Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes

Somers to be whipped several times around Bridgetown.

      Witnesses to punishment recalled the specific exposure town slaves suffered in public displays of humiliation. Evidence from travelers on the display of urban enslaved bodies to strangers and the ways that the sounds of inflicted pain traveled through town illuminate how the seemingly fluid nature of urban space was actually inherently physically intense and specifically violent. Distinguishing between country and town punishments, Captain Cook of the 89th Infantry of Foot explained that in the country “the mode of flogging these Negroes is by laying them upon their bellies, with a Negro at each extremity to raise each hand and foot from the ground, this is the general mode of flogging them in the country.”¹⁷⁵ “But in the towns,” he continued, “their method is more horrid and shameful, the poor wretch is obliged to stand bare in the open streets, and expose his posteriors to the jumper.”¹⁷⁶ In order to assert control in a context where the enslaved often moved through town independently, the authorities purposely conducted punishment so that it was highly visible to the other enslaved people walking around.

      Captain Cook remembered an instance where he, “was once particularly shocked at the sight of a young girl, a domestic Slave of about sixteen or seventeen years old, running about on her ordinary business with an iron collar with two hooks before and behind, projecting several inches, and this in the streets of Bridge Town.”¹⁷⁷ Enslaved women may have seemingly “enjoyed autonomy” by controlling the informal market economy in produce and other goods and certainly predominated the market place. But the market, like other sites of bodily disciplining—the Cage, the Custom House—also reproduced colonial power and reinforced social, racial, and gendered hierarchies.¹⁷⁸ Authorities in Bridgetown created symbolic boundaries of control with ritual punishments throughout the town that were visible to enslaved people carrying out their daily labors, and each architectural site embodied or produced social relationships based on colonial power, terror, and control. Even if, as one historian states, “urban slaves did not work under the constant threat of the whip which faced rural workers … there was the constant reality of living in a slave society” and constant spatial representations of the threat of violence.¹⁷⁹

      As the production of sites of confinement in urban spaces provided colonial authorities the means to terrorize an urban enslaved population, so too do the discursive spaces within the archive confine enslaved women in disfiguring historical representations. These marks and the brutality of slave laws also follow enslaved women into the archive. Indeed, descriptions of their scarred bodies and the acts passed that subjected them to instruments of torture are the primary content of the documents on which we must base their narratives. The fragmentary nature and format of runaway ads confine enslaved women in a depiction of violence and commodification from the perspective of the slave owner and other white authorities. In other words, combining the study of the body of the archive, bodies in the archive and the bodies in space, in the historical analyses of enslaved women in this context sheds light on the multiplicity of forces simultaneously at play in their subjugation. Narrating fugitive enslaved women’s stories from these records requires subversion of archival intent through a methodological practice that approaches these documents from the gaze of enslaved women and takes on power in the production of subaltern historical knowledge and the spatial terrain of urban slavery. This epistemological shift reorients historical inquiry to consider the workings of power on the bodies and historical afterlives of the enslaved to produce new knowledge about their lives from the records left by the regime of power.

      Interrogating the use and production of spaces and technologies of control on urban enslaved women’s bodies and within the archive also makes clear the important differences that shaped enslaved life within towns and plantation complexes without assuming that one was less brutal than the other. It also articulates how central enslaved black bodies were to the production of urban and domestic spaces. As the case of Bridgetown demonstrates, urban life proved equally distressing for the enslaved living there and those laboring on sugar plantations throughout the islands. Moreover, urban life proved fraught with danger for the enslaved who were especially subject to the violence of urban life whether by means of colonial authorities, natural disaster, disease or serving in the informal sexual economy. Enslaved women suffered in particular ways within the confines of Bridgetown as their gendered labor in the domestic realm forced them into close intimacies with their owners, many of who were white and free women of color. A careful interrogation of the brothel as a site of urban confinement reveals the complex intra-gendered relationships of enslaved women and their female owners and provides new insight into the troubling domestic spaces enslaved women occupied. It also exposes how narratives of economic success tragically and historiographically obscures the violence of sexualized labor in slavery and in freedom.

      CHAPTER 2

      Rachael and Joanna: Power, Historical Figuring, and Troubling Freedom

      Scandal and excess inundate the archive … The libidinal investment in violence is everywhere apparent in the documents, statements, and institutions that decide our knowledge of the past.

      —Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”

      [H]istory reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the process and conditions of such narratives…. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.

      —Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

      Item it is my Will, and I do hereby manumit and set free my negro Woman named Joannah from all Servitude whatsoever, and for compleating that purpose I do hereby desire my Executors herein after named to pay all such Sums of money and Execute such deeds as are necessary about the same:—And I do give, devise and bequeath unto the said woman Joannah, her child Richard, and a negro Woman named Amber, with her future Issue and Increase, to her the said Joannah and her heirs forever.

      —Will of Rachael Pringle Polgreen, 1791

      The great hurricane of 1780 destroyed lives, homes, and businesses, and free people of color felt acutely the tenuous nature of their freedom in Bridgetown. On 20 July 1793, Captain Henry Carter and William Willoughby—two white men—swore under oath that Joanna Polgreen, “a certain negroe or mulatto woman,” had been freed in 1780 but had lost her manumission papers in the storm.¹ Carter and Willoughby testified that Joanna was once owned by Bridgetown hotelier Rachael Pringle Polgreen, but Rachael sold her to a soldier named Joseph Haycock who promptly freed her from slavery. After her successful reclamation of her freedom Joanna enters another document into the archive, this time a deed wherein she frees her son Richard Braithwaite, “for the natural love & affection which She hath to [him].”²

      Joanna’s quest for freedom for herself and her son involved a long journey from slavery in a brothel to freedom and back, and has until recently remained in the shadows of Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s sensational narrative of infamy and fortune.³ Drawing Joanna’s story from underneath Pringle Polgreen’s dominance as a historical agent allows us to reconsider the terms of agency and sexuality in this slave society. We also gain insight into the dynamics between women of color and enslaved women in the context of a sexual economy in an urban slave society. Deconstructing Pringle Polgreen’s historical narrative ultimately exposes the power of certain narratives to obscure the politics of representing success, the violence fundamental to slavery, and the lives relegated to historical anonymity. The challenge, then, is to track power in the production of Pringle Polgreen’s history while recognizing that her historical visibility is also an erasure of the lives of those she enslaved. Doing so reveals, for the first time, the story of Joanna’s struggle and determination in freedom and the limits of freedom, sexual commerce, and agency in eighteenth-century Bridgetown.

       Rachael Pringle Polgreen, Historicity, and Liminality

      It may be precisely due to Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s “exorbitant circumstances”⁴ during her life as a free(d) woman of color in late eighteenth-century Bridgetown that historical narratives