INDEPENDENCE IS NOT a day. It is a long march out of bondage into freedom. We are not home free yet. The road is never clear. We may have taken some steps backward. It may hard to tell the difference.
This week in the NATION newspaper food crop producer Arthur Smith reasoned: “We are now experiencing economic slavery. When you have to pay for a house for 40 years that is a sign of economic slavery; you are paying more than it is worth and you are working endlessly for it.” Was he making a fair comparison or was he exaggerating? Does a mortgage feel like slavery? Sometimes even slavery doesn’t feel like slavery.
Adam Smith, an enslaved man from Mississippi recalled: “I liked being a slave, our white folks and ole friends are dead but we had plenty and dey were good to us . . . . Sure I remembers bout the Ku Kluxers but we never had no trouble with them. Why one of my cousins used to make de robes and masks they wore and I have watched them dress up in them many a time.”
There were others like Harriet Ann Jacobs, a young mother and fugitive from slavery in the old American South, who declared: “The war of my life had begun; and though one of God’s most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered . . . . He that is willing to be a slave, let him be a slave.”
There were those who were not willing slaves but maybe did not have the resolve of Harriet Jacobs. Robert Falls regretted not resolving to resist. “If I had my life to live over I would die fighting rather than be a slave again. I want no man’s yoke on my shoulders no more.”
The narratives of Africans enslaved in the US, available freely online, can give us a look into the varied minds of our own ancestors whose voices and stories are not as free today.
Barbados had a reputation as one of the worst, if not the worst, slave society on Earth. Slavers of the American South imported their vicious techniques from here. If you were born in those times, would you have had the resolve to get free? What kind of slave would you have been? A good way to answer that question may be to ask yourself: “What kind of slave am I now?”
On the CBC evening news, of Wednesday, November 23, they broadcasted this bit of trivia, that “the first slaves brought to Barbados were white (also called indentured servants)”. The plantation owners treated indentured servants cruelly. They had little value to their masters once their period of service was up. It was a bitter struggle to make it through to the end of their indentured servitude. At least there was an end. There was no foreseeable end for the African and a seemingly limitless cruelty to endure.
Euro-American slavers took slavery to another level. It went beyond indentured servitude and the slavery found elsewhere. Indentured servitude and chattel slavery were not the same. But for argument’s sake, let us call all bondage “slavery” and say that there are varying degrees of it. Then farmer Arthur Smith may have a point. What is the temperature of our enslavement today? What kind of bondage are you in?
If indentured servitude can be equated to slavery then the slavery in Barbados did not end in 1834. After the Emancipation Act, blacks were forced into a period of indentured servitude which lasted at least until 1838. 100 years later, the Moyne commission to investigate the riots of the 1930s found the black population of the West Indies malnourished, overworked and underpaid. Was this a kind of slavery still in effect?
On November 30, 1966 Barbados became independent from Britain. We are still loitering on the colonial doorstep with the Queen as head of state. What kind of bondage keeps Barbados from becoming a republic? Is it the economic bondage Arthur Smith spoke of or is the slavery psychological?
Harriet Tubman said that she freed thousands of slaves and could have freed thousands more if only they had known that they were slaves. Some did not recognise that they were enslaved even when the whip was cracking in the hand of the overseer. How difficult would it be for some to see if an invisible whip is in the hands of the loans officer, or a minister of government? Do you have a high tolerance for slavery?
Indentured servitude and chattel slavery are not on the same level. You could say they are at different points of the slavery scale. Where on that scale do you sit today?
Have you resolved never to be conquered? Or, in the end will you wish you could live your life over so you could fight for your freedom? Or maybe you are the modern day version of Simmons Smith who recalled that after the Emancipation proclamation: “Master called all the slaves up and said ‘you is just as free as I am. You can stay or go as you please’. We all stayed.”
Do you choose to stay in your bondage because, as former slave Patsy Mitchner observed: “Slavery was a bad thing, and freedom, of the kind we got, with nothing to live on, was bad. Two snakes full of poison. One lying with his head pointing north, the other with his head pointing south. Their names was slavery and freedom.”
Freedom that is handed over may not be worth the paper it is declared on. Real freedom is the freedom you create and nurture for yourself. Harriet Ann Jacobs resolved not to be a slave, but also to let those willing to be slaves stay in slavery. There are those exceptional beings, like Errol Barrow and Harriet Tubman, who not only desired and nurtured freedom for themselves but for others as well.
Happy Independence.
Adrian Green is a creative communications specialist. Email: Adriangreen14@gmail.com