MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 28 February 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
History, when all is said and done, is usually about men. Men as legislators, men as chief executive officers of a nation. Men as soldiers or warriors of one sort or another. So that women are usually behind. Giving rise to the axiom that behind every great man stands a woman. In a new world order, truly human, women will at least be alongside, and not behind.
History too is often by written by men. So that Her-Story is really ever told. Women are often smothered over in His-story, often opaque, very often absent. Indeed, history has often been written as the Divine Right of Kings and Statesmen to do wrong. Or, as men and women in the grip of blind social forces. Workers who daily make and shape the land, the landscape and seascape in which we live out our existence, are often sidelined, only less so than women.
It is perhaps only right that this Black History Month I should try to write Her-Story as lived out in these parts.
I shall begin on the lighter side. With the story of a Barbados woman, known as Rachel Pringle Polgreen.
She was said to be born in and around 1753. The daughter of an African female slave and her master, William Lauder.
Lauder, was a Scottish schoolmaster, who had fled England in disgrace after he had written and published some attacks on the great, perhaps the greatest English poet – John Milton.
Lauder, shared one characteristic with a contemporary Antiguan. Sometime in 1754 he had been appointed Latin Master at what was then the Harrison Grammar School, now Harrison’s College. In 1762 Lauder was discharged, after eight years, when it was discovered that he had not instructed a single student. He is then not dissimilar from a contemporary member of the ruling Bird family, who it was found was hired to teach at the Antigua State College and ten years later, was found not to have instructed a single student. The only difference between Lauder and the Bird, is that Lauder was discharged on discovery, the Bird was maintained in non-teaching, teaching post!
Lauder achieved another piece of notoriety. He was attracted to the youthful charms and curves of his youthful daughter by a slave woman, Rachel. She rejected his sexual advances. He the father, white and English, was furious that his very own daughter could decline his sexual assault. He turned her over to the public whipper to have her whipped, as was the due of unruly slaves then. Some there are here who writing in Editorial columns, mark you, would have this public whipper restored to deal with the sons and daughters of unruly ex-slaves. Apparently their sojourn in Singapore says that order depends on the whip – in private or better public. Ignorance is always with us, in whatever conservative garb, but it is a terrible pity that such ignorance about flogging should be peddled for money, in a Caribbean country, in 1997.
Anyway Rachel, herself a black slave, was saved from the public whipping for not accepting the ‘sexual favours’ (read rape) of her white father. A sea-captain of the ship Centaur who arrived in port saved her from the whipping of her life. The captain, Thomas Pringle, took her away from the flog-man’s searing whip, and installed her in a house in lower Bridgetown.
He therefore had taken possession of the young and voluptuous prize, and Rachel accordingly dropped the name Lauder and took the name Pringle, that of her new lord and master.
I use the latter terms deliberately and historically. Lauder challenged Pringle’s possession of his slave-daughter, claiming of course, rights of property – in a person – but a slave was not a person, by law. Pringle agreed to an out of court settlement for what was said to be “an extortionate sum”, to own a black girl, not yet 18. That is, in 1771.
Pringle, it seems, could not produce heirs and successors by his Rachel, whose affections he had secured by his timely intervention against the whip, and his purchase by way of “an extortionate sum”.
Rachel, as captive women are wont to do, feared the loss of Pringle’s affections because of his alleged or apparent infertility. She decided to do something about it. She borrowed a child, suitably brown-black, and presented it to sea-captain Pringle after he had returned from one of his extended cruises. This Rachel told him was his long sought son an heir.
The mother from whom Rachel borrowed the child did not keep her side of the bargain, not unlike several surrogate mothers of our time. The real mother turned up and demanded her child. Rachel’s subterfuge was scuttled and alas, Pringle left her, outraged by her ruse, her ample and substantial charms notwithstanding.
But charms are charms. And Rachel quickly overcame her reverse, finding another white husband, named. Polgreen, whose name she took, seemingly without benefit of a Christian ceremony.
Soon Rachel’s name, appeared in the records of property-owners. Around 1780 she owned a property assessed for what was a not inconsiderable sum of £6 as annual taxes.
Later she would own an even larger property assessed for purposes of taxation at £50. This was in 1780!
This large mansion became Barbados’ first hotel, owned wholly and solely by Rachel Pringle Polgreen – a black woman.
And not just a hotel, but a prime hotel, for Rachel had established her hotel, with much foresight at an important historical juncture.
The American Revolutionary War of Independence was at its high tide, with considerable naval activity in the Caribbean. The British Royal Navy used the Caribbean to outfit and to refurbish men and ships. Rachel’s hotel became very popular, among the visiting British officers. Not just popular, but Royally so.
