Politics of Polite Housing

In the complex taxonomies of race and class in Dominica, the most significant social division was that between British plantation owners, who considered themselves white, and enslaved people working their lands, who were Africans and racialized as black. These white elites learned to run plantations from West Indian planters, with whom they had long involvement because of their history as merchants, soldiers, and tradespeople who supported plantation economies. They were not especially upper class, and their knowledge of practices of culture and refinement in the West Indies were limited, but, in their own eyes, their identity as planters aligned them with these older West Indian families and British landed gentry. It also distanced them from Africans and their children, who worked their land. Buildings commissioned by these planters index their ambitions and the inequality baked into plantation landscapes.

One of the most evocative idioms for distance in Dominica are the arrangements made for housing elites and slaves. Estate houses constituted a West Indian version of “polite” architecture.33 Polite architecture is a building that is national or international in style, designed by a professional architect or master mason, constructed with the aid of plans and/or associated texts, and built and dwelt in by the elite. Though built on a more modest scale, British polite housing in Dominica cross-referenced polite housing in the British Atlantic. Rectangular floor plans of the houses and the principal façade, “divided evenly and symmetrically between four windows and a door on the first floor, characterized British polite architecture in the Caribbean.”34 While they paid attention to notable West Indian authors, such as Edward Long, who said that estate houses, “should be fixed on airy, dry and elevated, spots, raised some feet above the surface of the earth,” they also appeared to adopt metropolitan attitudes toward polite architecture rather than West Indian. 35 There were no verandas to allow breeze but obscure the sun. And the material with which they constructed the ground floor was generally made of stone, which, according to Long, “is a very improper material in this climate for dwelling-houses, on account of the damp and chill which it strikes in rainy weather.”36 What these buildings did not share with West Indian polite architecture was an eye to the environment.

Polite architecture can only be understood as a counterpoint to vernacular architecture (figure 5.2). Vernacular structures were the homes of people considered to be “lesser folk.” They are built without plans, relying on accumulated and shared knowledge about space, materials, and environmental conditions. Fewer of these buildings are visible today, and many of those were built in the decades after legal emancipation in 1838. A description of slave housing by an anonymous resident author was published in an account of his travels throughout the Eastern Caribbean in 1828. He spent a majority of his time in Dominica, where he had the chance to visit sugar estates and coffee estates in the vicinity of Roseau, Pointe Michel, Soufriere, and Grand Bay. He described slave housing in the region as “cottages, neatly thatched with palm or plantain leaves. Some have floors of wood and are well furnished with a bed, cooking utensils, &, etc.; but this depends on the station and industry of the occupier.”37 His account indicates that the location of the village was the decision of the planter or his manager, but that this did not entirely extend to use of the land by the enslaved. While the author’s descriptions of estates are vague, they do provide some clue about the land set aside for slaves: “The plantation negroes are provided with good houses, each containing two, some of them four apartments. Their cottages are thatched with leaves of the palmetto tree, or dyed Guinea grass. They have poultry-yards, and gardens railed in; and the latter produce all sorts of tropical fruits and vegetables.”38 It is clear from the account that houses were not uniform in design or contents, but that the variation in housing was very much tied to the status of its occupants.

Just like the West Indians of Barbados, Antigua, and Jamaica, new island elites acknowledged that they shared the same social space as enslaved Africans and their children. But they, too, subscribed to racializing taxonomies that classified slaves as backward, capricious but governable, and distinct. Richard Neave, for example, commissioned the estate house at Sugarloaf with an eye toward distancing the residence from the village. This estate house is identical in construction and floor plan to one that was built at Batalie Estate, suggesting that there was a plan in circulation that builders followed. Contrary to Long’s instruction, the houses were built with a masonry ground floor that acted as a store, with a wooden second floor where the entryways and windows were symmetrically placed. It appears the only accommodation to the environment was the alignment of the passage, which permitted a strong breeze to enter the house. This alignment also afforded a view of the estate—this way, conceptualizing space created distance between an elite observer and the landscape around them. From the entryway, Neave, if he had visited his property, would have been able to see at a distance the cane fields, sugar factory, and estate houses at Alleyne, Bell Hall, and Chance estates. Out of sight would have been the kitchen and other outbuildings that serviced the estate house. The village where laborers lived was only twenty meters away but concealed by a dramatic change in elevation.

Buildings like Sugarloaf’s estate house, commissioned by absentee landlords, also require us to turn our perspective around. Rather than just considering how the estate would have looked from the entryway, such organization also paid attention to how the estate house looked from a distance. The houses where workers lived were out of sight, and organized with similar principles of symmetry and spacing. The village extended away from the estate house in two parallel rows, in which houses and their gardens sat on platforms of relatively similar size. The combination of daily conditions for those who lived there and the overall organization of the estate meant that the estate was built to be seen from afar rather than lived up close.39 For Richard Neave, this improvement of the land had tangible results. At the time of his purchase of Sugarloaf Estate, Neave was a merchant based at 9 Broad Street, London.40 In 1795, he was bestowed with a Baronet for Dagnam Park, a title he was able to pass down to his heirs.41 By commissioning an estate house in a place he would never visit, Neave was able to develop the symbolic capital that would advance his station at home.

