Sugar in the Blood (29 page)
Read Sugar in the Blood Online
Authors: Andrea Stuart
The career of the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood, who arrived in Jamaica in 1750 hoping to make his fortune in the sugar industry, is an enduring testament to the fact that violence lubricated the entire slave system. As the historian James Walvin wrote:
In his very first days on the island, he had learned what was required to keep slaves in their place. He had seen a runaway slave savagely whipped, the wounds then marinated in salt, pepper and lime juice. The body of another runaway slave had been burned, but not before the head had been cut off and displayed on a pole. Thus he was instructed in the basics of Jamaican life … Later, Thistlewood witnessed the trial of a slave who had drawn a knife on a white man. Found guilty, the wretched man was immediately hanged from the nearest tree, the offending hand cut off and the body left to rot … There could have been no doubt in Thistlewood’s mind that capricious whippings, legalised executions and dismembering all formed the everyday ingredients of a culture of violence and fear which kept the plantation system in place.
The plantation was a space where the incarcerated population was controlled by a regime of surveillance and punishment and manipulated by what one historian described as “the psychology of terror.”
After exposure to the sadistic mores of slave society, Thistlewood, who had previously displayed no predilection for violence, was soon carrying out the vilest acts. In order to punish a slave who persistently stole food in a time of famine, he developed his own unique form of punishment. His diary entry for 26 May 1756 notes that Derby had once again offended: “
Had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector [another slave] shit in his mouth.” This unfortunate slave would give his name to this uniquely depraved form of castigation, and “to derbydose” someone became a widely used term. A couple of months later another slave was similarly chastised. “Gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put on a gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.” Thistlewood dreamt up other imaginative atrocities. Recording his treatment of a runaway, he wrote: “gagged him: locked his hands together; rubbed him with molasses & exposed him naked to the flies all day, and to the mosquitoes all night, without fire.” As extreme as Thistlewood’s behaviour seems to modern eyes, tellingly he was not notorious among his peers for the ill treatment of his slaves. Indeed, his behaviour only came to light because he chose to record it; which suggests that many other planters could have been treating their slaves just as viciously.
Beatings, brandings and being burned alive were accepted punishments for a sliding scale of offences. The slaves were thrashed whether they were sick or well; whether they worked too slowly or too hastily. Many of these chastisements were dispensed in an ad hoc fashion; it was only those punishments that could permanently damage a planter’s “stock” (like amputation) for which they had to get approval from higher up the chain. And there were few, if any, legal constraints on the more bizarre cruelties that had evolved in the plantation zone. Slaves were covered in honey and staked out on anthills to be stung to death; gunpowder was inserted into the offender’s orifices and then ignited; others were made to eat their own amputated limbs. They cropped their slaves’ ears, slit their nostrils and branded their cheeks. Indeed torture and the mangling of slaves’ bodies was such an intrinsic part of labour organization that planters, overseers and drivers felt free to abuse, wound and ill-treat their charges.
The most common retribution for serious infractions was flogging. This was necessarily a public punishment, since it was designed to inculcate fear in the entire slave population. At the appointed time the overseer stopped work and summoned the labourers, along with an impassive owner, to watch. Meanwhile the terrified accused was escorted to the place of punishment where he (or she) was disrobed, had his hands bound and was suspended from the high branch of a sturdy tree. The choice of the whip depended on the severity of the misdemeanour; the most excoriating was the bull-whip, which could cut human skin open with a single stroke. While the slave struggled against the rope and screamed out, the prescribed number of strokes—ten, twenty, even thirty were common—was administered. The slave was then cut down, falling into the dirt and staining the ground with his blood. Sometimes salt, lime or pepper was rubbed into the wound to worsen the pain.
