In early 1764, Thistlewood’s nephew John came out to Jamaica. The nephew kept his own diary, reporting on 25 February 1764 after a welcoming reception from his uncle: ‘Things seemed odd, but yet very pleasant.’ John Thistlewood wasted no time in partaking of the slave women at Egypt, in particular Little Mimber, who had previously been a favourite of both his uncle and John Cope, but was now the wife of Johnnie, the driver on the Egypt estate and therefore a highly valued and important slave. Johnnie complained vociferously to Thomas Thistlewood, who took his side, chastising his nephew and punishing the woman. But John Thistlewood went ahead and slept with Little Mimber anyway.
Shortly afterwards, he died while out fishing. His drowned body – ‘how strangely he looked’, his uncle noted – was found by one of the white drivers. The slaves celebrated ‘with load Huzzas’, Thistlewood wrote, ‘for joy that my kinsman is dead, I imagine. Strange impudence.’
Sexual encounters between white masters and black slaves were, in the main, about domination, violence and power. Ironically, though, while reaffirming the degraded state of slave women, they often at the same time went some way towards undermining the presumptions under which slavery operated. Most white men settled on a favourite black woman, and although they were obviously wildly unequal relationships, they were nonetheless intimate in a way that softened and disturbed racial boundaries; and their mixed-race progeny, of course, were a highly visible affront to the racial certainties that were so important to the institution of slavery in the Americas.
Indeed, Thistlewood’s diary gives us a picture of slavery that is much more subtle and nuanced than the popular perception. For all his brutality, Thistlewood often broke the laws governing management of slaves: he gave them alcohol and firearms, allowed them, if in his good books, to travel off the plantation to visit friends or relations or to sell produce at the Sunday markets. Thistlewood’s slaves were not just his livelihood, but his life: he existed intimately among them, and noted every coupling, fight, theft or illness. They used him to settle disputes among themselves, and he, in turn, was forced, at times like Tacky’s Revolt, to trust them with his life. While still fundamentally conflicted, slave and master also co-operated when their interests coincided, for example when faced with a shortage of provisions or an outside threat. In the same way, the sexual relations depicted in the diary show that the intimacy of man and woman could challenge the most fundamental presumptions of slavery.
William Crookshanks was Thistlewood’s subordinate at Egypt in 1754. Within a month of arrival he had contracted his first bout of venereal disease, but soon he was drawn to one slave, Myrtilla, who belonged to Elizabeth Mould, the coloured mistress of the recently deceased William Dorrill. By February the next year, Myrtilla was heavily pregnant and dangerously sick. Crookshanks was distraught. ‘Mirtilla is very ill, it is thought going to miscarry’, wrote Thistlewood. ‘William cries sadly, the more fool he, as it is probably for Salt River Quaw’, he added.
Myrtilla lost the baby, but not the affections of Crookshanks, who persuaded her owner to rent her to him for £20 a year. Crookshanks still made her work, but made a loss of about £5. Then, after 12 months, with Myrtilla pregnant again, Mould demanded her back. When she was returned, she was punished by having her head put in a yoke. Learning of this, Crookshanks exploded: according to Thistlewood, he ‘abused Mr and Mrs Mould in an extraordinary manner, at their own house’. Afterwards, perhaps realising that he had overstepped the mark by implicitly questioning the ‘master’s’ right to ownership, he became ‘crazed [and] went down [on] his knees & begged their pardons’.
Thistlewood, as well as continuing to rape his slaves at will, also had favourites, the first, Marina, in the year of his arrival in Jamaica. Marina was lavished with gifts – sugar, rum, clothes and food. After her, he transferred his affections, and presents, to Jenny, but this caused problems, as Jenny had little status among the other slaves, who resented the airs and graces she assumed once installed as the master’s favourite concubine. Then Thistlewood made a happier match, to a woman like him in her early thirties, who was already an important matriarchal figure amongst the enslaved community. Her name was Phibbah.