French-speaking planters were positioned awkwardly in the spatially ordered social hierarchy of the plantation. From the perspective of the British island elites and their managers, all French planters shared the same deficiencies: a vague familiarity between French and Kwéyòl spoken on the estate; a more condensed arrangement of housing, which promoted too much familiarity; and material lives idiomatic of the West Indies much more than metropolitan tastes. According to British elites, French polite architecture in Dominica tended toward the pragmatic and less to the ostentatious. Brunias depicted these buildings against the background of the Roseau River. They consisted of a two-story building, where the ground floor, built of masonry walls, served as a storeroom.42 A wooden-walled first floor would have been the residence and would have been entered from the side. A veranda on the principal face of the house would have provided residents a cool breeze and shelter from the rain. The house would have formed one side of a courtyard that would also have functioned as a glacee. Slave housing and factories formed boundaries on the other sides of this paved courtyard. As such, there was always a suspicion that they were closer to the enslaved in political and taxonomic ways.

French planters, aware of these stereotypes, nonetheless judged themselves by standards that subscribed to racial taxonomies of the time period. In their own eyes, they were superior to enslaved Africans, and they were meticulous in keeping their public distance. The earliest polite housing in Soufriere, including surviving houses at Morne Rouge and Petit Coulibri, standing ruins at Bette Rouge and Crabier, and excavated foundations at Bois Cotlette and Morne Patate, conformed to the descriptions above and could have been a prototype for Brunias. A 1777 indenture of Belligny to his heirs provides a description of the disposition of the land and buildings at Morne Patate: the “dwelling house built of stone, 60 feet long by 20 and galleries on three sides.”43 Vernacular housing, where slaves lived, was close to and visible from their verandas, marking a distinct contrast from British polite architecture.

Distance was a concern, but enforced through other means. Not all references to polite architecture were in the floor plans and the facades of houses. The owner of Bois Cotlette, for example, built a short wall to divide his living space from that of the enslaved. It was also in smaller details that difference shaped how spaces would be lived in. At all of the properties, distance was maintained through hydrosocial means. Perhaps the clearest references to polite French architecture are the dependencies, including the kitchen and its cistern. Owners of Crabier and Morne Rouge, for example, employed dripstones to purify water for their own exclusive consumption. The estate house at Morne Patate contained a case à eau: a crawl space or outbuilding where Biot jars stored drinking water (figure 5.3). At Bois Cotlette, Biot jars were encased in masonry walls where nearby rooftops collected rainwater to fill them. Biot jars encased in masonry improved the water. Sediment in the water was allowed to settle, clarifying the water over time. Because of the insulation provided by the stone and mortar, these cisterns also cooled the water in ways that were not possible in open cisterns. These smaller cisterns were characteristic of polite French architecture, including well-to-do townhouses and estate houses.44 Case à eau also distanced the water from its source, separating it for the exclusive use of the slave owners.

After 1763, colonial houses in Dominica, both polite and rustic, came to carry meanings of higher or lower social status with differing degrees indexed by size, building material, and decorative elaboration. French planters tried to create spatial distance when they could by building larger estate houses and manipulating landscapes. The owners of Bois Cotlette and Morne Patate dismantled their estate houses sometime after 1777 and constructed grander buildings that referenced polite architecture in Martinique and Guadeloupe. Both planters played important roles for the French during the American Revolution. Bellot was the island’s agent at the Court of Versailles, and Belligny sat on the island privy council for the French governor. The new housing referenced grand estates in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the decorative elements, construction materials, and layout. Bois Cotlette was most closely associated with Joseph Bellot, who took possession of the property when he married Adrien Constance's niece. The centerpiece of the estate is the maison de maître, located in the center of its glacee. The house was constructed out of masonry with a gabled roof and dormers. While much smaller, the front-facing facade matches the maison de maître at Habitation Macouba. The internal layout of the house consisted of a central parlor with stone and ceramic tiles and a circumambulating gallery surrounding it. This layout is common among grander estate houses, including the maison de maître at Habitation Clément. When this house was built, it coincided with a relocation of the slave village to a hillside farther away and arranged in such a way as to obstruct the view of the inhabitants.

Belligny, who owned properties in both Dominica and Martinique, including Morne Patate, commissioned the construction of an estate house employing this floor plan over the older, more humble iteration. An 1816 probate indenture states that the estate house was fifty-five feet by forty feet. It had a masonry foundation and a wooden frame. It contained six chambers, “one of them a store, a hall and two galleries.” According to the anonymous author who visited the area in 1823, the “mansion house” was a grand house with “A large salle a manger, or dining room with two bedrooms . . . wooden blinds to admit air and exclude the rain.”45 Because the owners were used to hosting neighbors, friends, and tradespeople like Troup, they built “barrack rooms for visitors” on the second floor. To protect their valuables, the owners built a “safe” on the second floor “for all sorts of household goods.”46 Like Sugarloaf's estate house, Morne Patate’s and Bois Cotlette’s played with sight lines and perspective to present a particular kind of grandeur from afar. While it is clear that the polite architecture of the French accommodated the landscape in ways that their British counterpart did not, it had the same effect: to distance the elite observer from the landscape surrounding them. The anonymous author described the arrangement of the estate housing: “The negro houses extended in two rows, at a short distance from the mansion-house.”47 While we do not know if the author is describing Morne Patate, archaeological studies of the site documented a similar arrangement in village layout.48

