Before continuing my sketches of colour, it is necessary to say something about prejudice. I mentioned in a former chapter, that possibly it would be better to bury such a subject in the gulf of oblivion; but upon mature consideration, I think it advisable to portray a few of its many instances as well in times past, as now.
A candid mind cannot but allow the illiberality, not to call it by a harsher name, of despising or underrating persons, because it has pleased their Creator to give them less fair skins. Yet that these feelings have existed from time immemorial to the present day is a well-known fact; and the West Indies in particular has been the place where Prejudice has erected her stronghold.
Although, as before remarked, the negroes were only considered as beasts of burden, their polished and urbane white masters had no objection to making them the partners of their illicit intercourse; and then, casting aside all natural affections, doomed their unoffending children, the issue of such unions, to a state of degradation.
In former years, the cruelty of such an act was not, perhaps, so keenly felt by them. Without any knowledge of religion or share of education, they grew up devoid of the finer feelings. The girls, as they approached womanhood, became themselves the mistresses of white men, or, in the West Indian term, housekeepers, while the males were content to drag on their existence much in the same way as a tolerated spaniel, which at one moment is noticed by a gracious nod, and allowed to lick the feet of its master, while at the next it is kicked out of the apartment, or spurned from the pathway.
As time wore on, and knowledge slowly progressed, the fathers of these poor children were led to send them to some place of instruction, where, besides acquiring the mere rudiments of reading and writing, they became grounded in plain, but solid learning. Having thus passed through the early stages of life, the males followed mercantile or agricultural pursuits; and as, perhaps, wealth poured in upon them, and they felt in their own bosoms their superiority to many of the white inhabitants, their eyes became more and more opened, and they more and more felt their degraded state.
They were debarred from holding any office of trust—were not allowed to act as jurors—and were prevented from serving in the militia, until the year 1793, when, as a great concession, or else because the “great folks” thought it for the public good, they were allowed to serve as pioneers, or drag the heavy artillery. The very churchyard was denied them, and their mortal remains were deposited by the roadside, where only the suicide or the murderer found a grave; while, should a white man be seen to take one of them, even the most respectable among the class, by the hand, in the way of social intimacy, that white man would be scouted from all ranks of society for his indecorous behaviour.
In 1798, Mr. Gilbert, (a relation to the Mr. Gilbert, the founder of Methodism in Antigua,) for many years the superintendent of his majesty’s dockyard at English Harbour, was united in the bands of wedlock to a highly respectable and accomplished coloured lady of Antigua. The iniquity! of this action, as they deemed it, was resented by his brother whites; himself and his lady were openly insulted; and some wag of the island, who, with the brains of a calf, fancied himself an Ulysses in wisdom, gave to the world an example of his would-be wit, by painting Mr. Gilbert’s office-door half black and half white.[[46]]
Not only were the coloured people refused interment in the churchyard, but so fearful were the whites of profanation, that the very bell which tolled out their demise was prohibited from being used to perform that service for those degraded ones through whose veins flowed the least drop of Afric’s tarnished blood. Accordingly, a smaller bell (which still hangs in the belfry) was obtained from an estate in the island, called “Golden Grove,” and which was regularly kept for the sole use of persons of colour, until within these last few years, when their rights as fellow-creatures have been allowed, and those mean and pitiful distinctions of caste, in great measure, done away with.
The first coloured person who was buried in the churchyard at St. John’s was a merchant’s clerk, (whose own blood was tainted, it is said, but who passed as a white man,) the favourite of his master. The merchant ordered the funeral to proceed to the churchyard, and upon the clergyman making his appearance, and no doubt expressing his surprise at such an unprecedented circumstance, he (the merchant) insisted upon his performing the burial service, and dared him to prevent the interment taking place. The rector thought it prudent to comply, and accordingly the coloured man reposed by the side of some white person, who (following the idea of Pollock in his “Course of Time”) will, indeed, feel surprised at the last day, when each one takes again his own body, to find how long his ashes have been polluted by mingling in one common dust with him who perhaps was the offspring of one of his own despised negroes.[[47]]
How the coloured people bore all these accumulated indignities, which were heaped upon them for so many years, would astonish any sensitive mind; nor if they had joined the negroes in one common cause against their tyrants would it have produced much surprise. But they did bear it, and with magnanimity, until time and circumstance worked the cure, and delivered them from that thraldom of the mind more galling than any servitude of the body.