A Response to Enslavement: Playing Their Way to Virtue

By Peter A. Roberts

Responses to enslavement are automatically seen as struggles (heroic or otherwise), but in the case of the English Caribbean colonies, the claim was irately made by pro-planter factions, reacting to criticism, that the enslaved Africans were not struggling, they were happy and better off than the poor in England and the idea of hideous enslavement was a prejudiced distortion. Evidence presented was the universal singing, dancing and carousing of the enslaved. A conviction that is really at the base of this irate retort is that society is inescapably hierarchical, with happiness as the ideal for the lower classes and pride or valour as the ideal only for the rulers. The question that may be asked then is: What should the oppressed do – reject this view, fight and die valiantly if necessary or try to survive by amusing themselves and making the best of a bad situation? The fact that the most popular images of the Caribbean today are those of “play” (carnivals, Bob Marley, Rihanna, Usain Bolt), not heroism (as in Haiti) seems to show what option the enslaved in the English colonies chose. A Response to Enslavement addresses the dilemma that the enslaved Africans (mostly young people) faced and how they dealt with it. Peter Roberts examines the critical role of play in human existence as the basis for its role in their response to enslavement and suggests that in a world today where people resort to catastrophic acts of suicide to win their struggles, the choices of the enslaved present a viable alternative.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9789766406592

Peter A. Roberts

PETER A. ROBERTS is Professor Emeritus of Caribbean Language, the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. He is the author of West Indians and Their Language; From Oral to Literate Culture; CXC English and Roots of Caribbean Identity.

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The University of the West Indies Press

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© 2018 Peter A. Roberts

All rights reserved. Published 2018

A catalogue record of this book is available

from the National Library of Jamaica.

ISBN: 978-976-640-657-8 (print)

978-976-640-658-5 (Kindle)

978-976-640-659-2 (ePub)

Cover illustration: Slavery abolished by Great Britain medallion, 1834.

Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Cover and book design by Robert Harris.

Set in Scala 10/14.2 x 27

The University of the West Indies Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Note on Terminology

Introduction: Two Questions, the Imagery of Happiness and a Hope

1. Framing the Relationship between Play, Happiness and Honour

2. Interpretations That Enhance and Diminish Play

3. The Question of an Indigenous Template of Festivity

4. Whites Promoting Play in the Colonial Beehive

5. From Africa to the Caribbean: Singing and Dancing Marionettes

6. Playing in Life and Death

7. Dancing in the Street: Parties, Parades, Sets and Masquerades

8. Dancing with Soul in It

9. Singing to Survive and Jive

10. Various Faces of Virtue and Honour

References

Index

Illustrations

1. Haitian slaves valiantly fighting the French at Crête-à-Pierrot

2. The Middle Temple Macaroni

3. West India custom (creolizing)

4. A Congo dancer with a band of musicians

5. Dancing the slaves on board ship

6. Cruelty and Oppression Abroad

7. New West India Dance

8. Slave Emancipation; or John Bull Gulled out of Twenty Millions

9. First day of Yam Custom

10. The English dance of death

11. The City Benin (King of Benin parade)

12. Fiesta of Our Lady of the Rosary

13. The batuca of Sao Paulo

14. Calinda: Danse des Nègres en Amérique

15. Negro Figuranti

16. Contests and Plays of the Negroes

17. Wouski

18. Trudge and Wowski

19. Slavery abolished by Great Britain medallion

20. Negro Slavery

21. Jamaica, no problem

Acknowledgements

A number of librarians were helpful, especially in the campus libraries (Cave Hill, Mona and St Augustine) of the University of the West Indies.

I am also grateful for being allowed to use the main library of the University of Central Florida (Orlando) and the library of the University of South Florida (Tampa).

Note on Terminology

There are a number of words which have become contentious or offensive when used to refer to people for various reasons. It is therefore necessary to account for the use of some words in this work:

1. indigenous person/inhabitant is used to refer to the people who were living in the Americas before the advent of Europeans in 1492. Indian is not used in this book to refer to these people, except when it occurs in a citation. Other alternatives (for example, native American, First American, neo-American) are not favoured in this work.

2. black is used to refer to African-derived people, especially as a contrast to the term white , meaning European and European-derived people.

3. negro is used to capture the terminology of a specific era; it may or may not be capitalized according to the context.

4. slave is used when other alternatives are clumsy or would be semantically inaccurate. Note that enslaved person is semantically accurate only in reference to Africans, not to those who were born in the Americas (that is, creoles) as slaves.

