It was always feud, feud, feud. Reading the slave books, we see how much of this bitterness must have been engendered. In crop time the slaves often had to labour all night, and frequently on Sundays they were in the cane-pieces instead of being allowed to go to their ground, and if they had not time to grow their provisions it is hardly likely these hard taskmasters made good the loss.
“Great evil arises,” writes someone in the Rose Hall estate book, possibly the Attorney in charge, “to the Negroes and stock from carting canes at night. An Overseer who arranges his work with judgment will always have abundance of canes in the mill yard by commencing to carry early in the morning. It is therefore my desire that no canes are to be brought from the field after Sunset.”
Judging by this book, sometimes the mills started after 7 p.m. on Sunday night and ran continuously till the following Saturday night or Sunday morning without intermission or rest for anyone, white or black. How bitter might be the black man thus worked remorselessly, even though the white man was himself driven by a higher power.
A study of the “Runaways” interspersed up and down the pages among the other entries shows us very clearly the position of the unfortunate slave, even though no word is said against him. Cæsar on Rose Hall ran away again and again, and we feel great pity for Cæsar because possibly he could not stand this appalling labour. He returned on the 6th July for the last time, and on the 21st of the same month among “Decrease of negroes” is a simple note “By Cæsar died.” Poor Cæsar! What agonies did he suffer during that long, long fortnight.
I went to Rose Hall once, a great four-storied stone building, approached by flights of steps built on arches. Its empty window-places, from which the glass has long since gone, look out over the blue Caribbean, its floors, where they are not worm-eaten, are of the most gorgeous polished mahogany, and the walls of the principal rooms are panelled with the like beautiful polished wood. It is empty, forlorn, the glory has departed, it is haunted, they say, and there is a blood stain that will not wash out on the floor. Of Mrs Palmer, who owned it last, very unsavoury tales are told. She is said to have murdered more than one husband and lived with her own slaves, doing away with her paramour when she tired of him. No old planter in the whole island had a worse reputation than this woman, who was murdered as late as 1833 by a lover who saw his influence waning. Rose Hall was a “bad estate.” It was notorious for the ill-treatment of its slaves. Underneath the Great House, reached by a flight of stone steps, are rooms dark and airless, where the unfortunates who in any way transgressed were caged. The walls are of heavy stone, and the only means by which air and light are admitted are by narrow slits in those walls, and they only give into another underground room. It was a ghastly and horrible place in which to confine anyone, let alone these children of the sun. I said this to a friend who told me of another estate on which a cruel master, when any slave offended him, had him shut up in a room—a dungeon he called it—which looked through iron bars on his dining-room. And there he kept the offender without food, and rejoiced he should be within sight and smell of the lavish plenty of the planter's table. Like a barbarian of old, the cruel master took pleasure in the thought of another's suffering. The narrator went on to say that on one occasion a slave was so shut up and the master went away taking with him the keys, and as no one could get in the unfortunate starved to death. This may be perfectly true, for it seems to me there is no particular form of torture to which the slaves have not been subjected at one time or another; reading between the lines of the Rose Hall book, one of the latest slave books, you can see this. Never till I read up the annals of Jamaica did I so thoroughly realise the meaning of man's inhumanity to man, and I suppose the lot of the Jamaican slave was the lot of slaves all the world over. But we must remember too that there were certain compensations.
As Lewis has shown, it was impossible in later times to get rid of an objectionable slave, and the slave when he was old and ill was by the kind master protected and cared for, and the women who had borne many children were exempt from all work. They were supposed to have no anxieties about the future, that should be their master's care. At its best, slavery supplied no stimulus to industry; at its worst—well, no words are bad enough for slavery at its worst.
In the Worthy Park slave book there is frequent mention made of a slave always referred to as Creole Cuba's Cuffee, who seems to have been unmanageable. At any rate he was always in trouble, and at last he was sent to Spring Gardens, where were others also difficult to deal with. It was not till I read in Lewis's book the evil reputation of an estate called Spring Gardens, about that time, that I knew how dreadful was their fate. Lewis quotes the owner as the cruellest proprietor that ever disgraced Jamaica. It was his practice when a negro was sick unto death, to order him to be carried to a distant gully among the mountains on his estate, there to be cast out and left to die, and the “John Crows” would clear away his bones. He also instructed the men who carried the unfortunate to the gully to strip him before they left him, telling them to be careful not only to bring back his frock, but the very board on which he had been carried. On one occasion a poor creature while being removed, screamed out that he was not dead yet, and implored them not to leave him to perish in the gully. His master cared nothing and ordered the funeral to proceed, but the bearers were less hard hearted and they brought the sick man back secretly to the negro village and nursed him till he recovered, when he was smuggled off the estate to Kingston. Apparently he found means to support himself there for one day, his late master on turning a corner came face to face with the man whose bones he thought had long ago been picked clean by the “John Crows.” He immediately seized him and claimed him as his slave, and ordered the men who were with him to drag him to his house. But the slave made one more bid for freedom. He shrieked and cried out his woes, and I am glad to say that in Kingston the spirit of fair play held good. The crowd that gathered were so excited by the tale that Mr Bedward was glad to save himself from being torn to pieces, fled from Kingston, and never again dared to claim that slave risen from the dead.
Lewis tells too of a man who was tried in Kingston for cruel treatment of a sambo woman slave. She had no friends to support her cause, nor any other evidence to prove her assertions than the apparent truth of her statement, and the marks of having been branded in five different places. Her master was actually sentenced to six months imprisonment, and the slave was given her freedom as compensation for her sufferings.
Thus we see slowly through the years the position of the slave improving.