Gender, Language, Violence and Slavery: Insult in Jamaica, 1800–1838

Abstract

Discussions of the coercion and abuse experienced by enslaved people in New World slave societies have tended to focus on violence. In many ways, this is how it should be: for enslaved people, experiencing or witnessing violence was indeed an everyday part of life. Nevertheless, violence inflicted by slaveholders on enslaved people did not take place in a vacuum: it was accompanied by, mediated through, and often preceded by abusive words. Yet while debates around negotiation, slave resistance and paternalism focus in detail on the cultural and discursive context of these relationships, discussions of violence tend to home in on their purely physical aspects.1 This article examines the context of violence in a society undergoing the transition from slavery to a post-slave society, by investigating the insulting words employed by plantation owners and managers in Jamaica, and the means by which enslaved people responded to them. It suggests that such words, in themselves and through their relationship to violent acts, played a central role in asserting and attempting to perpetuate the dominance of slave-owners and plantation managers over enslaved people. For some contemporary observers, insulting language served as a substitute for personal violence in situations where the latter had been de-legitimated. Benjamin McMahon, writing of the apprenticeship period in Jamaica (1834–38) when slaveholders lost the legal right to directly ‘punish’ their unfree workers, argued that, ‘the overseers, as they could not flog and tear the flesh of their victims, constantly vented their spite in the most dreadfully abusive and obscene language, which always hurts the feelings of the negroes even more than corporal punishment’.2 While McMahon was probably correct in his assessment of the frustration of overseers deprived of the use of the lash, I suggest that rather than ‘hurt the feelings’ of apprentices in a manner that contrasts with the hurt of corporal punishment, the ‘hurt’ of such abusive language lay precisely in the threat of violence that always implicitly accompanied it, and thus in the fear that it produced. McMahon's claim is not gendered. The evidence I present in this article, however, suggests that the kind of language he refers to was primarily directed at women, and that its ability to insult consisted of sexualised and animalistic language. Through this language of insult, planters discursively fragmented women's bodies, denied them the status of ‘real’ women, and metaphorically reduced them to their genitalia or to animals. The misogyny of insulting language directed against enslaved and apprenticed women suggests that these women's specific experience of subordination is not adequately described by a focus on discrete acts of sexual violence, or analyses of the additional burden of domestic and reproductive labour imposed on them, but rather was intertwined with daily interactions among managers and enslaved/apprenticed people. Analysis of spoken language, even though frozen in the archives and no doubt distorted through the recording process, provides a point of connection between three aspects of power relations that differentiated women's experience from that of enslaved men. The historiography of women in slave societies has been centrally concerned with the exploitation of their labour, the exploitation of their reproductive capacity, and the sexual violence, including rape, routinely imposed on them. However, while many fine historians have provided detailed accounts of each of these dimensions of enslaved women's oppression, their analyses have rarely linked these elements together.3 It has proved difficult to move beyond an analytic framework that understands enslaved women as ‘doubl[y] oppressed through production and reproduction’, or through their status as both enslaved and female.4 Such a paradigm is problematic because it recognises enslaved women's lives as structured by gendered power only in relation to experiences that appear to be specifically female, such as reproduction and sexual violence, and implies that men's experiences were not organised through gender. This article focuses on the generalised culture of racist misogyny of plantation managers, as revealed through the archival traces of their use of insulting language, with the aim of developing a framework for understanding slavery and gender that recognises the pervasiveness of gendered power. Through sexualised insulting language, gendered domination and more specifically the threat of sexual violence was integrated into the totality of power relations in slave society, rather than isolated in discrete acts of rape or other forms of sexist oppression. The language of insult described here was used by managers in the context of disputes over work, health, family and other conflict-provoking aspects of daily life. It played a role in justifying, in the eyes of these managers, the