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Finding Enslaved Children’s Place, Voice, and Agency within the Narrative
Documentos relacionados a niños en los archivos de esclavos en Jamaica
By Colleen A. Vasconcellos
In this essay, I discuss the methodologies behind examining the nature of childhood within Jamaican slavery. By exploring children’s experiences through lenses like family, resistance, and culture, I argue that we give them a voice and agency by examining how they carved a place for themselves in the slave community.
En este ensayo, discuto las metodologías envueltas en la examinación de la naturaleza de la niñez dentro del contexto de la esclavitud Jamaiquina. Mediante la exploración de las experiencias infantiles a través de enfoques como la familia, resistencia, y la cultura, argumento que les otorgamos una voz y agencia al examinar cómo ellos han establecido un lugar para ellos mismos dentro de la comunidad esclava.
Children traditionally find themselves on the fringes of historical discourse. Not only was childhood itself a largely unrecognized stage of life until the early modern era, historians generally prefer to examine topics with greater archival meat. As would be expected, source material for any study of childhood can be limited when children are confined to the periphery. Sifting through archival sources for any bit of information can be laborious, time-consuming, and a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack. As a result, children largely remain silent players in the annals of history.
Source material for a study of the children of slaves is even more elusive. Already part of a marginalized group of people, enslaved children, for the most part, have been lost within the traditional treatments of Atlantic-world slavery—ones that categorically depict the enslaved as victims or voiceless statistics. Because most slaves were illiterate, only a minute fraction put their memories to paper. Furthermore, the complexities of history and memory being what they are, as well as the biases of the abolitionists who collected and helped to publish their stories after their freedom, the validity of those few narratives that we do have is questionable. The quantity and quality of evidence suffers even more from gaps in documentation, age, and environmental deterioration. Outside of accounts written (or related) by Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano, among others, we really do not have much to go on when reconstructing the experiences of enslaved children and youth. Needless to say, the majority of our sources are from the planters’ point of view.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, planters generally viewed the enslaved children on their estates as financial burdens because they had to be supported without any reciprocal contribution to the plantation economy. Planters largely believed that children were a huge risk with little to no investment potential, given the incredibly high infant- and child-mortality rates endemic on plantations throughout the Atlantic world. To estate bookkeepers, who often recorded only the overall number of slaves in their annual reports, enslaved children were an afterthought. Only when the abolitionist movement began to threaten the slave trade, and later slavery itself, did more children begin to appear in the inventories and tax rolls. Even then, children were merely commoditized and catalogued in their own column below a long list of adults.
This kind of attitude from a society that justified a system of race-based slave labor as a “necessary evil” is expected. Planters chose to see only numbers and profits, investments and trade potential, opting to inventory and stratify enslaved Africans and their descendants into groupings based on age, gender, occupation, and degrees of blackness. To them, enslaved children were a nuisance—that is, until the institution of slavery became increasingly threatened by the abolitionist movement, beginning in about the 1750s. Despite the fact that planters began to place more importance on the children laboring in their fields, the white community did not see children. They saw only chattel.
What is surprising, and also incredibly disappointing, is that historians largely ignore these children as well, refusing to see enslaved children as anything more than members of slave families and kinship groups. Cecily Jones has called this troubling gap in the historiography “striking” (92), and I agree. When children are discussed, their stories are mere postscripts to their mothers’ experiences as slaves. Not only does this fail to acknowledge that enslaved children have a unique story compared to their mothers’, families’, or even their kinship group’s narrative, but this coopting ultimately fails to recognize that these stories are significant to the study of the African diaspora in their own right. Such disregard for children’s experiences as slaves keeps their voices silent and perpetuates their position on the periphery.
By using enslaved children in Jamaica as a case study, this essay discusses how to find their agency in an effort to bring their experiences to the forefront and help them step out of the periphery. Whether African-born or creole, these children lived in an environment that constantly reinforced their status as chattel—a status defined by the nature of their work. If we look, however, we can see a life outside of that labor and begin to piece together a picture of their childhoods, albeit one surrounded by suffering, brutality, and death. We also begin to see how these children struggled and fought for survival in a world that refused to acknowledge and protect their childhoods, and how many children reacted to their enslavement through acts of resistance and violence. Ultimately, this essay examines the various ways in which enslaved children as a whole coped with the hardships of slavery and the realization that they were slaves by considering how they developed physically and psychologically within the plantation complex.
Finding Place
Despite the fact that our knowledge of child development in the slave villages is limited, archival sources do offer glimpses into the experiences of enslaved children on Jamaican estates during the slave era. What these sources reveal are experiences defined by instability, immense poverty, overwork, and death—experiences not unlike those suffered by the adults living and working alongside them. Enslaved children were expected to work twelve- to fifteen-hour days in the hot tropical sun or even longer in the great house, just like enslaved adults. When their work was slow, they suffered the lash just like adults. And they resisted their enslavement and their owners just like enslaved adults when they acted out, stole food, ran away, burned crops, destroyed equipment, and poisoned their owners.
