Slaves seem to have recognized early that although they were part of an alienating infrastructure, they could still create, within this complex, an ontological space in which an alternative identity and aesthetics could be inscribed. As early as the seventeenth century, in the infancy of the slave complex, observers of the West Indian landscape noted that slaves were transforming the terms of their enslavement by claiming—sometimes demanding—spaces of cultivation that they could control outside the plantation system. An act passed in Jamaica in 1678 required masters to provide “one acre of ground well planted in provision for every five Negroes.”21 And this gesture, initially intended to placate slaves so that they could submit to the regimen of forced labor, would rapidly transform the character of West Indian slavery and the identities that emerged out of it; in regard to questions of land and emplacement, the provision ground helped restore a measure of autonomy to the African slave. By the end of the seventeenth century, West Indian slaves were investing cultural and moral value in the provision ground, making it the site in which what I term a counter-aesthetic would later emerge.
Initially, white masters and observers were not clued in to the revolutionary nature of the simple plots of land allotted to slaves. Oblivious to the aesthetic and moral value of the provision ground, white observers tended to evaluate the system in terms of its economic efficiency and its capacity to supply the basic needs of slaves. Writing from Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1685, John Taylor called attention to the utilitarian demand that had led to the emergence of the provision ground as an essential part of the landscape but missed the moral dimension: “When a planter hath purchased some 20, 30-or more Negro slaves, he first gives to each man a wife without which they will not be content or work. Then he gives to each man and his wife an half acre of land for them to plant for themselves maize, potatoes, yam etc.; which land they cleared in their Leisure hours and build them a wigwam on it, and then plant it as fast as they can.”22
The unintended consequence of these plots of land was astounding. By the time slavery was consolidated in Jamaica in the eighteenth century, the provision ground had become the site of an alternative way of life, a place where bonds of family were maintained and notions of both labor and cultural value were cultivated and recalibrated in spite of the harsh logic of enslavement. Even advocates of slavery such as Bryan Edwards recognized the centrality of the provision ground in the cultivation of a “humane” culture among Jamaican slaves. As a writer and later Member of Parliament, Edwards was a strong critic of what he considered the “odious severity of the Roman law,” which allowed the sale of slaves as payment of debts, a practice that was singularly responsible for the breakup of families and displacement of communities. What irked Edwards most about the sale of slaves to cover their master's debts was that it uprooted them from their spaces of identity and belonging:
In a few years a good Negro gets comfortably established, has built himself a house, obtained a wife, and begins to see a young family rising about him. His provision-ground, the creation of his own industry, and the staff of his existence, affords him not only support, but the means also of adding something to the mere necessaries of life. In this situation, he is seized on by the sheriff's officer, forcibly separated from his wife and children, dragged to publick auction, purchased by a stranger, and perhaps sent to terminate his miserable existence in the mines of Mexico, excluded for ever from the light of heaven; and all this without any crime or demerit on his part, real or pretended. He is punished because his master is unfortunate.23
Edwards considered the statute allowing the sale of slaves to cover their masters' debt “injurious to the national character” and “a disgrace to humanity”; as a member of the British parliament, he worked hard to have the statute repealed in the belief that a happy slave was one who was given the opportunity to become attached to the land and to “fold with it.”24 But even long before Edwards pushed for the repeal of the “Roman law” allowing slaves to be sold to cover their masters' debts, Africans in bondage had come to consider the provision ground to be a form of entitlement bound up with their own changing notions of labor and family. Indeed, one of the reasons the provision ground has come to mark the distinctiveness of West Indian slavery—and the communities that emerged from its ruins—was because it enabled the reversal of the social, moral, and epistemological categories that had been constructed to enforce slavery.
Consider, for example, the question of labor. As I have argued in previous chapters, the act of enslavement was at odds with accepted theories of value. In terms of labor value, slavery was the performance of work that did not provide any benefits to the enslaved. The profits that came out of this work—the cultivation of sugar, for example—went to a master who, in the West Indian case, was often absent from the plantation. Within the provision ground, however, this configuration of value was ameliorated if not changed. Here, slaves were allowed to plant crops for their use, to generate a surplus, and to retain the profits. Indeed, the terms of value were radically transformed. Masters came to value the system because it relieved them of the burden of feeding their slaves, while the slaves valued it because it permitted them “a degree of independence at odds with the notion of being chattels.”25 For the slaves, however, the provision ground was also the means to a larger end—a measure of control over time and space and hence part of the process of moral reorientation I noted earlier. The existence of the provision grounds under law mandated a rethinking of temporality. Whereas in other places in the slave world planters sought to maximize time, sometimes going out of their way to try to increase the number of working hours in a week, Jamaican slaves used the provisional ground as a form of temporal leverage, one that enabled them to put Saturday afternoons, Sundays, and the Christmas and Easter holidays under their own control.
