Provision Grounds Research Articles

In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World

Since the publication of David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson's “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas,” in the American Historical Review (Dec. 2007, pp. 1329–58), the historiographical pendulum has swung against African agency. As with all good historical debates, new research keeps the pendulum in motion. In the Shadow of Slavery by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff argues that African plants and animals are virtually invisible in the Columbian exchange literature. It focuses on the revolutionary roles played by enslaved Africans in shaping New World farming and animal husbandry systems. Surprisingly, given Carney's previous work, there is relatively little rice in In the Shadow of Slavery. Shifting their lens away from rice, power relations between planters and enslaved laborers, and commercial agriculture on antebellum plantations, Carney and Rosomoff reveal the importance of staple crops and subsistence in ensuring the survival of plantation societies and sustaining enslaved people's historical memory of their African homeland. Some crops, such as millet, sorghum, okra, yams, and cowpeas are indigenous to Africa. Others, such as manioc, bananas, plantains, and sesame had already become established as staples in Africa by the transatlantic slave trade period. Slave ships were the vectors that brought all the aforementioned staples to the New World—slaves, slave ships, and the transatlantic slave trade are also invisible in the Columbian exchange literature. Carney and Rosomoff argue that enslaved laborers, in particular enslaved women, resisted imposed diets and retained some modicum of control over their own bodies, culture, and identity by cultivating these African and Africanized staples in their provision grounds and using them to prepare “memory dishes.” In colonies where slaves were forced to provide or allowed to supplement their provisions, slaves’ marginal food fields were spaces within the oppressive social system where slaves could and did exercise agency.

Yam, Roots, and Rot: Allegories of the Provision Grounds

The historical and metaphysical connection between humans and the soil seems to be of vital significance to the recuperative power associated with the provision grounds, a relationship I trace by turning to Erna Brodber's allegorical novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007). Drawing upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and others about the differing plots of the plantation and the provision grounds, this essay explores how Brodber challenges the plot of plantation narratives and employs allegory to excavate the roots of the provision grounds, particularly the figure of the yam. While roots are a generative metaphor for cultural origins, Brodber demonstrates that decay is the material way in which we know history has passed and thus is key to the articulation of time and nature itself, a position with profound implications for the region's historiography.

Linstead Market before Linstead? Eighteenth-century Yabbas and the Internal Market System of Jamaica

Introduction The role of Linstead market in the internal economy of post-emancipation Jamaica has been the subject of numerous popular and academic discussions. Indeed there is ample documentary evidence that points to its existence at least as early as the 1 840s. Any arguments regarding its existence in the eighteenth century at this point is speculation based on models of economic necessity, our understanding of the organization of enslaved labour revolts, and demographic probabilities. At the time the area in which Linstead Market would be based was called Sixteen-Mile-Walk and was home to numerous plantations. The difficulty in trying to ascertain the organization of such markets in the eighteenth century is that they were inevitably poorly documented with only fragmentary accounts. In this paper I attempt to antedate the Linstead Market using multiple sources of evidence including, published accounts, unpublished ethnography and archaeology. Specifically, analysis of production and distribution of yabba, a local Jamaican ceramic, suggests an eighteenth-century establishment of Linstead Market, thus tying this space to one of the significant slave rebellions of eighteenth-century Jamaica. Markets and Unrest By the mid-eighteenth century, the internal market system figured centrally in Jamaican economic and social lives. The social importance of the combination of street markets, itinerant sellers, and small-scale trade is one of the reasons why such institutions have figured so prominently in the historiography of the African Diaspora. As many have noted the internal economy was a locus of independent acquisition, marketing, and production among the enslaved (Hall, N., 1977; Hall, D., 1980, 1985, 1994; Bush, 1981; Simmonds, 1987, 2004; Tomich, 1995; Boa, 1993; see the volume edited by Gaspar and Hine, 1996; Hall 1999). This economy also presaged a Caribbean peasantry rooted in the houseyard and market (Hall, 1959; Mintz, [1974] 1992; Craton, 1982; Trouillot, 1988). In the eighteenth century, few other institutions were as explicitly impacted by the rural and urban freed and enslaved. Everybody in Jamaica was dependent on the internal economy, some to a greater extent than others. The independent production by enslaved labourers on provision grounds and the exchange of those goods were activities that found constructed spaces on the margins of the planters' figurative and material control (Pulsipher, 1986, 1990, 1991, 1994; McKee, 1999; Pulsipher and Goodwin, 1999). Consequently, the informal markets as a meeting place of goods and ideas of the enslaved can be viewed as a locus of interaction where the enslaved could transgress the social and geographic boundaries imposed by the plantation. It is in these markets that we see a struggle over the valuation of local goods, to prevent engrossing the price of staples, but also enumerating the perpetrators of market disorder as Indian, Mulatto, or Negroe.1 Planters attempted to circumscribe market participation through a series of legislative mechanisms (see Mintz and Hall, 1991; Simmonds, 1987, 2004; Hauser, 2008). Planters were worried about two things, theft and association. The legal code monitored these two threats through a system of tickets and surveillance (Hauser, 2008, 56). As Barry Higman has noted in his analysis of documents associated with the artifacts recovered from Montpelier estate, that community emerged out of a shared sense of locality, kinship, language, values and reciprocity. More importantly, the people living at Montpelier were not confined geographically to the boundaries of the estate, rather their social landscape extended beyond the estate grounds through direct and indirect means (Higman, 1998, 297-305). By way of example, he cites the Baptist War, the 1831/32 slave rebellion which consumed the western parishes of Jamaica. He highlights that for the individuals responsible for its conception and execution, the markets provided one locus for planning in which information could be passed and the uprising organized (Higman, 1998,262-263). …