Phibbah was the senior house slave in charge of the kitchen at Egypt plantation when Thistlewood started work there in 1751. She was owned by William Dorrill, who bequeathed her to Elizabeth Mould, who in turn left her to Molly Dorrill, the long-suffering wife of John Cope (Molly may well have been Elizabeth’s daughter). Phibbah had a daughter, Coobah. At the beginning of 1752, Thistlewood had Phibbah flogged for a minor infraction, and after Congo Sam’s attempt on his life, he suspected her of complicity in the attack. But at the end of the following year he took her to bed, and she became his ‘wife’, supplanting Jenny, in February 1754. Thistlewood did not stop his predatory philandering with the other slave women, but Phibbah shared his bed more than all the others put together (Phibbah herself was sometimes suspected of sleeping with others as well). In their first year, they had sex 234 times, and continued a vigorous sex life thereafter. The relationship lasted for the rest of Thistlewood’s life – more than 30 years.
Phibbah had managed to acquire cash and property even before she met Thistlewood, selling food and animals in the informal trading networks, and through her skills as a seamstress and baker; she would in time save enough money to buy the freedom of her sister, Jenny, who lived on a neighbouring plantation. Thistlewood looked after her money, and helped buy cloth, and she even lent him quite a substantial sum early in his career. They nursed each other when either one was sick.
In 1757, Thistlewood fell out with the odious John Cope, mainly over unpaid wages, and in late June took up a job as overseer of an estate a few miles north of Egypt called Kendal. Separation from Phibbah seems to have pained them both. ‘Phibbah grieves very much’, Thistlewood wrote of her receiving the news of his move. For his part, ‘I could not sleep, but vastly uneasy.’ He ‘begged hard of Mrs Cope to sell or hire Phibbah to me, but she would not’. On their parting, he gave Phibbah money, cloth and soap, and she gave him a gold ring ‘to keep for her sake’. Installed at Kendal, Thistlewood noted he was ‘mighty lonesome’.
Phibbah made sure she was not forgotten, sending numerous gifts – of biscuits, cheese, fish – usually carried to Thistlewood by his slave Lincoln. She also made regular trips, staying overnight at weekends. After one such visit in early July, Thistlewood wrote in his diary, ‘I wish they would sell her to me … Tonight very lonely and melancholy again. No person sleep in the house but myself, and Phibbah’s being gone this morning is fresh in my mind.’ Later in the month, he heard that she was ill, which prompted Thistlewood’s only comment on slavery, and a strikingly rare expression of sympathy and humanity: ‘for which I am really very sorry. Poor girl, I pity her, she is in miserable slavery.’
Phibbah, acting as a go-between for Thistlewood and Cope, was instrumental in getting their disagreement resolved and Thistlewood returned to Egypt after just under a year at Kendal. Here he remained a further 10 years or so, with Phibbah as his ‘wife’ throughout. When in 1767 he moved with his slaves to his own ‘Pen’ called Breadnut Island, Phibbah, now probably in her forties, went with him; the Copes had at last agreed to rent her to Thistlewood for £18 a year.
Naturally, her close relationship with Thistlewood gave Phibbah great advantages among the enslaved community. On the basic level, she was not short of food and escaped the lash. Apart from noting a ‘correction’ he gave her early in their relationship, probably connected to some infidelity on her part, there is no other violence against her recorded in Thistle-wood’s diaries. (That said, many of the other owner–slave relationships that are mentioned seem to have been violent, so this may have been a particular, rather than general case.)
Phibbah’s daughter Coobah also benefited from the arrangement. Thistlewood took to treating her almost as his own, giving her presents and reasonably well-paid work. In 1758, against his usual practice, he intervened to stop th
e rape of Coobah (probably still a child) by a white bookkeeper, who ‘Attempted to Ravish her’ in the boiler house, having ‘Stopp’d a handkerchief into her mouth’.
Phibbah retained the status she had achieved as a house slave, and, like most ‘wives’, was spared the gruelling and often fatal labour in the cane-fields. Indeed, she had time to perform paid work for herself, and in partnership with Thistlewood. By 1761, Thistlewood held nearly £70 for her, the equivalent of two years’ wages for a white underling. Like many slave mistresses, such as Codrington’s Maudlin Morange, Phibbah was freed by a clause in Thistlewood’s will (so long as she did not cost more than £80), and given £100 to buy land and build a house.
