Sugar in the Blood

by Andrea Stuart

  By differentiating so sharply between the rights and treatment of their black and white workers, the Barbadian proprietors set up a legal system in which racism was encoded. Instead of being regarded as a rather unappetizing rag-tag assortment of felons, refractory Irish and rebellious Scots, the indentured servants were now collectively protected as “white” people. (The latter term was so unfamiliar at the time that one pamphleteer writing for an audience in the mother country felt it necessary to explain that it was used to describe Europeans living in the region.) The impact of this legislation was to separate the interests of the two groups and to stop black and white people fraternizing socially with one another. This, the planters fervently hoped, would make it less likely that the two groups would combine together and so overwhelm their masters.

  If the Barbadians helped to invent the concept of “whiteness” and the privileges intrinsically connected with it, they also by extension helped to invent “blackness” and its associated disadvantages. And so the transformation in the make-up of Barbados and the resultant racialization of its laws changed both the island and the world. It also reshaped George Ashby’s inner life. He was increasingly aware of himself not just as a man but as a “white man.” In this society, his colour, which he would have given little thought to in his old life, was becoming the most important determinant of his identity. Simultaneously the island’s slaves, who had previously thought of themselves as Kuba or Coromantee or Ibo, now had to accustom themselves to their new identity as “blacks.” Soon the dichotomy of black and white became the defining factor in every encounter and every conflict on the island.

  Another important issue that was thrashed out in Barbados was that slaves would serve for life and in perpetuity, passing their status down to their children and their children’s children. This harsh decision profoundly differentiated the black slaves’ experience from not just the white servants on the island but many of the enslaved peoples in history; for the Africans in Barbados it was a case of once a slave always a slave, and there was no prospect of escape from this destiny, even for one’s children.

  The colonists also redefined how slave status would be transmitted. In contrast to the patrilineal tradition of their homeland, the Barbadians decided that status should be taken from the mother. This meant that white men could continue to have sexual relationships with their black female slaves, without worrying that the offspring of these liaisons might claim freedom by means of their paternity. Slave owners could carry on fraternizing with their female workers with impunity, knowing that there would be no unpleasant legal or financial consequences to their behaviour, and they would not have to endure the embarrassment of policing other men’s sexual behaviour or their own. White women who transgressed, however, were censured not just for their licentious behaviour but for compromising the entire structure of society.

  These slave laws provide an extraordinary mirror of Barbadian society at the time, enabling us to see how slaves lived and the range of activities in which they engaged, as well as the beliefs held by the planters and what they felt about their “slave property.” Through the development of these laws we can chart not just what the ruling caste thought was happening in this society but also what they feared would happen. We can also see how their attitudes evolved. During these years the Barbados settlers transformed their laws, cultural mores and financial system to make race-based slavery the very foundation of their way of life. Whiteness became associated with social superiority and blackness with poverty and inferiority. Even white indentured servants, who previously might have felt empathy for their fellow black labourers, were now encouraged, by virtue of their shared skin colour, to identify with their oppressors instead. And thus Barbadian society became entirely predicated upon race.

  As was to be expected, the Ashby family, along with the vast majority of white settlers, became slave owners during this period. One can only imagine the debates around the family table as they discussed the pros and cons of this decision. A modest family like theirs would have had to dig deep in order to find the money. Then there was the fear of sharing their homestead with such a “barbarous and refractory” people. But whatever reservations they held, George Ashby or one of his sons eventually made the journey to Bridgetown, where the traumatized slaves were being sold, according to Ligon, “straight from the ship like horses at a market.” In a desperate attempt to make them appear more healthy, the sailors would have shaved the slaves’ heads, covered their sores and oiled their skin to remove the ashen hue it had taken on during the long and dreadful Middle Passage. Those who were suffering from dysentery would often have their bottoms plugged to disguise their symptoms. So the slaves stood, arranged in rows, shuddering and silent with shock. Once the auction began, planters examined the slaves like so much cattle, palpating their muscles, checking their orifices, forcing their hands into their mouths to examine their teeth.

  Then the bidding started. Prices varied: the highest were for healthy young males and those with plantation skills. The second most desirable category would be the young women who appeared strong enough for field work or who had skills as seamstresses or cooks. Beautiful girls were also dear. Babies were cheap because they were unlikely to survive. For those slaves who were left over, there was what was known as “the scramble.” After paying an agreed price, the planters would rush around throwing cords with numbers around the necks of the terrified captives they had chosen. Then the purchased slaves were led away. For the islanders, this was a shopping expedition; for the slaves, this was yet another “moment of rupture,” according to one historian, “this time of the bonds that had been formed among the enslaved on the ship, during the stay on the coast and the Middle Passage … [So] as the cords tightened and pulled them away, the enslaved tried to hold fast, to their family members, friends and comrades, without success.” One observer captured the terrible moment in a poem:

  One dreadful shriek assaults th’ affrighted sky,

  As to their friends the parted victims cry.

