Sugar in the Blood (25 page)

The entire house was encircled by a wide wrap-around balcony with slatted railings. On this veranda the family could sit and enjoy the breeze. Here the Ashbys collected to entertain their guests and chat, sip cool drinks and play cards. Most planters also had a spyglass, strategically positioned, so that they could survey their domain. With this, Robert Cooper could watch the distant ships sail across the horizon, scrutinize his workers in the fields and monitor the approach of any visitors as they rode towards his property.

It is not hard to imagine the Ashby family in these rooms, slumbering on canopied beds piled lushly with cushions and covered with embroidered sheets, as the ubiquitous bats soared and dipped against the starlit night and the plantation dogs barked their messages to their neighbours; or gorging on lavish plantation meals; or sitting on the balcony’s wicker furniture enjoying their lime water; or playing backgammon on the patio; or strolling in the garden against a backdrop of green pastures and a vivid sky, while the sounds of the slaves cutting cane wafted over to them from the far-off fields. Their lives were perpetually perfumed by the unique smells of plantation life—a heady combination of tropical flowers and horse manure, heat and the cloying smell of sugar cane—which drifted in through the doors and windows. All the while, they were served by an army of ever-present slaves, who slipped around the house as unremarked upon as ghosts.

At its most expansive, the Burkes property comprised 350 acres and over 200 slaves. To those who lived there, it must have felt sometimes as if it was the entire world. Like most plantations it was a self-sufficient community, as self-contained and independent as any small town. In addition to the plantation house and slave huts it included scores of buildings, including windmills to power the sugar works and boiling and curing houses with their smoking chimneys, as well as barns for livestock and storage sheds for cane and plantation supplies; it even had its own hospital and jail. It was sustained largely by what was grown on the property, including sweet potatoes, plantains and okra that the
slaves cultivated alongside guavas, oranges and bananas. There were pigs, cows and poultry in its fields, and fish in its waters. While the cane crop provided the backbone of the plantation’s economy, Burkes also sold small amounts of other produce like cotton, vegetables and eggs.

Surrounding all of this were the lands of the plantation itself. Some parts were devoted to grazing fields for cattle, others to the cultivation of foodstuffs, with the odd gully abandoned to nature, covered in draping vines and choked with foliage. All the rest was a sea of sugar cane, extending so wide and deep that it seemed to touch the horizon. The cane had as many moods as an ocean: on a still day it absorbed the heat of the sun and sent it back into the sky in shimmers, at other times when it was breezy, the cane waved ceaselessly, creating what the historian C. L. R. James called “the song that never ceased.”

These early years at Burkes were a period of transition for Robert Cooper Ashby. It was one thing to be brought up on a plantation, but quite another to run one. Though he would have been familiar with many of the processes involved in “civilizing sugar” and would have an instinctive understanding of how to recognize a diseased cane plant or when it was time to harvest, he had never before been responsible for making sure this complex operation ran smoothly and profitably. But it was probably a challenge he relished. Robert Cooper was an ambitious man, and Burkes was an altogether grander canvas on which to paint his dreams than the modest farm on which he grew up.

Robert Cooper’s first task when he took over control of the plantation in 1795 was to familiarize himself with the property, so he spent many hours on horseback riding up and down the cane breaks, inspecting Burkes’ buildings and boundaries, meeting employees and going through the slave ledgers and accounts. He needed to know where this operation was solid and where it was vulnerable. Was the estate yielding as much sugar as it could? Did the factory need repairing or extending? Was the overseer getting the best out of his slaves? Was the bookkeeper embezzling the family’s profits, taking advantage of the death of its previous owner? Perhaps he needed to get a loan to carry out his plans? Only then, when he had a clear idea of how best to proceed, would Robert Cooper roll up his sleeves and get to work.

Later on, the priority was to increase his human “stock.” Though
his wife had inherited the property with its existing slave population, once Burkes had been extended Robert Cooper needed more hands to farm the estate. Therefore he spent some of his time in these early years going backwards and forwards to the slave market in Bridgetown. It was one of the busiest in the region, with slaves on sale every day but Sunday, and it attracted buyers from all over the Americas. One nineteenth-century traveller to the island recollected such an occasion:

The biggest challenge for Robert Cooper would have been learning how to govern such a large and recalcitrant workforce. Luckily, advice was readily available. Just as cattle farmers had evolved many theories for raising a healthy herd, so the West Indian planters had written manuals—the product of over a hundred years of practical experience—about how to manage their slaves. For example, in 1786 a group of prominent Barbadian slave owners published a pamphlet in London entitled “
Instructions … offered to the Consideration of Proprietors and Managers of Plantations in Barbados.” It outlined a number of factors that the estate manager should consider in his daily manipulation of the black workforce in order to achieve high levels of productivity and social stability.

The West Indian proprietors had evolved an organizational structure that was extremely hierarchical and it was this system that Robert Cooper inevitably implemented at Burkes. At its summit was the planter, Robert Cooper, who ruled like an absolute monarch, and his wife and child, who enjoyed the privileges of any royal family. Here he was master of a large community of slaves over whom he literally had the power of life and death, since for most of his time as a planter the murder of a slave was punishable only by a fine of £15. So when Robert
Cooper rode across Burkes in his planter’s uniform of jodhpurs and white frock coat with shiny buttons, wielding his whip or gold-topped cane, the work rate would have quickened while every eye surreptitiously followed him, fearing to draw his attention or displease him.