The area surrounding the estate house was expansive. The boundary of this yard was clearly delineated by a wall and cobble surface. The areas attached to the housing in the village decreased dramatically and became more regimented. The platforms ranged in size from eight to ten meters on one dimension and ten to twelve meters along another dimension. Evidence of architecture, in the form of postholes dug into the subsoil, indicates that the houses were roughly three meters by five meters. The floors of the houses may have been wooden or compacted earth. The orientation of these structures shows an equal regimentation to the orientation of the buildings and the use of space. Concomitant with this change was an increase in the number of enslaved people living on the site. In 1777, Belligny claimed ownership over 117 Dominicans living on three different plantations. In 1816, 120 enslaved workers lived on Morne Patate alone. These people were Creoles: people who were born on the island and had lived on the property since the 1740s. They also included people born on the estate after British annexation. Importantly, many of the enslaved Dominicans living there in 1816 were born on other islands or continents.

While neither personal nor portable, the houses did the same thing as clothing, buttons, and other items of conspicuous consumption, which Brunias used to fix class and race in a harmonious colonial society. As landscapes to be observed, Sugarloaf, Bois Cotlette, and Morne Patate signaled the improvement of its residents; the fields in the background were an index of the island’s productivity and the ability to improve it. They also marked the people who owned these lands in an exclusive community of belonging—an exclusivity that began to extend to planters “of color.” In 1831, the assembly passed the “Brown Privilege Bill.” This opened up the franchise beyond the narrow confines of skin color and resulted in the election of three people of color to the assembly.

The Social Life of the Houseyard

Slaves, whose labor was legally not their own, not only possessed goods produced in their free time, but also owned what the sale of those goods could yield. Discussions by the anonymous author and Young speak—though only through the aid of context and analogy—to the relations created in and around the houseyard and to idioms of kinship and support. The archaeological record is helpful in building those analogies and provoking questions of the text to flesh out the context. In this case, the provision grounds, gardens, and yards were sites where the work of slaves and others could be exchanged on a reciprocal basis. For example, in the gardens of an elderly slave, the work of granddaughters too young to work in the fields could be seen as a set of obligations encumbered by kinship. It could also be seen as a set of gifts, in labor, through which the sale of goods could be reciprocated. Although the houseyards were units of production, savings, and investment, these would not be complete descriptions of their social function.

We know little about who lived in these houses and what their relationships were to each other. In the 1823 anonymous account, the French estate described by the author had a village extending behind the maison de maître:

All the married negroes had a house to each family, and the men who had no families had a large house, properly fitted for their accommodation, like a barrack. . . . On extensive estates, these different buildings form small towns of two to four or five hundred people.55

The author is, no doubt, bringing his assumptions about kinship and family to describe the internal workings of the village at this French coffee estate. While it is true that most enslaved laborers who married did so with someone who grew up on the same plantation, there are a range of life histories of the enslaved that include some movement from one plantation to another.56

In some cases, these could be neighboring plantations owned by the same family. In other cases, this could mean moving workers to entirely different colonies. For example, through either bankruptcy or frustration, Bellot and Constance relinquished their ownership of Bois Cotlette to Charles Court. By 1817, J. B. Dupigny, a local estate manager and their son-in-law, purchased the estate through a sale of the majority of the eighty-seven slaves who remained on the estate. With only twelve slaves, Dupigny began to acquire means to grow coffee. The majority of the slaves Dupigny sold were shipped to a new plantation in Demerara.57 As such, siblings who shared the same mothers or fathers could occupy different houses, villages, or colonies. That being said, linking the household with the houseyard was a concern, so much so that by 1823, laws enacted to encourage biological reproduction of slaves in the West Indies discouraged the separation of husbands, wives, and their children under the age of fifteen.

The document authored by the anonymous resident in 1828 fails to mention that siblings who shared the same mother could occupy distinct structural positions. A series of manumissions for enslaved individuals aged about twenty-one further suggest that the children of male planters and enslaved women would be manumitted upon reaching the age of majority. In 1788, Jean Louis Bellot, Joseph Bellot’s son, manumitted Charles Melor, a “Creole Mesif,” when he turned twenty-one. At Morne Patate, Nicholas Croquet Belligny manumitted Pancrasee, a “mullato man” aged twenty-two years. Two years later, Belligny’s son manumitted Germain, a mullato man, on his twenty-fifth birthday.58 Such children would have grown up with their mother, in the village, but most likely were afforded a status quite distinct from other yard mates.

