And so, I suppose, these slave women who were entered in the book about twenty years after Lady Nugent left the island, Cecelia and Amelia and Maph and Cowslip, who was christened Mary Paton, and May who became Hannah Palmer, never bothered about matrimony. What made Sussanah Johnston become Elizabeth Palmer I wonder, and why did Kate become Annie Brindley, and why was Frankie, who was only 32, and valued at £90, neither christened nor married? I don't know that Sabina isn't a prettier name than Eliza, but a Creole negro slave of a hundred years ago evidently didn't agree with me. Eve aged 9 became Ellen, and to change a negro Venus to Eliza Stennet is bathos indeed.
“Baptism,” says Lewis, “was in high vogue, and whenever one of them told me a monstrous lie—and they told me whole dozens—he never failed to conclude his story by saying, 'Now, massa, you know I've been christened, and if you do not believe what I say I'm ready to buss the book to the truth of it.' I am assured that unless a negro has an interest in telling the truth, he always lies in order to keep his tongue in practice.”
The question Lewis did not ask himself was whether a white man in like circumstances would have behaved any better.
It may be that the planters were—some of them—brutal men, but I know that had I lived in those times I should probably, like the planters, have regarded the ministers of the other denominations outside the Church of England as most offensively officious. The planters as was not unnatural regarded their slaves as their property, property for which they had paid very heavily, and even though they allowed them many privileges they desired it to be clearly understood that these were privileges given of their own goodwill, and by no means to be considered as rights. The Baptists and Methodists preached what the planters considered sedition. Even tolerant Lewis forbade the Methodists on Cornwall and Hordly, though he allowed any other denomination to preach to the slaves, and much as I dislike the Church of England parson Bridges, I dislike still more the Rev. H. Bleby. He and his confrères must have been a most pernicious lot. Evidently on their own showing they were not men of education. They took the Bible as their guide, quoting it in season and out of season. This is of course not a crime, but even nowadays it grates on the average man. In those days the insistence that the negro was a man and a brother when his master declared him a chattel was extremely offensive.
Besides the doctrine of equality was considered dangerous. It was dangerous.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century the talk of freedom was in the air. It was the burning question of the day in Jamaica. The planters discussed it openly at their tables, so did the overseers and book-keepers, and the listening slaves waiting round the table carried all the gossip to the slave quarters, for then as now the black people went back to their quarters once the day's work was done. The tinder was more than dry when the spark fell.
The former revolts in Jamaica had frankly been outbreaks of savages, dimly conscious of wrong, trying to regain their freedom, but the revolt of 1831-32 was a revolt into which religion entered largely. The planters declared openly it was engineered by the Baptists, and the slaves themselves called it the “Baptist War” and the “Black Family War,” the Baptists being styled in slave parlance the “Black Family.”
Bleby discussing this last of the slave revolts which raged through Hanover, Westmoreland, St James and Trelawny, declares it started because a certain Mr Grignon, the Attorney of Salt Springs near Montego Bay, going out there one day close to Christmas met a woman with a piece of sugarcane in her hand—not a very desperate offence one would think—and concluding it had been stolen from Salt Springs—it probably had—not only punished her on the spot but took her back to the plantation and called upon the head driver to strip and flog her. She happened to be this man's wife, so he refused, and the second driver was called upon and he too refused, and all the people taking their cue from their headmen defended her. The Attorney could not get that woman flogged, and becoming alarmed at the attitude of the people he called out the constabulary to arrest the offenders. But the whole body of the slaves menaced the constables, and the principal offenders made their escape to the woods. And the woods round Montego Bay, woods that clothe all the hills that the Maroons held so long, are particularly suited for such guerilla warfare.
