On a Desert Shore (28 page)
Authors: S. K. Rizzolo
In 1791 the abolitionist William Fox exhorted Britons to acknowledge the cruelty of racial and geographic boundaries that seek to separate person from person, soul from soul: “Can our pride suggest that the rights of men are limited to any nation, or to any colour? Or, were anyone to treat a fellow creature in this country as we do the unhappy Africans in the West Indies; struck with horror, we should be zealous to deliver the oppressed, and punish the oppressor” (as quoted in Debbie Lee's
Slavery and the Romantic Imagination
, 14).
Lee refers to slavery as “the great moral question” of the late Georgian era. Another related development of the time was, of course, the impulse toward freedom represented by the various revolutions sweeping the globe, including the one that gave birth to America, and that created the first black republic in the French colony of St. Domingue (Haiti). Slavery was not a faraway evil easily ignored by Britons. It was hotly contested, its moral dimensions explored in pamphlets and in poignant images of suffering humanity. While many people who profited from the institution battled to uphold it, others, “struck with horror,” argued, with increasing success, that slavery was antithetical to British values. Still, after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself endured for several more decades in the British empire. And none of the oppressors were ever punished. Instead, the government provided thousands of English men and women with financial compensation when they were forced to free their slaves.
Exposure to the issue of slavery in Georgian England brought with it anxieties about the danger of permeable boundaries in a global society (sound familiar?). And this exposure to new ideas, other cultures, and other races evoked a corresponding concern about protecting the purity of the domestic hearth and of national identity. Nor was the fear that sacred boundaries could be dissolved limited to race; the anxiety also extended to gender, social, and cultural norms. Thus, my character Marina Garrod is perceived as a threat to her family on every level. She is not a true English rose in that she carries Africa in her blood, a heritage made visible in her complexion. She is illegitimate and lacks breeding. Moreover, as the presumed heiress to a large fortune, her father has tapped this “half lady” to become the mother of a dynastic line. Lastly, through her mother, she is linked to Obeah, an African folk religion that can be seen as a vehicle of hidden power and revolt. In a society that prided itself on refinement and enlightenment, and that valued the transmission of family name, lands, and wealth to the next generation, Marina does not belong.
A quick note on Obeah and John Crow: I intend to publish a separate essay on this subject on my website, for there is no room here to discuss the fascinating connections between Obeah, the vulture John Crow, the John Canoe dancers, poisons, and
Abrus precatorius
or the jequirity bean (wild licorice). Some fuzziness exists as to when these symbolic links were forged. My main sourceâan essay by John Rashford, “Plants, Spirits and the Meaning of âJohn' in Jamaica,” which was published in the
Jamaica Journal
in 1984âmentions that the first record of the Jamaican turkey buzzard being called “John Crow” did not occur until 1826. But I have found indications that this may have happened earlier, and certainly, ideas can brew in the popular culture for some time before they are written down. A source of 1811 refers to the beads of wild licorice as being popular with Jamaican slaves for jewelry.
I am indebted to Rashford and to many other scholars of the Caribbean and the West Indians in London, and regret that I can mention only a few more in these already lengthy notes. First and foremost, I must acknowledge Nick Hibbert Steele. Nickâa descendant of George Hibbert, the model for my character Hugo Garrodâprovided resources from his personal library and his valuable insights. Very kindly, he read the manuscript in order to help me catch any historical inaccuracies. I should emphasize that Hugo Garrod is
not
George Hibbert. Though Hibbert's family wealth derived from Jamaica, Hibbert never went to the island and had no mixed-race children. He did live in Clapham among abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, and he kept a famous garden filled with botanical exotica (in particular, the Proteas mentioned in this novel). I have borrowed some of Hibbert's biographical details for the purposes of this story.
Next is Dan Livesay, whose dissertation titled
Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed Race Migration from the West Indies to Britain, 1750-1820
, was essential to this project. Dan's work chronicles the precarious lives of mixed-race children who relocated to Britain. White relatives sometimes mounted legal challenges to the inheritances left to these children or tried to rebrand them with the mark of slavery. For example, Dan explores the life of Barbadian planter Joshua Steele. Steele died, leaving his mixed-race children, Catherine and Edward, a sizeable inheritance. When Catherine and Edward were sent to school in England, Steele's sister, Mary Ann, successfully proved that the children were not properly manumitted, a tactic she used to make herself heiress of the estate and guardian of the minors. She did settle money on them but not as much as had been allocated in her brother's will. Dan makes the point that Catherine and Edward were left in a subservient position and were prevented from being independent people of color. I thank Dan Livesay not only for his scholarship but also for his encouraging response to my email. Thanks also to Brooke Newman, professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Dr. Ian Barrett of King's College, London, for their assistance.
I should mention the work of Deirdre Coleman and Felicity Nussbaum. In particular, Coleman's essay “Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire” helped me develop a mystery built around the notion of deadly convention. My idea was that my murderer should be a woman who poisons her brother (with arsenic that has tainted the purest sugar) because she feels he has brought a contaminating influence into her respectable family. In short, she wants those boundaries, those walls, to be raised up so that the Other can be excluded. Her obsession with purity, whiteness, and Englishness becomes a sickness of the spirit that pollutes her relationships with all of her adopted children and turns her into a civilized savage determined to create her own domestic empire.
I like to ponder the connections between my twenty-first-century novel and an anonymous work of 1808 titled simply
The Woman of Colour: A Tale
. In his excellent introduction to this work, Lyndon J. Dominique states that the novel is important “not only because it is the first long prose fiction in British literature to prominently feature a racially conscious mulatto heroine, but also because, conceivably, a woman of color could have written it” (18). How curious and disturbing it is, then, that this novel was ignored for almost two hundred years!
The Woman of Colour
introduces Olivia Fairfield, the natural daughter of a Jamaican planter and a slave on his plantation. Similar to my character Marina Garrod, she is expected to marry her cousin, as a condition of her lover inheriting her father's estate. Olivia travels to England, where she is the victim of rank prejudice and fraud. But she is not afraid to express her fellow feeling with African slaves or her contempt for slavery. She skillfully uses the weapon of protest cloaked in propriety to battle her tormenters.
In
On a Desert Shore
, Marina escapes confinement in a madhouse. However, she is still subject to her father's patriarchal control, which he has the power to exert beyond the grave. And yet she is as inclined as Olivia to speak her mind and to enact her own will. In writing this novel, I grew very fond of Marina, in part because she reminds me of the many impassioned and outspoken young women of all backgrounds with whom I have worked in my teaching career.
A last word about the title of this book. Marina is shipwrecked “on a desert shore” in an alien land that does not welcome her, even though she is half English and has been mostly raised in England. But to me the title also suggests what William Wordsworth calls “the still, sad music of humanity” or Matthew Arnold refers to as the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery,” the tide that comes in year after year and century after century. Why do we keep singing the same old song? I think it's because we cling to our proud systems, which are based on the lust of greed and the urge to dominate.
September 29, 2015
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