Only after safeguarding his new concubine and their young baby does Robert Cooper turn his attention to his more established family. He bequeaths to Mary Anne and her children the “remainder or balance of my said plantation,” Burkes. For the first five years the plantation was to be kept intact and the funds, “Crops, Produce and Profits,” were to be devoted primarily towards “the maintenance and support of his youngest children,” Elizabeth Mary Ashby, Arabella Ann Ashby, William Armstrong Ashby, Caroline Kezar Ashby, Alexander Lindsay Ashby and John George Ashby, until they reached the age of twenty-one, with a slightly smaller proportion of the plantation’s yields going to supporting his partner Mary Anne and their eldest children, Robert Henry and Alice Christian. Five years after his death, the property was to be sold and, profits divided and passed on to Mary Anne and her children. In a codicil to the will, he instructs his executors to sell and dispose of his plantation Brittons “for the benefit of the above children.”
It was an extraordinary document. Without ever stating explicitly the nature of his relationship to either of the women currently in his life, or declaring unequivocally that their children were also his, Robert Cooper Ashby nonetheless made clear his priorities and commitments. His decision to make Mary Anne and her eldest son, Robert Henry, his executors is also informative: it is a tacit acknowledgement of her standing as his common-law wife and her eldest son’s status as his most senior heir.
What is omitted from Robert Cooper’s will is also fascinating. The exclusion of his first wife, Mary Ashby, and his son, John Burke Jr., is no surprise since they had both died years before. But numerous members of his extended slave family also go unmentioned. Sukey Ann and her four children, for example, are not mentioned; perhaps he felt that their manumission a few years previously had been gift enough. John Stephen also had no share in the bounty. This was probably because he had never been treated as well as those half-siblings whose mothers Robert Cooper had eventually become attached to. And perhaps Robert Cooper felt that John Stephen’s future was already secured: he was an adult, had a lucrative trade, and was married now with children of his own.
Robert Cooper’s decision to leave his wealth to his slave children was uncommon but not unique. A few years earlier Jacob Hinds, a planter from St. Andrew, had also made a will that left everything to his extended mulatto clan. Jacob Hinds had seven separate family arrangements with black or coloured women living on his plantation that resulted in eighteen children. Where Hinds differed from Robert Cooper is that he explicitly acknowledged these children as his progeny. Unsurprisingly, his will is one of the longest on deposit in the Barbados Archives. Aware of the intense vulnerability of these slave children, Hinds wrote an emotional letter to his executor, begging him to enforce the stipulations of his will. It begins, “The first wish of my heart and request of you is that I commit your friendship to my poor unfortunate distressed children,” and it concludes, “If you have any love or regard for me never neglect them or turn your back on them … for the love of heaven don’t let them be distressed or inconvenienced.”
For both Robert Cooper and Jacob Hinds, the decision to acknowledge their alternative family transgressed the traditional behaviour of the planter class, who had for many years taken care to ensure their wealth remained in the hands of the white ruling caste (as was evident in the furore that erupted when Joshua Steele attempted to leave his estate to his enslaved offspring). Robert Cooper’s will was an unconventional act by an otherwise conventional man, so it is therefore interesting to speculate about what motivated him. Perhaps the years of living openly with Mary Anne and her brood, and his subsequent affection for Elizabeth Brewster and their young son, had changed him. Or perhaps it was about timing. The Barbados that he knew was over, slavery had been abolished and black and brown people were openly working to expand their opportunities. Perhaps in this context, his actions did not feel quite so transgressive after all.
The various fates of Robert Cooper Ashby’s illegitimate children mirrored those of many people of colour emerging from nineteenth-century slavery. Some of them had become free before emancipation and acquired the privileges associated with their freed status, while others had not. Some, encountering the enormity of racial prejudice, would reject their black ancestry; others would continue to claim it. Those children who were embraced within the will were given the opportunity for an education and a share in “the Colonel’s” personal wealth. But they also had other advantages. Mary Anne’s children, who were only one-quarter black, had moved even further away from their African roots towards the white community of the man whose surname they bore. With three white grandparents and one black grandparent, these children were still racially classified as mulattoes, but in reality had greater opportunities than their darker-skinned siblings. Virtually all of them forged marriages with prominent families with either land holdings or merchant businesses. Elizabeth Mary Ashby married Joseph Keeling Valverde, of mixed black and Jewish ancestry, while Arabella Ann Ashby married John Thomas Bentham, the light-skinned son of a prominent doctor and plantation owner.
These astute matrimonial choices may have augured well for the progress of this branch of the family, but the members of this branch still endured the complex realities of a society in which racism stained all social relationships. In appearance they were white, and they enjoyed real privileges because of their “brighter” skin colour, but their mixed-race heritage, which would have been widely known across the island, still connected them to the recently enslaved population.