sexual victimisation of enslaved women. Analysis of its content allows us to see everyday planter ideologies in action, in contrast with the writings of the plantocratic elite, which reflect the views of a minority of planters and were often produced for public consumption in the context of the debate over the abolition of slavery. The language of everyday relations of domination is difficult to access. While insults exchanged between near-status-equals are frequently repeated in courtrooms, those used in situations of extreme status difference such as slavery and apprenticeship are rarely preserved in archives.5 Powerful people can usually deal with insults from their social ‘inferiors’ without taking those who insult them to court, while recipients of insults from bosses, landlords, state officials and other powerful people can rarely afford to take the risk of prosecuting. As a result, historians have rarely analysed insults used by powerful to hurt and control their social inferiors. Perhaps the ubiquity of such behaviour renders it invisible. In order to circumvent this problem, this article makes use of the methods of microhistory, basing much of its argument on detailed analysis of a single small-scale case recorded in particularly rich detail, supplemented by additional examples. The goal of a microhistorical approach is not to find ‘representative’ cases, but rather to analyse in detail what can be gleaned from those exceptional cases that survive in archives, in order to provide insight into historical dynamics that cannot be observed at higher levels of abstraction.6 Enslaved women did not accept the male planter designation of their bodies as vile. They countered the planter language of insult in two ways. First, they responded in kind, turning managers' insults back on the insulter, although the precise content of the insults were different. In addition, they acted to redefine and reclaim their bodies, and to elaborate their own bodily practices of modesty and protection. In particular, enslaved and apprenticed women repeatedly claimed the right to define their own state of health, and thus when they were and were not fit to work. As the apprentice Susannah Stewart put it ‘I told him I know my own pain and sickness, and if I wasn't sick, I wouldn't stop to take all the pulling and hauling from Busha’.7 Such claims were not a direct response to misogynist insult, but did have the effect of elaborating an alternative view of the black female body. By presenting their bodies as whole and claiming the power of their own bodily knowledge, enslaved and apprenticed women contradicted the hostile discourse that disaggregated their bodies into a collection of parts. The evidence discussed here comes from a particular place, Jamaica, and mainly from a specific time, the early nineteenth century, including the transitional apprenticeship period (1834–38) through which slavery was ended in most British colonies. Jamaica in the first third of the nineteenth century was a society organised around intensive slaveholding and sugar production. The vast majority of its population was enslaved. Approximately half of these enslaved people lived on sugar plantations, with most of the rest divided among properties devoted to stock-raising and growing other crops including coffee and pimento.8 Jamaican rural society was characterised by large plantations of more than fifty enslaved workers; Barry Higman has calculated that in 1832 almost 50 per cent of enslaved people in Jamaica lived in units of more than 150.9 By the time slavery ended in 1834, Africans and their descendants had developed complex networks of kin within and across these plantations. With the exception of domestic workers, enslaved women in rural Jamaica worked mainly in gangs as field hands. The majority of enslaved men also worked in the fields, but men also had access to a wider range of skilled occupations.10 Enslaved people also constructed their own economy, growing crops and raising livestock for consumption and for sale in Jamaica's markets.11 Jamaican slaveholding units were run as businesses, with a range of white managerial staff who either worked alongside resident proprietors or served under the attorneys who represented absentees.12 Relations between enslaved people and managers were complex, tense and personal. Enslaved workers had distinct preferences about styles of manager, and were often astute in playing off lower-level managers against government officials and attorneys.13 The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 produced an economic squeeze, with declining numbers of enslaved workers pressured to produce increasing amounts of export crops. There were contradictory pressures on managers and owners trying to make a profit under post-slave-trade conditions and enslaved workers trying to protect their autonomous time, bodily integrity and pace of work. These pressures produced frequent conflict in a context in which one group was