Sugar in the Blood (32 page)

The term “mulatto,” which was widely used from the middle of the seventeenth century, is commonly thought to have originated from the Portuguese word for mule (
mulo
). It was considered a derogatory label, since the mulatto person—like its zoological counterpart—was assumed to be sterile. This idea was of course swiftly abandoned when the fecundity of mixed-race people proved to be equal to that of any other group. On the American mainland, for reasons both religious and demographic, the taboos around interracial sex were more intense, and so the rejection of the resultant children was more extreme. But in the sugar islands, the mixed-race population continued to increase. The community grew so large that Janet Schaw, a Scotswoman who visited the Caribbean in the 1770s, complained about “
the crowds of Mullatoes, which you meet in the streets, houses and indeed everywhere” and regarded them as the visible signs of “licentious and unnatural … liaisons between white masters and black slave women.” And indeed, John Stephen, along with his illegitimate siblings and half-siblings, was the product of a dynasty that would eventually dwarf Robert Cooper’s legitimate family.

John Stephen’s early years were very different from those of his father or his legitimate half-brother, John Burke Jr., despite their parentage and their shared experience of a plantation childhood. He was not raised in the comfort and elegance of the great house, but in the squalor of the slave quarters. He did not enjoy a cosseted childhood, but a rather neglected and knockabout one. Even so, when he was a young boy, Burkes must have seemed like an adventure playground. He must have explored every corner of this place: its cliffs and gullies, its recesses and caves. It is not hard to imagine him, even now: a barefoot, brown-skinned boy scampering along the dry stony paths that connected the slave quarters to the great house, cane fields and factory. Every face that he passed was familiar to him, just as his darting figure was to them. He would peer out across the ocean, his hand shielding his eyes, while the sea birds whirled and danced above his head. Burkes was his home and his prison. Everything he knew, loved and loathed existed within its boundaries, and he would live in this little community without interruption for more than half his life.

The plantation records show that John Stephen’s childhood contemporaries were slaves like Ben and Goridon and Elrick. He would
have played with them and probably also with the white children on the estate, though this was not necessarily a pleasant experience. As one contemporary explained:

He would almost certainly have come into contact with his legitimate half-brother too. Since there were no secrets on a sugar estate, John Burke Jr. probably knew that John Stephen was also Robert Cooper’s child. On some plantations this fact would have gone unremarked and unacknowledged; children like John Stephen were just “slave brats” and were treated as such. But on other plantations, particularly where the master’s wife resented her husband’s dalliances, these illegitimate offspring became scapegoats, bullied by the legitimate children in order to avenge their wronged mother. Any resentment John Stephen felt towards John Burke Jr. was of course carefully repressed. This was “Massa John,” who must be treated with deference at all times, masking any hostility or envy.

John Stephen had a number of other half-brothers and half-sisters. But it is unlikely that they considered themselves a family. The very concept of family had been so fractured and debased by plantation culture that one slave noted: “
Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.” Many slaves found it hard to generate any positive feelings for their siblings and fell instead into bickering and open competition. As the same slave concluded: “
There is not, beneath the sky, an enemy to filial affections so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.”

Life was hard for enslaved children, but nowhere near as hard as it would become, so many recalled their youth with fondness. Mary Prince wrote: “
This was the happiest period of my life; I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave, and too thoughtless and full of spirits to look forward to the days of toil and sorrow.”

The days of “toil and sorrow” began pretty quickly, since the planters made sure that children were put to work early in order to accustom them to what would be a life of incessant labour. Even as a toddler, therefore, John Stephen would have been given a miniature basket and hoe and encouraged to collect rocks, pull up weeds or collect eggs. He would already be beginning to develop his own understanding of what it meant to be black and what it meant to be white. By six, he was eligible for the Third Gang, which was primarily made up of the very young and the very old. Here he was instructed on how to perform simple tasks such as carrying the grass to the cattle and bringing food and refreshments to the adults labouring in the fields.

Frederick Douglass began to think seriously about being a slave when he was seven or eight; and the realization that he was merchandise, and that he had been “
born for another’s benefit,” came to him forcefully around twelve, when he found that he could not live his life as he wished. About that epiphany he wrote: “
I was a slave—born a slave—and though the fact was incomprehensible to me, it conveyed to me a sense of entire dependence on the will of somebody I had never seen.” “The ever-gnawing and soul devouring thought” of his enslavement made Douglass both mentally and physically “wretched.”

Despite the inherent hardship of daily life, John Stephen’s early years took place against a backdrop of great optimism for the slave population. Not only was the epic drama of Haiti still unfolding but the abolition movement was once more building up steam. It had gone dormant at the turn of the century as a result of a threefold fear of Jacobinism, the French Revolution, and the violence in Haiti. But in 1804, the Abolition Committee was re-formed. Alongside old faithfuls such as Thomas Clarkson was a dynamic set of new members including James Stephen, a barrister who had been radicalized by a traumatic visit to Barbados and who was also married to Wilberforce’s sister. Then there
was Zachary Macaulay, who had served as governor of Sierra Leone and had links to the Colonial Office; and Henry Brougham, a rising young lawyer with Whig connections.