Their financial situation was also not as secure as their father would have hoped. Robert Cooper’s decision that the property should be sold five years after his death, with the proceeds going to Mary Anne’s eleven children, was undoubtedly born of good motives: he wanted to make sure that they benefited equally. But the result was disastrous economically, since the wealth embodied in Burkes estate was spread perilously thin. It is difficult to create a detailed picture of the estate’s fate after Robert Cooper’s death, but it is clear that his decision to sell and divide the estate caused financial problems. By 1850 the estate was in receivership and a legal case had been lodged against it, with numerous parties making claims. The case was only settled in 1870, after which Burkes was purchased by the Clark family, who owned a number of similar properties. By the end of the nineteenth century, very few of those who were chosen as Robert Cooper’s heirs were prominent in the economics and politics of Christ Church and Oistins.
John Stephen’s story is less glamorous than that of some of Robert Cooper’s children, but it is more typical. Like the majority of enslaved mixed-race offspring, he was neither freed by his father nor bestowed with an inheritance, and he would not find a place among the elite freed coloured community that developed before abolition. The benefits he received from his father were limited to a brown skin and a profitable trade. But the value of the former bequest, one that he shared with all of Robert Cooper’s descendants, should not be underestimated. According to the local historian Robert Morris, “They all carried the badge of colour, a plantation source of origin, and the link to a prominent father, all possible sources of success in the society of the day.” John Stephen’s marriage would produce six children, and though his will has never been found, that of his wife, Mary Christian, which was proved on 13 January 1891, demonstrated that their union had generated enough wealth to leave substantial legacies for her children, the generation for whom real change finally took place.
I am the descendant of John Stephen and Mary Christian’s third child, Benjamin Ashby, who was part of the first generation of black Ashbys to be born free. It was likely that Benjamin received at least an elementary education, since schools that admitted black and brown children were being pioneered around this time. In his teens Benjamin was apprenticed to a shoemaker in the area of Providence. When the time came for marriage he would, like his father, become engaged to a woman who was the mixed-race descendant of a powerful white family. Her name was
Elizabeth Armstrong and their wedding took place in 1862. Benjamin and his new wife then settled in Lodge Road in Oistins, where he became a shopkeeper.
Even before emancipation, the mixed-race population had displayed a strong pull towards urban centres, and now people like Benjamin Ashby started to abandon the plantations and settle in towns like Bridgetown, Speightstown and Oistins to restart their lives. Once there, they tended to work as artisans, tradesmen and merchants, hoteliers and hostel keepers—all professions that allowed them to generate wealth outside the purview of the all-powerful plantocracy. Perhaps because of family influence, Benjamin was awarded the contract to supply Foundation School with groceries and its boarders with shoes. He also forged strong ties with the Vestry, which had absorbed so much of his grandfather’s time.
The considerable wealth he amassed is revealed by his wife’s will and later his own. Elizabeth Armstrong Ashby’s will, entered in 1910, revealed that she owned land in her own right which she left to her children. The relatives mentioned as beneficiaries included her husband, Benjamin, her son Benjamin Jr., and other children: John Clifford Ashby, Jeanette Armstrong Ashby, Helena and Eloise Ashby. Witnesses to the will were George Elphinstone Deane and Charles Frederick Ashby. By the time Benjamin himself died in 1925, he was well known in Oistins as a prominent village shopkeeper with easy access to the Vestry, and the owner of significant properties in Lodge Road and Maxwell. His heirs included his sons Benjamin Jr., Walter Fitz-Thomas, Charles Frederick, Edward Albert and Reginald Thomas Ashby.
As well as financial security, Benjamin had ensured that his sons received a proper education at a time when few could afford to do so, and some attended Foundation School, which their planter ancestor had been so influential in creating. All would go on to marry into members of the Barbados middle class. Charles Frederick wed Henrietta Nurse, the daughter of a schoolteacher, while Benjamin Jr. married Hester Frances Gall of a landowning family of Shot Hall. My great-grandfather Edward Albert married Edith Barnes, the child of a white family. Between the 1920s and the abolition of the Vestry system in the 1950s, the Ashby name was continually represented on this powerful local government body.
The fate of this generation of Ashbys and those who followed reflects the way that life evolved for the entire caste of coloured families descended from planter class origins. Indeed, as one local historian has noted:
One of the most important legacies of the plantation culture was the creation of a class of leaders poised between the Caucasians who dominated all aspects of the society and the slaves, later the teeming masses of the population. This intermediate group of free coloureds, or coloureds, not always free, mainly derived from the relationship between a rich white male, and a coloured or black woman with whom he established sexual relationships.
A similar caste emerged across much of the Atlantic slave world. In the United States, for example, the white patriarchs of these coloured clans included not just a legion of anonymous planters but also men as famous as the eighteenth-century president, Thomas Jefferson. Their biracial descendants would take up the same social place in their cultures as John Stephen and his contemporaries did in the sugar islands. This relatively privileged group enjoyed the benefit of financial legacies and access to education that eventually enabled them to become leaders in black society, what the writer Edward Ball has called “the home class of ministers, politicians and business people.”
Even after his death, Robert Cooper Ashby cast a long shadow. His memory lingers to this day, and his descendants still make reference to the exploits of “the Colonel” and pass his possessions from generation to generation in their wills. Thanks to his canny exploitation of sugar and slaves, he provided genuine financial and educational advantages to many of his mixed-race progeny; and he bequeathed to them not just their lighter skin but social confidence. The Ashby family therefore went into the future with certain distinct advantages that would shelter them somewhat from the vicissitudes of life in post-emancipation Barbados and the momentous challenges they would encounter in the twentieth century.