socially and legally legitimated to use violence to enforce its will.14 Some slaveholders responded to these pressures by adopting an ameliorationist slaveholding model in which ‘good management’ would supposedly produce high rates of productivity, as recommended for instance by Thomas Roughley in his The Jamaica Planter's Guide.15 Abolitionist exposés and the grievances of enslaved workers suggest, however, that it was at least as common for planters to respond with bitterness and anger to increasing imperial efforts to control their management practices. Violence and the threat of violence continued to be a core part of everyday plantation life. The apprenticeship system that came into force in 1834 did not abolish unfree labour, but it did produce profound changes in the dynamics of plantation life.16 Under the new system, which was implemented in almost all the British slave colonies, chattel slavery was replaced by compulsory labour enforced not by the private punishment of the planter but on the authority of the state. Apprentices were required to work for 40 hours a week without pay, for their former owner. If they refused this labour they could be taken before a stipendiary magistrate – one of a new group of officials created to oversee apprenticeship – who was authorised to order their punishment by flogging (if male), imprisonment or additional labour. Apprentice-holders who illegally mistreated apprentices could be punished as well, but only by fines. The British government intended the system to last six years, but it produced such intense conflict that it was abolished in 1838. Apprenticeship was not merely slavery by another name; it did not simply bring out into the open conflicts that already existed during slavery. Rather, by reconfiguring the relationships between state, property holder and unfree labourer, it produced new areas of contestation. In particular for our purposes, slaveholders' loss of the right to directly punish their slaves (now apprentices), came into direct conflict with apprentices' increasing assertiveness as they tried to ensure that their new rights were worth more than the paper they were written on. One result was a great deal of anger and frustration on the part of managers. This may well mean that planters' verbal abuse of unfree workers took place more frequently during apprenticeship than during slavery. It is also possible, however, that the incidents discussed here were very like those that took place during slavery, but that the conditions of apprenticeship mean that these incidents were recorded while similar events from the period of slavery were not. For several reasons, we know more about day-to-day interactions between unfree workers and their managers during apprenticeship than we do about slavery itself. As has already been mentioned, the apprenticeship system involved the appointment of a number of stipendiary magistrates who were to enforce apprentices' labour and adjudicate conflicts between apprentices and apprentice-holders. Many conflicts that would not have been recorded during slavery were during apprenticeship aired before these officials, whose records thus provide a rich source of evidence about daily contestation on and off the estates.17 In addition, the intense interest of the abolitionist British public in the progress of the apprenticeship system led to the production of a number of abolitionist investigations of the colonies, characterised by the detailed recording of specific incidents.18 Thus while the conditions of apprenticeship may have led to more frequent exchanges of angry words, the language of insult itself is unlikely to have changed much since the end of slavery – and indeed I cite below some pre-1834 evidence that confirms the similarities. Thus, while most of the evidence in this article comes from the apprenticeship period, it provides insight into planter cultures during late slavery as well as during apprenticeship. The argument here is specific in terms of time, but has potential wider applicability. It is also specific in terms of place, but it seems likely that similar kinds of gendered abusive language, likewise connected to the threat and practice of violence, were used in other slave societies. Further research will be necessary to reveal the particularities of such languages of insult, but we might expect that, while they might differ to some extent according to the specific European cultures of the planters, the social context of gendered domination and subordination in slave societies would lead to similar patterns of insult and abuse across Atlantic slave societies. Sarah Williams, an enslaved woman, lived and worked on Content Hall Pen in the parish of St Elizabeth, in south-west Jamaica.19 The term ‘Pen’ suggests that the business of the property was cattle-raising, although it may also have cultivated one or more of the secondary crops, coffee, pimento and ginger.20 Williams's elderly mother, Tabitha Hewitt, was a cook and general