In 1786 and 1789, Prince William Henry, later King William IV, of England and Empire, visited Barbados, while serving as a Naval Captain in the Leeward Islands Station. He stayed at Rachel’s Hotel. He wined and dined, and no doubt, sampled more than food and drink, as naval men as of custom or necessity do.
So great was England’s future king’s enjoyment of the hospitality provided at Rachel’s Hotel, that he and his companions drunk with Barbados favourite spirit, proceeded to wreck the place.
Rachel, it is said, sat calmly and imperturbably as Prince and future king and his companions laid waste, crockery, furniture, glass-ware, with feathers floating downstairs from the ravaged pillows and mattresses. Rachel unperturbed and inscrutable of countenance sat in the doorway all the while the Royal fracas raged.
Prince William on descending for departure saw her, enthroned on her chair, and proceeded with a heave and a ho to send Rachel, toppling over in her magnificent corpulence. Much to the mirth of the spectators who had gathered to watch the marauding Royals wreck the place.
Rachel unflustered, with dignity somewhat impaired, rose. She took careful note of the surrounding damage, took an inventory to the last item, and before the Prince’s ship sailed sent him her itemised bill. The Prince ordered the bill to be paid at once, and in full.
Rachel with her Royal bounty, refurbished her hotel in even more lavish style which she re-named the Royal Naval Hotel. Rachel prospered.
Besides her hotel, she owned some ten properties on Canary Street, now George Street, Barbados.
Her death at 38, was recorded on July 23, 1791. The story is not done yet. In her last will and testament, she childless, she directed that her houses and lands be sold, and that one-third of the net assets be sold and given to Captain Pringle, who had rescued her from the public whipping for rejecting an incestuous relationship, and whom she had sought to make the father of a child by an immaculate misconception.
No doubt Rachel P.P as she often styled herself was Barbados first hotelier, and probably the Caribbean’s first black hotelier. She had overcome incest, and some say child molestation, she had escaped a public whipping on the bare behind, to become a notable entrepreneur while still technically a slave. In the end she repaid her protector. She had endured humiliation at the hands of Royalty, but had the essential dignity to insist on payment and was paid. She prospered ... In spite of. It is, to use understatement, the stuff of which heroes are made, in this particular case, a heroine extraordinaire.
How prevalent was child molestation, of white planter on black slave child? That we will never know for sure, for slavery was a peculiar institution awash in criminality and criminal dehumanisation. But one thing is beyond all historical doubt. It is this: Rachel Pringle Polgreen is the spiritual Mother of all those who would love to see Caribbean hotels and tourism, in ownership and control, accumulate the capital for genuine human development in one Caribbean. Keep her in mind. But now on to other but related matters.
African Slavery, I have always contended, was essentially different in the Caribbean, than it was in the United States.
To begin with, the slaves were a majority here, whereas in the United States, the slaves were a minority. I contend that it bred a “terrified white consciousness” in the minority whites here, which in turn, relied inordinately on terror as an instrument of control, social and political. In a manner of speaking, plantation slave society in the Caribbean was a terrorist society. That is, a society ruled by terrified white terrorists.
I am going to call a woman writer, Maria Nugent to testify in her writings, one of the very few we have, by women on the early Caribbean. Maria Nugent it will be noted was the wife of the Governor of Jamaica, between 1801–06. That is, before the abolition of the slave trade, and well before the abolition of slavery in 1834.
Nugent reports the consciousness of the English-speaking Caribbean at the time was haunted by the revolutionary spectre of Haiti. No doubt this “fear” was the principle cause of abolition, and still is today not taught as such to Caribbean children. The Haitian revolution, the only successful slave revolution in all world history, probably had more to do with the abolition of slavery than many an abolitionist.
Anyway, Maria Nugent wrote:
“The splendour of the black chiefs of Santo Domingo, their superior strength, their firmness of character, and their living so much longer in these climates, and enjoying so much better health, are the common topics at dinner and the blackies in attendance seem so much interested, that they hardly change a plate or do anything but listen.”
Slave master and slave were so caught up by the activities of the slave liberators, the great Toussaint, Dessalines and Henri Christophe, that it preoccupied them both. The Master in fear and trembling. The slave in definite curiousity and elation, with hope of emulation, for certain.