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

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

The Customs of Slavery: The War without Arms

This article investigates one of the neglected topics of slavery, namely the role of slaves, owners, overseers and certain officials in creating customary slave norms. The article focuses upon three to four interrelated customs concerning the slave's use of his free time, his right to work for himself on the Sabbath, his right to cultivate provision grounds and gardens for his own use and sustenance, and his right to keep the fruits of his own industry. These customs are traced from origins in the Caribbean under the Code Noir to further development in Louisiana and other slave societies.Four general points emerge about the customs of slavery. The first is that a dialectical relationship existed between the customs and the governing statutes and laws. The second is that the customs are an essential corrective to the impressions gained by reading those statutes in isolation. The third is that these customs, from a comparative point of view, played a similar role in the American South and in the British and French colonies in the Caribbean. The final point is to advance a theory of the origins of the customs. Building upon the comparative evidence and the theories of Lon Fuller and Bruce Benson concerning the origins of moral duties, I suggest that the customs are a form of compromise and negotiated behavior in a "war without arms." They arose from the need to introduce incentives into a system of involuntary labor. In this war of collective wills, slave resistance and legal consciousness were important creative elements in the development of the customs.

Slaves, Poor Whites, and the Underground Economy of the Rural Carolinas

HISTORIANS HAVE PAID A GREAT DEAL OF ATTENTION OVER THE PAST TWO decades to the so-called slave, internal, or informal economy, studying slaves' independent activities as producers and consumers. In the rice-growing Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, where the task system predominated, slaves who rapidly completed their day's assigned labor had the opportunity to use their free time toward the end of the day as they saw fit, within certain constraints that their masters imposed. Many slaves diligently worked their own garden plots, raised and sold their own crops, and tended horses and livestock. As records of the Southern Claims Commission make clear, some slaves amassed impressive amounts of property. Outside the Lowcountry, various forces circumscribed slaves' ability to produce for themselves, market their goods, and accumulate wealth. Limited availability of land in the piedmont and in the upcountry precluded masters from supplying slaves with personal provision grounds. Moreover, slaveholders in those regions tended to organize their slave labor forces according to the gang system. Under the gang system, slaves labored under close supervision from sunup to sundown, leaving them time to work for themselves only at night and on Sundays. Across the South, however, internal economies proliferated. Slaves sometimes earned payments in money, perhaps for performing additional chores on the plantation or extra work in industry. Armed with the money and commodities they earned from or through the largesse of their masters, slaves were no strangers to the antebellum marketplace. (1) Running parallel to slaves' economic activities sanctioned by the master were those that lacked such authorization. Several historians have recognized that an illicit, underground slave economy--rooted largely in theft and consequently anathema to slaveholders--flourished throughout the antebellum South. Slaves' surreptitious dealings often brought them into contact not only with other bondpeople and with free blacks but also with unscrupulous whites who ignored racial distinctions and eagerly traded with slaves without the masters' consent. (2) But while scholars acknowledge the existence of this interracial, underground trade, they have devoted surprisingly little energy to its study. Timothy J. Lockley has uncovered evidence of a thriving clandestine network of exchange between slaves and white shopkeepers in the city of Savannah, but the preponderance of southerners lived not in urban but in rural areas. (3) It must have been much more difficult for slaves to sustain systems of underground trade with whites in the countryside. In the rural South the white population was more isolated and scattered across a wide geographical area. Small, close-knit communities in which everyone knew one another and closely watched their neighbors supplanted the anonymity of the bustling city. Furthermore, the relatively few foreigners who settled in the South--and who were among the whites most likely to collaborate and trade clandestinely with slaves--tended to congregate in the region's urban centers. (4) This study calls attention to the underground economy of the rural South through an investigation of slaves' unlawful trade with poor whites in the antebellum Carolinas. Lockley's work has examined the economic exchanges between slaves and a broad and diverse group of non-elite white shopkeepers, but the involvement of such merchants notwithstanding, there existed an inverse relationship between a white person's wealth and his or her likelihood of engaging in the unlawful trade with slaves. The whites with whom slaves traded most frequently were the poor-white farmers, laborers, and other marginal members of white society who composed between 30 and 50 percent of the southern white population, depending on the locality. (5) This study explores in depth the important place that these poor whites occupied within slaves' underground trading networks and argues that while anxious slaveholders found such economic cooperation inimical to a society stratified on the basis of race, the calculated, rational nature of slave-poor white exchange blunted its potentially subversive character. …

