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Subverting the Master's Narrative: Public Histories of Slavery in Plantation America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2009

Jorge L. Giovannetti
Jorge L. Giovannetti
Affiliation:
University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras
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Abstract

This article examines public representations of slavery on plantation sites devoted to heritage tourism in the Americas. Plantations of various colonial backgrounds are compared in terms of the narratives they present, finding that the history of slavery is largely hidden in Barbados and Puerto Rico, while addressed more explicitly (although still problematically) in the Brazilian and Cuban cases. The article highlights the importance of tour guides and site administrators in the production of histories of slavery and advocates for a more proactive role of historians in the production of public histories of slavery and for more productive and instructive discussions on this thorny topic.

Type
Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , Fall 2009 , pp. 105 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2009

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References

NOTES

1. Hartman, Saidiya, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, 2007), 136–153Google Scholar.

2. Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen (Boston, [1946] 1992), 28Google Scholar; Patterson, Orlando, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London, 1957), 150Google Scholar.

3. Whiteley, Henry, Excessive Cruelty to Slaves. Three Months in Jamaica in 1832: Comprising a Residence of Seven Weeks on a Sugar Plantation (Philadelphia, 1833?), 3Google Scholar.

4. This took place invariably throughout the western hemisphere wherever slavery was a central institution. Notable examples in the Caribbean are public executions for the 1812 Aponte conspiracy in Cuba and those for the 1831 Sam Sharpe revolt in Jamaica. See Franco, Jose Luciano, La conspiración de Aponte (Havana, [1963] 2006), 68–70Google Scholar; Childs, Matt, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, 2006), 21Google Scholar, 46, 125–126, 137, 173–175, 155; Turner, Mary, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society (Urbana, IL, 1986), 160–163Google Scholar, and her earlier article, “The Jamaica Slave Rebellion of 1831,” Past and Present 40 (July 1968): 122–123. On Jamaica also, see the recent book by Vincent Brown, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, 2008), 129–137. For similar examples of public punishment in Brazil, a notable example is the execution of Manuel Congo for the revolt in Vassouras in 1838. See dos Santos Gomes, Flávio, Histórias de quilombolas: Mocambos e comunidades de senzalas no Rio de Janeiro, século XIX, revised and enlarged edition (São Paulo, [1995] 2006), 246Google Scholar. In the United States, examples range from the retributions for the 1811 revolt in Louisiana (See Wish, Harvey, “American Slave Insurrections before 1861,” Journal of Negro History 22 [July 1937]: 319CrossRefGoogle Scholar) to the post-slavery era of public lynching (See Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 [New York, 1998]: 205Google Scholar, 220–221), both of which accomplished similar purposes, if indeed being qualitatively different phenomenon. It is worth noting also that even the granting of freedom—one way of ending enslavement—was made a public event, as is shown in royal ceremonies in Brazil. See Celso T. Castilho and Camillia Cowling, “Funding Freedom, Popularizing Politics: Abolitionism and Local Emancipation Funds in 1880s Brazil,” article manuscript (2008).

5. See Fiet, Lowell, “Puerto Rico, Slavery, Race: Faded Memories, Erased Histories,” in Facing up to the Past: Perspective on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe, ed. Oostindie, Gert (Kingston, 2001), 73Google Scholar. See also, María Margarita Flores Collazo and Humberto García Muñiz, “Legislar para recorder: las conmemoraciones de la abolicíon de la esclavitud en Jamaica y Puerto Rico,” paper presented at the Summer Institute: “Blacks or Negroes,” “Africans or Hyphenated Afro's,” “Slave descendants or Immigrants,” at L'Institut Interdisciplinaire Virtuel des Hautes Études sur les Esclavages et les Traites, Université d' Éte, Aix-en-Provence, August 23–29, 2008.

