by Tom Feiling
Livingston returned to Providence and married his childhood sweetheart, Ann Eliza. But she missed her family on San Andrés, so they decided to set up home on the bigger island. It was just forty miles from Providence, and movement between the two brother islands was easy and frequent. Although Livingston had yet to graduate from his correspondence course in medicine, he set himself up as a general practitioner, and used the little he knew to treat a population with only the dimmest conception of medical science. A photograph taken shortly after his return shows a short, slender, and rather gloomy-looking man, with blue eyes expressive of something between fear and reproach, a resolute mouth, and a thick, carefully trimmed beard.
In addition to his work as a general practitioner, Livingston worked as a missionary of the American Baptist Home Mission Society of New York City, for which he received an annual salary of $125. The Baptists taught that the first church in any community should spring from its first school, so he began teaching a group of free blacks how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. His students built a thatch-roofed shelter at Mount May, under the tamarind tree that crowned the highest point on the island. Despite the abolition of slavery, most of the black population of San Andrés still had to work in the fields during the day, so Livingston taught them at night.
At first, they were reluctant to give up their Sundays for prayers, as it was their only free day. But once they learned how to read for themselves, the stories Livingston read to them from the Bible took on new meaning, as did the Sabbath day. A Sunday congregation meeting was soon up and running, and in 1849, Philip performed his first baptism. His first initiate was his wife, Ann Eliza. Dressed in white and accompanied by his students, the Livingstons walked down to a pool of water on the edge of San Andrés Bay, where they sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and offered up prayers for the light that was about to enter their hearts. Philip and Ann Eliza took off their shoes and waded into the water until it reached their waists. He pulled his wife’s head under the water and raised her up again, in imitation of the resurrection of Christ. Then he went to one house and his wife to another, where they changed into dry clothes.
Three years later, Livingston’s congregation adopted the Baptist covenant. Aside from the spiritual bond that it created, the covenant was akin to a constitution, specifying the duties that members of the congregation were expected to perform and the protection they could expect in return. In swearing to abide by article twenty, which stated that ‘the brethren will be mutual to each other as iron sharpens iron,’ they effectively established a mutual aid society, an act of community building that would have been unthinkable under slavery. As slaves, Livingston’s congregation had been kept in a state of obligatory, impoverished equality. Following their emancipation, they had each been given a plot of land, however small, and they had quickly become proud and possessive landowners. In recognition of the independence they had gained in becoming property owners, article twenty-five of the covenant insisted that Baptists were only to sell land to their fellow Baptists.
Provision was made for the sick and the aged, to be paid for from the dues the congregation paid to the church every month, and Livingston drew up a program of education. Reading, writing, and mathematics were the priorities, but his curriculum also had a strong moral purpose. Among the vices he prohibited was alcohol: they were not to drink it, and wherever possible, they were not to carry it as cargo in their boats. He also warned them about the dangers inherent in ‘going to the billiard halls, participating in ball games and horse races on Sundays, and buying lottery tickets.’
The congregation was now ready to build a church. Coral rock and shells were gathered from the beach and carted up to Mount May for the foundations. A wooden church was erected, with four columns supporting a porch that ran the length of one side, and a tower was built for the belfry, where a bell was suspended. Since termites were a perennial problem, the entire structure was then doused with gallons of paint prepared with turpentine, arsenic, potash, and mercury. A tall front door with a burnished spring lock was fitted, and the three high windows were glazed and hung with muslin curtains.
The First Baptist Church of San Andrés was consecrated on 16 October 1853. The carpenters in the congregation had made pews to rent to individual families, but before long, they had all been taken, so they built a gallery for another eighty people. As their numbers increased, so did their monthly dues, and Philip was able to buy the necessary accoutrements: a hand bell, which he bought for $5, and four kerosene lamps, for $4 each. By 1857, the church at Mount May was doing so well that its minister felt able to invest $50 in that most essential of modern devices: a wall clock.