There was an aesthetic dimension to the provision ground, too, one that was comparable, if only by default, to the transformation of spaces of leisure in the European metropolis. Let us recall that debates on slaves and their relationship to social and physical space were taking place at a time when architects and designers in Britain were striving to transform landscapes into scenes of pleasure informed by “particular moral and political precepts.”26 During this period, leading British architects like William Chambers were trying to embellish landscapes in order “to evoke a particular emotion in the spectator.”27 While slaves did not make an explicit connection between their small plots and the British gardens, and there is no evidence that any of them had heard of English gardens of pleasure such as Vauxhall or Kew, they seemed to recognize the aesthetic value of their own tiny spaces and to maintain the provisional ground as a source of food, money, and pleasure.
Some scholars of slave gardens, most notably Jill Casid, have argued that provision grounds were self-consciously “artificed” as a “justification for the plantation system.”28 Although Casid recognizes how the slaves used these gardens to transform the Caribbean market, she cites many instances in which the planter class pointed to the existence of the provision ground to enhance the myth of happy slaves in a picturesque setting. Moreover, as prints and engravings of famous Jamaican plantations such as Montpelier Estate illustrate (fig. 6.2), the visual representation of the scene of slavery was intended to produce a pastoral discourse that concealed the brutal realities of slavery.29 But slaves were not always virtual prisoners of the other's gaze, and their relationship to the provision ground or the neighborhood was informed by a calculus—it could be “a way for slaves to recalibrate the balance of power in society.”30 Thus, even under the gaze of their masters and infrastructure of the plantations, slaves could engage in cultural practices whose ends and means were at odds with the representational regimen of the masters.
To understand the full scope of practices that denoted a measure of freedom in an unfree society, however, we need to shift interpretative interest from resistance as the organizing principle of slave life to what Michel de Certeau has called a tactic.31
Key to this shift in analytical terms is Certeau's recognition that a tactic is “a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus”; that it does not control its own spaces, but must “play on a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power”; and that it does not have the means to maintain its distance and must thus deploy maneuvers “within enemy territory.”32 One of the tactics and maneuvers the slaves could deploy was to transform the provision ground from a utilitarian space to an aesthetic object.
6.2 James Hakewill, Montpelier Estate, St. James. From James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica (London, 1825).
Evidence that the provision ground was more than a utilitarian space can be gleaned from the writings of Jamaican planter historians, most prominently Long, Edwards, and William Beckford, who often complained that slaves tended to invest too much time and effort in crops that had no exchange value. The misfortune of African slaves as cultivators, noted Edwards, was that “they trust more to plantain-groves, corn and other vegetables, that are liable to be destroyed by storms, than to what are called ground-provisions; such as yams, eddoes, potatoes, cassava, and other esculent roots; all which are out of the reach of hurricanes.”33 In matters of which crops to plant, Edwards lamented, “prudence” was a term “that has no place in the Negro-vocabulary.” The colonial government seemed to share Edwards's view; under the Consolidated Slave Act of 1787, every planter in Jamaica was required, under penalty of law, “to keep, properly cultivated in ground-provisions, one acre for every ten Negroes, exclusive of the Negro grounds.”34
In complaining that the slaves preferred “useless”—above-ground—crops to utilizable plants, both Edwards and the colonial government missed the ontological and aesthetic function of the provision ground and its emergence as an essential feature of the enslaved Africans' project of redefining their own spaces of bondage. At the center of this redefinition was the transformation of the landscape of death and suffering into a space of pleasure, of aesthetic value, one that could be made visible only through above-ground crops. Indeed, these were the crops that enchanted observers who, on encountering the provision ground for the first time, were struck by its beauty and its forceful sublimity. The sublime power of these gardens was captured vividly by Michael Scott in the Journal of Tom Cringle, in a scene where the title character encounters a Jamaican village for the first time:
At a distance it had the appearance of one entire orchard of fruit-trees, where were mingled together the pyramidal orange, in fruit and in flower, the former in all its stages from green to dropping ripe,—the citron, lemon, and lime trees, the stately, glossy-leaved star-apple, the golden shaddock and grape-fruit, with their slender branches bending under their ponderous yellow fruit,—the cashew, with its apple like those of the cities of the plain, fair to look at, but acrid to the taste, to which the far-famed nut is appended like a bud,—the avocada, with its Brobdingnag pear, as large as a purser's lantern,—the bread-fruit, with a leaf, one of which would have covered Adam like a bishop's apron, and a fruit for all the world in size and shape like a blackamoor's head; while for underwood you had the green, fresh, dew-spangled plantain, round which in the hottest day there is always a halo of coolness,—the coco root, the yam and granadillo, with their long vines twining up the neighbouring trees and shrubs like hop tendrils,—and peas and beans, in all their endless variety of blossom and of odour, from the Lima bean, with a stalk as thick as my arm, to the mouse pea, three inches high,—the pine-apple, literally growing in, and constituting, with its prickly leaves, part of the hedgerows,—the custard-apple, like russet bags of cold pudding,—the cocoa and coffee bushes, and the devil knows what all, that is delightful in nature besides; while aloft, the tall graceful cocoa-nut, the majestic palm, and the gigantic wild cotton-tree, shot up here and there like minarets far above the rest, high into the blue heavens.35
For Tom Cringle, the provision ground was an aesthetic space that transcended the landscape of slavery.
