Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Voices in Exile

CARIBBEAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOHISTORY

L. Antonio Curet, Series Editor

Voices in Exile

Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Edited by Jean D’Costa and Barbara Lalla

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 1989

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Voices in exile.

     Bibliography: p.

     1. Creole dialects, English—Jamaica—Texts.

I.    D’Costa, Jean, 1937–   .        II.      Lalla, Barbara, 1949–   .

PM7874.J3V65   1989         427'.97292         87-13267

ISBN 0-8173-0382-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8173-5566-1 (pbk : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8403-6 (electronic)

To F. G. Cassidy,

whose love of Jamaican Creole

has helped to retrieve the words

of many lost tongues

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Pre-Emancipation: The 18th Century

Grace before Rats

Francis Williams, a Double Exile

Franciscus Williams, To . . . George Haldane, Esq., An Ode

Welcome, Welcome, Brother Debtor

J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners

If Me Want fe Go in a Ebo

Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin

Tajo! My Mackey Massa!

Polite Conversation

Yellow Snake

Robert Charles Dallas, The History of the Maroons

One Wife Too Many

Married without Swear

2. Pre-Emancipation: The 19th Century

George Ross, Diary

The Maroons Defrauded

Captain Hugh Crow, Memoirs

Old Shipmates Meet

Recollections of the Middle Passage

Partners: The African Traders

The Welcome in Kingston

Walter Jekyll, Editor, Jamaican Song and Story

Dry-bone

Matthew G. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor

The Runaway

Song of the King of the Eboes

Mammy Luna: A Nancy Story

The Old Woman with No Head

Carry Him Along!

Cynric R. Williams, A Tour through the Island of Jamaica

Sermon at a Slave’s Funeral

Ebenezer in the Bilboes

Ebenezer and the Mules

Buckra Parson

Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica

Rat Good fe Nyam

A Flogging

White Creoles at a Ball

De Black Man’s Lub Song (Caricature and Verse). Sketched and Written by a Native Artist

Michael Scott, Tom Cringle’s Log

Quacco’s Graveside

Sergeant Heavystern

John Canoe

A Dispute over Breakfast

[Bernard Martin Senior], Jamaica, as It Was, as It Is, and as It May Be, by a Retired Military Officer

Turning Out

A Rebel’s Appeal

3. Apprenticeship: 1834–1838

Edward Bean Underhill, The Life of James Mursell Phillippo

A Prayer on Emancipation Day

James Mursell Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State

Answering Charges

Born Again

Between Two Masters

4. Post-Emancipation: 1838 and Beyond

Richard Robert Madden, A Twelvemonth Residence in the West Indies

Chant at a Funeral

A Letter Written by Abū Bakr of Timbuktu

Dead Planters, Ruined Plantations

Narrative of the Cruel Treatment of James Williams, A Negro Apprentice in Jamaica from 1st August, 1834, Till the Purchase of His Freedom in 1837 by Joseph Sturge, Esq., of Birmingham, by Whom He Was Brought to England

Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of Character of the Negro Population

Lovey’s Song

The Reverend R. Banbury, Jamaica Superstitions; or, The Obeah Book

Token Show

Song of the Shadow-Catchers

Obeah-pulling Songs

Return of the Obeahmen

Henry G. Murray, Manners and Customs of the Country a Generation Ago: Tom Kittle’s Wake

William George Hamley, Captain Clutterbuck’s Champagne

Domingo Visits the Clergyman

Mourners

The Creole and the African

Leander and the Daddy

C[harles] Rampini, Letters from Jamaica

The Old Servant

Annancy and Tiger

Why Hawks Eat Fowls

Grace

Notes

Glossary

Select Bibliography

Illustrations

Planting the sugarcane

Map of Jamaica in the late eighteenth century

No use me ill, Obisha

Negro Dance

Black Sailors

Captain Hugh Crow

Stowage of the British slaveship Brookes under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788

Stocks for hands and feet

Slave wearing iron collar with spikes

De Black Man’s Lub Song

Attack of the Rebels on the Old Works at Montpelier

iddīq pursued studies in the Koran

Abū Bakr’s route to the coast

Make haste with the Sangaree

Women in the field

The treadmill

Lovey

Market scene

Funeral practices of the slaves

Acknowledgments

In the preparation of this volume, the editors have been aided by the willing advice and help of many scholars and librarians. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the National Library of Jamaica and of John Aarons in particular; Mrs. Alvona Alleyne and the staff of the Libraries of the University of the West Indies at Mona and at St. Augustine; Joan Wolek and the staff of the Burke Library, Hamilton College, New York; the late Reverend Philip Hart and the staff of the Institute of Jamaica; Mrs. Beverley Alleyne and the staff of the African-Caribbean Institute, Kingston, Jamaica; and Ann Darling and the staff of the Audio-Visual Department of Hamilton College.

