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K: What were the lunas like as supervisors?

BT: Well, in our time, we did not have too much trouble with them. But if we listened to our parents and others talk about them -- well, that's a horse of another color. In the early days, I understand, they used to come around with whips in their hands, and they used to ride horses. The horse itself is a symbolism of power, because nobody else had horses except the plantation managers. So the horse in itself represents power, and they come around and go up and down the fields, see that everybody's working, and crack their whips and so forth. In our time, by the time the '30s, came around by the time we kids used to work in the cane fields, we didn't have that kind of atmosphere. I guess the plantations got a little more civilized, a little more humanity in them, so we didn't experience any of those intense bowing to authority and doing the every move and so forth. We were very much on our own, we were just given a field to hoe, and we just go ahead and do it, wait for the end of the day, and then go on home, wait for the next day to come around. But they were always around, no question about it, always watching us. But unless somebody had a particular [inaudible] against, particularly, a luna, we wouldn't have too much of this confrontation. The confrontation was on the ground between the rats and the centipedes. The fields are full of rats and centipedes, and then battle each other.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1983 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.