According to assemblages from Morne Patate, the estate that was dramatically transformed in the years immediately following the sugar revolution, many of the personal and portable possessions recovered from these houseyard contexts were found in several large circular features.59 Subfloor pits beneath the houses are a common characteristic of slave quarters, especially in the antebellum South. While some contextual and ethnohistoric data suggest they may have served as West African–style shrines in the Southeast United States, many have argued that these pits acted as places for people to store their individual belongings.60 Accordingly, their presence would suggest a concern over private property and its security.61

Sometime after 1761, an enslaved laborer buried what must have been a “life savings” underneath the floorboards of their house. In a storage pit associated with one houseyard, we recovered sixteen copper sou. On one side, Louis XVI was inscribed. On the other, Colonie de Cayenne. These coins were minted for an expedition undertaken by the French to found a new colonial enterprise in Guyana. The coins themselves were in circulation around the West Indies almost immediately. Indeed, some enslaved Creoles took advantage of new laborers as a potential workforce for their own grounds. One could imagine that new arrivals would easily become responsible for household production, “in quest for wood, water, or grass, as may be wanted.”62

Importantly, these differences can be granular where the amount of land that workers had access to, the system of land tenure in which it was worked, and the status of those who controlled decisions over the land equally shaped domestic assemblages.63 Recruiting new houseyard members was a way to build the domestic network and the kind of resiliency a robust network carried with it:

. . . every negro in his garden, and at his leisure hours, earning much more than is necessary to feed him, these young inmates are the wealth of the negro who entertains them, and for whom they work; their work finding plenty for the little household, and a surplus for sale at the market, and for feeding his stock.64

On well-managed estates, the author says, “where negroes have long been resident, many of them possess hoards of money, which they deposit with the manager or are, at all times, ready to lend him.”65 Coins such as these remind us that assemblages of belonging are not just a function of accumulation, but emerge from substantive practices through which people engage with each other and the land.

Rather than being the function of personal property in which goods are individuating, such pits can also suggest that houseyards of the regimented villages formed the nucleus of “domestic networks,” whereby individuals from one plantation might belong to multiple households, including those located on different estates.66 The strange land and conditions of labor engendered new bonds that originated in “common assumptions, idioms, and beliefs.”67 “Domestic networks” in Dominica engendered relations of care for newly arrived Africans who had yet to accumulate wealth, build food reserves, and develop the kind of social ties that enabled them to feed themselves or make a profit in the market.

Newly arrived slaves were oftentimes incorporated into existing households as a way to socialize newcomers to the conditions in which they found themselves. Young described that managers would “distribute them [enslaved Africans] in the huts of the Creole negroes, under their direction and care, who are to feed them, train them to work, and teach them their new language.”68 He continues to describe that households were “oppressed” with new mouths to feed, and they received “no allowance of provisions what so ever.”69 On Grenada and elsewhere, long-term residents were entrusted with the social reproduction of the estate. While Morne Patate, Bois Cotlette, and Sugarloaf were home to a large number of Dominican-born Creoles (70 percent, 77 percent, and 44 percent of the workforce, respectively), there were also a significant number of Africans. These newly arrived Africans were handed over to “old negroes” on the estates “to be taught the requisite duties.”70 For the necessities of everyday life, they had to rely on the houseyards of which they were made members. For the service of indoctrinating slaves, Creoles were given “a knife, a calabash to eat from, and an iron boiling pot for each.”71 Presumably, these wares given to the household were intended for the enslaved laborers, but could have also been sold to accumulate cash for the household.

Other options were to engage in less formal transactions, such as games of skill and chance. Gaming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consisted of numerous games, including but not limited to card games, dominos, backgammon, and games of chance using dice. The popular English game of draughts is the same as American checkers and was played with circular disks. Archaeologists have found game pieces on predynastic sites in Egypt, Iron Age sites in Cyprus and Turkey, on British Roman sites, on pre- and post-contact-period Native American sites across the American Southeast, and on colonial-period sites across the world. In his first few days, Troup witnessed two newly arrived enslaved Africans play a game on “a board with [a] number of hollows in it & they pass from one hole to another . . . small pebbles. . . . They [also] will take pieces of bottles & stoneware & toss them up after they have rapidly mixt them from hand to hand & in this way gain plantanes.”72 The passage seems to indicate two distinct games were being played. The board game being played is probably wari.73 Wari is a game of skill found throughout Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the West Indies.74 At Morne Patate, sixty-three carved ceramic disks excavated from houseyard contexts match the glass and ceramic fragments described in the text. Interpretations of “gaming disks” range from “button backs” to “counters” to “gaming pieces” to toilet paper.75 Regardless of meaning, games of skill and chance were an important way that new slaves acquired food. The presence of these pieces on the site would seem to indicate that such concerns were at play for at least some of the residents.

These domestic networks formed around communities of care. Take, for example, Granny Sarah, who was enslaved on an estate in St. Vincent called Calliaqua. William Young the Second, who authored the account, estimated her age to be ninety-five and reported that she was born in Africa and enslaved at the age of fourteen after having her first child.76 She had first labored on the family estate in Antigua for two years. Her age conferred upon her a special status among the enslaved and for Young. In his account, he speaks about how she held court among the other slaves when he first arrived on the island. He describes how he looked forward to dancing one jig with her at the Christmas ball. Importantly, given her age, she was no longer required to work except in her garden, “some hours of the day.” Sarah had formed a combined household with multiple generations. To increase her income, she recruited her young, six-year-old great-granddaughter to assist in the garden and was “thereby very rich.”77

The burden of care for children varied depending on the kind of estate, the disposition of its manager, and the age of the child. On sugar estates, “The children are taken care of, during their mother’s absence in the field, by the other old women no longer equal to field labor.”78 On a coffee estate, the anonymous author describes children “playing in the sun while their mother picked coffee.”79 Six appears to be an important age, as it is when the children began to labor for the estate in a more formal capacity. Between the ages of six and twelve, they were placed in the vine gang, where they were responsible for small tasks like collecting vines for the animals and light weeding and hoeing. This is the age, the anonymous author claims, at which English mothers and fathers send their children home for education that they could not receive in the West Indies.

