Sugar in the Blood

by Andrea Stuart

  Many things were different in the shadow world of the slave settlements, including their medicine. Despite the regular visits of the white doctor employed by Robert Cooper, most slaves relied on black healers on the plantation, whose practice drew on both traditions brought from Africa and skills learned on the island, particularly those inherited from the Amerindian people of the region, some of whom had been transported to Barbados in the early days of slavery. Local leaves and herbs were mixed with various roots and tree barks to make teas and tonics. These healing practices were associated with African traditions of magic and a faith in the supernatural known as “obeah.” Obeah men and women were akin to conjurors in parts of mainland America, and were not only engaged in healing, but also claimed to be able to ward off evil, bring good fortune or make people fall in love.

  Most larger plantations like Burkes had their own obeah practitioners who were notable for their paraphernalia: dried herbs, beads, knotted cords, cats’ teeth. They promised believers a life (often back in Africa) after death, where they would coexist with a world of spirits. Root doctors and obeah men and women were regarded with awe and deference across the island. Whites were, of course, aware of this world of healers and obeah—indeed, their preparations were so effective that the whites often used them as well. But they didn’t fully understand the tradition, and frequently used these beliefs to justify their view of slaves as unsophisticated, superstitious heathens. The planters also feared these heterodox healers because they had such a huge influence on the slave population and often played a prominent role in rebellions and subversion. As one American lamented, “They avail themselves of the passions and prejudices of the poor people and thus fit them for their own purposes.” They were also aware of their skills as poisoners, and were unnerved by their mysterious physical powers: one obeah man, burned slowly alive, displayed no pain and declared that “It was not in the power of the White people to kill him.”

  There was another group tussling with the obeah men for control of the slaves’ souls. This was the church. In the early days of settlement the Church of England was largely uninterested in ministering to black slaves, lest it provoke aspirations for freedom, but later on this changed and religion began to be used to subdue the black population and justify their enslavement. The Anglican ministers, funded by the planter-controlled Vestry, encouraged slaves to come to terms with “the place that God in his wisdom had chosen to put them.” As the Jamaican plantocrat Peter Beckford concluded: “Let him [the slave] be taught to revere God; and then his duty to his master; may he be made efficient—his labour easy, his life comfortable and his mind resigned.”

  But it was the nonconformist missionaries, rather than the Anglican church, that captured the loyalty of the enslaved population. And what emerged from their encounter with this unorthodox branch of Christianity was a group of charismatic black preachers who travelled around, spreading the word of God and the consolations of Christianity. They preached in secluded places or ramshackle “churches,” no more than wooden huts, where the congregation filled the rooms with song. The planters regarded these churches as ill-disciplined, loud and primitive, but put up with them provided they did not openly preach resistance to the slave system. As time passed, this hybrid form of worship began to undermine the influence of the older beliefs like obeah, but could never fully supplant it. So for many years, the slaves went to church and bought their charms and powders at the same time.

  Thus from the earliest days of settlement, the enslaved Africans who found themselves uprooted and transplanted had evolved a hybrid culture, transforming the rituals and tastes of the world they had left behind to fit their new environment. They forged a new language out of the languages that they had once used and the English tongue that had been imposed upon them. They melded old recipes with new ingredients to create an entirely different cuisine. And they integrated traditional instruments with western melodic traditions to create an innovative form of music. These new ways of thinking and being created a way of life which would guide and shape their descendants’ experience in this New World and also shape important aspects of the wider culture that still resonate today.

  Whatever whites felt about such practices, beliefs and behaviours, they were part of the interior landscape of slaves like John Stephen. At Burkes, as at other plantations in the region, this alternative Afro-Caribbean culture had its own worldview and coherence, one that resisted and challenged the hegemony of white European culture. By its very existence it said that Robert Cooper’s world of great white houses and neatly etched sugar fields was not the only way of being, and that there were other ways of thinking that included the possibility of a life free from slavery.

  The reality was that, on almost every level, slaves and their owners saw things across an unbridgeable divide. The imbalance of power between the two groups meant that their understanding and interpretation of each other’s motivations were often vastly different. So, while an owner might see a slave’s suicide as a form of revenge, the slave saw it as an honourable way of escaping unendurable suffering. Abortion and infanticide were not murder but a gesture of mercy, a way of sparing a beloved child from the horrors to come. Running away was also seen through a very different lens. Thus when “Jack, a light-skinned carpenter” absconded, his master assumed he was trying to “pass as a white man.” The planters perceived such escapes as a challenge to their authority and characterized the runaways as outlaws and rebels. But for the slaves, escapes such as Jack’s were not so much political as deeply personal: they often reflected a simple desire to avoid the immediate and specific circumstances of enslavement, and the runaways were seen as daring, inspirational heroes. Whether they were tales of a man absconding to enjoy a weekend with a sweetheart or visit a family member, or a more permanent bid for freedom, their stories travelled from plantation to plantation, were whispered about in local towns and settlements like Oistins and Bridgetown, and were talked about openly and gleefully in the quarters and at places of worship. It did not matter that so few of these tales ended happily, or that many runaways’ efforts were rewarded with painful punishments or even death. Their tales of courage shaped the imagination of the slaves and provided them with the hope of another life that could be attained if they were brave and bold enough.