The colonists believed fervently that violence was intrinsic to maintaining the safety of their society. So new planters arriving on the island were instructed with the maxim: “At all times they must fear you, they simply must.” Hardly a day passed on any plantation when some sort of violence did not take place. One observer estimated that many larger plantations had sixty or so chastisements a day. Every estate dweller recognized the terrible, desperate screams evoked by such punishments. They were so loud that they rang throughout the property from the field to boiling house. Visitors to the islands were shocked that whites there didn’t appear to hear these noises and would carry on eating or chatting as if nothing had happened. It was part of the soundtrack of their lives, as familiar as the rustling of the cane and the bell summoning slaves to the field. As the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher concluded:
The whip is the soul of the colonies … It is the clock of the plantation; it announced the moment of waking up and of going to bed; it marked the hour of work; it also marked the hour of rest … the day of his death is the only one in which the negro is allowed to forget the wake-up call of the whip.
The psychological impact of living in a world in which violence was endemic was powerfully recorded by the American ex-slave turned
abolitionist Frederick Douglass. He describes how one overseer’s prolonged campaign of abuse, which included sleep deprivation, violent punishments and lack of food, affected him:
I was broken in body soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute.
Mary Prince, the author of the only female Caribbean slave narrative, didn’t find her gender any protection from the “horrors of slavery.” She endured a succession of violent owners, passing, as she put it, from “butcher to butcher”:
I lay down at night and rose up in the morning in fear and sorrow; and often wished that … I could escape from this cruel bondage and be at rest in the grave … It was then, however, my heavy lot to weep, weep, weep and that for years; to pass from one misery to another, and from one cruel master to a worse.
Those who did attempt to model a kinder, more gentle slavery inevitably attracted the derision and ire of their fellow planters. This Matthew Lewis found out when a group of his neighbours, outraged at his lenient treatment of his workers, attempted to persuade the grand jury in the nearest town to prosecute him. With amazement he noted in his own journal: “
for over-indulgence to my own negroes!”
Another idealistic planter was the Englishman Joshua Steele, who arrived in Barbados in 1780 to take personal control of his plantations. Influenced by Enlightenment and abolitionist principles, he was determined to encourage a new style of improved plantation management that, he hoped, would eventually culminate in the end of slavery. But his success was very limited; the local planters were almost universally hostile to his vision and determined to see it fail. In their view, Steele’s philosophy undermined the central tenet of their society, white supremacy; it also eroded the power of their paternalism, and encouraged slaves to become more demanding, which they felt would
make everyone discontented. His attempt to bequeath his fortune to his enslaved partner and two children in order to guarantee their lifestyle and education was a failure because slaves could not inherit property. (The gesture also proved to his fellow planters how beyond the pale Steele actually was.)
It would be nice to credit Robert Cooper with being a benign, liberal slave owner. But there is no evidence to suggest that was the case. Had he pioneered some progressive scheme to eliminate exploitation from plantation life, it would certainly have been recorded in the accounts of the period, since such behaviour was so rare. Indeed, Robert Cooper had a reputation for being a canny planter who made sure he extracted the maximum profits from his property, be it land or slaves. So it is almost inevitable that the crop at Burkes was harvested at the usual cost of beatings and brutality and that Robert Cooper resorted to the full panoply of intimidatory violence that most planters employed.
Some contemporary commentators speculated on why the atmosphere of the colonies was capable of reducing civilized Europeans to brutes. The abolitionist James Stephen, for example, wondered why men who were “
conspicuously liberal and humane” changed their “moral character” when they settled in the West Indies. His explanation was straightforward: they were corrupted by the system they were forced to become part of:
Annoyed and irritated by those vices which slavery very rarely fails to produce in its degraded subjects, they have recourse to the established modes of correction: at first they do so with reluctance, and sparingly; but are soon persuaded that severer discipline is necessary; and every successive infliction of punishment, rubs off something of that humane sensibility with which they at first set out; till at length they acquire the common apathy, and the common aversion, towards that unfortunate class.
