Understanding Race and Labour in Plantation Economies in Jamaica

Notes Toward Understanding Plantation Economies Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger Penguin Books, London 1992 and James A Delle: The Colonial Caribbean, Cambridge University Press:2014 “In later times, when commercial enterprise came to be a virtue in itself, and a good return on capital was blessing enough the need to invoke legitimacy was not so much felt, but the men around the table still felt it strongly.” ( Unsworth 1992:16) Kemp looked smilingly round the table. “And look what is happening to sugar,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you gentlemen what raw sugar is worth on the home market nowadays.’ He raised a hand and made a rapid sketch of a triangle in the air before him. “Three separate profits’, he said. “One in Africa, one in Jamaica, one back here. And each one better than the last.” (17) “…these were all Liverpool men. There could scarcely have been one of them who had not a full understanding of the Triangular Trade as it was called –cheap trade goods to Africa for the purchase of Negroes, these then carried to America or the West Indies and sold there; rum and tobacco and sugar bought with the proceeds and resold in England. Most of them were involved in the trade to some degree, as manufacturers, brokers or wholesalers.’ (17) Barry Unsworth was a coal miner’s son, from Durham, who went on to study in Manchester and taught in Cambridge. He won the Booker Prize in 1992, with the Sri Lankan diaspora writer living in Canade, Michael Ondatje, who won it for his novel, later made into a film called the English Patient, which is about a love that destroys the protagonists. It looks at British colonialism from the point of view of the inflammable loves and lives of expatriates caught in the tropics and imprisoned by their passion. Sacred Hunger is about the way in which slavery is the bases of plantation economies rendered volatile by the emotions of those caught in the warp and weft of greed and an accompanying servitude. The same themes, with parallel renderings of theatre and commercial calumny, are to be found in Marina Warner’s Indigo. For the purposes of understanding the repertoire of writers seeking to describe the history of exploitation and greed, we need to look at the self reflexivity of these authors. They are carriers of that huge warren of memory that allows us to negotiate with civilizational guilt, a record keeping of the brutality of British adventurers and traders before the administrators took over, before civil rights awareness about slavery took hold of the public imagination. It must be remembered that mission history begins around the same period, because the missionaries did not find a ready listening public in England. The abolition of slavery was part and parcel of missionary enterprise. Their countrymen were busy in taverns and did not heed the call to frugality and reform, so the missionary congress moved abroad attaching themselves to company servants and administrators who were not willing to give them the status that they had as members of the ruling class. The missionary movements thus first congregated around the pietist missionaries from Denmarkk and Germany in seeking to travel to India. Dennis Hudson’s monumental work on the Tranquebar Mission deals with questions of caste and language to help us understand the manner in which at a later time, Church Missionary Society in the early 19th century, had a baseline from which to work with in Serampore or in Kottayam. Unsworth, much in the style of the Ancient Mariner demands our attention of a ship journey through the Atlantic to Jamaica from Liverpool. He uses 630 pages to tell us a story of the late 18th century, before slavery was abolished. He describes the fate of these ‘negroes’ or ‘blacks’ who are captured by slave drivers from their homes and locked in the underbelly of the ship. These quarters cramp hundreds of them together, all manacled and half starved. They are separated by gender, with children being enclosed with their mothers. For half an hour a day they are brought on to the deck, where they are told to dance with their shackles on. The noise they make, the clanking of their chains, their collective misery is so terrible, that the fiddler deputized to play Irish songs for their dancing, complains to the ship’s captain that he cannot hear his tunes, and that affects his performance. These terms of continuous misery, to which the galley crew, as well as the slaves from Africa kidnapped for commercial reasons, become the subject of this literary work of immense magnitude. Barry Unsworth provides for us a valuable text for understanding questions of colour and hierarchy, the manner in which the dialects of the Scots and Irish is posed against the English spoken by Liverpool inhabitants as sailors and carpenters, and later the pidgin devised to access conversation between the different groups. The omnipresent narrator, who is the ship’s doctor, is the central figure in the book. The emotions, the conversations, the details of windcrossings and ocean tides, the manner in which people connect to one another through their personal dialects and forms of speech are all reflected through the log kept by the doctor in a free flowing hand, which does not limit itself to events but also to the dialectic of past and present as an ever arising confluence of contradictions. The Doctor has an interest in evolution, it is more than a scientific preoccupation, it is a passion. He used fossil remains to show that the earth is older than 6000 years, given in biblical lore, and he is so profoundly affected by his discovery and the corresponding literature that is emerging at that time, that he is thrown into jail. His ‘sin’ is that he has opposed the evolutionary principles outlined in the book of Genesis. Because of an idea that he is convinced about, he loses all his prosperity and the domestic spaces of tender conjugal love and the child his wife carries in her womb. Both die, he is freed from prison, because his uncle pays for his release. However, the tax is to accompany