Another Darkness, Another Dawn

by Becky Taylor

  At the time of my voyage it was principally the Gypsies who, in Rio de Janeiro, sold slaves second-hand, having among them some who thus became quite wealthy . . . [in São Paolo there was a large band] all of whom appeared in good circumstances, they owned slaves, and a large number of horses and pack animals.4

  A report from 1731 from Angola also indicates that Gypsies who had been transported to the colony states were in control of the interior trade in slaves, ivory and honey, suggesting that the Brazilian case was not unique. The colonial slave trade consequently seems to have offered Gypsies a means of legitimizing their nomadic lifestyle, and shifting from a pariah status to that of an accepted, if unpopular, minority. Evidence suggests that the several thousand Gypsies living in Brazil in the decades leading up to independence were able to respond to this changed climate in different ways. Individuals could of course disassociate themselves from the Gypsy community and integrate into wider colonial society, particularly among the poorer ‘white’ communities. But what is more notable is how Gypsies in both larger towns, such as Rio de Janeiro, and the interior were able simultaneously to maintain a distinctive identity while at the same time throwing off something of their deviant image:

  [They] preserve much of their peculiarity of appearance and character in this their trans-atlantic home . . . but their conformity does not appear to have influenced their moral habits. They employ their slaves in fishing, and part of their families is generally resident at their settlements, but the men rove about the country and are the horse-jockies of this part of Brazil. Some engage in trade, and many are very rich . . . they retain their peculiar dialect.5

  So by the late colonial era in Brazil Gypsies were well established as slave owners and traders, living in distinctive communities in the country’s leading towns, as well as continuing to maintain a distinctive nomadic element to their lives.6 Part of the context for this was of course the fact that they were operating within a colonial society where ‘race’ had different meanings and outcomes than at home in Portugal. The preoccupation at home with purity of blood became much diluted on the other side of the Atlantic, in the face of a limited settler population and less social control. Essentially, with the exception of those with obvious African ancestry, the opportunities presented by social mobility in the colonies meant that individuals and their descendants could move beyond their ethnic identity and establish themselves as part of mainstream society.

  The experience of Gypsies transported to Brazil feeds into one of the areas of debate among Romani scholars around whether their relocation to the colonies of the New World resulted in the establishing of new Gypsy communities on the other side of the Atlantic (and consequently continuing the diaspora that began in India), or resulted in assimilation into the wider colonial society. Seventeenth-century records confirm that New World colonies received Gypsies transported from Britain and France. In 1665, for example, the Scottish Privy Council granted a warrant and gave power to an Edinburgh merchant George Hitcheson to transport to ‘Gemaica and Barbadoes’, a number of ‘strong and idle beggars’ and ‘Egyptians’. Some 50 years later nine Gypsies from Jedburgh in Scotland were transported after sentencing by Glasgow magistrates to the plantations of Virginia at a cost of thirteen pounds.7 Court records from Henrico county, Virginia, in 1685, against a woman named Joane Scot, show her discharge from charge of fornication as she was ‘an Egyptian and a non-Christian’, while transportation of Gypsies from France around 1700 resulted in the creation of a distinct colony on Biloxi Bay, Louisiana.8

  For the earlier years of transportation evidence from Brazil as much as from North America suggests that Gypsies tended to be transported as individuals rather than en masse. Consequently the likelihood is that, certainly initially, transportation did little to spread Gypsy communities and culture, even if it did take individuals across the Atlantic. Most Gypsies transported would have travelled alongside ‘strong and idle beggars . . . common and notorious thieves, and other dissolute and looss [sic] persons banished and stigmatized for gross crimes’.9 A 1714 Privy Council permission to British merchants and planters to ship Gypsies to the Caribbean to be used as slaves cannot be taken at face value. According to this document prisoners were sentenced to be transported to the plantations for being by ‘habit and repute gipsies’,10 reminding us that throughout this period the legal definition of Gypsy was taken from the Vagabond’s Act of 1597. This covered ‘all such persons not being Fellons wandering and pretending (i.e., identifying themselves to be Egypcians, or wandering in the Habite, Form or Attyre) counterfayte Egypcians’.11 As is so often the case we are left with the arbitrary distinctions made by outsiders as to who constituted a ‘Gypsy’, or even a ‘counterfeit Egyptian’, rather than any definitive evidence that those transported were Gypsies.

