Daddy Sharpe

• by admin on February 14th, 2011

The following article by Daive Dunkley, UWI, Mona, appears in the  March-June 2010 edition of Caribbean Quarterly

Daddy Sharpe, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Samuel Sharpe, A West Indian Slave , Written by Himself, 1832 by Fred W. Kennedy, Kingston and Miami, Ian Randle Publishers, 2008, xii, 41 1 pp., US$24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-976-637-343-6

 The use of history in fiction is quite common for the Caribbean. The combination can be found in the novels of a host of fiction writers including Jamaica Kincaid and Marlon James. Academics who have tried their hand at fiction have also made use of the rich historical data that exists on the Caribbean and most notable are the novels of Orlando Patterson, An Absence of Ruins and Die the Long Day. Fred Kennedy makes use of the same formula in Daddy Sharpe, a novel/narrative which joins the world of the Slave narrative with the world of fiction writing. But Kennedy in this work offers something that is quite original by taking advantage of the fact that there is not a great amount of information on the personal life of his protagonist and National Hero of Jamaica, Samuel Sharpe. Furthermore, the information that does exist on Sharpe contains many contradictory accounts, but which Kennedy confidently embraces and incorporates into his book. He states that, “I have exploited these and other examples of incongruities to help weave the narrative of Sam Sharpe’s life” (p. viii).

Kennedy has no doubt accomplished something special in this autobiographical narrative in which he has undertaken the task of writing as Sam Sharpe. Sharpe as many already know was the leader of the last Slave rebellion in the Anglo-Caribbean in 1831-32 and was executed for his role in that uprising. Today, Sharpe is a National Hero of Jamaica, where he fought the British colonial regime in the early part of the nineteenth century in a bid to end the exploitation of enslaved blacks in that country and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Kennedy makes a bold leap of faith when he assumes the role of Sharpe, placing himself in a sort of existential position as he tries relentlessly to recount the events in the life of this enslaved rebel and champion of black self-determination and liberty. But the mere fact that the book is purported to be a Slave narrative links it to a body of literature that is already large and is still growing as new works come to light. This is the category known simply as the ’slave narrative’ as well, and in which can be found popular and now classical works like The History of Mary Prince, The Narrative of Archibald Monteith and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.

Each of these slaves challenged the institution of slavery in their own way and wrote about their ordeals and has now won the attention of scholars the world over. So Kennedy is quite justified in his attempt to write a narrative of Sharpe which puts the rebel Slave in the same pantheon as other enslaved people who tried to change their own situation and that of their fellow slaves. Why Sharpe’s story is so interesting too is the fact that he led an open and bloody rebellion and one that still pulls the attention of scholars to which an upcoming work by Devon Dick can testify, The Cross and Machete. Many of the graphic and upsetting scenes from slavery appear throughout the work in which Kennedy recreates the life of Sharpe, ending with the violence that started shortly after the strike by the slaves on 27 December 1831 (p. 292). Enslaved women are raped and otherwise molested and male slaves are punished using a range of severe tactics. Even Sharpe’s mother, Mimba (or Mama) is depicted as a rape victim who then takes revenge on her assailant, an overseer named Mr. Crawford, when she gets a chance to do so several years later (pp. 10, 362). Before that, Crawford was punished by his removal from the Cooper’s Hill sugar estate where he had reigned with terror for a number of years, and by his insanity which the slaves felt was an act of God. Indeed, the slaves had a range of strategies for resistance at their disposal including hidden ones such as the belief that divine intervention would one day bring them the justice that they deserved, one of the Weapons of the Weak, to borrow James C. Scott’s phrase.

