The Summer Country

by Lauren Willig

  One of the hardest challenges in writing The Summer Country was trying to reconstruct the life of an enslaved woman. Not the daily toil in the fields or the duties of a body servant—there are plenty of materials there—but the internal life of an enslaved woman. As Andrea Stuart points out in her remarkable family history, Sugar in the Blood, in the case of her own many times great-grandmother, who bore a child to the plantation owner, not only can one not know how she felt, it’s impossible even to determine her name. For the most part, when we look for the lives of enslaved women, we hear the voices of others: visitors from England, writing back home about the barbarities perpetrated upon women’s bodies; planters complaining of their laziness or slyness. It is very hard digging through the propaganda on either side to recover the emotions of the women who lived within this system. As Marisa J. Fuentes comments in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, “the very nature of slavery in the eighteenth century Caribbean made enslaved life fleeting and rendered access to literacy nearly impossible.”

  However, that “nearly” is important. One historian places the percentage of literacy among the enslaved at 2 percent—but posits that the majority of that 2 percent were female, particularly housekeepers. We know, for example, that Nanny Grigg, one of the participants in the 1816 rising, was literate. Letters do survive from enslaved women. Dolly and Jenny Lane, daughters of the housekeeper at Newton Plantation, Old Doll, each wrote to their master to request her manumission (Dolly’s letter is dated 1807, Jenny’s 1804). After making clear that she has her mistress’s approval for the request, Jenny explains, “I have a friend who has been generous enough to promise me if I can obtain your consent will pay for my freedom but first I must implore you to take another good slave in my stead, or sell me, which ever you please to do, and you shall be most honestly paid if it should please you to sell me.” Jenny acquired her freedom in 1807, and, in 1813, wrote again, this time on behalf of her grown sons, one a tailor on the plantation, the other a joiner, explaining that she has a little put by, as the plantation attorney will attest, and since the boys have such poor constitutions and aren’t much good to the estate, she would take the liberty to buy them. After all these years, her voice and character come strongly through the text.

  Two important facts stand out about the enslaved population in Barbados in the early nineteenth century: there were more women than men (54.4 percent female) and, in marked contrast to the other sugar islands, the vast majority of enslaved people were Barbados-born. In the year 1817, only 7.1 percent of enslaved people on the island were African-born; 92.9 percent were born in Barbados. In Jamaica and St. Vincent, that same year, 37 percent and 38.8 percent, respectively, of the enslaved population had been brought from Africa; on Demerara, that number was 54.7 percent. There were all sorts of reasons for this, which we don’t have space to go into here, but the result was that there was a strong Creole consciousness among the enslaved population, an identification as Barbadian, and, beyond that, to a particular parish and a particular plantation. As Professor Beckles points out, “In 1826, most estates in the colony had been owned by the same family for 100 years, so that several generations of slaves were born, raised, and died in the same villages.” Jenny, brought over from Jamaica, is considered a “foreigner,” outside the local social structures.

  In creating my Jenny, I relied heavily on Professor Hilary Beckles’s Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados, Marisa J. Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, and Katherine Paugh’s The Politics of Reproduction: Race, Medicine, and Fertility in the Age of Abolition, all of which I strongly recommend to anyone wishing to learn more about the topic. I am also deeply indebted to Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood, which goes beyond bare facts to attempt to reconstruct the emotional and physical environment in which her ancestors lived. Her work was invaluable in helping me flesh out not only Jenny, but also Robert and Mary Anne Davenant.

