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CHAPTER 1

Jane: Fugitivity, Space, and Structures of Control in Bridgetown

Black women’s histories, lives, and spaces must be understood as enmeshing with traditional geographic arrangements in order to identify a different way of knowing and writing the social world and to expand how the production of space is achieved across terrains of domination.

—Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds

The body African henceforth inscribed with the text of events of the New World. Body becoming text. In turn the Body African—dis place—place and s/place of exploitation inscribes itself permanently on the European text. Not in the Margins. But within the very body of the text where the silence exists.

—M. Nourbese Philip, A Genealogy of Resistanceand Other Essays

Jan 13, 1789

RUNAWAY: A short black skin negro woman named JANE, speaks broken English, has her country marks in [sic] her forehead and a fire brand on one of her breasts, likewise a large mark of her country behind her shoulder almost to the small of her back, and a [stab] of a knife in her neck. Whoever will bring the said negro to the subscriber in Bridge Town shall receive 20 shillings … JOHN WRIGHT

—Barbados Mercury

In a typical late eighteenth-century advertisement for the return of “lost property,” Jane, an enslaved woman who survived the Middle Passage, stumbles into history. In her brief encounter with the “official” record, Jane emerges in the archive disfigured by her capture, captivity, enslavement, and the power of her owner in this written document. The scars on enslaved women’s “flesh” as described in runaway advertisements disclose more than who owned them, what they wore, and to whom they might have run even as they limit their historicization. The very description of this wounded “flesh” represents one of the points at which black bodies became racialized objects, and their scars produce multiple axes of meaning.

Contradictions between Jane’s constructed humanity as an enslaved “negro woman” and the memory of a time before enslavement in Barbados play out in the descriptions of her textualized flesh. The “country marks in her forehead” exemplify the temporality of her life, a time before captivity when she belonged to a kinship.¹ The “firebrand on one of her breasts” marks not only her capture and objectification, but also the violation of bodily exposure at the time of her branding.² The advertisement re-exposes her body to history. “A large mark of her country behind her shoulder almost to the small of her back” may be from another kinship ritual performed, or a mark of abuse in the moment of her capture in West Africa. “A stab of a knife in her neck” exemplifies the extreme peril and powerlessness of her captivity. It may have happened in a moment of defense in the process of capture or on board the ship across the Atlantic. These scars turn into enslaved women’s stories—symbols of the deep penetration of violence that mark the relationship between the body of the archive, the body in the archive, the material body, and the enslaved female body in space.

Jane materializes briefly in a runaway advertisement from a condition of trauma describing all that her owner wanted the public to know about her—scarred and running—in a few sentences. With this scant accounting we must write her history. Jane’s language, possible ethnic origins (although dubious in this description by her owner), history of violence, and the crisis of her condition as an enslaved subject are herein revealed.³ Her subjectivity, constituted through theft from Africa, violence marked on her flesh, and her unrecorded suffering “is a life that [had] to be lived in loss.”⁴ Tragically and perversely, her flesh and her bodily movements in flight to “freedom” become her archive.

Enslaved women interacted with local urban spaces and their bodies became concentrated sites of meaning that in turn represented their inhumanity to owners or other whites and their predicament to other slaves. The public discourse of runaway advertisements exposed their private scarred bodies even as they were concealed in fugitivity. Thus, the condition of slavery permeated all spaces; and where slavery existed, “there is no place that is wholly liberatory” not even the archive, itself layered with “geographies of domination” and violence.⁵ Attention to how power was mobilized and deployed through space—urban space, body-space, archival space—and how colonial authorities confronted, confined, and distorted mobile enslaved bodies complicates what was possible in the alternative spaces created by the enslaved. As Katherine McKittrick argues, dwelling on the relationship between bodies and space also “reveals that the interplay between domination and black women’s geographies is underscored by the social production of space.”⁶ The archive encompasses another space of domination in this configuration and represents the link between the objectification of enslaved women and historical dispossession.

The following discussion utilizes a methodological practice that aims to subvert the archival discourse that filters the past only through white (male and female) voices by dwelling on the scars of other fugitive women. Close readings of scarred enslaved bodies in runaway ads alongside analyses of urban space—the built environment—and theoretical scholarship concerned with black women’s bodies as sites of meaning demonstrate how enslaved women encountered and were configured by urban slavery and the difficulties constituent to their historical narration.⁷ In the subsequent section we will follow Jane through the streets of Bridgetown. Jane’s movement through the town maps the sensorial and architectural history of slavery in this urban site from an enslaved woman’s perspective. Experiencing Bridgetown from Jane’s view—emanating from the silences within the runaway ad—the historian’s focus is redirected to the sensorial perspective of the historically disempowered enslaved woman. After Jane’s flight through town, a detailed chronology of Bridgetown’s history illuminates the vulnerability of slaves in an urban environment with the port town’s exposure to natural disaster, disease, and invasion. In addition, the layout and geographical particularities of Bridgetown embody the confluence of urban space and enslaved punishment.

Fugitive Women: The Body in the Archive

As identifying marks, the scars on enslaved bodies signified different meanings for various groups of people within Barbados slave society. For the colonial authorities they served as punishment for the victim and terror to the enslaved population. For the enslaved they confirmed one’s condition of captivity and this “body memory”—the permanent marks and meanings inscribed on the body—also transferred knowledge of enslavement to future generations.⁸ An enslaved child would come to understand that the scars on her caregivers represented pain and unfreedom. Put another way, the scars became a different type of “country mark,” produced by a ritual of violence that identified a person to other enslaved people not by their “ethnic” origin but by their dishonored condition that branded them as commodities.

