Others fought their way out in order to escape the suffocating environment. On 25 October 1788, The Barbados Mercury reported that “fourteen of the negroes confined in the Public Cage in this town made their escape; having filed the lock from the bolt to which it was fastened, they opened the door and got out.”172 Risking further punishment, including death, the enslaved confined in Bridgetown’s Cage sometimes made desperate efforts to break free.
Enslaved women who ran away did so at great risk to themselves. Even if they managed to avoid capture, they risked manipulation by people who sought to exploit their dangerous situation. Some no doubt worried about the fate of children or family members left behind. Those who ran with their children had to find ways to feed and shelter them. And of course, if caught, they would be immediately confined and possibly sentenced to death.173 The threats of capture and punishment made fugitivity a fraught choice. The repetition in the advertisements of women who ran from the far corners of the island to town reflects their understanding of Bridgetown as a possible hiding place. Some had relatives and friends in the town and may have had knowledge of networks along the way. But even fugitive women without such ties or knowledge may have viewed urban spaces as offering the best chance of hiding in plain sight among the large enslaved and free black population.
These urban spaces also demonstrated the control of the authorities to impose their will on slave owners, since owners lost valuable property when police or magistrates chose to charge one of their slaves with a crime. With no legal defense to oppose mistreatment, enslaved people remained at the mercy of their owners’ ability to argue for their innocence. Occasionally slave owners successfully managed to overturn death sentences for their condemned slaves. However, if the Council overturned a conviction, the enslaved were rarely released without punishment. Most often, like Grigg, their sentences were reduced from death to multiple whippings at symbolic and hyper-visible sites. For example, on 16 February 1748, Christopher Moe submitted a petition “to Reverse the Sentence of Death against a Negro Man called Somers” to the Court of Errors presided over by the Governor and Council,
Whereupon the Errors assigned by the Petitioner for Reversing the said sentence were Confessed by the Solicitor for the Prosecution Robert Leader … And thereupon [His Excellency] & all the Council were pleased to alter the said [Judgment] of Death; & to order that the said Negro Man Somers receive 13 Lashes before the Custom House; 13 in the Market Place; & 13 before Eldridge’s Tavern before he is Discharged.174
Although the case was dismissed, a public example was made of Somers and he did not escape punishment. Indeed, the authorities retained their ability to make a spectacle of Somers’s tortured body. The records do not indicate the crime for which Somers was accused of or if the confession of errors by the prosecutor exonerated him from the crime. Nevertheless, it appears that the accusation was enough for Somers to be whipped several times around Bridgetown.
Witnesses to punishment recalled the specific exposure town slaves suffered in public displays of humiliation. Evidence from travelers on the display of urban enslaved bodies to strangers and the ways that the sounds of inflicted pain traveled through town illuminate how the seemingly fluid nature of urban space was actually inherently physically intense and specifically violent. Distinguishing between country and town punishments, Captain Cook of the 89th Infantry of Foot explained that in the country “the mode of flogging these Negroes is by laying them upon their bellies, with a Negro at each extremity to raise each hand and foot from the ground, this is the general mode of flogging them in the country.”175 “But in the towns,” he continued, “their method is more horrid and shameful, the poor wretch is obliged to stand bare in the open streets, and expose his posteriors to the jumper.”176 In order to assert control in a context where the enslaved often moved through town independently, the authorities purposely conducted punishment so that it was highly visible to the other enslaved people walking around.
Captain Cook remembered an instance where he, “was once particularly shocked at the sight of a young girl, a domestic Slave of about sixteen or seventeen years old, running about on her ordinary business with an iron collar with two hooks before and behind, projecting several inches, and this in the streets of Bridge Town.”177 Enslaved women may have seemingly “enjoyed autonomy” by controlling the informal market economy in produce and other goods and certainly predominated the market place. But the market, like other sites of bodily disciplining—the Cage, the Custom House—also reproduced colonial power and reinforced social, racial, and gendered hierarchies.178 Authorities in Bridgetown created symbolic boundaries of control with ritual punishments throughout the town that were visible to enslaved people carrying out their daily labors, and each architectural site embodied or produced social relationships based on colonial power, terror, and control. Even if, as one historian states, “urban slaves did not work under the constant threat of the whip which faced rural workers … there was the constant reality of living in a slave society” and constant spatial representations of the threat of violence.179
As the production of sites of confinement in urban spaces provided colonial authorities the means to terrorize an urban enslaved population, so too do the discursive spaces within the archive confine enslaved women in disfiguring historical representations. These marks and the brutality of slave laws also follow enslaved women into the archive. Indeed, descriptions of their scarred bodies and the acts passed that subjected them to instruments of torture are the primary content of the documents on which we must base their narratives. The fragmentary nature and format of runaway ads confine enslaved women in a depiction of violence and commodification from the perspective of the slave owner and other white authorities. In other words, combining the study of the body of the archive, bodies in the archive and the bodies in space, in the historical analyses of enslaved women in this context sheds light on the multiplicity of forces simultaneously at play in their subjugation. Narrating fugitive enslaved women’s stories from these records requires subversion of archival intent through a methodological practice that approaches these documents from the gaze of enslaved women and takes on power in the production of subaltern historical knowledge and the spatial terrain of urban slavery. This epistemological shift reorients historical inquiry to consider the workings of power on the bodies and historical afterlives of the enslaved to produce new knowledge about their lives from the records left by the regime of power.
Interrogating the use and production of spaces and technologies of control on urban enslaved women’s bodies and within the archive also makes clear the important differences that shaped enslaved life within towns and plantation complexes without assuming that one was less brutal than the other. It also articulates how central enslaved black bodies were to the production of urban and domestic spaces. As the case of Bridgetown demonstrates, urban life proved equally distressing for the enslaved living there and those laboring on sugar plantations throughout the islands. Moreover, urban life proved fraught with danger for the enslaved who were especially subject to the violence of urban life whether by means of colonial authorities, natural disaster, disease or serving in the informal sexual economy. Enslaved women suffered in particular ways within the confines of Bridgetown as their gendered labor in the domestic realm forced them into close intimacies with their owners, many of who were white and free women of color. A careful interrogation of the brothel as a site of urban confinement reveals the complex intra-gendered relationships of enslaved women and their female owners and provides new insight into the troubling domestic spaces enslaved women occupied. It also exposes how narratives of economic success tragically and historiographically obscures the violence of sexualized labor in slavery and in freedom.
CHAPTER 2
Rachael and Joanna: Power, Historical Figuring, and Troubling Freedom
Scandal and excess inundate the archive … The libidinal investment in violence is everywhere apparent in the documents, statements, and institutions that decide our knowledge of the past.
—Saidiya