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We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be.
—MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT
BY THE TIME my grandfather Edward Everton Ashby was born in 1899, Barbados had become a place to leave. The heyday of cane sugar had passed, eclipsed in popularity by the highly subsidized sugar beet produced in Europe. And Barbados, “the most esteemed and ancient of the British colonies,” was in a desperate state. Across the island, living standards had deteriorated: wages had plummeted and jobs had disappeared. Food shortages meant that prices rose, malnourishment was pervasive and infant mortality soared. The situation was only exacerbated by a hurricane in 1898 that destroyed the homes of thousands of workers and prompted outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery and later smallpox. By 1902, Barbados seemed on the point of economic and social collapse and its citizens were departing in droves, eager to try their luck elsewhere.
Migration was an instinctive solution for the population of a region where restlessness and movement had been a way of life for centuries. Most of these migrants were desperate to escape what the historian Sidney Mintz described as the “iron grip” of sugar, and the economic and social limitations it had created in their society. They left in the first instance largely for other Caribbean colonies like Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana, which were bigger and offered more opportunities. Hopefuls would often take on short contracts and return home with their pockets heavy. After 1880, the epic construction project that was the Panama Canal attracted tens of thousands of Barbadians and Jamaicans whose livelihood had been affected by the dip in sugar prices. Many of these workers, who moved backwards and forwards between Panama and their home territories, eventually returned to the sugar islands, boosting the economies there with their earnings. But a goodly number moved towards the land of opportunity: America. These “dusky destiny seekers,” whose number peaked at the end of the 1910s and the early 1920s, settled primarily in Harlem and Brooklyn and soon carved out prominent roles for themselves in the intellectual, political and economic leadership of the communities they established there.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, virtually every black family in the Caribbean had lost someone to the dream of migration: field workers who had been turned off the land; tradesmen who fantasized about expanding their horizons; middle-class people frustrated by the lack of change; all of them determined to find a way out of a system that was as unyielding as cement. Some left on a whim, others planned meticulously; some left fearfully, others in a fever of optimism. So many people were leaving that locals referred to it as “the Exodus.”
In 1923, the Barbados Weekly Herald wrote:
We are sensitive in Barbados over this question of immigration. It is perhaps regrettable that with the West Indies and British Guiana full of undeveloped resources it should be necessary for nationals to seek employment elsewhere. But people must eat … Who is to blame the ambitious, near destitute, who goes forth to find what he is not likely to find at home? We yield to no one in our understanding and appreciation of the excellencies of the British flag but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that in the present state of affairs emigration to America is indispensably necessary to the West Indies.
My grandfather Edward Everton, known as “Vere,” was amongst this group of eager émigrés. Born in 1899, he was the second son of Edward Albert Ashby and his wife, Edith Barnes, a white woman (or “near white,” since most of the people in the Caribbean who identify as Caucasian are really of mixed-race origin). Their rather stormy marriage nonetheless managed to produce four children: my grandfather, my great-aunt Una, my great-aunt Reba, who migrated early to America and lost touch with the family, and my great-uncle Ross, a dashing, handsome man, who became a merchant marine and was killed during the Second World War.
Vere’s father, Edward Albert, had, like other descendants of Robert Cooper, benefited from the social and financial advantages a
ssociated with his background. Known as “the Colonel” like his illustrious ancestor, he owned a number of shops as well as several valuable properties in the Oistins area. Edward Albert’s brothers, Reginald and Charles Frederick, had also taken advantage of their good fortune and were successful merchants in Bridgetown. Indeed the latter’s various emporiums on Swan Street, which sold everything from jewellery to hardware and bicycles, marked him out as one of the pioneering coloured merchants of the era, opening the doors for other members of his caste to succeed as entrepreneurs. The Ashby family would also be associated with the founding of the Barbados Progressive Bank, which had ambitions to break the stranglehold that whites held on the business community.
At the age of twenty-five my grandfather Vere Ashby married Muriel Haynes Skinner, who was six years his junior. For him it was love at first sight. He was besotted, he claimed, as soon as he saw her “plump yellow thighs” ascending a flight of stairs. She was probably quite impressed with him, too. As a youth my grandfather was a good-looking, rather foppish young man, who sported immaculately tailored clothes and had round, soulful, puppy-dog eyes. But marriages among the mixed-race middle classes of this era were more than a romantic liaison. A certain amount of social engineering was encouraged. The status of families like the Ashbys was still precarious. The “wrong marriage” to someone darker or poorer could easily precipitate a slide back into that world of powerlessness and discrimination to which the majority of those of African descent were consigned. But marriage to a person of equal or lighter skin colour and some material worth would maintain or even boost the privileges of the next generation. It was unsurprising, therefore, that his bride-to-be also came from a successful mixed-race family; and that her father was also a merchant, who had a number of shops in Speightstown on the west coast of the island.
Sugar in the Blood Page 31