Return to Jamaica

My visit​ to Jamaica in May was shadowed by the likelihood of two important endings. One was familial. Sister Maureen Clare – my late husband Stuart Hall’s cousin and his last living relative on the island – was gravely ill. For decades, Clare had given us a home in Kingston. The other related to my work as a historian. I had recently finished a book on Edward Long, slaveowner and author of the celebrated three-volume History of Jamaica, first published in 1774 and never out of print. (Peter Fryer described Long as the ‘father of English racism’ in Staying Power, his classic study of Black people in Britain from 1984.) I would see Clare and also make a final visit to Lucky Valley, Long’s plantation in Clarendon.

Would this mark the end of my long connection with Jamaica? Stuart left the island in 1951, making a different kind of journey from the one undertaken by those who disembarked from the Windrush in search of work and a new life. Jamaica had been taken by the British in 1655 and only became independent in 1962. For all migrants, Britain was ‘the mother country’. Stuart came as a Rhodes scholar, a young anti-colonial, to Oxford. Like most of the Windrush generation he stayed, learning new political identities – first West Indian, then Black – over troubled decades. I learned what it meant to live in a mixed couple, something that carried one set of meanings in Kingston, another in Birmingham. Slowly, over time, I tried to absorb what my whiteness signified, both before and after empire.

I first visited Jamaica in 1965 to meet Stuart’s family, shortly after we were married. Independence was still new and hopes were high for a better future, but there were some worrying signs too. Ska was erupting in Kingston marketplaces and the New World Group was beginning to analyse ‘the plantation economy’, but few talked about ‘slavery days’. The West Indian Federation had been rejected in favour of a nationalist dream. The third anniversary of independence was celebrated at the new stadium; a beauty contest was held, with contestants described in their full range of skin colours, a sure sign that Jamaica’s ‘pigmentocracy’ was alive and well. The ‘not quite white’ Browns gathered on their verandas to drink rum punch, served by their Black servants (soon to be renamed ‘helpers’); they looked to Britain and wondered anxiously what was to come.

Six decades later the island feels very different. Marley and Manley have both come and gone; Black music, writing, sport and fashion have all triumphed, but the socialist experiment failed and the IMF dictated terms. Inequality, low employment and poverty are endemic; multinationals rule the roost and the US dominates, though China is rapidly extending its influence. States of emergency currently obtain in several parishes because of a spate of killings. There has been a popular backlash against a political class accused of corruption (huge increases in salaries for parliamentarians were recently proposed). Calls for reparations are made and contested, and the narratives of plantation tours are sometimes questioned. There is the prospect of the island breaking with the British monarchy and becoming a republic. And always, beneath and alongside all this, the perennial problems of a small island exploited over centuries by richer nations, whether for racialised labour or for sugar, bananas, bauxite, ganja. Now it is the island’s marvellous beaches and natural beauty which secure the foreign exchange that is so desperately needed.

On this latest trip I was met at the airport by Sister Trinita, one of the Franciscan Sisters of Allegany and a close friend of Clare’s. I was taken straight to the hospital – we were delighted to see each other, but she was very frail and was soon brought back to the convent for palliative care. I sat at her bedside for four days before she died.

Clare was born in 1935 in Old Harbour, a bustling market town between Kingston and Spanish Town. This was where Clare and Stuart’s grandfather Henry, the local pharmacist, lived with his wife, Mamee (her first name was never used), along with their five daughters and two sons, in a small house on South Street. It was a lower-middle-class Brown household. The oldest daughter, Gerry, was an impressive woman, who taught reading, writing and arithmetic to generations of Old Harbour children in the backyard of the house. It was Gerry, a devout Catholic, who arranged for Clare, the only child of her sister Ivy, to board at the Immaculate Conception High School in Kingston. The school is in the grounds of what was once the Constant Spring Hotel, an upmarket destination for American tourists in the 1930s and 1940s, and the venue for the Moyne Commission, which investigated the wave of strikes across Jamaica in the 1930s, a prelude to independence. When war interrupted the flow of tourists to the island, the hotel was sold to the Catholics.