The history of black business in America: capitalism, race, entrepreneurship

The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship. By Juliet E. K. Walker (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Pp. xxv, 482. $56.25 cloth.) Juliet E. K. Walker has written a volume that belongs in every library and that many will want to purchase for their personal reference collection. One of Twayne Publisher's series, Evolution of Modem Business, The History of Black Business in America, appears in clear, readable prose for an audience composed of both fellow specialists in business history and the broader general public. Calling her study introductory and building on her own previous exploration of American entrepreneurship in Kentucky and Illinois, particularly Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (1983) and on the work of historians such as Loren Schweninger, whose Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915, appeared in 1990, Walker traces major themes in the history of American participation in business. She also critiques previous accounts of black enterprise by well-known sociologists and historians. In a time when many researchers prefer micro-history, she presents a tour deforce of synthesis and original research that carries readers through 400 years. Walker intends to bury myths about black business found in the work of sociologists E. Franklin Frazier (the idea that black consumers do not support black business and that African-Americans lack an entrepreneurial tradition), and especially, Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan's contention that, most importantly, blacks historically had failed to develop a pattern of saving (p. xvii-xix). In contrast to most business historians, Walker stresses the role of governments in various periods in creating opportunity for whites. Revising Alfred Chandler, for whom the visible hand was management practices, Walker argues that the transformative visible hand consisted of government subsidies and support for white business. Placing the history of black enterprise within the larger context of the history of business in what became the United States, Walker argues first, that the legal framework consistently favored whites and discouraged black business; second, that, when African-Americans succeeded in carving out and developing profitable sectors, such as music production and beauty products for mass markets, whites have regularly tried to take over; third, that black business in urban areas often lost out to immigrant business people, who had advantages of education and capital; fourth, that only during the post-civil rights era were government programs available to black business and then only in a limited way; and finally, that today, as for the last 400 years, white racism continues to inhibit the progress of black entrepreneurs and managers. Going far beyond previous scattered accounts of AfricanAmerican enterprise and synthesizing much previous scholarship, Walker traces the origins of independent economic activity by Blacks to business traditions found in precolonial West Africa, that is, to what her chapter title calls African Diaspora Commercial Survivalisms. Africans brought to America came from states propelled by a high degree of both individual and communally based profit-oriented entrepreneurial activities (p.1) in agriculture, construction, fishing, craft and merchant guilds. Debunking the stolen myth, Walker emphasizes the role of states, rulers/politicians, merchants, business people, and military in the African supply side (p. 17) of the transatlantic market in human merchandise. Part of the marketability of people from certain regions consisted in their skill and experience with certain activities, such as mining, cattle-raising, and the culture of rice. Considering the use by enslaved Africans of the colonial period of their slave provision grounds, Walker traces this institution to West traditions and experiences and argues that Eugene Genovese, among others, was wrong to see these plots of ground as merely a means by which Africans learned to get along without a master. …