Introduction

Two Questions, the Imagery of Happiness and a Hope

PLAY TODAY IS BIG BUSINESS. IT BRINGS FAME AND FORTUNE, whether from major periodic activities like the Olympic Games and the World Cup or from annual activities like carnivals or from the everyday entertainment industry. Entertainment generates billions of dollars and provides a livelihood for millions of people across the world. In the Caribbean, entertainment, through tourism, has long replaced sugar and other raw materials as the mainstay of the economy in most countries. Two hundred years ago play was considered frivolous or marginal, not a proper way to earn a living; today that is no longer so – play is seen as virtuous. It is seen and promoted as a way to show off one’s culture, to represent one’s country, to prove oneself.

Historically, proving oneself was associated more with fighting than with playing, although both are fundamentally competitive human activities that are not always distinguishable. For example, puberty rituals in modern and traditional societies have blended the two. Yet when one’s dignity, safety or life is at stake, fighting is seen as the honourable way to respond. In the case of a community of people or a society, when there is a reality or threat of extreme dominance, internally or externally, fighting or war is seen as the honourable way to defend oneself. Still, the question that invariably recurs in the face of threats to life, limb, liberty and dignity is: Is fighting the only virtuous way to respond to extreme dominance?

Though the Bible is contradictory on this matter, Western law and morals are guided by its two recommendations – an eye for an eye in the Old Testament (Leviticus 24:19–21) and turning the other cheek in the New Testament (Matthew 5:38–40). The nineteenth-century Anglican ethic in Mrs Alexander’s hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful is to be acquiescent, because the hierarchical order of things is ordained by God:

Figure 1. Haitian slaves valiantly fighting the French at Crête-à-Pierrot, by Auguste Raffet. In M. de Norvins, Histoire de Napoleon (Brussels: Société typographique belge, Wahlen et compagnie, 1839), between pages 236 and 237.

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

Christopher Boehm, in his 1993 paper Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy, identifies through a survey of societies across the world four mechanisms through which egalitarian behaviour is achieved – public opinion, criticism and ridicule, disobedience, and extreme sanctions (for example, assassination). In other words, the response to extreme dominance is to remove it.

This book presupposes a combination of Alexander’s ethic and a weak form of Boehm’s mechanisms as the response of the people in the Caribbean islands (excluding Haiti) to slavery, a response powered by play and visibly expressed in an image of happiness. The question it addresses is: Did that image of happiness indeed reflect happiness, and, if so, was such happiness without virtue, dishonourable and a mask for weakness in the face of extreme dominance or was it virtuous and honourable, providing a viable model to follow? Bear in mind that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, whites in the thirteen North American colonies had fought for their honour, and enslaved blacks in Haiti had done the same, whereas neither whites nor enslaved blacks in the Caribbean islands (except for Haiti) fought steadfastly for theirs; they played instead.

In answering the latter question, this book has tried to distinguish, in the historical record, between genuine happiness and cultural assumptions. Then and now, writers have often gone beyond making straightforward assertions and resorted to familiar comparisons and metaphors to portray happiness. For example, in temperate cultures, happiness is often associated with ecology (that is, the brightness/colourfulness of nature) as well as with lively activities, dancing and singing being the main ones. However, metaphorical representation is not always universally applicable, for symbols can be contradictory and, as to dancing and singing, they are media for expressing all degrees and types of emotion, not just happiness.

The bluebird is recognized as a symbol of happiness in parts of the United States. That in those places a brightly coloured bird signals the return of spring and happiness implies that happiness is seasonal for people of temperate climates. A logical inference from this is that happiness is perpetual for people of tropical climates with colourful vegetation. Thus, European writers may well have been inclined to believe that people in the Caribbean would naturally be happy.

Another problem with the bluebird’s association with happiness is that a bright colour does not always signal happiness. In English, the colour blue is used to represent sadness (as in singing the blues) as well as extreme anger. Consequently, for the Caribbean context, one can reasonably reject the bluebird as a symbol and substitute the blackbird – the latter is more familiar to the Caribbean and more generally to areas where enslaved blacks were and the adjective black applies to both the bird and the people. The problem is that although black people have been associated with happiness, the colour black has never been.

Note, however, that the two birds were connected by the American singer Florence Mills in her signature song and biggest hit I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird:

Never had no happiness

Never felt no-one’s caress

Just a lonesome bit of humanity,

Born on a Friday I guess

Blue as anyone can be

Clouds are all I ever see

If the sun forgets no one

Why don’t it shine for me

Chorus

I’m a little blackbird looking for a bluebird too

You know little blackbirds get a little lonesome too and blue

I’ve been all over from East to West

In search of someone to feather my nest

Why don’t I find one the same as you do

The answer must be that I am a hoo-doo

(Clarke and Turk 1924, 2–4)

It is interesting how she plays on the meaning of the word blue when it applies to her and when it applies to the man she wants. It is clear that for Florence Mills the bluebird is a sugar daddy (probably a white man from the northeastern United States) who will make her happy.

