At the end of 1754, William Dorrill died and the ownership of Egypt passed to John Cope, from a local gentry family, who had married Dorrill’s young daughter Molly. Cope’s speciality was turning up at Egypt, getting drunk, then summoning a slave woman to his bed. In March 1755 he arrived with a party of six, four of whom ‘being heartily drunk, haw’led Eve separately into the Water Room and were Concern’d with her[.] Weech 2cd. First and last.’ Thistlewood did nothing to stop the rape, but did not punish Eve when she subsequently ran away for a few days.
On another occasion Cope, following a drinking session with Mr MacDonald (‘who had Eve to whom he gave 6 bitts’), ordered ‘Tom fetch Beck from the Negroe’s house for himself with whom he was with till morning’. But Beck had not been the first choice, as the next Monday Cope ordered ‘Egypt Susannah and Mazerine whipped for refusal’. In revenge, ‘Little Phibbah told Mrs Cope last Saturday’s affair. Mrs Cope also examined the sheets and found them amiss.’
But Cope continued the same behaviour, which became increasingly drunken, erratic and angry. In October 1756, Thistlewood noted, ‘Mr C. in his tantrums last night. Forced Egypt Susanah in the cookroom; was like a madman most part of the night, &c. Mrs Cope very ill today.’ Cope made no effort to hide his behaviour, and his young wife Molly was forced to turn a blind eye; nor did it stop Cope becoming an assemblyman and custos of the parish.
Thistlewood hardly ever condemned any of this behaviour, except for when Cope forced himself on girls as young as nine. Men like Thistlewood and Cope expected white men to have sex with enslaved black women, whom they thought of as the embodiment of earthiness, sexuality and physical strength. Attractive female slaves, ‘young and full-breasted’, always fetched a premium at slave auctions. White bookkeepers were even encouraged to take on black ‘wives’, in the hope that their concubines might betray an incipient Negro plot. The resulting stream of mulatto children, some 10 per cent of all births in Jamaica, were, for visitors, evidence of the planters’ ‘licentious and even unnatural amours … a crime that seems to have gained sanction from custom’. From the highest to the lowest, almost all white men, ‘of every rank, quality and degree’, chose to ‘riot in these goatish embraces’, as an eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica put it.
Indeed, many planters, managers and overseers, even some whose wives and children were with them, lived openly with black mistresses. When
they died, many who could afford it, like Codrington, made provision for them in their wills. Typical was one Jamaican planter, who died in 1714, having fathered four mulatto children. He freed their mothers and bequeathed the children 100 acres of his best land together with 20 of his black slaves. Others, however, for reasons of poverty or indifference, abandoned their own mulatto children to slavery.
According to a later writer, J. B. Moreton, who worked as a bookkeeper in Jamaica, attorneys managing plantations for absentee owners would ‘keep a favourite black or mulatta girl on every estate’. He complained that these women ‘are often intolerably insolent to subordinate white men’. Alternatively, as Moreton explained, an attorney would come with ‘a few dissipated gentlemen’ and then order the manager to ‘procure some of the finest young wenches for the gentlemen’. At sunset, the girls were called from the fields; ‘these poor wretches wash themselves in some river or pond, brace up their breasts, and meet at the Great House’. There, they danced for the white men, and then were taken to bed. ‘Their black husbands’, Moreton continued, ‘being neglected, silently pass those nights in disagreeable slumbers, wrecked with jealousy and torture.’
Sometimes, it seems, revenge was had. Henry McCormick, who worked for Thistlewood at Egypt, was killed by a tree being felled by slaves. Thistle-wood noted that the slaves, who were now runaways, had ‘murdered him for meddling with their women’.
In early 1764, Thistlewood’s nephew John came out to Jamaica. The nephew kept his own diary, reporting on 25 February 1764 after a welcoming reception from his uncle: ‘Things seemed odd, but yet very pleasant.’ John Thistlewood wasted no time in partaking of the slave women at Egypt, in particular Little Mimber, who had previously been a favourite of both his uncle and John Cope, but was now the wife of Johnnie, the driver on the Egypt estate and therefore a highly valued and important slave. Johnnie complained vociferously to Thomas Thistlewood, who took his side, chastising his nephew and punishing the woman. But John Thistlewood went ahead and slept with Little Mimber anyway.
