Sugar in the Blood (31 page)

Mary Ashby could not have been unaware of her husband’s relationships with his female slaves, but I wonder what she felt about these
women. Many planters’ wives regarded their husband’s relationships with slave women as inevitable, but this didn’t mean that it didn’t upset them. Traveller after traveller noted the open resentment that white women displayed towards their female slaves. Edward Thompson, who visited Barbados in 1756, remarked that Barbadian white women frequently swore at their slaves “
in a vulgar corrupt dialect.” He blamed their behaviour on Barbadian men “who carry on amours with the ladies’ slaves.” Many wives may even have feared these lovers, since there were stories in circulation about slave-mistresses who poisoned their rivals in order to get the “top job.” Being perpetually in her company must have been excruciating as she imagined (or noticed) her husband and maid exchanging surreptitious glances over her head. But perhaps Mary Ashby believed, as so many in her position did, that she should simply put up with things, playing the part of the mistress of the plantation in public and never revealing her chagrin.

The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Mary Ashby had little else to distract her. There were so many servants bustling around Burkes’ great house that there was scarcely any domestic work left for her to do; and it is safe to assume that Mary Ashby did not roam the house making the beds, or emptying the chamber pots. She may, like many plantation wives, have had a few specialities such as cake baking or jam making, but the role of mistress was essentially supervisory: she stood at the ends of beds berating slaves on the way they tidied rooms, or read out the recipes as their slaves stirred the batter. Therefore women like Mary Ashby had a lot of time for thinking, brooding, and “persecuting their slaves.”

Then there were the children: a living reminder of her husband’s infidelities, and of her rejection, impotence and shame. We cannot know for sure how Mary Ashby coped with her husband’s bastards running around the plantation, whether she even knew which children he had fathered or whether she was reduced to scrutinizing the young faces she encountered, wondering whether they were his. According to one American slave, many women regarded these illegitimate children as a constant offence:

While the situation was less taboo in the West Indies, some wives did agitate for the sale of their rival’s children. They often conspired with their own families, and even his, to make sure that these women wouldn’t be included in wills or receive other benefits. Other wives chose to keep their dignity intact and ignore the adultery that was taking place within their own home. A wife was, after all, socially and financially at the mercy of her husband; as was his mistress.

What of Mary Anne, the maid? Her story was in many ways typical of the experience of many female house servants. It was largely in the domestic sphere that women were able to gain promotion to the level of skilled workers, and certainly this was preferable in many ways to the brutal outdoor work of cane cultivation. But so great was the assumption that these women were sexually available to the men of the house that many were employed merely because their masters found them attractive. Indeed, the sale price of domestics was often inflated in advertisements and at the slave market to reflect the expectation that they would be fulfilling two jobs: as concubine and maid.

In such an unequal society, some women would have regarded a relationship with their owners as an opportunity. Many mulatto women avoided having relationships with slave men. They were either in long-term relationships with white men on the plantation, or they married other mixed-race servants from other properties. This is upsetting from a contemporary perspective, where people of colour are encouraged to value solidarity in the face of oppression, but with the limited choices available to them, these women sometimes embraced the chance to safeguard themselves and their children from the worst vicissitudes of a racist society.

In deciding to become his mistress, Mary Anne had to weigh the potential advantages against the possible dangers. In most of these
situations, the relationship between the wife and the mistress was permanently soured, and so Mary Anne risked endless slights or even violence. She would also have realized that Robert Cooper’s long-term attentions were by no means guaranteed and that she could be discarded as easily as she had been taken up.

It appears that Robert Cooper and Mary Anne did come to care for each other profoundly. They would, after all, have ten children together. The eldest was Robert Henry Ashby. He was followed in quick succession by Alice Christian Ashby, Elizabeth Mary Ashby, Margaret Ann Ashby, Caroline Kezar Ashby, Alexander Lindsay Ashby, John George Ashby, Thomas Cooper Ashby, Arabella Ann Ashby, and William Armstrong Ashby. Theirs was clearly a stable and domesticated relationship, which grew even more so after the death of Mary Ashby. But I cannot help but wonder how many years it took, and how many children were born, before she stopped calling him “Massa” and was allowed the privilege of calling him “Robert.”

NUMBERED AMONG
Robert Cooper’s impressive seraglio was my great-great-great-great-grandmother. What can we know for sure about this woman? Regrettably, very little, as Frederick Douglass declared: “
Genealogical trees do not flourish amongst slaves.” Deprived of the time, information and education to record their own lives, slaves had no way to keep track of their families; indeed, most didn’t even know their own date of birth. So even if I could ask her, she might not have been able to solve the puzzle. Had she been one of Robert Cooper’s favourites she might have appeared in the manumission records, if he had chosen to set her free; or in wills or deeds, if he had provided her with goods or property. But this was not the case. So it is most likely that she was just another casual sexual conquest.

She was probably born on the plantation, since most of Burkes’ slaves had enduring roots on the property. It was extremely unlikely that she was a “saltwater” slave—that is, someone born in Africa—because by the end of the eighteenth century most Barbadian slaves were born on the island. She was probably young, as Robert Cooper seemed to prefer his women that way. West Indian planters frequently joked that girls, like fruit, ripened more quickly in the tropics.

