ese to Northup.
             Genovese puts the slave gang working grueling hours with specific daily goals, and
             Northup backs this up with his description. "The hands are required to be in the cotton
             fields as soon as it is light ... and ... they often times labor till the middle of the night."1
             This is a prime example of how Northup is able to lend his personal experience to
             Genovese's general description of slavery. Northup tells us that even after such long
             hours, the slaves are still extremely afraid, because the master demands a certain
             amount of cotton from each slave. Merely meeting that goal is not be enough; if a
             slave exceeds it, then the expectations for that slave's ability would be raised.
             However, if the goal is not met, then the slave is whipped2. These specific elucidations
             of Genovese's general work theme strengthen his thesis and make slavery a much more
             The description of Northup's experience of working cotton and cane again ties together
             many things Genovese outlines in Roll, Jordan, Roll. Even though Northup is not really
             working in a gang, the work style is much the same and the demands are even more
             personalized to the worker. "Each one is tasked...according to his picking abilities, none,
             however, to come short of two hundred weight." Northup goes on to explain about
             Patsey who picked around five hundred pounds a day, and if she didn't pick at least
             four hundred pounds she "would surely have been beaten."3 Genovese suggests that
             the general trend of slaveholders is to use this kind of inducement to keep their slaves
             on their toes, but he doesn't have descriptions as graphic as this. When Genovese
             discusses labor, he seems to focus mainly on the southern idea that slaves are lazy.
             Northup's tale hones in more on what the individual experience is in slavery; and it is
             not one concerned with trying to avoid work. Northup is a slave, and any w...