Rather than rushing into a new popular campaign, they focused primarily on lobbying important legislators and senior civil servants. Their rhetoric was frequently as much anti-French as pro-black. In one of Stephen’s pamphlets, he declared: “
What are [Bonaparte] and his ruffians to stab and drown all the poor labourers of [Haiti] because they chuse to work as men for wages, and not like horses under the driver’s lash.” Indeed, they argued that the Haitian revolution pointed to the inherent fragility of the slave system and the need to make changes. A few also noted how important African-born slaves had been to the rebels, and thus how dangerous these “saltwater slaves” were to the peace of the region. They proposed that abolition of the slave trade would provoke a speedy growth of the natural black population and that this, in the end, would enhance British West Indian interests.

The Abolition Committee’s first attempt in 1804 to make the legislature rethink the issue met with defeat; as did a new Abolition Bill in 1805, even though Pitt had personally endorsed it. But despite these setbacks, support was growing among both the people and the oligarchy, who realized that abolition of the slave trade might actually be in the mother country’s interest. As the historian Robin Blackburn explained:

The agitation of the abolitionists soon gave rise to legal and social change in the West Indies. In 1805, for example, “An Act for the Better Protection of the Slaves of this Island” was presented in the Barbados House of Assembly. This legislation proposed that the ludicrously lenient punishment for the murder of a slave, which had been merely a fine of £15, be repealed. And the imperial government, pressured by pro-abolitionist sentiments at home, intervened to push it through. Now the murder of a slave was a felony, and the following year a man
called John Welch was the first person to be indicted. Nobody was surprised that he was not convicted, but slaves and abolitionists were nonetheless content: the most iniquitous of the old statutes had fallen and slave murder was now a capital offence. The impact of this legislation was profound. John Beckles, Speaker of the Barbadian House of Assembly in 1805, claimed that slaves might exploit this situation by provoking whites into killing them, so that they would be tried and executed. This remarkable argument illustrates the extraordinary lengths to which the planters believed slaves would go to be revenged on their hated masters.

On 10 June 1806, the House of Commons passed a resolution by a margin of ninety-five to fifteen declaring that the slave trade was founded “
on principles contrary to justice, humanity and sound policy” and demanding the government institute measures for its total abolition. By a much slimmer majority, the House of Lords supported the motion of the lower house and it was presented to the king, “praying his majesty to negotiate with foreign powers for their cooperation towards effecting a total abolition of the trade to Africa for slaves.” It was a huge victory for the campaigners and a mortal blow for the slave trade.

Emboldened, the abolitionists stepped up their attacks on the West India lobby. In early 1807 Thomas Clarkson published “Three Letters to Slave Merchants on Compensation,” pleading with the West Indians to treat their slaves better:

“An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” finally became law on 25 March 1807. The Barbadians were the only sugar islanders who could remain relatively sanguine about its passing, since their “it is cheaper to breed rather buy” philosophy meant they had been ameliorating slave conditions for several generations. In fact the passing of the law was something of an opportunity for the Barbadians, who realized that they
could now sell their surplus slaves to plantation owners from neighbouring islands at a premium in this newly constricted market. But even though Barbados was somewhat less affected than the other British colonies, the planters still saw the legislation as a cause for grave concern. The Act that had abolished the slave trade said nothing about freeing the slaves, but it was the first major victory for the abolitionists, and as such was simultaneously a slap in the face for the planters and a great boost to the aspirations of the region’s enslaved people. They rightly saw it as an important nail in the coffin of Atlantic slavery and a giant step towards their ultimate goal of emancipation.

MUCH TO THE
slaves’ chagrin, these momentous developments did not lead to an immediate transformation of their condition. Indeed, the realities of the plantation remained much the same and John Stephen’s early life followed its predestined course. He was enslaved and, for the first three decades or so of his existence—every hour of his day and night—his life was determined by this fact. The only change in John Stephen’s fortunes came about not as a result of wider political change, but through the chance benevolence of his unacknowledged father. At the age of around thirteen, when other slaves were being promoted to the Second Gang, on their way to the terrible pressure of the First Gang, John Stephen was lucky enough to bypass the rigours of field work and was apprenticed to a carpenter on the plantation. Bestowing such a privileged position on a by-blow was a common gesture for a planter who wanted to enhance the future prospects of an illegitimate child he did not plan to openly acknowledge. At this point, John Stephen was categorized in the slave registers as a “Boy Carpenter Learning” and consigned to the custody of the plantation’s head carpenter. Here, in Burkes’ carpentry workshop, the young John Stephen was taught how to use hammers and augers, adzes and axes, and when to use a jackplane or a joiner plane. As he gained experience he learned how to make simple benches, tables and stools, as well as boxes and coffins, and later he learned to construct storehouses, a new fowl coop and a pigsty.

Other than his vocational training, the educational opportunities available to John Stephen were extremely limited. Though a few planters
in the French islands paid to educate their illegitimate children, most believed that it was imperative that slaves “
be kept in the profoundest ignorance,” arguing, “If they are not instructed in any arts or skills other than those required for unpaid labour, they are less likely to contemplate alternatives and so resist their masters.” As a result, there were for many years virtually no educational institutions that catered for the black people of Barbados. The only exceptions were the Sunday schools provided by the hard-pressed Moravian and Methodist missionaries, where some slave children were able to gain a very rudimentary schooling, based largely on Christian teachings.