Florence Mills was the daughter of former slaves, who was honoured by the island of Grenada by having her portrait put on a postage stamp to celebrate the birth of the silver screen. In her day (1920s) she was called the Queen of Happiness, and because of her untimely death at a young age she did not get to be the headliner, as she was slated to be, in the show Blackbirds of 1928. This Broadway show publicly established African American entertainers, principally singers, as blackbirds, probably seen as happy ones. Enslaved blacks in the Americas had previously been compared to songbirds by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1913) in 1899 in his poem Sympathy, which influenced Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird in 1983.

No doubt the most famous blackbird of all was the polymath Ziryab. Chapter 8 of John Gill’s book Andalucía is titled The Blackbird of Baghdad: Ali Ibn-Nafi and the Invention of Rock’n’Roll. Gill says:

It is simply too irresistible . . . not to identify . . . Abu i-Hasan Ali ibn-Nafi (789–857) as perhaps the iconic intellectual figure of Islamic Córdoba. [He was] nicknamed Ziryab, blackbird in Arabic . . . pajaro negro (blackbird) in Spanish. . . . He was probably Persian Kurdish, although others argue he was a liberated African slave, which would lend itself to the legend that his nickname Blackbird came from the colour of his skin as much as his musical ability. . . . Ziryab turned Córdoba into a centre of musical excellence . . . Ziryab is credited with the invention of a school nowadays known as Andalucían classical music, an African-based early music form. (2009, 81–82)

Ziryab, therefore, in spite of the mythical nature of much of the evidence, can be said, almost like a national epic figure, to have single-handedly established the blackbird as a symbol of virtuosity in the arts and especially in music in the medieval Islamic world.

Whereas, in discussions of happiness/sadness, there is now this familiar connection between blackbirds, birds singing and enslaved blacks and their descendants in the Americas, there is no such connection between birds flying, dancing and Africans and their descendants in the Americas. Other than the belief in the transmigration of souls back to Africa, which could be associated with flying, the only other well-known image of black people flying is modern – African American versions, including Bob Marley’s reinterpretation, of Albert Brumley’s song I’ll Fly Away (One bright morning when my work is over / Man will fly away home). However, neither one of these specifically links flying to dancing.

There is today a flying image of the principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre, African American Misty Copeland, deriving from her performance in Stravinsky’s ballet Firebird in which she is pictured flying like a firebird, which is also the title of her first book. The firebird, however, is a mythical feature of Russian culture and has little association with American or African cultures other than in the metaphorical sense of a distant, difficult, exotic goal to reach, which is partly expressed in the everyday phrase flying high.

Flying high and having your feet on the ground are two mutually exclusive images of living life. Whether it is in relation to Caribbean people now or in the net of slavery two to three hundred years ago, observers have had the same views about which of the two modes is virtuous and should be followed. Usually, those who think that moving away from having your feet on the ground is embarking on a vacuous path are vociferous in their condemnation. It is only when flying high is validated, as in the case of Misty Copeland, that most people concede that dreams and aspirations should not be stymied with logical practicality. The chapter headings in this book refer to the era of slavery, but they are equally applicable to the Caribbean today as they systematically analyse the courage/cowardice and happiness/survival dilemmas provoked by play.

Colonial Caribbean societies were unusual in that they started as dependencies, with gender imbalances and with the majority of the populations being the property of or under the control of an ethnic minority. The fundamental problem in accurately visualizing the early colonies is that one has to interpret virtually everything through the words and images of the ethnic minority. At a time when there was a dearth of information but where new accounts sought to be comprehensive, cursory remarks in earlier accounts were often repeated with modifications or amplification to make them seem current. Also, there is no way of verifying the prominence or lack of prominence of any cultural characteristic – it could have been factual or illusory. There was no objectivity either in what caught the attention of one eyewitness as opposed to another or in what the person chose to write down, and there is no way of recovering omissions.

Primary or eyewitness writers had to find words to describe items that were unfamiliar to them. Even if they managed to discover the local word for an item, that in itself did not provide an explanation or picture of the item for the reader. They then resorted to comparisons with things presumed to be familiar to the reader and/or to define by explanation of structure, construction, function, use or by reference to authority. To complicate matters, historians, who sometimes depended on word-of-mouth reports, converted such items into their own image of them. This practice is apparent when early European illustrations of people and things unfamiliar to them at the time are compared with reality. Borrowings and omissions from the works of predecessors as well as translations across languages complicated matters even further.

