Sugar in the Blood (41 page)

It was an extraordinary document. Without ever stating explicitly the nature of his relationship to either of the women currently in his life, or declaring unequivocally that their children were also his, Robert Cooper Ashby nonetheless made clear his priorities and commitments. His decision to make Mary Anne and her eldest son, Robert Henry, his executors is also informative: it is a tacit acknowledgement of her standing as his common-law wife and her eldest son’s status as his most senior heir.

What is omitted from Robert Cooper’s will is also fascinating. The exclusion of his first wife, Mary Ashby, and his son, John Burke Jr., is no surprise since they had both died years before. But numerous members of his extended slave family also go unmentioned. Sukey Ann and her four children, for example, are not mentioned; perhaps he felt that their manumission a few years previously had been gift enough. John Stephen also had no share in the bounty. This was probably because he had never been treated as well as those half-siblings whose mothers Robert Cooper had eventually become attached to. And perhaps Robert Cooper felt that John Stephen’s future was already secured: he was an adult, had a lucrative trade, and was married now with children of his own.

Robert Cooper’s decision to leave his wealth to his slave children was uncommon but not unique. A few years earlier Jacob Hinds, a planter from St. Andrew, had also made a will that left everything to his extended mulatto clan. Jacob Hinds had seven separate family arrangements with black or coloured women living on his plantation that resulted in eighteen children. Where Hinds differed from Robert Cooper is that he explicitly acknowledged these children as his progeny. Unsurprisingly, his will is one of the longest on deposit in the Barbados Archives. Aware of the intense vulnerability of these slave children, Hinds wrote an emotional letter to his executor, begging him to enforce the stipulations of his will. It begins, “
The first wish of my heart and request of you is that I commit your friendship to my poor unfortunate distressed children,” and it concludes, “If you have any love or regard for me never neglect them or turn your back on them … for the love of heaven don’t let them be distressed or inconvenienced.”

For both Robert Cooper and Jacob Hinds, the decision to acknowledge their alternative family transgressed the traditional behaviour of
the planter class, who had for many years taken care to ensure their wealth remained in the hands of the white ruling caste (as was evident in the furore that erupted when Joshua Steele attempted to leave his estate to his enslaved offspring). Robert Cooper’s will was an unconventional act by an otherwise conventional man, so it is therefore interesting to speculate about what motivated him. Perhaps the years of living openly with Mary Anne and her brood, and his subsequent affection for Elizabeth Brewster and their young son, had changed him. Or perhaps it was about timing. The Barbados that he knew was over, slavery had been abolished and black and brown people were openly working to expand their opportunities. Perhaps in this context, his actions did not feel quite so transgressive after all.

The various fates of Robert Cooper Ashby’s illegitimate children mirrored those of many people of colour emerging from nineteenth-century slavery. Some of them had become free before emancipation and acquired the privileges associated with their freed status, while others had not. Some, encountering the enormity of racial prejudice, would reject their black ancestry; others would continue to claim it. Those children who were embraced within the will were given the opportunity for an education and a share in “the Colonel’s” personal wealth. But they also had other advantages. Mary Anne’s children, who were only one-quarter black, had moved even further away from their African roots towards the white community of the man whose surname they bore. With three white grandparents and one black grandparent, these children were still racially classified as mulattoes, but in reality had greater opportunities than their darker-skinned siblings. Virtually all of them forged marriages with prominent families with either land holdings or merchant businesses. Elizabeth Mary Ashby married Joseph Keeling Valverde, of mixed black and Jewish ancestry, while Arabella Ann Ashby married John Thomas Bentham, the light-skinned son of a prominent doctor and plantation owner.

These astute matrimonial choices may have augured well for the progress of this branch of the family, but the members of this branch still endured the complex realities of a society in which racism stained all social relationships. In appearance they were white, and they enjoyed
real privileges because of their “brighter” skin colour, but their mixed-race heritage, which would have been widely known across the island, still connected them to the recently enslaved population.

Their financial situation was also not as secure as their father would have hoped. Robert Cooper’s decision that the property should be sold five years after his death, with the proceeds going to Mary Anne’s eleven children, was undoubtedly born of good motives: he wanted to make sure that they benefited equally. But the result was disastrous economically, since the wealth embodied in Burkes estate was spread perilously thin. It is difficult to create a detailed picture of the estate’s fate after Robert Cooper’s death, but it is clear that his decision to sell and divide the estate caused financial problems. By 1850 the estate was in receivership and a legal case had been lodged against it, with numerous parties making claims. The case was only settled in 1870, after which Burkes was purchased by the Clark family, who owned a number of similar properties. By the end of the nineteenth century, very few of those who were chosen as Robert Cooper’s heirs were prominent in the economics and politics of Christ Church and Oistins.

