Caribbean Historiography and Dennis Scott's an Echo in the Bone

1 Repossessing the Slave Past: Caribbean Historiography and Dennis Scott’s An Echo in the Bone John Thieme The potential of a country is the mass of its people. (Derek Walcott, Drums and Colours1) During the 1990s I worked in Hull, where in the Old Town the iconic presence of William Wilberforce looms large. Wilberforce sits atop the city’s equivalent of Nelson’s Column and the Wilberforce House in cobbled High Street, now very much a back street, has been the home to a museum, which, for a century, has curated the story of Atlantic slavery and the work of Wilberforce and his associates in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. Hull’s museums have strong proletarian traditions. The Old Grammar School, where Andrew Marvell and Wilberforce were once pupils, houses an exhibition of “The Story of Hull and Its Peoples” that devotes most of its space to a narrative of the social history of the city, memorializing the lives of its ordinary inhabitants rather than such luminaries as Marvell and Wilberforce. However, not surprisingly, the Wilberforce House Museum, the finest and best-preserved seventeenth-century residence in Hull, has been concerned with chronicling the life of the single most important figure in the abolitionist struggle. Until recently it offered a two-part story of slavery. Visitors were exposed to the horrors and brutality of the trade and the conditions on New World plantations, particularly through a gruesome three- dimensional mock-up of the hold of a Middle Passage ship, complete with sound effects in the form of the groans of slaves. Then, after this journey through trauma, they progressed into a more redemptive narrative, viewing exhibits that illustrated 2 ways in which Wilberforce and his Evangelical contemporaries pursued their campaign to eradicate the trade. To commemorate the bicentenary of abolition, the museum’s exhibits have been expanded as part of a development project that has redirected emphasis by highlighting the African perspective and exploring contemporary issues. This change of focus seems salutary. One does not want to dispute the abolitionist narrative, simply to say that, if history rewrites the present, shifting the emphasis, so that the story is told from the side of those who were the victims of one of the most inhumane episodes in world history provides a more appropriate perspective. It would be invidious if commemorating the bicentenary privileged abolition at the expense of the horrors that occurred. Serious narratives of other “unspeakable” chapters in human history, such as the Holocaust have not generally placed their main stress on the forces that brought them to an end and in this respect the historiography of slavery runs the risk of being exceptional, even if popular representations of other genocides, including films such as The Killing Fields (1984), Schindler’s List (1993) and Hotel Rwanda (2004), have centred their attention on individual stories of rescue. Down the road from the Georgian Wilberforce House, there is another historical building: a modest back-street pub called “Ye Olde Black Boy”. It dates from the early eighteenth century, but its history is less well documented. It became a pub in the twentieth century, after reputedly having previously been a coffee house and a brothel. The provenance of the pub’s name is particularly uncertain. Although a major port from the medieval period onwards, Hull, unlike Liverpool and Bristol, was not a terminus for the triangular trade; facing East, its commerce was mainly with mainland Europe. So, while the presence of a single real-life “black boy” is very conceivable, the name would seem to attest to a different situation from those in the 3 West coast ports. Hull is a town which, despite the Wilberforce legacy, has historically been more monocultural than most British cities, albeit a location in which European migrants have frequently shored up. What is known about the “black boy”? One theory has it that he was a Moroccan, who worked in the building when it was a coffee house in the eighteenth century. The rest is rumour and prominent among the rumours is a popular tradition that the pub is haunted. So, altogether less celebrated than the Wilberforce House, the pub is nevertheless something of a heritage site in itself, but it attests to a history of silence, anecdote and rumour. A silence which perhaps haunts the very well-documented, humanitarian work of William Wilberforce. The restaging of the Wilberforce House exhibits is thankfully going some way to remedying the occlusion of the African side of the story and in this essay I should like to consider work by Caribbean dramatists, which also re-envisions slave-related experiences in ways that suggest the inadequacy of the abolitionist narrative unless it is complemented by an engagement with the African legacy. After some brief remarks on Derek Walcott’s 1993 Walker, originally