  If, for Britain at least, there is some murkiness over the identities of those transported, what is clear is the social conditions faced on arrival. Most of those transported – 80 per cent in the case of Britain – were male,12 and as we have observed for Brazil, the pragmatism of settler life often outweighed the ideological concerns of the homeland when it came to keeping social or racial boundaries. Early Gypsy settlers in Bahia mixed freely among lower-class whites, with most women working as domestic servants and men as labourers, although there are also records of Gypsies becoming shop owners and gaolers.13 Although the documentary evidence does not exist, we can reasonably assume that, in this context, relationships between Gypsies and other settlers would have been common, leading to loss of a distinctive Gypsy identity across even one generation. Even where particular Gypsy communities did develop, as in Louisiana, the scanty evidence that exists suggests that creolization was just as likely as the distinct Gypsy districts noted in Brazil. Memories from a planter from Alexandria, Louisiana in the last years of the eighteenth century showed that the inhabitants at the time were ‘of mixed nationalities, French, Spanish, Egyptian, Indian, Mulattoes and negroes’, with the Gypsies speaking ‘a language of their own’ alongside French and Spanish: ‘Though of a dark colour they passed for white folks and frequently intermarried with Mulattoes.’14

  Without doubt, transportation to the New World moved Gypsies, alongside others who were deemed deviant, across the Atlantic and to the settler colonies that sprang up right across the Americas. The presence of peoples ‘more different’ than Gypsies to the bulk of Europeans moving in and to the colonies allowed Gypsies to create different spaces for themselves. Either by moving away from their identity, reasserting it through nomadism and trading, or remaking it, as did the slave dealers of Brazil, Gypsies as with so many other settlers were able to use the opportunities presented by the Americas to break away from some of the constraints imposed on them in Europe. However it wasn’t until the mass migrations of the late nineteenth century from south-east and eastern Europe that the Roma and Gypsy diaspora fully crossed the Atlantic.

  Although existing in a very different context, the Ottoman Empire also continued to offer an example of the way in which distinct populations might exist within one state system. While clearly not privileged, and often living in materially very poor circumstances, Gypsies were enabled by the Empire’s acceptance of heterogeneity combined with its flexible bureaucratic system to be seen as different but not separated from the communities in which they lived. So, for example, in Syria, western travellers to Aleppo noted how alongside local Gypsies, who camped on the outskirts of the town and tended to hire themselves out as labourers, every spring there was a larger influx that came to work on the wheat harvest. In other places, as well as living in tents, they lived in caves, but whatever their mode of living, were universally Muslim. They were also recorded as making ‘a coarse sort of tapestry or carpet work for housings of saddles, and other uses, and when they are not far from towns, deal much in milch cattle’. One western observer, passing through Aleppo in the 1740s observed how

  [they] have a much better character than their relations in Hungary, or the Gypsies in Eng
land, who are thought by some to have been originally from the same tribe. These and the Turcomen, with regard to offences, are under the pasha and cadi . . . but with regard to taxes they are immediately under the grand signor, whose tribute is collected yearly by an officer over each of these people.15

  Although presumably unintentional, the direct contrasting of the situation in both Hungary and England where Gypsies were seen very much as outsiders, with that under the Ottomans where they were clearly integrated into the legal and taxation systems, is very striking. And yet once again we need to be wary of generalizing too heavily, but rather to point also to the role of local circumstances if we are to understand the position and treatment of Gypsies. So, if we return to Moldavia and Wallachia, we come across what appears at first glance to be a surprising decree from 1726 made by Mihai Racoviǎ in the last year of his reign. This dealt with the removal of a tax on the Gypsies of the kingdom, a measure that had originally been seen as temporary:

