from Europe, were prevalent in many port towns across the Atlantic. Its purpose was to regulate and account for the import and export of trade goods. Not surprisingly, by linking punishment of slaves to the structure of the Custom House, the authorities reinforced enslaved commodification and objectification while setting an example of deterrence to the enslaved population. The Custom House’s location in the center of town and as a common site of whipping exemplifies the deliberate linking of the punishment and subjugation of black life and the consolidation of white supremacy in urban spaces. The other significant intention of such punishment was to make the spectacle visible to the greatest number of enslaved people.
The Cage, another physical representation of colonial power, was a gaol building originally erected for the confinement of riotous sailors in the mid-seventeenth century. Prior to 1657, there was a Cage located farther northwest at the intersection of Milk Market and Jews Streets. Situated between the courthouse and the main town market, this pre-1657 Cage held unruly indentured servants and “riotous sailors” after an incident in 1654.147 In 1657 a new Cage was completed on the southeastern public wharf, where Broad Street meets White Street, next to a public jail and near the State House. This new Cage was at the turn of the nineteenth century surrounded by open land that bordered a public “boardwalk” lined with pedestrian “stepping stones,” from which the walkway received its name.148 The Cage appears to have faced the busy Broad Street, although it could have been open to both the street and the wharf on the rear.149 From its early use for the confinement of white seamen and indentured servants, the new Cage’s purpose quickly shifted to that of a holding cell for runaway slaves, “a poignant symbol of the new stresses of the sugar era.”150 Captured runaways confined in the Cage waited there until they were claimed by their owners or tried.
Figure 5. Plan of the Publick Cage, drawn by John Atwood, c. 1830. Courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.
Directly related to the surveillance and confinement of the ever-increasing enslaved population, this shift in the use of the Cage from riotous white sailors to the confinement of black bodies signaled a critical shift in colonial priorities. Shortly after the sugar boom in the mid-seventeenth century, controlling the urban slave population was the most important aspect of enforcing white colonial power. Located on Broad Street and facing the careenage or public wharf the Cage was in the midst of busy maritime and foot traffic.151 As early as 1688 an Act “For the Governing of Negroes” specifies that “Negroes or Slaves So brought [to Bridgetown], shall be kept in the Cage at the Stepping-Stones, by the Provost Marshall, and not in the gaol; which said Cage is always to be kept in sufficient repair, at the public charge of this Island.”152 By this edict it appears the gaol was primarily reserved for white criminals and debtors representing the segregation between slaves and whites and reinforcing the special category in which the enslaved were held. In 1762, “An Act to impower the Justices of the Peace at their respective Quarter Sessions, to appoint Constables for the Several Parishes of this Island; and also for the appointment of Watches to be in the respective Towns of this Island” was passed.153 It authorized the justices of the peace to divide the town into districts and appoint “twenty-eight Watch-men, who with the Constable of the night to be deemed as two men, shall watch every night within the said [Bridgetown], from the hour of nine o’clock at night, till five o’clock the next morning.”154 The Justices directed each Watch-man to be armed and a Cage built, “and stocks kept in good order.”155 This law created a vast system of surveillance throughout the town and seems to suggest that in addition to the main Cage near the main bridge in the eastern region, many Cages would be built one in each district. Although there are no surviving records that referred to the actual existence of multiple Cages throughout the town, these edicts expose a careful plan of confinement and control aimed at enslaved people.156
Enslaved women like Jane who ran away for thirty days or more and were caught would have likely been held in the Cage until their trial and execution.157 Such occurrences were not rare. Prior to the 1750s, if a woman “absented” herself above thirty days, the law directed conviction and execution following her capture. For instance, on 27 October 1702, George Sharpe Esq. submitted a petition to the Barbados Council for the value of “a Negro Wooman of his, who was Executed for running away and absenting herself from her Masters Service for about one whole Yeare.”158 Execution records for the course of the eighteenth century reveal that enslaved men and women were condemned for running away as late at 1759.159 In later years, likely due to the impending abolition of the slave trade to and from Africa rather than humanitarian concerns, colonial authorities changed the terms by which runaways would be punished in the latter eighteenth century.160 But the Cage(s) and other sites of punishment remained the literal and symbolic material of colonial power and the consolidation of white supremacy into the nineteenth century.
The Cage’s deadly conditions proved distressing not only to the slaves confined within but an affront to the respectability of the residents of Bridgetown into the nineteenth-century who complained of it as “disgusting to Humanity and at first view disgraceful to the Age in which we live,” and as a “Nuisance to its Neighborhood.”161 In 1810, an enslaved man died while being held in the Cage and the Assembly and Bridgetown magistrates investigated the causes of his death.162 The construction of the main Cage purported to hold no more than twelve persons, yet, as the Barbados Minutes of Assembly reported, “[in] this wretched and miserable hole, shocking to relate, eighty-five persons have been confined at one time. If they lay down at all, they must have lain tier upon tier, at least four deep.”163 Similar to conditions of the Middle Passage, the confining spaces of an urban slave environment served not simply to hold fugitives in captivity but to symbolically reinforce the legal status of chattel and the disposability of black life. The Barbados Council met in the middle of December 1810 to hear the investigations by the Assembly and Bridgetown magistrates and to consider requests to remove the Cage, “as far as can be … from the principal & public Streets of the Town.”164 The Assembly, magistrates and Council ultimately agreed that the fatal conditions of the Cage stemmed from two main issues. First, the enslaved suffered from insufficient provisions because the keeper of the Cage took a third of their allotted daily corn in exchanged for providing them with meals and water.165 Additionally, Bridgetown slave owners, or “proprietors” of slaves confined their slaves for punishment which was an, “illuse, the Cage being intended for the Confinement only of runaway and disorderly Slaves,” the latter of which were taken from the streets and held overnight.166 Consequently, the residents’ concerns were not resolved for seven years A deed poll of 1818, contesting the ownership and transfer of the land upon which the Cage stood, describes the site as still located within the “most public and populous street in the town” and reports the “Cage unwholesome to the slaves confined therein.”167 It was in 1818 that the Barbados government acquiesced to the white residents and moved the cage to the Pierhead (Molehead) until it was finally eradicated in 1838 after Emancipation in the British Caribbean.168
However, despite the threat of “unwholesome” conditions, it is evident from the records that some women were repeatedly confined within this prison. If captured and confined in the Cage, the enslaved were stripped of clothing by the guards and their owners in order to identify them by the scars on their bodies. Descriptions of burns and whip marks brought them out of hiding and into public exposure: the private concealed black female body made public and legible. In October 1787, two enslaved women, Molly and Bessey, ran away from their owners in the southeast part of the island. Bessey, “has frequently been taken up and confined in the Cage,” according to her owner Elizabeth Pollard.169 On December 20, 1788, Jonathan Perkins also advertised for the return of four enslaved women. Ambah was fifty years old, African born, and “[had] lost the forefinger from her left hand.”170 Ambah disappeared with two of her daughters, Quasheba (thirty) and Betty (thirteen). All were said to be “so well known in and about Bridgetown (where they lived for many years) as to require no further description: [they were] perfectly
