Punishing the Black Body

Marking Social and Racial Structures in Barbados and Jamaica

Dawn Harris, Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, Manisha Sinha

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780820351711
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Punishing the Black Body examines the punitive and disciplinary technologies and ideologies embraced by ruling white elites in nineteenth-century Barbados and Jamaica. Among studies of the Caribbean on similar topics, this is the first to look at the meanings inscribed on the raced, gendered, and classed bodies on the receiving end of punishment. Dawn P. Harris uses theories of the body to detail the ways colonial states and their agents appropriated physicality to debase the black body, assert the inviolability of the white body, and demarcate the social boundaries between them.

Noting marked demographic and geographic differences between Jamaica and Barbados, as well as any number of changes within the separate economic, political, and social trajectories of each island, Harris still finds that societal infractions by the subaltern populations of both islands brought on draconian forms of punishments aimed at maintaining the socio-racial hierarchy. Her investigation ranges across such topics as hair-cropping, the 1836 Emigration Act of Barbados and other punitive legislation, the state reprisals following the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica, the use of the whip and the treadmill in jails and houses of correction, and methods of surveillance, policing, and limiting free movement. By focusing on meanings ascribed to the disciplined and punished body, Harris reminds us that the transitions between slavery, apprenticeship, and post-emancipation were not just a series of abstract phenomena signaling shifts in the prevailing order of things. For a large part of these islands' populations, these times of dramatic change were physically felt.

CHAPTER 1

Six-Legged Women and Derby’s Dose

The White Imagination and Narratives of Bad Bodies and Good Punishments

On the 4th, Derby was again caught, this time by the watchman as he attempted to take corn out of Col Barclay’s Long Pond cornpiece. He was severely chopped with a machete, his right ear, cheek, and jaw almost cut off. On the 27th of the same month, Egypt was whipped and given “Derby’s dose” [that is Derby was made to shit in his mouth] for eating cane. On Thursday, 5th October, Hector and Joe and Mr Watt’s Pomona were similarly punished for the same misdemeanour.

—THOMAS THISTLEWOOD (in Hall, In Miserable Slavery; brackets in original)

For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.

—FRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks

Creating a Pathological Blackness

In the Caribbean area today, those thought to be transgressing social boundaries and those considered socially inferior, whether because of their social class or even their age, are often kept in line with an admonition to “know your place.” The basic ethos of this well-known directive also undergirded Caribbean colonial societies. Thus, during slavery, punishments were also notable for their aims, whether implied or stated outright, to make the enslaved “know their place.” Being lashed with a whip, rubbed in molasses, or pickled with lime and pepper were punishments carried out to reinforce the social position of the recipient. It was through such punitive tactics that blacks’ place in society was crystallized and the place of the whites guaranteed. In fact, punishment became a potent symbol that marked the enslaved as slaves, while also demarcating—and solidifying—the boundaries between the races.

Bearing this in mind, this chapter looks at the ways in which corporal punishments helped to shore up the slave-based plantation economy by marking black bodies as inferior. It also demonstrates that although these punishments were enacted during slavery, they formed part and parcel of a wider process—involving ideologies and tangible practices—that simultaneously created and debased blackness as a social identity. These punishments could not have been enacted without a sensibility that, according to historian Trevor Burnard, drew “on earlier Iberian notions of Africans as culturally inferior and marked by their race as savages and idolaters with subhuman, bestial characteristics.”¹ It was this sensibility of African grotesquerie, honed even before the plantation model was grafted into the fabric of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, that helped to shape the experiences of the enslaved, including influencing the types of punishments that were meted out to them.

According to this racialized sensibility, there were unassailable differences between Africans and Europeans, with the former possessing an inferiority that firmly cemented their lower status in the social order. In addition, the differences that Europeans noted were often corporeal. For example, when arguing for the existence of a black person as a typology, European colonists paid attention to Africans’ hair, bodies, and, of course, complexions. The physical differences that they noticed on the bodies of Africans indicated internal, mental, and psychic differences, some European observers and colonists insisted.

In addition, although ideas about Africans and their bodies often bordered on the ridiculous, their disseminators were successful in reinforcing the narrative of Africans’ inferiority in ways that seemed to justify their treatment as brute laborers and punished beings. Colonialists believed that the bodies of the enslaved were shrouded in blackness, which they saw not only as a color but also as evidence of a congenital and moral failing. Not only were Africans afflicted with this epidermal malediction, their differences also rendered them not quite human.

Pejorative ideas about the bodies of Africans—and, by extension, the en-slaved—are readily captured in the works of many contemporary observers, most notably the Cornwall-born planter Edward Long, who went to Jamaica in 1757 after the death of his father.² In his memoirs, Long posited that the blacks found “on that part of the African continent, called Guiney” differed from whites “in respect to their bodies, viz. the dark membrane which communicates that black colour to their skins.”³ Their hair, according to Long, was not hair at all. Instead, it was a “covering of wool, like the bestial fleece.”

