As soon as the slaves were procured, by sale on shipboard, by auction, or by scramble, they received the private marks of their owners.  Each planter had a silver plate, perforated with his letter, figure, or cipher, which he used to designate his own slaves by branding.  If two planters happened to be using the same mark, the brand was placed upon different spots of the body.  The heated plate, with an interposing piece of oiled or waxed paper, was touched lightly to the body; the flesh swelled, and the form of the brand could never be obliterated.  Many slaves passed from one plantation to another, being sold and resold, till their bodies were as thick with marks as an obelisk.  How different from the symbols of care in the furrowed face and stooping form of a free laborer, where the history of a humble home, planted in marriage and nursed by independent sorrow, is printed by the hand of God!

By this fusion of native races a Creole nation of slaves was slowly formed and maintained.  The old qualities were not lost, but new qualities resulted from the new conditions.  The bozal negro was easily to be distinguished from the Creole. Bozal is from the Spanish, meaning muzzled, that is, ignorant of the Creole language and not able to talk.[K] Creole French was created by the negroes, who put into it very few words of their native dialects, but something of the native construction, and certain euphonic peculiarities.  It is interesting to trace their love of alliteration and a concord of sounds in this mongrel French, which became a new colonial language.  The bright and sparkling French appears as if submitted to great heat and just on the point of running together.  There is a great family of African dialects in which a principal sound, or the chief sound of a leading word, appears in all the words of a sentence, from no grammatical reason at all, but to satisfy a sweetish ear.  It is like the charming gabble of children, who love to follow the first key that the tongue strikes.  Mr. Grout[L] and other missionaries note examples of this:  Abantu bake bonke abakoluayo ba hlala ba de ba be ba quedile, is a sentence to illustrate this native disposition.  The alliteration is sometimes obscured by elisions and contractions, but never quite disappears.  Mr. Grout says:  “So strong is the influence of this inclination to concord produced by the repetition of initials, that it controls the distinction of number, and quite subordinates that of gender, and tends to mould the pronoun after the likeness of the initial element of the noun to which it refers; as, Izintombi zake zi ya hamba, ‘The daughters of him they do walk.’” These characteristics appear in the formation of the Creole French, in connection with another childlike habit of the negro, who loves to put himself in the objective case, and to say me instead of I, as if he knew that he had to be a chattel.

[Footnote K:  In Cuba, the slave who had lived upon the island long enough to learn the language was called Ladino, “versed in an idiom.”]