The value given to eyewitness accounts as opposed to third-party accounts was not always of great importance to publishers, although there were differences between writers according to their training and intent. Moreover, the historical movement from ignorance to knowledge was not uniform across European countries or writers. There was violent disagreement among eyewitnesses from the very beginning, as was the case when Bartolomé de las Casas said of his Spanish compatriot Fernández de Oviedo: Oviedo can say nothing big or small because he was not capable either of seeing or understanding (2011, 29).¹ Las Casas was of the view that understanding a people required being able to converse with them in their language, and this Oviedo could not do.

The French writers were mostly missionary-type priests who became immersed in the local culture. However, even among the French writers, competitiveness led to harsh words, as was the case when Labat summarily dismissed De Rochefort’s work, saying: Minister Rochefort, who never saw the islands of America except through the eyes of others . . . since he copied Father Du Tertre, but he completely spoilt his narrative by descriptions totally removed from the truth, in attempting to make things more pleasant and to hide his thievery (Labat 1722, 1:xi–xii).

In the case of the British, those who were writing were mostly secular plantation types or people connected to the political and military administration of the colony or casual visitors who did not stay long enough to acquire a penetrating knowledge of the colonial culture. Some of these, like Trelawney Wentworth and James Phillippo, could be charged with the same crimes as Oviedo and De Rochefort in that they, without acknowledging it, included in their accounts with modifications and embellishments information that they copied from earlier writers.

In his introduction to the writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, Paul Hair says: The attractiveness of Barbot’s printed account . . . has in no small part lain in its illustrations (Hair, Jones and Law 1992, 1:xlvi). He goes on: As he [Barbot] put it . . .: ‘my pencil has made some amends for the defects of my pen’ (1:li). However, since historical and social accounts were not dominated by illustrations, paradoxically, the few illustrations assumed greater importance as representations of reality and because they had memory value. Visions of colonial life were complemented by the works of those who drew or painted and produced their own versions of reality according to their political or religious intent or the likes and dislikes of patrons.

African slavery was the economic foundation upon which twentieth-century Europe was built and attempts to dismantle it were met with fiery opposition from many quarters, including several in Britain. Satire and caricature were used to bolster arguments on both sides and they became increasingly strident as the realization of the costs of dismantling slavery became more apparent. However, the problem with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British visual satire dealing with slavery was that it increased the skewed images of life in the colonies and especially the image of the enslaved. Consider, in contrast, Auguste Raffet’s visual presentation of the battle at Crête-à-Pierrot during the Haitian Revolution (see figure 1). Even though Raffet was a nationalistic Frenchman, his portrayal did not show a simplistic ridicule of black effort, for he foregrounds the Haitian soldiers as they overpower the French forces. It is by reproducing and commenting on such historical visual images that this book demonstrates the ways in which visual artists were like soldiers on one side or another of a cause.

In today’s world, with the universal availability of the Internet and the explosion of social media, there are limitless possibilities of skewing visions of different people, practices and beliefs in the pursuit of power. Practices and beliefs are being given diametrically opposed valuations within and across cultures with the emphasis on converting souls to one’s point of view, whether that be political, racial, religious or moral, by constructing attractive arguments. The struggle between honour (warrior) and happiness (non-warrior) will intensify because migration from former colonies or poor countries to First World countries will increase. Yet the same Internet and social media, by facilitating fluidity, creativity, interchange and transfer of a variety of ideas across the world among peers, will eventually break down negative territoriality at all levels in all countries. Outside the box music, dance and artistic entertainment generally will play an even greater role in facilitating the pursuit of happiness across the world than today and historically, especially in the lives of young people. Hopefully, in spite of the duplicity of imagery, the study of older colonial situations will help to lessen the problems of contemporary colonisation in reverse (Bennett 1966, 179–80).

1. Framing the Relationship between Play, Happiness and Honour

In no country in the world are there stronger or more unequivocal indications of happiness and enjoyment than in the West Indies. Their song is the song of joy; their dance is the dance of hilarity and delight. All they wish for, all that they can enjoy, is in their actual possession.

—Resident 1828, 234

IN THE EPIGRAPH ABOVE, THE WRITER LINKS happiness and enjoyment to song and dance, which, as he indirectly points out, are available to all human beings. If one moves beyond the writer’s primary objective (to argue that since their happiness is complete, these slaves in the West Indies lack nothing), it is clear that in the writer’s mind the song of joy and the dance of hilarity and delight were unique in these people. It is easy now to dismiss this anonymous writer’s image of enslaved Africans as a political posture driven by the need to justify injustice, but the fact is that the same idea was elaborated sixty years later (that is, after emancipation) by the (in)famous James Froude (1888, 43–44), who became the Regius Professor of History at Oxford University:

In no part of the globe is there any peasantry whose every want is so completely satisfied as her Majesty’s black subjects in these West Indian islands. They have no aspirations to make them restless. They have no guilt upon their consciences. They have no food for the picking up. Clothes they need not, and lodging in such a climate need not be elaborate. They have perfect liberty, and are safe from dangers, to which if left to themselves they would be exposed. . . . In their own country they would have remained slaves to more warlike races. In the West Indies their fathers underwent a bondage of a century or two, lighter at its worst than the easiest form of it in Africa; their descendants in return have nothing now to do save to laugh and sing and enjoy existence. Their quarrels, if they have any, begin and end in words. If happiness is the be all and end all of life, and those who have most of it have most completely attained the object of their being, the nigger who now basks among the ruins of the West Indian plantations is the supremest specimen of present humanity.