Hortense Spillers makes an important intervention in understanding the distinction between the “enslaved body” and “flesh” “as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions,” which is helpful in reading scars on enslaved bodies and to account for their multiplicity of meanings.⁹ Spillers argues that the human body is a site imbued with cultural significations (race, gender, sexuality), but it is the violence upon the flesh of African captives—“its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ over-board”¹⁰—that is the point at which African captives became differentiated from human subjects and made into commodified objects.¹¹ Consequently, in runaway ads the flesh is the site of objectification that becomes the material from which the enslaved, in this case fugitive enslaved women, come into what I call a mutilated historicity. This term refers to the violent condition in which enslaved women appear in the archive disfigured and violated. Mutilated historicity exemplifies how their bodies and flesh become “inscribed” with the text/violence of slavery.¹² As a result, the quality of their historicization remains degraded in our present attempts to recreate their everyday experiences. The infliction of scars, lacerations, burns, and wounds of captivity reproduce African captive objectification and display as a “social hieroglyph” that communicates enslaved status to others—enslaved and free—and these flesh injuries are the remains with which we must construct their history.¹³

All Jane’s probable movements, the impetus of her flight and experience in fugitivity, are unknowable in the existing archive. The publicity and intention of the runaway ad challenges her concealment and freedom. Fugitivity in this context denotes the experience of enslaved women as fugitives—both hidden from view and in the state of absconding. It also signifies the fragile condition of runaways who came into visibility through runaway advertisements. If fugitivity is “the artful escape of objectification”¹⁴ (racial, commodified, legal/political), Jane’s disappearance was a defiant act against these constraints. The fugitive slave subverted the very paradigm of enslavement—immobility, disembodiment, violation—and created an alternative self in what Stephanie Camp terms a “rival geography.”¹⁵ Yet, the discourse of runaway advertisements remained an ever looming and corporeal threat for the absconding slave. This discursive power combined with the legal right of whites to interrogate, inspect, probe, and detain any black suspect made fugitivity both an insecure and defiant status.¹⁶ Jane’s owner conjured an image of her body that enabled others to access her through their surveillance and her bodily exposure.¹⁷ As the earliest slave laws of Barbados indicated, the fear and reality of rebellion and maroon resistance in the mid-seventeenth century made running away punishable by death if the slave had been captured after one year.¹⁸ These laws lasted into the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁹ Fugitivity then, embodied both a critique of slavery and the precarity of the fugitive condition.²⁰

Jane was one of many fugitive women who may have run to Bridgetown and were then described by their scarred flesh.²¹ On 5 April 1783, Harrison Walke of St. Peter placed an advertisement in the Barbados Mercury: “Runaway … a negro wench named SARAH CLARKE, about forty-five years old, she is a stout woman, very bandy legged, and has a large scar between one of her shoulders and breasts, she is supposed to be harboured in Bridge Town, and employed in the occupation of washerwoman, having been [seen] there several times with a tray of clothes on her head.”²² Sarah Clarke’s flight reveals multiple aspects of her life. That she ran away as an older woman is notable though not unusual, according to the collection of late eighteenth-century runaway advertisements.²³ Clarke also ran several miles from her owner to Bridgetown, when Speightstown and its free black population might have offered an easier journey. She therefore traveled as far away from her owner as possible. In addition, Sarah Clarke was marked by the whip. Her “escape,” whether temporary or permanent, carries a scar that that provides evidence of endured brutality as well as a certain identification to those who sought her apprehension.

An enslaved woman named Affey was similarly described by marks on her skin. Affey was “about forty odd years of age; … is a little [pitted or pecked] with the small pox, and has a remarkable scar under the calf of one of her legs, the size of the palm of a hand, about five feet six inches high, is well know[n] in Bridge Town, and has comrades in different parts of the island.”²⁴ Daphney, listed as “a mulatto woman,” had been “branded in the face with the letters H.L.” She had been seen in Bridge Town among the Barracks and at other sites.²⁵ The man who claimed ownership of her body hailed from St. Lucy, the northernmost parish and at least twenty-two miles away from Bridgetown. Daphney also bypassed the closest urban space of Speightstown to seek escape. In the weeks of 9 through 22 November 1788, an advertisement sought a woman named Joney who had part of her ear missing and a “scar on her underlip.”²⁶

Figure 2. A new & exact map of the island of Barbados in America according to survey made in the years 1717 to 1721, by William Mayo. Courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.

More than a year before Joney’s escape, Pothenah ran away in August 1787. She was sought by a subscriber to the newspaper, who offered a reward of five pounds “for apprehending a stout yellow skin negro woman … has a mark from the lash of a whip across her stomach, and two others on one of her sides.”²⁷ During the month of September 1787, Mary escaped her owner. She was described by a proximity to a working animal, “between a black and yellow complexion, stout limbed, is marked in the forehead near the form of a horse shoe and marked on her stomach, she had a mark of a whip on one eye,” and her owner noted that she “speaks tolerable good English.”²⁸ Enslaved women often ran toward town and to the military barracks in hopes of hiding themselves or earning money working for the soldiers. Other enslaved women were hired out to soldiers and officers as part of an informal sexual economy.²⁹ Their networks across the island demonstrate the distances across which the enslaved maintained kin and communal ties, whether family or friend.

But Daphney, Joney, Pothenah and Mary also carried their flesh wounds and the memories of their infliction into hiding. They could not escape the fact of their objectification nor the precarious status stemming from perpetual enslavement. Their scars would always be associated with slavery. The society in which they lived made it impossible to change the meaning of their mutilations even if they did find freedom. Although many enslaved women ran away, sometimes great distances from their owners, what they could not escape, even in death or hiding, was the violence of their condition and material lives. And, this remains the condition in which we find them in the archive and from where we must attempt to recount their stories.

Barbados developed into a lucrative colony from its establishment in 1627 until Jamaica surpassed its economic significance by the mid-eighteenth century. Bridgetown, the capital “city,” was for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the preeminent entrepôt for British Caribbean colonial production and profit.³⁰ This profit, directly linked to the rise in sugar production, manifested itself in concerted urban building projects that supported the intensive shipping and trade industries.³¹ Corresponding to this expanded architecture was the influx of thousands of Africans brought into the colony to sustain sugar production on hundreds of plantations throughout the island. Urban planning began as early as 1657, when an “Act for ye appointing and nomination of Streets, Lanes Alleys, Wharfs and other passages convenient in and about ye towne of St. Michael” passed for building the streets, government buildings and infrastructure that would support a rising merchant class.³² Planters, merchants, and widows who initially populated the town of St. Michael, as it was first named, brought and purchased slaves who worked to support their owners’ increasingly opulent urban lives. To focus solely on profit, development, and trade in colonial urban sites elides a central facet of the economy and this urbanization—that British colonists built into the landscape spatial features, both material and symbolic, to control and terrorize a growing enslaved population over the course of the eighteenth century.³³ One crucial element is the violent tactics employed by urban slave owners, legislators, and colonial governments in an effort to regulate enslaved bodies in a physically porous environment where the mobility of the enslaved and free threatened colonial power. Therefore, enslaved people experienced surveillance and spectacles of violent punishments as they went about their daily work.

