Sugar in the Blood (33 page)

More than becoming literate or numerate, the most important lesson for the slaves to learn concerned their place in society. Just as planters’ children were taught to view themselves as different from and superior to their slaves, so their slaves were socialized to recognize that they were what the Barbadian novelist George Lamming called an “instrument of production.” To the planters of the Atlantic system this was the real “education” that needed to be inculcated in their charges so that they could endure the ceaseless, punishing and dull work to which their race had sentenced them, and in order that they would come to believe in their own inferiority. This was the justification for feeding them a diet of humiliation and abuse, for the insults that assailed them as they served round the table, for the whippings and the rapes.

Parents and plantation elders would also pass on advice about how to cope with the perils of being owned by their fellow man. A lot of this wisdom was encoded in the folk tales that emerged in slave societies across the New World: the Anansi stories in which a wily spider triumphs against the odds; and Brer Rabbit, whose endless battles with Brer Wolf proved that a powerful and ruthless opponent could be overcome with cunning and a good heart. Whites saw these tales as the fanciful product of an ignorant and superstitious people. But for the slaves, these stories provided valuable lessons for living in a harsh and arbitrary world: they were an allegory of their own lives.

A central message of these folk tales was to appreciate that whites, even the apparently kindly ones, were potentially hazardous figures. John Stephen and his little friends were taught to be cautious, remain silent or act dumb when being questioned by white people. They were reminded never to hold their gaze for too long or to speak to them
unless they were spoken to first. Above all they were taught to stick together, to protect other slaves’ interests. If a slave did something wrong, like steal food or break equipment, his fellows usually drew together and concealed their knowledge of the transgression. Those who broke ranks suffered the wrath of the rest.

Young slaves learned early the advantage of silence and of obeying orders with a blank expression, giving no sign of understanding what was going on around them. They learned to slip into a posture of cowering deference when in the presence of almost any white person, and to use the language of subservience and the submissive bobbing and bowing and entreaties of “Yassuh Massa,” “Nossuh Massa!” to hide their real feelings. With such a need to dissemble, it was no wonder that many planters believed that slaves were inherently untrustworthy and unknowable. As one American slave owner wrote:

After five years’ apprenticeship, John Stephen was classified as an “Ordinary Carpenter” in the slave books. As such he was heir to an established tradition of slave carpentry that had existed for over two centuries, combining the skills of their African ancestors with the best aspects of the European tradition. John Stephen was now involved with all the important areas of the plantation work: he repaired the great house banisters, window frames and guttering, as well as doing the highly skilled jobs of mending the factory coolers or the wooden parts of the mills. And though most of the great house’s furniture was imported, he was also trained to do the fine work, fashioning louvred windows, beautiful tables and chairs, bookcases and cupboards.

As he grew in experience he was expected to oversee others: the young apprentices that he was training, and the slaves who were cutting and hauling large logs across the plantation to make shingles for the great house. Sometimes he would work with the sawyers who cut the timber or fix lathes for the masons to plaster. By the time he approached
twenty, John Stephen’s status on the plantation had risen substantially; and there was still the possibility that he would rise even higher, to the position of head carpenter. By virtue of his trade, John Stephen was valuable and he knew it. Indeed in the slave economy, the ordinary carpenter was thought to be worth more than a head driver, and a head carpenter was valued at as much as £300—the price of four healthy field slaves.

Robert Cooper’s gift of a trade considerably improved John Stephen’s life of servitude. His superior status was recognized by everyone on the plantation, black and white. He was also allowed to hire himself out, paying a certain percentage of his fees to his owner, Robert Cooper, and keeping the rest for himself. This gave him a way of earning additional money that he could spend as he wished or save up to buy himself out of slavery, but it also meant that he had more mobility than his fellow slaves. As a jobbing carpenter, he was allowed to travel around the island virtually unsupervised as he moved to and from appointments.

This freedom of movement was one of the most valuable perks of his job. He was able to visit the local area of Oistins regularly and even went as far as Bridgetown, the bustling capital, where he would have encountered raucous street musicians and foreign sailors and traders from every corner of the globe. Some of the most colourful figures in the capital were the female hucksters or vendors. These were the slaves who came into town from country plantations like Burkes to sell the produce that they grew in their provision grounds. They were formidable women who often carried their vast trays of produce—corn, tomatoes, okra—on their heads. Their poise amazed visitors to the islands. One Barbadian higgler was seen balancing an entire brood of chickens, with the nest, coop and all. Their entrepreneurship and aggressive hawking caused the authorities profound consternation, since their success often undermined the sales of conventional merchants. As a result the higglers were accused of monopolizing the marketplace, pushing up prices and setting a dangerous example to the other slaves. But the authorities were also nervous about banning them altogether, because early attempts to do so had caused intense unrest among the slave population.

One aspect of the capital that would have impressed John Stephen
was the lifestyle of the slaves there, which was very different from what he had known on the plantation. Rather than living in relative isolation, the blacks and whites of the city interacted not just with one another but with a wide variety of visitors to the islands, so the slaves tended to be more worldly: they often knew how to read and write and had greater access to wider news.

But it was the exposure to free people of colour that probably had the most profound impact on John Stephen, because he would undoubtedly have wished to join their ranks. A large percentage of them were mulattoes like him who had been freed by their fathers-cum-owners. These people lived curious lives. They had a status that any slave would envy: they were legally British subjects and could theoretically lay claim to some of the legal rights held by white freemen; they also shared obligations of citizenship such as paying taxes and serving in the militia. But in reality they found themselves confined to a subordinate social position with restricted civil rights and social privileges. They could not become church ministers or take communion at the same time as whites, and they were segregated at church. They were also excluded from parish schools, though they supported them through their taxes. They couldn’t join libraries, hold any commissions or become magistrates. And in the social arena they were still expected to maintain a respectful deference to whites.

