Ghosts of Slavery
Ghosts of Slavery
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Ghosts of Slavery a
l it er a ry
o f
b l ac k
a r c h a e o l o g y
wo m en’s
Jenny J enny Sharpe
University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis / London
l ive s
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following. Lines from “Nanny” (text version) by Jean “Binta” Breeze, from Riddym Ravings and Other Poems (London: Blackrose Press, 1988), copyright 1988, reprinted courtesy of Race Today Publications. Lines from “Nanny” by Lorna Goodison, from I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1986), copyright 1986, reprinted courtesy of New Beacon Books. Lines from “mary prince bermuda. turks island. antigua. 1787” by Gale Jackson, in the Kenyon Review 14, no. 1 (1992): 48, copyright 1992, reprinted courtesy of the author. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as “‘Something Akin to Freedom’: The Case of Mary Prince,” differences 8, no. 1 (1996): 31 –56; copyright 1996 by the Regents of Indiana University; reprinted with permission. Copyright 2003 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of slavery : a literary archaeology of black women’s lives / Jenny Sharpe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3722-9 (HC : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3723-7 (PB : alk. paper) 1. West Indian literature (English)—History and criticism. 2. Slavery in literature. 3. Stedman, John Gabriel, 1744–1797. Narrative of a five years’ expedition against t he revolted Negroes of Surinam. 4. Prince, Mary. History of Mary Prince, a West Indian slave. 5. Women, Black—West Indies—Biography—History and criticism. 6. Women slaves—West Indies—Biography—History and criticism. 7. Slave insurrections—West Indies—Historiography. 8. Slaves’ writings—History and criticism. 9. Joanna, 18th cent.—In literature. 10. Women and literature—West Indies. 11. Prince, Mary— In literature. 12. West Indies—In literature. 13. Women, Black, in literature. 14. Nanny—In literature. I. Title. PR9210.O5S47 2003 810.9'353—dc21 2002013315 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
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For Max and Maleka
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction The Haunting of History xi 1. “The Rebels Old Obeah Woman” History as Spirit Possession 1 2. “An Incomparable Nurse” The Obi of Domesticity 44 3. “Our History Was Truly Broken” Writing Back to a Slave Past 87 4. “A Very Troublesome Woman” Who Speaks for the Morality of Slave Women? 120 Afterword 153 Notes 157 Bibliography 169 Index 183
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Acknowledgments
This book was enabled by the financial support of the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, the Council on Research of the Academic Senate of the Los Angeles Division of the University of California, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, and the University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities. Sandra Harding and Kate Norberg at the Center for the Study of Women provided the enthusiasm and encouragement that were equally necessary for its completion. I was fortunate, during the period of the book’s inception, to share a semester’s residency at the Humanities Research Institute at Irvine in Spring 1995 with members of the “Feminism and Discourses of Power” research group— Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Nancy Campbell, Rey Chow, Nancy Fraser, Angela Harris, Saidiya Hartman, Anne Norton, Jacqueline Siapno, and Irene Wei. The weekly arguments, debates, and discussions provided an invaluable forum for working through the questions of power and agency that this book addresses. My study has benefited enormously from the critical input of Hazel Carby, Sangeeta Ray, Ellen Rooney, and Val Smith, who read chapters at different stages of their writing. Felicity Nussbaum, my most exacting reader, read the entire manuscript and shared with me her immense knowledge and love of the eighteenth century. The reports of the press readers, Abdul R. JanMohamed and Barbara Christian (in memory), were central to the revision of the manuscript, as were the encouraging responses to early drafts of the second chapter at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Center for Cultural Studies at the ix
x — Acknowledgments
University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of South Dakota, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the University of California at Riverside. Since motherhood restricted my ability to travel, I have relied on the generosity of others for conducting library research. I would like to thank the staff at the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota for making a microfilm of Stedman’s diaries available to me, and Eppie Edwards at the National Library of Jamaica for her help in my research of Nanny. The assistance of my graduate student Victoria Sams, who accompanied me to Kingston and visited the Public Records Office in London on my behalf, was especially welcomed, as were her companionship and sense of humor. I am also grateful to the UCLA graduate students who took my course “Caribbean Fictions of a Slave Past,” in which I initially tested some of these ideas, and to those who served as my research assistants over the years, in particular Colette Brown, Vivian Halloran, Matt Titolo, Beth Wightman, and Laura Wyrick. The intellectual vitality and warm friendship of my colleagues at UCLA— Ali Behdad, King-Kok Cheung, Helen Deutsch, Bobby Hill, Rachel Lee, Françoise Lionnet, Arthur Little, Beth Marchant, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Shu-mei Shih, and Richard Yarborough—made the geographical distance of Los Angeles from the Caribbean easier to contend with. Carolyn Cooper’s Jamaican hospitality and incisive critiques made my visit to Kingston particularly pleasurable. The ideas reflected in this book would not have been possible without Jeff Decker, who served as a sounding board, read countless versions of the manuscript, and took the kids down to the playground and swimming pool so I could finish a book that was long overdue. He remains now, as always, my intellectual companion and partner in life. I also want to acknowledge my extended family—Cile, Max, Rosie, Russel, and Steve—for their wit and conversation, inspired meals and drunken revelries that nourished the body as well as the mind. The writing of this book has spanned times of sorrow and those of joy: the death of my parents and the birth of my children. For helping me see the world anew through the eyes of a child, I dedicate this book to Maleka and Max, with love.