But to a degree, Phibbah had already ‘transcended’ her state of ‘miserable slavery’, particularly after being rented by Thistlewood from the Copes. She was friends with free people, including whites, exchanging gifts all over the local area. When she was ill in 1760, ‘with a bad looseness’, Mrs Cope sent flour, wine and cinnamon. On one occasion in 1779, she even entertained the white wives of two local grandees to tea ‘under ye guinep trees in ye garden at Breadout blood Pen’. Most strikingly, perhaps, she even owned slaves herself. In 1765 she was given Bess, an 11-year-old girl, heavily scarred from yaws, as a present from Sarah Bennett, a free coloured woman, although legally Phibbah could not possess slaves. Bess subsequently had a child, Sam, who thus also belonged to Phibbah. Phibbah on occasion punished other slaves. She had effective jurisdiction in the kitchen, and when a slave named Sally was caught stealing there, Phibbah had her tied up outside, ‘naked for the mosquitoes to bite here tonight’.
Thus the role of black mistresses, particularly those like Phibbah who were resourceful and accomplished, blurred the rigid distinctions of race and slavery. Most remarkably perhaps, Phibbah retained the affection and respect of the rest of Thistlewood’s slave community, despite her ‘halfway’ position.
In addition, almost all the slave women had direct experience of how it was impossible to reject the attentions of Thistlewood. Most would also have accepted the reality that using their bodies was pretty much the only way they would achieve any sort of agency, and in some circumstances even freedom. A white visitor to Barbados during the late eighteenth century noted at length the availability of young black prostitutes in the bars and hotels of Bridgetown. He added, ‘this offers the only hope they have of procuring a sum of money, wherewith to purchase their freedom; and the resource among them is so common, that neither shame nor disgrace attaches to it; but, on the contrary, she who is most sought, becomes an object of envy, and is proud of the distinction shewn her’.
Other slaves found that having Phibbah in a ‘halfway’ position, between them and the master, was to their interest. Phibbah no doubt kept Thistle-wood informed of the ins and outs of the slave dwellings. But she also interceded with him on the side of the slaves.49 On at least three occasions, Thistlewood actually reprimanded her for pushing too far on behalf of the field slaves, which he considered outside her jurisdiction. Nonetheless, the regime notably softened. Writers on Thistlewood all agree that Phibbah ‘civilised’ him. A major incentive for slave women to become ‘wives’ of whites was to do with their children. The child of a slave was automatically a slave him- or herself, and thus could be sold to other distant plantations or even off the island entirely. Hans Sloane, who was in Jamaica 70 years earlier, advised against this, as it often led to the suicide of the parents – but the practice was nonetheless widespread. This outcome was much less likely for mulatto children, who often enjoyed other substantial benefits.
After a difficult pregnancy, Thistlewood and Phibbah had a child, John, in 1760. When born, Thistlewood’s child belonged to another white – Phibbah’s mistress, Molly Cope. After a struggle, Thistlewood bought his son’s freedom when the boy was two years old. From the age of five he was educated at the local school. Thistlewood added children’s books such as ‘History of Jack the Giant Killer in 2 parts’ to his regular orders from London. As a teen, John was apprenticed to a carpenter. Thistlewood reported regular battles with his son: he was caught lying; he was indolent. But Phibbah adored him, and according to Thistlewood, spoilt him rotten.
Had John survived, he would have inherited his father’s estate, as well as the not insubstantial property amassed by his mother. He would then have gone on to ‘become a member of Jamaica’s brown elite’. But it was not to be.
In August 1780, John was spending a lot of time at a neighbouring plantation where he had become friendly with a slave girl, Mimber. On 1 September, Thistlewood received word that his son was ‘very ill’. He was too sick to return home, so Phibbah, on foot, went to nurse him. While she was away, Thistlewood had Sally in his bed.
Phibbah got her son as far as Egypt, whence Thistlewood rode from Breadnut Island Pen to see him. The next day John was brought home, ‘very weak indeed & not in his right senses’. A doctor summoned from a nearby estate pronounced him in very great danger, recommending doses of bark and rhubarb to curb his fever. Another doctor arrived ‘much in liquor’ and ‘laid blisters inside each thigh; but he continued light headed’. Two days later, ‘burning with the fever’, he died. Phibbah was devastated, ‘almost out of her senses’. Thistlewood, in his grief, made wild accusations that his son had been poisoned, but the doctors confirmed the cause of death as ‘putrid fever’.
