“What for you run away? We all free now. Buckra can't catch we. Hurra for fuss of Augus! hi! hi! fuss of Augus! hurra for fuss of Augus!”
On that night, too, there was a grand ball given by the black and brown people, to which the General and his Staff were invited. “Miss Quashaba, belonging to Mr C., led off with Mr Cupid, belonging to Mr M., while Mrs Juno, belonging to Mr P., received the blacks and buckras.”
It took a long while to shake off the shackles.
Besides, we must never forget there was a kindly side to slavery. Many of the white people took a great interest in their slaves, and at the slave balls many a slave girl was decked out in her mistress's jewels. Indeed, there was much competition among the ladies as to whose waiting-maid should make the best show.
They received instruction, too, these slaves, and sometimes the instruction given was extraordinary enough. Madden tells how on one occasion a girl was brought before him to give evidence against a fellow apprentice. He asked if she knew the nature of an oath, and her mistress was a little hurt that a girl of seventeen, who had been in her charge for so long, should be asked such a question. Nevertheless, he persisted in asking the question, and the girl replied, to the no small discomfiture of her mistress and the surprise of the crowded Court—“Massa, if me swear false my belly would burst, my face would be scratched, and my fingers would drop off!” And Madden dismissed the case for want of better testimony, though really, I think, if the girl feared such unpleasant things would happen to her if she lied, he might have trusted her to tell the truth. But that, I am aware, is a very modern view.
Slavery was abolished for good and all in 1838. The intention, when Madden came to the island, was to abolish it in 1840, but the apprenticeship which was substituted seems to have been very unsatisfactory, and I have read books by Quaker and Baptist missionaries which are full of the suffering of the freed slaves under these conditions. Up till 1734 the owners had the right to punish their slaves by mutilation, which, of course, often meant death, but though it was abolished, there are many ways, as we have seen, of making the life of a slave unbearable. If the apprentice did not please his master he sent him to the nearest workhouse, and many are the ghastly tales of the tired men and women worked in the tread-mill. It takes a long, long while for mercy and pity and kindly friendliness to make its way.
Madden shows us too a side of slavery which I confess had not struck me.
“The law, as it now stands,” he writes, “does permit the father to hold his own son in bondage, and the son to demand the wages of slavery from his own mother, and to claim the services of his own sister as his bondswoman. These horrors are not merely possible contingencies that may be heard of occasionally; they are actual occurrences, two of which came before me within the last three months.
“A Jew of this town had a young mulatto man taken up for refusing to pay wages. It turned out that these wages were demanded from his own son, his child by one of his negro slaves.... I most reluctantly fixed for that obdurate father the wages of a son's slavery, but in amount the lowest sum I had ever ordered.”
And it was not always the whites who were the unkind and grasping masters. A free 'black' came before him on one occasion, claiming the services of a runaway slave and her four children.