They produce principally rice and sugar.

It is a self-evident fact that the labor of the colored men produces two-thirds of all the cotton raised in the South, four-fifths of the sugar, and nine-tenths of all the rice.
"In the cotton sections of Louisiana the colored men work mostly on shares, and here and there some of them have accumulated a little money; but, as a rule, they make fortunes for the landlords and die in poverty because of no fault of their own.

Rent here, as everywhere else, pulls the laborer down, and keeps him down.

What remains to him after the landlord has taken his _share_, goes to the Jew shopkeepers and other middle men at crossroads, who will not be satisfied with any profit less than one hundred to one hundred and fifty per cent.
"But the sugar districts of Louisiana are like oases in the desert.
Vacuum pans, steam cars, fine machinery and smiling faces are to be met on every hand.

Colored laborers find employment very readily in the sugar districts from October to February; and during cultivation-time, in many places, the colored laborers receive _as high as one dollar and twenty cents per day_, and during the grinding season, which is the harvest time, laborers receive from one dollar and twenty-five cents to one dollar and fifty cents per day in the field and seventy-five cents for one half of the night.