Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes
Jane was one of many fugitive women who may have run to Bridgetown and were then described by their scarred flesh.21 On 5 April 1783, Harrison Walke of St. Peter placed an advertisement in the Barbados Mercury: “Runaway … a negro wench named SARAH CLARKE, about forty-five years old, she is a stout woman, very bandy legged, and has a large scar between one of her shoulders and breasts, she is supposed to be harboured in Bridge Town, and employed in the occupation of washerwoman, having been [seen] there several times with a tray of clothes on her head.”22 Sarah Clarke’s flight reveals multiple aspects of her life. That she ran away as an older woman is notable though not unusual, according to the collection of late eighteenth-century runaway advertisements.23 Clarke also ran several miles from her owner to Bridgetown, when Speightstown and its free black population might have offered an easier journey. She therefore traveled as far away from her owner as possible. In addition, Sarah Clarke was marked by the whip. Her “escape,” whether temporary or permanent, carries a scar that that provides evidence of endured brutality as well as a certain identification to those who sought her apprehension.
An enslaved woman named Affey was similarly described by marks on her skin. Affey was “about forty odd years of age; … is a little [pitted or pecked] with the small pox, and has a remarkable scar under the calf of one of her legs, the size of the palm of a hand, about five feet six inches high, is well know[n] in Bridge Town, and has comrades in different parts of the island.”24 Daphney, listed as “a mulatto woman,” had been “branded in the face with the letters H.L.” She had been seen in Bridge Town among the Barracks and at other sites.25 The man who claimed ownership of her body hailed from St. Lucy, the northernmost parish and at least twenty-two miles away from Bridgetown. Daphney also bypassed the closest urban space of Speightstown to seek escape. In the weeks of 9 through 22 November 1788, an advertisement sought a woman named Joney who had part of her ear missing and a “scar on her underlip.”26
Figure 2. A new & exact map of the island of Barbados in America according to survey made in the years 1717 to 1721, by William Mayo. Courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.
More than a year before Joney’s escape, Pothenah ran away in August 1787. She was sought by a subscriber to the newspaper, who offered a reward of five pounds “for apprehending a stout yellow skin negro woman … has a mark from the lash of a whip across her stomach, and two others on one of her sides.”27 During the month of September 1787, Mary escaped her owner. She was described by a proximity to a working animal, “between a black and yellow complexion, stout limbed, is marked in the forehead near the form of a horse shoe and marked on her stomach, she had a mark of a whip on one eye,” and her owner noted that she “speaks tolerable good English.”28 Enslaved women often ran toward town and to the military barracks in hopes of hiding themselves or earning money working for the soldiers. Other enslaved women were hired out to soldiers and officers as part of an informal sexual economy.29 Their networks across the island demonstrate the distances across which the enslaved maintained kin and communal ties, whether family or friend.
But Daphney, Joney, Pothenah and Mary also carried their flesh wounds and the memories of their infliction into hiding. They could not escape the fact of their objectification nor the precarious status stemming from perpetual enslavement. Their scars would always be associated with slavery. The society in which they lived made it impossible to change the meaning of their mutilations even if they did find freedom. Although many enslaved women ran away, sometimes great distances from their owners, what they could not escape, even in death or hiding, was the violence of their condition and material lives. And, this remains the condition in which we find them in the archive and from where we must attempt to recount their stories.
Barbados developed into a lucrative colony from its establishment in 1627 until Jamaica surpassed its economic significance by the mid-eighteenth century. Bridgetown, the capital “city,” was for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the preeminent entrepôt for British Caribbean colonial production and profit.30 This profit, directly linked to the rise in sugar production, manifested itself in concerted urban building projects that supported the intensive shipping and trade industries.31 Corresponding to this expanded architecture was the influx of thousands of Africans brought into the colony to sustain sugar production on hundreds of plantations throughout the island. Urban planning began as early as 1657, when an “Act for ye appointing and nomination of Streets, Lanes Alleys, Wharfs and other passages convenient in and about ye towne of St. Michael” passed for building the streets, government buildings and infrastructure that would support a rising merchant class.32 Planters, merchants, and widows who initially populated the town of St. Michael, as it was first named, brought and purchased slaves who worked to support their owners’ increasingly opulent urban lives. To focus solely on profit, development, and trade in colonial urban sites elides a central facet of the economy and this urbanization—that British colonists built into the landscape spatial features, both material and symbolic, to control and terrorize a growing enslaved population over the course of the eighteenth century.33 One crucial element is the violent tactics employed by urban slave owners, legislators, and colonial governments in an effort to regulate enslaved bodies in a physically porous environment where the mobility of the enslaved and free threatened colonial power. Therefore, enslaved people experienced surveillance and spectacles of violent punishments as they went about their daily work.
Attention to how urban colonists consciously developed structures of confinement and punishment discloses a strong link between physical space, slavery, and enslaved bodies. It also indexes the specificities of unfreedom and fear in urban enslavement that have remained unremarkable compared with the violence of the sugar plantation complex.34 Here we also see that the transition from private owner punishment to state punishment that has typically characterized the historiography of post-emancipation societies was not the reality for West Indian slave societies. As Diana Paton reminds us, punishment “was carried out on the authority of the state both before and after the end of slavery … and that slave holders made direct use of imprisonment, both on and off their estates.”35 There was a marked transition after the British Abolition Act that took away the ability of slave owners to punish black bodies and shifted this authority to the state.36 However, state authority to punish was always present in urban contexts, and the regimentation and standardization of punishment, including laws of flogging, were practiced much earlier than post-emancipation legislation would suggest.37 Without the definable constricting geography of the plantation landscape—its “Great House,” sugar fields, provision grounds, and slave villages—the colonists residing in Bridgetown constructed markers and holding cells and enacted spatial punishments on enslaved bodies limiting enslaved movement, congregation, and other group activities. In addition, the enclosing space of Barbados as a small non-mountainous island limited possibilities for prolonged escape. There was generally no sustainable maroon community to run toward after the seventeenth century, nor an easily accessible neighboring colony that might offer slaves freedom for loyalty against a colonial enemy. This landscape was essentially finite.38 Yet, over time and precisely correlated to the influx of Africans into the colony, Bridgetown council members, assembly, and vestry men ordered and paid for structures like the Cage and the gallows to serve as a constant reminder to the enslaved laborers who traversed the town that their lives were bound to perpetual servitude violently enforced. One way to consider this historical experience of urban enslavement is to follow fugitive bodies moving through the space of Bridgetown as they encountered various spatial reminders of the looming violence of slavery.
Jane’s Flight: The Fugitive Body in Space
From her runaway advertisement it is unknown whether Jane spent her life in town or the countryside, but she shared with many enslaved women the desire to run toward Bridgetown to conceal themselves in a dense and more diverse population. Demographic statistics for the eighteenth century are sparse, but by 1774 the enslaved population of Saint Michael’s Parish numbered 12,268 to 5,105 white inhabitants.39 These numbers included both rural and urban parts of the parish in which