mirtilla

Updated: May 21, 2025

A Jamaican author wrote, for example, that in five or six months on one plantation "not less than nine and thirty thousand were caught." In the "weeding gang," in which most of the children from five to eight years old were kept as much for control as for achievement, there were twenty pickaninnies, all black, under Mirtilla as "driveress," who had borne and lost seven children of her own.

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips - American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime