reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the process and conditions of such narratives…. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.
—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past
Item it is my Will, and I do hereby manumit and set free my negro Woman named Joannah from all Servitude whatsoever, and for compleating that purpose I do hereby desire my Executors herein after named to pay all such Sums of money and Execute such deeds as are necessary about the same:—And I do give, devise and bequeath unto the said woman Joannah, her child Richard, and a negro Woman named Amber, with her future Issue and Increase, to her the said Joannah and her heirs forever.
—Will of Rachael Pringle Polgreen, 1791
The great hurricane of 1780 destroyed lives, homes, and businesses, and free people of color felt acutely the tenuous nature of their freedom in Bridgetown. On 20 July 1793, Captain Henry Carter and William Willoughby—two white men—swore under oath that Joanna Polgreen, “a certain negroe or mulatto woman,” had been freed in 1780 but had lost her manumission papers in the storm.1 Carter and Willoughby testified that Joanna was once owned by Bridgetown hotelier Rachael Pringle Polgreen, but Rachael sold her to a soldier named Joseph Haycock who promptly freed her from slavery. After her successful reclamation of her freedom Joanna enters another document into the archive, this time a deed wherein she frees her son Richard Braithwaite, “for the natural love & affection which She hath to [him].”2
Joanna’s quest for freedom for herself and her son involved a long journey from slavery in a brothel to freedom and back, and has until recently remained in the shadows of Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s sensational narrative of infamy and fortune.3 Drawing Joanna’s story from underneath Pringle Polgreen’s dominance as a historical agent allows us to reconsider the terms of agency and sexuality in this slave society. We also gain insight into the dynamics between women of color and enslaved women in the context of a sexual economy in an urban slave society. Deconstructing Pringle Polgreen’s historical narrative ultimately exposes the power of certain narratives to obscure the politics of representing success, the violence fundamental to slavery, and the lives relegated to historical anonymity. The challenge, then, is to track power in the production of Pringle Polgreen’s history while recognizing that her historical visibility is also an erasure of the lives of those she enslaved. Doing so reveals, for the first time, the story of Joanna’s struggle and determination in freedom and the limits of freedom, sexual commerce, and agency in eighteenth-century Bridgetown.
Rachael Pringle Polgreen, Historicity, and Liminality
It may be precisely due to Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s “exorbitant circumstances”4 during her life as a free(d) woman of color in late eighteenth-century Bridgetown that historical narratives about her life have not changed since she appeared in J. W. Orderson’s 1842 novel, Creoleana.5 Apart from an important critique by Melanie Newton of the political and historical context of Orderson’s novel, Polgreen’s life story—her triumphs, extraordinary relationships, and visual depictions—has not altered since the nineteenth century. Thus both the archive and secondary historical accounts beg reexamination.
Polgreen was a woman of color, a former slave turned slave owner, and many stories circulate that she ran a well-known brothel without much controversy.6 Persistent representations of Polgreen’s life draw from an archive unusual for women of color in eighteenth-century slave societies. She left a will, and her estate was inventoried by white men on her death—a process used primarily by the society’s wealthier (white) citizens. Her relationships with elite white men and the British Royal Navy are well documented in newspaper accounts and, most significantly, in the nineteenth-century novel by a Bridgetown resident who was likely well acquainted with Polgreen. In the 1770s and 1780s, this female entrepreneur appears in Bridgetown’s tax records as a propertied resident, and her advertisements in a local newspaper allude to the importance she placed on property. From a caricatured 1796 lithograph to the folkloric accounts of Prince William Henry’s (King William Henry IV’s) rampage through her brothel, Polgreen’s story has in many ways been rendered impermeable, difficult to revise, and overdetermined by the language and power of the archive.
Yet the archive conceals, distorts, and silences as much as it reveals. In Creoleana, a “complete” dramatized life story of Polgreen is narrated; it provides a tantalizing but fictional solution to gaps and uncertainties for scholars who struggle with the fragmented and fraught records of female enslavement marked by the embedded silences, commodified representations of bodies, and epistemic violence. However, for Polgreen, it is perhaps her hypervisibility in images and stories that continues to obscure her everyday life, even when the archive appears to substantiate certain aspects of that life. Such powerful narratives, visual reproductions, and archival assumptions erase the crucial complexities of her personhood and obfuscate the violent and violating relationships she maintained with other women of color in Bridgetown’s slave society.
In the scholarship of slavery and slave societies of the Caribbean, Polgreen and other free(d) women of color are centered in narratives about business acumen and entrepreneurship. Several historians discuss the significant role prostitution played in the local and transnational market economy.7 Indeed, in many eighteenth-century Caribbean and metropolitan Atlantic port cities prostitution was rampant and served a significant mobile military population as well as providing local “entertainment.” During the 1790s, “the symbol of non-white business success in Barbados was the female hotelier.”8 A number of free(d) women found slave-owning and prostitution economically viable routes to self-sustenance, since they and other free(d) people of color were systemically excluded from most occupations and opportunities.9 Bridgetown’s white female (mostly slave-owning) majority, however, tended to own more women than men and set the precedent for selling and renting out enslaved women for sexual purposes.10 Moreover, without the possibility of employing their enslaved laborers in agricultural pursuits, urban white women profited from the surplus of domestic workers by hiring them out to island visitors.11 It is in this environment of slaves, sailors, Royal Navy officers, and other maritime traffic in Bridgetown’s bustling port that Rachael Pringle Polgreen made her living.
However Polgreen’s seductive narrative too often eclipses and silences the experiences of other enslaved and free(d) women who lived during her time. This chapter revisits her story to analyze how material and discursive power moves through the archive in the historical production of subaltern women.12 Reexamining the documentary traces of Polgreen’s life and death illuminates several contradictions and historical paradoxes that make it problematic to characterize Polgreen or enslaved and free(d) women’s sexual relations with white men as unmediated examples of black female agency. How does one write a narrative of enslaved “prostitution”? What language should we use to describe this economy of forced sexual labor? How do we write against historical scholarship, which too often relies on the discourses of will, agency, choice, and volunteerism that reproduce a troubling archive, one that cements enslaved and free(d) women of color in representations of “their willingness to become mistresses of white men”?13 If “freedom” meant being free from bondage but not from social, economic, and political degradation, what did it mean to survive under such conditions?
In the 1770s and 1780s, Bridgetown’s free population of color remained relatively small, but it experienced significant growth by the turn of the nineteenth century.14 This group of “free colored” women and men survived through store-keeping, huckstering, ship-building, prostitution, and a small range of other trades. The Royal Navy’s military infrastructure perpetuated the demand for an informal sexual economy that was not fully met by the efforts of white slave owners in Bridgetown. For former slaves like Polgreen, who had certainly witnessed white owners profiting from sexual violations of
