Sugar in the Blood

by Andrea Stuart

  The most common retribution for serious infractions was flogging. This was necessarily a public punishment, since it was designed to inculcate fear in the entire slave population. At the appointed time the overseer stopped work and summoned the labourers, along with an impassive owner, to watch. Meanwhile the terrified accused was escorted to the place of punishment where he (or she) was disrobed, had his hands bound and was suspended from the high branch of a sturdy tree. The choice of the whip depended on the severity of the misdemeanour; the most excoriating was the bull-whip, which could cut human skin open with a single stroke. While the slave struggled against the rope and screamed out, the prescribed number of strokes—ten, twenty, even thirty were common—was administered. The slave was then cut down, falling into the dirt and staining the ground with his blood. Sometimes salt, lime or pepper was rubbed into the wound to worsen the pain.

  The colonists believed fervently that violence was intrinsic to maintaining the safety of their society. So new planters arriving on the island were instructed with the maxim: “At all times they must fear you, they simply must.” Hardly a day passed on any plantation when some sort of violence did not take place. One observer estimated that many larger plantations had sixty or so chastisements a day. Every estate dweller recognized the terrible, desperate screams evoked by such punishments. They were so loud that they rang throughout the property from the field to boiling house. Visitors to the islands were shocked that whites there didn’t appear to hear these noises and would carry on eating or chatting as if nothing had happened. It was part of the soundtrack of their lives, as familiar as the rustling of the cane and the bell summoning slaves to the field. As the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher concluded:

  The whip is the soul of the colonies … It is the clock of the plantation; it announced the moment of waking up and of going to bed; it marked the hour of work; it also marked the hour of rest … the day of his death is the only one in which the negro is allowed to forget the wake-up call of the whip.

  The psychological impact of living in a world in which violence was endemic was powerfully recorded by the American ex-slave turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He describes how one overseer’s prolonged campaign of abuse, which included sleep deprivation, violent punishments and lack of food, affected him:

  I was broken in body soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute.

  Mary Prince, the author of the only female Caribbean slave narrative, didn’t find her gender any protection from the “horrors of slavery.” She endured a succession of violent owners, passing, as she put it, from “butcher to butcher”:

  I lay down at night and rose up in the morning in fear and sorrow; and often wished that … I could escape from this cruel bondage and be at rest in the grave … It was then, however, my heavy lot to weep, weep, weep and that for years; to pass from one misery to another, and from one cruel master to a worse.

  Those who did attempt to model a kinder, more gentle slavery inevitably attracted the derision and ire of their fellow planters. This Matthew Lewis found out when a group of his neighbours, outraged at his lenient treatment of his workers, attempted to persuade the grand jury in the nearest town to prosecute him. With amazement he noted in his own journal: “for over-indulgence to my own negroes!”

  Another idealistic planter was the Englishman Joshua Steele, who arrived in Barbados in 1780 to take personal control of his plantations. Influenced by Enlightenment and abolitionist principles, he was determined to encourage a new style of improved plantation management that, he hoped, would eventually culminate in the end of slavery. But his success was very limited; the local planters were almost universally hostile to his vision and determined to see it fail. In their view, Steele’s philosophy undermined the central tenet of their society, white supremacy; it also eroded the power of their paternalism, and encouraged slaves to become more demanding, which they felt would make everyone discontented. His attempt to bequeath his fortune to his enslaved partner and two children in order to guarantee their lifestyle and education was a failure because slaves could not inherit property. (The gesture also proved to his fellow planters how beyond the pale Steele actually was.)

  It would be nice to credit Robert Cooper with being a benign, liberal slave owner. But there is no evidence to suggest that was the case. Had he pioneered some progressive scheme to eliminate exploitation from plantation life, it would certainly have been recorded in the accounts of the period, since such behaviour was so rare. Indeed, Robert Cooper had a reputation for being a canny planter who made sure he extracted the maximum profits from his property, be it land or slaves. So it is almost inevitable that the crop at Burkes was harvested at the usual cost of beatings and brutality and that Robert Cooper resorted to the full panoply of intimidatory violence that most planters employed.

  Some contemporary commentators speculated on why the atmosphere of the colonies was capable of reducing civilized Europeans to brutes. The abolitionist James Stephen, for example, wondered why men who were “conspicuously liberal and humane” changed their “moral character” when they settled in the West Indies. His explanation was straightforward: they were corrupted by the system they were forced to become part of:

  Annoyed and irritated by those vices which slavery very rarely fails to produce in its degraded subjects, they have recourse to the established modes of correction: at first they do so with reluctance, and sparingly; but are soon persuaded that severer discipline is necessary; and every successive infliction of punishment, rubs off something of that humane sensibility with which they at first set out; till at length they acquire the common apathy, and the common aversion, towards that unfortunate class.