Maria Nugent, was even more cogent on the terror and the time in which she lived. She reported how with the French fleet near Jamaica in 1805, and her husband, the Governor, away on military duty, she went for a walk in Port Henderson. There she came upon a “horrid looking black man”. I suspect the horror was more in the eyes of the beholder than the beheld. Then came the horror of horrors for the ‘delicate’ Maria Nugent: “the black man failed to bow” to her but instead “grinned”. He may well have done no more than smiled, and certainly did not whistle as his American counterpart Emmett Till did much much later and was lynched. Maria Nugent continued that the “black man gave a fierce look, that struck me with a terror I could not shake off”. That terror became a lasting component of her mind. It was rooted in her condition as a minority in control of a majority, absolutely, and all the wealth that majority produced controlled with equal absolutism. The absolutism may have been diluted. But the control still persists, independence or no independence. Something more than independence is called for. It is a crying necessity. Crying, for now, in the Caribbean wilderness.
Maybe it is well that I come to Antigua now. Slavery as everybody knows was abolished, without apprenticeship, in Antigua, in 1834. Miss Lanaghan visiting Antigua, and writing on Antigua and the Antiguans in the 1840’s, after abolition mind you, gives off this inordinate fear, this terror of the freed slaves. She wrote of an incident where freed African servants in an Antiguan white home had sought to burn down the house as a result of a simple dispute with the white owners. Rage, of if you prefer volatility, is always the preserve of the powerless. The more powerless, the more volatile. Powerless they have nothing to lose, and can burn down anything for any reason.
“Who would not think himself safe” wrote Miss Lanaghan, “within the precincts of his own home? – where but in the fortress would we look for rest? Alas ..., even in our domestic circle ‘revenge’ might lead to the destruction of that great blessing family place!”
Fear of revenge by the ex-slaves, within, but more so, without the household, remained a fundamental category of the white mind, before and after slavery. It no doubt informed much of what the men legislated, but it is women, more sensitive than men, from whom we get this invaluable testimony of the inordinate fear in which white men and women, always in the minority, lived out their timorous, but terrorist lives in the Caribbean.
We come now to other testimony from women, admittedly, ruling class women of the Caribbean. It is Elizabeth Fenwick, who lived in Barbados between 1814–21.
She reports that she found dealing with black domestics, slave and free, a terrible task. She wrote that the slaves in the domestic household were “a sluggish, inert, self-willed race of people apparently inaccessible to gentle and kindly impulses. Nothing but the dread of the whip seems capable of rousing them to exertion and not even that can make them honest.” As if the exploiting whites could claim “honesty” as part of these cruel production and social relations, on which their very existence depended.
What is amazing is that this passage, shot through and through with racism, sounds very much like an editorial written here in another publication recently. It did not occur to Elizabeth Fenwick that people who did not own and control anything, who had no stake and no say, whose very humanity was denied every waking or sleeping minute, had no reason to exert themselves, except by compulsion. It did not even occur to her, that she herself did not work, but expected others to work for her with enthusiasm. The whip, she concluded, was the only remedy for this at once “sluggish” but “self-willed race”. Having used the word ‘self-willed’ she should have seen that the essential problem was that “this race” could not use its own “will” to self-determine the context and content of life, and, therefore used “indolence” and “pilfering” as forms of resistance. An amoral or immoral human condition, often breeds, equally amoral or immoral responses, as the first forms of resistance.
Lanaghan in her Antigua and the Antiguans is even less perceptive. She wrote that Antiguan domestics “think themselves upon an equality with the highest in the land.” Why not.
She missed the point by a mile, if not more. The ex-slaves were in fact, free and equal, like the highest in the land. The difference was, that then as now, they democratically controlled nothing. Their freedom was abstract. And as such, it either emasculated or alienated both men and women. Such a condition bends both women, but more so men out of shape – they pretend to be and affect the greed of their age-old masters. And they internalise their own oppression and the prejudices that go with it– – until liberated by new property relations.
Lanaghan writing in Antigua and Antiguans makes a comment about blacks here, which I have heard a thousand times, if I have heard it once. However I have heard it not from whites but from modern blacks. It shows to what degree we have internalised the prejudices and pejoratives used by our masters and mistresses against us.
Writing of blacks, mainly domestics here in 1840, more than 150 years ago, Lanaghan wrote:
“If you keep them at their proper distance, they become dissatisfied and complain of your being harsh to them, if, on the contrary you show them any degree of attention and try to make their situation as comfortable as possible, they then assume too much and entirely forget the difference of rank. Try to serve them, and it is ten chances to one, you make them your enemy; do them ninety-nine favours, and refuse the hundredth, and you are reviled and blamed as if you had injured them.”
The relation of slave or ex-slave to economic master, allowed for little humanity on either side. Miss Lanaghan expects the limited charity of the oppressor to be lauded by the oppressed! This would have been a denial of their own condition – oppression!