Attention to how urban colonists consciously developed structures of confinement and punishment discloses a strong link between physical space, slavery, and enslaved bodies. It also indexes the specificities of unfreedom and fear in urban enslavement that have remained unremarkable compared with the violence of the sugar plantation complex.³⁴ Here we also see that the transition from private owner punishment to state punishment that has typically characterized the historiography of post-emancipation societies was not the reality for West Indian slave societies. As Diana Paton reminds us, punishment “was carried out on the authority of the state both before and after the end of slavery … and that slave holders made direct use of imprisonment, both on and off their estates.”³⁵ There was a marked transition after the British Abolition Act that took away the ability of slave owners to punish black bodies and shifted this authority to the state.³⁶ However, state authority to punish was always present in urban contexts, and the regimentation and standardization of punishment, including laws of flogging, were practiced much earlier than post-emancipation legislation would suggest.³⁷ Without the definable constricting geography of the plantation landscape—its “Great House,” sugar fields, provision grounds, and slave villages—the colonists residing in Bridgetown constructed markers and holding cells and enacted spatial punishments on enslaved bodies limiting enslaved movement, congregation, and other group activities. In addition, the enclosing space of Barbados as a small non-mountainous island limited possibilities for prolonged escape. There was generally no sustainable maroon community to run toward after the seventeenth century, nor an easily accessible neighboring colony that might offer slaves freedom for loyalty against a colonial enemy. This landscape was essentially finite.³⁸ Yet, over time and precisely correlated to the influx of Africans into the colony, Bridgetown council members, assembly, and vestry men ordered and paid for structures like the Cage and the gallows to serve as a constant reminder to the enslaved laborers who traversed the town that their lives were bound to perpetual servitude violently enforced. One way to consider this historical experience of urban enslavement is to follow fugitive bodies moving through the space of Bridgetown as they encountered various spatial reminders of the looming violence of slavery.

Jane’s Flight: The Fugitive Body in Space

From her runaway advertisement it is unknown whether Jane spent her life in town or the countryside, but she shared with many enslaved women the desire to run toward Bridgetown to conceal themselves in a dense and more diverse population. Demographic statistics for the eighteenth century are sparse, but by 1774 the enslaved population of Saint Michael’s Parish numbered 12,268 to 5,105 white inhabitants.³⁹ These numbers included both rural and urban parts of the parish in which Bridgetown was located.⁴⁰ Wherever Jane originated on the island, she would have entered a town still rebuilding from “the worst hurricane in historic times,” which in 1780 wiped out half the houses, buildings, and wharves and the infrastructure that sustained this bustling Caribbean port town.⁴¹

Constructed around swamps and a landscape of mangroves, Bridgetown suffered from damp and humid conditions and the streets were strewn with animal and human waste. Richard Ligon, a seventeenth-century visitor, describes the town as being “ill scituate” and that it was built

upon so unwholesome a place for the spring Tides flow over [the banks], and there remains, making a great part of that flat, a kind of Bog or Morass, which vents out so loathsome a savour, as cannot but breed ill blood, and is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there.⁴²

Figure 3. A Plan of Bridge Town in the island of Barbadoes, by John Gibson (London: Gent. Mag., c.1766). Courtesy of Harvard University.

Just five months before John Wright placed the notice in the paper for Jane’s (re)capture, Mr. John Crawford, a Bridgetown surveyor, also complained of the inhospitable conditions of Bridgetown:

dung heaps had been accumulated to such a number and those so large as to render many of the Alleys & narrow Streets almost impassible which was a nuisance of so intolerable a nature as to render the Houses in the viscinity scarsely habitable from the stench, and from the Air being impregnated with such noxious particles as could scaresly fail to injure the health of the Inhabitants.⁴³

The unhealthy conditions of town were manifold, and enslaved people, tasked with the most degraded jobs, cleaned and carried household and animal waste into the streets. One historian notes that, “[the enslaved] emptied chamber pots of their owners, sometimes going no further than the street gutter to do so, disposed of their garbage in vacant lots or threw it into the streets or the sea.”⁴⁴ Indeed, Crawford recognized that the enslaved were responsible for waste disposal and recommended that the parish officer should “oblige the Negroes to deposit what they had taken from the Houses in [appointed] places only.”⁴⁵ Other early modern European towns suffered from similarly polluted conditions and certainly the poor took the jobs of handling household waste. In the context of West Indian slave societies, however, the enslaved performed the most degrading and dangerous work. Many white visitors to Bridgetown remarked on the splendors of buildings and the opulent hospitality of the white residents. In the early eighteenth century visitor Pierre Baptiste Labat commented on the beauty and grandness of the town. Labat remarked on the well-set streets and the “English style” houses, that “have an air of propriety, politeness and opulence, that does not exist in other islands, and would be difficult to find elsewhere.”⁴⁶ In contrast, enslaved women and men navigated an intimate proximity to the waste and excrement of urban slavery—the byproduct of capital accumulation—and their proximity to refuse exemplified their historical expendability.⁴⁷ If enslaved lives were linked to waste and garbage, the authors of archival documents did not record the experiences of the enslaved as historical actors. They were often evoked in relation to filth.

Whether Jane arrived during the day or night there would have been people about—merchant and government men attending their affairs, meeting in government offices on the east end or the multiple taverns throughout the town. The streets would also be filled with “jobbing” slaves, poor white and black hucksters and free people of color going about their work, opening shops, and setting up stands to sell their goods. Walking from the eastside to the west, Jane would have passed Egginton’s Green, a piece of land close to an acre in area that made up the “front yard of [Jeremiah] Egginton’s grand mansion (‘the finest house in town’).⁴⁸ In the late seventeenth century the Bridgetown courthouse and town hall were located in Egginton’s Green. For a period of time the Barbados House of Assembly met in these buildings. In addition, before the completion of James Fort in western Cheapside in 1701 many slaves were punished for various legal offenses at Egginton’s Green, which contained stocks and a whipping post.⁴⁹

Jane might also have walked close to the careenage where small skiffs came in and out, returning with goods and people from the larger merchant ships anchored in the large natural harbor of Carlisle Bay just west of town. Dr. George Pinckard, a late eighteenth-century English visitor described the heavy maritime traffic:

Figure 4. Map of Bridgetown circa 1780s. This is a composite map using data from Denise Challenger, Luther Johnson, John Bannister, and Arlene Waterman, “The Streets of Bridgetown Circa 1765,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 45 (1999): 77–87, and Martyn Bowden, “The Three Centuries of Bridgetown: An Historical Geography,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical 49 (November 2003): 1–137. The locations on this map are an approximation based on the above data to provide a sense of the spatial layout of the town by the late eighteenth century. Courtesy of Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.