As enslaved children transitioned from the nursery to the field at age five or six, from the children’s gang to the second gang at age eight or nine, and eventually to the first gang by age fifteen, the tasks they performed were designed to socialize progressively and acclimate them to their lives as slaves. As members of the children’s gang, they picked grass, tended livestock, carried cane husks from the boiling houses to the trash, washed clothes in lye, worked in hot kitchens, served meals, and waited on their masters’ every whim. Children who survived long enough to move to the second gang harvested sugar cane and other cash crops, dried tobacco, boiled cane juice into molasses, and refined this substance into sugar. On their transition to the first gang, enslaved children were expected to perform the same work at the same pace as the adults working alongside them.
Uncovering their childhoods within this narrative is no easy task, and that is probably the main reason why their experiences and stories have been overlooked. Beginning in September 2002, I spent ten months searching for their narratives in the archival collections held at three principle holdings in Jamaica: the National Archives of Jamaica in Spanish Town, the National Library of Jamaica in Kingston, and the West India Collection at the University of the West Indies at Mona. The majority of my time was spent pouring over the numerous plantation inventories and letter books, registries, manumission decrees, tax rolls, and Assembly records housed at the National Archives. I spent a month looking through the various collections of folklore and music found at the National Library, in addition to its impressive cache of newspapers and periodicals from the slave era. Another two months were devoted to the examination of the rare books, diaries, and journals housed within the West India Collection at the University of the West Indies at Mona. For nearly a year, I immersed myself in ephemera and inventories, carefully constructing forgotten childhoods by separating the experiences of enslaved children from the larger narrative on slavery in Jamaica. I had no particular methodology in selecting sources; I simply requested materials that fell between the years 1750 and 1838, my specific years of study, and carefully skimmed each source, looking for anything and everything I could find on enslaved children.
Walking into the archives, my main questions concerned the specific nature of childhood within the slave community and how it changed over time. I wanted to tell these children’s stories and give them a voice—one that was unique from the adults who lived and toiled beside them. My only plan was to look beyond the obvious and let the sources guide me. For example, following the names of enslaved children who appeared and then disappeared in the Registry of the Returns of Slaves confirmed the widely held argument that extremely high infant- and child-mortality rates were endemic on the sugar and coffee plantations in every parish on the island. However, there is much more to the registries than easily observable quantitative evidence. Beginning in 1817, the Assembly of Jamaica required triennial returns from each slaveholder, listing each slave’s name, sex, age, color, and country of origin, and any additional remarks, including the mothers’ names, if known (Registry 1B|11|7; Reasons 40, 56, 64; Review 9, 20–21). Once I began to examine these returns in the National Archives, I instantly saw the wealth of information listed therein and knew that I needed to look much more closely for glimpses of everyday life outside of the work that defined them as slaves.
Immediately after opening the first registry book, I began to see the presence of West African naming traditions among Jamaican-born creoles. Page after page listed enslaved creole children, often of creole parentage, with traditional West African day names, like Quamin and Cudjoe, as well as children with names like Friday and Tuesday, January and December. One afternoon spent with the 1817 returns resulted in the discovery of two creole women of African parentage on two different estates in the parish of Westmoreland who named their children Eboe and Fantee (1B|11|7|9). In the parish of St. George, these same returns listed a twenty-eight-year-old creole woman named Banda (1B|11|7|22). Not only did this information indicate that enslaved children in Jamaica continued to receive West African day names, as was customary in Akan, Ga, and Ewe cultures, some ten and even twenty-five years after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, but it also showed that the slave community placed great significance on the names that they gave to their children. Names like these not only passed down West African naming practices to other generations, but they gave enslaved children an individuality outside of their identity as slaves and educated them about their past. Furthermore, this practice showed that the slave community regularly used enslaved children to sustain their national identity in Jamaica and to ensure that it was protected from the destructive process of slavery—proof that their childhoods had meaning.
Outside of the retention and reinvention of African cultural identity in Jamaica, names offer even more complex information when one examines them in the context of family structure. While reading through the Radnor Estate Letter Book at the National Library in Kingston, I found a collection of documents that proved to be very useful not only in describing the nature of children’s work in the fields and great house, but also in shedding light on the complex familial formations of the slave villages. In January 1824, for example, a Radnor Estate bookkeeper noted in the estate’s inventories that George and Grace’s young daughter, Moriah, died of worms. The following year, an enslaved woman named Elfrida gave birth to a daughter, who she named Moriah. Interestingly, I remembered reading that just two years earlier, in 1823, the bookkeeper noted that Elfrida’s daughter Grace had died of yaws. I searched the remaining pages in the letter book and observed that the inventories did not duplicate the names of any of the slaves living on the estate like many others in the archives. However, nowhere in the letter book did the bookkeeper state whether Grace and Elfrida were related. That was not surprising, since most bookkeepers did not bother to list such information. Most had no clue about the complex nature of family and kinship in the slave villages. While it could mean that the Radnor Estate managers or owners had a decided interest in the names Grace and Moriah, the names of these children do propose the real possibility that some sort of bond existed between their families.
