by Alec Waugh
Edwards found the Negroes from Angola and the Congo better fitted for domestic service than for field labour. They could be trained into excellent mechanics and were less dishonest than other Africans.
He noted that there was a great fellowship between fellow countrymen who travelled in the same ship. The term ‘shipmate’ had a special significance. Their amatory relations were, he said, ‘temporary connections which they form without ceremony and dissolve without reluctance. When age begins to mitigate the ardour and lessen the fickleness of youth, many of them form attachments which, strengthened by habit and endeared by the consciousness of mutual interdependence, produce a union for life. It is not uncommon to behold a venerable couple of this stamp who, tottering under the load of years, contribute to each other’s comfort with a cheerful assiduity which is at once amiable and affecting. The aged are well looked after on a plantation.’
They were, he said, very loquacious, as fond of delivering set speeches as professional orators, and it required a considerable share of patience to hear them to the end. Yet they could be concise. Once a slave went to sleep while awaiting his master’s writing of a letter. It was hard to rouse him. The servant shouted to him, ‘You no hear Massa call you?’ He replied, ‘Sleep hab no master.’
Every attempt was made to keep groups of friends separate. It was easier to break a slave’s links with the past when he and his fellows in the cane-fields did not have a common tongue, when they could learn the white man’s language and start a new life in the white and Christian tradition. In consequence, most of the islands, particularly the French islands, have built up a patois consisting of European words mingled with African. No Englishman listening today to four longshore Barbadians chattering together would be able to understand what they were saying, nor could a Frenchman understand the gossip of Martinique fishermen. One of the jobs of the planter was to see that the slaves forgot as soon as was possible that they were African.
The handbooks which were given to young planters at the end of the eighteenth century stress the differences between the various tribes in character and appearance; in view of this and the fact that each colonizing power had its own factories along the Guinea coast and that the navigation acts of each country forbade its colonies to trade with ships of another country, one would have imagined that there would be marked differences between the native populations of the various islands, that a Martinique man would be as different from a Jamaican as a Chinese man from a Japanese. But this is not the case. It is easier for an Englishman to recognize differences between his own compatriots than between one kind of Frenchman and another, and it is not difficult for an Englishman to detect the difference in accent between a Barbadian, a Jamaican and a Trinidadian; but the difference would seem to be the result of climate and of the kinds of Europeans with which the original slaves had been brought in contact. Barbados has never been colonized by any except Britons. There were Spaniards in Jamaica for 150 years before Cromwell captured it; Trinidad was Spanish for three hundred years. Trinidad had been neglected by the Spaniards and was underpopulated. The slave trade was abolished in the year that the British captured it, so that it was impossible to develop its resources with African labour. The British therefore introduced ‘indented labour’ from India. Intermarriage between Spanish, Indian, African and British stock has given the Trinidadian a special air. The great variety of feature between the completely Negroid inhabitants of the various islands can be, however, explained by the different parts of Africa, the different tribes, from which their ancestors had come.
The women of Martinique have always been famous for their elegance, and it has been suggested that their beauty is due to the fact that the plantations of Martinique were populated by Africans from a special area, but there is no proof of this. The difference between one island and another is not the outcome of the different tribes from which they have been populated, but from the differences in the masters, the national characters of their masters, and the variety of masters to whom they were subjected. For, with the exception of Barbados, every island changed hands at least once during the two centuries of conflict that lay between Elizabeth’s death and the battle of Waterloo; the present condition of the islands has indeed largely been determined by what happened to them during the Napoleonic Wars, when a number of islands, in particular Hispaniola, Guadeloupe, St Lucia and Grenada, were exposed to the full force of revolutionary ardour.
Every attempt was made to break down the slaves’ links with Africa, and in time the slaves learned their masters’ language. They accepted the profession of their masters’ faith, but deep in their hearts they cherished the dark gods of Africa. Their loyalty to their witch doctors never weakened ; it is indeed still active, and no one who has lived in the islands has questioned the validity of their magic.
