“'No, she was a free woman.'
“'Was she in my service then?'
“'No, she was not in my service; I began to grow impatient.
“'But what does she do at Cornwall? Of what use is she in the house?'
“'Why, sir, as to use, of great use, sir'; and then, after a pause, added in a lower voice, 'It is the custom, sir, for unmarried men to have housekeepers, and Nancy is mine.'”
Lewis wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth century a little after Lady Nugent, and putting all these little stories together, we get a complete picture of the Jamaican estate as it must have been for close on two hundred years.
The black people, naked at first and later clad in rags, lived in a little village some distance from the Great House where dwelt their master, and the bond between them was the woman he took from amongst them for his convenience. The villages were of palm-thatched houses with walls of swish or of wattle, and were very often surrounded by a wall, for if the owner valued his privacy so did the dweller in the village, and presently around them grew up a grove of trees planted by the negro sometimes by design, sometimes by accident; there were coconut palms and naseberries, tall leafy trees, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks to Bligh and Marshall, breadfruit and mango trees, the handsomest trees, perhaps, that bear fruit, and there were oranges and lemons with their fragrant blossoms.
“I never witnessed on the stage a scene,” says Lewis, “so picturesque as a negro village.... If I were to decide according to my own taste I should infinitely have preferred their habitations to my own. Each house is surrounded by a separate garden, and the whole village is intersected by lanes bordered with all kinds of sweet-smelling and flowering plants.” Certainly he was fortunate. The villages on his estate must have been model ones. I have been up and down the land and I have never seen a negro village that in my eyes did not badly need cleaning up. There is no reason why the houses should not be delightful, but they are not. In those old days, the days long before Lewis, they were a danger, of course. Of sanitation there was none. Even now about a peasant's house in Jamaica there is often an unpleasant smell from the rotting waste that is scattered around; then it must have been much worse, but what could you expect, when the masters themselves regarded bad smells and rotting waste as all in the day's work? In the old slave-trading castles on the Guinea Coast there was always a well in the courtyard, a very necessary precaution, surrounded as the traders were by hostile tribes, but they also buried their dead in the courtyard and it never seems to have occurred to them that by such a practice they might possibly be arranging for a constant supply of graves. Sloane, I think it is, puts it on paper that, but for the John Crows—a small vulture—he does not think the towns in Jamaica would have been habitable.
The fields where the slaves grew cassava and yams and chochos and cocos were usually at some distance from the village, “on the mountain,” which meant the rougher and more stony hill ground at a distance from the Great House. According to custom one acre of ground was planted for every five negroes, and they were allowed to work on it one day a week.
And very gradually, the descendants of the naked savages who had been brought so unwillingly came to feel that they belonged to the land—it was their country. It was said that all the outbreaks were led by the newly-imported slaves, and that the Creoles, those born in the colony, were contented enough. They had many wrongs, but undoubtedly they loved the place of their birth, and felt deeply being sent away or sold. They pitied, as from a higher plane, the book-keeper who had to go. It is curious to learn that when a white underling was dismissed, the gangs—these slaves who must stay whether they liked it or not—would sing: