Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Price of Slavery: Dividing Families and Divisions of Race

2015; Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Volume: 72; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5309/willmaryquar.72.4.0659

1933-7698

Simon P. Newman,

Cuban History and Society

The Price of Slavery:Dividing Families and Divisions of Race Simon P. Newman (bio) A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. By Richard S. Dunn. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 552 pages. $39.95 (cloth). MORE than forty years after the publication of what remains the best study of the English planters who settled the Caribbean, Richard S. Dunn has completed his account of the enslaved. While Sugar and Slaves recounted “what these English sons of Adam did to the Garden of Eden islands they discovered,” A Tale of Two Plantations painstakingly recovers the individual lives and collective experiences of approximately two thousand enslaved people who endured the final three generations of slavery on two plantations, Mesopotamia in western Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia.1 Decades of research, tabulation of dry lists of human property, and painstaking reconstruction of lives and deaths has enabled Dunn to tell as complete a story of intergenerational enslavement as we have for British America, and with characteristic quiet authority Dunn lays bare the horrors of this labor system. Dunn’s greatest achievement lies in his recounting of the lives of individuals, enabling readers to comprehend the humanity of the enslaved. Countless hours of work are distilled into the reconstruction of the individual and dynastic stories of one family on each plantation, and Dunn places a woman at the heart of each of these accounts. First is Sarah Affir and her Mesopotamia family, followed by Winney Grimshaw and her [End Page 659] Mount Airy (and Alabama) family. Dunn reconstructs how the enslaved in the Caribbean and North America experienced birth, life, labor, and death, how they conformed and resisted, and how the planters who owned them affected their lives and families in numerous and profound ways. Rarely have we seen such detailed case studies in which familiar themes become so real and so human. Affy, later known as Sarah Affir after she became a member of the Moravian church, was born at Mesopotamia in 1767. Her father was almost certainly one of the plantation’s black slaves, while her mother was probably Amelia, the black head servant in the main house. As a child Sarah worked with other children in the grass gang and then for five years she worked with her mother in the main house. But the best domestic jobs were given by whites to mixed-race people, and Sarah could not long escape the field-work that half of the male and most of the female enslaved suffered. Sugar production and human reproduction wrecked Sarah’s body. By the age of about twenty she was working in the first gang, and for the next decade of her life she undertook some of the most strenuous plantation labor. During this time Sarah bore five of her six children, usually spending her first trimester as a member of the first gang, therefore undertaking the most arduous work on a sugar plantation. Sarah’s four black children followed her into fieldwork, while her two mixed-race children enjoyed the benefits of their mixed-race parentage. Harsh labor, multiple births, and almost constant pregnancy and child rearing meant that after twelve years of good health Sarah was, at the age of thirty-one, described as weak, and for the remainder of her life she would never again be described as healthy. The racial hierarchy of enslaved labor emerges as one of Dunn’s key themes in his analysis of Mesopotamia, and he interprets the lives and experiences of Sarah and her descendants as evidence of the ways in which racial hierarchy defined Jamaican plantation slavery. Sarah’s children Robert and Ann were very likely fathered by the Scottish bookkeeper Andrew McAlpin. In their youth both worked in domestic service, although while Ann continued in this work Robert was then trained as a cooper and worked as a skilled artisan for most of his adult life. Like all other mixed-race enslaved people at Mesopotamia, Robert and Ann and their children never had to plant, tend, or harvest sugar cane. White Jamaicans assumed that racially mixed parentage made for superior slaves who were more adept at skilled...