The following is an excerpt from chapter 6 of The Colour of Shadows: Images of Caribbean Slavery by Judy Raymond.
This imaginative book throws new light on the closing years of Caribbean slavery and the lives of enslaved people of African descent before emancipation in Trinidad in 1834.
The book centres on the drawings of plantation life by Richard Bridgens, an English-born artist who became a planter and slaveholder in Trinidad, and examines these in the context of contemporary documents, records, and writings. The result is a detailed written and visual account of the everyday life of enslaved people, the conditions under which they lived and worked, and the new creole culture they were beginning to create.
Invincibly Human Beings
Tropical nights are full of noises. After the heat, that’s the first thing you notice, coming in from a colder place. A house in the country, like that at St Clair, would have been unbearably hot when closed, but perhaps unbearably frightening when left open at nights: the darkness loud with crickets, the deep-throated barking of frogs, the wind rustling and rattling through the cane and the bush.
Insects hurled themselves all night against the wooden jalousies: moths, flying cockroaches, grasshoppers, and rainflies by the thousand on wet nights when the roar of the rain could drown out a multitude of more sinister noises.
[caption id="attachment_1100052" align="alignnone" width="806"] Negro heads - File photo[/caption]
Tree frogs and lizards would scuttle over the walls inside. On the riverbanks, bamboo creaks and snaps; sometimes clumps of it topple under their own weight, banging and slithering together as though something or someone is creeping through it, until the long stems collide in a final leafy crash. That quieter pattering outside might be an iguana or an agouti in the bush, or it might be someone walking softly up to the window.
So in the big house, the nights were long, the planters restless. They would toss on their linen sheets, sticky with sweat because the shutters were closed against the breeze, rain and danger. Between the stars and the fireflies, in the deep, steamy darkness of the tropical night darker shadows walked through their dreams armed with cutlasses and flambeaux, and they came from the slave huts to take their freedom and revenge as they had done in other colonies: Haiti and Jamaica, Berbice and Demerara.
[caption id="attachment_1100053" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Interior of a boiling-house - File photo[/caption]
CLR James quotes the French revolutionary Mirabeau as saying that the colonists slept on the edge of Vesuvius. As James also writes, it didn't matter how badly enslaved people were treated, whether they were worked to death, or how brutally or how often they were beaten.
“The difficulty,” he wrote, "was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins
