Thank you Martha, Anita, Mary, Jon, and the others who responded to my query
about Jefferson's soap. I am trying to get a sense of how much time and
labor went into a slave making soap on her own. From discussions with the
archaeologists at Monticello and with Leni Sorensen, and from Peter Hatch, I
learned that these seemingly trivial sales of eggs, chickens, cucumbers,
soap, etc, required very non-trivial investments of labor and time by the
slaves. Some of them were running rather large operations in the scant free
time available to them, involving the construction of hen houses and fenced
areas, recruiting children and the elderly to tend gardens and chickens, etc
etc. The transactions in the mistress's account books reveal that a lot of
invisible work was going on.

Henry Wiencek