Sugar in the Blood (34 page)

There was even a tiny minority of slaves who managed to bend the rules of the plantation system to their will. This was demonstrated by a clan of slaves at Newton estate, near Burkes, in the late eighteenth century. A protracted exchange of letters between its slaves, owners and managers revealed how one slave family, headed by a black female house slave called Old Doll, was able to exploit familial connections and clever negotiation skills to manipulate their owners until they had “
a kind of right to be idle.” Ultimately, they would even negotiate freedom for many of their number. This degree of influence was extremely unusual, since most slaves had neither the opportunity nor the education to pull off such a feat, but even within the most repressive environments, the slaves nonetheless carved out for themselves some small spaces of respite, as well as lacunas of power, of pleasure, of care. Each day, some slave, somewhere, found stolen moments in which the yoke of slavery didn’t feel so heavy: a joke shared, a flirtatious exchange, a secret embrace.

The ability to squeeze joy from a stone depended, in part, on the slaves themselves, for John Stephen and his contemporaries all had their own personalities and idiosyncrasies that could not be obliterated by their enslavement. And there is always a danger when documenting their stories of turning them into mere symbols of what this terrible
system could do to people. (As Orlando Patterson has argued, it “
is impossible to generalize about the inner psychology of any group.”) To do so would dehumanize them just as surely as slavery tried to do. So we can only hope to understand the enormity of the system that they were resisting and exercise compassion when we judge the strategies they used to endure it. If defeating the slave system was impossible for any individual, that some survived without losing entirely their ability for love and laughter was in itself a victory.

When he was not working, most of John Stephen’s time was spent in the quarters where the slaves lived. Although they were set in the wider world of Burkes, they had their own social structure, their own leaders and followers, their own manners and habits, and their own traditions and history. Because their days were not their own, the social world of the slaves at Burkes largely sprang to life at night and weekends. So every evening after work, the slaves, preferring to be outdoors rather than in their poky cabins, would gather on the piece of open land around which the huts were loosely organized. This was the place where they could relax and let their guard down, so they laughed and flirted, told stories of their ancestors, sang songs, admonished their offspring and shared secrets and gossip: jokes about the unreasonable behaviour of their masters or mistresses, and rumours of rebellions and the progress of the abolitionists.

I sometimes picture John Stephen here, after a hard day’s work, finally allowing the mask of obedient slavehood to slip, his shoulders relaxing, his accent becoming more broad and his behaviour less inhibited. Here he is a different man: a person of authority, treated with respect. He is squatting on the ground, chatting to friends, eating dinner. For him and the other slaves, these hours in the quarters are virtually the only times when the authorities on the plantation are not actively checking up on them and harassing them. It is their brief hiatus of peace and they make the most of it.

The quarters were also alive with music; it was the wind that blew away fatigue, grief and fear. For just as slaves accompanied their work in the fields and mills with song, so music leavened their leisure hours. But this singing was not, as many planters claimed, an indication of their well-being. As Frederick Douglass wrote:

So at night, Burkes was haunted with the sounds of melodious voices and a variety of instruments such as fiddles and pipes. Barbadian slaves, virtually alone of all the islands, were for many years deprived of the consolations of the drums which had such importance in the aural lexicons of their forefathers, because the slave laws of 1688 proscribed the keeping of loud instruments “which may call together, or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes” by slaves. Nonetheless the slaves in the Caribbean, like those in mainland America, developed their own unique musical styles, a fusion of African and European traditions that became the genesis of many popular musical forms, from blues to jazz, from reggae to hip hop.

This new musical style took pride of place at the events that were most important in the slaves’ lives, such as births, marriages and funerals. It was the soundtrack of the impromptu gatherings, informal dances and grand balls that were held to celebrate special occasions like Christmas and “crop over.” On these nights, slaves travelled to neighbouring plantations, with the grudging permission of their owners, who did not approve of these amusements but did not as a rule obstruct them, aware that these orgies of dancing and forgetting were a safety valve that helped slaves cope with the rigours of servitude.

Many things were different in the shadow world of the slave settlements, including their medicine. Despite the regular visits of the white doctor employed by Robert Cooper, most slaves relied on black healers on the plantation, whose practice drew on both traditions brought from Africa and skills learned on the island, particularly those inherited from the Amerindian people of the region, some of whom had been transported to Barbados in the early days of slavery. Local leaves and herbs were mixed with various roots and tree barks to make teas and tonics. These healing practices were associated with African traditions
of magic and a faith in the supernatural known as “obeah.” Obeah men and women were akin to conjurors in parts of mainland America, and were not only engaged in healing, but also claimed to be able to ward off evil, bring good fortune or make people fall in love.

Most larger plantations like Burkes had their own obeah practitioners who were notable for their paraphernalia: dried herbs, beads, knotted cords, cats’ teeth. They promised believers a life (often back in Africa) after death, where they would coexist with a world of spirits. Root doctors and obeah men and women were regarded with awe and deference across the island. Whites were, of course, aware of this world of healers and obeah—indeed, their preparations were so effective that the whites often used them as well. But they didn’t fully understand the tradition, and frequently used these beliefs to justify their view of slaves as unsophisticated, superstitious heathens. The planters also feared these heterodox healers because they had such a huge influence on the slave population and often played a prominent role in rebellions and subversion. As one American lamented, “
They avail themselves of the passions and prejudices of the poor people and thus fit them for their own purposes.” They were also aware of their skills as poisoners, and were unnerved by their mysterious physical powers: one obeah man, burned slowly alive, displayed no pain and declared that “It was not in the power of the White people to kill him.”

