by Julia Markus
“He is so generous and tenderhearted, that he naturally takes the part of every party or person attacked by others—He defends everyone who is accused.”
Robert looked at her, and said, “Everyone, except you.”
At the end of February, Elizabeth took her stand. The brothers “must choose,” she wrote to Arabel, “& if they do not love me enough to accept mine with me, why they may cast me off at their pleasure. I cannot help it. I say it in sorrow more than in any anger.” But anger showed. “I should not have acted to them as they have acted to me.”
She would never admit to what she called a formula for kindness “which insultingly excludes the one who has given up his life to me with the very perfection of tenderness! He who from first to last never for a moment failed to me.” They wanted her “to stand aside from him as if he had failed: No!—As my husband he has claims on the respect of those who also love me—but as Robert Browning [double underline], he has stronger claims on me than even the word ‘husband’ suggests.… If I sinned against him so, I should scorn myself—… Tell dear George that I dearly love him . . better than he ever loved me, . . but that I do not answer his letter for these reasons.”
Robert tried to convince her to accept her brothers’ terms. He told her, “It is enough for me, darling, that you understand me . . that you know my heart & my motives.” She answered by asking him what he would do if his family tried to blot her “out of the world after that fashion.” Could he bear it?
His answer was simply astonishment. “He! his family! to me!”
In this letter to Arabel she concluded quite strongly, “So then he was able to observe that it was my affair & concerned my own feelings & that he had no right to interfer. And in fact it is simply my affair. My brothers confer no honour on my husband by their notice, nor inflict any injury by their neglect—the injury is mine . . to my feelings . . my affections—the blow falls there. This is all, I think, that is necessary to say.”
There was only one person with whom she would reconcile singularly, her father. “If he said ‘I will write you . . I will see you . . your husband’s name never being named between us’ . . I should think it my duty to accept under any condition . . any alms of kindness from him—He is my father. I would kiss his hands & feet at any moment. Also he has peculiarities, which I deeply pity the tendencies of, & which, where it is possible, should be dealt with tenderly.” Her father’s tendencies may underlie the one poem she wrote in Pisa.
“THE RUNAWAY SLAVE AT PILGRIM’S POINT” was a peculiar poem to write on one’s honeymoon. Elizabeth recorded that the Americans had asked her for an abolitionist poem. But why write it then? There was a great passion in this poem, an undercurrent of psychological penetration of the nature of racism that was so sharp and clear that one wonders, in the happy honeymoon in that dull town of Pisa, what made it so relevant, so near? The impetus of Sonnets from the Portuguese was the love of Robert Browning, which made the poet confront life, not death. What was the impetus of her only other poem of this period?
“I’m not mad: I am black,” cried the female slave who narrated “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” That explanation of her condition and her action could echo a reggae or rap lyric or suit the psychology of the disenfranchised today. “Mad and Black at Pilgrim’s Point” was the original title. It has been customary to dismiss this powerful antislavery poem, just as it has been customary to assume Elizabeth Barrett Browning was herself sort of a runaway slave finding her own freedom. Although Robert Browning spoke of Moulton Barrett’s treating his children as chattel, and the ever-present Surtees Cook once had the gumption to ask his future father-in-law if he considered his children his slaves, Elizabeth, who called herself a “prisoner” in terms of her former life, would never consider herself a “slave.” For her that would be as immoral as it was cowardly. She was a Christian woman, in the broadest sense, a Protestant who had absolute belief in the freedom of will. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, away from Wimpole Street and with a new last name, was writing about slavery—the psychological state of the real thing.
The locale of “The Runaway Slave” seemed as much British Jamaica as the American South. The slave remembered:
In the sunny ground between the canes,
He said “I love you” as he passed;
When the shingle-roof rang sharp with the rains,
I heard how he vowed it fast:
While others shook he smiled in the hut,
As he carved me a bowl of the cocoa-nut
Through the roar of the hurricanes.