We know of this woman’s existence only because she bore Robert Cooper a son: John Stephen Ashby, my first identifiable slave forebear. He was born in 1803 and probably delivered by a slave midwife at Burkes. His mother could not have helped being apprehensive during her pregnancy. Giving birth in the early nineteenth century, whether you were black or white, enslaved or free, was a perilous business. But
John Stephen’s mother was lucky. Had she lived a few generations earlier, her experience of pregnancy and childbirth would have been very different.

In the earliest days of slavery, when the Barbadian planters had no interest in increasing the slave population, newborns were regarded as a nuisance, a distraction that kept women from work. New mothers were expected to return to the fields almost immediately after giving birth and were allowed to nurse their children only if they kept on working. Shocked at the sight of these women in the cane fields with their babies strapped to them, Richard Ligon remarked: “
For they carry burdens on their backs and yet work too.” His perspective was, of course, very different from that of the slave women themselves; for them the work was the burden, not the child. Unsurprisingly, the island shared the terrible infant mortality rates that bedevilled all the sugar isles.

By the late eighteenth century, however, the Barbadian planters had decided it was more economical to “breed rather than buy” and had shifted to pro-natalist policies in the hope of increasing the birth rate among the slave population. This meant that pregnant women were often withdrawn from the first gang, which did the most strenuous work, and put in slightly less demanding positions until they delivered.

In these newly enlightened times then, John Stephen’s mother was probably encouraged to bear her child safely. But she certainly would not be supported in raising him. As one slave noted:

So not long after John Stephen’s birth, his mother was forced to return to work and consign her child to the care of other women, those in their fifties and sixties who could no longer manage the rigours of field work. Frederick Douglass wrote that “
The practice of separating children from their mothers … is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity
of the slave system.” He noted that the custom had a terrible impact on slave women, who had “children but no family!” But he was even more grieved on his own behalf, because he felt that he had been denied the natural connection a child should have with his mother. Today we use the term “attachment disorder” to describe the profound impact on children’s emotional and psychological development of being denied a consistent and intimate relationship with a trusted caregiver. We can only guess at how John Stephen and millions like him were affected by being denied the core human experience of a parent–child relationship.

Just as it is impossible to name John Stephen’s mother, so it is difficult to definitively verify that Robert Cooper was his father, since planters virtually never declared themselves as parents of slaves on plantation records. The social rules and the law functioned both to facilitate white men’s sexual exploitation of black women, and also to protect the men themselves from the consequences of their actions. As one American slave who was also the child of a white estate owner noted: “
Men do not love those who remind them of their sins—unless they have a mind to repent—and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.” But the situation was somewhat different in the Caribbean, where interracial liaisons were more openly tolerated, and, though not publicly claimed, paternity was often acknowledged in more subtle ways. In the case of John Stephen, the evidence pointing towards Robert Cooper being his father is convincing: apart from island lore, there was the lighter skin that marked his father out as white, as well as the physical resemblance to the Ashbys. There is a hint in his name too. Robert Cooper had a penchant for giving his illegitimate children traditional English two-handed names like his own. Thus his mixed-race children, including John Stephen, Robert Henry and Alice Christian, stand out among the rather more traditional slave names that dominate his ledgers. These small distinctions and offerings are often the clearest clue to a slave’s parentage. As the historian James Walvin noted: “Few planters accepted their slave children as legitimate offspring, but they often bestowed on them and their mothers a string of material benefits and privileges generally denied to other slaves.” According to local historian Robert Morris, it is doubtful
that Robert Cooper would have allowed John Stephen to marry using his surname unless he had given him explicit permission to do so, and it is reasonable to assume that this was because he accepted John Stephen was his son.

Whether or not this tacit paternity extended to a formal relationship between father and son, John Stephen’s mixed-race identity was one of the most formative facts of his life. By the time that John Stephen was born, miscegenation or “race mixing” was a source of great anxiety in the region. But this had not always been the case. In the first days of settlement, when island society was still fluid and unformed, and when indentured servitude was still the dominant form of labour, there were marriages recorded between white and black people. During these years, before the ideology of racism had taken root, the English authorities suggested that the offspring of these couples should be free. But with the emergence of slavery, attitudes had hardened. As early as 1644, the island of Antigua passed a law that prohibited the “carnal copulation between Christian and heathen.” Miscegenation could, it was now argued, undermine the entire system: “
Interracial sex was said to be a violation of both natural and divine law,” noted the American writer Edward Ball, “as it produced a ‘mixed’ race of people previously not seen on earth and also unsanctioned by God.”

Although unwilling to curb the sexual freedoms of white men, the Barbadian authorities were equally concerned that interracial dalliances would undermine white supremacy. Mixed-race people disrupted the binary opposition between black and white, a polarization that depended on a perception of skin colour as immutable and species-specific. As the structure of the Atlantic slave system hinged on matters of race, categorizing the children of black-white liaisons was an obsession across the Americas. Hence the notorious “one drop rule” adopted in the American South, which eliminated anyone who was not “pure” white from assuming the privileges associated with the planter caste. In Saint-Domingue the islanders divided the offspring of white and black people into an astounding 128 categories. In Barbados these classifications were more simple: the non-white population was divided into “black” or “negro” (referring to those who were dark-skinned people of African origin or descent) and “coloured” or “mulatto” (which were used interchangeably to refer to the product of black and white parents).