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.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes of historical power, arguing that history represents 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