Even if one were to remove all the racism from these statements, the fact remains that both writers were singling out West Indians as extraordinary on the basis of their experience. One therefore has to account for this positive image of West Indians by asking not what caused these writers to come to this conclusion but, more importantly, what was the real significance of their assertion. Is it that they were really implying that perfect happiness, touted as the most positive human state, was actually only for simpletons and carefree people and that more important and serious people pursued greater goals?

If we take the answer to the question to be yes, then it means that for these writers the world was essentially hierarchical and closed, with rulers and subjects who respectively operated by different philosophies. In that world, happiness was a vague, changeable state open to all, whereas honour was noble, long-lasting, measurable and achieved only by the superior. In that world, race was integrally worked into the construction of social hierarchy to guarantee caste-like social systems. Accordingly, in the Americas, African slavery was justified on the basis of natural dominance of white over black and Africans were seen as having ignoble codes and philosophies.

Not even emancipation could alter this construction. Evidence of this is simply but ironically made clear in J.W. Orderson’s 1832 play, The Fair Barbadian and Faithful Black. In the last scene of the play, Judge Errington tells his confidential black servant Hampshire, as he gives him his freedom: no society can exist without subordination. The judge also says to Hampshire: And now, Hampshire, that you are free, by the liberal spirit of our laws you are possessed of all the rights and privileges of a British subject, equally with myself. Hampshire’s response to this is especially poignant and ironic (not that this is what Orderson intended): (With amazement, examining his hands and opening his bosom.) ‘Hey! – I like you? Massa, you making you fun! – I tan [am] like you? Ha, ha!’ (1835, 34). Clearly there was no social equality and never would be between freed servant and former master and they both knew that. The social codes and philosophies that ruled their lives would continue as before.

In that colonial world of rulers and subjects, the guiding illusion for the judge/planter was honour. The importance of honour in the European mind is exemplified in the famous act 3, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which the word honour/able occurs fifteen times. The importance of honour is still proclaimed generally today even though, as Roberto Unger (2014, 44) points out, this heroic and martial ethic was associated with a particular class or caste – the rulers or fighters. On the other hand, the guiding illusion for those formerly enslaved was happiness and, in the case of the Caribbean, the quest for happiness has been strenuously pursued in play.

Though today, no extreme happy statements are being used to characterize people in the Caribbean, there is no question that the small island states of the Caribbean are a special zone of achievement in music, dance, sport and literature – they have produced world-class performers far out of relation to their small size (for example, Bob Marley, Rihanna, Usain Bolt and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott). So, one may argue that there is a connection between the extreme nineteenth-century assertions of happiness and intellectual and behavioural goals in the Caribbean today, and that by looking at the early colonial history of this special, small geographical zone, one can better explain the relationship between play, the image of happiness and honour.

Notwithstanding the absence today of extreme happy statements about Caribbean people, in various parts of the world, the Caribbean, like Hawaii, spontaneously conjures up images of fun, pleasure and relaxation because it is made up of tropical islands. But beyond this tourist imagery of islands, there is also the case that the Caribbean expands far beyond its shores, for its music, dancing and performances have been spread to affect people worldwide.

During the twentieth century, the bigger, Spanish-speaking islands especially became famous internationally for music and dance – Cuba for the rumba, the Dominican Republic for the meringue and Puerto Rico for the salsa.¹ The French and French-influenced islands also gave the world the béguine, and even more recently zouk and kadans became popular in parts of Europe. The music of the English-speaking Caribbean became popular internationally from about the middle of the twentieth century and has remained so into the twenty-first century. Today, calypso and reggae music² immediately call to mind the West Indies generally, and the limbo dance has been a happy experience of many tourists over the years. The academic norm has been to study suffering (which is often associated with honour) rather than happiness, but today, when no one is exempt from the threat of unpredictable violence, it is imperative to examine images of happiness to see what models of living they provide and for whom.