  With imprecating screams of horror wild,

  The frantick mother calls her sever’d child.

  Thus the slaves’ journey to the New World ended as it had begun: in a welter of grief, fear and horror. For those who were not purchased, because of ill health or old age, the end of the story was even worse. They were often thrown overboard, and some jumped to their deaths in order to avoid further suffering.

  It is interesting that a nation that so highly prized and protected its own freedoms found it so easy to reconcile itself to the imprisonment of others. And certainly it can be argued that conditions in the New World placed these settlers in a moral quandary to which they were ill equipped to respond. But time and again the colonists adapted their morality to justify their actions, and, prompted by venality and prejudice, forged a system that was a betrayal of natural law and accepted ethics.

  Some white colonizers felt disquiet on their first encounter with the slave trade. For example, when the planter John Pinney first went to buy slaves in neighbouring St. Christopher, he found it an unsettling experience. “I can assure you,” he wrote home to a friend, “I was shocked at the first appearance of human flesh exposed to sale.” Immediately, however, he reasons this away. “But surely God ordained them for the use and benefits of us: otherwise his divine will would have been made manifest by some particular sign or token.”

  Whether George Ashby or his children felt a similar unease is unknown. If so, they, like John Pinney, certainly got over it: by the census of 1680 the family had a total of nine slaves, in addition to one indentured servant, working their land. And most of the surviving records from the Ashby family during this period concern their various slave transactions. These deeds and wills prove that slave holdings, just as much as land, were considered an integral part of the family’s wealth, to be bought, sold and exchanged when necessary. In a deed dated 25 March 1687, George Ashby the younger sold his loving mother Deborah Hutton four Negro slaves for th
e sum of £40. She in turn bequeathed the said slaves—Jack, Betty, Little Jack and Goffe—to her second son, William Ashby, to be transferred to him by deed of gift on her death. In 1690 another deed was lodged, in which “eight slaves and 2 acres of land” were used as security on a payment Deborah made to her eldest son, George. In 1692 George Ashby the younger, “for the real love, goodwill and affection” which he had for his wife-to-be Dorothy Nusum, sold six acres of land in the parish of St. Philip “with all appurtenances and one Negro man”; the funds from this sale were to go to providing for Dorothy’s maintenance.

  Having put aside his scruples, John Pinney was able to congratulate himself on being a compassionate owner, though he was still clearly unable to see his enslaved workers as anything more than possessions: “It is unnecessary I flatter myself,” he wrote in his standing instructions to his managers, “to say a word respecting the care of slaves and stock—your good sense must tell you they are the sinews of a plantation and must claim your particular care and attention. Humanity tempered with justice towards the former must ever be exercised, and when sick I am satisfied they will experience every kindness from you, they surely deserve it, being the very means of our support.” The “latter” he added without a break in the paragraph, “must be kept clean of ticks.”

  While the rules of engagement between blacks and whites were being forged, it was a strange and uneasy time on the island. Just as the early white settlers of Barbados had not gone to the New World with the expectation of becoming slavers, so too their black captives had no idea how to “be” slaves. The two groups therefore had to invent the rules of this uneven relationship via trial and error over an extended period of time.

  For most slaves, the process began with another long and enervating journey to their new owner’s plantation, where they arrived disorientated, grief-stricken and brutalized. There, planters like George Ashby stripped them of their African names and assigned them a slave name which must have sounded like gibberish to their ears and rolled uncomfortably off their tongue. The symbolism of this was profound. For a man’s name is more than just a way of calling him: it is the verbal symbol of his whole identity, indicating his place in his family and community. To separate a person from his name effectively “killed” his old self. The new name, chosen by the planter, also carried its own message. The patterns of naming across the Americas were often deliberately insulting and careless. Slaves from one region were given names from another, while many of these African names acquired pejorative meanings: Quarshee, a day-name that originally meant Sunday in Akan, came to signify a stupid, lazy slave; Cudjo, which was the Akan day-name for Monday, came to mean a drunkard. Many slave names in the ledgers of the Jamaican plantation Worthy Park were disconcertingly similar to those of its cattle.

  But the slave’s new name was only one of the emblems of his transformed position. In many American slave societies, new purchases were routinely branded to make their enslaved status clear. Captives were identifiable in other ways. In most of the sugar islands their clothes, made from cheap cloth such as osnaburg (a type of coarse linen), instantly marked them out as part of the enslaved population. Many sugar societies also had sumptuary laws that forbade slaves from wearing certain things, such as shoes or precious metals like gold. Most significant, of course, was the slaves’ colour, for across the Americas being non-white immediately associated one with the slave community.