domestic worker in the house of the estate's resident owner, Thomas Mason, who stipendiary magistrate William Oldrey described as a ‘very rich man’.21 When Hewitt became sick, Mason refused to provide her with any medical care, something he also refused to the other enslaved people on his estates. Mason's denial of medical and social care was part of a pattern of refusal to provide enslaved workers with the means of subsistence: they also complained of a lack of clothing and provision grounds. Tabitha Hewitt's illness meant that she was unable to look after herself, and became dependent on the care provided by her children and grandchildren, who were only able to look after her when they were not required to work.22 As a result, her condition rapidly worsened as a result of her inability to prepare food for herself. She experienced an unnecessarily demeaning final illness, at times lying in her own excrement for lack of anyone to clean her. Tabitha Hewitt died early in August 1834, a matter of days after she ceased legally to be a slave. On her death, her daughter Sarah Williams and granddaughter Evelina Smith washed her body and dressed it but, rather than allow them to stay with the body, Thomas Mason ordered the two women to return to work. Testifying at an investigation into Mason's actions four months later, Williams reported that: I went to field, massa walked up and down in the field and told me ‘that he heard me say that I was a strong woman, and he wished to have a try at me, that he would beat off twenty like me’, … the expressions Massa made use of I am ashamed to speak before you sir. The investigating magistrates asked Williams to overcome her reticence and reveal the words used in detail, which she did: Massa say I was a stinking bumbo, he said I was a maggothy [sic] bumbo, he said if he had the will of me, he would run a red hot iron up my bumbo; he said that I stood like an old Spaniard Mule, he said that I was a woman and a man.23 According to Williams, this was only the beginning of Mason's stream of invective. The investigating magistrates asked her if Mason said ‘any thing to you about diseasing the men’? The testimony continued as follows: ‘Massa said that I was a poxy a—se, and that I pox'd up all the men’. Q: ‘Have you ever had such a complaint’? ‘Since I was born I never had such a disease’. As well as these sexualised insults, Mason threatened Williams with physical violence should she attempt to report the event to Captain Oldrey, the stipendiary magistrate for the area who by chance was visiting the property on the day of Hewitt's death: Massa … said that if I talked to him [Oldrey] he would knock the teeth down my throat and that he did not care if he went to Goshen and had £20 to pay.24 Mason's insulting language, in addition to his treatment of Tabitha Hewitt and his general neglect of the apprentices' needs – specifically, his refusal to issue them with the clothing that enslaved people had traditionally received – led to demonstrations on the property including shouting, clapping and making noise; according to the rather hyperbolic account of the coroner who investigated Hewitt's death, the plantation was in ‘a state of rebellion or insubordination’ when he arrived.25 Perhaps buoyed by the support of her fellow apprentices, Williams put aside Mason's threats and reported his actions to the magistrate. In response, Mason stole livestock from her and from many other apprentices on the estate: ‘the very afternoon that Capt. Oldrey came on the property Massa in spite because I went to complain to the Captn took away my sow, it was because I took him before the Captain’. Other apprentices at the investigation also testified to Mason's angry and abusive language. Evelina Smith reported that Mason threatened to break her neck should she stay with her grandmother's body. John Nunes, Sarah Williams's twin brother and a former driver on the estate, reported that Mason called him a ‘villain … a dammed rascal and scoundrel for upholding those bitches … Master meant by the bitches my sister Sarah Williams and Evelina Smith’. Other testimony at the investigation revealed that Mason had referred to Williams and Smith as ‘damned bitches’ on other occasions. This incident provides the most detailed testimony about planters' languages of insult that I have discovered. It encapsulates the racist misogyny of Jamaican planter culture, and is worth discussing in some detail. I use the term ‘misogyny’ with care, for this language bespeaks not merely a sense of sexual difference and hierarchy, as is conveyed by the term ‘gender’, nor even one of sustained discrimination along gendered lines, as is implied by ‘sexism’, but a real hatred of women. Mason expresses his anger with Williams through an attack directed at her femaleness that renders her body grotesque.26 His insults attempt to reduce Williams to her sexual organs, equating her with her ‘bumbo’ (genitalia), which he vividly represents as an object of disgust: ‘stinking’ and ‘maggothy’ (maggoty). These adjectives augmented an implication of decay and disgust already suggested by the use of the term ‘bumbo’. The word derives, according to linguist Richard Allsopp, from the Efik term mbumbu, meaning ‘rotten, putrified, decomposed’, and is ‘associated only with obscene slang’. In contemporary Jamaican speech, the term is strongly insulting if directed against another person.27 Mason did not limit himself to describing Sarah Williams as an object of revulsion. In addition, he threatened her with an act of extreme sexual violence: rape with a red hot iron. He goes on to compare her to a mule – an animal that is both sterile and considered unnatural – and then even more strongly to call into question her femininity by suggesting that she is both ‘a woman and a man’. Finally, he returns to the theme of sex, this time linking her sexual organs to disease, and implying that she is promiscuous and the source of disease (‘I pox'd up all the men’). The misogyny of the language is clear, but I would argue further that this is a racist misogyny. The racism is not in this case made explicit, although in some other incidents of abusive language, planters did use racially coded terms such as ‘obeah bitch’.28 Nevertheless, Mason's language was implicitly racist in being directed against a black woman in a context where such language could routinely be used against black women but was extremely unlikely to have been used against a white woman. A counter-example, in which a white man does use curses against a white woman, appears in the song ‘Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin’, recorded in 1793 by J. B. Moreton. Narrated in the voice of an enslaved woman, the song describes the narrator's sexual relationships first with ‘massa’, then with ‘overseer’, and eventually the birth of a ‘white’ baby by the overseer, who ‘misses’ believes to be fathered by ‘massa’. It includes the following stanza: Then misses fum [flog] me wid long switch, And say him [the white baby] da for massa; My massa curse her, ‘lying bitch!’ And tell her, ‘buss my rassa!’[kiss my arse]29 Despite this evidence, as a general rule white women would be far less likely to be insulted in this way than would black women. The fact that in this case the white woman insulted is the wife of the insulter is interesting and suggests that white women might be most likely to be subjected to such insults in domestic and intimate settings. In addition, although the white woman in this example is called a ‘bitch’, her body is not invoked as a means to insult her, nor is presented as grotesque or disgusting. On its own, Sarah Williams's story could be dismissed as an isolated and extreme event telling us little about the general culture within which enslaved and later apprenticed people in Jamaica lived and worked. However, other evidence suggests that similar language was widely used. In a case dating from slavery, an overseer, James McCall, was accused of using unspecified ‘cruel measures’ in his attempt to force an enslaved woman, Rebecca Taylor, to have sex with him. When she continued to refuse he managed to get her committed to the workhouse on trumped-up charges, even though she was in poor health. According to a newspaper report of the Council of Protection hearing to determine whether or not he should be prosecuted, McCall said in the courtroom ‘“let her stay [in the workhouse], and be —,” together with another indecent observation, at which Mr R. S. Thompson chuckled heartily’.30 This evidence is brief and deliberately obscures the precise words said, yet suggests a homosocial planter culture in which ‘indecent’ remarks about enslaved women were used to cement relationships among white men.31 Joseph Sturge and David Harvey, British abolitionists who visited the West Indies in 1837 to publicise bad conditions during apprenticeship, reported a case in which a woman was locked up illegally by a bookkeeper and called ‘obscene names’.32 Several stipendiary magistrates commented on planters' use of insulting language against apprenticed women. One claimed that apprentices' withdrawal of their labour resulted primarily ‘from the overseers own bad and indecent conduct towards the labourers such as insulting the women and calling them “bitches” and other epithets likely to issue from vulgar minds’.33 Another wrote that planters' ‘want of consideration for the feelings of the people, and of the women in particular, by the too frequent application to them of language the most disgusting that passion could suggest, or the want of common decency dictate’, led to ‘insolence, recrimination desertion, and other manifestations of discontent’. He noted that a prominent apprentice complaint against apprentice-holders was using ‘vulgar curse[s]’ against them.34 These general reports are reticent as to the content of planter curses, but evidence from particular cases confirms the first magistrate's comment that the most frequently used insult was ‘bitch’, a