Clare finished her secondary schooling at Immaculate, then went as an undergraduate to the US. In 1952 she joined the Allegany Franciscan Sisters and returned to Jamaica as Sister Maureen Clare, living in the convent and teaching at the school. In 1963, following independence, she was appointed principal, the first Jamaican to hold the position. She led the school for three decades and subsequently served on numerous boards and as the local minister of the Sisters. One memory I have is particularly vivid. On a visit some years ago to the Catholic girls’ school in Montego Bay (the island’s second city), I watched the pupils, all of whom were dressed in white, gather on the banks of the hills on which their classrooms stand. Sheltered by a magnificent array of trees, as well as bougainvillea and ginger plants in full flower, they sang the national anthem, ‘Jamaica, Land We Love’.

Hailed after her death as a ‘national icon of education’, Clare was a passionate Jamaican, who believed in the capacities of girls and women to contribute to the new nation. Her funeral service, in which death was understood as a change not an ending, was attended by hundreds. Thousands more, many of them former ‘Immaculate girls’, now part of the North American diaspora, watched online. The Franciscan Sisters earn deep respect for their lives of service: they are active across the island, teach at every level of education, seek to empower the poor and marginalised, and care deeply for one another in sickness and in health.

Family stories intersect with colonial histories. I learned some years ago that Old Harbour was on Long’s route from Lucky Valley to the wharf from where his hogsheads of sugar were sent to Port Royal and then on to England. An earlier discovery had kickstarted my work on Jamaica. In the late 1980s, fascinated by Britain’s postcolonial situation and determined to connect the histories of metropole and colony, I came across the small village of Kettering on Jamaica’s north coast, named after the Northamptonshire town where I was born. The Jamaican Kettering’s simple Baptist church contains a dedication to the missionary and emancipator William Knibb, who growing up in England had worshipped at Fuller, the chapel where my father was a minister. The money needed to buy the land for the ‘free village’ of Kettering in the immediate aftermath of the end of slavery in 1833 had come from abolitionists. Missionaries in Jamaica had campaigned for emancipation and were loathed by the planters, who blamed them for the rebellion in 1831 which helped bring slavery to an end. They dreamed of creating new Black Christian subjects who would accept their guidance and eventually become ‘like them’. I wanted to know what stories these missionaries told the abolitionist public in Britain. How did they shape British racial thinking? What was particular about this historical moment when abolitionists defeated pro-slavers? How did it relate to the long history of violence between the two islands?

As one of the team working on the Legacies of British Slaveownership project, which aimed to shift the orthodoxy that ‘race’ and slavery were insignificant to British history, I made another personal discovery: Stuart’s mother was descended, through her mother, from John Rock Grosset, a pro-slavery Tory MP who owned a plantation in Portland. Further questions arose. What, beyond simple economic interest, turned people into active pro-slavers? What were they afraid of? How did they hope to stem the tide of abolitionism? How should we understand their racism? What are the continuities and discontinuities with the present? Grosset would have read Long’s History, an account of ‘natural’ difference; he campaigned with another generation of the Long family as part of the West India lobby. Long’s worldview steadily became racialised common sense. I needed to confront him.

Long’s great-grandfather, Samuel, was on Cromwell’s Jamaican expedition in 1655. One of the colony’s founding fathers, he established two plantations in Clarendon – Longville and Lucky Valley – which stayed in the family into the 19th century. Edward Long was born in England in 1734, but his father’s early death in 1757 left him convinced that his best hope of a fortune lay in Jamaica, with sugar and slavery. He ‘improved’ Lucky Valley between 1759 and 1768 by buying more enslaved men and women, purchasing land and building new works. Once he had made his money, he returned to England with his young family. He hoped his History would convince the metropolitan public that inequality was natural, that there was an essential difference between white and Black: Blacks were born to serve. The book is a vivid and detailed account of how a slave society works, how difference was practised economically, politically, legally, spatially and theoretically, and how it was experienced intimately in the course of a life.

