Sugar in the Blood (50 page)

The environmental impact of sugar remains appalling. Just as in Barbados, where the crop destroyed a complete natural ecosystem, in Florida too its legacy is disastrous: it bleeds water from the Everglades and pollutes its run-offs. In India, sugar mill waste has contaminated streams and coastal waters, killing off marine life. Its impact on global health has also been devastating. It is the key ingredient in ubiquitous products like Coca-Cola, ice cream and candy. It is also the hidden persuader in the most unlikely range of products from soup to ketchup and bread. As a result it is a significant contributor to obesity and diabetes, which is colloquially known as having “sugar in the blood.” And, as in the past, it is the poor and the disadvantaged who suffer most from the dietary dangers associated with sugar. Indeed, the only upside in what Elizabeth Abbott calls sugar’s “relentlessly sad and bad story” is its potential to create ethanol, a cane-based, ecologically friendly fuel that might one day replace oil.

For the Ashby family specifically, the picture is largely positive. George Ashby spawned a succession of descendants who were raised in a place that he could never even have conceived of before he arrived. The world that became their home was a land of sunlight and warmth where they became accustomed to different foods, traditions and beliefs. They mutated from a traditional English family to a multi-hued one with white, brown and black faces. Of George Ashby’s descendants who migrated in their turn, their fates have been as varied and complex. Many of them suffered extreme hardship, while others achieved great success and happiness. The pattern of their movement—to other islands in the Caribbean, to the U.S. and UK, to Canada and as far away as Australia—has mirrored that of their fellow islanders. Those who remained in Barbados have done well, but perhaps suffered more from the complex psychological pressures that evolved from slavery, since
it is still a country deeply influenced by the interactions of colour and class. My mother’s two sisters found out for themselves how slowly social change comes about. One fell for a dark-skinned Barbadian; but even in the 1970s, the familial pressure was such that she felt she could not marry him. The other, meanwhile, fell in love with a married white man. He loved her in return but would not leave his wife for a brown-skinned woman.

In a material sense, at least in Barbados, the Ashbys’ impact cannot be denied. Their handprint is firmly impressed on the local area, where they have made a lasting contribution to the nation George Ashby helped found. You can see it in the new development at Plumgrove, with the old mansion still at its centre; and on Lodge Road, where signs point to Ashby Land, and where Robert Cooper’s descendants still live; and in Benjamin Ashby’s store, which is now a Jehovah’s Witness church, beside which Jeanette Ashby and her family still live. It’s there if you go to the top of Oistins Hill, where Ashby-owned property was sold in the nineteenth century to build Foundation School, or down into Oistins, where a broad swath of land from Cashel to Welches belonged to the family. Everywhere, there are reminders of the powerful station this family held in its heyday.

Some of the wider changes that have occurred across the island are mirrored in the land. There is no trace of Waterland Hall, the great sugar plantation from which Plumgrove was carved. Because real estate is now more valuable than cane land, its endless fields of sugar cane have largely been replaced by residential districts. The plantation, too, is a different place. Within the span of a few decades, most of its acreage has been converted from the cultivation of sugar to a modern housing development built for middle-income Barbadians; the little wooden houses that once perched so precariously on their coral blocks have now been replaced by sturdy stone dwellings.

Instead of a sleepy backwater, the modern Plumgrove is never silent. Indeed, no property in contemporary Barbados could ever be. The land hums with incessant activity: engines starting, tractors rolling, nails hitting plywood as houses are being constructed. This perpetual babble almost overwhelms the perennial soundtrack of the plantation: the
strangely soothing and sad noise of the cane. Sitting here now—with cane behind me and the development in front of me, the main road and its busy stream of cars just out of sight—Plumgrove’s great house still provides the perfect vantage point to feel both the rural isolation of the plantation and the busyness of modern Barbadian life. The plantation house is fated to be converted to condominiums, but perhaps, however sad, its demolition is fitting: a way of finally laying the ghost of the plantation system to rest.

So today, I return to Plumgrove, the focus of some of my earliest, most vivid memories: being enfolded in my grandmother’s warm and perfumed arms, eating roast pork and plantain round the large wooden dining table, and at night looking out of the windows at the rustling cane, which swayed like an army of stick-like shadows against the starlit night.

I can never simply regard this place casually. For me, this land is haunted. It is a haven for restless souls for whom not even death has provided any respite. These spectres disturb the air, waiting for me to face and name them, as all our ghosts do. Every time I visit it, Plumgrove catches my heart so intensely that I’m left dizzy by the force of emotion. The house and the land that surrounds it are peopled with memories that are so clear that they disturb my sense of reality. I am immediately carried back to my childhood self: jumping from hot paving stones onto cool green grass, chasing my brother and sister around the garden, or hiding behind gigantic tamarind trees, trying to catch fireflies in the starlit Caribbean night.

Plumgrove has been for me a place of refuge and a place of profound sadness. It has always been central to the mythology of my maternal family, the Ashbys; but it is also, I now see, a place of loss and death and endings. When I was a child this place was a strange and wonderful playground; as an adult, I can almost taste the aura of unhappiness that surrounds it. I can sense the spirits of my ancestors here—George Ashby, Robert Cooper, Mary Anne, John Stephen, and all the names I will never know—who strived and suffered on this island. So the plantation house our family still owns stands as a monument to things lost: not just my youth, my sense of belonging, my Caribbean self, but also
my predecessors, their hopes, dreams, and despair. When I visit Plumgrove I am assailed by existential questions. Where do I belong? Who am I? And I realize that the sights and sounds and smells of this place have permeated my thoughts and shaped my personality in ways that will last a lifetime—just as my ancestors’ plantation experiences did theirs.

