Abstract
In the summer of 1804, Grace Donne died after ‘an illness of four or five days’. In a letter to his cousin, Simon Taylor, a wealthy white Creole planter and attorney, lamented that he was ‘like a Fish out of the Water by her loss’.1 For 36 years, Grace Donne lived with Simon Taylor in his home in the suburbs of Kingston and in St. Thomas in the East as his lover and, in many ways, his companion. Despite her central role in his life, in over 500 letters authored by Taylor to his family, friends, and associates, between the mid-eighteenth century and the time of his death in 1813, there are only a few references to Grace Donne threaded throughout. Despite the paucity of archival records, the relationship between Grace Donne and Simon Taylor presents a lens through which the nuances and complexities of interracial sex, agency, and the dynamics of power in Jamaican slave society can be viewed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For exceptions, see Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
and Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999).
For examples, see Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989) and Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire.
Nell Irwin Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 4.
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.) Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)
and Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).
Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–1902: Race, Class, and Social Control (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2000), 97–98.
I use the term sexual-economic exchange to describe the relationships in which monetary or material goods are exchanged for sexual/domestic services. In Jamaica, both concubinage and prostitution formed part of this exchange. For more on sexual-economic exchange in the contemporary Caribbean see, Kamala Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race, and Sexual Labor (New York: Routledge, 2004);
and Amalia L. Cabezas, Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).
J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (London: J. Parsons, 1793), 130.
John Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1823), 326–27.
Winthrop Jordon, ‘American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 19, 2 (April 1962), 195–197.
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, Volume II (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 261.
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 148.
Betty Wood and Martin Lynn (eds), Travel, Trade and Power in the Atlantic 1765–1884 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2002), 64.
For more on marriage in eighteenth century Jamaica, see Trevor Burnard ‘“Rioting in Goatish Embraces”: Marriage and Improvement in Early British Jamaica’, History of the Family, 11, 4 (2006), 185–97.
For more on legitimacy and inheritance in Jamaica, see Christer Petley, ‘“Legitimacy” and Social Boundaries: Free People of Colour and the Social Order in Jamaican Slave Society’, Social History, 30, 4 (2005), 481–98.
See Christer Petley, ‘“Home” and “This Country”: Britishness and Creole Identity in the Letters of a Transatlantic Slaveholder’, Atlantic Studies, 6, 1 (2009), 43–61.
Heuman, Between Black and White. In the American context, see Loren Schweninger, ‘Property-Owning Free African-American Women in the South, 1800–1870’, Journal of Women’s History, 1 (Winter 1990), 13–44;
Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–1879 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991);
and, Judith Keller Schafer, ‘“Open and Notorious Concubinage”: The Emancipation of Slave Mistresses by Will and the Supreme Court in Antebellum Louisiana’, Louisiana History, 27 (Spring 1987), 166–82.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002), 16.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Meleisa Ono-George
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ono-George, M. (2015). ‘Washing the Blackamoor White’: Interracial Intimacy and Coloured Women’s Agency in Jamaica. In: Jackson, W., Manktelow, E.J. (eds) Subverting Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137465870_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57350-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-46587-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)