John was buried on the day of his death, Thursday 7 September 1780, ‘in the old garden, between the pimento tree and the bee houses’. Gathered at his graveside was an extraordinary cross-section of Jamaican society: planter friends of Thistlewood, free fellow-apprentice friends of John, enslaved friends of his mother – the entire radical diversity through which, had he survived, John Thistlewood would have had to negotiate.
24
JAMAICA: RICH AND POOR
‘Franklin gripped the bridge-stanchions with a hand
Trembling from fever. Each spring, memories
Of his own country where he could not die
Assaulted him. He watched the malarial light
Shiver the canes.’
Derek Walcott, ‘Tales of the Islands’
Thistlewood never had the capital or manpower to go into sugar on his own account. Nonetheless, he did much better in Jamaica than he ever would have done at home, achieving in the West Indies his dream of landed independence. He was even financially secure enough to have time for reading, gardening and socialising. In spite of severe setbacks late in his life, he was worth nearly £3,000 at the time of his death. By comparison, the average holder of wealth in England was worth only a little more than £200. In the northern colonies it was about £300. By far the most valuable asset Thistlewood owned when he died was his slave force – some 35, worth more than £1,500.
But Thistlewood, judging from his diaries, was something of an exception among the more ‘middling’ whites of Jamaica. During a five-year period at Egypt, he had 18 different white men working for him. Only one stayed more than a year, some lasted only days. Those not dismissed for indolence, drunkenness or excessive violence against the slaves sickened and died.
On most sugar plantations, below a head overseer like Thistlewood would be found two or three white ‘bookkeepers’. By the mid-eighteenth century, many were young Scots (Robert Burns was appointed a bookkeeper in Jamaica, and was ready to depart for the island when halted by the news of the success of his first volume of poetry). The work included driving the slaves, as well as managing the planting, harvesting and processing of the cane.
This undertaking remained as hectic as in the seventeenth century. The technology had barely changed since the days of Sir James Drax. The cut canes still had to be ground and the juice boiled on a fiercely rapid and potentially problem-strewn schedule: mills still broke down, particularly in undercapitalised estates where a new set of rollers or machinery was unaffordable. The boiling went wrong (expert boilers, the vast majority now the most valued slaves, were in great demand, and were lent out to oth
er plantations at considerable expense). Bookkeeper J. B. Moreton complained that during the harvest, he only got three or four hours’ sleep out of 24.
As well as hard work, it was isolated, poorly paid, ‘a dull, cheerless, drudging life’, as one bookkeeper later complained. Unless armed with an introduction, the young men were shunned by ‘smart’ white society. It was, the bookkeeper wrote, ‘A line of life where, to his first conception, everything wears the appearance of barbarity and slavish oppression.’ The consolations of plentiful alcohol and sex often contributed to the young men’s downfall.
A string of casualties from this cadre of rootless, dispirited young men process across the pages of Thistlewood’s diary. John Hartnole, only 19 years old, who took over at Egypt plantation, was called ‘Crakka Juba’, ‘Crazy Somebody’, by the slaves. Thistlewood reported him as overindulging in food and alcohol to the extent that he soiled himself. Another underling of Thistlewood, Patrick May, was said to be ‘in his house all day, drunk’. He was quickly dismissed after violently assaulting his slave lover.
In 1761, a bookkeeper called John Groves was taken on at Egypt. He had come from nearby Roaring River plantation, owned by the estate of Richard Beckford, having been fired for excessive brutality. Soon after his start, Thistlewood noted, ‘Yesterday afternoon John Groves like a madman amongst the Negroes, flogging Dago, Primus, &c. without much occasion.’ Thistlewood reprimanded him, and Groves left the estate. His replacement, Thistlewood complained, did nothing but eat. He died four months later. In November 1761, another bookkeeper was fired for attacking the slaves in the fields when he was drunk.
The chance was still there for a first-generation immigrant, who worked hard and avoided an early death from disease or drinking, to put together enough property to pass on at least the germ of a great Jamaican sugar estate to the next generation. By the end of the eighteenth century, a high proportion of Jamaican wealth was held by Scots – in the main the sons or grandsons of young bookkeepers who had come out at the beginning of the century, survived and prospered. Nonetheless, from the lower-ranking whites there must have been more than a few envious glances at the vigorously displayed riches of the Jamaica sugar barons.
The Sugar Barons Page 37