2020/09/14 by Diana Paton
Social Sciences · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Migration and Labor Dynamics #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtaa033
Between 1770 and 1796 an enslaved woman known to us only as Phillis worked as driver of the ‘grass gang’ or ‘small gang’ of Rozelle Estate, a few miles west of the town of Morant Bay in St Thomas in the East parish, Jamaica. She directed the work of a group of between seven and thirty-one enslaved children and teens, ranging in age from 4 to 18 years. These children did ‘light’ agricultural work, primarily weeding around the developing sugar cane plants. From the middle of the 1780s another two women, Bessy and Mary Ann, took care of the younger children on the estate, usually until those children were 6 years old. Between them at any given time they were responsible for the care of around twenty infants, toddlers and very young children.1 Phillis, Bessy and Mary Ann were all born in the early 1730s, most likely in Africa, and thus probably experienced the dislocation of removal from their homes and the terror of enslavement and the voyage across the Atlantic on slaving ships as young adults.2 As younger women they had worked as field labourers. In their late fifties and sixties they were described as ‘weakly’, but their work was essential to the running of Rozelle estate. Without Bessy and Mary Ann’s work, Rozelle’s managers would have found it more difficult to force the children’s mothers to work the long days in the sugar fields that were routinely required of them. Without Phillis’ work, cane growth would have been restricted by rapidly growing weeds. Less sugar would have been cut, and less profit made.