Carlisle Bay is become quite the busy Thames of the West Indies. English ships of war, merchantmen, and transports; slave ships from the coast of Africa; packets; prizes; American traders; island vessels, privateers, fishing smacks, and different kinds of boats, cutters, and luggers are among the almost hourly variety.⁵⁰

This geography of Carlisle Bay as an accommodating and large harbor was likely one factor in making Bridgetown the economic capital of Barbados instead of Speightstown, Holetown, or Oistins. With calm waters, small boats easily navigated to and from the larger merchant ships carrying goods in both directions. The wharves on the careenage always teemed with enslaved men and women, the former who worked loading the small boats with casks of sugar or rum and the latter huckster women selling produce, meat and household wares to the passersby. In November 1757 the Barbados Council debated a bill “to Remedy the Mischief & Inconveniency arising to the Inhabitants of this Island from the Traffick of Huckster Slaves…. Committed in any of the Harbours, Bays, Rivers, or Creeks or upon the Coast of this Island.”⁵¹ Similar laws were proposed throughout the eighteenth century as colonial authorities attempted to regulate enslaved movement and commerce.

Walking along the careenage, Jane would smell the seawater, mixed with the sour and dank smells of too many people in too small an area, and if she passed by the Cage, which held captured runaways, she would have seen the sweat and sensed the fear of the occupants inside. Enslaved people were no longer executed for running away by the time Jane made her escape, but the return to an angry owner offered no solace to the captured fugitive, as whipping or some form of bodily mutilation followed capture.⁵² James Fort, both a structure of official government business (completed in 1701) and by the mid-eighteenth century a common site, as Governor James Spry stated, “where Slaves have frequently Suffered Death,”⁵³ sat on an out-cropping on the south west of the Bridgetown waterfront.⁵⁴ Execution sites in Barbados towns were centrally located, and slaves were often hanged, gibbeted, or burned to death in front of large audiences. For example, in 1768 an enslaved woman named Molly was executed in Speightstown for allegedly poisoning John Denny Esqr., while a crowd of slaves gathered to bear witness to colonial violence.⁵⁵ Similarly, Jane might have heard the beating of drums announcing new acts passed for the “governing of negroes” or overheard conversations about a recent burning alive of enslaved men who were falsely accused of murdering a white doctor just three years before her escape.⁵⁶ One of the accused, an elderly black man, likely named Nick, raised the stake to which he was tied with his bound body, in an effort to escape the terror of being burned alive. The authorities instantly struck the stake farther into the ground and increased the wood to intensify the flames that eventually ended his life.⁵⁷

If Jane continued west she would see balconied two and three story houses, only a few of which were still made of wood after the fires of 1757 and 1766.⁵⁸ The fires of May and December 1766 destroyed 70 percent of the houses, storefronts, and warehouses throughout the town.⁵⁹ The minutes of council records for the period describe the destruction: “The fire broke out May 14th, at 11 O’ Clock at night, at a house in High Street. Four hundred & eighteen principal houses, independent of lesser buildings, stores, & sheds were burnt. The rents of the houses burnt, by the Church Books, amounted to £15, 442 Per Annum.”⁶⁰ Accounts and statements from the governor’s council included the conflation of fire with the surreptitious activities of the urban enslaved. In 1757, a speech given by Governor Charles Pinfold clarified the continued objective of slave control and confinement. Imploring council members to convene committees to force residents to rebuild in brick and stone and not timber, Pinfold makes explicit reference to the increased regulations on urban slaves,

[Infesting] Your streets … their Lust for Revenge, the great Advantage they have Reaped from the two late fires, I am under the Greatest Apprehensions, that unless prevented by Your Care and prudence they may by such favourable Opportunitys for theft and plunder be tempted to renew your misfortunes.⁶¹

In 1771 Governor Spry, still responding to the devastation of property from the 1766 fires, wrote to the Board of Trade and Plantations concerning the most pertinent issues consuming council members in the legislature: “some Bills for the Improvement of our Internal Police: The Preservation of the Town from future Accidents by Fire—And the better Government of the Negros.”⁶² Despite the evidence presented to the Board of Trade that the 1766 fire in Bridgetown “was started by the Carelessness of an Apprentice Boy who fell asleep & left a lighted Candle too near some loose Flakes of Cotton,”⁶³ the enslaved remained criminal suspects and subject to restrictive legislation curtailing their movements and regulating enslaved gatherings throughout the town.⁶⁴ Colonial authorities in Barbados were responding to the history of attempts and conspiracies to revolt in the seventeenth century and the recent large-scale and deadly wars the British fought with the maroons in Jamaica in the early eighteenth century, including Tacky’s revolt in 1760, in which over a thousand slaves rose up against the British on that island for more than a year.⁶⁵

As Jane made her way west she might have caught a glimpse of newly arrived Africans or “seasoned” creole slaves being sold in various storehouses throughout the merchant district and in the Molehead warehouses across the careenage from the mainland.⁶⁶ On 2 August 1783, for example, the Barbados Mercury announced for sale, “At public Vendue at the store of James Beaumont Evans & Co. on the wharf Eighty Seasoned Negroes.”⁶⁷ Lacking a central marketplace for the sale of slaves, slave merchants constructed makeshift spaces for the auction of African captives. These warehouses lined the waterfront and also housed bulk export items such as sugar, ginger, rum, and molasses for the wealthiest planters and merchants on the island.⁶⁸ Constructed of wood or stone and close to the waterfront, they sweltered in the heat of the day. The threat and reality of pestilence from incoming ships, foul air and insects, and human bodies packed dangerously tight rendered the conditions inside the warehouses a constant peril and extended the mortal conditions of the Middle Passage onto shore. Merchant companies, townspeople, and planters all advertised sales of the enslaved. One such advertisement reads:

Dec 29th 1787

Just imported in the ship FANNY. Jenkins Evans, Co. from the Coast of Africa, and to be sold by the subscribers. A remarkable fine cargo, consisting of One Hundred and Eighty Five, prime young healthy SLAVES, which will be exposed to sale at the yard of Mr Thomas Griffith, on Monday the 7th of January early in the fore noon.

