Taking a suggestion from an article which appeared in "L'Homme" in 1985, the essay attempts to reconstruct the conception of the work of the rural proletariat of Martinique as it emerges from its oral literature. Liberated from slavery only in 1848, the negroes of the French Antilles let surface through the fabulatory language activated during the funeral wake, the mnestic traces of a historical experience which even today among these classes conditions the perception of manual activity and of the social relationships which frame it.