While this commentary is merely a snapshot of the lives of two families and their children, other archival sources allowed me to piece together entire lives. While examining the Votes of the Assembly of Jamaica at the National Archives, I was introduced to Molly Matthews, a recently baptized infant born in 1764 to an unnamed slave woman belonging to the Clarendon parish rectory. According to the parish rector, little Molly was the reputed daughter of a white man named David Matthews. Four years after her birth, Matthews applied for Molly’s manumission and provided a new slave woman in exchange for her freedom. Unfortunately for Matthews and his daughter, the parish rector stole Molly’s replacement and left the parish before her manumission paperwork could be processed. The two were never seen again, and the Clarendon Vestry rescinded the order until Matthews provided a new slave. Matthews never supplied the parish rectory with another enslaved woman, so little Molly remained enslaved. Thirty years later, a more sympathetic Clarendon Vestry championed Molly’s case and petitioned the Assembly for her freedom in November 1794. This time, with little debate, the Assembly manumitted Molly and her four children. Interestingly, the Assembly did not require the customary replacement slaves for Molly or her children, and the thirty-year-old mother of four walked out of the Clarendon rectory with her family to begin her life as a free woman (Votes fols. 79–80, 119).
Life histories like Molly’s are extremely rare because most information about enslaved children comes in small bits of information that must be assembled together like a puzzle. The fact that I found evidence of both Molly’s childhood and adulthood was monumental, and I was hard-pressed to find more than a handful of life histories during my time in the archives. Furthermore, Molly’s manumission experience is unique and certainly a result of her connection to the Clarendon rectory. Enslaved children rarely had a champion, including the abolitionists who waxed poetic from across the ocean about freedom. That said, her life experiences are exemplary of what many enslaved children in her situation faced in Jamaica during this period. Molly’s status as a mulatto, or the child of an enslaved woman and a white man, was one that set her apart from the rest of the slave community. In addition to having manumission opportunities that most enslaved children only dreamed of, some enslaved children like Molly enjoyed certain benefits from being a child of mixed parentage. Furthermore, although her father attempted to secure her freedom while she was a child, her experiences with the manumission process illustrate the difficulties and setbacks that many people of color faced while trying to attain their freedom. While Molly was lucky to gain the support of the Clarendon Vestry in her adulthood, many progressed through their childhood without even a sliver of hope for freedom.
As I started piecing stories like these together, a pattern began to form and I began to see a link between the changing nature of childhood, the changing nature of slavery, and the growth, influence, and impact of the British abolitionist movement during my period of study. Planters and members of the British Parliament modified their definitions of value, risk, and investment as attitudes toward abolition and abolitionists changed. Simply put, the abolitionist movement forced the planters to re-evaluate the economic viability of enslaved children. Before abolitionist sentiment threatened the slave trade, children were nothing more than a risk and a hindrance to Jamaican planters and overseers. Once the abolition of the slave trade became a possibility, however, children, in the minds of Jamaican planters, changed from a risk to a necessity as they began to envision children as a means of delaying the inevitability of abolition. Planters’ ideas of child worth expanded as they gradually came to recognize enslaved children as a means of securing the profitability of their estates. As a result, Jamaican planters soon depended on slave youth just as they had depended on the slave trade before English abolitionists threatened the slave supply.
Needless to say, enslaved children became more visible in the archival sources once they became more important to the planters. They were not just slaves; they were sons and daughters, members of complex familial units and kinship groups, cultural agents, and contributors to their own household economies. The abolitionist movement provided an excellent opportunity for me to see how their childhoods changed over time, as well as how these changes affected the quality of life for Jamaica’s enslaved children. The more archival texts I found, the more I began to understand childhood as not only an important concept defined by planter opinion and manipulation, but one also affected by the institution of slavery. These children were fighters, and they continued their struggle for survival despite the increased pressures put upon them. Yet, at the same time, children inadvertently gained leverage from the abolitionist movement, using it as a window of opportunity to negotiate their own place and voice as historical agents.
Finding Voice through Agency
One can only surmise how children’s experiences as slaves shaped or obstructed their psychological development, but the archival sources do suggest that children acted out their frustrations in many ways. While examining issues of the Royal Gazette and the Kingston Chronicle housed at the National Library, I was impressed by the number of enslaved boys and girls whose names appeared in the runaway lists as having “absconded” from their estates. One particular boy named John appeared a few times within the available issues, and I was struck not only by his bravery, but also by his tenacity. I first ran across John in an announcement of a public auction in Spanish Town, where he was sold in August 1781 (Royal Gazette 19 Aug. 1781). I recorded the information in my notes, mostly in an effort to compare the fluctuations in market prices for enslaved children. However, I saw John appear again in another issue: six months after his purchase at public auction, John’s new owners included him in the runaway lists, believing that he was “lurking around” Spanish Town in search of his mother, who lived there as a slave (Royal Gazette 2 Mar. 1782).
Most runaway advertisements simply list the name and, occasionally, the estimated age of the slave in question. They usually appear in a grid of boxes, with or without the obligatory sketch of a chained slave en route or the cartoonish “Sambo” profile, filling the first few pages of each edition of the newspaper. Every so often we are lucky to find an advertisement that lists certain characteristics or descriptors, incl...