Even a cursory analysis of calypso and reggae music will show that they were not simply tourism products; they are rooted in the history of the islands. In the case of calypso music, it was the time of the Second World War and the agency of US servicemen that were initially important in the spread of the music. Subsequently, it was the migration of West Indians to some of the major cities of the world that led to the international popularization of Jamaican music and dance. Added to the social and political factors that account for its spread, the music in itself captivated many other people of different cultures across Europe, Africa and Asia.

Caribbean music is rooted in the New World experience and is fed from different sources, a major one being carnival. Though carnival established itself initially as a Christian festival in Europe, its most prominent manifestations today are in the Americas – Brazil, Colombia, New Orleans and Trinidad – and they all prominently feature the African-derived part of the population in each case. Remarkably enough also, migrants from the English-speaking Caribbean islands are responsible for the transfer and development of huge carnival celebrations in New York, Toronto, London and other major international cities. These carnival celebrations have spread with migration because for many migrants, playing mas is psychologically indispensable and represents for them, whether at home or abroad, an annual renewal of the spark of life.

Two significant, summary statements on the development and widespread influence of Caribbean music complement this introduction – one straightforward and prosaic, by Kenneth Bilby (1985, 181–82) and the other steeped in poetic imagery, by Édouard Glissant (1990, 275–76):

During this [twentieth] century . . . the Caribbean region has become a major exporter of culture. The material products exported in previous centuries have more recently been joined by a succession of musical forms, born and bred in the Caribbean. Not only Europe, but much of the rest of the world as well, has developed a steadily growing appetite for the indigenous musical creations of Caribbean peoples. This process has unfolded gradually, one wave of musical exportation following another, and practically every major linguistic sub-region of the Caribbean (hispanophone, francophone, and anglophone) has been represented. Afro-Cuban and Dominican music, Haitian meringue, and Trinidad calypso have all had international success. More recently, Jamaican reggae has had the widest, and perhaps the most significant, impact of any Caribbean form to date.

Night in the cabins gave birth to this other enormous silence from which music, inescapable, a murmur at first, finally burst out into this long shout – a music of reserved spirituality through which the body suddenly expresses itself. Monotonous chants, syncopated, broken by prohibitions, set free by the entire thrust of bodies, produced their language from one end of this world to the other. These musical expressions born of silence: Negro spirituals and blues, persisting in towns and growing cities; jazz, biguines, and calypsos, bursting into barrios and shantytowns; salsas and reggaes, assembled everything blunt and direct, painfully stifled, and patiently differed into this varied speech. This was the cry of the Plantation, transfigured into the speech of the world.

This book represents a contrast to, not a contradiction of, the customary treatments of the emergence of Caribbean festivity, treatments that usually feature the pain and struggle of the people, as in Glissant above. In this book, the emergence of Caribbean festivity with its image of happiness is used as a test case for the role of play in situations of extreme dominance.

Several national epics or founding myths have some combination of a sojourn, a journey and battles to overcome foes as the necessary experience for the birth of a nation. Two classic examples are The Aeneid, which tells of the founding of Rome and thus the Roman Empire, and the books of Genesis and Exodus in the Bible, which tell of the birth of the nation of Israel. National epics are celebratory and are used to bolster national pride and identity. For African descendants across the Americas there is no national epic, principally because, except for the Empire of Haiti (1804), there has been no African/black nation that could be said to have come into being in the Americas. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of works celebrating the struggles and deeds of African Americans. In national epics, there is some characteristic in the emergence of the people that is seen to identify them and this is also the case for African Americans. This book sees play as such a characteristic.

This book is an exploration of the experience of enslaved people, considered lowest on the human scale, to see how they were able to rise above their subjection and to project an image of well-being and happiness without material wealth, armaments, scientific technology or anything external to themselves. This is a case in which dispossession and brusque removal of sub-Saharan Africans from their homes did not allow them to take their material accompaniments of music, dance and other implements of festivity to their new homes across the Atlantic. Also, because there was an enforced shift from native language to colonial language and because a considerable percentage of captives were young and not fully experienced in their own cultures, they had no complete store of ancestral material to call upon. In our analysis of the role of play and the development of the image of happiness, we show the resources human minds invoked, imagined and fashioned, in the face of various limitations, deprivations and negative beliefs, in a situation which initially was one of exile in a new, though not adverse, environment.

THE ACQUIESCENT SLAVE

Robert Morris (1984, 39–40), in a paper given on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies, posed what seems to be a simple question: Why did the black slaves, over the extended period of slavery, remain in a position of economic, political and social dependence on the whites who were a numerical minority? He then uses the words of Karl Watson (1979, 92–93), supported by those of Monica Schuler to answer the question: In giving a general assessment of the reaction of enslaved people in Barbados to their situations, one must note the functional importance of compliance. It was on the basis of acceptance of the status quo that the system functioned. ‘The whole slave system began as a coercive one, but developed into a system of consent.’³ Morris complements his view of the compliance of the slaves with the words, it would appear to me that the unspectacular, uneasily chronicled reality of day-to-day work on the plantation by thousands of slaves, patiently learning the masters’ language, forming family relations, tilling the soil, studying the masters’ foibles and weaknesses, were as much preparation for freedom, as actual open rebellion or resistance, the impact of which was likely to be, especially within the context of the time, costly and ephemeral (1984, 37).