term that features in Sarah Williams's story. Kitty Hilton, an enslaved domestic worker, was cursed as a ‘damned bitch’ by her master, the proslavery propagandist George Bridges, who had mistakenly ordered her to prepare food that he later decided he did not need. The insulting words were followed by physical violence: Bridges blackened both Hilton's eyes, kicked her and had her severely flogged.35 Richard Allen, a constable, called apprentice Jenny a ‘bastard b—h’ before beating her around the head.36 As noted above, in two cases women were called ‘obeah bitch’. The insult ‘bitch’ in this context invokes two layers of meaning. Most obviously, it refers to the woman as an animal, a common feature of insulting language cross-culturally.37 The blurring of the line between human and animal was presumably especially powerful in a society that repeatedly discursively reduced enslaved people to animals – for example in the listing of ‘slaves’ alongside ‘stock’ in plantation account books, or in the intermingling of advertisements for enslaved ‘runaways’ with animal ‘strays’.38 But ‘bitch’ also has sexual connotations. The OED, whose second definition of the word is ‘applied opprobriously to a woman; strictly, a lewd or sensual woman’, includes an example from 1790 ‘Call her Prostitute, Bawd, dirty Bitch’, while Laura Gowing's study of insult in seventeenth-century London includes ‘worse than anie salte bitche which the dogge followethe up and downe the streete’.39 Thus in calling enslaved women ‘bitch’, planters invoked a long-standing discourse of the black woman as both sexually ‘promiscuous’ or ‘slack’, and animalistic.40 Also noteworthy is Mason's use of a Jamaican (Afro–) Creole term to attack Williams, ‘bumbo’, rather than a standard English equivalent. The use of such a term by a white resident planter is significant, indicating that Jamaican Creole vocabulary, if not grammar, was not confined to black Jamaicans but was in certain circumstances also used by white people.41 Mason was integrated into a hierarchical Creole culture in a way that, for instance, the investigating English magistrate Oldrey could not have been. This suggests that, to use Richard Burton's terms, Mason's ‘Euro–Creole’ cultural formation included interaction with and occasional appropriation of the ‘Afro–Creole’ and ‘Meso–Creole’ layers of Jamaican culture.42 The use of an Afro–Creole term by a white man in the specific context of a language of insult confirms Nigel Bolland's argument that Creolisation is ‘not a homogenising process, but rather a process of contention’.43 In most of the cases in which planters used insulting language, the insults were directed at women. Even in one case where the direct target of the insult was male, the insult was routed through an attack partially directed at the man's mother, when William Gilbert told his young apprentice Milford Pettiger to ‘go and kiss your mothers a—se’ before beating him with a cane.44 Thomas Mason called John Nunes a ‘villain’, a ‘rascal’ and a ‘scoundrel’, but did not demean him sexually. While there must be many more cases of abusive language awaiting discovery in the archives, and many more that were never reported, this clustering of the evidence nevertheless strongly suggests that planters' use of languages of insult was directed primarily at women, and that it was discursively directed at women's bodies. This evidence concords with what we know about languages of insult in Britain, where ‘insults of women were overwhelmingly personal and sexual’, while those of men ‘were much less likely to attack their own sexuality’.45 The insults above come from a context very different from that of the exchange of insults among near equals that has dominated the literature on insult. The distinction matters, because the routine use of insulting language by powerful people to insult those over whom they have power – and in particular, by powerful men to insult relatively powerless women – is different to the exchange of insults among near equals. In the former situation, the recipients of the abuse have much less recourse, and the insulting language is potentially far more threatening, carrying with it the potential for violence and other kinds of mistreatment. Anger, when displayed by a person with significant power over you, is frightening, whereas it may be merely disturbing, perhaps even comic, when displayed by someone without power.46 In understanding the dynamics of such interactions, we might usefully draw on the work of recent legal scholars associated with Critical Race Theory, who have developed the concept of ‘assaultive’ or ‘hate speech’. US-based scholars such as Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence and Kimberlé Crenshaw developed this concept in the context of a debate about appropriate legal limitations on ‘free speech’.47 Unlike the Critical Race Theorists, Judith Butler argues that calling on the state to act to limit hate speech is not a solution to the problem, but