Me too, Anon. Believe me – me too. I couldn’t possibly disagree more strongly – not only does that treatment of the place ignore the visual evidence we’re presented with in canon, it downplays the horrors of slavery, So, since I’m feeling like flexing my degrees today:

Here’s a little slice of what people forced to work on sugar plantations faced. Warning – this is not for the squeamish, and if you feel like you’re going to be triggered by graphic descriptions of violence or slavery, this is where you might want to hop off this post. I’m putting this discussion under a cut for those reasons, not to spare the feelings of anyone who wants to tell me that Oglethorpe’s plantation is somehow meant to be paradise.

This is a quotation from a man named Sir Thomas Lynch, written in 1672, regarding the conditions on sugar plantations. This pertained, mainly, to slaves working in the West Indies: 

“If a Mill-feeder be catch’d by the finger, his whole body is drawn in, and is squees’d to pieces, If a Boyler gets any part into the scalding Sugar, it sticks like Glew, or Birdlime, and ‘tis hard to save either Limb or Life.”

Here’s another, from a Thomas Tryon (and no, I am not ignoring the irony/horrifying but coincidental fact that both these men are named Thomas and had a problem with how sugarworks were run).

“ the Climate is so hot, and the labor so constant, that the [Black] Servants night and day standing great Boyling Houses, where there are Six Seven large Coppers or Furnaces kept perpetually boyling; and from which with heavy Ladles and Scummers, the Skim off the excrementatious parts of the Canes, till it comes to its perfection and cleanness, while others as Stoakers, Broil, as it were alive, in managing the Fires; and one part is constantly at the Mill, to supply it with Canes, night and day, during the whole Season of making Sugar, which is about six Months of the year".

Source

For a really good look at the whole process of growing sugar cane, there’s a summary here:

http://www.discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/routes/places-involved/west-indies/years-work/

Here’s another horrifying set of descriptions:

“During the rolling season of 1846 his Negro man Jacob escaped with only a dislocated collarbone and “some severe bruises about the head” after he “was cuaght by the cane carrier of the Mill” and “carried with the drum as far as his shoulder.” Some years later, another Palfrey slave “lost his forefinger” when his left hand was “lacerated by the engine.” On another Louisiana plantation a female slave got her dress caught in the mill, and “before the engineer could stop the miller her arm had gone under” as well as part of her ear. As a result, she lost the arm, and the engineer suffered a severely “mashed” foot from “stoping the engine so suddenly.”“

Source

I’d like to draw attention to a phrase there – “only a dislocated collarbone.” Anon – readers – have you ever dislocated something? Ever had a bone out of place? There’s no only about it. In fact, it usually results in screaming in agony until it’s put back in place regardless of what the movies tell you. It hurts, and if you don’t believe me, you can come and listen to my shoulder go click pop crunch thump any day of the week, and that’s just what I suspect is a rotator cuff injury that hurts like anything when the barometric pressure changes.That’s the least of the injuries you’d be facing if you got caught in a sugar mill – or rather, the least of the injuries Madi’s people had to look forward to on the plantations they were being kept on. The least that Thomas and James could look forward to if they had to stay at that place and do Oglethorpe’s bidding and got unlucky or were too tired to be careful (and that happened regularly). Now – let’s talk about the diseases that are endemic to that region and were particularly experienced by slaves.

This article discusses some of the things that slaves at the time faced in terms of disease. Again – it wasn’t pretty. Smallpox, dysentery, tuberculosis, lung disease, parasite-born illnesses – the list goes on and on and on. I don’t doubt that in his time at that plantation, Thomas had seen a lot of death, and that’s even WITH the dubious proviso that they’re being well cared for, which I don’t actually recall anyone saying – only that they were “taken care of,” which could mean a lot of things, but which I’m going to take to mean that they’re generally given food, adequate amounts of water, shelter, and not beaten to a pulp on a regular basis. That last I have my doubts about too, given that we can see the guards carrying cudgels on their belts and carrying muskets, apparently to keep the workers in line.

I will give the show full points, too, for historical accuracy in that Oglethorpe’s plantation is not a cotton plantation. At this point in American history, the British were attempting to colonize the area north of Spanish Florida. This was in direct response to the Dutch colonies’ success in farming sugar cane and the equal success the British and Spanish were having in other colonies which was making them big profits. Oglethorpe’s plantation is located, as we’re told, in Savannah, which is exactly in the right region for them to be farming sugar cane, and in fact we are shown the canes growing in the field during the reunion scene. 

Even were all of this not true, though, Anon – the point is that both James and Thomas are being held against their wills. We see James being walked through those gates in heavy chains. We know for a fact that Thomas is being kept there against his will, because if he were not, I can guarantee you he would have come looking for James and Miranda years ago. Max says it herself, and Oglethorpe echoes the thought – the plantation is a place where people “cease to be.” It’s meant to be a place where people go to be forgotten – to be wiped out of their own stories, to be wiped out of history entirely. There’s nothing about being forgotten that’s good – not when the forgetting is not by choice. 

What I’m getting down to, Anon, is that the shame farm is not a good place. It’s spoken of in the narrative as a place that is an alternative to death, but neither of the people using it as a get out of hell free card are without reasons to lie to themselves about the nature of the place. Max needs to believe that she would have been sending Silver to a place where he could be comfortable, and Silver very much needs to believe the same thing in order to live with himself after what he does to James. To some extent, maybe he needs to believe that survival is always preferable to death – he certainly seems to not understand that there are things in life worth dying for and not to be lived without, or he wouldn’t do what he did. 

The fact is that I don’t care how tolerant Oglethorpe is toward his workers’ sexualities, he’s still keeping men in a damn sugar cane plantation and forcing them to do a very dangerous job in a dangerous place.