Acquiescence was not glorious, but the fact is that it was the reality for the majority of enslaved persons in the British West Indies. It is only in French Saint Domingue that slavery was removed by the enslaved against the wishes of their rulers.

Extreme dominance in the form of slavery has been a part of human societies all over the world from time immemorial. The Old Testament of the Christian Bible gives guidance on slavery and trading in slaves in the book of Leviticus (25:44–46). It is only probably from the twentieth century that slavery has been seen across the world as contrary to natural justice and as something to be removed.

Some geographical situations in the Americas facilitated escape from slavery in the form of maroonage, but many did not, especially those in the smaller Caribbean islands. Moreover, escaping from slavery was not just a matter of getting away from or removing the slave master, but escaping from the slave society and all the neighbouring ones. In Jamaica, where maroons fought to maintain their independence, they agreed not to help enslaved Africans to escape from the English colony in Jamaica. Even in the case of Haiti, though those enslaved won their freedom internally, they were confronted externally by a cordon of white enemies who were bent on suffocating them.

But it is not only the widespread existence of extreme dominance that explains enslaved Africans accepting enslavement, but also the dangers of trying to escape. The many and varied forms of punishment used were illustrated in broadsides and identified in evidence presented to the British Parliament by abolitionists in the 1790s, and other methods of punishment were also illustrated in Bridgens (1837), for example. One broadside (figure 8, 1793) shows a slave at work cruelly accoutered – with a head frame and mouth piece to prevent his eating – with boots and spurs round his legs, and a half hundred weight chained to his body to prevent his absconding. This iconic image of punishment is powerful evidence showing why acquiescence was general.

Yet it was not physically menacing deterrents principally that caused the enslaved to carry out their daily work; it was the system of rivalry and reward that bolstered the hierarchical structure of slavery. The divide-and-rule policy was strengthened by the fostering of animosities and competitiveness that worked both ways (rebellion and acquiescence), but maintaining ascendancy over social inferiors was a powerful spur for preservation of the status quo. Some plots to revolt were revealed by those who favoured their own position (for example, house slaves) in the social hierarchy and some rebellions were not fully supported. One of the factors that precipitated the revolution in Saint Domingue was the attempt on the part of the administration to reduce people of colour to the level of common slaves by preventing them from wearing clothes like whites and behaving like whites. If they had been allowed to, probably the status quo would have prevailed.

The basic divisions of the enslaved part of the population were house slaves, tradesmen and field slaves, with the latter separated into gangs at different levels of achievement. Attempts were made daily in all these divisions to win the favour of the master or mistress to improve occupational status or gain privilege – promotion to head of group, promotion to a higher group, making a sex case to get special consideration or be relieved of some chore. In his comments on the slave plantation, Orlando Patterson ([1967] 1973, 65) argues that assignment of status to slaves had little to do with the qualities of the slaves themselves, but was merely a reflection of the attitudes and estimation of the masters. Patterson gives the following interpretation of what he calls the personality structure of the slave, based principally on the many comments made by white observers: Quashee may be said to have existed on three levels. First, as a stereotyped conception held by whites of their slaves; secondly, as a response on the part of the slave to this stereotype; and thirdly, as a psychological function of the real life situation of the slave. All three levels of Quashee’s existence were closely related and mutually reinforced each other (178).

This interplay of levels shows the extent to which the enslaved person was a player/actor as well as a product of play. One can also use this interpretation to characterize the image of happiness the enslaved person portrayed. It is obvious that one could pick out some of their experiences and label them as happy while identifying others as not. That, however, is not going to resolve the fairly normal happy appearance of the enslaved, which could have been masking pain and suffering or expressing genuine happiness. The mysterious expression that is a characteristic of the Mona Lisa (slightly smiling lips plus sad eyes) has made it intriguing and famous; probably the slaves’ image of happiness can be thought of in the same way.