  This visceral desire to escape a shackled existence was shared by all slaves and united all enslaved communities. Hence a piece of slave lore that recurs across the Americas, from Brazil to Barbados, from Cuba to Maryland: whether it is told in the Spanish-, French- or English-speaking territories, the story is essentially the same. One day in the cane or cotton fields, after a wretched loss or before a brutal punishment, a slave, troubled and tormented, simply rises up and, hovering for a time just out of the reach of his abusers, flies away. It is a piece of mythology that says everything about the enslaved person’s desire for transcendence and sums up all of the slave’s terrible longing and desperation to elude his terrible fate.

  Such differences in perspective between owners and slaves shaped every aspect of life on the plantation, even down to the way the two groups responded to the land. Thus if the manicured driveway that led up to Burkes, as well as the imposing great house itself, embodied Robert Cooper’s position as patriarch, ruler of an orderly, well-managed universe, so the plantation’s anarchic little pathways and ramshackle quarters represented the alternative lives of the slaves. The island as a whole was contested ground. The planters were reassured by the order that farming had imposed upon its original unruliness. Barbados was now dominated by seven hundred or so grand sugar estates that were served by roads easily policed by the militia. But for the slaves the very symmetry and uniformity were a constant reminder of the all-encompassing power of the planter elite and the brutal circumscription of their own lives.

  At night, as Robert Cooper and his family sat on the Burkes veranda, he could look out across his vast estate with an easy sense of achievement. Year after year, he had the satisfaction of seei
ng the working plantation over which he ruled increase his wealth and prestige. For John Stephen and his fellow slaves, gathered around the fire in their quarters, Burkes represented something far more complicated. By the nineteenth century, when John Stephen was growing up, most sugar estates in Barbados had been owned by the same family for a hundred years, so that on a plantation like Burkes, several generations of slaves had been born, raised and died in the same villages. And, in spite of the shifting political landscape, the slaves at Burkes, like most of those on the island, had a fierce attachment to their plantation. Unable to quite believe in the possibility of freedom, they knew they would only leave Burkes if they were sold, which would have been regarded by them as a terrible fate. As a group of Barbadian slaves questioned by one visitor to the island explained: “Here we are born, and here are the graves of our fathers. Can we say to their bones, arise and go with us into a foreign land?”

  So Burkes for them was home, just as it was for the Ashbys. And just like the dwellers in the great house, the slaves could appreciate the beauty of the plantation and of their island. They too enjoyed the sunrises that ushered in the day with such abruptness, and the glorious molten sunsets that signalled its end. They could watch the turquoise sea in all its varying humours, and enjoy the lulling sound of the waves as they crashed against the cliffs. They were accustomed to the ubiquitous noises of plantation life: the songs and groans of the slaves at their toil, the clangs and rumbles of the factory’s machinery, the perpetual song of the wind whistling through the canes. And at night, they too were lulled to sleep by the melody of the Caribbean night: that wondrous chorus of tree frogs, cicadas and other insects. Yet they could never forget that alongside the beauty, there was the ugly reality of their enslavement. Burkes was also a place of humiliating squalor, onerous toil, terrible restriction and unpredictable violence; it was both familiar and threatening, a home and a prison.

  By the second decade of the nineteenth century, when John Stephen grew into manhood, the tensions between these two communities had grown even more acute, as the slaves’ dreams of freedom inched ever closer to becoming reality. The abolitionist movement had profoundly altered the opinions of people across the colonies. For the first time since the inception of Atlantic slavery, the West Indian proprietors had to justify both their ideas about race and their treatment of their charges. To their slaves’ delight, the planters were now on the defensive. When the campaigner William Wilberforce was scheduled to visit a plantation, one absentee planter pleaded with his overseers “not to let a slave be corrected in his presence,” in the hope that Wilberforce would leave the island “possessed with favourable impressions.” Elsewhere, an estate manager noted that the abolitionist movement had “led the slaves to assume an air of self-importance not known or expressed among them in former times.”

  Even though the planters were far away from the machinations of the abolitionists in Britain, they were aware of the progress of their campaign. Friends in the West India lobby reported back from the metropolis, while news of the abolitionists’ latest actions were minutely recorded in the local papers. They were aware that the figure of the West Indian planter was now widely criticized and ridiculed. Cartoonists like James Gillray had earlier satirized them as bloated, red-faced drunkards who tortured their slaves. The islanders felt that they were being disavowed and dismissed by the populace of Great Britain, who were increasingly aligning themselves with the values of compassion and decency that were claimed by the abolitionists. The planters of course passionately rejected the idea that they were somehow a different sort of white person than those in England, but the charge stuck. It was felt particularly acutely in Barbados because its white citizens had long been seen and had portrayed themselves as the empire’s most loyal subjects, as evidenced by the self-description of the island as “Little England,” which gained currency in this period.

