Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes
set free, they likely did not survive for long due to the food shortages and destruction of homes. Many witnesses and victims wrote in apprehension of the sight and sounds of death throughout the towns and countryside. Several men of the Barbados Council wrote an address to King George III declaring their horror of hearing “the dying groans of a very considerable number of the inhabitants, who lay expiring in the streets of the towns … a circumstance too shocking to even mention.”132 Significant attention in the written reports also focused on slaves, noting their lack of shelter and impending starvation.133 A Barbadian planter wrote about ships being sent to North America to secure provisions, “without a supply of which numbers must die of famine: 1000 negroes have perished that way since the hurricane for want.”134 All inhabitants suffered from the 1780 hurricane, but evidence illuminates the particular hardships endured by the enslaved.135
John Gay Alleyne, speaker of the House of Assembly and a wealthy planter, expressed concern for his prospective loss of property in dying slaves. Alleyne implores, “The King’s Most Excellent Majesty … we dread a scarcity of [Indian corn] … for the subsistence of our negroes, and that a famine will complete that misery which the tempest may then seem only to have begun.”136 The limited diet of the enslaved made them incredibly vulnerable to any threats to these sources of sustenance. In contrast to the quality of food to which planters and slave owners had access to during disasters, the enslaved either starved or struggled to survive the diseases that spread across the island following hurricanes.137 Meanwhile colonists scrambled to prevent their loss of profits. Authorities feared not only famine and the death of their enslaved but also unrest and revolt due to the chaos after disasters.138 Evidence of colonial authorities’ fear and their efforts to exert control can be read in the technologies and architectures they developed to confine the urban enslaved population before and after the hurricane of 1780.
Architectures of Control
There was an obvious link between enslaved bodies in urban space and architectures of control. White supremacy was expressed in ideology, physical exertion, and inanimate symbols of power to the enslaved population with structures such as the common gaol, the execution gallows, or the Cage. These architectures served as stark reminders of the consequences of resistance to the enslaved even as they grafted a criminal identity onto their bodies.139 In Barbados the concentration of power was expressed through the organization of labor, punishment, and space. Barbados slave owners and the colonial government built and maintained urban carceral sites and practiced the spectacle of mobile punishments—whipping the same enslaved body in different locations—to (re)produce and exercise the forms of discipline that were found on plantations.
The control wielded by slave owners, overseers, and drivers on plantations was shared with constables, magistrates, jumpers, and executioners in urban areas.140 On the plantation, punishment for most offenses committed by the enslaved, whether purposely or in self-defense, remained in the hands of the planter, overseer, or driver. These men used the whip and other physical forms of discipline at their discretion with little, if any, regulation from colonial authorities. In town, however, in the absence of a “gang” of laboring workers and the urban reality of more individualized tasks, the white men appointed as constables and watchmen served as representatives of the urban slave holder, non-slave holders, and the larger white population and were given authority to mete out punishments on enslaved bodies.141
Power to inflict physical punishment extended to the judiciary as well as magistrates, who could order a whipping at their discretion, even if the slaveholder was not present or aware that the slave had been taken up by a constable. For instance, an Act passed in January 1708 allowed any justice of the peace to order “one and twenty stripes,” of the whip on any slave caught selling allegedly stolen goods.142 The slaveholder was required to pay for both the captivity of his/her “property” and the whipping, illustrating the extent to which control of “slave behavior” was enforced from many areas of urban society and was distinct from plantation discipline.143 Punishments on enslaved bodies included public displays of colonial power, and Bridgetown contained several spaces that invoked fear in the absence of the spatial confinement of the plantation complex. These spaces reproduced criminal identities, racial terror, and mortal confinement in urban Barbados.
An enslaved woman walking from one end of Bridgetown to the other would pass scenes and “visible symbols” of public punishment reinforcing the threat of violence as well as her own racial and gendered status.144 Such sites included the Cage, James Fort, the Custom House, taverns, brothels busy streets, and the commercial warehouses that lined the active wharf. Seemingly neutral sites occupied by enslaved women engaged in economic endeavors, such as the Milk Market or Great Market, were also spaces of terror since punishments were often meted out in different locations. For instance, Grigg and Bess were prosecuted for the theft of a cow in February 1743. This felony conviction carried the sentence of death. While Bess’s sentence of guilt was reversed, Grigg was ordered to be whipped by the town “jumper.” The order stated specifically that he be released from incarceration once “The Gaoler or his Deputy See … that [Grigg] first receive 39 Lashes on his bare back (vizt.) 13 at the Roebuck 13 at the Cage and 13 at the Custom House.”145 “The Roebuck,” or Roebuck Street was a busy district of shops and foot traffic and largely occupied by free(d) people of color by the end of the eighteenth century.146 Indeed, even the free population of color suffered the proximity to the violence of slavery. Likewise, the Custom House sat in the center of town where Grigg’s punishment would be witnessed by many enslaved and free(d)men, women, and children. The Custom Houses, a relic from Europe, were prevalent in many port towns across the Atlantic. Its purpose was to regulate and account for the import and export of trade goods. Not surprisingly, by linking punishment of slaves to the structure of the Custom House, the authorities reinforced enslaved commodification and objectification while setting an example of deterrence to the enslaved population. The Custom House’s location in the center of town and as a common site of whipping exemplifies the deliberate linking of the punishment and subjugation of black life and the consolidation of white supremacy in urban spaces. The other significant intention of such punishment was to make the spectacle visible to the greatest number of enslaved people.
The Cage, another physical representation of colonial power, was a gaol building originally erected for the confinement of riotous sailors in the mid-seventeenth century. Prior to 1657, there was a Cage located farther northwest at the intersection of Milk Market and Jews Streets. Situated between the courthouse and the main town market, this pre-1657 Cage held unruly indentured servants and “riotous sailors” after an incident in 1654.147 In 1657 a new Cage was completed on the southeastern public wharf, where Broad Street meets White Street, next to a public jail and near the State House. This new Cage was at the turn of the nineteenth century surrounded by open land that bordered a public “boardwalk” lined with pedestrian “stepping stones,” from which the walkway received its name.148 The Cage appears to have faced the busy Broad Street, although it could have been open to both the street and the wharf on the rear.149 From its early use for the confinement of white seamen and indentured servants, the new Cage’s purpose quickly shifted to that of a holding cell for runaway slaves, “a poignant symbol of the new stresses of the sugar era.”150 Captured runaways confined in the Cage waited there until they were claimed by their owners or tried.
Figure 5. Plan of the Publick Cage, drawn by John Atwood, c. 1830. Courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.
Directly related to the surveillance and confinement of the ever-increasing enslaved population, this shift in the use of the Cage from riotous white sailors to the confinement of black bodies signaled a critical shift in colonial priorities. Shortly after the sugar boom in the mid-seventeenth century, controlling the urban slave population was the most important aspect of enforcing white colonial power. Located on Broad Street and facing the careenage or public wharf the Cage was in the midst of busy maritime and foot traffic.151 As early as 1688 an Act “For the Governing of Negroes” specifies that “Negroes or Slaves So brought [to Bridgetown],