GRIFFITH and APPLEWHAITE⁶⁹

The language of “exposure” and “fine cargo” describes the process of commodification and “black dispossession.”⁷⁰ The African captives in this instance were removed from the ship’s hold to another pen in the warehouse district or the yards of merchant businesses, where they waited a week for their impending sale. Likely suffering from loss of shipmates during the journey, and other archivally invisible horrors, these men, women, and children faced new threats as they stood in Griffith’s yard where planters and townspeople, men and women, crowded around to inspect their potential investment. At the same time, the sight of newly arrived Africans being moved from the ship Fanny docked in Carlisle Bay reminded creole slaves of their denigrated position whether remembering their own moment of disembarkation and sale or the repeated terror of witnessing frightened captives led into a life of perpetual bondage and violence.⁷¹ In 1789, the year Jane became a fugitive, debates raged in the British Parliament about the cessation of the slave trade. It would not end in the British Empire for another eighteen years.⁷²

The volume of Bridgetown’s slave trade and its convenient geographic location frequently lured purchasers from the French or Spanish colonies or even Europe. In late June 1773, a Spanish ship from Cadiz but bound for Havana entered Carlisle Bay. The captain, Don Ramon de la Hera, was ill with a fever and the crew asked local authorities for a few days berth. Another man from the ship, Don Heronimo Enrile, “Director for the Company of Asiento of Negroes,” purchased African captives with a “considerable sum of money … which sum was delivered to Messrs. Stevensen and … British Merchants Established here.”⁷³ The Spaniard received slaves and provisions from the same. Stifling captivity, then, did not end in the dungeons of Cape Coast or in the holds of ships during the Middle Passage. From the layout of the town and the circumstances of slave trading, merchants and planters likely held many African captives for extended periods as they awaited sale in the warehouses lining the wharves.

To the north of the wharves and above the main thoroughfare of Broad Street, Jewish families, descendants of those who fled Dutch Brazil in the mid-seventeenth century, occupied Swan Street (formerly Jew Street), with shops of hardware and other goods.⁷⁴ The former Quaker meeting house and the Milk Market dominated by enslaved and free hucksters and poor whites was not far from Swan Street to the west.⁷⁵ Farther west Jane would meet the fish market and butchers’ shambles, where goats, cows, chickens, and pigs were slaughtered and fish was sold by the enslaved for dinner tables throughout the town.⁷⁶ Jane may have known and made her way to the great market in Cheapside, to ask the huckster women for a place to hide, or a job where she might blend in with the twelve thousand or so enslaved people who worked in domestic capacities or on the docks. The great market, largely populated by enslaved women, was a place where runaways could gain information, hear news, and grasp a sense of the new dangers of town life. If Jane had run away on a Sunday, she would mingle with many enslaved people given day travel passes and wearing the required metal collar to sell goods in town.⁷⁷ On 6 January 1708, an act passed, “to prohibit the Inhabitants of this Island from employing, their Negroes or other Slaves, in selling or bartering.” The authorities had difficulties enforcing this so added a provision, “That all such Negroes and other Slaves who are employed in selling Milk, Horse-meat, or Fire-wood shall have at all such times … a metaled Collar locked about his, her, or their Neck or Necks, Leg or Legs.”⁷⁸ It is unclear to what extent owners complied with this provision, and although white residents attempted in various ways over the eighteenth century to curtail the commerce of huckstering slaves, they nonetheless persisted in their market activities.⁷⁹

Across the water from Cheapside market and butcher’s shambles lay a swamp on the Molehead. This land was considered “unproductive” by the white townspeople and was often flooded by torrential rain or the tidewater brought in by hurricanes. If Jane was out at night she may have heard the sounds of song and mourning from a group of her fellow slaves interring a deceased friend or kin in this marginal land.⁸⁰ She might have passed Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s infamous “Royal Navy Hotel” on Canary Street near the careenage, peopled by enslaved women who provided sexual services to the many sailors and military officers briefly in port.⁸¹ During the night there were also white watchmen patrolling the streets for suspect activity, black bodies out of place or engaged in illegal behavior.⁸² However, perceptions of enslaved women as public, mobile, and accessible provided some a useful disguise. On an October evening in 1742 an enslaved boy dressed as a woman walked across Bridgetown and was caught with a concealed sword at a home to which he was not bonded. Although he was following orders from his master, who was having an affair with the woman of the house, any efforts to explain himself were unrecognized by the law. Only white men decided the “guilt” or “innocence” of the enslaved. The law did not permit slave testimony.⁸³

From a single runaway advertisement we cannot know Jane’s ultimate fate—whether she was harbored by friends, relatives, or strangers, caught, or continued her journey in danger. Left only with the newspaper trace of her scarred body, we lose her alongside “all the lives that are outside of history.”⁸⁴ By subverting the discourse of the runaway ad and the gaze of her white male owner, we shift the epistemological weight of the archival document. Using maps and first-hand descriptions, we can reconstruct Bridgetown’s topography and visualize the historical experience of the enslaved in an urban context in a way that does not reinscribe the violence of the archive and erase the enslaved women who were a significant presence. Traveling through Bridgetown guided by Jane’s sensorial insight, we imagine the embodied experience of the enslaved, even if the record insists on reproducing the commodification and objectification in the descriptions of her scars and the reward offered for her return. Moreover, this method points to the tensions inherent in fugitivity between the rejection of the notion of being owned as property and the tenuous position of moving through public space. Violent punishment inevitably followed capture; well into the eighteenth century mutilation and death were commonly inflicted on runaways.⁸⁵ Indeed, after a 1675 insurrection plot was discovered, the Barbados legislature revised existing laws in a 1676 act to include the death penalty for runaways.⁸⁶ Yet, over the course of the eighteenth century, Bridgetown and other urban sites endured as a destination for runaways hoping for a permanent or temporary reprieve from their captivity. Whether enslaved in town or coming from the country to sell provisions, enslaved women and men became familiar with the urban landscape they traversed. Jane’s body, marked from the violence of enslaved captivity, would have also been a common corporeal topography to enslaved and free alike. Colonial power was mapped onto enslaved bodies through physical punishment and displays of public violence, and these modes of production developed early in step with the growing investment in a sugar economy. From its earliest development Bridgetown became a focal point for the production and exchange of commodities, colonial power and the precarious lives of the enslaved.