  What with the armies with their devastations and by the capture of slaves and many things of a similar nature which have brought about the impoverishment of the country, leaving it not only weak but also oppressed by heavy debts and therefore not able to raise the necessary amount to pay the taxes and to carry on, the Government has continued the taxation upon the Gypsies, which I have hitherto allowed to continue, not realising it was a bad practice and that there was no shame in following it, for it has been assumed to be a good practice.16

  Although the decree states that the tax should be ‘entirely abolished’, in fact it only related to slaves belonging to monasteries and nobles, as ‘the Gypsies belonging to the ruler’ were still liable for tax.17 Not only does this document give a flavour of the court of the time – it reads as if the words have been recorded verbatim by a court scribe – it also demonstrates how the situation of the Gypsies in the Balkans was intimately tied up with the wider political situation of the region. This period had seen the extension of direct Ottoman rule over Wallachia and Moldavia under the ethnically Greek Phanariots, who effectively added an extra layer of exploitation onto an already overburdened peasantry.18 And as the power of the local rulers collapsed in the face of the expansion of external control, their inclination to side with their populations increased. Racoviǎ’s decree here should be seen in this light, as should the actions of his successor Constantin Mavrocordato who attempted both to reduce the burden of taxation on the peasantry and to outlaw serfdom, and in 1756 sponsored legislation banning Gypsy children from being sold separately to their parents. Lest we get carried away thinking that this signalled a significant change in attitude towards Gypsies, in 1749 Mavrocordato also passed a charter categorically stating that Gypsies were permanently enslaved; while his successor, Grigore Ioan passed a charter in 1753 affirming that any nomadic Gypsy not under a noble or the Church would automatically become the property of the state.19

  And yet it is worth looking more closely at documents from this period, such as a decree in 1766 against ‘mixed’ marriages, because they reveal something of the complexities of everyday life. As we know, since the fifteenth century marriages between Gypsies and the wider population had been outlawed, as such unions would result in the non-Gypsy party being consigned to slavery. Even so,

  my princely highness has seen from an evil and wicked deed, that in some parts Gypsies have married Moldavian women and also Moldavian men have taken in marriage Gypsy girls, which is entirely against the Christian faith, for not only have these people bound themselves to spend all their life with the Gypsies but especially that their children remain for ever in unchanged slavery.20

  This document simultaneously shows us that the authorities had concerns about such marriages – partly, it seems, on the grounds of their lack of religion, but also the implications, as we have seen, of non-Gypsy people becoming subject to slavery – and that such unions were sufficiently common for them to be legislated against. The decree goes on to threaten priests who performed such a ‘great and everlasting wicked act’ with being ‘severely punished’, as well as emphasizing how its measures should be ‘publically read in all parts of the towns and villages of this district, and in all the cloisters, so that everybody should know exactly the meaning of it’. We are left with two conflicting impressions: first, and most obviously, that the state intended to do everything in its power to ensure that the edict was obeyed; secondly, that it was necessary to adopt such a strident tone precisely because there were many priests who did not object to performing these marriages. Perhaps one reason for the apparent common occurrence of mixed marriages was that, despite their slave status, Gypsies actually fulfilled crucial skilled and artisanal roles in society:

  The Boyard [noble] had everything he needed on his estate: cooks, bakers, postilions, gardeners, masons, shoemakers, blacksmiths, musicians, labourers, other classes of workers – and all of them were Tziganes. The Gypsy women helped the mistress of the house with her work, and they were on such good terms that they were even allowed to assist in the beautiful embroidery done . . . [he] could close his gates and live for months at a time with his family and woman servants and his men – eighty to a hundred [Tziganes] – without having the slightest need of those who lived outside.21

  Taken together these documents and insights allow us to move away from a rather ‘flat’ understanding of Gypsy lives under slavery. Without in any way suggesting that slavery was a desirable or acceptable condition, it is obvious that the little surviving evidence we have on the matter reveals how central Gypsies were to the social and economic functioning of feudal Wallachia and Moldavia.