Formal education is, of course, only one manner through which knowledge is imparted from one generation to the next. Notwithstanding the requirements of labor that slavery imposed on children as early as the age of six, illiteracy was not a foregone conclusion. Writing slates were found in nearly all houseyards that dated to the period immediately after 1763. In most cases, the fragments of slate were small, and evidence suggests some fragments were crafted into buttons. Despite alternative possibilities, one fragment shows that the slate was still used for writing. This fragment found on the surface of one houseyard has etched into it two letters that are hard to make out. Items such as writing slate offer questions that are difficult to answer. Who tutored people to read and who learned to read? Distinctions such as young and old, family and nonfamily members don’t answer this question. Many who lived in the same houseyard, who might belong to the same household, were not family. It could also be the case that some took responsibility for educating those who might not be considered kin.

There was a material basis by which people achieved status and gained wealth through the work of others. Personal portable objects, and archaeologists’ interpretations of them, have shown how culture was a tool both for subjugating class interests and for repudiating those interests by subordinated classes.80 While the houseyard and its contents came to exist through the plans of English-speaking elites, they formed a space beyond their plans. As the enslaved dealt with details of the environment like hurricanes and droughts, as they made their day-to-day decisions about what to plant and where, a situated knowledge was expressed in other, equally important finds. 81

The Ecological Life of the Houseyard

To make the land suitable for housing, people had to clear forests and carve out platforms. It is no surprise, then, that the same archaeological record that confirms the organization of the workers’ village also shows evidence of a site plagued by landslides and erosion. Without the benefit of terraces or other means of support, the loose, sandy soil could easily crumble through the repeated footsteps of humans or a dislodged rock from above sliding down the hill. In this way, then, we can see that villages were not placed on marginal lands, but land was made marginal through their occupation. The adaptation of slaves was not so much to a foreign environment, but to a set of conditions that made the land foreign. Houses became very similar, while at the same time, a broad distinction between elite and subordinate housing emerged. The amount of land attached to these houses diminished, while at the same time becoming more regulated. What they did with marginal spaces, however, was quite extraordinary.

In the years between 1763 and 1834, enslaved laborers would most likely have unusual stories about weather and the land upon which they made a living. Between 1763 and 1834, Dominicans lived through seventeen years in which hurricanes impacted their lives. Storm cycles were most intense in the years between 1764 and 1787, and between 1817 and 1834.82 The most substantial single loss of life was on August 14, 1788, when over 500 were killed after the island experienced three hurricanes. In 1806, within days of each other—on September 9, and again on September 20—450 and 165 individuals were killed in two separate hurricanes. On October 21, 1817, a combined total of about 250 persons were killed. On September 20, 1834, just after the declaration of emancipation was read out in market squares, more than 200 people were killed during a storm, and countless more in its aftermath.83 We have to imagine the new challenges faced by slaves who had once had their farms in the area surrounding their houses. After the sugar revolution transformed their landscape, their sources of food were, for the most part, in grounds located several miles from where they lived, and difficult to access during a hurricane. Hurricanes, such as the devastating hurricane in 1788, would uproot plantain and banana trees and destroy maize crops. While failure to harvest root crops from waterlogged soils might cause them to rot, tubers such as cassava, taro, and yam were secure against the devastating impacts of high winds. Such hurricanes would also endanger the village with landslides.

Enslaved people likely tried to maximize the cash revenue, so that those who could not grow enough food to feed their families/households could purchase additional foodstuffs in markets. Wild pigs, feral dogs, and untethered goats, which were voracious opportunists, made this difficult as “improving” the land meant woodland habitats grew smaller and more distant. Strong fences were required to keep such animals out of the household gardens.

Denizens made choices about which plants to grow to take care of their environment. Many excavated houses contained seeds of guava (Psidium guajava L.). These observations, coupled with contemporary accounts, suggest that this fruit was popular among most residents in Dominica.84 A small tree with a wide, short canopy and a sturdy single- to multi-stemmed trunk, guava is part of the myrtle family and is indigenous to central America. While no evidence of guava seeds has been recovered from pre-colonial sites in the region, it is likely that the trees were already in Dominica when Europeans arrived. Growing guava from seed may not produce fruit for up to eight years, but once established they fruit for up to forty years. With plenty of sun, they do very well in well-drained soil, such as in Soufriere.

While many of the guava trees in the gardens of slaves could have grown through accidental placement, certainly some of those seeds were planted and cared for. In addition to eating the ripe fruit in and of itself, people could preserve and commercialize it by making jellies, jams, or cheeses.85 The relatively high ubiquity but generally low numbers of seeds in all the habitation areas sampled at Morne Patate may suggest that processing of fruits was a common occurrence. Fruit trees were an important part of any garden or provision ground, preventing stubborn weeds by shading them out. The roots also provided protection from soil erosion by holding the soil to its roots and spreading a leafy canopy to reduce the impact of wind and rain. Fruit trees would have been an important fix to the soil erosion that accompanied deforestation and sugar agriculture.