Since 2015 I have been using my visits to Jamaica to search for traces of the Long family. This year looked set to be my third and final sighting of Lucky Valley. We set out with a team of archaeologists from the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, in a minibus plentifully supplied with water for what we knew would be a long, hot day. We stopped for patties for breakfast and headed north-west. Lucky Valley is hard to find, since it no longer figures on maps. Lying in the foothills of Clarendon, served by the Rio Minho and Back River, Lucky Valley perhaps owed its name to the profits it afforded its owners. It is four miles from the original family property of Longville (now the site of the village of New Longville, outside the market town of Maypen) and sixteen miles from the old capital, Spanish Town, the political and military hub of the island in the 18th century. The land has recently been sold and the cane fields extended, but all the works constructed by Long are gone; lorries take the crop to the vast estate of Worthy Park to be processed. The only way to find Lucky Valley now is to ask. We were told to go right at the chapel, right again at the third rum shop, past the ganja farm (unmissable with its security posts and high fences), keep going and then turn left. When we got to the left turn, we were met with an abyss created by a collapse in the road. We had to retrace our steps. Eventually, having watched a number of people drive down a steep incline to a river to wash their cars, we persuaded ourselves that this was a potential route. After fording the river six times and following a rough track shaded by bamboos, banana plants, ackee trees and wild cane, we finally glimpsed the Church of God in Jamaica, Lucky Valley. Built in 1920, it is the only remaining landmark.

Around 1808, Lucky Valley was painted in watercolours by a jobbing artist, William Berryman, who was hoping for a commission from the Long family. It is a sanitised scene, yet it clearly shows the lie of the land, the river, the works sitting at the heart of the plantation, even some evidence of labour (oxen and a cartload of cane). Contemporary plans show the site of the cane fields, the pasture for cattle, the woodlands for timber and the ‘Negro village’; there was no great house, but a good-sized dwelling for the overseer. Add in the detailed account of the plantation given by Long in the History and it is possible to develop a picture of the place as it was in the 1760s, when more than three hundred enslaved men and women lived, worked and died there.

On a previous visit, searches in the bush had exposed guttering connected to the river. This time we found the remains of the aqueduct and waterwheel, leading to the boiling house Long installed. We wandered about, picking up fragments of 18th-century pottery lying between the canes. It was a moving and ghostly experience. Archaeologists have found only two burial grounds of the enslaved in Jamaica. Colonial men, by contrast, are memorialised in the churches they built across the island. The following day we visited the fine cathedral in Spanish Town. Many of the early graves have been removed from inside the church and relocated in the surrounding yard and garden, but Samuel Long, Edward’s great-grandfather, still has pride of place in the chancel: he rests in a black marble tomb celebrating his genius and good sense, his love of justice and piety. In the late 1670s he had played a prominent role in the defence of ‘the rights of freeborn Englishmen’ against the claims of the Crown: their rights pertained to their property, which included the enslaved. At his death he bequeathed enslaved women and their ‘increase’ to his widow and daughters. Even the wombs of the enslaved were not their own.

The harm done by colonialism, the scale of the debt owed and the need for reparative histories and restorative justice are increasingly, though by no means universally, recognised. In the mid to late 18th century, Francis Williams, a poet, scientist and free African Jamaican who had lived in England in the 1720s, became the subject of intense debate among Enlightenment men, including David Hume, James Ramsay and Edward Long. Were Africans different or were they ‘the same’? Could they write poetry? Could they claim gentility? Long devoted an entire chapter of the History to an attempted demolition of Williams, a man who represented a serious threat to his belief in the essential inequality of the African. A very striking portrait of Williams, quite possibly a self-portrait, hangs in the V&A, acquired by the museum in the 1920s from Long’s descendants. New research on Williams and the portrait is being undertaken, and new plans are being made for its display. As a Windrush tribute it is currently exhibited alongside the work of the Birmingham photographer Vanley Burke. A meeting in Kingston with the Jamaican National Gallery before I left the island has paved the way for this unique representation of a Black Jamaican man, who lived across the two islands, to be shown in his own country. Another small step taken in a long history.

My connection with Jamaica is not over. You are family, the Sisters said to me, come back soon.