Frederick Douglass asserted that slavery was a disaster for the entire society as even good people were forced into situations where they had to compromise their goodness to accommodate the demands of the peculiar institution. Kennedy in his work shows that this view might not necessarily be true given the fact that there were slaveholders who rose above the institution by introducing measures to ameliorate the conditions of the slaves that they owned. One such slave master was Matthew Lewis, who had inherited two sugar estates in Jamaica when his father died in 1812. Lewis arrived in the island for the first time in 1816 and almost immediately began writing his “new code of laws” for his two properties. By the time of his second visit in 1818, the treatment that his slaves received had improved. Of course, this is not to say that Lewis was interested in abolition since he did not make any pronouncements to that effect. But it is noteworthy that there were slaveholders such as Lewis who could act differently from the others, which inadvertently put their slaves in positions of advantage. Kennedy found space for such a slaveholder in his work in the form of Mr. Sharpe, the owner of Cooper’s Hill and Sam Sharpe his namesake. Notions of honour helped to determine the attempts of Mr. Sharpe to act benevolently towards his slaves and further research needs to be done on the implications that these notions had for the agency of the slaves who were the beneficiaries of owners who, by and large, treated them better than other owners treated their own slaves.

One of the problems with historical fiction is precisely the fact that it is steeped in fiction and often has to make compromises in its use of history. In other words, historical fiction is generally more fiction than history, for it has to tell a story that contains all of the literary and dramatic features that can make it a good and marketable story, or one that the public would want to read. And Kennedy seems to be quite aware that he is not a historian but a novelist who has written a book for mass consumption, one that should sell many copies. Falsehoods, biases and misconceptions are easily replicated in works like Kennedy’s which try to straddle that thin and easily elusive line between fiction and fact. Information that gives the story substance and shape can be passed off as fact when it clearly is not. We do not know when Sharpe was born, for example, and we do not know how old he was when he was killed. Yet these fragments of information which have eluded historians appear in Kennedy’s work almost as if they are settled facts. We are even told the monetary value of �16 10s that Sharpe was given at the moment that he was facing his death by hanging (p. 259).

Since Sharpe was such a religious man, a deacon in the Baptist Church, it is not surprising that Christianity appears frequently in Kennedy’s narrative recounting the slave’s life. But we already know a great deal about this matter: the slaves’ attachment to Christianity and their involvement in the various Protestant groups in the colonies. Historians who have done excellent studies on the slaves and Christianity include Shirley C. Gordon, Mary Turner and to a lesser extent, Armando Lampe, Keith Hunte and Dale Bisnauth. However, Kennedy seems to be almost too intrigued by the role that Christianity played in the decision that Sharpe made to take action on 27 December 1831. As Kennedy made Sharpe divulge, “The reverend had planted a seed in my soul. I yearned now to know more about Jesus who promised that I would be set free” (p. 41). Statements such as these give the impression that Christianity gave the slaves their desire for freedom, meanwhile there is a large and significant historiography on slave resistance and other forms of agency showing the longstanding existence of the desire of the slaves for freedom. Slaves controlled the marketing of ground provisions in Jamaica and other colonies from which they earned large sums of money to purchase their freedom. There were also cases of slaves who petitioned local courts for freedom on the basis that they were illegally enslaved. And scores of slaves resorted to running away which showed that they were ready to risk a great deal to obtain their freedom even if this was temporary.

On the upside, Kennedy has given us a book that is well written and quite interesting, and one that adds both to Caribbean literature generally and to the historical fiction of the region. Kennedy also references a good deal of the historical material that he draws from and these will be of benefit to those readers who are keen to know more about the history of Sam Sharpe.

NOTES

1. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, New York: Plume, 1 989; 2. Marlon James, The Book of Night Women, New York: Riverhead Trade, 2010.

2. London: Hutchinson, 1967; New York: Morrow, 1972.

3. London: F. Wesley and A.H. Davis, 3rd Ed., 1831: Callaloo. Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter, 1990), pp. 115-130; London: 1789.

4. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 20 10.

5. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

6. See Gary B. Nash, et. al., The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 7th Ed., New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. pp. 356-57.

7. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 145-46.

8. Shirley C. Gordon, God Almighty Make Me Free: Christianity in Preemancipation Jamaica, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996; Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787-1834, Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 1998; Armando Lampe, Mission or Submission? Moravian and Catholic Missionaries in the Dutch Caribbean during the 19th Century, G�ttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001; Keith Hunte, “Protestantism and Slavery in the Caribbean” in Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays on Church History, Armando Lampe, ed., Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2001. pp. 86-125; Dale Bisnauth, History of Religions in the Caribbean, Kingston: LMH Publishing Company, 2006.

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