a libretto set in nineteenth- century Boston, my main focus is on Dennis Scott’s 1974 play, An Echo in the Bone, which develops a brilliant strategy to demonstrate how the slave past permeates its twentieth-century Jamaican present. The task of recuperating the silenced voices of history’s dispossessed is, of course, never easy and sometimes nigh-on impossible; and in this case the cliché that history is written by the victors is an understatement, since the victims of the trade and plantation slavery seldom had any access to the written word at all, unless, like Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Phillis Wheatley, their writing was used to argue the abolitionist case. And even today, at this bicentennial moment, the story of African slavery continues to be told in tandem with accounts of abolition which, 4 not unreasonably given their focus, accord equal space to British reformers. In Murray Watts’s acclaimed recent play African Snow (2007),2 for example, Equiano is thrown into dialogue with John Newton, the reformed slave-trader, who in later life assisted Wilberforce and is now best remembered as the composer of the hymn “Amazing Grace”. Newton is another abolitionist whose memory has been only too well curated by a British museum, the Cowper and Newton Museum in Olney. Equiano less so? Not altogether. He, too, has been given a voice, then and now, but primarily as a vicarious, iconic spokesman for his mute African contemporaries and in a context that has been dependent on the work of the abolitionists. When the slaves and the freed diasporic Africans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were literate, the pressure to comply with the gradualist tactics favoured by many white abolitionists often led to a dilution of their protests. Derek Walcott dramatizes their dilemma in Walker, originally a libretto commissioned by the Boston Athenaeum for an opera by T.J. Anderson and subsequently revised as a play with music by Walcott’s long-time collaborator Galt MacDermot.3 The first scene of Walker includes a dialogue between the historical figures of its hero, the black abolitionist David Walker, and the Irish abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Set at Thanksgiving in 1830, in the years between the abolition of the trade in the U.S. (in 1808) and Emancipation, this dialogue debates the relative merits of gradualist and militant approaches to ending slavery. Garrison counsels the literate and highly articulate Walker against publishing what he sees as a seditious text,4 while a chorus locates Walker’s vision in the context of such African American pathfinders as the painters Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin and Romare Bearden as work in the true “American grain”.5 Walker is at its most effective in stylized passages such as the 5 following, which underline the revolutionary potential of black print as a means for voicing African retentions in the snow-white world of Boston: I was walking alone through a forest of black trees whose leaves were like print, but their language was different and the leaves were letters I had learnt but forgotten from the African kingdoms, and I was lost and not lost. […] I was remembering an alphabet from a language I did not know, then I looked outside the window and the drums no longer beat, and saw Boston smothered in snow […].6 The emphasis on the scribal in passages like this clearly speaks to the continued need to give voice to African American experience as part of the fight against slavery in the period after the abolition of the trade. Walcott’s Walker is silenced – apparently poisoned to collect a bounty placed on his head, as, “rumour” has it, he was in real life7 – but the dramatic reconstruction of his last hours revives and articulates his uncompromising message and ultimately Garrison is no more than a bit-player in a production that places Walker centre-stage. With literacy comparatively rare among the slaves in the southern American states and the anglophone Caribbean, orally transmitted histories became the main conduits for preserving, transforming and revivifying African-derived cultural practices. However, these potent storehouses of ancestral memories more frequently functioned as repositories of communal strength and survival rather than as testimonies to the atrocities of the slave trade and slavery. In the mid twentieth- century Caribbean, the era in which Walcott and Dennis Scott were coming of age, slavery remained the unspoken Ur-narrative of Afro-Caribbean life, as well as a crucial sub-text underlying the experience of Caribbean peoples of other ethnicities. George Lamming highlights the omission of slavery from the late colonial educational 6 curriculum in a memorable passage in his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953). A group of colonial schoolboys find it hard to believe that slavery ever existed in Barbados.

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