CHAPTER X—THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS
The feud that raged over the religious instruction of the negroes makes a curious piece of Jamaican history.
“The imported Africans were wild, savage and barbarous in the extreme; their untractable passions and ferocious temperament rendered severity necessary. They provoked the iron rule of harsh authority; and the earliest laws, constructed to restrain their unexampled atrocities, were rigid and inclement. They exhibited, in fact, such depravity of nature and deformity of mind as gave colour to the prevailing belief in a natural inferiority of intellect; so that the colonist conceived it to be a crime of no greater moral magnitude to kill a negro than to destroy a monkey; however rare their interest in them, as valuable property, rendered such a lamentable test of conscience.”
Thus the Rev. George William Bridges on the negroes when their spiritual state was exercising the minds of all the religious teachers. This particular shepherd was wroth because he objected to the sectarians, that is Quakers, Methodists and Baptists, taking upon themselves any interest in the souls of the slaves. “The country already pays,” he remarks, “near £40,000 per annum for their religious instruction.”
I don't know if I shall be called libellous, but it does seem to me that the Church was decidedly slack in dispensing that instruction for which she was so highly paid. She administered religion in the impersonal and dignified manner that was her wont, and the slaves might be christened if they so desired. Of course they had to get their master's consent, for it was not likely the parson was going to do it for nothing, and at the end of the eighteenth century it cost four bits a head, that is about 2s. 6d. But the clergyman was sometimes open to a bargain, and would do the whole estate for a fixed sum—about half the usual cost per head. And sometimes a whole estate would clamour to be christened. Sometimes they did it as a safeguard against some feared Obeah man, and sometimes simply to have names like the buckra. After their new name they added that of their master for a surname, and reserved the old name for common use. And then came trouble for the overseer or book-keeper, for the new Christians while exceedingly proud of being Christians like the buckras, were apt to forget their new names, and were always teasing to be told them, for, of course, they were recorded in the estate book.
As late as the end of the eighteenth century no one bothered about the naming of the slaves, and we find them entered in the Worthy Park estate book as Villian and Mutton, Baddo, Woman and Whore, but towards the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth, when Lewis writes, we find that even the Rose Hall slaves, and Rose Hall slaves were backward, had been christened, most of them.
Hannibal, a Creole, that is a slave born in the island, aged 54, of good disposition, appears to have been content with his old slave name; but Ulysses, of the same age, and also a Creole of good disposition, becomes Henry and adds Palmer because that was the name of his owner. Shemonth and Adonis, both Creoles of 42 and 39, make no change, perhaps the owner would not pay for their christening, neither does Aaron, an African of 44, though how they knew the age of an African unless he had been bought as a baby I do not know. Out of fifty male negroes nearly half changed their names, but some who did not were children, so perhaps they were christened in the ordinary way; The names they chose seem to have been singularly commonplace. Why should Adam, aged 6, become William Bennett? Or Othello, who was older, J. Fletcher? Why should Robert, a quadroon 3 years old, become Lawrence Low, and why should Isaac, 12, become simple J. James?
Out of sixty women and girls only six of mature age neglected to change their names. None of the older women are married, but some of the younger ones add their married names. Still, matrimony was not much in favour, either with slave or free. Lady % Nugent, twenty years before this book was entered up, is always worrying about it.
“See Martin's daughter soon after breakfast. It is a sad thing to see this good, kind woman, in other respects so easy, on the subject of what a decent kind of woman in England would be ashamed of and shocked at. She told me of all her children by different fathers with the greatest sangfroid. The mother is quite looked up to at Port Royal, and yet her life has been most profligate as we should think at least in England.”