believed that slavery was even more essential to tropical agriculture than irrigation.
In nearly all his images, naked and suffering black bodies outnumbered white figures, which were always clothed, often luxuriously. In one vignette, two white men on horseback arrive at the beach where they are greeted by a third white man. They peer at ships on the sea, apparently oblivious to the fact that several yards away a nearly naked black woman, tied to a ladder, is being whipped by a black man, who wears only white breeches. Beauvernet’s vignettes depict a violent plantation world in which whites ignore the pain that surrounds—and indeed supports—them. His view of a waterfall near the plantation shows a large alligator or caiman that has surprised two black bathers. One of them, in the center of the image, is about to be devoured by the creature, whose jagged teeth and large eye make him much more of an individual than his victim.
Figure 7. “Vue Perspective de la Purgerie et d’une partie des Batimens, Plan de l’habitation de Févret de Saint-Mésmin, à Saint-Domingue, Louis de Beauvernet.” © RMN-Blérancourt, Musée franco-américain du Château de Blérancourt.
Two of Beauvernet’s vignettes focus on the productivity of Févret’s estate. Figure 7 shows the sugar refinery in full operation. Here, as in figure 8, naked suffering slaves are shown as part of the tropical landscape. The refinery building has no walls, allowing Beauvernet to depict five black figures with long-handled tools, stirring the sugar syrup as it boils, while a ship approaches in the distance. In the foreground a black man holds a whip high above his head as he chases a woman who raises her arms in distress. Another vignette, not shown here, shows the plantation’s two animal-driven cane mills and contains eight human and three animal figures. Two or perhaps three of the humans are holding whips in midstroke, above the animals in two cases and perhaps above a human in the third. One trio consists of two persons standing with a third kneeling between them.
Figure 8. [Untitled cartouche of woman in carriage with slaves] “Plan de l’habitation de Févret de Saint-Mésmin, à Saint-Domingue, Louis de Beauvernet.” © RMN-Blérancourt, Musée franco-américain du Château de Blérancourt.
Beauvernet not only showed Févret his estate’s productive assets—its processing centers and their coerced human and animal workers—he also illustrated the wealth these machines generated. In figure 8 two horses with ostentatiously studded harnesses draw a handsome carriage along a coastal road. Inside the carriage, at the very center of the image, sits a richly dressed white woman. This may have been Judge Févret’s creole mother-in-law, Mme. Motmans, who was criticized for her extravagant domestic service.62 She is not driving the vehicle, for its reins are being held by a black man riding alongside on a third horse, carrying the omnipresent whip. Two black postilions stand on the back of the carriage, wearing the same livery as the rider—white turbans with a single red feather, red jackets trimmed in white, and a white shirt.
In the left foreground, Beauvernet depicts a black couple whose naked suffering stand in stark contrast to the comfortable passenger. The man and woman wear heavy chains around their wrists. The larger of the two figures is also wearing a special iron collar, a device designed to humiliate and to isolate slaves found eating sugarcane or committing other minor violations of plantation discipline. The iron arms of the collar, with their barbed ends, stick out at a forty-five-degree angle, extending far over the man’s shoulders. The composition reinforces the marked contrast between the grandeur of the men and horses accompanying Mme. Motmans and the abject misery and animalistic treatment of the chained pair. Moreover Beauvernet depicts Mme. Motmans and her attendants as unaware of this scene of degradation. The cruelty of plantation life, Beauvernet suggests, is what keeps the wheels of commerce turning.
In 1779 the army officer Desdorides confirmed this when he described colonists’ casual attitude about cruelty in Saint-Domingue: “They do not always take care to remove the children when the slaves are punished. Those who frequently witness these punishments become hardened to it; they run as to a game to see an unhappy slave be whipped…. I have heard a mother boast of her son that at the age of ten he was strong enough to ‘cut’ a slave, that is to remove his skin with the stroke of a whip.”63 The Févret images illustrated an omnipresent reality in the slave colonies of the Greater Antilles. Violence was at the base of all the wealth and social and political power in slave societies in the region.
In his influential study of the English West Indies in the seventeenth century, Richard Dunn put forward a thesis on the social character of the West Indies that has proven very enduring. Looking at the development of the British West Indies as a student of Puritan New England and early modern European history, Dunn discounted the economic success of places like mid-seventeenth-century Barbados. He concluded that these societies were social failures, monstrous societies that were moral indictments of the process of European colonization in the Americas.64
That the colonial experience of the West Indies was socially and morally repugnant has been a strong theme in writings on the period. The Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul famously described them as places of mimicry where nothing original was created.65 This characterization of the West Indies as a cultural and political wasteland has, of course, been extensively critiqued, from Aimé Césaire to Kamau Braithwaite and beyond. These opponents of Naipaul’s depressing vision, however, have generally seen the Afro-Caribbean struggle against oppression as the fundamental source of Caribbean creativity, while describing the plantation as the essential colonial institution that creative Caribbean peoples struggled against. Vincent Brown has recently reinforced these arguments, mainly as a way of trying to overcome what he sees as the nihilistic assumptions embedded in the notion that Caribbean slavery was a form of “social death,” in which the slave self was irrevocably harmed through the process of being ripped away in the Atlantic slave trade from communities and familiar landscapes in Africa. He believes that slaves “must have found some way to turn the disorganization, instability, and chaos of slavery into collective forms of belonging and striving, making connections when confronted with alienation and finding dignity in the face of dishonor.”66
This literature on colonization, creolization, and cultural mimesis in the Greater Antilles is rich, confrontational, and intellectually challenging. What we want to suggest, however, is that the plantation world of the eighteenth-century Greater Antilles should not be viewed only in terms of horror.67 Death and despair were abundantly in evidence on the plantation, as the Févret map and vignettes show. That neither the white nor the black populations of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue and Jamaica could naturally reproduce their population is one more testimony to the destructive character of the plantation system. Yet the plantation system was also a place of dramatic vitality. Enslaved persons’ creative attempts to overcome or evade slavery are reason enough to see slavery’s power as both destructive and productive; in other words, enslaved people’s fear of social death was not incapacitating but generative.68 It was more than just a machine for the accumulation of wealth. We turn in the next chapter to look at some manifestations of that world in the urban life of both colonies and in the startlingly untraditional relationships between men and women of all races between the Seven Years’ War and the start of the French Revolution.
CHAPTER 3
Urban Life
The sugar plantation was the most remarkable institution in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Nevertheless, both colonies were also home to lively cities in which