These trees anchored the fertile topsoil of gardens and grounds in the subsoil. Such a strategy was crucial in Portsmouth and Soufriere, where the nature of the subsoil made the area prone to landslides after deforestation. For example, while passion fruit, another popular fruit, was eaten or made into drinks, its cultivation had beneficial effects.86 The climbing vines of passion fruit species often thrive in the living fence materials of fruit trees and shrubs around fields and gardens, providing an additional source of food. We recovered one seed in the provision ground, suggesting that the fruit and vines were used by people to feed themselves and secure the land. Okra (Abelmoschus esculentus Moench) is another seemingly important West African crop that became a staple of provision grounds throughout the Americas once it was introduced.87 In Dominica, okra was a widely cultivated crop, and it was incorporated into all kinds of soups and stews, where “leaves were cooked like spinach; and . . . buds were cut, processed, dried, or boiled, and served in a variety of dishes.”88 When not eaten fresh, in much of West Africa the processing of okra involves sun-drying the sliced okra pods, which are then ground and used when needed.89 Unharvested leaves of the viney plants enriched the soil with nutrients that other plants needed.

The wide variety of woody and herbaceous plants grown together in a dense pattern confused European observers, prompting them to consider cultivation strategies of enslaved laborers as inefficient, wasteful, and untidy. On the contrary, this strategy of cultivation is highly efficient.90 Beans and tubers have different nutrient requirements, and trees are useful in drawing nutrient-rich matter from considerable depths from decaying leaves that drop onto the ground.91 The spacing of species away from each other through intercropping also protects against disease. Finally, intercropping aids in stabilizing soils. Duncan McGregor has shown how the use of such a multistory system provides a sustainable engagement with the land, especially in the aftermath of land degradation.92 The local knowledge that McGregor observed was one that developed in the steep slopes and forested land on which enslaved laborers made their living. The assemblage of botanical remains shows that enslaved laborers paid careful attention to how the plants would improve the soil, despite forces that might make it more difficult to grow food. Enslaved laborers could not count on planters to provide their “ration” in times of crisis.

A drought was as much a risk to food security as a hurricane, though its frequency and impact were poorly documented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Soufriere is located on the leeward side of Dominica, which is generally characterized by higher evaporation rates and more drought-tolerant vegetation. Provision grounds were located on steep slopes with poor access to roads and very limited irrigation potential, and few had access to year-round, gravity-fed irrigation, which aqueducts afforded sugar plantations. Cultivation was planned around the rainy season between October and February, as well as a smaller precipitation peak in May. New food crops came into use after the sugar revolution. The enslaved probably experimented with growing millet in areas unsuitable for other crops; both millet and sorghum were grown on other, more arid Caribbean islands.93 This West African crop is an important staple of sub-Saharan Africa, where it performs well in arid regions, where limited or erratic rainfall makes maize and sorghum yields less reliable. Another important West African cereal, sorghum, is a valuable grain in that it has relatively high yields and is less sensitive than maize to hot and dry conditions.94 Throughout the Caribbean and the Southeast US, sorghum is documented as having previously been a common crop in provision grounds. In some cases, sorghum was also grown as fallow for sugar fields and was harvested as a primary source of food for the enslaved workers. This suggests that in earlier periods, sorghum may have been widely favored, a familiar crop from Africa that became incorporated into plantation and provision ground agriculture due to its high yields and tolerance of aridity.95

This last point requires some elaboration. In Dominica, where precipitation cycles varied widely, the use of such drought-tolerant crops would have been vital to both newly arrived Africans and Creole enslaved workers alike.96 Because there is no archaeological or textual evidence that such grains were grown in Dominica previous to 1763, it is likely that millet and sorghum cultivation began only after enslaved Africans began to arrive. This means that Creole slaves living through the transformation of the landscape may have lost familiarity with the plant or not had the requisite seed stock with which to experiment. Newly arrived slaves would have had the requisite knowledge, and perhaps seed stock, to grow sorghum and millet. Under what conditions to plant seeds, when to harvest grain, and how best to protect it from a harsh sun would have all been skills with which people living on marginalized land would have to contend. By considering the materiality of plants, we also have to consider the agency of newly arrived Africans in villages such as Morne Patate’s.

This botanical evidence suggests that there was some forethought, consideration, and care that went into planting a garden and tending provision grounds. People who worked were not just labor. By this account, it would be all too easy to valorize such activities and overlook some of the deleterious effects of shifting cultivation and over-exploitation. Rather, the “contextual local knowledge and practice” accounted for long-term consequences. A signal of the health of forests and woodlands are species that are vulnerable to overhunting and changes in habitat. The giant ditch frog, or crapeaux, described in chapters 1 and 4, is one such species. As amphibians they are fairly susceptible to changes in climate and because of their size (13 cm in length) are readily visible to predators. As “sit and wait” predators, they lie motionless for long periods, consuming whatever they can swallow. They predominantly eat crickets and beetles, but also land crabs, small frogs, lizards, and, very occasionally, small birds and mammals.97 They are unusual in that they breed on land in burrows and require seasonal rain to survive. They are also susceptible to predation by humans and feral mammals. On neighboring islands, ditch frogs were subject to overhunting and habitat loss to the point they ceased to be part of the dietary record by the late nineteenth century.98 The archaeological record highlights that enslaved laborers ate the giant ditch frog in some quantity in Dominica. Despite this, the species persisted with little danger well into the twentieth century. Only after tourism and disease in the 1990s was the ditch frog threatened.

