Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes

from an important critique by Melanie Newton of the political and historical context of Orderson’s novel, Polgreen’s life story—her triumphs, extraordinary relationships, and visual depictions—has not altered since the nineteenth century. Thus both the archive and secondary historical accounts beg reexamination.

      Polgreen was a woman of color, a former slave turned slave owner, and many stories circulate that she ran a well-known brothel without much controversy.⁶ Persistent representations of Polgreen’s life draw from an archive unusual for women of color in eighteenth-century slave societies. She left a will, and her estate was inventoried by white men on her death—a process used primarily by the society’s wealthier (white) citizens. Her relationships with elite white men and the British Royal Navy are well documented in newspaper accounts and, most significantly, in the nineteenth-century novel by a Bridgetown resident who was likely well acquainted with Polgreen. In the 1770s and 1780s, this female entrepreneur appears in Bridgetown’s tax records as a propertied resident, and her advertisements in a local newspaper allude to the importance she placed on property. From a caricatured 1796 lithograph to the folkloric accounts of Prince William Henry’s (King William Henry IV’s) rampage through her brothel, Polgreen’s story has in many ways been rendered impermeable, difficult to revise, and overdetermined by the language and power of the archive.

      Yet the archive conceals, distorts, and silences as much as it reveals. In Creoleana, a “complete” dramatized life story of Polgreen is narrated; it provides a tantalizing but fictional solution to gaps and uncertainties for scholars who struggle with the fragmented and fraught records of female enslavement marked by the embedded silences, commodified representations of bodies, and epistemic violence. However, for Polgreen, it is perhaps her hypervisibility in images and stories that continues to obscure her everyday life, even when the archive appears to substantiate certain aspects of that life. Such powerful narratives, visual reproductions, and archival assumptions erase the crucial complexities of her personhood and obfuscate the violent and violating relationships she maintained with other women of color in Bridgetown’s slave society.

      In the scholarship of slavery and slave societies of the Caribbean, Polgreen and other free(d) women of color are centered in narratives about business acumen and entrepreneurship. Several historians discuss the significant role prostitution played in the local and transnational market economy.⁷ Indeed, in many eighteenth-century Caribbean and metropolitan Atlantic port cities prostitution was rampant and served a significant mobile military population as well as providing local “entertainment.” During the 1790s, “the symbol of non-white business success in Barbados was the female hotelier.”⁸ A number of free(d) women found slave-owning and prostitution economically viable routes to self-sustenance, since they and other free(d) people of color were systemically excluded from most occupations and opportunities.⁹ Bridgetown’s white female (mostly slave-owning) majority, however, tended to own more women than men and set the precedent for selling and renting out enslaved women for sexual purposes.¹⁰ Moreover, without the possibility of employing their enslaved laborers in agricultural pursuits, urban white women profited from the surplus of domestic workers by hiring them out to island visitors.¹¹ It is in this environment of slaves, sailors, Royal Navy officers, and other maritime traffic in Bridgetown’s bustling port that Rachael Pringle Polgreen made her living.

      However Polgreen’s seductive narrative too often eclipses and silences the experiences of other enslaved and free(d) women who lived during her time. This chapter revisits her story to analyze how material and discursive power moves through the archive in the historical production of subaltern women.¹² Reexamining the documentary traces of Polgreen’s life and death illuminates several contradictions and historical paradoxes that make it problematic to characterize Polgreen or enslaved and free(d) women’s sexual relations with white men as unmediated examples of black female agency. How does one write a narrative of enslaved “prostitution”? What language should we use to describe this economy of forced sexual labor? How do we write against historical scholarship, which too often relies on the discourses of will, agency, choice, and volunteerism that reproduce a troubling archive, one that cements enslaved and free(d) women of color in representations of “their willingness to become mistresses of white men”?¹³ If “freedom” meant being free from bondage but not from social, economic, and political degradation, what did it mean to survive under such conditions?

      In the 1770s and 1780s, Bridgetown’s free population of color remained relatively small, but it experienced significant growth by the turn of the nineteenth century.¹⁴ This group of “free colored” women and men survived through store-keeping, huckstering, ship-building, prostitution, and a small range of other trades. The Royal Navy’s military infrastructure perpetuated the demand for an informal sexual economy that was not fully met by the efforts of white slave owners in Bridgetown. For former slaves like Polgreen, who had certainly witnessed white owners profiting from sexual violations of black women, it was possible to imagine hiring enslaved women out for similar purposes. And, if it is true that Polgreen’s original owner was her own father, then the sexual dynamics of her life and her business become even more complex.¹⁵ Women comprised a majority of slave owners in Bridgetown, some of them women of color. Therefore, female slave owners like Polgreen comprised an important part of the urban landscape. However, Polgreen’s business of brothel keeping diverged sharply from the public economic pursuits of most white female slave owners. Although many white women engaged in “hiring-out” their female slaves for sexual purposes, there is no evidence suggesting that they engaged in running houses of prostitution in Bridgetown.¹⁶ While Polgreen’s ability to accumulate wealth was comparable to that of her white counterparts, her avenues for profit restricted her to an arena that would likely have been shameful and disreputable for them.

      For studies focused on Barbados specifically, Jerome Handler’s two publications, The Unappropriated People: Freedman in the Slave Society of Barbados (1974), and “Joseph Rachell and Rachael Pringle-Polgreen: Petty Entrepreneurs” (1981), laid the foundation for later discussions of Rachael Pringle Polgreen, free(d) women of color and prostitution.¹⁷ Handler’s discussion recounts Polgreen’s enslavement by William Lauder and her freedom and rise to “business” woman—a story drawn directly from the nineteenth-century novel Creoleana. Understandably, subsequent historical work has drawn extensively on Handler’s authority on Polgreen and free(d) people of color in Barbados.¹⁸ Consequently, several texts mention Polgreen’s property accumulation, her relationships with white male elites, her shrewd business management, and her demurring yet assertive challenge to the prince of Britain.¹⁹ One historian of Barbados contends that property ownership by free(d) women of color, “managed [to] challenge the economic hegemony of whites.”²⁰

      Polgreen was part of a “colored elite” who owned property—including slaves—and were able to maintain a standard of living comparable to their white counterparts. But focusing on economic prosperity alone obscures the coercive nature of the enterprise of enslaved prostitution. When concentrated on the economic possibilities for enslaved and free(d) women of color, it is easy to equate black female agency with sexuality without critically examining some of the violating attributes of this labor. Discussions of black women, free(d) or enslaved, using white men as an avenue to freedom often erase the reality of coercion and violence, and the complicated place of black women in this system of domination. Indeed, attention only to opportunities for material benefit suggests that women of color wielded an inordinate amount of power in these sexual encounters. How then, do we tease out the ways narratives of “resistance,” “sexual power,” and “will” shape our understanding of female slavery? Is will, as Hartman asks, “an overextended approximation of the agency of the dispossessed subject/object of property or perhaps simply unrecognizable in a context in which agency and intentionality are inseparable from the threat of punishment?”²¹ The power gained from slave ownership and enslaved prostitution benefited slave owners while leaving enslaved women in a position in which they could not refuse this work. Polgreen herself was dependent on this system of exploitation that left few other avenues for economic prosperity. This reality, and the archive that documented these circumstances, shaped the way her history has been written, leaving the lives of the vast majority of exploited enslaved women virtually invisible.