his uncle’s ship to Jamaica, where the commerce in slavery can be supported by the Doctor confirming for the commercial company owned by his uncle of the health of slaves bought and sold and resold. The Doctor carries with him the terrible guilt of his past, the loss of his lovely and tender wife Ruth and their first born child aborted by the horror of his imprisonment, and his mutilation in the stocks to which he was chained for a night before being jailed. He can never forget that it was ideas to which he held so passionately, in which he believed in as a geological and scientific truth which rent his life apart. When his uncle rescued him, and then bartered his future to the cause of slavery and commerce he felt that inviting his nephew to enter the family business was a logical consequence. The Doctor never imagined that the days in the company of run away thieves, captive drunkards and the ceaseless ranting in the holds of those who saw their lives not just as exploited but who fought among themselves would have such a deleterious impact on him. He notes everything carefully, keeping his log in a box, lacquered and precious which his aunt had given him before he sailed. It survives ship wreck, and later becomes the bases of the novel. Unsworth writes that there was a mulatto in the 1830s. who was a relic from the North Carolina plantations, who would roam in the pubs and taverns talking about his father, a white doctor. A journalist recorded his story, the collation was seen by Unsworth, but then it was lost, disappeared or crumbled as old papers do. Fiction represented itself as the way a real story, (that of a mulatto talking about Paradise) could reappear. So, in the ship’s hold was a beautiful slave, who helps to heal the Doctor. He sees her, and in his descriptions, she is the archetypically loose limbed, strong, exquisite of face and form. She recognizes his ardour. And among these slaves and free men all entangled in the torpor of a stinking ship, where the wind has stopped, but when they reach Florida, instead of Jamaica, there is retribution. The ship’s captain is killed, and a motley crew with slaves reaches the shore. There they invent for themselves a ‘free society’, a kind of primitive communism, where women are polyandrous, (or atleast bigamous) and bear children of slave fathers as well as white crew and the doctor recognizes his son among those born by his lover. The management of emotions in a free love society operated by consent and rules is the subject of the last sections of the book. They spend ten years in this situation, hidden away from the world, swearing to the rights of being human and equal. But into this paradise, comes the Doctor’s cousin, a merchant, who has had to face the calamities of his youth, including his father’s suicide. The ship lost at sea turns them into paupers, and he climbs the ladder by marrying a rich trader’s daughter and gives up his first love. This cousin has come to punish the sailors who jumped ship, and reclaim the slaves and their children, for they are to him property. The abhorrent situations in which the slaves find themselves in, when captured once again, is to place them back on the ship that their proprietor’s son has brought, and the Doctor dies in the mishap following being shot in his leg. He knows that the Paradise he had been a part of, where all were equal in the face of abundance was a fluke of nature. It was the way in which his sorrowful past had been brushed aside, and new possibilities of love and life had come to fruition. Death brings with it the end of a life, and yet, the jagged remembrance of a child sold to slavery, who grows old in the taverns of North Carolina becomes the fleeting way by which a life is retold almost 60 years after the Doctor was killed by the soldiers his cousin had brought for his capture. Unsworth suddenly closes the tale, by setting two men, who are not allied emotionally, but yet the tenderness of a childhood act of lifting a younger cousin above the waves becomes the nucleus of a passionate hatred that informs the betrayal and the shooting of the older cousin decades later. Life with its twists and turns only betrays the reader because Unsworth shows us that emotions are palimsests which we must continually unravel. Till such time, the narrator, like a playwright weaves the actors in different contexts, with different resolutions, the events remain opaque to us. The slaves were sold in North Carolina, and did not reach Jamaica. The plantation economies were dependent on slaves, and the mortality rate was huge, and they were quickly replaced by new ones. According to James A. Delle, in The Colonial Caribbean (2014) the African resource in the labour needed for plantations was replaced by labour from the basin of the Indian Ocean. This was because slavery had been abolished by parliament in 1807. From here, we can understand the rise of Indian indentured labour. ( Delle 2014: 55) “Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of African people had been brought to Jamaica to work the plantations, throughout the eighteenth century, Jamaica had experienced the incessant re-population of the plantations made possible by the African slave trade.” (55) The importation of slaves from Africa was no longer possible after 1807. The plantations were also dependent on the political connotations of the environment, as we know from the American Revolution and the Boston Tea Party. Taxes, costs and the profit motives were interdependent. Coffee had never had the popularity of tea, the British grew coffee in the highlands of Jamaica with access to the sea being variable. With the Napoleonic wars and the embargos on export to Europe they lost a major market.(55) Plantation owners saved money on slaves by encouraging them to grow their own food, and become subsistence farmers, (56). Farmers with small landholdings grew cocoa, indigo and food for themselves, but after their death, their land was usually usurped by wealthy planters who focused mono agriculture, namely sugar (59) The highlands became reserved for coffee, as sugar could not be grown there, and the famous Blue Mountain coffee developed under these plantation owners. The term plantation or mono agriculture became identified with colonialism(62). In the 16th century Ulster planters were settled in Jamaica, and the Protestant dissenters in America.