Labat includes in the records of his travels three examples of what is known generally as Obeah; firstly there is the instance of a voyage by sea that was so delayed and hindered that the ship appeared to be nailed to the sea, although the winds were favourable. The captain and his officers were desperate; they could find no remedy because they did not know the cause. There was soon a shortage of food and water; the Negroes began to die, and in order to save the survivors a number were thrown into the sea. Some of the sufferers as they were dying complained that there was a sorceress on board who had threatened to eat their hearts, causing them to perish with great pain. The captain ordered an autopsy and indeed discovered that their hearts and livers were as dry and empty as punctured balloons.
The captain therefore had the accused woman roped to a cannon and fiercely flogged in the hope of extracting a confession, but she did not appear to feel the blows. The ship’s surgeon, feeling that the intendant was not striking hard enough, took a rope himself and belaboured her with all his might. This flogging had no more effect than the previous one; the woman assured him that she had felt no pain whatsoever, but that since the surgeon had wished to hurt her, which he had no right to do, she would make him repent of his brutality and announced that she would eat his heart. Two days later the surgeon died in great agony; his heart was found to be as dry as a sheet of parchment.
The captain was desperate; he could have had the woman strangled or flung into the sea, but he was afraid that she might have accomplices who would take their revenge on him and on his crew. So he decided to be gentle with her and promised her anything she wanted if she would cease these practices. A bargain was struck and it was agreed that if she and three of her friends were put ashore, the ship could continue on its way. As her signature upon the document she offered him a sample of her powers. She asked the captain if he had any fruit or anything else that it would be pleasurable for her to eat. Yes, he said, he had some water melons. ‘Show them to me,’ she said. They were brought on deck. ‘I will not touch them,’ she said. ‘I will not go near them, but rest assured that within twenty-four hours I shall have eaten them.’ He accepted the bet and locked the melons in a chest, putting the key in his own pocket because he could not trust the crew.
Next morning she asked him where the melons were; he brought the chest on deck and opened it. To his delight he saw that the melons were whole, but his delight was brief. When he picked up a melon to show it to her, it collapsed between his hands; only the skin remained. She had won her bet. He returned to land to water and victual the ship. He set her and her three friends ashore and the ship’ was able to continue its voyage without hindrance.
Père Labat was the witness of two other examples of sorcery. One of the monks in Guadeloupe had a nine-year-old Negro boy who had not yet been baptized. One day this boy heard the monks complaining of a lack of rain. He asked if they would like a heavy downfall or a light shower. He would procure for them whichever they preferred. Their curiosity overcoming their sense of what was right, they asked for a light shower for their garden. The boy then set out on the ground three oranges. He knelt before each orange with a reverence which surprised the monks.
He then took three branches from an orange tree and, having bowed before them, placed them on the oranges. Once again he performed his genuflections, speaking with great reverence some words which the monks could not understand. He then stood up, one of the orange twigs in his hand, and gazed at the horizon in all directions, till at last he saw, far away but very clear, a minute cloud. He stretched the twig toward it and immediately a light rain began to fall. The shower lasted an hour and fell only on the garden. The boy then buried the oranges and branches. He said he had been taught how to do this by two fellow slaves during’the middle passage’.
The other story is macabre. A Negress had been afflicted for some time by an illness that no doctor could cure. Labat, convinced that she was being poisoned, brought her back to his house and gave instructions that she was not to be given any food that had not been prepared by the doctor himself.
One night Labat learned that a Negro who practised medicine was in her hut. He went down and looked through the latticework of the walls. The sick woman was stretched on a mat. A clay monkey was on a chair; the quack doctor knelt before it in prayer. He then put some powder in a calabash, lit it, and incense rose before the idol. After numerous genuflections, he demanded of the idol whether or not the invalid would survive. Labat heard the question, but not the answer. The invalid, however, appeared to do so, because she and the two or three other slaves who were with her began to shout and wail. Labat pushed open the door; he was accompanied by his overseer and several witnesses. He ordered them to seize the witch doctor and those of the spectators who did not work on his estate. He picked up the monkey, the incense and the calabash, and asked the invalid why she was crying. She replied that the devil had spoken out of the mouth of the clay monkey, telling her that she would die in four days’ time. The spectators confirmed this.