We also acknowledge our gratitude to the British Library, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the Library and Museum of the Royal Engineers; the Library of Louisiana State University; the Library of Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone; the Library of the United Theological College of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica; the Library of Memphis State University; and the Bermuda National Archives.

The work and encouragement of the remarkable folklorist, the late H. P. Jacobs, played an important role in the framing of this collection, as did the advice of Olive Lewin, musicologist and folk historian. Dr. C. Duncan Rice gave very useful criticisms while we were editing the manuscript, and Mrs. Elsie Aarons moved the research along with much practical help and encouragement. Professor Keith Laurence kindly granted us access to the papers of the late Dr. Kemling Laurence. We must also thank the Audio-Visual Department of Hamilton College for invaluable assistance with the preparation of maps and prints.

The support of our institutions—the University of the West Indies and Hamilton College—gave us the means and opportunity to gather the material and to go through the lengthy process of organizing it. Barbara Lalla was aided by Research and Publications funding and a staff development grant from the University of the West Indies, and Jean D’Costa received a Gertrude Flesh Bristol Fellowship in 1984–85, and generous support for travel to the United Kingdom and the Caribbean.

Introduction

This volume brings together a strange choir of voices: slaves, masters, and sundry onlookers. They have been assembled so as to give voice and witness to an even stranger event, the birth of a creole culture in Jamaica. This event has been chronicled by historians and discussed by scholars, but the evidence of witnesses remains primary. Anyone who wishes to understand either the past or the present of this most curious culture needs to listen to its distinctive voice, and the editors will stand aside as much as possible so as to allow the extracts to speak for themselves. The society of which they speak came about through a unique pattern of events: the voices of the past therefore offer singular testimony to singular circumstances.

The plantation societies of the New World began as deliberate manufactures by the Old, created for the sole purpose of profit and with only the most cursory idea of anything that would not contribute to this end. For their European creators they were simply vast factories designed to cater to the needs of their faraway owners, and what consequences this design might have upon the human grist needed for its operation was considered in only the simplest and most utilitarian terms.

For the newcomers to this land the consequences were immediate. First, there was the fact of exile. The experience of exile is central to Jamaican history and to the making of language in a Jamaica which spelled banishment for most of its people. Every island’s but a prison / strongly guarded by the sea, sang the black Francis Williams in the eighteenth century, and if the physical terms of the sentences were different for some exiles, the consequences could be ironically similar for all. Africans and Europeans both had to contend with the loss of a familiar past and with a new country that offered nothing to replace the uprooted spiritual needs of its recent arrivals and that extended instead only a crude code of conduct for the production of sugar. The physical condition of the slave might be vastly worse than that of his overseer, but both were prey to a profound sense of alienation and both strove to adapt or escape in the ways that have become the peculiar Jamaican culture.

The tropics are hostile to the human past. The alliance of climate and flora and insect makes short work of monuments and relics, but in Jamaica the destruction of the past has been even more absolute than unaided nature might contrive. When the first Spaniard arrived at the end of the fifteenth century there had been a primitive but stable civilization that reached back seven hundred years. Native Americans, the Arawaks, had settled in the land of wood and water, Xaymaca, as hunters, fishermen, and farmers. They had evolved a stable system of social organization: their villages were ruled by headmen answerable to caciques, or provincial chiefs; the people worshipped ancestral spirits as well as two supreme gods, a male and a female; Arawak economy depended on agriculture and some overseas trade.¹ Famine seems not to have troubled these people: their wants were simple and they were able to treat strangers with generosity, as Columbus and the Spanish discovered.

The Arawaks were repaid by the stockade, the musket, and the whip. In scarcely more than a hundred years, the entire Arawak population had vanished: new diseases, forced labor, enslavement, and cultural chaos erased them utterly. Their only remnants were a few words (Liguanea, iguana), a few village middens, and the contents of graveyards left to be pondered by modern archaeologists. All that a newcomer of 1720 or 1800 might hear of them would be those few names and faint rumors of a people lost even to legend and superstition. No Arawak duppies walk the hills of Jamaica.

The Spanish survived the Arawaks by a century and a half, during which they began to bring enslaved Africans to establish their struggling plantations. It was to no avail; prosperity eluded them and by 1655 the English found an impoverished and underpopulated colony, which they seized without difficulty. The last Spaniards withdrew, and once again, the island seemed to expunge memory. The only ties to that past would be a few Hispanic place names, a handful of blacks called Maroons, and an equally small community of Sephardic Jews.

The British succeeded where the Spaniards had failed. By the middle of the eighteenth century they had transformed Jamaica into one of their most prosperous colonies and were producing coffee, dyeing woods, hard woods, and ginger as well as rum, molasses, and sugar. During this period the white population fell behind the influx of African slaves, and the social landscape of the island was decisively altered as the small settlements under white labor gave way to large holdings dependent on the blacks. African slavery had become the key to the prosperity of the plantation society.