This Caribbean echoing was not surprising in a poem by the great-granddaughter of Edward of Cinnamon Hill. In fact, the poem has been seen as based on a true story first told to Elizabeth as a child by a prominent relative who lived both in England and in Jamaica, her illegitimate cousin Richard Barrett. But Richard Barrett, whom she disliked, was a staunch supporter of slavery, and the tale he wrote down for her was about a “bad” runaway African slave in Jamaica who was killed by the “good” Creole slave who defended his master’s plantain. This was a far cry from the poem she wrote on her honeymoon.
Everything the Barretts owned, and what they had to give up, came from sugarcane and was based on the slave trade, the same West African slave trading on which the system in the United States was based. It was only Elizabeth, not her father, who was pleased when slavery was abolished in 1833, and he was no longer a slaveholder in absentia. The importation of slaves into Jamaica was illegal after 1809, which meant slaves were systematically bred on the plantations up until 1833. The morality of the law was perverted by its loophole. The four thousand pounds left her by her adoring Uncle Samuel came from the estates that he had returned to Jamaica to manage, and which were owned by him and her father. The four thousand pounds Elizabeth’s namesake and grandmother left her favorite grandchild came from the profits of the enormous holdings of her father, Edward of Cinnamon Hill.
Jamaican roots were part of the everyday life of this British poet who drank not tea but good strong coffee. At the time of the poem she was worried that the oldest remaining brother, Stormie, might be going off to that dreadful place to oversee the family interests. Slavery was by then illegal, but the system it bred was not overcome in a decade. How close the family was to Jamaica was seen as the poet decided what to put into the newspaper announcement of her secret marriage. In describing her father, “You might put in the newspaper . . of Wimpole Street & Jamaica, or, . . & Cinnamon Hill, Jamaica.” For so many years the myth of the family has been based on The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but Edward, as well as all of his sons, had two addresses.
“The Runaway Slave” had to be written by someone who had a true feeling for the darkest underside of the system, by someone like Elizabeth, who from the earliest age was exposed to it not only through tales and letters but through members of her household. There were intimate accounts from dear Bro, who would have been sent there against his will once more if he hadn’t stayed with her at Torquay. She was saving him from that fate when the brother sent to Jamaica, Sam, died. Sam was the hard-drinking son who, on an earlier trip to the family’s estates, had upset the missionary Reverend Hope Waddell and had corrupted at least one Christian black woman with trinkets, to the disgust of the woman’s father and the pastor. Sam repented of his sins, which seemingly were many, before his death, witnessed by Reverend Waddell. And Sam requested that the news of this deathbed repentance be sent by the pastor to his father and his dear sister. All of this occurred a short time before Bro drowned.
There was Elizabeth’s grandmother’s companion—not her servant, her lifelong companion, Mary Trepsack—Treppy or Trippy, as she was called. Treppy, the daughter of a British planter and a Negro slave, was the ward of Edward of Cinnamon Hill’s brother Samuel, who died in 1782. In his will, Samuel bought the freedom of his African concubine, Magekan, and her issue. His ward, Treppy, the main concern of his will, went on to Cinnamon Hill, where she was adopted by Edward himself.
Treppy accompanied Edward’s daughter, the first Elizabeth Barrett Moulton Barrett, to England and survived her by twenty-seven years. She was an intimate of the Barrett household until she died in 1857. After her marriage, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to her sisters in letters sent in care of Miss Trepsack. Treppy, who the poet said was as proud of being a Creole as if she were a Roman, knew and was treated as family by four generations of Barretts. She was a lively woman, full of the gossip and tales of that benevolent slavemaster Edward and of the old Barrett and Moulton involvement in the slave trade.
EDWARD BARRETT (1734–98). Miniature of EBB’s great-grandfather by John Barry, 1791. Edward of Cinnamon Hill was one of the wealthiest land and slave owners in Jamaica in the eighteenth century. EBB’s grandmother and namesake; her father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett; and her uncle Samuel were his legitimate heirs.