* * *
The plantation owners of Jamaica did not welcome the news that their slaves had become workers, who expected to be paid for their labor. But what brought them to ruin was not the wages bill they now had to pay, but their workforce’s retreat from the plantations. As soon as they were able, freemen bought plots of land for themselves and turned their backs on the plantations for good. The plantation owners grew so exasperated that they resorted to cutting down the freemen’s fruit trees, in an effort to drive them back to work. It was in vain: by 1852, most of Jamaica’s landowners had thrown up their hands in surrender to ruin, and over two hundred forty estates had been abandoned.7
Plantation owners on the other Caribbean islands fared better. Being smaller, there was less virgin land to which a freed slave could resort, and the black population had no choice but continue working in the cotton and cane fields that had made the white population rich. But they charged for the work they did and only worked until noon, for they were determined to spend the rest of the day tending their own plots. Some of them also began growing cash crops and were soon competing with their former masters to supply the local market. As wages became the plantation owners’ principal outgoing, their cotton became more expensive, and they soon found themselves being undercut by competitors from the Indian subcontinent.
The wealthiest landowners on San Andrés began casting around for less labor-intensive crops to grow, and in 1850, half a dozen of them got together to plant coconut palms. The island’s freemen followed suit, planting coconuts on their plots in the hills, and wherever else they would take root. This didn’t suit the white landowners at all, for they weren’t accustomed to competition, and slavery had made them eminently unsuited to the life of a smallholder. After seventy years of instructing, inspecting, and punishing, they were now obliged to turn their hands to manual labor. Coconuts didn’t require year-round tending, but come harvest time somebody had to climb the palm’s trunk, and as Philip Livingston put it, ‘bone and sinue is the capital to bring in wealth here.’ The island’s freemen were flush with the taste of freedom and eager to enjoy the fruits of their labor. ‘Thrift was soon manifested among the emancipated part of the population,’ Livingston wrote in his diary.
Lands were purchased and cleared, timbers felled and coconut planted, and by the time 1856 had dawned upon San Andrés, it had become a coconut country. Two schooners under the English flag—white washed Yankees—are regular traders, and others under the same flag come to fill up or load for the Costa Rica Railroad Company, who have established a large store here.
But while black islanders were growing coconuts on their own land, the white merchants still dominated the trade with the Americans, and they did their best to maintain the exploitative relationship they had grown up with. They refused to pay the growers more than $7 per thousand coconuts, and the growers had no way of circumventing them. So Livingston established a cooperative, which consolidated the collective power of the smallholders and undercut the prices the merchants were offering the Americans.
At first, the cooperative simply bartered their crop for the clothing, building materials, and tools that its members needed. But the switch to cash was quick, as was the sale of kitchen stoves, sewing machines, and bolts of cloth. For the first time in their lives, the island’s black population had money to f
urnish a household, and because the larger, white landowners were not part of the cooperative, ‘they had to beg and wait, as well as pay, to get their coconuts prepared for shipment.’
Livingston watched as demand for the island’s coconuts continued to outstrip supply. ‘Rather unusually, the price of the article kept pace with the increase of the article,’ he wrote, ‘the price advancing first to $10, then to $12, until by the year 1857 it was commanding $16 per thousand.’ San Andrés was by then exporting one hundred fifty thousand coconuts every month, and the cooperative was making $2,400 a month.8 Thanks to the demand for coconuts in the United States, which only increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, San Andrés was probably the only island in the Caribbean where emancipated slaves flourished after emancipation.
Money is plentiful, and the persons who in 1850 would have bowed to the earth to pick up a five cent piece, and were wont to utter their plaintive ‘Ha de massa’ with naught but tatters to don on any occasion, are now to be seen in broadcloth, muslins, and costly fashionable hats.
Handsome new houses were built with timber imported from New Orleans, the windows were glazed and hung with drapes to keep out prying eyes, and black people were finally able to enjoy the pleasures that come with privacy.