Shortly afterwards, he died while out fishing. His drowned body – ‘how strangely he looked’, his uncle noted – was found by one of the white drivers. The slaves celebrated ‘with load Huzzas’, Thistlewood wrote, ‘for joy that my kinsman is dead, I imagine. Strange impudence.’
Sexual encounters between white masters and black slaves were, in the main, about domination, violence and power. Ironically, though, while reaffirming the degraded state of slave women, they often at the same time went some way towards undermining the presumptions under which slavery
operated. Most white men settled on a favourite black woman, and although they were obviously wildly unequal relationships, they were nonetheless intimate in a way that softened and disturbed racial boundaries; and their mixed-race progeny, of course, were a highly visible affront to the racial certainties that were so important to the institution of slavery in the Americas.
Indeed, Thistlewood’s diary gives us a picture of slavery that is much more subtle and nuanced than the popular perception. For all his brutality, Thistlewood often broke the laws governing management of slaves: he gave them alcohol and firearms, allowed them, if in his good books, to travel off the plantation to visit friends or relations or to sell produce at the Sunday markets. Thistlewood’s slaves were not just his livelihood, but his life: he existed intimately among them, and noted every coupling, fight, theft or illness. They used him to settle disputes among themselves, and he, in turn, was forced, at times like Tacky’s Revolt, to trust them with his life. While still fundamentally conflicted, slave and master also co-operated when their interests coincided, for example when faced with a shortage of provisions or an outside threat. In the same way, the sexual relations depicted in the diary show that the intimacy of man and woman could challenge the most fundamental presumptions of slavery.
William Crookshanks was Thistlewood’s subordinate at Egypt in 1754. Within a month of arrival he had contracted his first bout of venereal disease, but soon he was drawn to one slave, Myrtilla, who belonged to Elizabeth Mould, the coloured mistress of the recently deceased William Dorrill. By February the next year, Myrtilla was heavily pregnant and dangerously sick. Crookshanks was distraught. ‘Mirtilla is very ill, it is thought going to miscarry’, wrote Thistlewood. ‘William cries sadly, the more fool he, as it is probably for Salt River Quaw’, he added.
Myrtilla lost the baby, but not the affections of Crookshanks, who persuaded her owner to rent her to him for £20 a year. Crookshanks still made her work, but made a loss of about £5. Then, after 12 months, with Myrtilla pregnant again, Mould demanded her back. When she was returned, she was punished by having her head put in a yoke. Learning of this, Crookshanks exploded: according to Thistlewood, he ‘abused Mr and Mrs Mould in an extraordinary manner, at their own house’. Afterwards, perhaps realising that he had overstepped the mark by implicitly questioning the ‘master’s’ right to ownership, he became ‘crazed [and] went down [on] his knees & begged their pardons’.
Thistlewood, as well as continuing to rape his slaves at will, also had favourites, the first, Marina, in the year of his arrival in Jamaica. Marina
was lavished with gifts – sugar, rum, clothes and food. After her, he transferred his affections, and presents, to Jenny, but this caused problems, as Jenny had little status among the other slaves, who resented the airs and graces she assumed once installed as the master’s favourite concubine. Then Thistlewood made a happier match, to a woman like him in her early thirties, who was already an important matriarchal figure amongst the enslaved community. Her name was Phibbah.
Phibbah was the senior house slave in charge of the kitchen at Egypt plantation when Thistlewood started work there in 1751. She was owned by William Dorrill, who bequeathed her to Elizabeth Mould, who in turn left her to Molly Dorrill, the long-suffering wife of John Cope (Molly may well have been Elizabeth’s daughter). Phibbah had a daughter, Coobah. At the beginning of 1752, Thistlewood had Phibbah flogged for a minor infraction, and after Congo Sam’s attempt on his life, he suspected her of complicity in the attack. But at the end of the following year he took her to bed, and she became his ‘wife’, supplanting Jenny, in February 1754. Thistlewood did not stop his predatory philandering with the other slave women, but Phibbah shared his bed more than all the others put together (Phibbah herself was sometimes suspected of sleeping with others as well). In their first year, they had sex 234 times, and continued a vigorous sex life thereafter. The relationship lasted for the rest of Thistlewood’s life – more than 30 years.