From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas

Part 1 Negotiating slavery - informal contracts and cash rewards: chattel slaves to wage slaves - a Jamaican case study, Mary Turner strategies into slave subsistence - the Jamaican case reconsidered, R.B. Sheridan strategies of slave subsistence - foods, markets and survival, Michael Mullin Never on Sunday? - slavery and the Sabbath in Lawacountry, Georgia 1750-1830, Betty Wood work and resistance in the New Republic - the case of Chesapeake 1770-1820, Lorena Welsh proto-proletarians? slave in the Americas, O. Nigel Bolland for in urban Surinam 1760-1830, Rosemary Brana-Shute a slow and extended abolition - the Bahamas 1800-1838, Howard Johnson. Part 2 Counteracting - contract and coercion: between slavery and free labour - in Brazil and Cuba, Lucia Lamounier resistance among Asian plantation workers in Peru 1870-1920 the worker and the wage in a plantation economy - Trinidad in the late 19th century, Kusha Haraksingh. Part 3 Achieving rights for labour - confrontation and collective bargaining: contested terrains - houses, provision grounds and the reconstitution of labour in post-emancipation Martinique, Dale Tomich post-emancipation protest in Jamaica - the Morant Bay rebellion 1865, Gad Heuman the pursuit of higher wages and perfect personal freedom in St Kitts-Nevis 1836-1956, Glen Richards.

The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (review)

BOOK REVIEWS263 society, as Rabinowitz argues, and reveals how difficult it is to preserve freedom and equal opportunity in a nation of "partial-identifiers." Rabinowitz, a self-proclaimed "partial identifier" himself, does show that this perspective can make for excellent history. This Northern white offers important insights into both Southern and African American history. These essays deserve what, in his introduction, Rabinowitz calls his highest compliment: they display "common sense based on a tiiorough reading ofdie sources" (15). Gaines M. Foster Louisiana State University The Economy andMaterial Culture ofSlaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. By Roderick A. McDonald. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv, 339. $39.95.) In his intriguingstudy ofdie "slaves' economy" inJamaicaandLouisianaduring those two societies' most mature stages of economic development—Jamaica, 1780-1820, and Louisiana, 1820-1860—Roderick A. McDonald argues diat slaves on sugar plantations engaged in extensive and integrated economic networks diat tiiey themselves created and largely controlled. This "internal economy," moreover, undergirded an autonomous slave culture diat thrived beyond slaveholders' purview. Despite tiieir enslavement—which was exacerbated by die grinding routine of sugar production—slaves in Jamaica and Louisiana exercised considerable self-determination. While attending to die geographical and environmental factors mat distinguished sugar production and plantation routine in Jamaica and Louisiana, McDonald documents an array of activities mat enterprising slaves on sugar plantations conducted on their own time. Slaves raised animals, grew crops in their gardens or on provision grounds, and manufactured items, among other tasks. They bartered or sold diese commodities in nearby towns during "market days" or sold them directly to die plantation. Slaves were also paid cash or received credit for performing routine plantation chores on tiieir own time. One Louisiana sugar planter, for instance, paid his slaves on average three hundred dollars annually between 1848 and 1861 for die Spanish moss they collected. Slaves in botii societies were also consumers. They purchased necessities— household utensils, clothing, blankets, or foodstuffs—to supplement their paltry provisions; and they purchased such "luxury" items as meat, flour, shoes, tobacco, fancy clothing, watches, and jewelry. Indeed, slaves enjoyed surprisingly wide discretion in spending the sums they earned, and they exhibited "proprietary" rights to tiieir houses, gardens, and goods. Although important differences marked die internal economies of Jamaica and Louisiana, die networks ofproduction, exchange, and consumption diat obtained in botii regions provided die material basis for a distinctive and autonomous African American culture. 264CIVIL WAR HISTORY While McDonald masterfully reconstructs the slaves' economy, the implications of his argument are somewhat unsettling. Because the internal economy empowered slaves, McDonald impUes, it was subversive of the slave regime. Yet McDonald's own evidence shows that slaveholders not only tolerated but indeed encouraged and superintended slaves' economic activity. Moreover, no matter how extensive the slaves' economy, or how much independence die slaves derived from it, the fact remains that in neither Jamaica nor the American South was slavery ever seriously threatened from within. To be sure, slaves struggled heroically to create meaningful Uves while Uving under unspeakable oppression. Yet this struggle never amounted to a chaUenge to tiieir enslavement . Rather than imperiling the slave regime, the internal economy helped to sustain it, and instead of spawning an "autonomous" slave culture, the internal economy bespoke a more complex master-slave relationship than historians have previously aUowed for. Despite its interpretive bent, with which one may quibble, McDonald's study addresses so many important issues—such as the internal dynamics ofthe slave family and household, distinctions within the slave community to which the internal economy gave rise, and the dialectic of slave resistance and accommodation —that it warrants a close reading from scholars ofNew World slavery. John C. Rodrigue University ofMaryland Pulling the Temple Down: The Fire-Eaters and the Destruction of the Union. By David S. Heidler. (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1994. Pp. x, 262. $22.95.) Pulling the Temple Down provides a chronologicaUy organized synthesis of Southern secessionism that puts the Old South's "fire-eaters"—its most fanatic disunionists—at center stage. Whereas John McCardell (Idea of a Southern Nation [1979]) approached the radicals thematically and Eric H. Walther (The Fire-Eaters [1992]) served up chapter-length biographies...