By 1869, American ships were coming to San Andrés in such numbers that the Department of State set up a consulate on the island. They appointed Livingston to run it, and sent him a Stars and Stripes, which he would run up the flagpole in his front garden every morning. The consul was responsible for collecting taxes due on cargo going to the United States, clearing vessels, granting visas, reporting shipwrecks, caring for castaways, settling disputes between captains and crew, and defending any American citizen who fell foul of the Colombian authorities. By 1873, Philip Livingston, Jr. was the most important man on the archipelago, respected by the powerful, and loved by the powerless, who called him ‘Papa Massa.’
The American flag was soon flying in other parts of the island, for there were now twelve agents for the coconut companies living there. San Andrés’s only connection with Colombia was the monthly mail boat, yet The New York Times reached the island just a few days after rolling off the presses. The islanders’ children spent their weekends playing baseball and drinking soda, which they bought with U.S. dollars, and the more prosperous among them even went to high school in the States. When a hurricane destroyed just about every house on the island in 1877, the intendente cabled the president of the United States before he notified Bogotá. San Andrés might have been part of the sixth canton of Cartagena, but as the intendente pointed out in his annual report, the islanders ‘paid more attention to what the captains of the American ships say than they do to any established authority.’9
King Coconut reigned in San Andrés, and his rule looked to be a benevolent one. ‘What change in a quarter century,’ Livingston marveled. ‘Almighty God must surely have turned the wheel of destiny in that time.’10 Religion and profit jumped together on San Andrés, just as they had in New England two hundred years before. The transformation was apparent not only in the new streets laid out around the wharf, but in the islanders’ frame of mind. Life no longer appeared governed by blind chance; instead, it was directed by a merciful God. This was the breakthrough that Hope Sherrard, the Puritan colony’s minister, had spent his time trying to effect, and it took place not on the English colony on Providence, but the (practically) American colony on San Andrés. Two hundred fifty years had passed since Lord Saye wrote to the governor of Massachusetts to convince him that God meant his chosen people to settle in Central, not North, America. The extraordinary rise to power of the United States had proved his lordship wrong. For the people of San Andrés, freedom, prosperity, and the United States rose together, and they regarded all three as gifts from a merciful God. ‘Those States first founded by thy firm decree, will by thy power achieve their destiny,’ Livingston declared.
But the American consul was quick to spot new vices among his congregation. When the coconut boom began, ‘the people, viewing it as a great favour from God, were thankful and quite satisfied with the price, not expecting or anticipating any increase in that department.’ But by 1870, they had grown accustomed to their prosperity and ‘would complain that coconuts were bringing nothing if they fell to $15 per thousand.’ By its very nature, the coconut business encouraged the islanders to do nothing, for the palms require little tending. Their newfound wealth combined with their idleness to make them greedy, and Livingston was dismayed to see ‘the usual increase in covetousness with the increase of prosperity.’ Although their houses were ‘much nicer and more expensive than their [former] owners’ houses,’ the black population’s thirst for recognition made them imitative of the whites. ‘They know of no distinction whatever among the whole race of men on the earth, and will not hire themselves to be cooks or helps, lest it derogate from their gentleman or ladyship.’ Their vanity even blinded them to the contempt with which the American ships’ captains treated them. ‘Whilst the captains call these people “nigger” or “orang-utan” in their absence, they are highly flattered by them in their presence, which makes them conceive themselves to be of as much importance as emperors or Kaisers.’11
* * *
Livingston first took the word of God to Providence in 1851. Preaching in a makeshift church to illiterate islanders with no knowledge of the Bible, he made sure that his first Sunday service was a dramatic affair. He had brimstone sent to the island from Kingston, which his assistant burned in a cauldron behind the pulpit to simulate the rank fumes that awaited the unrepentant sinner in hell. Only when all present were struggling for breath did Philip begin to preach. In the absence of God, sin had crept into their hearts, he thundered. Whatever the outward signs of peaceful contentedness, they were lost souls, akin to the hundreds of shipwrecked mariners to have died on the cays. Their only hope of salvation from the tide of sin threatening to overwhelm them lay with their celestial captain, Jesus Christ. As Livingston succumbed to the terrible smoke pouring from the mouth of hell, his assistant threw him a lifebuoy and dragged him into the sunlight outside, closely followed by his awestruck congregation.