SAMUEL BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT (1787–1837). EBB described him after his death as “My beloved uncle … for many years a member of the English House of Commons … & at one time himself a man of large fortune.… Oh to look back & think! What he might have been.… A bright, gifted being!” Samuel died in Jamaica, where he was sent to supervise the family estates while his brother, Edward, conducted business from London.
MARY TREPSACK, “TRIPPY” or “TREPPY” (1768?–1857). The daughter of a planter and a female slave, she became the ward of Edward of Cinnamon Hill. She came to England with her lifelong companion, EBB’s grandmother, and was treated as family by four generations of Barretts. Late in life Mary Trepsack suffered from dementia.
In the poem, the runaway slave’s love was dragged away from her by white men.
We had no claim to love and bliss,
What marvel if each went to wrack?
They wrung my cold hands out of his,
They dragged him—where?
Well, “wrong, followed by a deeper wrong!” The white men raped her. And she gave birth to a child with very white skin. It is the treatment of this mulatto child that haunts the imagination, and reflects back on the impetus of the poem.
My own, own child! I could not bear
To look in his face, it was so white.
The black slave could not help herself. Every time she looked at the white face of her own dear child, she looked into the hated face of the master’s race. Placing a kerchief over his face, she suffocated him. He moaned and struggled:
For the white child wanted his liberty—
Ha, ha! he wanted the master-right.
She was crazed by her action, kept her dead child by her breast, and was unable to look at his fair skin without seeing the white man. The awful irony:
For hark! I will tell you low, low,
I am black, you see,—
And the babe who lay on my bosom so,
Was far too white, too white for me.
Quite an abolitionist poem, this one that dealt with the rape of black women and the birth of mulatto children. After the runaway slave finally buried the child under a grove of mango trees, she went through forests until she got to Pilgrim’s Point in New England, which might as well have been Montego Bay in Jamaica.
John Kenyon once said that all Jamaican planters were cousins. The brothers who opposed their sister’s marriage on account of Browning’s lack of funds must have known through their own circle, and from Kenyon directly, why Robert’s father wasn’t wealthy. Robert’s father, another heir to colonial wealth, was sent to his mother’s St. Kitts plantation by his father. The system was deplorable to Robert Browning, Senior, and he got in trouble when he was caught teaching a black to read. When he returned to England, he renounced his inheritance, to the eternal displeasure of his father. He might not have been a bank clerk had he been able to abide slavery. Of course, he wouldn’t have been as rich as the Barretts either, but his money would have come from colonial sources.
IT HAS BEEN relatively easy to place Moulton Barrett, the poet’s father, on the furthest side of the Victorian view of the patriarch as the voice of God in the family. Yet a man who had sired twelve children of a desirable wife, and then refused permission for these adult children, male or female, to pursue romantic attachment and marriage was obviously an enigma in his own time.
Since the opening of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, A Comedy, critics have been content to shadowbox the image of the despotic father as he appeared in the hit Broadway play. After the stage character was debunked, contemporary critics even assumed what Elizabeth Barrett and her siblings discounted as a family joke: that had the right gentleman or lady, of the right class and connection, come along, the father might have, perhaps, permitted a courtship. Moulton Barrett has been seen as a wealthy country gentleman, a man rich enough to build a gingerbread palace on almost five hundred acres near the Malvern Hills but who, after his grandfather’s will was contested, lost considerable money and eventually had to sell Hope End; a man who never really got over that turn of fortune, though, as Elizabeth said, he faced adversity with stoicism and strength. Certainly this was part of the story: the human seen structured and controlled through the prism of time; a man of means, a country gentleman, a believing Christian, the father of twelve; his peculiarity aside, a Victorian gentleman, reflecting an age heralded in by Queen Victoria, when family values and domestic life reigned supreme. At the backdrop, Western civilization as clear-cut as our literary tastes, as free from world history as our imaginations.
EDWARD BARRETT MOULTON BARRETT AS A YOUNG MAN AND MARY GRAHAM-CLARKE. Miniatures of EBB’s parents before their marriage. They had known each other since childhood.