I doubt there is a living Antiguan who has not heard the same said about his fellow Antiguans. How they are “uppity” or “boast”. Of course, he or she, spoken to, is supposed to be different to the “others” spoken of. The epithets are but verbal weapons to keep us all in our downpressed places. It was so then. It is so now.
The problem is the poor do not love a condition which requires the charity of the condescending. They have a right to see to it that they eradicate poverty, as a precondition to their full humanity. In that struggle the oppressor, or his apologists, will always find them “rude”, “boast”, “conceited”, “ungrateful” or thinking themselves free and equal, like the highest in the land!
Belonging to the oppressor class, Ms. Lanaghan, though herself oppressed as a female could not conceive of a free society without “rank” and people keeping or being kept “in their place”. It was a way both of seeing and being. It was sustained by property relations. That is, who owns what, and so controls whose means of living, as well as their “standard of living”.
But Lanaghan’s consciousness, though female, was nevertheless part and parcel of the oppressor class. She could hardly see, think or write otherwise.
Mary Prince, a slave who lived in Bermuda and Antigua had an entirely different view from the Nugent’s, Fenwick’s and Lanaghan’s who wrote “her-story”. Mary Prince’s is both Her-Story and His-Story.
For most of Mary Prince’s life as a domestic in the Caribbean between 1788 and 1828, three of her four slave-owners treated her and her fellow domestic slaves with extreme brutality, the brutality of the terrorist, which seems to have escaped Nugent, Fenwick and Lanaghan. As Mary Prince reports in her written work, the first by a female slave, Captain Mrs I–– of Bermuda treated her and her fellow domestic slaves, from the time she was about 12, with routine torture, which extended to “two little slaves boys”. Hetty was constantly flogged by Captain and Mrs. I–– with both whip and cow-skin. After a most vicious flogging Hetty went into premature labour, delivering a dead infant. Hetty never recovered. She herself died soon after. “The manner of it filled me with horror” Mary Prince records epigrammatically.
Nor did Mary Prince herself escape. Mrs. I––, Mary Prince reported almost tersely and somewhat unemotionally:
“Caused me to know the difference between the rope, the cart-whip and the cow-skin when applied to my naked body by her cruel hand. And there was scarcely any punishment more dreadful than the blows I received on my face and head from her heavy fist. She was a fearful woman and a savage mistress to her slaves.”
Now we know, for sure, who were the savages. Mary Prince by writing Her-story was setting history right. We owe her an enormous debt of historical gratitude.
When Mary Prince got married, the Woods with whom she lived here in Antigua, and off whom Woods Mall is most inappropriately named, could not abide her right “to a separate and autonomous sexual and personal life.” The work relation penetrated into the innermost recesses of the person and the personal. Mary Prince could not be with her husband. For, Mrs. Wood “would not have nigger men about the yards, or allow a nigger man’s clothes to be washed in the same tub as hers.” Mr. Wood was ordered to flog Mary Prince on her marriage because she married. He obliged. Despite “working like a horse” in England for the Woods, she was turned out by them to be a beggar in London. Mary Prince’s immortal struggle for dignity, for a truly human existence, did not allow her to fall. She rose. To become one of the great campaigners against slavery. Even now she gets little or no attention in Caribbean text-books. Because the Caribbean has not liberated itself.
What I have showed here is that females writing history brought new insights, but showed as well that the old production relations, between Order-Giver and Order-Taker, were fraught with misery then, and even more so now. Mary Prince, herself a slave, wanted to abolish not just slavery, but the property relations which underpinned servility, whether as slave labour or free labour.
“The liberation of labour from a command economy involves the liberation of women in part, though not in whole.” This last sentence is not mine, it is Arah Hector’s who faced her own murder defending her dignity. Give me dignity or give me death.
The struggle for dignity has been the struggle of the women of the Caribbean be it Mary Prince or her successor the formidable Rachel P.P first Caribbean hotelier, or Jackie Croft or Arah Hector. Dignity, to be sure, is not just manners and behaviour. It is above all, new property relations and new social relations, which allow each to develop her or his own natural and acquired abilities, for the benefit of herself and himself, in community. Black women, often excluded from the prevailing property relations and subordinated as the resultant social relations, have always and will always fight for that kind of dignity, especially freedom from violence by oppressing men, with whip or without whip. Those who urge flogging wish, for sure, to terrify the lower orders, but more particularly, all women into fear and trembling before the actual whipping-man, as overlord, or the potentially whipping man. They were sworn enemies of human liberation. Shun them. As would Rachel P.P., as would Mary Prince, as would Jackie Croft, as would Arah Hector.
Last updated on 14 February 2022