The islanders had every reason to believe Papa Massa, for he was a highly respected man, and few could resist the power of his message. Four years after preaching his first sermon on Providence, the East Side Baptist Church opened its doors, and within a generation, almost all the islanders had been baptized into his church. At sunrise every Sunday morning, they emerged from their isolated farmsteads in their finest clothes—the women in wide-brimmed hats or bonnets; the men in suits and straw hats. The wealthier, whiter families arrived on horseback, while their poorer, darker-skinned neighbors came barefoot. The state of their finances held no interest for the Lord, Livingston assured them. Come the day of reckoning, it was their hearts, not their wallets that would be in the balance.
Christianity gave rich and poor alike a common language. It tempered the stubborn individualism that their isolation had fostered and challenged the simple dichotomy between white goodness and black malignity that they had grown up with. It also gave Livingston enormous control over what the British naval officer, C. F. Collett, called their ‘moral character.’ The values he preached were the brotherhood of all believers, the importance of cooperation, and the perennial value of education. Until Philip began preaching, the white islanders’ only understanding of discipline was the punishment they dished out to their slaves. He taught them to turn their watchfulness inward, for a good Christian had to exercise self-discipline if he was to cleanse his soul of its diabolical accretions. He had to strive to be good: sober, straight talking, and honest in his business dealings, and respectful to his neighbors. And he should avoid dancing, drunkenness, and loose women, for sexual promiscuity was also a sin.
Until the arrival of Baptism, marriage had been an entirely secular ceremony on Providence, reserved for the island’s biggest landowners and performed by the intendente on
San Andrés or the captain of any American or British ship that happened to be on the dock. Now the islanders had a church minister to join them in holy matrimony. By article twenty-seven of the Baptist covenant, the men agreed not to marry nonbelievers and to find a partner among the congregation. If a man was productive, he would become prosperous, and this would allow him to keep his wife at home, where she would reflect her husband’s unstained conscience by keeping her household neat and tidy.
Philip’s acolytes brought their children to be baptized. Some gave them Old Testament names like Isaac, Israel, or Lemuel (which would surely have brought a smile to Hope Sherrard’s face). Others chose one of the plain names that their fathers had heard sailing around the region’s English-speaking ports: Alexander, James, or John. There were also Spanish names, like those given to Mario and Antonio Rankin. Yet the names in the island’s register of births, deaths, and marriages show the choice of names to have been anything but predictable. Multiple fragments washed up on the island’s shores, as seen in the names given to Plutarco Robinson and Abdulrahim Wong. As for Eudosia, Lorehema, and Rovine Robinson, and their cousins Zulli, Zenon, and Zaldoa, their names can only have been conjured up by the island’s remoter poets.
Philip warned his congregation to keep their children, and particularly their daughters, in check. They were to show good manners when meeting the elders of the community, and to spend their mornings helping their parents. The boys should learn the rudiments of their fathers’ trade: how to repair a lobster pot, read a sextant, or deliver a calf. The girls should do chores around the house, in preparation for becoming good housewives. As there was no school on Providence, few children learned how to read or write. But a free Jamaican called Mr. Watson came to the island to work as a private tutor to the children of the wealthier families, and he agreed to give classes to the poorer children as well. Not to be outdone by their own children, the adults also signed up for classes in reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. They attended class in the evening and returned home on horseback, their schoolbooks in one hand, a lantern to light the crooked shoreline road in the other.