But to have a proper understanding of the centrality of the provision system in slaves' attempts to construct their own aesthetic, or even a counterculture of taste, we need to turn to where its presence was most tenuous: in the American colonies, more specifically in the low country of South Carolina. Here, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, a work practice described as the task system developed in the rice plantations of the region. At the center of this system, as Philip Morgan has shown, was the slaves' control over time and labor.36 Slaves, many of them possibly familiar with rice growing even before arriving in the Americas, had developed a system in which their time was differentiated from that of their masters.37 There are no obvious reasons why this system developed in the rice country and not the tobacco or cotton “kingdoms” of Virginia and Mississippi, but there is clear evidence that the slaves' determination to take possession of their time, land, and labor posed a threat to the established order. Numerous legal attempts were initiated to control the spread of the task system. As early as 1686, a law had been passed in South Carolina prohibiting the exchange of goods between slaves and other slaves or freemen without the consent of the masters. In 1714 the South Carolina legislature passed a law prohibiting slaves from planting for themselves corn, rice, or peas.38 Morgan argues that these laws were ineffective and that the task system dominated agricultural life in the low country well into the middle of the nineteenth century. Still, legal attempts to curtail this kind of “free work” and to control “free time” points to its significance in the slaves' attempt to develop an ontology of space.
The task system in South Carolina, like the provision ground in Jamaica, was tied up with a significant politics of time. Through these systems, slaves could transcend the rigorous regimen of forced labor to evolve what one may call surplus time, one controlled by the enslaved and deployed toward ends that were at odds with the political economy of servitude. A “fugitive” system of labor enabled a measure of autonomy for the enslaved. In South Carolina the slaves' control over time and space “increased their autonomy, allowed them to accumulate (and bequeath) wealth, fed individual initiative, sponsored collective discipline and esteem, and otherwise benefited them economically and socially.”39 Perhaps masters allowed this system to continue because they recognized that the slaves' attachment to the land and the property it generated for them facilitated the regimen of enslavement, but what needs to be underscored is that the slaves embraced the provision ground because it enabled cultural autonomy in what might have been places of absolute deracination.
It is easy to underestimate the huge phenomenological gap between free and forced labor even within the culture of slavery. As numerous illustrations from the eighteenth century show, free labor, and its attendant notions of time and space, was centered on the wishes and desires of slaves as individuals; even when it was hard work, it was unbounded. A vivid sense of leisure and joy would characterize descriptions and scenes of the West Indian market, the culmination of the process of unfettered labor and the free and profitable exchange of its produce, or Sunday dress, when slaves owned their time (fig. 6.3). Working in the plantation was, in contrast, labor under strict control and surveillance, with the ubiquitous planter and driver in the foreground or background (fig. 6.4).
I do not think it is pure coincidence that Africanisms survived, or were most prominently invoked, in those slave cultures where the provision ground or task system was a salient part of the landscape, for autonomous spaces of time and task could be secured only outside the gaze of the master. The outstanding question, however, concerns the meaning and scope of these spaces and their relation to the slaves' aspiration to freedom: how could they be sustained within the infrastructure of the plantation? But perhaps there is a prior question that needs to be addressed: what does the existence of these autonomous spaces mean for the widely held view that to be enslaved was to be socially dead?40
6.3 Female Negro Peasant in Her Sunday and Working Dress. From James M. Phil
lippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London, 1843).
6.4 Planter, Attended by Negro Driver. From James M. Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (London, 1843).
2
In earlier parts of this book, I cited and rehearsed Orlando Patterson's famous definition of the slave as socially dead and his reflections on the slaves' natal alienation, their exclusion from the claims and obligation of a community, and their genealogical isolation.41 Significantly, Patterson's thesis was founded on the concept of time, or temporality, as an instrument of exclusion. One of his most radical claims was that slaves “differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.” Patterson conceded that slaves strove to reach back in time and to connect with a past, but such efforts came up against “the iron curtain of the master, his community, his laws, his policemen or patrollers, and his heritage.”42 He concluded that the “genealogical and historical memory of the slaves” was shallow, citing examples from Michael Craton's study of the descendants of slaves at the Worthy Park sugar plantation in Jamaica to prove his point.43 At the end of his study of the lives of slaves on a Jamaican plantation, Craton had noted that attempts to get descendants of slaves to talk about “antecedents dating back to slavery days” or to trace “precise lineage” led to “disappointment in nearly every case”: “At best the information was inaccurate; at worst there was ignorance of even indifference.”44 What are we to make of this genealogical ignorance or shallowness of memory? Or, as Saidiya Hartman has asked poignantly, “What is it we choose to remember about the past and what is it we will to forget?”45
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 33