6. This includes Afro-Puerto Rican teachers in art, social studies, and English in different schools and different levels. A long overdue study on slavery, racial ideas, and school education in Puerto Rico was recently published by a team of scholars: Godreau, Isar, et al., “The Lessons of Slavery: Discourses of Slavery, mestizaje, and blanqueamiento in an Elementary School in Puerto Rico,” American Ethnologist 35 (2008): 115–138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. The plantation has historically been central for analysts of the Caribbean region in particular and was also central in earlier more general hemispheric assessments. See, for example, Wagley, Charles, “Plantation America: A Culture Sphere,” in Caribbean Studies: A Symposium, ed. Rubin, Vera (Seattle, 1960), 3–13Google Scholar, and more recently, Giovannetti, Jorge L., “Grounds of Race: Slavery, Racism, and the Plantation in the Caribbean,” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1 (April 2006): 5–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Notably, the plantation is a central point of departure and analysis in George Reid Andrew's recent survey history of Afro-Latin America. Andrews, George Reid, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar. It is important to note that however important or widely defined, the plantation was obviously not the only place where slaves became central to the economy of the Americas.

8. Frederickson, George, The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (Berkeley, 1997), 23–24Google Scholar. See also Degler, Carl, “Comparative History: An Essay Review,” The Journal of Southern History 34 (August 1968): 426–427CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It will be clear to the reader that the purpose of this specific essay, and the space limitations, will not allow for a full exploration of the myriad analytical dimensions that would be possible from the data collected, and which hopefully will be the subject of future works.

9. Wagley, “Plantation America.”

10. See the website of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico: www.fideicomiso.org (accessed April 2008).

11. A local brochure marks 1984 as the moment when Vassouras became an “Estância Turística” (tourist site). Prefeitura de Vassouras, Secretaria de Cultura e Turismo, Vassouras: A Cidade dos Barões (n.d.), collected in 2007. The plantations visited in 2007 date the acquisition of property from the 1990s also, and our driver mentioned to us the dramatic changes in Vassouras during the last ten years—1997 to 2007—regarding local tourism. Entry for Saturday, December 1, 2007, Journal Notes, Vassouras, Río de Janeiro, Brazil.

12. I made most of my fieldwork visits to plantation sites accompanied by other colleagues and friends, and sometimes the drivers in charge of taking us to often-distant isolated locations. However, given that I was ultimately the only one doing research and taking fieldnotes, I will mainly use the first person in my writing and refer to “we” or to specific persons when relevant or when needed for descriptive accuracy.

13. The pattern of focusing on the Great House, while disregarding the locations where the enslaved lived and worked, is also a common practice on plantation tourist sites in the U.S. South. Adams, Jessica, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (Chapel Hill, 2007), 58–59Google Scholar, 60, 63.

14. A Description and History of St. Nicholas Abbey, Barbados (manuscript, self-guide descriptive sheet), 1.

15. A Description and History, 1.

16. Entry for Sunday, October 14, 2007, Journal Notes, Barbados. Emphasis indicates that of the guide herself.

17. The film presents some of the workers in the plantation, and while there is no reason why a homemade family film should pay attention to things other than those of interest to the person taking them, no mention is made in the film about the labor struggles that were taking place in the decade the film was taken. But there is also no intervention by the guides of St. Nicholas Abbey to explain the historical context of the film. Visitors are left on their own to see the film without reference to the convulsive time in which it was recorded. For information on labor struggles in the Caribbean during the 1930s, see Bolland, O. Nigel, The Politics of Labor in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarism and Democracy in the Labour Movement (Kingston, 2001)Google Scholar.

18. A Description and History, 3; Alleyne, Warren and Fraser, Henry, The Barbados–Carolina Connection (Oxford, 1988), 39Google Scholar.

19. The emphasis on “authentic” furniture on tours is also common in the U.S. South. Adams, Wounds of Returning, 60.

20. Entry for Sunday, October 14, 2007, Journal Notes, Barbados.

21. See www.fideicomiso.org (accessed April 2008).

22. Giovannetti, “Grounds of Race,” 27–28.

23. This is based on multiple visits to the Hacienda (due to be a native from the area), but also specifically on the ethnographic visit made on December 29, 2005, accompanied by Ruth Torres, my mother, and historian Camillia Cowling.