There was another group tussling with the obeah men for control of the slaves’ souls. This was the church. In the early days of settlement the Church of England was largely uninterested in ministering to black slaves, lest it provoke aspirations for freedom, but later on this changed and religion began to be used to subdue the black population and justify their enslavement. The Anglican ministers, funded by the planter-controlled Vestry, encouraged slaves to come to terms with “the place that God in his wisdom had chosen to put them.” As the Jamaican plantocrat Peter Beckford concluded: “
Let him [the slave] be taught to revere God; and then his duty to his master; may he be made efficient—his labour easy, his life comfortable and his mind resigned.”

But it was the nonconformist missionaries, rather than the Anglican church, that captured the loyalty of the enslaved population. And what emerged from their encounter with this unorthodox branch of Christianity was a group of charismatic black preachers who travelled around,
spreading the word of God and the consolations of Christianity. They preached in secluded places or ramshackle “churches,” no more than wooden huts, where the congregation filled the rooms with song. The planters regarded these churches as ill-disciplined, loud and primitive, but put up with them provided they did not openly preach resistance to the slave system. As time passed, this hybrid form of worship began to undermine the influence of the older beliefs like obeah, but could never fully supplant it. So for many years, the slaves went to church and bought their charms and powders at the same time.

Thus from the earliest days of settlement, the enslaved Africans who found themselves uprooted and transplanted had evolved a hybrid culture, transforming the rituals and tastes of the world they had left behind to fit their new environment. They forged a new language out of the languages that they had once used and the English tongue that had been imposed upon them. They melded old recipes with new ingredients to create an entirely different cuisine. And they integrated traditional instruments with western melodic traditions to create an innovative form of music. These new ways of thinking and being created a way of life which would guide and shape their descendants’ experience in this New World and also shape important aspects of the wider culture that still resonate today.

Whatever whites felt about such practices, beliefs and behaviours, they were part of the interior landscape of slaves like John Stephen. At Burkes, as at other plantations in the region, this alternative Afro-Caribbean culture had its own worldview and coherence, one that resisted and challenged the hegemony of white European culture. By its very existence it said that Robert Cooper’s world of great white houses and neatly etched sugar fields was not the only way of being, and that there were other ways of thinking that included the possibility of a life free from slavery.

The reality was that, on almost every level, slaves and their owners saw things across an unbridgeable divide. The imbalance of power between the two groups meant that their understanding and interpretation of each other’s motivations were often vastly different. So, while an owner might see a slave’s suicide as a form of revenge, the slave saw
it as an honourable way of escaping unendurable suffering. Abortion and infanticide were not murder but a gesture of mercy, a way of sparing a beloved child from the horrors to come. Running away was also seen through a very different lens. Thus when “
Jack, a light-skinned carpenter” absconded, his master assumed he was trying to “pass as a white man.” The planters perceived such escapes as a challenge to their authority and characterized the runaways as outlaws and rebels. But for the slaves, escapes such as Jack’s were not so much political as deeply personal: they often reflected a simple desire to avoid the immediate and specific circumstances of enslavement, and the runaways were seen as daring, inspirational heroes. Whether they were tales of a man absconding to enjoy a weekend with a sweetheart or visit a family member, or a more permanent bid for freedom, their stories travelled from plantation to plantation, were whispered about in local towns and settlements like Oistins and Bridgetown, and were talked about openly and gleefully in the quarters and at places of worship. It did not matter that so few of these tales ended happily, or that many runaways’ efforts were rewarded with painful punishments or even death. Their tales of courage shaped the imagination of the slaves and provided them with the hope of another life that could be attained if they were brave and bold enough.

This visceral desire to escape a shackled existence was shared by all slaves and united all enslaved communities. Hence a piece of slave lore that recurs across the Americas, from Brazil to Barbados, from Cuba to Maryland: whether it is told in the Spanish-, French- or English-speaking territories, the story is essentially the same. One day in the cane or cotton fields, after a wretched loss or before a brutal punishment, a slave, troubled and tormented, simply rises up and, hovering for a time just out of the reach of his abusers, flies away. It is a piece of mythology that says everything about the enslaved person’s desire for transcendence and sums up all of the slave’s terrible longing and desperation to elude his terrible fate.

Such differences in perspective between owners and slaves shaped every aspect of life on the plantation, even down to the way the two groups responded to the land. Thus if the manicured driveway that led up to Burkes, as well as the imposing great house itself, embodied Robert Cooper’s position as patriarch, ruler of an orderly, well-managed
universe, so the plantation’s anarchic little pathways and ramshackle quarters represented the alternative lives of the slaves. The island as a whole was contested ground. The planters were reassured by the order that farming had imposed upon its original unruliness. Barbados was now dominated by seven hundred or so grand sugar estates that were served by roads easily policed by the militia. But for the slaves the very symmetry and uniformity were a constant reminder of the all-encompassing power of the planter elite and the brutal circumscription of their own lives.

At night, as Robert Cooper and his family sat on the Burkes veranda, he could look out across his vast estate with an easy sense of achievement. Year after year, he had the satisfaction of seeing the working plantation over which he ruled increase his wealth and prestige. For John Stephen and his fellow slaves, gathered around the fire in their quarters, Burkes represented something far more complicated. By the nineteenth century, when John Stephen was growing up, most sugar estates in Barbados had been owned by the same family for a hundred years, so that on a plantation like Burkes, several generations of slaves had been born, raised and died in the same villages. And, in spite of the shifting political landscape, the slaves at Burkes, like most of those on the island, had a fierce attachment to their plantation. Unable to quite believe in the possibility of freedom, they knew they would only leave Burkes if they were sold, which would have been regarded by them as a terrible fate. As a group of Barbadian slaves questioned by one visitor to the island explained: “Here we are born, and here are the graves of our fathers. Can we say to their bones, arise and go with us into a foreign land?”