Long expanded on his views that there were other fundamental and corporeal differences that set Africans apart from whites besides the color of their skin and the “wool” that covered them. He noted, for example, that Africans had a “bestial or fetid smell, which they all have in a greater or less degree.”⁴ When one notes Long’s use of words like “wool,” “fleece,” “bestial,” and “fetid,” along with his emphasis on the supposed stark differences between Africans and Europeans, it is perhaps not surprising to see that he was able to reach the conclusion that “the oran-outang and some races of black men are very nearly allied.”⁵ In addition, though he acknowledged that his opinion might be “ludicrous,” Long did not censor himself and instead stated that “an oran-outang husband would [not] be any dishonour to an Hottentot female.”⁶ Through these descriptions, this Jamaican planter had aligned Africans with animals, taking them out of the human realm completely—and by extension out of civilization. If the Africans were animals, nonhuman, then they were even further removed from the sphere occupied by Europeans.

Moreover, Long’s racialization and pejorative reduction of Africans, though starting with the corporeal, trickled insidiously to other areas of “African” life. In Long’s estimation, Africans were “void of genius” and seemed “almost incapable of making any progress in civility or science.” He opined further that “in so vast a continent as that of Africa and in so great a variety of climates and provinces” there were no differences among the various peoples with regard to “their qualifications of body and mind; strength, agility, industry, and dexterity, on the one hand; ingenuity, learning, arts, and sciences, on the other.” Long concluded that “a general uniformity runs through all these various regions of people; so that, if any difference be found, it is only in degrees of the same qualities; and, what is more strange, those of the worst kind; it being a common known proverb, that all people on the globe have some good as well as ill qualities, except the Africans.”⁷

The problems that Long noted with those of African origin did not end with his theorization about the supposed similarities between primates and “some races” of blacks or about blacks’ primitivism and amorality. Indeed, Long’s theorization extended even further and branched out to the realm of labor, with “enslaveability” being etched into the bodies of the enslaved.⁸

Thus, by sleight of pen, Long had signed away the humanity of Africans, refused to extend the sanctity of womanhood to African women (as it was apportioned naturally to white women, particularly those who were from the middle and upper classes), and contributed to a narrative that justified the maltreatment and subjection of Africans. In his estimation, the blackness that was attached to the bodies of Africans, therefore, was a congenital defect that could never be erased. Instead, it could only be tamed through careful management.

Not all European observers held ideas about Africans like those held by Long. In fact, there were cases where positive ideas about Africans were intermixed with their fetishization. In this regard, for example, whereas seventeenth-century plantation owner Richard Ligon found that the white indentured servants who labored alongside the enslaved during the early phases of Barbados’s plantation economy did not have “spirits” that could withstand enslavement, he seemed not to feel that way about blacks.⁹ Perhaps Ligon’s conclusion had to do with how he regarded Africans. Ligon observed: “But ’tis a very lovely sight to see a hundred hansom Negroes, men and women, with everyone a grasse-green bunch of these fruits on their heads, every bunch twice as big as their heads, all coming in a train one after another, the black and green so well becoming one another. . . . They are happy people, whom so little contents. Very good servants, if they are not spoyled by the English.”¹⁰

The idea that blacks seemed perfectly suited to servitude is also found when one examines Ligon’s seeming fascination with their bodies. Upon observing enslaved blacks in Barbados, Ligon noted that the men were very “well timber’d.” In clarifying what he meant by this he again paid acute attention to the bodies of these individuals. Enslaved black men were “broad between the shoulders, full breasted, well filleted, and clean leg’d and may hold good with Albert Dürer’s rules, who allowes twice the length of the head, to the breadth of the shoulders, and twice the length of the face, to the breadth of the hips, and according to this rule these men are shaped.”¹¹ Ligon’s observations are more than cursory glances. In observing their handsomeness, Ligon’s fascination is arguably akin to the attention one would pay to an object, observing it for defects or even characteristics that make it worthy of a task for which it was created.

Ligon paid equal attention to the form of the bodies of enslaved women. He described them as having “twice the length of the face to the breadth of the shoulders, and twice the length of her own head to the breadth of the hips.” This made them “faulty” according to Ligon, as he saw “very few of them . . . whose hips have been broader than their shoulders, unless they have been very fat.”¹² Ligon added: “The young Maids have ordinarily very large breasts, which stand strutting out so hard and firm, as no leaping, jumping, or stirring, will cause them to shake any more, than the brawns of their arms. But when they come to be old, and have had five or six Children, their breasts hang down below their Navels so that when they stoop at their common work of weeding, they hang down almost down to the ground, that at a distance, you would think they had six legs.” In explaining why the breasts of young maids would change so drastically in their old age, Ligon cited African cultural practices as the culprit: “And the reason of this is, they tye the cloaths about their Children’s backs, which comes upon their breasts, which by pressing very hard causes them to heng down to that length.”¹³ What stands out in Ligon’s description of the “hard”-breasted young woman is that she is transmogrified as she ages and has children. If one were to believe Ligon’s description and assume that what he saw would also have been perceived by other observers, from a distance enslaved black women could have been mistaken for six-legged creatures. In a sense, black women had insidiously and fantastically joined the realm of monsters and monstrosities.