  But the most important transformation that the slave underwent was not material but psychological: the system was designed to transform the way he saw himself and perceived his own interests. From his earliest days on the island, the slave was discouraged from speaking his language, prohibited from practising his religion, and prevented from living in the manner to which he had previously been accustomed. The slave, therefore, had a past but not a heritage. As the historian Orlando Patterson explains: “Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, or to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.” With such a brutal assault on their physical and psychological self, it was unsurprising that almost a third of slaves died within that first year, expiring because of suicide, abuse or grief.

  Communication on the plantations was also a fundamental problem. This first generation of blacks would have known no English or other European languages, so they would not have been able to speak to their owner nor he to them. They may have fared no better with their fellow captives. The slaves that were brought to Barbados or any other part of the Americas had no understanding of themselves as “African” or “black” people. And why should they? The African continent encompasses more than thirty million square kilometres and includes a stupendous variety of peoples with different appearances, beliefs and cultures. To speak of “African culture” or “African religion” implies a unity and a uniformity that simply do not exist. Thus the men and women who arrived in Barbados, sometimes taken from very different ethnic groups, often met each other as foreigners, traumatized strangers thrown together in a strange and hostile land.

  What an odd, uneasy little household the Ashbys must have been. As the family struggled to raise their children and make enough money to keep them, they shared their living space with people who had neither a common language nor a common background. Conversation on the farm would have been desultory, difficult and largely one-way, enacted by a series of pantomimes and gestures, and abetted by a few swiftly taught commands and the use of the lash. And then there was the indentured servant, who was neither relative, friend nor slave, and thus had a somewhat ambiguous social place in the domestic unit. These different groups must have circled each other nervously, in a welter of misunderstanding, resentment and misery: lonely as islands.

  This unease was exacerbated by the misconceptions each group held about the other. Though there had been a smattering of blacks in England since Elizabethan times, many settlers would never have seen a black face before arriving in the Americas and they brought with them a hotchpotch of ideas about blacks that were predominantly negative. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English explorers frequently described the Africans they encountered as a “brutish,” “beastly” and “savage people.” They regarded their nakedness as a mark of their lewdness and immorality, and their skin colour as a mark of sin, depravity and evil. Religion too played its part: unable to comprehend the complex belief systems of the Africans they encountered, the Europeans dismissed them as “heathens” and “devil worshippers.” Indeed many Europeans, particularly the slave owners of the New World, called upon the Bible to justify the practice, citing the “curse of Ham” passage in Genesis, in which Noah condemns his son Ham to eternal slavery. In their version Ham is understood to be the progenitor of the black line of humanity, so the story justifies the persecution of all black people. But this was an interpretation of convenience, and the same passage has also been used to condemn other groups, including Jews.

  In turn, Africans had negative impressions of white people. On first encountering white slavers, many blacks saw them as diabolical figures, dubbing them “white devils.” They were repelled by the paleness of their skin and the hairiness of their bodies; one chieftain claimed that they looked like “sea-monsters.” And, as we have seen, Olaudah Equiano firmly believed, along with many of his fellow captives, that whites “were cannibals who were capturing them in order to eat them.” As well as lamenting Europeans’ lack of cleanliness, the slaves associated their pale skins with death, the other world or ghosts (what the slaves called “duppy spirits”).

  The sprinkling of American Indians among the body of the enslaved added to this farrago of misunderstanding and hostility and influenced the way Europeans handled their slaves. It was regarded as best to treat the Indians gently as they were “apt to die out of pure grief if they be put to more than ordinary hardship.” In
contrast, it was believed that blacks should be “kept in awe by threats and blows for if a man grow too familiar with them, they are apt to take advantage of it and abuse that familiarity; but if they be chastised with moderation when they have done something amiss, they will become better, more submissive and more compliant … and think better of their masters.” All these stereotypes were of course weapons to justify the subjugation of the slaves and make them seem even more strange and other to the colonists.

  It is impossible to know whether George Ashby was a severe or considerate master, but the island’s planters had a poor reputation in this respect. As enthusiastic entrepreneurs they were ever eager to maximize profits and minimize costs. So they were perpetually torn between the need to protect the well-being of their slaves, who represented a sizeable capital investment, and the desire to cut costs for short-term profit. In the end, the latter imperative usually won out, and this, combined with a goodly dash of racial hostility, meant the slaves were fed and housed poorly, and provided with inadequate medical treatment. They were malnourished and vulnerable to disease; their health was so degraded that in these early years of slavery they were largely infertile and their lifespan in captivity was a mere seven to ten years. This inability of most slave populations in the region to reproduce in turn prompted the shipment of even more slaves to take their place.