His role as head of the plantation was crucial, for just as one could not run a country without a head of state, so it was inadvisable to run a plantation with someone who did not have its long-term interests at heart. On islands such as Jamaica, where the percentage of absentee planters was high, individual plantations tended to be more unruly and less profitable in the long run, and the island itself was more violent and unstable. Indeed, Jamaica had more rebellions than the rest of the British islands put together. As the Gothic novel writer turned Jamaican planter Matthew Lewis noted, the declaration “
You belong no massa” was one of the most contemptuous remarks that one slave could throw at another. Lewis mistakenly put this down to the slaves’ desire to be ruled, rather than a recognition of how dangerous it was to live on a plantation without an ultimate authority figure. There was virtually no protection for its black inhabitants under the law, which meant that workers’ well-being was utterly dependent on the nature and values of those in charge of them.

Beneath Robert Cooper were a handful of white men, including clerks, attorneys and bookkeepers, who tended to be a transient, disgruntled community. They frequently found the work lonely and dispiriting and quibbled ceaselessly about wages and conditions. The most important of them were the overseers, who were responsible for slave performance; they spent most of their time directly supervising slaves in the cane fields or in the boiling house. As de facto deputies, these men were also in charge of the plantation when Robert Cooper went away.

Overseers were often second sons who had no other way of making a living, or poor boys from Britain who hoped to make their fortune in the colonies. But their wages were not usually sufficient to fulfil their dreams of establishing their own plantations. These men were frequently a source of aggravation to planters because so few of them were reliable or efficient. Poorly educated and frequently pickled with drink, they were usually unmarried—planters felt that wives were a distraction—but virtually never celibate. Indeed, they were notorious
for their rapacious attentions to their female slaves, whom they assaulted in the cane fields or co-opted as their mistresses. Some were too interested in fornicating to keep their minds on the job, while others were either too lenient or too harsh to get the best out of the workers, though excesses were rarely curtailed unless it affected production.

One such case occurred in 1824, when the Martinican planter Pierre Desalles noted in his diary that his slaves had been lobbying for many months against a vicious overseer. They told him: “
Your negroes are giving in to despair … nothing amuses them, they no longer get dressed, and when they think of M. Chignac, the hospital fills up, and they let themselves die.” In the end the planter gave in and fired the man, admitting: “All our misfortunes were caused by the slaves’ hatred for him.” Desalles understood, as Robert Cooper eventually would, that a good planter had to be responsive to the subtle shifts in the interpersonal dynamics on his plantation in order to neutralize potential conflict.

Just below overseers in the pyramid, and almost as valued, was a group of slaves known as rangers or drivers. Notable for their physical strength and vigour, these men were chosen to help the overseer impose discipline in the fields. Armed with whips and sometimes even knives and guns, they were allowed to administer ad hoc punishment to field slaves who were not working fast or hard enough. With a punch in the face or a well-aimed kick, they urged the exhausted slaves onwards. They even had permission to apply whippings—usually a preset number sanctioned by the overseer—to slaves they believed had misbehaved. Their power extended beyond the canes; at night they rampaged through the slave settlement like pirates, stealing food and possessions or grabbing a woman or girl.

At the top of this group was the head driver or ranger, who traditionally was an unusually strong and impressive figure. He had authority from the overseer to direct all the slaves in each gang, and to instruct them in the tasks that he believed to be necessary. He was also the conduit between the slaves and the white managers, a role that demanded that he be an excellent negotiator and possess the ability to inspire both fear and respect in the slaves. This position was so important that a bad or indifferent head driver could seriously compromise the success of the plantation.

The 1786 manual also stressed the importance of carefully handling slaves of special ability, partly because of their potential contribution to plantation life but also because they were the biggest challenge to an estate’s equilibrium and could easily turn their energies towards subversion. The canny planter provided such slaves with privileges and authority, selecting them for management roles: alongside the driver and rangers were artisans like carpenters, masons and blacksmiths and specialists who worked in the sugar factory such as boiler men. Women too were sometimes elevated to more privileged positions, as skilled domestic labourers, such as cooks, nurses and launderers, as well as midwives or healers.

At the base of this pyramid, and supporting the entire edifice, was an army of Africans who did the work of planting, harvesting and transporting of the cane. They were organized into a gang system. The first gang was for the strongest slaves, both male and female, who undertook the most strenuous jobs on the plantation such as the sowing and harvesting. One planter described them as “
the flower of all field battalions, drafted and recruited from all the other gangs as they come of age to endure severe labour. They were drilled to become veterans of the most arduous field undertakings … They are the very essence of an estate, its support in all weathers and necessities.” The spectacle of these slaves at work awed outsiders. One visitor to the islands wrote in 1812: “
It has often occurred to me that a gang of Negroes in the act of holing for canes, when hard driven, appeared to be as formidable as a phalanx of infantry by the rapid movement of their hoes … while I have been astonished how such habits could enable beings to persevere, so many hours in such violent effort.”

The second gang was responsible for the weeding and clearing; it included mothers of suckling children, youths aged between twelve and eighteen, and elderly people who were still strong enough for field work. They cleaned up the fields and cleared the floor of crushed cane and trash in the factory. The third gang was comprised of the most vulnerable people on the plantation: the very young and the old, the frail and recuperating. They did the light work of clearing weeds and rocks, as well as taking care of the other gangs and the animals, hence the sight of youngsters running up and down the canes carrying buckets of water, or feeding the cattle hay.

The plantation system provided a strong blueprint, but each estate had its own history, set of relationships and mix of characters, so no single strategy could ever be successful. An effective plantation was one where all the levels of this hierarchy worked in functional harmony. While this could and did accommodate a high degree of brutality and discord, there was a tipping point beyond which productivity was impaired.