Angrily Labat insisted that the witch doctor was a ventriloquist who could disguise and throw his voice. ‘If the devil had really been here,’ he cried, ‘would he not have warned you that I was outside the door?’ He had the the witch doctor tied up and proceeded to thrash him personally, three hundred strokes from his shoulders to his knees. The witch doctor screamed like a man who was lost to hope. The spectators begged for mercy for him, but Labat told them that sorcerers could not feel pain and that he was only crying out of mockery. He then put the monkey on a chair in front of the sorcerer. ‘If he is the devil,’ said Labat, ‘tell him to rescue you from my hands.’
The sorcerer did nothing, so Labat went on beating him. The spectators were terrified; they were convinced that the sorcerer would kill Père Labat. To assure them that he feared neither witch doctor nor devil, the priest broke the idol and the calabash and had the whole paraphernalia set alight and the ashes scattered in the river. He then ordered that a mixture of pepper and small lemons should be rubbed into the Negro’s back. This would cause him acute pain, but it would prevent gangrene from setting up in the sores. He sent the sorcerer back to his own plantation with a report on what had happened. The owner thanked Labat for having been at so many pains and thrashed the Negro. Labat was confident that he had set a good example to the slaves, but to his annoyance the invalid did die on the fourth day.
No one who has lived in the islands has ever questioned the power of the witch doctors. To this day the planter has realized that he must accommodate himself to these dark mysteries.
In addition to Obeah, the slaves brought with them a form of snake worship that was known as voodoo. This was a religion, and the voodoo man stood as high socially above the Obeah man as a priest does above a doctor, Voodoo ceremonies were ruthlessly repressed on the plantations, but they survived into the nineteenth century. In Haiti they are practised still.
Père Labat arrived in the islands in 1694, and his memoirs are the most valuable document we possess about the early colonial days. He was a warm-hearted man, intelligent and educated, attached to the pleasures of the table, tolerant, accepting the status quo, in the certain knowledge that in paradise a peace not of this earth awaited the unfortunate in this. When he arrived at Martinique a crowd of Negroes rowed out to welcome him. ‘Many,’ he wrote, ‘bore the marks of stripes upon their backs. This excited the pity of those among us who were not accustomed to seeing this sort of thing.’
Père Labat, during the twelve years that he spent in the islands, visited not only the French islands but Barbados and Jamaica. He accepted what he saw and he approved of what he saw. It was a stage in the progress of mankind. From these islands wealth would come to France. The owner of a plantation was a useful citizen and, viewed by the standards of the day, the life to which the slaves were introduced was little harder than that which the peasants of Ireland and Scotland were enduring across the water, while the climate was infinitely preferable.
The slave quarters were set a quarter of a mile from the main mill, and downwind for the masters comfort. The cabins were arranged in regularly spaced rows round a large square garden. They were simple, palm-thatched erections, made of handposts driven deep into the ground and interlaced with plaster and with wattles. They were a man’s length long, and high enough to allow a tall man to walk erect. That was the cabin for a couple living together in what passed for marriage. The men outnumbered the women by two to one; no woman lived alone. A connubial couple would have little furniture. Their bedstead was a platform of boards; the bed was a mat covered with a blanket. They had a table and a stool or two, with such pots and pans as their simple cookery demanded. There was wood in plenty for the fire within doors at night without which no Negro could sleep at peace.
Probably through the village would run a stream clustered with fruit trees, the plantain, the avocado pear, the orange. It looked pretty and picturesque.