Introduction The Haunting of History
We live in a postmodern world, or so we are told, when narrative ceases to exist except as shadows of the past. Narrative functions less as a story to be told than as bits and pieces of stories we once knew but have forgotten because they no longer matter. But what if the story was not recorded from the start? What if the ghosts of the past are spirits that are doomed to wander precisely because their stories have not been told? Slaves believed that their earthly shadows lingered behind unless the appropriate burial rituals were performed. Their lost stories can be thought of as a violence analogous to the uprooting that denied New World Africans their burial rites. Slavery continues to haunt the present because its stories, particularly those of slave women, have been improperly buried. But an improper burial does not mean that they are irretrievably lost. Toni Morrison describes her historical novels as “a kind of literary archeology” of the life stories that are missing from the written records. She calls her imaginative recreation of the past an archaeology because she sees herself piecing together a world that exists only as fragments in the archives. At the same time she insists that just because the slave’s world has to be imagined does not make it any less true (1987, 112–13). Alluding to the fictional narration of slaves’ lives as a way of laying the past to rest, she speaks of the responsibility she feels for her characters, “these unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried, people made literate in art” (Naylor and Morrison 1985, 585). Diasporic Caribbean writers have joined Morrison in resuscitating the lives of the dead by raising the painful memory of slavery. 1 Black xi
xii — Introduction
British novelists like Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen, Beryl Gilroy, and Caryl Phillips engage the colonial records on slavery in order to find a place for the histories of black people those records exclude. Yet the story, unlike history, does not have to be faithful to the past. Jamaican American writer Michelle Cliff is not interested simply in recovering the lost stories of slaves who once lived; she also wants to unleash the imaginative force of what might have been. “As artists,” she asserts, “Morrison has said it is our job to imagine the unimaginable” ( 1994, 198). This is what Cliff does when she identifies a powerful obeah woman mentioned briefly in an eighteenth-century West Indian history as a woman who derived her strength from loving other women. Her novels do not reconstruct the past so much as produce a memory that enables black women to act in the present. History matters to all of these writers because they consider a slave past to be intimately bound up with the present, as a point of departure for the African diaspora or a condition of existence for fractured identities. Slavery may be a thing of the past but that does not mean that its legacy is not still with us. “The past coexists with the present,” declares Cliff about the memory of slavery in the United States, “in this amnesiac country in this forgetful century” (1994, 198). By staging how a lost or forgotten past continues to exert its influence, active yet unseen, fiction makes the ghosts of slavery speak. Ghosts of Slavery moves between past and present, history and fiction in order to narrate the everyday lives of slave women in the English-speaking Caribbean. The study centers on three singular Afro-Caribbean women: Nanny the maroon leader, Joanna the mulatto concubine, and Mary Prince the fugitive slave. Each woman lived during a different era of slavery: Nanny during the initial stages of Britain’s acquisition of its West Indian colonies; Joanna at the beginning of the campaign to end the African slave trade; and Mary Prince on the cusp of the emancipation of slaves. And each one occupies a different place in the written records: Nanny appears as a name and not much else; Joanna is an object of desire in the travel narrative of a Scottish soldier; and Mary Prince is the narrator of the only known English-language testimony by a West Indian slave woman. The three women could not be more different. Nanny was the leader of a group of runaway slaves in Jamaica known as the windward maroons. Joanna belonged to an elite caste of Surinamese slave women
