Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes

both the past (facts and archival materials) and the stories told about the past (narratives).²² Polgreen’s archival remains and the histories written about her clearly represent this interaction between the processes of historical production and her limited power of self-representation, as well as the ways authors who narrated her life represent her agency through her material success. Throughout her life and afterlife, Polgreen served the agendas of divergent political discourses. In the nineteenth century, she was used as a motif to remind white society that black women’s sexuality must be contained; for the postcolonial Barbados elite, she exemplified loyalty to Britain, accommodation, and peaceful negotiation. In more recent scholarship dating to the 1980s, Polgreen and women of color represented successful challenges to colonial domination.

      The documents and processes used to fashion “truths” about Polgreen’s experiences represent material accumulation as a triumph over adversity. Polgreen’s inner self—her fears and confidences—remain impossible to retrieve using documents produced in a slave society limited by capitalist and elite perspectives.²³ A critical reengagement with the sources elucidates the complexities and contradictions she embodied. Although no birth record survives, historians contend that Rachael Pringle Polgreen was born Rachael Lauder sometime around 1753.²⁴ Her burial was recorded on 23 July 1791 at the Parish Church of St. Michael.²⁵ At her death, her estate was worth “Two Thousand nine hundred & thirty Six pounds nine Shillings four pence half penny,” an amount comparable to a moderately wealthy white person living at the same time.²⁶ According to her inventory, along with ample material wealth in the form of houses, furniture, and household sundries, Polgreen owned thirty-eight enslaved people: fifteen men and boys and twenty-three women and girls.²⁷ In her will she freed a Negro woman named Joanna and bequeathed to her an enslaved Negro woman named Amber. Joanna was also given her own son Richard, who was still enslaved. Polgreen also freed a “mulatto” woman named Princess and four “mulatto” children (not listed in familial relation to any “parents”). Polgreen ordered that the rest of her estate—including William, Dickey, Rachael, Teresa, Dido Beckey, Pickett, Jack Thomas, Betsey, Cesar, a boy named Peter, and nineteen other enslaved people—be divided among William Firebrace and his female relatives, William Stevens, and Captain Thomas Pringle, all white people with whom she had social ties. This bequest—giving away the enslaved as property—was to them and “their heirs forever.”²⁸

      The above information survives precisely because of the value placed on property. Produced through her material wealth, Polgreen’s archival visibility relies on the logic of white colonial patriarchal and capitalist functions, reproducing the terms of the system of enslavement. Her burial in the yard of the Anglican Church of Saint Michael’s Parish did not, as a triumphal narrative might argue, exemplify transcendence over racial and gendered systems of domination. Rather, it illustrates the power of her social connections, without which permission for a church burial would not have been granted. We may speculate that the limited degree of Polgreen’s integration into the white Anglican religious community of Bridgetown granted her unusual status given her profession as a brothel owner, even as we acknowledge that her participation in, even acceptance of, the economic and social circles of white slave owners granted her unusual power.

      Beyond her will and estate inventory, another remarkable document has survived: a lithograph produced by British artist Thomas Rowlandson and printed in 1796.²⁹ It pictures a large and dark-skinned Rachael Pringle Polgreen seated in front of a house purported to be her “hotel.” Her breasts are revealed through a low-cut dress as she sits open-legged and bejeweled. In the background of the lithograph are three other figures, a young woman and two white men. The young woman is similarly dressed, with a bodice cut even lower than Polgreen’s. She stares, almost sullen-faced, at a large white man appearing in the rear of the picture in a tattered jacket and hat.³⁰ Observing the young woman from the right side of the picture is a younger white man wearing a British military uniform. He is a partial figure, shown in profile only. A sign posted behind Polgreen reads: “Pawpaw Sweetmeats & Pickles of all Sorts by Rachel PP.”³¹

      In 1958, an anonymous editorial preceded the first “scholarly” article about Polgreen in the Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society. The editorial reads the image as a narrative about her life, contending that “a gifted [caricaturist] such as Rowlandson would not … have placed as a background to the central figure of Polgreen in her later and prosperous years characters such as “a tall girl in a white frock,” etc. and an officer looking through a window, which had no relation to her or to her career.”³² In the writer’s view, the figures in the background represent a young Polgreen, averting the repulsive advances of her master/father. The young military man represents her “savior” Captain Pringle, the man credited with granting her freedom. Deduced from the most pervasive narrative about her life, Polgreen’s name came from Pringle after the captain who allegedly purchased her from her father/master William Lauder (d. 1771). After settling Polgreen in a house in Bridgetown, Pringle left the island to pursue his military career, and in his absence Rachael Pringle added the name Polgreen.³³

      Figure 6. Illustration by Thomas Rowlandson, published by William Holland (London, 1796). Courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.

      The editorial does not, however, consider the explicit sexual tone of the sign posted above Polgreen. “Pawpaw, Sweetmeats & Pickles of all Sorts” advertised more than the culinary items available for purchase. Free(d) and enslaved women in towns played a significant role in the informal market economy, selling a variety of ground provisions to locals and incoming ships, and the sign above Polgreen clearly situates her within a well-established economic system. She can easily assume the part of a market woman seated outside her “shop.”³⁴ However, the artist’s phallic references on the sign also allude to sexual services offered. The language of “sweetmeats and pickles” worked to both mask and advertise the sexually overt activities within the tavern. At the same time, the image reinforces the positionality of enslaved black women as sexually available, consenting, consumable, and disposable. Many of Rowlandson’s works depict London and other maritime scenes and are filled with sexual references. These include sailors and prostitutes in various sexual acts and stages of undress. It may not be surprising, then, to find him dedicating an entire collection to what was then described as “erotic” art.³⁵ Rowlandson’s caricature of Rachael Pringle Polgreen depicts an extravagant woman of color in various stages of her life. In this single frame, she is racialized, discursively and visually sexualized, and carried across her life-span from a younger, lighter self to an older, darker, larger self. This visual production intertwines Polgreen’s race, gender, and sexuality with a complete narrative of her life story as the artist imagined it. The material fragments of Polgreen’s existence evident in her will, inventory and the lithograph exemplify Trouillot’s concept of archival power.³⁶ Operating on two levels, it influences what it is possible to know or not to know about her life. In the first instance, power is present in the making of the archival fragments during her lifetime. Her will, recorded by a white male contemporary, only leaves evidence of what was valued in Polgreen’s time—the material worth of her assets in property. She left no diary or self-produced records.³⁷ Second, illustrated by the lithographic representation, Polgreen’s image and life history were imagined by a British man whose own socioeconomic and racial reality limited and informed what he produced about a woman of African descent.

      In 1842, nearly fifty-one years after Polgreen’s death, Creoleana, or Social and Domestic Scenes and Incidents in Barbados in the Days of Yore, written by J. W. Orderson, was published in London. Orderson was born in Barbados in 1767 and grew up in Bridgetown. His father John Orderson owned the Barbados Mercury, a local newspaper, and J. W. became its sole proprietor in 1795.³⁸ Thus, he would have been a teenager when many of the events he wrote about in Creoleana occurred, although he wrote about them when he was seventy-five. It was likely, as evidenced in the numerous newspaper advertisements Polgreen placed in his paper, that J. W. Orderson knew the female hotelier.³⁹ It is important to read Creoleana as a “sentimental” novel of its time, for the historical context in and the literary