  Mary Anne proved nearly as elusive as Jenny. There is a great deal of writing about Creole women, but it comes largely from English visitors, who enjoyed themselves hugely in deploring the laziness, decadence, and ignorance of Creole womanhood. As Cecily Jones comments in Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, “much of our knowledge about white Caribbean women . . . necessarily derives from the comments of male observers, but their representations of womanhood are largely informed by misogynistic, class-bound perspectives, and must be approached with caution.” In an archetypal story, a plantation mistress, desiring some tamarind water from a jug at the far end of the room, shouts for her slaves rather than getting it herself, shouting and shouting until she falls into a fit of coughing. The English observer concludes, “These lazy creoles, if they drop a pin, will not stoop to pick it up.” One finds variants on this story again and again, as well as complaints that the voice of the mistress of the plantation, her accent, her diction, her mannerisms, are indistinguishable from those of her slaves. As one critical visitor put it, the white women of Barbados spoke “a vulgar, corrupt dialect,” caused by mingling more with their slaves than their own kind.

  Taking the biases of observers as a given, it does seem highly likely that there was a fair amount of cultural commonality between mistress and slave. Unlike the other sugar islands, Barbados had a very low level of absenteeism. Planters, while they might send their sons to Eton or Harrow for a bit of Latin, Greek, and social polish, returned, for the most part, to the island, where they served in the assembly, oversaw their own acreage, married the sisters of their peers, and raised their children to do the same. Because of this, the island didn’t see the same dearth of women that one found on other sugar colonies, where single men served as overseers for absentee owners. In 1816, the year of the rising, the white population was 52.2 percent female. (By contrast, in Jamaica, the ratio of white men to women was 200:1.) That white female majority did not go to England for their education. They might—theoretically—be educated at a young ladies’ academy in Bridgetown, like the one run by novelist and prolific letter writer Eliza Fenwick, but, for the most part, they stayed at home, at the parental plantation. So while a Charles Davenant might go off to England as a young boy and return with a grounding in Enlightenment texts and a pronounced Whig drawl, a Mary Anne Beckles would be more likely to be familiar with folk remedies and plantation lore, and would, in conversation, have an accent very similar to that of her maid.

  The Barbados plantocracy believed themselves to be enlightened masters, pursuing a policy known as amelioration, in which they posited that more lenient treatment of the enslaved would lead to increased returns and fewer angry letters from British abolitionists. As proof of the success of their program, they liked to boast that Barbados was the only one of the islands to muster a net increase of slaves rather than a net loss. (Because sugar cultivation was so brutal, the death rate on most of the sugar islands tended to be high and there were few live births.) Although the Barbados slave code was among the harshest on the books, planters insisted that most provisions, such as the need for passes to leave the plantation, were generally ignored, and that their slaves enjoyed great freedom of movement. Although there had been rebellions on neighboring islands, there had not been a slave rising in Barbados since 1692, a fact that planters ascribed to the good relations between themselves and their slaves. No one saw a conflagration coming. As one indignant planter put it, “The night of the insurrection I would and did sleep with my chamber door open, and if I had possessed ten thousand pounds in my house I should not have had any more precaution, so well convinced I was of their attachment.” Be that as it may, on Easter Sunday, 1816, about half past eight in the evening, the cane began to go up in flames in the parish of St. Philip.

  In writing about the 1816 rising, I’ve tried to stay as close as I can to the historical information available. Unfortunately, the historical record is patchy and sometimes suspect, much of the information a
vailable having been drawn out in interrogations after the fact, or played up to make a point. There’s a great deal of debate over what was actually known or intended, why the revolt happened when it did, and who, exactly, was involved. Was the catalyst the registry bill of 1815? That’s the generally accepted view, but there are some dissenters who argue that to focus on the registry bill is to play into planter propaganda. (While the registry bill was intended only to enforce the provisions of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, making sure that slaveholders weren’t violating the law by importing new slaves, planters argued the very idea of registering their slaves was an incursion of their property rights; the rising was taken as a sign that the legislation had, indeed, been incendiary.) Those historians make the case that the revolt was a reaction to more local concerns: to famine caused by drought, to the harshness of particular masters. The testimony of those involved and the slogans and images that survive do seem to point to a larger consciousness: many of the conspirators, when questioned, referred to the successful rising in Haiti (which they called Saint Domingo or “Mingo”), and to the belief that support was forthcoming from both Crown and Parliament. As the battle banner proclaimed, “Britannier are always happy to assist all such sons as endeavour.”

