."
"The reason there's no corporal punishment is that inflicting physical pain only raises the risk of injury and doesn't boost work efficiency as much as you'd think. Keep in mind that what you and I have to do from here on is, from start to finish, push cotton output as high as possible, as efficiently as possible."
"M-Master! May I ask just one thing? Cotton being what it is, the daily yield swings up and down. How exactly do you intend to set this target?"
"That's why I said it would be by team, not by individual. Our plantation's cotton output is all already recorded, so we'll take the average of past output as the baseline and adjust it realistically according to the weather and the state of the plantation. I intend to factor in opinions from the field too, so don't worry about that part."
He's worried about what happens if I set some impossible, outrageous target, isn't he?
But if I did that, work morale would nosedive immediately, so unless I'm an idiot, there's no way I'd do that.
In a system like this, the most important thing is to set the bonus threshold at a level you can reach only by working yourself to the bone, as efficiently as humanly possible. That's the whole point.
To be conservative, setting it a touch above the average of the past three years should cause no real trouble.
"Now then, the field drivers stay behind, and the rest of you are dismissed. If anyone wants to hear the explanation, you're welcome to watch from the back."
Once the real harvest season began, it was normal to work half a day even on Sundays, so on an ordinary day people would have streamed out like an ebbing tide to savor even one more minute of an unbroken day off, but.
"Nobody's leaving."
This time, as if by some shared agreement, everyone held their place without so much as a breath.
"Then I'll explain from here. This new policy will go into effect right after a three-day preparation period, and after a one-month trial period, we'll decide whether or not to keep it going. So all of you, give it everything you've got."
The overseer was watching, so I didn't forget to tack on one last line worthy of a wicked plantation owner.
Well then, let's get down to it for real.
***
When modern people look at the conduct of folks in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, they're surprisingly often appalled, wondering how anyone could be that stupid.
It's not that human intelligence hit some singularity over the past 150 years; it's that the systems humanity has refined over those 150 years are that overwhelmingly powerful.
In particular, the more an office worker hails from an already-developed country, the more they can't help marveling, when they go on a business trip to a developing one, at how an organization could possibly be run like this.
And what about the 1850s?
A trivial procedure or a piece of a system taken for granted as common sense at a major twenty-first-century Korean corporation is, in this era, nothing short of an unrepeatable innovation.
It struck me anew just how easily modern people had lived, basking in the sum total of all the knowledge humanity had accumulated.
The same went for the way I changed how the plantation was run.
Naturally, I knew next to nothing about cotton farming itself, so I simply overhauled the system in the direction of thoroughly cutting down on wasted labor.
Boiled down to the core principles, it came to this.
First, I scrapped the irrational method of saddling individuals with unlimited responsibility, and formed teams of six to eight people, assigning each a shared goal.
Next, I pushed the division of labor at the team level even more thoroughly.
The people who picked cotton focused solely on picking; the people who carried the full sacks focused solely on carrying.
Before, because the work had been done individual by individual, paths crossed pointlessly and labor was wasted, and this offset that.
Of course, doing it this way put the heaviest burden on the pickers, so they were almost entirely exempted from other odd jobs.
On top of that, rather than simply picking a lot, I awarded extra credit for cotton picked "clean," making it easier to hit the workload targets.
Finally, I took the afternoon rest that had already been in practice and broke it up more systematically, transforming it into a proper resupply period.
Beyond that, I eliminated some thirty-one minor inefficiencies, and I set firm targets for exceeding quota as well.
In broad terms, you could call it quality control, dynamic targets, division of labor, a solid incentive structure, and a perceived improvement from managing fatigue.
You might say, "Is that all?", but considering that systematizing this and establishing it as a working system was followed by all manner of social experiment and verification, "that's all" hardly does it justice.
And this alone produced clear results.
"Master! The results are astonishing!"
"Oh? Let's hear it, then."
"Honestly, during the trial period I figured we'd be lucky if work efficiency cleared 90% of the old levels, but the results are truly encouraging."
John made a great fuss as he showed me the detailed work-achievement table he'd compiled week by week, just as I'd instructed.
"First, the opening week, being a period of adjustment as expected, was all over the place, so we fell short of the target by more than 10%. But from the second week things nearly normalized, and by the third week efficiency clearly climbed even higher."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. And in the fourth week, not only was the drainage-ditch repair completion rate up, but the mid-season growth indicators clearly improved too. If we keep up efficiency like last week's, wouldn't profits in the actual harvest season rise by at least 10%?"
This assumed, of course, that the performance held up all year round, but that part didn't particularly worry me.
Besides, "at least 10%" meant that, done well, profits could climb as high as 15%.
"Then there's no reason not to keep this going, is there?"
"Yes, yes! Of course. Master, I never doubted your wisdom for a moment, from the very start, I"
"That's enough. Take this instead."
Thunk.
The overseer John picked up the heavy pouch that had dropped onto the desk, and a puzzled look crossed his face.
"What's this?"
"Your performance bonus. I said I'd give you triple, didn't I? Don't go wandering off anywhere else, you stick right here."
He wasn't stupid enough to miss that it doubled as hush money; John broke into a grin at once and bent at a perfect right angle from the waist.
"Yes! I'll serve the Sergent family all my life and bury my bones on this plantation!"
"Then go and tell the field drivers. We'll be keeping to this policy from here on, so no slacking, work hard, produce cotton with everything they've got."
"Yessir! If those fellows have any sense, they'll work themselves to the bone."
Of course they will. There's no way they haven't felt that, compared to before, this is all but heaven.
A few minutes after John left my room.
I let out a small laugh as I listened to the fervent cheering drifting in from the yard.
"Wooooaaaah!"
"Long live the Master! Long live the Sergent plantation!"
"We'll work even harder! Please, trust us!"
The last Sunday of July, 1856.
The Sergent family plantation cast off its outdated methods and changed its management policy to one that was more efficient and could aim for far greater output.
It was the moment I, James Sergent, became the hope of everyone here.
*****
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