This is not to say that enslaved workers were ecologically neutral. They had a different set of priorities with which they encountered the land and its resources. These priorities were informed by the problems created by others, which they then had to negotiate. They also held different assumptions about who belonged to a community and what membership meant in terms of rights and responsibilities. Assemblages of care, therefore, become a material question with implications for everyday life.

Crafting People

Just as objects were used to craft types of water, they also crafted people. The observed record of the hydrosocial houseyard has two implications. How people crafted water was informed by the peripheral flows that made slave colonies work. Biot jars that clarified water and goglets that cooled it were more part of the waterways of the French-oriented Bois Cotlette than of the English-oriented Sugarloaf. Here, culture is a not a thing or a shared set of values. It is an assemblage of ideas materialized through the work of people encountering the predicaments that emerged from new economic and social orders. The second implication refers to the number of people who might have had access to water from the goglets. To apprehend why there might have been far fewer goglets than necessary to support all the residents in the houseyard, we have to consider its materiality. Porous goglets transform the quality of water, adding coolness. For example, highlighting the importance of coolness, Belisario (see chapter 2) seems most concerned with coolness. Belisario commented that most newcomers were “greatly surprised at the quantity of water drunk by natives [Creoles of African and/or European descent]” until their “thirst” got the better of them. While Belisario, for example, claimed that water jars would not be “presentable at the sideboards of the respectable families,” there was a “decided preference” for their water, which was “rendered much cooler from the free admission of air” due to their “porous nature.”106 Water cools in these vessels because the pores in the earthenware accelerate interaction between air and water. The importance of the quality of coolness “was new to strangers to the Caribbean but one for which they soon grew a taste.”107

Cool water plays an important role in the symbolic systems that manage the health of Dominicans today. Some rural Dominicans employ a humoral medical system that conforms to many such systems in the French Antilles.108 Drinking water plays a curative role in balancing cold/hot humors and cleansing pollutants. Foreign substances, like dirt, can pollute the blood, causing inflammation. Dominicans believe cool water from a stream or pitcher balances humors and cleans dirt, reducing inflammations.109 Smoke from fires used to clear brush, cook food, and distill bay rum is also seen as a source of polluting dirt that can lead to inflammation. Other sources include dust associated with agriculture in the dry season and the airborne particulate of Roseau and Portsmouth. While it is unknown whether Caribbean dwellers in the eighteenth century believed cool water to have curative properties, coolness was an important quality of water then. Jonathan Troup described how one enslaved woman, Penny, enjoyed cool water.110 He also documented the use of cold water by itself or with remedies for gas, hangovers, nausea, small pox, and virility.111 Cool water was not a cure-all, however. Troup notes that a carpenter he hosted in August, after heavy rains, suffered diarrhea after imbibing cold water with his dinner.112

Because goglets held about one liter of water, they would have required constant refilling over the course of the day. For landowners, this was not a problem. In 1903, Lafcadio Hearn observed “the thick red earthen vessels which keep your drinking-water cool on the hottest days, but which are always filled thrice between sunrise and sunset with clear water from the mountain.’”113 The only sources of cool water available to slaves at Bois Cotlette and Sugarloaf were one of two freshwater springs in Soufriere or rivers in Portsmouth. In Soufriere, accessing this water meant transgressing property boundaries, walking several miles, and climbing fifteen- to twenty-degree slopes. No doubt water carriers made several such trips a day, but not everyone had access to the product of their labor. Near Portsmouth there are many rivers with cool water. The clarity of that water can be quite variable. During the rainy season, many of those rivers become filled with sediment as eroded soils and fallen plant debris are churned up in fast-moving water.

Oral histories provide evidence for the limited use of goglets in all households. According to one of my interlocutors, one or two such pots were set on a sideboard near where people would eat. The water in them was cool and sweet, and served to elders and guests. As a child, my interlocutor was never allowed to drink this water. As an adult caretaker at a wealthy Englishman’s property, he was rarely granted access to the vessel’s contents. A century earlier, Hearn described the role of “Bonne” in Martinique: “She is the confidential messenger, the nurse, the chamber-maid, the water-carrier, everything, in short, except cook and washer-woman.”114 Hearn draws parallels to slavery in his discussion of the intimate workings of wealthy households. While considered a member of the family, Bonne did not enjoy the benefits of its membership, including access to water stored in the case à eau.

It is difficult to interpret these gradations in Dominica’s slave villages. As I have suggested, membership in households in the villages where enslaved laborers lived is notoriously tricky to define. The residents of slave dwellings were not always related, nor did they necessarily consider themselves family. Some could be kin, such as Granny Smith. Other kinds of relationships could also exist, such as reciprocal forms of exchange that defined the interaction between slaves and maroons. Certainly, holding a profession such as a carpenter, nurse, or boiler meant that one enjoyed material and social benefits. At the same time, multiple hierarchies could exist simultaneously on a plantation. Healers, charismatic leaders, or specialists were recognized by denizens and reflected a social organization not documented by Europeans. Gradations of age and rituals of hospitality were important dimensions establishing who drank cool water and under what conditions they could do so. To care for someone or something with water, it first had to be crafted. In crafting that water, however, a person was also crafted.115