  The rising is commonly known as Bussa’s Rebellion—now. In fact, it was only in the 1870s, sixty years after the rising, that one sees the first references to “the War of General Bussa.” We know there was a Bussa; he figures in the reports compiled immediately after the rebellion, although not as the primary actor. Did he play a seminal role in the rising, or was he just one of many participants? I’ve included Bussa in the narrative—because it would seem wrong to have Bussa’s Rebellion without a Bussa, debates notwithstanding—but I chose to focus on other named conspirators, particularly Nanny Grigg. I did so partly because we have testimony from her own mouth, which we don’t for Bussa, who died in battle, and partly because, as a woman, she made a better counterpart for my own fictional Jenny. There is, sadly, very little known about Nanny Grigg. We know that she was literate and that she was valued at the high sum of £130, but that’s about it. Harrow Plantation did change ownership and became Simmons during this period, and the Sunday gatherings and the dance at the River Plantation were all taken from the record. Most of the statements made by Nanny Grigg, Jackey, King Wiltshire, and the other participants in this book were taken, frequently verbatim, from their own testimony. Where I took liberties was in including Jenny and in having Harrow leased by my fictional Mr. and Mrs. Boland, giving me a way for Jenny to meet Nanny Grigg.

  Emancipation came to Barbados by imperial edict with the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which came fully into effect in 1838 (technically, it came into effect in 1834, but a period of “apprenticeship” followed, with full emancipation only in 1838). There was, however, already a thriving free Afro-Caribbean community on the island, primarily centered in Bridgetown, where merchants like London Bourne, Thomas Cummins, John Montefiore, and Joseph Thorne impressed English visitors with their elegant homes and the numerous charitable committees run by their wives. My own London Turner is a thinly veiled stand-in for these men, particularly London Bourne. Born a slave, Bourne was manumitted (in London, to save the fee), amassed a considerable fortune, and became a respected member of the Afro-Caribbean merchant elite. The Turner drawing room, however, was stolen in pretty much every particular from Joseph Thorne, whose “taste and judgment” in his collection of books and artefacts was noted by guests from England. For information about the Afro-Caribbean middle class, I am deeply indebted to Melanie J. Newton’s The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation, which provided me with everything from the charitable committees upon which Mrs. Turner would have sat to the furniture in Mr. Turner’s parlor. For a picture of London Bourne’s life and times, I relied upon Cecilia Karch’s “A Man for All Seasons: London Bourne” in the Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.

  The real London Bourne did not, to my knowledge, have a nephew who trained as a doctor. There were, however, plenty of real Nathaniels out there. In the early nineteenth century, English and Scottish universities opened their doors to African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean medical students. By the 1820s, there was an Afro-Caribbean doctor in Trinidad who had trained at the University of Edinburgh. James McCune Smith, the first African American to hold a medical degree, graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1837. Nathaniel’s near contemporary, the West African Africanus Horton (also known as James Beale) studied at King’s College London and the University of Edinburgh, graduating from the latter in 1859.

  Where I did take liberties was in adding Nathaniel to the staff of the Barbados General Hospital in 1854. The hospital opened its doors in 1844 with a staff consisting of six doctors: a senior resident surgeon, plus junior house surgeons (resident), and non-resident visiting surgeons. As in England, these doctors worked for free, in the understanding that they would have the opportunity to hone their skills, observe, experiment, and expand their private practice. Hospital positions did not become salaried until 1875. As Olivia Cetinoglu notes in her A History of the Barbados General Hospital, 1844–1910, “All of the doctors recruited at the Barbados General Hospital were white and most were recruited from England.” Adding Nathaniel to the staff was something of a leap, but one does imagine that, given the hospital’s cash flow issues, a hefty donation from London Turner might have helped to cross the color bar. By 1854, the hospital was already experiencing issues with overcrowding, with one exception: during the cholera epidemic, the number of patients admitted dropped dramatically, due to the hospital policy of barring those with infectious diseases. If anyone would like to know more about the hospital, or medical care in Barbados, I recommend Olivia Cetinoglu’s A History of the Barbados General Hospital, 1844–1910, as well as Eleane I. Hunte’s The Unsung Nightingales: the Development of Nursing in Barbados from 1844 to the Year 2000.