  Typical of this change of heart was Governor Fenlon, who wrote in 1764: “I arrived in Martinique with all the prejudices of Europe against the harshness with which the Negroes are treated,” but after a short stay he declared that “the safety of the whites requires that the Negroes be treated like animals.”

  As Fenlon’s words suggest, at the root of it all was fear. Colonial whites worried that those mighty arms, which could chop with one stroke straight through a bundle of canes, might one day put the blade to their throats; that the hands that prepared their food might one mealtime sprinkle it with poison; that their domestic slaves might one night rise up and murder them in their beds.

  Guilt, suppressed and unacknowledged, also played a part, but the moral transformation displayed by so many colonists was also due to something else altogether: the soul-corroding effect that such absolute power over their fellow human beings had on them. In the colonies a white man could do things that he could do virtually nowhere else. If he had a sadistic streak he could indulge it here with impunity; if he wished to rape or beat or sodomize a black man, woman or child there was little anyone could or would do to stop him. The colonies became Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness,” some of the few places in the world where individuals were entirely free to indulge their ugliest impulses without the normal social constraints. This total power corrupted locals and newcomers alike, distorting their personalities and turning them into beasts.

  As Frederick Douglass eloquently put it:

  The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system. A man’s character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and colour of things about him. Under the whole heavens there is no relation more unfavourable to the development of honourable character, than that sustained by the slaveholders to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild.

  12

  Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women. Super added to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings and mortifications peculiarly their own.

  —HARRIET JACOBS, AMERICAN SLAVE

  SLAVERY DID NOT EXIST j
ust on Robert Cooper’s land; it permeated the intimacy of his home, his family and his bed. The great house was the hub of the plantation, and more than 10 per cent of the enslaved population at Burkes worked there as domestics. The atmosphere in the great house was like that of a royal court, with people coming and going in search of favours and carrying out errands. So Burkes was constantly busy, alive with intrigue and suspicion, gossiping and bickering. In an attempt to obviate their powerlessness, the slaves acted like courtiers, collecting information, lobbying for position and status, attempting to shore up their position and further their interests. Meanwhile the Ashbys behaved like any royals, believing that they had the inalienable right to know all the details of their subjects’ existence, dispensing rewards and punishment, even meddling in their slaves’ personal affairs, with the justification that every child that was born and survived on the plantation added to their wealth. Thus the slaves who worked at Burkes’ great house were inextricably entangled in every aspect of the Ashby family’s daily—and nightly—life.

  This lack of privacy surprised and exasperated newcomers to plantation life, as Matthew Lewis commented:

  The greatest drawback upon one’s comfort in a Jamaica existence seems to me to be being obliged to live perpetually in public … The houses are absolutely transparent; the walls are nothing but windows—and all the doors stand wide open. No servants are in waiting to announce arrivals visitors, negroes, dogs, cats, poultry, all walk in and out and up and down your living-rooms, without the slightest ceremony.

  He added on another occasion: “Certainly, if a man was desirous of leading a life of vice here, he must have set himself totally above shame, for he may depend upon everything done being seen and known.” According to the historian Karl Watson, this intimacy was particularly marked in Barbados: “Both blacks and whites knew each other well. The point is clearly illustrated by the advertisements issued for runaway slaves, in which precise details of physical features, residential location and social relationships are stated.”

  Living in such close proximity, sexual encounters between the owners and the owned were almost inevitable, and this was a feature of life at Burkes as it was on most plantations. The result was a complicated extended family, with Robert Cooper at its nucleus, which was a product of his relationships with numerous female slaves ranging from the casually exploitative to the passionate and long term. By the time the entire web had been spun it included at least five women and seventeen children. These relationships were not necessarily sequential; many of them overlapped with one another, so at any one time Robert Cooper would have been juggling a number of concubines alongside his legitimate relationship with his wife, Mary Ashby.

  The sexual exploitation of slave women was so omnipresent in Atlantic slavery that few visitors to the region failed to mention it in their reports. While many observers found the practice “disgraceful and iniquitous,” it was nonetheless evident from the earliest days of slavery. The historian Hilary Beckles notes that one of the major problems the enslaved black woman faced was “getting the slave master off her back in the day time and off her belly in the night time.” White men often had their first sexual experience with a woman of colour and continued to assume rights of access thereafter. Thus if a female slave tried to resist she was quite likely to be met with cruel beatings or other punishments. Unsurprisingly, some women chose simply to submit and used these relationships to further their own economic and social goals.