Emergent Bridgetown: The Material Body and Spatial Control

Fueled by the growing significance of sugar, late seventeenth-century Bridgetown’s development demanded a growing enslaved African population.⁸⁷ The geography, economy, and coastal location of the town facilitated significant human and maritime traffic, exposing the urban population to threats of war from rival colonies, disease, and natural disasters. Conscious of their own vulnerability to an increasing majority African and island-born enslaved population, colonial authorities erected the Cage, gallows, and stocks within town to discourage rebellion and revolt.⁸⁸ These factors, explored in detail below contributed to the hazards of urban enslaved life in unique ways.

Settled in 1627, Barbados became one of the first and most economically successful early modern British colonial projects in the Caribbean.⁸⁹ This success developed slowly over time from dozens of Englishmen experimenting with tobacco, cotton, and livestock in the early years of settlement to the introduction of sugar by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century.⁹⁰ Situated in a strategic geography that isolated the island from its neighbors, and as the most easterly of the Caribbean islands, Barbados grew in significance in the sugar and slave trades, both of which expanded exponentially. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the island boasted an elevated status in the British Empire as a lucrative sugar producer in addition to being a transportation hub of commodities, including captive Africans, shipped throughout the Americas.⁹¹ The first recorded settlement in the area of Bridgetown dates back to 1628 and was financed by James Hay, earl of Carlisle, who initiated the first group of settlers into the “Indian Bridge Town” named for an early Amerindian bridge that connected two parts of town over “Indian River.”⁹² Bridgetown developed haphazardly and slowly over the late seventeenth century.⁹³ Located on the southwestern coast of the island, it boasted a natural harbor in Carlisle Bay that would become important to the shipping trade for the entire island colony. Large portions of St. Michael’s Parish remained rural in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries while Bridgetown had increased its urbanity and density consistently since the initial settlement. Speightstown on the northwest coast and Oistins on the south both developed distinct urban communities during this period, the former with a substantial free community of color into the nineteenth century.⁹⁴ However, similar to Holetown, neither town became as important in terms of business, shipping, and colonial administration as Bridgetown. Indeed, Bridgetown was established as a rival town to Holetown, the first English settlement on the island.⁹⁵ By the late seventeenth century, Bridgetown emerged as the island’s governmental and economic center, eclipsing Holetown in significance. The town arose around a substantial mangrove swamp where settlers claimed lands, built homes, and used natural bridges and harbors to establish their port. In the 1650s, directly related to the agricultural transition to sugar production, rudimentary cart roads gave way to trading infrastructures, warehouses, and wharves lining the waterways of the town and a usable port.⁹⁶ Supplementing the creation of an infrastructure supporting sugar production, “the town also had a jail, stocks, pillory, whipping post, and dunking pool for thieves, fugitive slaves and servants, and the gangs of drunken seamen who frequently disturbed the peace of the town’s citizens.”⁹⁷ Central to the project of a slave economy, the government of Barbados constructed these instruments of torture to subjugate disorderly black and white bodies publicly and persistently. Moreover, many of these technologies were specific to this urban context and increasingly reserved for the enslaved population.

By the 1680s, with its population of some 3,000 residents, Bridgetown was larger and more populated than all British American towns except Boston.⁹⁸ During the sugar boom of the 1640s through 1660s, the Atlantic slave trade brought in tens of thousands of Africans, most of whom labored on the plantations strewn throughout the island colony. And by 1715, enslaved women outnumbered men. Similarly, from 1715 to the end of the century Bridgetown’s enslaved population grew substantially, from 13,000 to 17,000.⁹⁹ Over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Bridgetown became the epicenter of British profit in the Caribbean. The growth of the sugar trade spurred the large-scale importation of Africans from west and central Africa. Combined, these economic factors made Barbados the most profitable colony in the region until the 1720s, when it was surpassed in exportation by Jamaica.¹⁰⁰ Between 1707 and 1726, the board of trade and plantations listed 49,594 Africans brought into the colony.¹⁰¹ Destined for the fatal conditions associated with sugar cultivation, the majority were sold to planters across the island. Others were sold to neighboring colonies and a few remained to labor in town. Early Bridgetown was a central hub in this slave trade, and the Royal African Company of slave traders maintained an office on Tudor Street from 1671–1721.¹⁰² With no central market site for sales, a variety of urban spaces became flesh markets, further implicating this town in the violence of slavery. African captives were sold in several ways. A “vendue,” public auction, or “outcry” usually involved a financially distressed or liquidated estate. In the British Caribbean, captives also experienced sale through a “scramble,” wherein buyers raced around a holding yard or on a ship grabbing as many captives as they could afford within a designated timeframe marked with a bell.¹⁰³ Other captives were sold individually within the ships by which they were transported.

From the late seventeenth century on, Bridgetown grew in density in people and buildings as well as in susceptibility to the elements, disease, and world affairs. Though disease, war, and natural disasters affected the entire population, slaves living in town acutely felt the brunt of incoming plagues, thinning provisions, and destruction of shelters. Since the late seventeenth century, Bridgetown had been known as “being by far the unhealthiest place on the island,” with a constant influx of diseased and transient sailors in addition to the African captives sickened by the Middle Passage.¹⁰⁴ Epidemics killed hundreds of people in this society; in 1694 yellow fever killed 354 people in Bridgetown alone. Into the late eighteenth century governors wrote to England about the periodically high mortality of all the inhabitants.¹⁰⁵ On 13 April 1776, for example, Governor Hay wrote the Lords of Trade and Plantations about “a Calamity … that has reigned in the Island for these three or four [Monthes], which is the Small Pox, attended with a putrid fever; Some Hundreds of People have been carried off by this disorder, particularly White Children and Negroes.”¹⁰⁶ Living in a dense urban environment where the enslaved moved through town in ways not possible on plantations still left them exposed to the rapid spread of disease from a constant influx of people from abroad. Incoming ships brought decimating illness to the inhabitants of the town, and captive Africans remained the most predisposed to disease and death. In February 1782, slave trader Captain Coleman “of a Liverpool Guineaman” ship petitioned Governor James Cunninghame “for leave to land his Slaves in order to inoculate them for the small Pox, some few of them having caught the infection from the [West African] Shore.”¹⁰⁷ In the late eighteenth century, Surveyor Crawford remarked to the St. Michael’s Parish Vestry that “In every populous Towns such as this it will be ever found impossible to [inforce] that law so effectually as to prevent the accumulation of dirt in different parts of the Town, and from that accumulation, together with the [pudles] formed in broken parts of the Streets, I am perfectly persuaded many diseases especially [epidemic] Sore Throats and Fevers originate.”¹⁰⁸ Both white and black residents suffered from the unhealthy conditions of urban life and disease, but Richard Dunn points out that both groups’ survival rates differed resulting from the general maltreatment of the enslaved: “the blacks were overdisciplined and underfed, while their masters were underdisciplined and overfed.”¹⁰⁹ The opulent lifestyles of the planter class existed in distinct contrast to the conditions in which enslaved people lived and worked.