Another factor that contributed to and reflected the acquiescence of enslaved Africans was naming. In the television series Roots, renaming of Africans was dramatized as a contentious issue (that is, the name change from Kunta Kinte to Toby), but generally the naming of slaves was not, and in the case of creole babies, it was routine for the master to see and name his new property. While in many cases there was nothing remarkable about the names beyond the fact that they stamped the person as a slave, in other cases accounts highlighted the comic contrast between the grand name given and the lowly person so named, as in the following:

The names given to the Negroes are the prettiest you can imagine. All the histories and romances, ancient and modern, have been ransacked for names; and I do not think there is a name in Shakespeare’s, or any body else’s plays, that does not belong to a Negro: some are very a propos, others not at all so. I have seen the haughty Cleopatra descend to wash dishes, and the mighty thunderer of Olympus rubbing down horses. There are Romeos the fathers of Juliets, and Juliets the mothers of Romeos. Augustus Caesar cleans shoes, and works at a pestle and mortar; and old Adonis is an excellent hand at making up medicines of all kinds. The chaste Lucretia has lost so much of her Roman virtue, that Tarquin, or any one else is welcome to her. Othello is a waiter at a tavern, and Hamlet – (what a falling off was there!) – was whipped through the town lately for robbing a henroost. (Anon. Irish 1776, 43–44)

Slave masters gave their slaves famous European names in order to remove Africanness from them, but they chose names that were different from the normal ones of their own children to maintain the distinction between white and black. In these cases, whether or not the slaves were aware of the apparent incongruity of their famous European names, they became the subject of fun for visitors. The names thus diminished them further psychologically and magnified their image as comic characters.

There are two other constituents of the slave’s personality structure that need to be mentioned explicitly – the curse of blackness and slavery, and the benefits of prison. The curse of blackness and slavery is often referred to as the curse of Ham and David Goldenberg, in his book of the same name, explains how, in spite of the fact that there is no such curse in the Bible, it might have come into being (2003, 169–70). Goldenberg also points out that ‘the curse of Ham’ is not restricted to Judaeo-Christian contexts but is also very widespread in Islamic sources (170). Since the curse of Ham is prominent in the Christian tradition and since enslaved people in the Americas came to be a part of that tradition, they themselves came to be besieged by this curse and to accept it to some extent as part of the divine mandate. Together with the colour hierarchy (white on top and black at the bottom), which came to be a part of it, it was difficult for some slaves not to accept the nadir position of humanity.

The benefits of prison life are that prisoners get food, clothing and shelter without having to worry about where they are coming from. Slaves were seen to be in the same position, but to have the additional advantage that they were totally in control of their free time during which they could sing, dance and enjoy themselves to their heart’s content. What better life could one hope for. Although it is unlikely that any slave would have preferred these benefits to freedom, some slaves may have wondered how they would make a living and survive, if free, and whether they could have had a truly independent life, free of the abuses and dominance of whites. These considerations could have led them to question the advantages of freedom in their context, just as many in the small states of the Caribbean during the 1950s and 1960s had doubts about the advantages of political independence. It is this questioning of self that would have made for a more cautious slave, tending more towards acquiescence.

The slave’s personality was also shaped by self-preservation strategies forged from the experiences of everyday life which contrast with that of Tony, a ring-leader in a failed rebellion in Barbados in 1675. His uncompromising stance even after capture caused his white captors to say: We shall see you fry bravely by and by. To this taunt Tony, with bravado, replies: If you roast me today, you cannot roast me tomorrow (Great Newes 1676). Tony is burned alive in front of his peers and so dies honourably, but dies. So, slaves would have asked themselves: What was the worth of such bravado/honour? Dying honourably meant that Tony was in the morally superior position, but after several failed revolts, the slaves surely realized that a less confrontational strategy was needed for them to survive and thrive.

CREATION OF AN ENHANCED ALTERNATIVE REALITY

The thesis of this book is that the enslaved created an enhanced alternative reality for themselves in circumstances of cognitive deprivation. They were excluded from using their brains, as normal human beings do, to make a living and nurture a family. Moreover, across the entire slave population, perhaps the majority suffered from inadequate sleep and chronic stress, and almost all children were illiterate, had a poor learning environment and no formal schooling. The cumulative effect of these factors on the slaves would have had to be extremely significant, for there seems to be general agreement on the following:

•All areas of the brain should work for its full development

•Adequate sleep allows the brain to reorganize and restore itself.

•Chronic stress affects learning and memory.

•Literacy facilitates cognitive development.

•Early cognitive development is aided by a rich learning environment.

•Formal schooling seems to help verbal logical reasoning (for example, deduction) and abstract reasoning.

Furthermore, while it is difficult to assess the effect of physical abuse (for example, constant corporal punishment) and exposure to trauma on the young children and their early addition to the workforce, it is quite clear that these too could have affected their cognitive development. Factors such as warmth, stimulation and family cohesion are even more difficult to assess, but it is also clear that in the case of the children these would have been far less than optimal. All these negative factors could have led to a compensatory right-brain dominance in the slaves.

The idea of an alternative reality is, as will be seen, the function of play, but in normal circumstances it is usually thought of as subordinate