(62). By the beginning of the 18th century, in the Carribean and SouthEastern America, plantations took on a new meaning. They referred to “a privately held agricultural estate, consisting of capitalized land and social labour harnessed for the material gain of the owners of the estates, the plantation proprietors’ (62). David Eltis and Martin Halbert have an important cyber data base in ‘slavevoyages’ (63). Eltis argues in a video interview, sponsored by Emory University, that in locating the places that slaves came from becomes difficult when personal names are lost by renaming on being purchased. Delle brings to our attention to the differences between the metropolitan elite who are buyers and consumers in cities like London, and the regional elites who are administrators and peripheral producers and managers in the colonies. They would include clerks, accountants, lawyers, doctors and other types of managers(65) The plantation system brought out a “racialised hierarchy” where labour could be fettered and not paid. To achieve planter status required purchase of land. “The planter class was subdivided by social ranking, particularly as that ranking applied to an individual’s relationship to the means of production. Heuristically, the planters can be divided into three overlapping groups. The most powerful was comprised of the proprietor who held legal title to plantations, as well as the attorneys who managed financial affairs of their own. A second group included overseers, who ran the daily operation of the estates, and their assistants (often called ‘bookkeepers’). The final groups included artisans, merchants doctors and other professions who lived in the urban centers but owned plantations (67). Till 1834, when slavery was legally abolished, the slaves were seen as mere commodities, and did not have the right to sell their labour power (68). The book keeper, or record keeper, was the man hired to keep day to day accounts of events,and often like Thomas Thistlewood put himself in the text giving an archival resource to the economic, domestic and sexual customs of plantation managerial staff (71). In the occupational mobility system book keepers sought to become overseers, as this allowed them privileges of keeping watch over slaves and controlling them, in the name of safe guarding the produce for the owners, who were often absentee landlords. (71) The overseer found it easy to classify slaves according to birth antecedents, so white, black and mulatto could be defined according to color (111). Delle writes, “In creating a “negro” or “black” race, the planters created simultaneously a “white” race. In the context of early 19th century Jamaica, this process of racialization not only created systems of symbolic definition of self, defined by physical characteristics, but used that system to maintain a class-based social structure in which access to the control of the forces of production was mediated by the definition of legal “whiteness” (111) .In between colonizing British and slaves were Jews, Indians and mulattoes all of whom were guarded by restrictions either against owning property or office, of having control over certain occupations. (111) There were ‘free black’ or ‘free colour’ but the British used sanctions to curtail their freedoms or access to civil rights which were seen as privileges. The planter class defined differences amongst themselves in terms of very structured rules of hospitality and social mobility, access to goods and services, and finally consent about how order between themselves would be maintained. (114) They created ‘colonial enclaves’ which were important to them in terms of shared understanding of consumption and leisure, and networking (115). There was a leveling principle which helped whites of all classes to bond in terms of their acceptance of duties, and involved rejection of the rights of slaves to freedom or equal worth. (115). To survive in the isolation of their plantations, networking was the most important feature. They had to meet and establish relations of reciprocity. Plantation houses became the grandest symbol of what they had achieved. The forms of socialization into the hierarchy and intimacy of slavery was necessary for the continuation of the system. In Jamaica, shared wharves became along with the shared hospitality of homes and sponsored tavern feasts became the major point of unity among the Blue Mountain planters, who had to descend to the sea coast to send off their produce (117). There were also the road managers, or ‘waywardens’ who were in charge of the roads from mountains to the beaches. They had to see to the pliability of the roads for which they were dependent on slave labour (124). This labour was procured through rotation from each plantation labour, and was responsible for moving boulders and clearing mud from the roads. By placing the work of a literary writer and an archaeologist of spatial uses in colonialism I have tried to show the weaving of two kinds of specialized narrative. Literature seeks to embolden the sensory aspect of historical reality. It brings to life those very people who walked the earth, and who are now long dead. It uses the embellishments of language to help us understand the cross cutting trajectories of a received memory, either from archives, early socialization in working class contexts, or the murmuring of memory as it rises in specialized study in a foreign university. Unsworth chose to study in Manchester, though he had the possibility equally of receiving a scholarship in Cambridge. That choice was integral to the way in which the intimacies of Cockney speaking Englishmen moves on to an understanding of Scottish and Irish dialects, and the animosities among themselves. In the end, in Paradise, the Doctor reverts suddenly to speak in the Queen’s English, and his comrades round on him in pidgin for betraying their community.