John Stephen’s story is less glamorous than that of some of Robert Cooper’s children, but it is more typical. Like the majority of enslaved mixed-race offspring, he was neither freed by his father nor bestowed with an inheritance, and he would not find a place among the elite freed coloured community that developed before abolition. The benefits he received from his father were limited to a brown skin and a profitable trade. But the value of the former bequest, one that he shared with all of Robert Cooper’s descendants, should not be underestimated. According to the local historian Robert Morris, “
They all carried the badge of colour, a plantation source of origin, and the link to a prominent father, all possible sources of success in the society of the day.” John Stephen’s marriage would produce six children, and though his will has never been found, that of his wife, Mary Christian, which was proved on 13 January 1891, demonstrated that their union had generated enough wealth to leave substantial legacies for her children, the generation for whom real change finally took place.

I am the descendant of John Stephen and Mary Christian’s third child, Benjamin Ashby, who was part of the first generation of black Ashbys to be born free. It was likely that Benjamin received at least an elementary education, since schools that admitted black and brown children were being pioneered around this time. In his teens Benjamin was apprenticed to a shoemaker in the area of Providence. When the time came for marriage he would, like his father, become engaged to a woman who was the mixed-race descendant of a powerful white family. Her name was Elizabeth Armstrong and their wedding took place in 1862. Benjamin and his new wife then settled in Lodge Road in Oistins, where he became a shopkeeper.

Even before emancipation, the mixed-race population had displayed a strong pull towards urban centres, and now people like Benjamin Ashby started to abandon the plantations and settle in towns like Bridgetown, Speightstown and Oistins to restart their lives. Once there, they tended to work as artisans, tradesmen and merchants, hoteliers and hostel keepers—all professions that allowed them to generate wealth outside the purview of the all-powerful plantocracy. Perhaps because of family influence, Benjamin was awarded the contract to supply Foundation School with groceries and its boarders with shoes. He also forged strong ties with the Vestry, which had absorbed so much of his grandfather’s time.

The considerable wealth he amassed is revealed by his wife’s will and later his own. Elizabeth Armstrong Ashby’s will, entered in 1910, revealed that she owned land in her own right which she left to her children. The relatives mentioned as beneficiaries included her husband, Benjamin, her son Benjamin Jr., and other children: John Clifford Ashby, Jeanette Armstrong Ashby, Helena and Eloise Ashby. Witnesses to the will were George Elphinstone Deane and Charles Frederick Ashby. By the time Benjamin himself died in 1925, he was well known in Oistins as a prominent village shopkeeper with easy access to the Vestry, and the owner of significant properties in Lodge Road and Maxwell. His heirs included his sons Benjamin Jr., Walter Fitz-Thomas, Charles Frederick, Edward Albert and Reginald Thomas Ashby.

As well as financial security, Benjamin had ensured that his sons
received a proper education at a time when few could afford to do so, and some attended Foundation School, which their planter ancestor had been so influential in creating. All would go on to marry into members of the Barbados middle class. Charles Frederick wed Henrietta Nurse, the daughter of a schoolteacher, while Benjamin Jr. married Hester Frances Gall of a landowning family of Shot Hall. My great-grandfather Edward Albert married Edith Barnes, the child of a white family. Between the 1920s and the abolition of the Vestry system in the 1950s, the Ashby name was continually represented on this powerful local government body.

The fate of this generation of Ashbys and those who followed reflects the way that life evolved for the entire caste of coloured families descended from planter class origins. Indeed, as one local historian has noted:

A similar caste emerged across much of the Atlantic slave world. In the United States, for example, the white patriarchs of these coloured clans included not just a legion of anonymous planters but also men as famous as the eighteenth-century president, Thomas Jefferson. Their biracial descendants would take up the same social place in their cultures as John Stephen and his contemporaries did in the sugar islands. This relatively privileged group enjoyed the benefit of financial legacies and access to education that eventually enabled them to become leaders in black society, what the writer Edward Ball has called “the home class of ministers, politicians and business people.”

Even after his death, Robert Cooper Ashby cast a long shadow. His memory lingers to this day, and his descendants still make reference to
the exploits of “the Colonel” and pass his possessions from generation to generation in their wills. Thanks to his canny exploitation of sugar and slaves, he provided genuine financial and educational advantages to many of his mixed-race progeny; and he bequeathed to them not just their lighter skin but social confidence. The Ashby family therefore went into the future with certain distinct advantages that would shelter them somewhat from the vicissitudes of life in post-emancipation Barbados and the momentous challenges they would encounter in the twentieth century.