Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-slavery Jamaica, 1834–1882

Abstract

Three years ago in a review essay, Trevor Burnard noted that the social history of the Caribbean remained a somewhat underdeveloped field. There is much that we do not yet know about demographic change, social structure, and economic patterns across the Caribbean—the stuff of social history—compared to the historians of other regions. Thankfully, the University of the West Indies Press has been steadily publishing innovative studies that provide the rich empirical data of social history while attending to the cultural and political significance of these findings. One of their recent publications is Jenny M. Jemmott's Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-slavery Jamaica, 1834–1882. In this monograph, Jemmott examines the black family in postemancipation Jamaica, arguing that black Jamaicans saw the ability to preserve and sustain their families as one of the crucial rights of freedom.Over the course of six chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, Jemmott examines how freedpeople understood kinship and the ways that they fought to preserve their family arrangements in the face of the stark socioeconomic and legal challenges presented by the postemancipation political landscape. This is not a demographic study, nor is Jemmott especially interested in categorizing or counting family units. Instead, she focuses on black Jamaicans' family values, as expressed in legal proceedings and other encounters with the state. When pressed by Jemmott, the archives are surprisingly revealing, and the sources illustrate the deep attachment and devotion that blacks had for their kin. Throughout she highlights “family advocacy,” the active pursuits by black Jamaicans to preserve the dignity of their families both inside and outside the courtroom (p. 37).The text's structure is straightforward. All but one chapter begin during apprenticeship and trace their theme through the early 1880s. Thus the text starts to feel repetitive. This is unfortunate, because within the circular structure are revelatory arguments and major interventions. The first revelation is implicit: the short apprenticeship period, the transitional phase between slavery and emancipation in the 1830s during which British masters and administrators were supposed to prepare the enslaved and themselves for emancipation, features here as a foundational moment. Between 1834 and 1838, blacks used the increasing freedom of mobility and expanding legal rights to assert their rights as family members: they found and reconnected with relatives from whom they had been separated, and they asserted autonomy over the fates of their children, all in preparation for full freedom. The second revelation comes in chapter 5, which departs from the structure of the other chapters and focuses instead on the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, a peasant rebellion brutally repressed by the British colonial government. By illuminating the devastating losses of loved ones that black families experienced in the rebellion's aftermath, Jemmott identifies the months after Morant Bay as another moment, like apprenticeship, when blacks rebuilt their families after trauma.Among the important (and connected) interventions made by Ties That Bind is Jemmott's rejection of Eurocentric frameworks that identify Christian marriage and the nuclear family as the primary indicators of a stable family unit. The commitment and devotion to family that blacks demonstrated throughout the period in question matter far more, she suggests, than Europeans' legal or religious approval of these relationships. Coupled with her insistence that Christian marriage and European recognition are fundamentally ill-suited markers for assessing the importance of family is her argument that blacks conceptualized family in ways that harkened back to West African beliefs about kinship and family organization. In this way, Ties That Bind adds to a broadening literature about continuities between African traditions and creole practices. This argument is integral to Jemmott's rejection of European metrics, and much of it is persuasive. Jemmott identifies likely parallels to West African traditions: extended families living together when possible, veneration of the elderly, a collective approach to raising children and political advocacy, and the embrace of fictive kin. Yet at times, the argument feels strained, especially at points when Jemmott has to admit that certain values were not unique to West African traditions. Finally, the book as a whole is a sharp rebuke to the stereotype that black Jamaicans—and especially black men—abandoned or neglected their families during this period. She counters instances of neglect in the archives with her own discoveries of men and women who went to extraordinary legal and personal lengths to assert the existence and primacy of their families. This is an important work that deserves a broad audience. It will be of interest not only to historians of the nineteenth-century Caribbean but to scholars of the family and those interested in the affective dimensions of postemancipation societies.