There is indirect evidence that some enslaved laborers had differential access to crafted water. Many maladies associated with slave life could have also resulted from water scarcity brought about by the sugar revolution. Aside from the discomfort, dehydration can lead to complications including heat stroke, swelling on the brain, seizures, low blood volume, shock, kidney failure, and even death. Caribbean physicians, including Troup, often diagnosed slaves with either dropsy (edema) or mal d’etomach. Planters and physicians believed that “dirt eating,” or pica, which sometimes accompanied the bundle of symptoms, was the ultimate cause of the disease. In fact, the symptoms associated with mal d’etomach were the result of beriberi.116 In 1817, Parliament instituted the triennial slave register as a way to monitor illegal trade in human beings. At Sugarloaf, whose manager was meticulous in detailing the causes of death, twenty-seven slaves died and seven individuals were sold. Causes of death listed include age (four), scrofula (one), consumption (three), injury (one), flux (three), rupture (two), paralectic (one), worms (six) and mal d’etomach (six). Eighteen of the twenty-seven deaths could be attributed to diseases in which water is a vector or its scarcity is a cause. Of those eighteen, all were new to the island.

While the above statistics suggest a relation, they are anecdotal at best. The observation of maladies causing death was uneven in its application and accuracy across the board. For example, in the same year enslaved laborers died at both Bois Cotlette and Morne Patate; causes were not listed. What the statistics do suggest is that water was part of the relations of care. Archaeologists have highlighted how such calculus forged or reinforced domestic networks and mitigated the embodied consequences of enslavement.117 We know from other contexts that “enslaved nurses drew from a range of wild, tended and domestic plant and animal resources to care for their patients.”118 Certainly, the enslaved might have sought respite in hospitals, but from documentary evidence and Troup’s own account, they were places of last resort. For Troup, treating someone was a function of his profession, for which he received remuneration. For others in Dominica, it was also an act of care for one’s community to ensure “belonging and regeneration.” It is likely that the enslaved would have initially relied on domestic networks located in the houseyards of villages.

Administering to the sick in the houseyard was a communal act with political consequences. Water was crafted by ritual or medicinal specialists to harm, protect, or heal people. Belgian artist Pierre Jaques Benoit visited Suriname around 1831 and published pictures from his visit.119 One painting illustrates a calabash and an “Indian Pot” of a “Water-Mama”: a woman called on for physical and spiritual interventions including herbal decoctions and ritual acts. Describing the ritual, he states she “poured water from the pot into the calabash and then made the Negress drink. She made her drink again and then gave her herbs to be administered to her child. All finished, we departed, and I left my offering in the sibyl’s hands. Tankie, masra (thank you, master), she responded to me.”120 While this performance should be understood within the specific context of Suriname and its particular ecological and social context, similar types of specialists operated in Dominica. The 1788 “Act for the better regulation and protection of slaves” punished “Obeah or Doctor Men” with death for administering certain drugs or potions generally of a poisonous” nature.121 Nurses, among others, would have had access to such knowledge and been agents in political mobilization.122 While it is likely that some beverages were decocted by enslaved laborers for sinister purposes, it is also likely that such beverages played a vital role in communities of care. Common medicines such as bush tea or rum infused with medicinal herbs could be cause for prosecution.123

Cool water was not enumerated in such texts, but it was no less present. Anthropologists have argued that when more than one person holds rights over the same objects, such as water, the circulation of objects is very different from the circulation of private property. Weiner refers to this process as “keeping while giving” and these types of objects as “inalienable possessions.” Inalienable possessions are “symbolic repositories of genealogies and historical events, their unique, subjective identity gives them absolute value placing them above the exchangeability of one thing or another.”124 Exchanged objects materialize the social identity of the actors that are vested in them, preserve lineage ties, and reproduce the specific cultural characteristics of the larger group. So, while filling a goglet, glass bottle, or gourd changed the ownership status of the water, sharing that water changed the nature of the relationship. The substance was no longer individuating, since crafting water to heal or reunite was a communal act. Acts that made water communal helped resolve some of the predicaments of slavery.

Features documented and vessels recovered from houseyards in Portsmouth and Soufriere index different types of water, including murky, clear, holy, and cool. We can use the qualities of water encoded in these objects to envision how experiences varied for peoples who stood in different relations to objects that stored and transformed water. Rain fell in Soufriere and was collected in ponds or cisterns. Water could be diverted from roofs into Biot jars near the estate house. Goglets were filled and placed in galleries to be cooled during the day and served to elite occupants. While cisterns and distant springs were possible sources of water, few, if any, slaves would have had regular access to their contents, exacerbating social hierarchies. Instead, rainwater, rotting detritus, and sediment would collect in strategically placed ponds across Soufriere. Children would travel back and forth from those ponds to collect water in buckets and fill jars near slave houses. From jars, cooking pots were filled. Individuals might fill a smaller vessel made from plants, ceramic, or glass. A few people would have had access to water from goglets. The remainder relied on glass bottles, gourds, and calabashes.125 Matter like water held in calabashes and goglets entangled long sequences of social events involving manufacture, gifting, administering care, ownership, and final disposal. It was the sequence that individuated or entangled people in relations of care. In crafting water, people and their relationship with each other were also crafted.