  I can have no doubt about the position of my ancestor, Robert Cooper Ashby. In an interview many years later, he admitted that for most of his life he regarded William Wilberforce as “the devil.” So it is almost inevitable that, like many of his contemporaries, Robert Cooper fervently wished that the abolitionists would be eradicated from the face of the earth and things could return to “normal.” No doubt he would have agreed with the Martinican planter Pierre Desalles, who believed the abolitionists’ entire agenda was pernicious: “To make the negro think about all these ideas for improvement is to expose the colonies to the most baneful disorders.” He added that “to touch the internal system designed to regulate the work and discipline of individual plantations is to promote revolt and compromise the livelihood of the whites.” To improve conditions on one plantation but not on another, he continued, “will say to the negroes of the latter, ‘Go and obtain by force what your masters will not give us voluntarily.’ ”

  After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 the disquiet among the slave population only intensified. Their hostility to their masters manifested itself in numerous ways, from insolence and escape to open rebellion. During a House of Assembly debate on 10 December 1810, it was noted that “the abolitionist activities of Mr. Wilberforce” had provoked “the increase of arrogance and vice among the slaves.” This refractory mood prompted the government into serious discussions about the state of the internal defence system and the effects that it produced among the slaves. Robert Haynes, a planter-assemblyman, warned that there was “something brewing up in their minds,” and it was decided to tighten police control on the island.

  The slaves had two options when it came to pursuing their freedom. They could press for further ameliorative measures or they could organize armed revolt. The more moderate choice was quashed in 1811–12 when the Barbadian planters once again rejected requests by the free people of colour for further civil rights. In the face of such intransigence, many slaves felt the only option was to take direct action. This feeling was exacerbated by the Slave Registration bill that had recently been proposed, which was designed to prevent illegal slave trading by keeping track of every slave on each individual plantation. The planters believed that it would diminish the value of their property and destabilize the region. When the bill was passed, John Pinney wrote: “I consider my property reduced in value upwards of 50,000 pounds, and all this by Wilberforce!” The jubilant slaves saw the passing of the bill as a prelude to complete emancipation and became ever more restless and unmanageable. As the historian Hilary Beckles concluded: “Ideologically, the colony was in deepening crisis, and it was within this context of diminishing planter hegemony that slaves organized for their overthrow by violent means.”

  15

  To the attack, grenadier

  Who gets killed, that’s his affair

  Forget your ma,

  Forget your pa,

  To the attack grenadier,

  Who gets killed that’s his affair.

  —HAITIAN REBELS’ MARCHING SONG

  THE TINDERBOX THAT was Barbadian slave society exploded on 14 April 1816, when half the island went up in flames. Curiously, it had been a prosperous year. The Barbadian House of Assembly later commented that it “was remarkable for having yielded the most abundant returns with which Providence had ever rewarded the labours of the Inhabitants of this Island.” This was particularly true of the parish of St. Philip, which was the flashpoint of the revolt, where a plentiful harvest meant that bellies were full. The slaves therefore rebelled not because they were in material distress but because they desired a different social order.

  The rebellion that one army officer evocatively described as “a hell-broth” was led by a slave known as Bussa. Today a statue widely believed to be a model of him is sited on one of the island’s most prominent roundabouts. Positioned like a triumphant boxer, the figure stands cast in bronze, his face turned to the skies, clenched fist raised at right angles to his head, with broken shackles dangling from his wrists.

  In 1816, Bussa was chief ranger on the Bayleys plantation in St. Philip. La
ter to be dubbed “General” by his followers, he was probably somewhere between thirty and forty years old and was an African-born slave. This was significant, since “saltwater” slaves, with their memories of a free life, were traditionally regarded as the most refractory and prone to revolt. It is likely that he was a member of the Bussa nation (hence his nickname), a faction of the powerful Mande people, who had spread over much of West Africa during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as conquerors and traders in gold and kola nuts. Their commercial and political prominence emerged particularly in the context of their dealings with the Portuguese at Elmina, the infamous slave fort. If Bussa was by inclination rebellious, he also had more prosaic reasons to resist his enslavement. The plantation on which he laboured had recently changed hands and its relaxed, liberal owner Joseph Bayley had been replaced by a new manager, Mr. Thomas, a hard man who had a reputation as a “severe disciplinarian.”

  Bussa had been plotting the uprising for over a year, along with a number of co-conspirators, who were also elite slaves. Among them was Jackey, a head driver at Simmons plantation; Johnny the Cooper, who also worked at Bayleys, and a free man of colour called Joseph Franklyn. One of the most radical of the plotters was a woman called Nanny Grigg, who called for armed struggle long before her male counterparts were ready to take that extreme step. As skilled slaves, their privileged positions meant that while they had less material need to rebel, they were the kind of people who found the indignities of enslavement most difficult to bear. As John Vaughan, a manager of the Codrington plantation, acknowledged long before the rebellion: “[It] is those slaves who are our chiefest favourites and such that we put most confidence in that are generally the first and greatest conspirators.”