Let This Voice Be Heard by Jackson Maurice;

Author:Jackson, Maurice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Charles Ignatius Sancho

Charles Ignatius Sancho was born aboard a slave ship during the middle passage “a few days after it quitted the coast of Guinea for the Spanish West Indies.”79 Consequently, he had no immediate memories of Africa, even though he was born to an African mother and father.80 His father committed suicide rather than live the life of a slave; his mother died when he was two. Baptized by a Catholic bishop as Ignatius, he was given to three maiden sisters in Greenwich, England, who then gave him the surname Sancho purportedly because he resembled the antihero squire in Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Unlike the Guerin sisters, who helped educate Equiano, they denied Sancho education, thinking it would make him indolent. Sancho’s earliest biographer, Joseph Jekyll, wrote that the sisters’ “prejudices had unhappily taught them that African ignorance was the only security for his obedience.”81 Such attitudes extended beyond race to class, and the literature of the period is replete with citations from upper- and middleclass writers about the unfortunate effects of education on those who worked with their hands, whether peasant, day laborer, artisan, or black, enslaved or free. Fortunately for Sancho, he came to the attention of John, the second duke of Montagu, who lived nearby in Blackhearth, took a liking to the lad, and taught him to read and write. Jekyll wrote that the duke “accidentally saw the little Negro, and admired in him a native frankness of manner yet unbroken by servitude, and unrefined by education.” He admired the young boy so much that “he brought him frequently home to the Duchess, indulged his turn for reading with presents of books, and strongly recommended to his mistress the duty of cultivating a genius of such apparent fertility.”82

When the duke died in 1749, Sancho ran away from the sisters “and sought refuge in the household of the duke’s widow, eventually becoming the valet of the duchess’s son-in-law, the next duke of Montagu.” As Car-retta noted, “Black men were especially desired as servants in wealthy households—and particularly in the public roles of butler and valet—because they were associated with the exotic riches of the empire and thus served as the most obvious indicators of the status of their owners and employers.”83 Sancho in turn reaped some benefits. When Mary, the duchess, died in 1751, she left him £70 and an annuity of £30, a rare gesture of white magnanimity toward a person of African descent.84 (Then £30 a year was enough money to live a comfortable, if simple life; the poverty line was £10 a year.) In addition to being a place to learn about literature, art, and music, the duke’s home was also a magnet for artists, writers, and other people of ideas and influence. Sancho lost his inheritance, according to Sukhdev Sandhu and David Dabydeen, because he was “forever, wenching, boozing and gambling,” and his health deteriorated to the extent that he was physically unable to continue the strenuous work of valet and butler. But the

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