A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance by Stella Dadzie

Author:Stella Dadzie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

Back in Britain, reports of plantation debauchery were both a source of titillation and a subject of growing debate. As public outrage gathered momentum, it became a favourite subject of coffee house gossip, broadsheets and anti-slavery tracts. In an article entitled The ‘Ruin’ of Jamaica, a certain Mr R. Hildreth berated the plantocracy for their hedonistic lifestyle, which he described as consisting of ‘wine, brandy, ale, rum and black mistresses’.29 His opinion of his fellow white men was far from complimentary. ‘Their only relaxations’ he railed, ‘were drunken frolics, naked Negro girls being employed to wait at table; while it was an ordinary piece of Jamaica hospitality to furnish, not only a bed to the guest, but a woman to share it’.

Predictably, Hildreth blames these sexual excesses on the men’s proximity to Africans. Still, his insights into the predicament of concubines and mistresses are uncharacteristically sympathetic:

The females had as their only resource the concubinage above described – a degraded position in which, however, they often fulfilled, with the utmost scrupulousness and self-devotion, all the duties, without enjoying one of the rights of a wife … the enjoyments, if they are to be called such, secured by it to the limited white population, and to them only, being of the grossest character. From living constantly among Negroes, mostly imported from Africa, over whom they exercised despotic authority, the white immigrants, the greater part of them not over-refined to begin with, degenerated into gross barbarians.30

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