  I have tried to be as faithful to the actual circumstances of the 1854 cholera epidemic as I could. Fortunately for the historical novelist, Barbados had a thriving newspaper industry, including the Barbadian, the West Indian, and the Barbados Globe, all of which reported on the crisis as it occurred. There are also accounts from those who survived it, including the Reverend Thomas Butcher’s grimly named Mordichim: Recollections of Cholera in Barbados, During the Middle of the Year 1854, which relates the entirety of the epidemic with impressive thoroughness. Most of the physical details—the phaeton carrying a coffin, the woman who takes on a baby she found alone, the Reverend Bannister’s death after kissing his dead child, and so on—are taken directly from Mordichim or from the reports in the local papers. The first cases were reported on May 14; notices warning residents that the Asiatic cholera was in the town went up on May 21. One of the first to die was a local merchant, John Castello Montefiore (the same Montefiore with whom Adam visits in this book). One can still see the fountain erected to his memory in Bridgetown by his son. The governor, Sir William Colebrooke, divided the city into seven districts, with two medical officers to each, although there was little they could do. Soup kitchens were opened, with packets of food prepared for the needy, and supplies of lime and drinking water were distributed. Barbados had a population of roughly 126,000. By September of 1854, the death toll had risen to over 20,000. There were no sure remedies, although many were attempted, some more bizarre than others, such as Mrs. Davenant’s turpentine wraps. For those wishing to know more, I can only recommend reading through Mordichim, which is both chilling and fascinating and contains so much more than I was able to fit in the novel.

  For anyone who would like to delve deeper into the fascinating history of Barbados, there is no better general survey than Professor Hilary Beckles’s A History of Barbados. For a more intimate portrait of the country’s history, Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood paints a compelling picture of slavery and its legacy through the prism of one family’s exp
erience over the generations. For more specific information on various subtopics, you can find a much (much) longer bibliography on my website, www.laurenwillig.com.

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been nearly a decade in the making. It all started on a June day in 2010 when three historians on vacation decided to skip the beach and go on a plantation tour instead—and I first heard the story of the Portuguese ward.

  So many thanks to my agent, Alexandra Machinist, for telling me to stop talking about it and just write it already. Huge hugs to my editor, Rachel Kahan, for taking on the project and for completely getting it when I say things like: “This is my M. M. Kaye meets The Thorn Birds book!”—and for not only understanding, but knowing exactly which M. M. Kaye book I mean. I cannot imagine having written this book with anyone but you.

  Thank you to the many talented people at William Morrow who have helped to turn this book from words in my head to the book in your hands, with special thanks to Mumtaz Mustafa for the gorgeous cover. Thanks go to Liate Stehlik for her support, and to Tavia Kowalchuk and Danielle Bartlett for their infinite resourcefulness and unfailing sense of humor. I am so in awe of all you do.

  It took two years of research before I felt competent to tackle the writing of this book. I am so very privileged to have been colleagues with brilliant women who, years later, are willing to put up with random historical questions at odd times of day. So many thanks to Harvard history department buddies Becky Goetz, Elly Truitt, and Maya Jasanoff for fielding questions about slavery, sugar islands, medical practice, and nineteenth-century race relations, for pointing me to appropriate books and bibliographies, and for referring me to relevant colleagues. I am so grateful. The next round of drinks is on me. And, of course, I can’t leave out Jenny Davis and Liz Mellyn, who came up with the brilliant idea of a girls’ trip to the Caribbean all those years ago. A medievalist, a Renaissance expert, and an Early Modernist walk into a tour . . . and come out with a book.