“A Bit of Land, Which They Call Roça”: Slave Provision Grounds in the Bahian Recôncavo, 1780-1860

T nH E history of plantation slavery in the Americas has in recent years been enriched by a growing number of studies that focus on provision grounds and gardensthe small plots of land where, working in their free time, slaves grew food crops for their own use. Studies from the West Indies and the southern United States have shown that granting slaves access to land was a common practice in many areas of slave-based agriculture; indeed, slaves frequently gained by custom the right to gardens or provision grounds and to the time needed to work in them. Slaves in some regions not only obtained a large share of their daily diet from their provision grounds, but also managed to harvest sizable surpluses for sale in local markets. Even where planters relied chiefly on rations rather than on provision grounds to feed their bondsmen, slaves often succeeded in selling produce from their plots. Thus, in several plantation regions, provision grounds and gardens allowed slaves to develop an extensive and even impressive range of independent production and marketing activities.'

Subsistence cultivation in the Caribbean

Subsistence cultivation on small plots is a marked characteristic of rural life in the Caribbean islands, as it is in most areas in the American tropics. It closely resembles the subsistence cultivation systems of neighboring areas and has been classified as a subcategory of American tropical forest agriculture (Denevan 1980; Katz, Hediger & Valleroy 1974: 769). Yet its practitioners are not natives of the American tropics, but the descendants of Africans who often grew their own food and a small market surplus on the unused lands near the plantations on which they worked as slaves. These provision grounds were important in their adaptations to slavery and to the changes later brought by emancipation (Mintz & Hall 1960). That they are still an essential part of rural land use, economy, and household survival has been recog nized in an abundant literature.2 Most of the studies in this literature are local and particular. Few attempt any intra-regional comparison or generalization (Hills & Iton 1982, 1983; Momsen 1972; Paquette 1968, 1982; Rashford 1982), and none attempt extra-regional comparison or systematic synthesis. This is surprising when we consider the synthesizing and explanatory efforts applied to some other important Afro-American cultural features with multi-cultural origins, such as religion or Creole languages (e.g., Al leyne 1980; Bickerton 1975; Carrington et al. 1983; Simpson 1978; Taylor 1977). This paper uses both intra-regional and extra-regional comparison to test a working hypothesis developed in the field. It asks whether a

Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838

Four years after their “emancipation” in 1838, the former slaves of British Guiana protested against their conditions and their unfair treatment by the planters who sought to bind them to labor on the estates. When the planters introduced certain rules and regulations, which were intended to regulate the quality and quantity of work, and to reduce labor costs by lowering wages and abolishing customary allowances of free medical attention, housing, and provision grounds, the workers complained to the stipendiary magistrates and stopped work.