24. See Baralt, Guillermo, La Buena Vista, 1833–1904: Estancia de frutos menores, fábrica de harinas y hacienda cafetalera (San Juan, 1988)Google Scholar, and his earlier work, Esclavos rebeldes: Conspiraciones y sublevaciones de esclavos en Puerto Rico, 1795–1873 (Río Piedras, 1981).

25. Entry for Saturday, December 1, 2007, Journal Notes, Vassouras, Río de Janeiro, Brazil.

26. See Adams, Wounds of Returning, 59 for a parallel with the U.S. South.

27. Entry for Saturday, December 1, 2007, Journal Notes, Vassouras, Río de Janeiro, Brazil.

28. Same quote contained in a poster about the Fazendas do Ciclo de Café in the hotel were I stayed, and also in the brochure of the plantation. See Fazenda Cachoeira Grande, Vassouras–RJ (brochure in author's collection).

29. For furniture matters and the effect of experiencing the interiors of the Great House “as they were” in past times, see Adams, Wounds of Returning, 60–61.

30. On the revolt, see Gomes, Histórias de quilombolas, 144–247.

31. Entry on visit to Vassouras the previous day, written on Monday, December 3, 2007, Journal Notes, in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

32. Entry for Monday, December 3, 2007, Journal Notes, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

33. Entry for Monday, December 3, 2007, Journal Notes, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On medical treatments on plantations in Vassouras, see the classic study by Stein, Stanley J., Vassouras, A Brazilian Coffee Country, 1850–1900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (Princeton, [1958] 1985), 190–191Google Scholar, 193–195.

34. Entry for Monday, December 3, 2007, Journal Notes, Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

35. Couty, Louis, Étude de Biologie Industrielle sur le Café (Rio de Janeiro, 1883), 83Google Scholar, in Stein, Vassouras, 165.

36. See brochure Mara Palace Hotel, Vassouras–RJ (in author's collection) on the cultural program of plantation visits containing the profile of five fazendas.

37. This is a quote from the promotional poster in my hotel but is not included in the hotel brochure mentioned in the previous note. It states that the fazenda had up to 500,000 feet of coffee and 366 slaves.

38. Música na Fazenda, Vassouras–RJ (brochure and program in author's collection, 2007).

39. Richard Morton, Diary, March 30, 1857–May 11, 1858, Mss5: 1 M8465: 1, Virginia Historical Society, Virginia, USA, cited in Daniel Rood, “Industrial Epistemology, Slavery and the Atlantic World, 1840–1860,” manuscript. I am grateful to Mr. Rood for allowing me to quote from his work-in-progress. On slave jongos, see Stein, Vassouras, 204–209, and more recently, audiovisual materials produced in Brazil by Mattos, Hebe and Abreu, Martha, Jongos, Calangos e Folias: Música Negra, memória e poesia, DVD (JLM Produções Artísticas, 2007)Google Scholar. See also Lara, Silvia Hunold and Pacheco, Gustavo, eds. Memória do Jongo: As Gravações Históricas de Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras, 1949 (Rio de Janeiro, 2007)Google Scholar based on Stanley Stein's jongo recordings. An English modified version of this text is being prepared at Princeton University by Michael Stone and Pedro Meira Montero.