MAP OF JAMAICA. St. James Parish, which included Montego Bay and Falmouth, was the seat of Edward Barrett’s estates, slaves, and fortune.
Yet Moulton Barrett’s grandfather, Edward of Cinnamon Hill, was one of the greatest plantation owners of Jamaica. As late as the year in which the slaves ended a period of apprenticeship and in reality gained freedom, 1838, the Barretts still owned 31,000 acres. The legend that in the past Robert Browning’s great-grandparents had made boots for the Barretts in Jamaica has truth to it, but only if we compare the means of the wealthy house of the Tittles, who became wainwrights and landowners in the colonies, to the extraordinary wealth of Edward Barrett, who veritably owned the Northside of Jamaica—including Barrett Town—and whose fortune from the exportation of sugar and rum was made on the backs of close to ten thousand slaves.
Life in Jamaica among the colonists had since the eighteenth century more affinity to America’s wild, wild West than to the stately drawing rooms of England. Making money was the name of the game, and the pretensions of respectability and sexual restraint were left at home. The “gold rush” was slavery. Slaves were bought in West Africa for four pounds a head and sold in Jamaica at eighteen pounds. The “gilt-edged” security you left your child in Jamaica was a nubile female slave. Rum became demon for colonial women as well as men, and opium was widely used in the eighteenth century among the wives of the planters, who often lived in proximity or in the same house as their husbands’ African mistresses. Many of these wives were involved in the running of the plantation and/or business, and became rich in their own right after their husbands’ deaths. “Marry and bury” was the way it was phrased, and often “marry and bury” again.
Jeannette Marks traced this colonial culture in her tome The Family of the Barretts in a style as circuitous as the subject matter was explosive. She went to Jamaica in the 1930s, stayed with members of the Moulton-Barrett family, and examined state records and wills, deactivating land mines inherent in the information by the vagueness and open-endedness of her prose style. Her information was exact, but often she seemed to be mulling it over under her breath. It was clear to her that beyond the sinister aspects of the white male’s sexual dominion over the African slave woman, these beautiful black women who came from a culture that was not sexually repressed often won the hearts of the colonial men. The colonists preferred them to their English wives. The study is yet to be made of t
he contribution these women still in chains made to the lives and destinies of these British families and to British culture. Marks, seeing through the eyes of her time, emphasized the cleanliness of the women, their gleaming white teeth, the way they bathed daily and then rolled in the sand before rinsing off. Their diet was mainly vegetarian, their habits close to nature. And many of them saw a way for a better future for their children sired by their masters rather than their slave men. Certainly Elissa Peters’s children were given freedom because of her union with Colonel George Goodin Barrett, a son of Edward of Cinnamon Hill.
It was not unusual for the colonial men to send their mulatto and quadroon children back to England to be educated along with their legitimate sons and daughters. But George Goodin Barrett went further. He provided for his children’s education in England and stipulated that after that education he hoped they would not return to Jamaica but settle in a country where racism would not hinder their development. (Many settled in France.) On October 7, 1795, close to his early death, he freed—manumitted—Elissa Peters and her issue:
“I George Goodin Barrett Esquire … in consideration of the long and faithfull Services of my Housekeeper Eliza alias Elissa Peters … manumit herself, her Issue and Offspring and make the same free from all servitude, whatever to me, my Heirs and Exors for ever from the date hereof.” That his father, Edward of Cinnamon Hill, accepted the relationship between George Goodin and Elissa Peters was inherent in his earlier having released his claim on his slave Elissa Peters to his son.
George Goodin’s brother Samuel Barrett had four illegitimate white children with his cousin Elizabeth Barrett Waite Williams. She was and always would be held in respect by the Barretts, perhaps because she was a woman of wealth in Jamaica. She had previously married and buried Martyn Williams. During his marriage, Martyn Williams had eight mulatto children by Eleanor Williams, “a free negro woman,” and he petitioned the House of Assembly for their rights and privileges. What a complicated web of interracial family affairs existed in Jamaica.