The shock of introduction to this new society proved fatal to many. European graves remain to testify to the culling effects of the climate and disease, and the planters recorded grievous losses of human property as the new Africans made their first acquaintance with bacterial pneumonias, tuberculosis, and smallpox. Some Africans avoided these plagues and elected instead to kill themselves by eating dirt: such was the explanation given for geophagy, a deficiency disease syndrome.

The effort to transform the captured African into serviceable property began with a semiformalized three-year period known as seasoning, in which each newcomer was manacled to an experienced slave, whose daily routine was then followed of necessity. At the same time, pains were taken to separate tribal groups and to fracture family ties. The new arrivals were methodically stripped of such spiritual possessions and introduced to a new language—of which, more later—as well as to the utilitarian rules of the plantation.

Even the most comfortable circumstances the island might afford were no defense against the pervasive alienation that lurked in this deceitful dreadful climate with its blue skies and lilac-coloured mountains, as Maria Nugent confided to her Journal.²

I cannot tell what it is, but this climate has a most extraordinary effect upon me; I am not ill, but every object is, at times, not only uninteresting, but even disgusting. I feel a sort of inward discontent and restlessness, that are perfectly unnatural to me.—At moments, when I exert myself, I go even beyond my usual spirits; but the instant I give way, . . . despondency takes possession of my mind.³

Maria Nugent, wife of the new governor, had been in Jamaica for a month when she wrote those words in 1801. Her seasoning had just begun.

Few were prepared for the cultural isolation of Jamaican life. The Europeans found themselves prisoners in a small scattering of whites surrounded by blacks in servitude. The angst that preyed upon the Europeans—Everything is too much. . . . Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near—drove them in various directions.⁴ Some were maddened, some weakened and died (by their own means or with assistance from rum or disease), but most sought relief in the memories of a distant home and the hope of eventual return. They consoled themselves with the belief that they could eventually achieve the prosperity required to return to that distant place from which power, respectability, and recognition derived.

For the African, the hope of return had to take a different form. Far away inna chookoo, that distant land of the ancestral spirits, there awaited them the true home of the soul into which they would be released by death. Many tales and accounts of funerary rites among Africans and creole blacks bear the traces of these beliefs, as we see in the encounter between the African and the creole in Hamley’s novel (see chapter 4, this volume) and, very explicitly, in the following funeral chant recorded in Michael Scott’s Tom Cringle’s Log (see chapter 2, this volume):

I say, broder, you can’t go yet.

. . . When da morning star rise, den we put you in a hole.

. . . Den you go in a Africa, you see Fetish dere.

. . . You shall nyam goat dere? wid all your family.

. . . Buccra can’t come dere; say, dam rascal, why you no work?

. . . Buccra can’t catch Duppy, no, no.

Even as late as 1877, the brown Jamaican Henry G. Murray could publish reminiscences of creole funerals in which the notion of reunion through death formed a major theme in chants and rituals: O! Tom, boy, gone before, o! / If we dead or lib, o! / We mammy [Mother Earth] want we, o! (see chapter 4, this volume). In the same passage, the dying owner of Tom Kittle gives precise instructions to Tom, hero of the narrative, as to his obsequies:

Tom, he said, I lef you free.—I lef ebery ting fe you. All my fish pot, an my cast net an my seine, and my turckle net, and my paddle, and my harpoon, and my fishing line—ebery ting fe you. I lef [my boat] fe you. I know you will care her, Tom; and look ya, Tom, when you feel say you gwine go dead mash her up and turn her adrift. Dont mek no man handle my canoe. Ef you don’t do dat, Tom, I wi bex wid you, and when you come yonder I won’t glad fee see you." Thus Old John died.

Not all Africans were willing to seek relief from an intolerable situation by looking to a spiritual release. A more practical bent is revealed by the occurrence of more slave revolts and rebellions in Jamaica than in any other British colony; not even in the slave states of the American South would there be such attempts to break the shackles.

It was precisely this nightmare of slave rebellion which drove the planters to uproot and destroy the language and the customs of their new slaves. The Europeans were well aware that the incomprehensible tongues of their reluctant property could be the means of subversive communication. And there was another and equally pressing reason to dissolve the differing African languages into a common medium: how else could speakers of Mende, Hausa, Bambara, Twi, Wolof, and a dozen other languages (as unlike to each other as Russian is to German) possibly hope to work together on the plantation?

And here we come to a mystery. The earliest written records and reports we have of this new Jamaican language date from 1740 and, though fragmentary, are recognizably the Creole tongue which is heard to this day in the island. Linguistic scholars are virtually unanimous in agreeing that the development of the Creole must be preceded by a pidgin, which is defined as a strictly utilitarian language designed for the simplest needs of trade and communication. Such a process occurs under strictly defined conditions: speakers of mutually unintelligible languages must be bound together in a workplace where—usually—one language group dominates all others. Communication in the workplace (which may be factory, field, or fort) is determined by the narrow needs of labor. The pidgin is