40. Entry for Saturday, March 29, 2008, Journal Notes, Matanzas, Cuba.

41. Ibid.

42. While not specifically for Matanzas, where the Dionisia is located, the Haiti-Louisiana-Cuba connection has been noted, in particular for coffee plantations in western Cuba. Pérez, Jorge Freddy Ramírez and Pupo, Fernando Antonio Paredes, Francia en Cuba: Los cafetales de la Sierra del Rosario (1790–1850) (Havana, 2004), 26–27Google Scholar. See also de la Riva, Francisco Pérez, “Apuntes para servir a la historia del café en Cuba,” in Sección de Historia de Cuba: Del Descubrimiento a la República, Primer Congreso Nacional de Historia, Vol. D (Havana, October 8–12, 1942)Google Scholar, 1. Biblioteca, Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC). Historians have established the relation between the Haitian Revolution and its impact in the Cuban agricultural economy, and wider Atlantic links. See, among others, a general assessment by del Carmen Barcia Zequeira, María, “Influencias múltiples: Cuba y la Revolución Haitiana,” Universidad de La Habana, 237 (January–April 1990): 47–65Google Scholar, and Hernán Venegas Delgado, “Entre revoluciones: La familia Heredia-Girard en el Oriente cubano,” (Manuscript, 2008) for reference to the impact on the eastern side of the island. Another treatment of the St. Domingue/Haiti-Cuba-Louisiana connection is Scott, Rebecca J., “Public Rights and Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary,” Current Anthropology 48 (April 2007): 237–249CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Stories of other coffee plantations identify the practice of Spaniards of naming their haciendas after their wives. See Méndez, M. Isidro, Biografía del cafetal Angerona (Havana, 1952), 9Google Scholar.

44. While enslaved women were significantly more in coffee plantations than in sugar ones, a study of coffee plantations in Matanzas indicates that enslaved men were still a majority. The logic of their combined use of women as workers and for the reproduction of the enslaved population, which Don Nemesio mentioned, is noted by this study, however. See Fernández, Doria González, “La economía cafetalera cubana: 1790–1860,” Arbor: Ciencia, pensamiento, y cultura 547–548 (July–August 1991): 171Google Scholar.

45. Fieldnotes, Saturday, March 29, 2008.

46. On the sacred aspects of the Ceiba tree see Cabrera, Lydia, El Monte (Havana, [1954] 2006), 171–246Google Scholar, and Glean, Manuel Rivero and Spínola, Gerardo Chávez, Catauro de seres míticos y legendarios en Cuba (Havana, 2005), 132–135Google Scholar. In Afro-Cuban traditions, the Ceiba may be associated with death in particular ways, but is also strongly associated with life. It is worth noting that the examination by Louis Pérez Jr. of slave suicides mentions the guásima tree, not the Ceiba, as the preferred tree for slave suicides. Pérez, Louis A. Jr., To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society (Chapel Hill, 2005), 37–39Google Scholar.

47. Fieldnotes, Saturday, March 29, 2008.

48. Entry for Saturday, March 29, 2008, Journal Notes, Matanzas, Cuba.

49. Yet, it must be mentioned that other coffee plantations in Cuba are distinguished by their unique features, such as the large walls surrounding the slave village, the ruins of which still survive in El Padre and Angerona plantations. See Singleton, Theresa A., “Slavery and Spatial Dialectics on Cuban Coffee Plantations,” World Archaeology 33 (2001): 98–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Entry for Sunday, May 25, 2008, Journal Notes, Havana, Cuba.

50. For descriptions of one of these “criaderos” in another coffee plantation (Angerona), see Abbot, Abiel, Cartas (Havana, [1829] 1965), 213Google Scholar.

51. On the clandestine slave trade, see Franco, José Luciano, Comercio clandestino de esclavos (Havana, [1980] 1996)Google Scholar. The study of coffee plantations in Matanzas only quotes prices as high as 600 pesos. González Fernández, “La economía cafetalera cubana,” 173. A sample of my own research on slave prices in coffee plantations in the eastern side of the island in 1841 indicates prices under 500 pesos. See “Terreria promovida por el Lic. D. José M. Portuondo Bravo como Síndico del Curso,” por Don Manuel de Valenzuela (July 29, 1841), Archivo Histórico Provincial de Santiago de Cuba, Fondo-Juzgado de Primera Instancia, leg. 384, no. 5 [1844]. In the principal study on slave markets in Cuba, the average price goes over 1,000 pesos for only a limited number of years. Bergad, Laird W., García, Fe Iglesias, del Carmen Barcia, María, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (Cambridge, 1995), 38–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But Pérez Jr. refers to a source indicating prices as high as 2,000 pesos within the context of the abolition of the slave trade. Pérez Jr., To Die in Cuba, 49. Future research should be done in order to juxtapose plantation tour narratives, including these figures, with empirical historical data.