Typical of this change of heart was Governor Fenlon, who wrote in 1764: “I arrived in Martinique with all the prejudices of Europe against the harshness with which the Negroes are treated,” but after a short stay
he declared that “the safety of the whites requires that the Negroes be treated like animals.”
As Fenlon’s words suggest, at the root of it all was fear. Colonial whites worried that those mighty arms, which could chop with one stroke straight through a bundle of canes, might one day put the blade to their throats; that the hands that prepared their food might one mealtime sprinkle it with poison; that their domestic slaves might one night rise up and murder them in their beds.
Guilt, suppressed and unacknowledged, also played a part, but the moral transformation displayed by so many colonists was also due to something else altogether: the soul-corroding effect that such absolute power over their fellow human beings had on them. In the colonies a white man could do things that he could do virtually nowhere else. If he had a sadistic streak he could indulge it here with impunity; if he wished to rape or beat or sodomize a black man, woman or child there was little anyone could or would do to stop him. The colonies became Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness,” some of the few places in the world where individuals were entirely free to indulge their ugliest impulses without the normal social constraints. This total power corrupted locals and newcomers alike, distorting their personalities and turning them into beasts.
As Frederick Douglass eloquently put it:
The slaveholder, as well as the slave, is the victim of the slave system. A man’s character greatly takes its hue and shape from the form and colour of things about him. Under the whole heavens there is no relation more unfavourable to the development of honourable character, than that sustained by the slaveholders to the slave. Reason is imprisoned here, and passions run wild.
Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women. Super added to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings and mortifications peculiarly their own.
—
HARRIET JACOBS, AMERICAN SLAVE
SLAVERY DID NOT EXIST
just on Robert Cooper’s land; it permeated the intimacy of his home, his family and his bed. The great house was the hub of the plantation, and more than 10 per cent of the enslaved population at Burkes worked there as domestics. The atmosphere in the great house was like that of a royal court, with people coming and going in search of favours and carrying out errands. So Burkes was constantly busy, alive with intrigue and suspicion, gossiping and bickering. In an attempt to obviate their powerlessness, the slaves acted like courtiers, collecting information, lobbying for position and status, attempting to shore up their position and further their interests. Meanwhile the Ashbys behaved like any royals, believing that they had the inalienable right to know all the details of their subjects’ existence, dispensing rewards and punishment, even meddling in their slaves’ personal affairs, with the justification that every child that was born and survived on the plantation added to their wealth. Thus the slaves who worked at Burkes’ great house were inextricably entangled in every aspect of the Ashby family’s daily—and nightly—life.
This lack of privacy surprised and exasperated newcomers to plantation life, as Matthew Lewis commented:
The greatest drawback upon one’s comfort in a Jamaica existence seems to me to be being obliged to live perpetually in public … The houses are absolutely transparent; the walls are nothing but windows—and all the doors stand wide open. No servants are in waiting
to announce arrivals visitors, negroes, dogs, cats, poultry, all walk in and out and up and down your living-rooms, without the slightest ceremony.
He added on another occasion: “
Certainly, if a man was desirous of leading a life of vice here, he must have set himself totally above shame, for he may depend upon everything done being seen and known.” According to the historian Karl Watson, this intimacy was particularly marked in Barbados: “Both blacks and whites knew each other well. The point is clearly illustrated by the advertisements issued for runaway slaves, in which precise details of physical features, residential location and social relationships are stated.”
Living in such close proximity, sexual encounters between the owners and the owned were almost inevitable, and this was a feature of life at Burkes as it was on most plantations. The result was a complicated extended family, with Robert Cooper at its nucleus, which was a product of his relationships with numerous female slaves ranging from the casually exploitative to the passionate and long term. By the time the entire web had been spun it included at least five women and seventeen children. These relationships were not necessarily sequential; many of them overlapped with one another, so at any one time Robert Cooper would have been juggling a number of concubines alongside his legitimate relationship with his wife, Mary Ashby.