Inevitably these restrictions provoked resentment, and in the 1790s the free people of colour had begun their struggle for civil rights. By the time John Stephen was an adult, they were a force to be reckoned with. They used a variety of methods to improve their lot, from serious political agitation and raising petitions, to making addresses to the governor and legislative lobbying—all of which the planters resisted furiously. Freedmen who were of mixed race represented something dangerous in a slave society; despite the limits on their rights, they were an important inspiration for many slaves, proving that their enslaved status was neither inevitable nor permanent.

So John Stephen was part of a community that was simultaneously sanctioned and rejected, accepted and reviled. His brown skin gave him greater privileges and economic opportunities than the darker-skinned population, and better life chances. In a society where both blacks and whites had internalized poisonous ideas about racial hierarchies, and
where skin colour was a largely reliable indicator of social place, the mixed-race population was often treated with greater respect than the majority of slaves; and in some islands they were addressed as “Miss” or “Mr.” to indicate their special status. But these privileges came at a price, and many mulattoes found themselves caught between blacks and whites—different from either, and distrusted by both.

As a “coloured” person John Stephen was also sometimes regarded with suspicion by other blacks, who feared that he might throw his lot in with the planters if he felt it would increase his rights and opportunities. If a person of colour had also been freed, his allegiances were even more suspect. As two visitors to the island noted, this group tended to see themselves as superior to mere slaves: “
They have no fellow feeling with the slaves. In fact they had prejudices against the Negroes no less bitter than those that the whites have exercised towards them. There are honourable exceptions to this … but such, we are convinced, is the general fact.”

Whites were also wary of mixed-race people, whom they saw as a potential Trojan horse that could infiltrate white society and then turn against them at any moment. They were the offspring of black women, after all, and their roots were in the slave population. It was feared that a person like John Stephen could use his advantages, particularly if he had received an education, to inform his slave brethren about current events and even inspire them to insurgency, as had happened in Haiti.

Unsurprisingly, mixed-race people evolved their own social world where they could get together without hostility. One late-eighteenth-century visitor to the island was intrigued by the events they held, which neither whites nor blacks were encouraged to attend: “In the evening, I went to a grand mulatto ball, commonly called a Dignity Ball, at Susy Austen’s. The ladies were all splendidly dressed and they danced uncommonly well. The ballroom was brilliantly lighted and highly perfumed.” John Stephen would have been aware of these gatherings, and probably attended more than a few.

More than his racial identity, it was John Stephen’s status as a slave that most profoundly shaped his individual experience. He was a man born into slavery who had thus far had no experience of a free life. The ubiquitous
brutality of plantation life was all that he knew, and the perpetual petty insults of a slave’s life were something that he was all too familiar with. What he probably couldn’t be aware of was how pernicious an influence the slave system could have on his inner life. In a slave society, the only relationship that counted was the one the slave had with his master, and the authorities refused to recognize any other, whether between enslaved men and women or between enslaved parents and their children. This meant that however ardently these ties were felt, they would never be deemed legitimate or binding. Thus a slave could not prevent the master or overseer from taking his woman; nor could he prevent his family from being sold away. He could not even carry out the normal duties of a parent: to remain with his children and keep them from harm.

In this way, the system of slavery effectively abolished families, which had a particularly alienating effect on males like John Stephen. They were encouraged to have sexual relations to increase a planter’s stock and were discouraged from taking a role in raising their offspring, who would in any case not take their father’s name, but the one bestowed upon them by their owner, and they would be known as “the slave of Mister So-and-so,” or “So-and-so’s boy.” Without the possibility of establishing these crucial ties and assuming their responsibilities, the male slave’s own development was permanently stunted, as the American Frederick Douglass lamented: “
I could grow, though I could not become a man, but must remain all my life a minor—a mere boy.”

This disfiguring psychological process was supported by the power structure of the entire slave system, enshrined in law, and enforced by that society’s traditions and its military might. On a day-to-day basis, it was sustained by a consistent campaign of violence and brutality, random whippings, mutilation and brandings, mobilized to remind the slave of who he was: merely and simply “a slave”—someone with virtually no rights or protection; and who had but one obligation: to satisfy his owner. A slave’s life therefore was defined by his extreme powerlessness, over his person and the persons of his loved ones. This lack of autonomy engendered a sense of humiliation and dishonour. And this was the most pernicious heritage of slavery: that the slaves frequently internalized the master’s denigration and abuse and turned it into self-loathing, creating the mental slavery that imprisoned the
slaves as surely as their shackles; what the Caribbean historian and poet Edward Brathwaite dubbed the “inner plantation.”

However, no matter how all-powerful and all-pervasive the slave system tried to be, it could not entirely control or mould the slave’s reality. This was due to pragmatics if nothing else. Although it is impossible to speak of freedom in relation to a system that so resolutely desecrated its subjects’ human rights, the regime on each plantation evolved out of the interaction between the individual owner and his slaves. So at Burkes, as at other estates, there had to be a degree of compromise to allow daily tasks to be carried out despite the master’s anxiety and the slaves’ unquenchable desire for freedom. So there were moments in the routine when the tight controls loosened a little, and there were circumstances in which transgressive behaviour was allowed to pass unpunished.