  One of the most revealing accounts of a planter’s sexual relationships with his slaves was provided by the plantation manager Thomas Thistlewood, who as well as recording the obscene punishments he inflicted on his slaves in his diary also kept a detailed account, written in an elaborate code, of his sex life on the various Jamaican plantations where he worked. With the exception of a handful of sexual encounters with white prostitutes, all of his partners were women who worked for him. Whether they were young or old, sick or well, none was safe from his sexual marauding. He molested women on the way to the fields, in the kitchens, in their cabins as they rested. Not even venereal disease hindered his sexual exploits. These assaults began almost as soon as he arrived on the island. In the first few weeks he recorded sex with Franke under a cotton tree and with Mirtilla in a slave cabin and in a field by the riverside. After that the attacks would carry on almost unbroken for the rest of his time in Jamaica.

  For Thistlewood, sex with his slaves, whether consensual or not, was one of the perks of plantation life. He made no effort to hide any of these encounters. And why should he? These women were in his complete power—as were any witnesses—and there was no one to whom they could complain or from whom they could obtain redress. In an average year he had sex 108 times with around fourteen different partners. The only evidence of any guilt was the trinkets or coins he would sometimes stuff into his victims’ hands after the deed was done. By his own account, after a total of thirty-seven years on the island, Thistlewood had had intercourse on 3,852 occasions.

  Thistlewood also pandered his slaves to his friends. When visitors came to the estate they only had to indicate an interest in a particular female and she would be summarily dispatched to their room. Even those visitors who expressed no such inclination would often be sent some poor girl anyway. They were a demonstration of his hospitality, like copious food and ever-flowing rum. Alongside his philandering, Thistlewood also had more committed relationships, in particular one with Phibbah, who worked as housekeeper at the first plantation where he was employed. Their relationship lasted almost all the years he spent in Jamaica. They quarrelled and made up like any ordinary couple; presents were exchanged, and this enterprising woman would even lend him money she had earned through her sideline of buying and selling produce. Phibbah bore him a son in 1760, whom Thistlewood referred to as “Mulatto John.”

  The sheer number of Thistlewood’s sexual encounters is shocking, but perhaps not untypical of that time and place. One Barbadian planter, for example, famously claimed to have fathered seventy-four illegitimate children with his slaves. Another Martinican planter boasted that at least a third of the children on his plantation were “the product of his loins.” Again, Thistlewood’s own behaviour did not come to light because his neighbours regarded his sexual conduct as scandalous, but because he was meticulous enough to record it. In this context, Robert Cooper’s network of liaisons was unremarkable. He probably assumed these relationships were his right as a planter, and he would not have been overburdened with embarrassment or remorse.

  The effect on the slave community of such casual sexual marauding would have been immense. Beyond the damage done to the women themselves, their mothers, fathers, lovers and brothers were forced to continue serving their abusers, powerless to protect or avenge them. In this way, the planters’ sexual liberty intimidated slaves across the plantation. Robert Cooper’s ability to take any woman on the estate was a mark of his complete control over his slaves’ bodies and lives. And random rapacious attacks were part of the regime of violence that maintained order at plantations like Burkes and across the wider slave system.

  There was often something of a pattern to these liaisons. Those in the early days of a planter’s marriage tended to be more short-lived and tentative than many of those which followed. The first transgressions often felt dangerous and were carried out anxiously and furtively, lest their wives or friends object. But as time passed, men’s confidence grew. They realized that their wives would not—or more significantly could not—leave them. They also knew that their neighbours and contemporaries were often doing exactly the same thing, that their whole community would turn a blind eye—often with a nudge and a wink. The law was also on their side. For most of the duration of slavery in Barbados a man could not be accused of “raping” his slave because the slave was property and therefore had no legal rights. As time went on and “concubinage” (the keeping of black mistresses) became an integral part of island life, the legislature wisely decided to stay out of it
. As the Jamaican planter Edward Long remarked: “He who should presume to show any displeasure against such a thing as simple fornication, would for his pains be accounted a simple blockhead; since not one in twenty can be persuaded, that there is either sin or shame in cohabiting with his slave.” (The taboos against white women having sex with black men grew stronger as white men’s permission to take black women increased.) Realizing that they could get away with these affairs, Robert Cooper and his contemporaries became emboldened and increasingly little effort was invested in being discreet.

  In 1809, for example, Robert Cooper began a relationship with Susannah, more commonly known as Sukey Ann, a young slave girl who was about his son’s age. Born around 1795, Susannah was listed as a “stock-keeper” and was fourteen years old when she was baptized. This probably marked the start of her relationship with Robert Cooper, since some planters baptized their slave mistresses before becoming too embroiled with them. Their reasoning showed up some of the nonsensical attitudes of slave society. Men like Robert Cooper were quite happy to seduce a girl barely out of childhood but were not willing to have sex with a heathen. The relationship with Sukey Ann would continue for a number of years, and would produce four children: Sarah Jane, John Richard, Thomas Edmund and Thomas Stephen.