In times of war these differences proved stark. The architecture of militia and military fortifications served as powerful symbols of the strength of colonial power and as crucial sites for controlling the enslaved throughout Bridgetown. Situated the farthest east of the Caribbean islands, Barbados benefited from its relative isolation in cases of hostility from rival and neighboring colonial powers. Still, occasional threats between and during war-time kept Barbados colonists in a state of readiness, particularly from their tense relationship with the French and Spanish.¹¹⁰ A militia established by the mid-seventeenth century helped prepare the island for foreign invasion. By 1680 about 5,588 men served in this unit, which also functioned as a defense against threats of slave rebellions in the same period.¹¹¹ Bridgetown did not host the British Caribbean’s largest military fortifications until the late eighteenth century, but as early as 1650 Needham’s Point’s fortifications were built for the protection of Carlisle Bay.¹¹² In 1705 Barbados officials commissioned St. Ann’s Fort in the area on the southeast edge of Bridgetown that would be occupied by the garrison military buildings in the late eighteenth century.¹¹³

Barbados colonists often recruited enslaved men in the building and defense of the colony when it served their interests. The enslaved, therefore, were particularly threatened at times of invasion. During a conversation in the Barbados Assembly in 1740 about raising money to build fortifications, a list of expenses exemplified the peril to which the enslaved were subject and the significant attention given to the building of forts, accumulation of ammunition, and arming of magazines. The list reads as follows:

The Orders that the Governor or Commander in Chief with the Consent of the Council may issue without an Address from the Assembly are:

1. Value of Negroes lost in the Publick Service

2. Value of Negroes set free for Gallantry [opposing] the Enemy.

3. Value of Negroes kill’d at the Time of Invasion or Appearance of the Enemy.

4. Gunners and Matrosses Sallarys

5. Master Gunner and Matrosses of Artillery

6. Captain and Men at the Magazine

7. Certificates from the Commissioners for repairing the Fortifications¹¹⁴

Noted for their bravery, enslaved men served as armed soldiers when it suited colonial interests, and some were freed for their “loyalty.”¹¹⁵ However, they had no choice in the matter of protecting and serving the public, and many lost their lives in the front lines of conflict.¹¹⁶ Enslaved men were also made to build and repair roads, public buildings, bridges, military fortifications, and other urban infrastructures that served to control their mobility.¹¹⁷ Slave owners benefited from payment from the public treasury for their slaves’ work, including a sum of twenty-five pounds if the slave died during this public labor. This financial reimbursement to slave owners for loss of their slaves in service revealed another level of enslaved objectification—their retained value as commodities in death and expendability, in physical harm from invasion, or the dangers of public works projects.

The enslaved population in Bridgetown also suffered acutely from interruption of trade during extended warfare. For example, without the provision grounds typical on plantations, urban slaves struggled for sustenance during the American Revolution. While anticipating a trade embargo from England due to the war with its North American colonies, Barbadian planters seemed to have prepared more provision grounds and “increased their imports to stock up Barbadian warehouses as much as possible.”¹¹⁸ However, Governor Hay proved overconfident when allowing the Royal Navy to provision Boston out of Barbados stocks. A year after the trade embargo of September 1775 supplies were depleted in Barbados to a dangerous degree.¹¹⁹ During a political conflict between Governor Hay, who continually denied the lack of supplies, and the Barbados Assembly, who sent their complaints directly to the king, the danger of food shortages continued. Historian Karl Watson remarks that “the urban white poor were the greatest sufferers” in such conditions because they could not plant food crops as their peers in the country.¹²⁰ Despite the political disagreements between the governor and the assembly, with the governor denying the veracity of food scarcity claims, it was clear that the urban enslaved would also be susceptible to dwindling food supplies.¹²¹ In a letter from Governor Hay to the Lords of Trade and Plantations on 24 March 1776, he suggests that the Assembly’s complaint of the scarceness of Guinea Corn and Indian corn, the main staple for slaves, was overblown.¹²² This letter was followed by an address from the assembly to the Lords complaining that the distress from want of provisions to feed the poor and slaves was not exaggerated as the governor claimed.¹²³ Without significant demographic statistics for the period, Watson asserts that “the situation [of scarcity of food] with respect to the slave population is less clear,” but one can surmise that when the “urban poor” suffered, the urban enslaved enjoyed no better conditions, given the deeply stratified social conditions in which the enslaved occupied the lowest status.