  So far as we have been able to construct a picture of the various experiences of Gypsies by the eighteenth century, it seems reasonable to suggest that despite fierce legislation they were by and large able to create an often precarious existence, often, but not exclusively, on the fringes of European society. In this regard, their experiences can be seen in the same light as Jews of eastern and central Europe, whose opportunities were constrained socially by their religious difference, and economically by common prohibitions on landowning. Positioned between the Catholic nobility and peasantry, they emerged as artisans, tradesmen, merchants and estate managers. In Poland, for example, everyone, ‘whether nobleman or labourer, peasant or city dweller, turned to the Jew to buy or sell, to borrow or to pay taxes, to travel or to patronise a tavern’.22 It is perhaps clear to us how states and societies were consequently instrumental in the creation and fulfilment of stereotypes of minorities: Jews were barred from certain livelihoods and then criticized for being, and stereotyped as, money lenders and avaricious merchants. Similarly, Gypsies across Europe were moved on, hunted down, seen as foreigners and regarded with suspicion. No wonder then that they kept to the margins of societies and the borders of countries.

  If we can see how stereotypes might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, contemporary writers, thinkers and legislators were grappling with a very different perspective on the place of minorities in European societies. Although our idea of ‘the Enlightenment’ has become more nuanced as we have moved away from a straightforward narrative of ‘history as progress’, it is still accepted that the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a significant shift towards a more secular and ‘rational’ understanding of society and humanity.23 As well as being associated with new ways of understanding the relationship between the state and individuals, and hence the function of the state in society, this period also saw the acceptance of the importance of attempts to understand and categorize the world on the basis of observation and evidence. Although appearing to exist in the elite and rarefied world of salons and universities, in fact the shifts in thinking which the Enlightenment engendered are crucial to understanding momentous events of the period – for example the theoretical bases for the French Revolution and American Independence – as well as laying the groundwork for how Europe’s Gypsy populations would be understood and treated in the coming centuries.

  We saw
how by the sixteenth century European societies began to wrestle with ideas of ‘race’ that were informed by the process of colonial expansion outside Europe. By the eighteenth century these emerging ideas of ‘race’ intersected with Enlightenment ideas of progress and rationalism so that, to put it crudely, thought, reason and civilization became associated with ‘white’ people and northern Europe, while unreason and savagery were conveniently located among ‘blacks’ and ‘non-whites’ outside Europe.24 Within Europe we see similar hierarchies of race being set out (a tendency that was to become intensified in the nineteenth century with the ascendancy of social Darwinist thinking), so that those living on the margins of Europe and at the margins of society were positioned as closer to nature, to chaos and to savagery.

  Despite the fact that Gypsies were thoroughly entrenched within the different national cultures right across Europe, very often their perceived social deviancy was seen as an expression of their innate foreignness and their position as outsiders. There was consequently a tension between the broad ideas of the Enlightenment stressing the rationality of human existence with its belief that education and reform might raise humanity, and suggestions that differences between ‘races’ were impermeable to change. We see something of this in that landmark publication of the Enlightenment, Diderot’s Encyclopédie. While on the one hand the entry for Gypsies might be taken as an objective description – ‘Gypsies . . . vagabonds who profess to tell fortunes by examining hands. Their talent is to sing, dance and steal’ – the suggestion here is that they have particular, and possibly innate characteristics that are seemingly shared by all of them. Similarly, the Dictionnaire de l’Academie française of 1718 focused on how the women were seen as thieves, commonly ‘telling fortunes and derobing with skill’.25