If George Ashby’s story began with a journey, it would end with the eternal enigma that is arrival. Every migration—voluntary or forced—is a dangerous gamble, initiating a series of events that cannot be anticipated or even fully understood. When he embarked for the New World in the seventeenth century, no one, least of all George Ashby himself, could have anticipated how his descendants would mutate and multiply, spreading virtually across the globe. In an era when we are undergoing our own great migration, with millions of people on the move in search of opportunity, perhaps we can learn something from the past. Somewhere in all of our family stories is a “George Ashby,” and we are all the descendants of migrants—those resilient souls making the best of history’s terrible twists of fate, or those brave opportunists taking a chance on the future and striking out to forge a life for themselves in a new world.

1
the late 1630s:
There is no record of George Ashby’s outward journey, so this is an approximate date only, calculated on the basis of land sale patterns.

2
“a will-o’-the-wisp”:
Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh 1972: 18.

3
“so momentous a development”:
Arciniegas 2004: 3.

4
“wedded to their native Soile”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 396.

5
“non-separating puritans”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 401.

6
“the typical Sunday service”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 402.

7
“Get thee out of thy country”:
Genesis 12:1–2, quoted in Bridenbaugh 1968: 402

8
“If hee have any graine”:
Smith 2006: vol. 2, 125.

9
“Thus was the king’s coffers”:
Hill 1972: 29.

10
“probably amongst the most terrible years”:
Peter Bowden, quoted in Thirske 1967: 621.

11
“last scene of my life”:
Ligon 1657: i.

12
“pearls and other such riches”:
This and the following extracts from Richard Eden are quoted in Sale 1992: 254.

13
“a succulent maiden”:
Sale 1992: 258.

14
“Licence my roving hands”:
Donne, Elegie XIX “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” quoted in Sale 1992: 258.

15
“He wondered that your lordship”:
Shakespeare,
Two Gentlemen of Verona
, I.ii.4–9, quoted in Davis 1887: 20.

16
“the Wild West”:
Dunn 1972: 9.

17
“provinces of El Dorado”:
Naipaul 1970: 93.

18
“to educate the public”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 400.

19
“Bee not too much in love with that countrie”:
Richard Eburne, quoted in Bridenbaugh 1968: 401. 16
“varnishing their owne actions”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 403.

20
“The West Indian Colonist of the Seventeenth Century”:
Jaeffreson 1878: 35.

21
“Before you come be careful to be strongly instructed”:
Anderson 1991: 53.

22
“having tasted much of God’s mercy”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 6.

1
“in a very small room”:
Coad, quoted in Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh 1972: 113.

2
“operation and the several faces that watery Element puts on”:
Ligon 1657: 1.

3
“a prosperous gale”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 50.

4
“The living fed upon the dead”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 8.

5
“Our ship was so pestered”:
Bridenbaugh 1968: 8.

6
“had well nigh putt an end to this my Journall”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 78.

7
“Death is better”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 79.

8
“a long sleeved shirt”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 99.

9
“a competency”:
Anderson 1991: 123.

10
“sometimes rough with mighty mountains”:
Richard Mather, quoted in Anderson 1991: 80.

11
“our greatest bullocks”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 107.

12
“One might almost believe that the puny sun”:
W.B.W. 1789: 131.

13
“Surely the Journey is as great”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 62.

14
“There is no place so void and empty”:
Ligon 1657: 28.

15
“sixpence throwne down”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 63.

16
“the woman with childe”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1925: 64.

17
“more healthful than any of hir neighbours”:
Colt, quoted in Harlow 1924: 43.

18
“The nearer we came”:
Ligon 1657: 30.

19
“Their main oversight”:
Ligon 1657: 37.

20
“Sir William Tufton had Severe Measure”:
Davis 1887: 53.

1
“growne over with trees”:
Father Andrew White, quoted in Gragg 2003: 14.

2
“the woods were so thick”:
Ligon 1657: 37.

3
“It was as if the whole Atlantic ocean”:
W.B.W. 1789: 132.

4
Richard Ligon was beguiled by the plants:
Ligon 1657: 107.

5
“the Prince of all fruits”:
Gragg 2003: 20.

6
“find you sleeping”:
Ligon 1657: 62.

7
“a scorching island”:
Gragg 2003: 16.

8
“as ordinary as taverns and tippling houses”:
Gately 2001: 48.

9
“all these spectacles”:
Paul Hentzner, quoted in Gately 2001: 47.

10
“In our time the use of tobacco”:
Francis Bacon, quoted in Gately 2001: 50.

11
“very ill-conditioned”:
John Winthrop, quoted in Beckles 1990: 44.

12
“Anyone who has seen them bent double”:
Davies 1666: 180.

13
When a shipload of Frenchmen:
Pares 1960: 18.

14
“a plantation in this place is worth nothing”:
Beckles 1996: 574.

15
“21 lashes on the bare back”:
Beckles 1990: 41.

16
“great damage to their master”:
Beckles 1990: 44.

17
“sell their servants to one another”:
Ligon 1657: 59.

18
“the urge to try something noble”:
This and the following extracts come from von Uchteritz 1969: 91–94.

19
“Truly I have seen such cruelty”:
Ligon 1657: 51.

20
“The masters are obliged to support them”:
Biet, quoted in Handler 1967: 66. 48
“there hardly passes a year but they make one or two irruptions”:
Charles de Rochefort, quoted in Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh 1972: 172.