Phibbah had managed to acquire cash and property even before she met Thistlewood, selling food and animals in the informal trading networks, and through her skills as a seamstress and baker; she would in time save enough money to buy the freedom of her sister, Jenny, who lived on a neighbouring plantation. Thistlewood looked after her money, and helped buy cloth, and she even lent him quite a substantial sum early in his career. They nursed each other when either one was sick.
In 1757, Thistlewood fell out with the odious John Cope, mainly over unpaid wages, and in late June took up a job as overseer of an estate a few miles north of Egypt called Kendal. Separation from Phibbah seems to have pained them both. ‘Phibbah grieves very much’, Thistlewood wrote of her receiving the news of his move. For his part, ‘I could not sleep, but vastly uneasy.’ He ‘begged hard of Mrs Cope to sell or hire Phibbah to me, but she would not’. On their parting, he gave Phibbah money, cloth and soap, and she gave him a gold ring ‘to keep for her sake’. Installed at Kendal, Thistlewood noted he was ‘mighty lonesome’.
Phibbah made sure she was not forgotten, sending numerous gifts – of biscuits, cheese, fish – usually carried to Thistlewood by his slave Lincoln.
She also made regular trips, staying overnight at weekends. After one such visit in early July, Thistlewood wrote in his diary, ‘I wish they would sell her to me … Tonight very lonely and melancholy again. No person sleep in the house but myself, and Phibbah’s being gone this morning is fresh in my mind.’ Later in the month, he heard that she was ill, which prompted Thistlewood’s only comment on slavery, and a strikingly rare expression of sympathy and humanity: ‘for which I am really very sorry. Poor girl, I pity her, she is in miserable slavery.’
Phibbah, acting as a go-between for Thistlewood and Cope, was instrumental in getting their disagreement resolved and Thistlewood returned to Egypt after just under a year at Kendal. Here he remained a further 10 years or so, with Phibbah as his ‘wife’ throughout. When in 1767 he moved with his slaves to his own ‘Pen’ called Breadnut Island, Phibbah, now probably in her forties, went with him; the Copes had at last agreed to rent her to Thistlewood for £18 a year.
Naturally, her close relationship with Thistlewood gave Phibbah great advantages among the enslaved community. On the basic level, she was not short of food and escaped the lash. Apart from noting a ‘correction’ he gave her early in their relationship, probably connected to some infidelity on her part, there is no other violence against her recorded in Thistle-wood’s diaries. (That said, many of the other owner–slave relationships that are mentioned seem to have been violent, so this may have been a particular, rather than general case.)
Phibbah’s daughter Coobah also benefited from the arrangement. Thistlewood took to treating her almost as his own, giving her presents and reasonably well-paid work. In 1758, against his usual practice, he intervened to stop the rape of Coobah (probably still a child) by a white bookkeeper, who ‘Attempted to Ravish her’ in the boiler house, having ‘Stopp’d a handkerchief into her mouth’.
Phibbah retained the status she had achieved as a house slave, and, like most ‘wives’, was spared the gruelling and often fatal labour in the cane-fields. Indeed, she had time to perform paid work for herself, and in partnership with Thistlewood. By 1761, Thistlewood held nearly £70 for her, the equivalent of two years’ wages for a white underling. Like many slave mistresses, such as Codrington’s Maudlin Morange, Phibbah was freed by a clause in Thistlewood’s will (so long as she did not cost more than £80), and given £100 to buy land and build a house.
But to a degree, Phibbah had already ‘transcended’ her state of ‘miserable slavery’, particularly after being rented by Thistlewood from the Copes. She was friends with free people, including whites, exchanging
gifts all over the local area. When she was ill in 1760, ‘with a bad looseness’, Mrs Cope sent flour, wine and cinnamon. On one occasion in 1779, she even entertained the white wives of two local grandees to tea ‘under ye guinep trees in ye garden at Breadout blood Pen’. Most strikingly, perhaps, she even owned slaves herself. In 1765 she was given Bess, an 11-year-old girl, heavily scarred from yaws, as a present from Sarah Bennett, a free coloured woman, although legally Phibbah could not possess slaves. Bess subsequently had a child, Sam, who thus also belonged to Phibbah. Phibbah on occasion punished other slaves. She had effective jurisdiction in the kitchen, and when a slave named Sally was caught stealing there, Phibbah had her tied up outside, ‘naked for the mosquitoes to bite here tonight’.