Dooryard Medicinal Plants of St. Lucia

Dooryard Medicinal Plants of St. Lucia Barbara E. Fredrich* Increasing recognition of the importance of medicinal plant species and their uses is being evidenced in recent literature.1 However , apart from giving listings and detailed descriptions of plant use for specific areas, few studies have attempted to combine medicinal plant usage and spatial patterns of medicinal plants in dooryard gardens.2 This article is a partial documentation of rural folk medicine, or bush medicine as it is more commonly known, in St. Lucia, a small volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean. On this island medicinal plant usage reflects the rich culture-history charac- * Dr. Fredrich is Assistant Professor of Geography at San Diego State University , San Diego 92182. 1 See for example, J. Eldridge, "Bush Medicine in the Exumas and Long Island, Bahamas: A Field Study," Economic Botany, Vol. 29 (1975), pp. 307332 , and W. Wong, "Some Folk Medicinal Plants from Trinidad," Economic Botany, Vol. 30 (1976), pp. 103-143. 2 Physiognomic or floristic maps of sketches of gardens are presented in E. Anderson, "Reflections on Certain Honduran Gardens," Landscape, Vol. 4 (1954), pp. 21-23; C. Bennett, "The House of the Bayano Cuna Indians of Panama," Antropologica, No. 20 (1967), pp. 37-52; A. Covich and N. Nickerson , "Studies of Cultivated Plants in Choco Dwelling Clearings, Darien, Panama ," Economic Botany, Vol. 20 (1966), pp. 285-301; C. Kimber, "Dooryard Gardens of Martinique," Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers , Vol. 28 (1966), pp. 97-118; and C. Kimber, "Spatial Patterning in the Dooryard Gardens of Puerto Rico," The Geographical Review, Vol. 63 (1973), pp. 6-26. However, medicinal species are not distinguished from other garden flora, and consequently are not considered spatially in any of these reports. 65 66 ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS LOCATION OF DOORYARD GARDENS, IN ST. LUCIA ATLANTIC OCEAN TT A;· FOND D'ASSAU CASTR CARIBBEAN SEA SOUFRIERE LEGEND Dooryard Gardens 0 12 3 4 5 Miles 1 I ? I ? I ? I |l 0 2 4 6 8 Kilometers L'AMERIQUE ...T OENNERY Mt. Gimie VIEUX FORT UICOUD Figure 1. The majority of visited dooryard gardens are located in northern St. Lucia, where most of the population resides. YEARBOOK · VOLUME 40 · 197867 terized by Amerind influences, alternating British and French domination , African and East Indian imprints, and recent emergence as an independent state. The type and patterning of medicinal plants in dooryard gardens may indicate the degree of adherence to traditional folk practices in a society which has had long exposure to Western medicine. Information is derived from a field study conducted from June 1970 to June 1971.3 Interviewees were primarily female adults. The 160 dooryard gardens that were visited as part of a larger study furnished the majority of medicinal plant specimens (Figure 1 ).4 Additional specimens were obtained from provision grounds where a mixed-cropping agricultural system prevails, and from "bush" which includes the rain-forest, areas of secondary vegetation, and roadside vegetation. With the exception of about a dozen species, specimens from provision grounds and "bush" were duplicates of those collected in dooryard gardens. Medicinal plant species are next discussed as they relate to ( 1) the number of species occurrences in gardens, (2) spatial patterning in sample dooryard gardens, and (3) the use of plants for common ailments. Species Occurrences Some 121 medicinal species representing 55 botanical families were collected on St. Lucia. These medicinal species, accounting for approximately one-third of the total garden species gathered during the course of field work, are presented in Table 1 at the conclusion of this article. It was left to respondents to determine whether or not a given plant was a medicinal, but St. Lucians are not in complete accord as to which plants contain medicinal properties. Consequently, 3 The author wishes to thank the many St. Lucians who willingly donated plant specimens, and Professors C. D. Adams, of the University of the West Indies, Mona, and J. D. Sauer, of the University of California, Los Angeles, for their kind assistance in species identification. 4 Gardens studied and all species collected are considered in B. E. Fredrich , "Morphology of Dooryard Gardens: Patterns, Imprints, and Transformations in St. Lucia, West...

A Six-Fingered Family

IT may interest some of your readers to hear that there is at present living in Brown's Town, Jamaica, a family in whom the possession of six fingers has been hereditary for at least four generations. Unfortunately they consider the sixth finger a deformity, and always amputate it, so that there is very little opportunity of observing it. There is a little girl there however upon whom this operation has not been performed, and I much regret that, as her parents had taken her up into the hills to work in their provision grounds, I could not see her. As I am informed, the sixth finger springs from the little finger knuckle at right angles to the little finger, and when it is free of it, it turns up parallel to the rest, being a little shorter than the little finger, but quite perfect, with nail and two joints. It is bent and extended with the rest on opening or closing the fist.