The reaper's garden: death and power in the world of Atlantic slavery

Abstract

The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008.Young Scotsman, Robert Renny, was greeted early on by the stark reality that faced countless of his contemporaries, both white and black - eighteenth century Jamaica was a graveyard. Vincent Brown presents a fascinating study of death's cultural and political ramifications on the island in his work The Reaper's Garden. His impressive research moves through a myriad of correspondence, diaries, wills, cemeteries, visual images, archaeology, church minutes, autobiographies, and contemporary histories, ultimately constructing a much more convincing analysis than seen in other cultural histories of the Caribbean. Driven by narrative, the style is easily digestible and the subject matter disturbingly compelling.Brown's Jamaica is two distinct worlds united by death. As a subject, death exists as a grim and original component that is integral to both social organization and political mobilization, and therefore vital to historical transformation. (6) Death was ubiquitous. It welcomed newcomers, both enslaved and free, and somehow simultaneously created and destroyed, according to Brown, everything in this most profitable and promising of the British West Indies. What Brown terms mortuary politics governs virtually every social, political, historical, religious, and geographical aspect on the island. He uses this perception of death's consequences to substantiate his characters' actions, struggles to both maintain and resist authority, and classify virtually every social feature on the island. Death was translated into idioms of power and protest. Funerals served to articulate communal values, bequests served to buttress familial networks against future fluctuations, and claimants to authority made partisan use of the dead. (59)The picture of this hellish outpost comes into focus early. Robert Renny (the quintessential Jonny New-Come) would record in his 1807 A History of Jamaica the quizzical singing of a small rowboat of black enslaved girls that brought out fresh produce to the sea-weary passengers. The portentous lyrics, New-Come buckra, He get sick, He tak fever, He be die, He be die reveal a morbid truth about Jamaica's reputation as 'the graveyard for Europeans.' Eager to capitalize on Jamaica's astounding wealth, Britons flocked to the island in droves, not out of desperation, but, as Brown illustrates, these individuals expected to make quick profits and then return to England. This was not a migration but a sugar rush.Death had far-reaching political ramifications for the living as well. Funerary practices like that of Florentius Vassall underscored meaningful social arrangements (91). For white plantation owners like Vassall, death ceremonies functioned to cement status, race, wealth and his prominence within in Jamaican planter society. Brown also notes that remembrance in the form of monuments and grave markers served as tools for blacks and whites alike. Through the enduring form of physical landmark (232), symbols provided memorials to the dead and promised shreds of immortality to an otherwise turbulent environment. Standing as reminders to earlier sacrifices, events, and deeds they also illustrated earlier political positions and allowed, as Brown observes, a subjective reading of the past and its participants. In this way death serves more than just a reminder of how horrible life could be on the island at this time. Brown wants to underscore how 'death' and the 'dead' were able to shape the living's perception of the world in profound ways.Brown's effort is a welcome contribution to West Indian scholarship and fits nicely with other analyses of life on Jamaica. While Trevor Buraard's seminal Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World provides a more personal, intimate look at this strange, degrading environment, it certainly couples best with Brown's work. …

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