This way of thinking about Africans and, by extension, creating a pejorative narrative about a debased blackness, has a long history, as has been noted by modern scholars like Jennifer L. Morgan. In her 2004 publication Laboring Women, Morgan notes, for example, that there was an entire discourse about the bodies of Africans, African women in particular, that found its way along a circuit traversed by slave owners, traveling writers, and others with a vested interest in seeing Africans only as debased and enslaved. As Morgan notes of this “European racial ideology,” with reference specifically to African women:

By the time the English made their way to the West Indies, decades of ideas and information about brown and black women predated the actual encounter. In many ways, the encounter had already taken place in parlors and reading rooms on English soil, assuring that colonists would arrive with a battery of assumptions and predispositions about race, femininity, sexuality, and civilization. Confronted with an Africa they needed to exploit, European writers turned to black women as evidence of a cultural inferiority that ultimately became encoded as racial difference.¹⁴

This “‘fabulous fiction’ of black women’s identities” was used to justify black women’s use as brute labor on plantations in the Americas.¹⁵ Additionally, this debasement of Africans and blackness and the alignment of Africans with animals contributed to the ideological wellspring from which the punishment of the enslaved was drawn. I also argue that this pejorative delineation of Africans, along with the concomitant valorization of a European identity, made it very easy for enslaved blacks to be punished in a draconian fashion.

Thus, during slavery, the punishment of Africans and their descendants was never only a physical act. Instead, the punishment of the enslaved was bound up in a complex scheme of physicality and racialization, of the palpable and the ideological. The punishment of the enslaved was also part of a process that helped to create and instantiate the socio-racial order upon which the slave societies in the West Indies depended for their survival. This socio-racial order meant that the class system in the colonial Caribbean was organized along racial and phenotypic lines, with whites occupying the apex of the social hierarchy and those of mixed-race and black ancestry occupying the middle and lower rungs of the hierarchy respectively.¹⁶ This was the “order” that colonial officials were attempting to preserve through punishment and the debasement of the black body.

For punishments to effectively feed this socio-racial order, they were by necessity a central component of a multipronged process that was tied to the dehumanization of the enslaved and their categorization as a separate species. Additionally, the punishment of the enslaved was tied to the white population’s sense of being and personhood. Punishment, therefore, formed a core part of the process whereby the enslaved were differentiated from the colonialists.

Making the Enslaved Know Their Place

One of the exigencies of the colonial project that helped to fuel the slave-based plantation economies in the Americas was an us-versus-them ideology.¹⁷ Essentially, the colonial Caribbean—particularly during years of the slave-based plantation economy—was fortified by the exploitation and hierarchization of differences among its inhabitants and the concomitant elision of any similarities that these groups might have shared. This simultaneous spotlighting and erasure was very important in separating colonists—the “us” in the colonial narrative—from those they would come to dominate—the subaltern “them.”

One way this us-versus-them ideology was cemented was in the legal codes that sprang up in Barbados and Jamaica in the seventeenth century. In Barbados, examples of these legal codes included legislation governing “Christians and heathens,” “servants and Negroes,” and “masters and servants,” which set in motion a gradual process of racialization that inextricably linked African bodies to slavery.¹⁸ Even though the marriage between blackness and enslavement occurred in a piecemeal fashion, there were strong indicators in the early seventeenth century that enslavement was linked to non-Europeans, as historian Edward B. Rugemer points out. As evidence, Rugemer cites the machinations of the 1636 “Barbados Council [that] resolved that ‘Negroes and Indians, that came here to be sold, should serve for Life, unless a Contract was made before to the contrary.’”¹⁹

An examination of the laws relating to white servants in Jamaica provides further evidence in support of the processual linking of African bodies to enslavement, while at the same time making the us-versus-them ideology even more knotty. In fact, although the title of the 1681 “Act for Regulating Servants” appears to be “racially neutral,” a reading of the law reveals that there were clear and “racial” distinctions between who was enslaved and who was free. This law mandated that “all and every Master or Mistress of Slaves, for the first Five Working Slaves, shall be obliged to keep One White Man-Servant, Overseer, or hired Man for Three Months at least.”²⁰ The distinctions between whites—whether servants or employers—and enslaved blacks was further reinforced in “An Act for the Better Order and Government of Slaves” that was passed in Jamaica in 1696. Not only ...