While slave owners might have wanted to keep their investments in human property alive, when forced to choose between their own lives and the lives of their slaves one can assume they chose themselves.¹²⁴ This is evident in the general maltreatment of slaves throughout the islands, slave laws demanding mutilating punishments for alleged crimes, the dangerous tasks they were assigned in times of war and disaster, and travelers’ and locals’ observations during the eighteenth century on the depraved appearance of enslaved people in town.¹²⁵ William Dickson, a resident of Barbados in the late eighteenth century, described “several worn out and leprous negroes, who frequented the more public parts of [Bridgetown], especially the market and both the bridges.” His recollection included “a most miserable and leprous woman … in the alley parallel to and between, Broad street and Jew Street,” and another “negro” woman whose “naked and extenuated corpse [was] … surrounded with ordure and vermin.”¹²⁶ Enslaved people past their productive labor were sometimes left to fend for themselves, and Bridgetown became frequented by those destitute from lack of food and shelter and ill from disease.¹²⁷

The urban slaves’ susceptibility to danger was likewise acutely visible in times of natural disaster. One of the most devastating events in Barbados history occurred on the morning of October 10, 1780, when a colossal hurricane struck the island and its neighboring colonies, including Jamaica far to the north.¹²⁸ This notorious hurricane produced volumes of desperate correspondence from officials and residents describing ruin beyond anything previously experienced. Even the governor and his family were forced into the open as the roof of their home tore away.¹²⁹ Bridgetown felt the force of the storm. Several witnesses, including colonial officials, described the extreme destruction. One resident wrote, “Scarce a house is standing in Bridgetown; whole families were buried in the ruins of their habitations.”¹³⁰ Governor Cunningham reported, “Bridge Town our Capital is now a [heap] of ruins, the Court House & Prisons, where criminals & Prisoners of War were confined, lies open, therefore the Prisoners of all kinds are at liberty.”¹³¹ Although some enslaved might have been inadvertently set free, they likely did not survive for long due to the food shortages and destruction of homes. Many witnesses and victims wrote in apprehension of the sight and sounds of death throughout the towns and countryside. Several men of the Barbados Council wrote an address to King George III declaring their horror of hearing “the dying groans of a very considerable number of the inhabitants, who lay expiring in the streets of the towns … a circumstance too shocking to even mention.”¹³² Significant attention in the written reports also focused on slaves, noting their lack of shelter and impending starvation.¹³³ A Barbadian planter wrote about ships being sent to North America to secure provisions, “without a supply of which numbers must die of famine: 1000 negroes have perished that way since the hurricane for want.”¹³⁴ All inhabitants suffered from the 1780 hurricane, but evidence illuminates the particular hardships endured by the enslaved.¹³⁵

John Gay Alleyne, speaker of the House of Assembly and a wealthy planter, expressed concern for his prospective loss of property in dying slaves. Alleyne implores, “The King’s Most Excellent Majesty … we dread a scarcity of [Indian corn] … for the subsistence of our negroes, and that a famine will complete that misery which the tempest may then seem only to have begun.”¹³⁶ The limited diet of the enslaved made them incredibly vulnerable to any threats to these sources of sustenance. In contrast to the quality of food to which planters and slave owners had access to during disasters, the enslaved either starved or struggled to survive the diseases that spread across the island following hurricanes.¹³⁷ Meanwhile colonists scrambled to prevent their loss of profits. Authorities feared not only famine and the death of their enslaved but also unrest and revolt due to the chaos after disasters.¹³⁸ Evidence of colonial authorities’ fear and their efforts to exert control can be read in the technologies and architectures they developed to confine the urban enslaved population before and after the hurricane of 1780.

Architectures of Control

There was an obvious link between enslaved bodies in urban space and architectures of control. White supremacy was expressed in ideology, physical exertion, and inanimate symbols of power to the enslaved population with structures such as the common gaol, the execution gallows, or the Cage. These architectures served as stark reminders of the consequences of resistance to the enslaved even as they grafted a criminal identity onto their bodies.¹³⁹ In Barbados the concentration of power was expressed through the organization of labor, punishment, and space. Barbados slave owners and the colonial government built and maintained urban carceral sites and practiced the spectacle of mobile punishments—whipping the same enslaved body in different locations—to (re)produce and exercise the forms of discipline that were found on plantations.

The control wielded by slave owners, overseers, and drivers on plantations was shared with constables, magistrates, jumpers, and executioners in urban areas.¹⁴⁰ On the plantation, punishment for most offenses committed by the enslaved, whether purposely or in self-defense, remained in the hands of the planter, overseer, or driver. These men used the whip and other physical forms of discipline at their discretion with little, if any, regulation from colonial authorities. In town, however, in the absence of a “gang” of laboring workers and the urban reality of more individualized tasks, the white men appointed as constables and watchmen served as representatives of the urban slave holder, non-slave holders, and the larger white population and were given authority to mete out punishments on enslaved bodies.¹⁴¹

Power to inflict physical punishment extended to the judiciary as well as magistrates, who could order a whipping at their discretion, even if the slaveholder was not present or aware that the slave had been taken up by a constable. For instance, an Act passed in January 1708 allowed any justice of the peace to order “one and twenty stripes,” of the whip on any slave caught selling allegedly stolen goods.¹⁴² The slaveholder was required to pay for both the captivity of his/her “property” and the whipping, illustrating the extent to which control of “slave behavior” was enforced from many areas of urban society and was distinct from plantation discipline.¹⁴³ Punishments on enslaved bodies included public displays of colonial power, and Bridgetown contained several spaces that invoked fear in the absence of the spatial confinement of the plantation complex. These spaces reproduced criminal identities, racial terror, and mortal confinement in urban Barbados.

An enslaved woman walking from one end of Bridgetown to the other would pass scenes and “visible symbols” of public punishment reinforcing the threat of violence as well as her own racial and gendered status.¹⁴⁴ Such sites included the Cage, James Fort, the Custom House, taverns, brothels busy streets, and the commercial warehouses that lined the active wharf. Seemingly neutral sites occupied by enslaved women engaged in economic endeavors, such as the Milk Market or Great Market, were also spaces of terror since punishments were often meted out in different locations. For instance, Grigg and Bess were prosecuted for the theft of a cow in February 1743. This felony conviction carried the sentence of death. While Bess’s sentence of guilt was reversed, Grigg was ordered to be whipped by the town “jumper.” The order stated specifically that he be released from incarceration once “The Gaoler or his Deputy See … that [Grigg] first receive 39 Lashes on his bare back (vizt.) 13 at the Roebuck 13 at the Cage and 13 at the Custom House.”¹⁴⁵ “The Roebuck,” or Roebuck Street was a busy district of shops and foot traffic and largely occupied by free(d) people of color by the end of the eighteenth century.¹⁴⁶ Indeed, even the free population of color suffered the proximity to the violence of slavery. Likewise, the Custom House sat in the center of town where Grigg’s punishment would be witnessed by many enslaved and free(d)men, women, and children. The Custom Houses, a relic 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 well known to Mr. Gooding, of the Cage and his attendants.”¹⁷¹ 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.