52. Entry for Saturday, March 29, 2008, Journal Notes, Matanzas, Cuba.

53. While some Barbadian sites where slavery is publicly represented, such as the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, are to be commended for their exhibition on slavery, others have been allowed to fall into disrepair. At the time of my visit in 2007, the surrounding gardens of the once controversial “Bussa Statue” were completely unattended and no illumination seemed to have been in place for a long time. A slave hut replica in the Tyrol Cot Heritage Village—formerly the house of Sir Grantley Adams—is virtually hidden behind the “sanitized” chattel houses where crafts are sold to tourists. For an analysis of the debates and politics over public history, monuments, and memorials in Barbados, see Cummings, Alissandra, “Caribbean Museums and National Identity,” History Workshop Journal 58 (2004): 225–245Google Scholar; Constance R. Sutton, “Public Monuments in Post-Colonial Barbados: Sites of Memory, Sites of Contestation,” in Identities: Global Studies of Culture and Power (in press). With regard to the history and memory of the slave revolt of 1816 in Barbados, see the debate between Hilary Beckles and Jerome Handler in the Barbadian press between March and April 2000, Sunday Advocate (March 26, 2000); Daily Nation (April 5, 2000); Sunday Advocate (April 16, 2000); Sunday Advocate (April 30, 2000). I am grateful to Kenneth Bilby and Jerome Handler for calling my attention to this debate.

54. On race relations during the Special Period, see de la Fuente, Alejandro, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill, 2001), 317–334Google Scholar.

55. In contrast with The Bussa Statue in Barbados, the monument to the abolition of slavery has been recently refurbished, and the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, organized a symposium to deal with the representation of slavery in another of their properties, the Esperanza Plantation.

56. See Giovannetti, Jorge L., “La raza: Un asunto ‘festivo’,” El Nuevo Día (January 30, 2007): 72Google Scholar.

57. During a visit to Vassouras in 2007, we went to the Manuel Congo Memorial, but we were the only visitors there. The place, located outside of the center of town, was “difficult to find because either people did not know where it was or because Vassourenses were not capable of giving right directions,” I noted. Once there, the place was well kept and in good conditions, but without visitors. A painting of Manuel Congo's public execution was hanging on the walls of the tourist shop in the Casa de Cultura of Vassouras, near the main town square, entry for Saturday, December 1, 2007, Journal Notes, Vassouras, Río de Janeiro, Brazil.

58. See Sutton, “Public Monuments in Post-Colonial Barbados,” Cummings, “Caribbean Museums and National Identity,” and Hilary Beckles, “Emancipation in the British Caribbean,” in Facing up to the Past, 94.

59. A Cuban colleague, Bárbara Danzie, who joined me in my trip and has visited La Dionisia before mentions that Don Nemesio basically repeats the same script for all visitors.

60. See www.lennoxhonychurch.com/article.cfm?Id=386 (accessed December 2007).

61. Entry for Sunday, June 15, 2008, Journal Notes, Havana, Cuba. This visit was made with historians Camillia Cowling, María de los Ángeles Meriño, and Aisnara Perera, all specialist on slavery in Cuba.

62. Horton, James Oliver, “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, eds. Horton, James Oliver and Horton, Louis E. (New York, 2006), 48–49Google Scholar.

63. Anthropologist Karen Fog Olwig has argued for better attention to the “relations of power that govern the construction of heritage and its meta-narratives” for the understanding of the inequalities reproduced in the “‘heritage’ constituency.” See Olwig, Karen Fog, “The Burden of Heritage: Claiming a Place for West Indian Culture,” American Ethnologist 26 (May 1999): 384–385CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. Horton highlights the important role of field trips, museums, and historic sites in Horton, “Slavery in American History,” 43.

65. Levy, Andrea, Fruit of the Lemon (New York, [1999] 2007), 325Google Scholar.

66. A similar call for research and outreach as a central responsibility of scholars is made by Richard Price, “Monuments and Silent Screamings: A View from Martinique,” in Facing up to the Past, 61.