Where the Twain Meet

by Mary Gaunt

“Oh, massa,” said Cubina, shocked, “him sambo!”—that is, the child of a mulatto and a negro. But this did not always hold good.

He tells another story of a slave of his named Nicholas, a mulatto. Nicholas was the son of a white man, who on his deathbed charged his nephew and heir to purchase the freedom of this natural child. The nephew promised, and Matthew Lewis the master had agreed. Nothing was wanting except to find a substitute. But a substitute, once the slave trade had stopped, was very difficult to find. Before he was found, the nephew had broken his neck, and his estate had gone to a distant heir. Poor Nicholas's freedom was once more put off. Lewis says he liked the man so much he was strongly tempted to set him at liberty at once.

“But,” he adds very naturally, “if I began that way there would be no stopping.”

“Another,” says Lewis, “was building a house for a superannuated wife—for they have so much decency to call their tender attachments by a conjugal name.” Which is merely to say that even the mulattoes continued African customs here in Jamaica.

There was a law against slaves holding stock of any sort, and of course at first they did not, but gradually men who had to go out into the wilder parts of the mountains to grow their provisions, acquired live stock as well, and they held it not only on Lewis's estate, but on other men's. Lewis bought all the cattle which the industrious ones bred, good, bad, and indifferent, at an all-round price of £15 a head, and he never charged them for pasturage. Truly patriarchal in his rule was he. He believed that the slaves, taken all in all, had a fairly good time, and he was a man of letters, a man who had travelled, and whose opinion is worth considering.

“As far as I can judge,” he writes in the inflated style of the time of George III. of blessed memory, “if I were now standing on the banks of Lethe with a goblet of the waters of oblivion in my hand and were asked whether I chose to enter life as an English labourer or a Jamaican negro, I should have no hesitation in preferring the latter.” Doubtless he was quite right. His saying it only proves to me what a ghastly time the English labourer must have had at the beginning of the last century.

There is another aspect of slavery that we don't often realise, but he brings it before us clearly. At the present day if we wish to get rid of a bad servant, or even one we dislike, all we have to do is to pay him and dismiss him, and we are quit of him and his evil ways; but it wasn't so easy to get rid of a slave. He had a man named Adam, a Creole, who had a bad reputation as an Obeah man.

“There is no doubt of his having infused poison into the water-jars through spite against the late superintendent. He is unfortunately clever and plausible, and I am told that the mischief that he has already done by working upon the folly and superstition of his fellows is incalculable. Yet I cannot get rid of him. The law will not suffer any negro to be shipped off the island until he shall have been convicted of felony at the session. I cannot sell him, for nobody would buy him, nor even accept him if I would offer them so dangerous a present. If he were to go away the law would seize him and bring him back to me, and I should be obliged to pay heavily for his retaking and his maintenance in the workhouse. In short, I know not what to do with him.”

The habit of murdering the superintendents and “bushas” who had done them an injury, sometimes a very trivial injury, was one that had always to be taken into account, and a negro who had no personal grudge against the doomed man could always be relied upon to help a friend. Such were the strained relations between the white and black. A Mr Dunbar was set upon and murdered by his driver, helped by two young men who barely knew the planter by sight, and they could have had no possible grudge against him except that of colour. Again and again they had missed their chance by the merest accident, but one night as he was riding home from a dinner party at Montego Bay they rushed out from behind a clump of trees, pulled him down from his horse and clubbed him to death. No one suspected the driver, but a curious superstition gave him away. Naturally, all the houses of the slaves were searched, and in the driver's Mr Dunbar's watch and one of his ears was found. The watch might have been arrived at by barter, but the ear had been kept by the murderer from a negro belief that so long as the murderer possesses one of the ears of his victim he will never be haunted by his spectre.

It would be monotonous to put down the number of murders I have come across in my search for old tales of Jamaica. A book-keeper was discovered in one of the cane-pieces of Cornwall with his skull fractured, but the murderer was never discovered; and innumerable were the book-keepers and overseers who were poisoned by the women they trusted. Often the woman who mixed the draught had no idea of its being poison. She received the ingredients from the Obeah man as a charm to “make her massa good to her,” by which, says Lewis, “the negroes mean the compelling a person to give another everything for which that other may ask him.”