Trevor Burnard HEARING SLAVES SPEAK with an Introduction by Trevor Burnard

HEARING SLAVES SPEAK i Trevor Burnard HEARING SLAVES SPEAK with an Introduction by Trevor Burnard First published © The Caribbean Press 2010 Series Preface © Bharrat Jagdeo 2010 Introduction © Trevor Burnard Cover design by Cristiano Coppola All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission Published by The Caribbean Press for the Government of Guyana This publication was made possible by the financial support of the Peepal Tree Press (Leeds), the Lord Gavron Trust and the Government of Guyana ISBN 978-1-907493-17-1 ii THE GUYANA CLASSICS LIBRARY Series Preface by the President of Guyana, H.E. Bharrat Jagdeo General Editor: David Dabydeen Associate Editor: Trevor Burnard Consulting Editor: Ian McDonald Director of Research: Letizia Gramaglia iii iv SERIES PREFACE Modern Guyana came into being, in the Western imagination, through the travelogue of Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of Guiana (1595). Ralegh was as beguiled by Guiana’s landscape (“I never saw a more beautiful country…”) as he was by the prospect of plunder (“every stone we stooped to take up promised either gold or silver by his complexion”). Ralegh’s contemporaries, too, were doubly inspired, writing, as Thoreau says, of Guiana’s “majestic forests”, but also of its earth, “resplendent with gold.” By the eighteenth century, when the trade in Africans was in full swing, writers cared less for Guiana’s beauty than for its mineral wealth. Sugar was the poet’s muse, hence the epic work by James Grainger The Sugar Cane (1764), a poem which deals with subjects such as how best to manure the sugar cane plant, the most effective diet for the African slaves, worming techniques, etc. As John Singleton confessed (in his General Description of the West Indies, 1776), there was no contradiction between the manufacture of odes and that of sugar: “…a fine exuberant plant, which clothes the fields with the richest verdure. There is, I believe, scarcely any cultivation which yields so lucrative a return per acre as under favourable circumstances, than that of the sugar cane. So bountiful a gift of Providence seems not only calculated to call forth the activity and enterprise of the agriculturalist and merchant, but to awaken also feelings of a higher and more refined enthusiasm.” The refinement of art and that of sugar were one and the same process. The nineteenth century saw the introduction of Indian indentureship, but as the sugar industry expanded, literary works contracted. Edward Jenkins’ novel Lutchmee and Dilloo (1877) was the only substantial fiction on Guiana, and whilst it was broadly sympathetic to the plight of Indian labourers, it was certain of Britain’s imperial destiny, and rights over mineral v resources. It was not until the period leading up to Guiana’s Independence from Britain (1966) and the subsequent years, that our own writers of Amerindian, African, Asian and European ancestry (A.J. Seymour, Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, Edgar Mittelholzer, Martin Carter, Rajkumari Singh et al.) attempted to purify literature of its commercial taint, restoring to readers a vision of the complexity of the Guyanese character and the beauty of the Guyanese landscape. The Guyana Classics Library will republish out-of-print poetry, novels and travelogues so as to remind us of our literary heritage, and it will also remind us of our reputation for scholarship in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology and politics, through the reprinting of seminal works in these subjects. The Series builds upon previous Guyanese endeavours, like the institution of CARIFESTA and the Guyana Prize. I am delighted that my government has originated the project and has pledged that every library in the land will be furnished with titles from the Series, so that all Guyanese can appreciate our monumental achievement in moving from Exploitation to Expression. If the Series becomes the foundation and inspiration for future literary and scholarly works, then my government will have moved towards fulfilling one of its primary tasks, which is the educational development of our people. President Bharrat Jagdeo vi HEARING SLAVES SPEAK TREVOR BURNARD The Guyana Classics Library vii viii INTRODUCTION It is very difficult to hear West Indian slaves speak in the historical archive. Most were illiterate and thus unable to leave written records, not just in the harshest phases of African slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also in the years of amelioration covered by the material in this book. This period, following the end of the Atlantic slave trade, was marked by a supposed softening of the slave system and an increased concern among metropolitan Britons about how slave life and conditions were affecting slaves in the West Indies.1 Even if slaves had been literate, as so few were, they were always constrained by being in close contact with masters and mistresses, all of whom were supported by the coercive powers of the state. As James C. Scott states in his explorations of how the oppressed enter into discourse with oppressors, it is very rare that we catch a glimpse of what Scott calls the “private transcript” of the oppressed, what peasants or enslaved persons said to each other when their masters were not around or when representatives of power did not monitor and judge their words.2 It is close to impossible, therefore, to hear slaves speak freely, in voices unmediated by the context in which they found themselves. The records outlined below do not provide such unmediated reflections by slaves upon their condition. They are records created by official authorities as part of a governmental judicial process. But they do provide a rich, close to unparalleled, source of evidence about the contours of slave experience. They give us a good guide to the moral economy of enslaved people: what they considered their rights, what they thought they owed their owners and what their owners owed them, and what actions they thought so egregious that they would walk long distances to put forward their complaints to the Fiscal.3 This set of records helps us gain a rare entree into the world of enslaved people in Berbice in the ix 1820s and 1830s, to their hopes and fears, and to the particular constraints and opportunities that they faced.4 I have taken ninety-two cases presented before the Fiscal between 1819 and 1832, drawing them nearly at random from the voluminous records of the Fiscal of Berbice held in Colonial Office Series 116 at The National Archives, Kew, London, in order for readers to gain some perspective on the strange world of Berbice slavery in the dying years of slavery in the British Empire.5 I hope these records will contribute to a more complete understanding of the multifaceted realities of slavery in early nineteenth century Berbice, one of three colonies that became British Guiana in 1831. These records illustrate, through the complaints of slaves – complaints about overwork and excessive punishment, righteous indignation about ill-treatment of family members, accusations of petty criminality and sometimes charges of severe criminality, such as rape and, in a particularly interesting case, of obeah – how slavery operated in the British West Indies and how enslaved people negotiated their way through the uncomfortable situations that they found themselves in. What is most important about the documents that form the basis of this book is that they reveal enslaved people as real people, as individuals who often quarrelled with each other but whom, it seems, shared similar aspirations and dreams about the lives they might be able to fashion for themselves. Responses from the white minority, usually as defendants, not only confirm slaves’ humanity and individuality, but also reveal the irony of a society where African Americans often responded to their environment in a variety of idiosyncratic ways, while their white owners and managers were constrained by the duty of solidarity, forever conscious of their numerical inferiority and the need to present consistent and homogenous opposition to demands from slaves. It is the voices of enslaved people, speaking through these records, that inspired the title of “Hearing Slaves Speak.” Before reading these cases, however, we should examine more closely the kind of documents that make up the Fiscal’s Records, and the social character of Berbice in the 1820s when these records were created. The Fiscal’s Records The Fiscal’s Records for Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo are contained with 24 large volumes kept at The National Archives x in Kew, London. Overall, they contain perhaps 10,000 pages of information. In this volume, I have sampled records from only a few of the 24 volumes still extant – volumes 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 147, and 148. Readers should be aware that masses of equally interesting or representative stories from the Fiscal’s reports from these and other volumes are not included here, demonstrating the richness of the sources available. Indeed, the Fiscal’s reports are that rare commodity, a virtually unused body of raw evidence about life under slavery for West Indian slaves.6 This book is intended as an introduction to the riches that are contained in these records. I have confined my attention to records from Berbice, in part because the range of records in respect of Berbice is especially large. Nevertheless, there are abundant records about Demerara in the 1820s that will also be of use to the researcher and student. The Fiscal’s Records come in several forms.7 Perhaps the most valuable records are the manuscript and printed copies of complaints made, mostly by enslaved people, to the Fiscal about matters that outraged them. That many things outraged them can be seen in the wide variety in types of complaints that are listed in the ninety-two cases outlined below.

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