In Britain it has always been a challenge to establish what sort of lives poorer people had during this period; the lives of black and mixed-race women in the British West Indies island of Grenada are even more difficult to uncover. However, through some of the testamentary documents left by white men with whom some of these women were associated, a little light may be shed on those women’s lives. Their own voices remain silent to us, but some aspects of their lives are revealed through evidence that, while clearly presented from the male perspective, nonetheless, tells us something about them.
The wills of course, tell us nothing of the nature of these interactions between the white men and the black or mixed-race women. They could have been entirely based on the position of power that white males of the slave-owning class held over vulnerable and enslaved black and mixed-race women. Women in such circumstances have either no choice at all or had what amounted to ‘Hobson’s Choice’; they may have made a decision to make the best of what life offered to them. White male protection could ensure that they and their children had a future. Some of the women mentioned in the wills, especially those who were slaves, were likely to have been subjected to coerced or forced sex with their owners and/or with other white men. Using wills as our source of information presents a blatant ands massive bias in that the vast majority of women who were not left anything, remain invisible to us. We can see only a tiny and dramatically unrepresentative sample of the whole. However, it is worth looking at this sample, rather than at none at all.
In a world where the ‘amount of white blood’ one had was deemed important, there is some irony that it was the perceived ‘amount of black blood’ that was used to label people. Some of the resultant children of these relationships were identified as ‘mulatto’, which was a term that generally referred to anyone having specifically one white and one black parent. Others were labelled as ‘quadroon’ – with one quarter black ancestry, or even ‘octoroon’ when one great-grandparent was black. Less specifically, the term ‘coloured’ was used where perhaps today we would use mixed-race, itself a much used but arguably inaccurate term.
We find that in 1808, on the death of the Scot Alexander Turnbull, he left the ‘Portugese [sic] coloured woman, Maria Diurnoc commonly called Maria Turnbull… £100 or 5 slaves’ as well as a small amount of land. Her son Alexander ‘now resident at Edinburgh at the wheelwright business’ was to get £700 on attaining the age of 21. His sisters – Betty, Peggy, Molly and Charlotte – were each left a female slave. Turnbull also left money to Molly and Charlotte’s children. It seems then that in this instance, not only did the white Scots father of Maria’s children provide for her and them, but also for his grandchildren.
Similarly Laurence [sic] Turnbull was described as a ‘free coloured woman’; she lived with Alexander’s brother Gordon, by whom she had two sons and three daughters. In 1809, the sons Horatio Nelson and Alexander received £300 and £200 respectively ‘for their education’ and two male slaves each. Their sisters Elizabeth, Catharine and Helen each got one female slave and £100 on reaching age 15. Laurence herself was left ‘all the household goods in Charlottetown’ and two female slaves.
Moritz Heardman, who originated in Germany, but had later links with Scotland, had two daughters. Their mother was identified as ‘a certain mulatto slave of mine called Henrietta’ in his testament drawn up in 1812. When he died, five years later, he had left ‘my two girls … Catherine and Eliza… by…Henrietta’ the interest on £10,000 to ‘be their legal property’ after they reached the age of 20. He requested that his (legitimate) nephew was to ‘support and maintain his two girls’. Only if the girls died was the nephew to get Mortitz’ money twenty years after Moritz’ death. It seems that Moritz’ anticipation that his nephew would not be happy with this arrangement, was justified as in 1842 the nephew was involved in a court case over the money.
Women like Maria, Lawrence and the more anonymous Henrietta were often referred to as ‘concubines’ or ‘housekeepers.’ The latter term was one commonly used at the time in Scotland to refer to women in similar relationships. In the Caribbean at this time, marriage was rarely an option for these pairings of white men and black or mixed-race women, being both legally and socially unacceptable. Nonetheless some white men and their ‘concubines’ seem to have created long-term relationships and families together, a fact not always included in the men’s letters home. Often it was only after the death of the men that the evidence of these otherwise hidden aspects of their lives emerged from their wills and testaments. More rarely, other evidence has emerged that when some of those men did return home, they did not return alone; some brought their mixed-race children with them. One can only imagine the difficulties such children might have encountered. The fates of all of the mothers remains unknown; I have only found one instance of a desire stated in a draft will that the entire family be relocated away from the West Indies. The final will for the man has not yet been located; it may even have been destroyed.
From the scattering of wills extant we find that some of the women mentioned were free as was the case for such as Maria and Lawrence mentioned above. Henrietta was not free, she was clearly Heardman’s slave, and was probably black. In 1800 Alexander Duguid, originally from Aberdeen, left instructions that his two mulatto children – Lewis and Jenny – should be manumitted (freed) after his death (a person’s freedom could be bought), and monies were left to them. Their mother was clearly a slave as her children were also enslaved. She herself is not mentioned; perhaps she was already dead.
Overarching all the above is the complication of what passed as ‘normal’ in relationships during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a very different society to the one we know today. Setting that to one side – for my research is very much ongoing and nowhere near complete – nonetheless, some of the evidence that is extant leads to tantalising questions about the lives and the interactions between this particular group of white men and certain black or mixed-race women that perhaps may never be fully answered.
Further reading:
C. Petley, ‘”Legitimacy” and social boundaries: free people of colour and the social order in Jamaican slave society’, Social History, 30:4, (2005), 481-8.
P. L. V., Welch, ‘Madams & mariners: expressions of self-confidence among free coloured women in Barbados, 1750-1834.’ Paper submitted to the 29th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Historians, (April 7-12, 1997), 1.
Sonia Baker is in her second year of her doctoral research in which she is looking at Scots in the British West Indies during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