Life followed a simple enough routine. Shortly before sunrise there would be the blowing of a conch shell. At the roll call the slaves would gather with their bills and breakfasts. While the men and the stronger of the women worked in the fields, the cooks would prepare the breakfast. It would be a savoury but strange-looking hash composed of plantains, yams, eddoes, calalu, okra, seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper. On chill and foggy mornings there would usually be a number of absentees. During the three quarters of an hour’s interval for breakfast, the backs of the delinquents would be basted by the driver’s whip. At noon there would be another interval for food. Many, preferring to eat their main meal at night, lay out in the shade during the two hours of heavy heat, and slept.
It was in the afternoon that the most strenuous work was done. Refreshed with rest and food, their muscles loosened by the sun, the slaves would work almost heartily among the canes, with the sound of singing as frequent as the crack of the driver’s whip.
They accepted the blows that fell on them as they accepted the other details of their life. Torture held no mysteries for them. In Africa they had seen the slaughtering of their fellows; the yelling sacrifice of the virgin; they had eaten in their religious feasts the flesh of the young child. They expected to be beaten when they arrived late at roll call, when they were lazy in the fields, when they made blunders in their work. And should they be aggressive and unruly, should they be rebellious toward their employers, worse still, should they escape into the hills, they expected to receive heavy punishment.
And indeed heavy punishments were served out to them, brutal and licentious punishments, by overseers who had no personal interest in the plantation’s welfare, to whom a slave’s health was not his capital; by planters bored, cruel, dissipated, their nerves frayed by heat and fever, who had no better employment for their imagination than the devising of refined tortures for refractory slaves. There was the driver’s whip and the weight of chains; chains cunningly set in an iron collar round the neck from which a short chain to the ankle held the foot into the small of the back, so that the slave could only hobble, with his chained leg numb and agonized. There was the iron cage studded with spikes that fitted close to neck and foot, so that the pain in one limb could be relieved only by s
hifting it to the other. There were those and there were other tortures. There was the burying of the slave up to the neck in earth, the covering of the head and face with sugar, so that the flies and mosquitoes would slowly sting him to a frenzy. There was the coating of the naked slave with sugar and the pouring over him of ladle after ladle of living ants.
Sullenly but patiently the slaves bore these punishments. There were times when the nostalgia for Africa grew intolerable. Then in groups or alone they would go apart and hang themselves, believing that when they were dead the dark gods of Africa would carry their bodies back to the high green jungles. There were times when their hatred for their masters grew so great that in order to do them damage they would kill themselves, knowing that their death would be a loss of money. They sought death in the most casual and sometimes the most ingenious manners, contriving at times to throttle themselves with their own tongues while their masters were in the act of thrashing them. They learned how to acquire dropsy by eating earth. Occasionally they revolted, setting upon one of their overseers and tearing him to pieces, indifferent to the punishment that they knew awaited them, provided they could be avenged upon a particular tyrant. The reprisals taken on such an insurrection would be pitiless. A favourite punishment was to hang one of them in a cage and leave him to die of rage and hunger. This was called ‘putting a man out to dry’.
But for the most part they endured their subjection patiently. Freedom was a foreign country to them. They had their amusements. There were Sundays when, from all parts of the country, in their finest clothes, they would go down to the market, laden with fruits and vegetables and poultry, to barter their provisions for salted beef and pork and the bright cotton and ornaments with which they loved to deck themselves.
It was to Sunday that, during the hard hours of labour in the canefields, they would count the hours. For many that day would be simply so many hours of rest, when men and women would sit silent before their doors, the men smoking their pipes, the women catching and subsequently eating the lice off their children’s heads. But for the younger ones Sunday was a day of life and laughter, when they could walk through the bright streets of the town, gazing with envying wonderment at the gaudy half-castes with their gay madras handkerchiefs knotted in their hair; their fine linen blouses, low-cut and trimmed with lace upon their bosoms, with flowers fastened at the breast, their necks hung with coral necklaces, and from the ears heavy gold earrings hanging. Back in the village, their eyes tired with the new bright sights, they would dance in the cool evening.