1823 might one day come to be regarded as a hinge year in Guyana’s historical
development, outsignifying other years and events, like 1834 in Essequibo,or
1763 in Berbice. And who knows, some good day, when our nation is brimming
with prosperity, and can boast a film studio and film-making talent, someone
might secure the financing to make a movie or documentary based on events of
that year.
1823 saw the uprising of slaves on the Demerara plantations in what has been
described as “one of the most massive slave rebellions in the history of the
Western Hemisphere”.
It has inspired several books, the most acclaimed so far“Crowns of Glory, Tears
of Blood” ( 1997) by the Brazilian professor (History/Yale) Emilia Viotti da
Costa. This book is recognized as a serious work of reconstruction, well
researched, careful with facts and the nuances of relations among the many power players.
But long before the publication of that scholarly work there was Ratoon (1962), a novel by Christopher Nicole.
Based on events of the same year, Ratoon takes fearless liberties with the
historical record. In an author’s note Nicole states that incidents described inis
book were “based on eyewitness accounts of what actually took place”; but the
main characters were invented.
The novelist like the professor attempts a multi-angled chronicle of events,
though for his staging Nicole inflates the number of slaves involved in the
uprising from the estimated 12,000 to a potential cast of 20,000. Nicole’s fiction covers those history-altering days in prose that feels “modern”, if at
times unmoved by (to borrow language from author George Lamming) the
profound implications of that human tragedy.
The focus of the novel is the Elisabeth Plantation House. It stands in an almost
exotic setting, “in the centre of a carefully created paradise of soft green
lawns, deep flower beds brilliant with multi-coloured zinnias, and borders of
heavenly scented jasmine and spreading oleander bushes.” Beyond it, the slave compound, a vegetable patch; then the chimney of the boiling house, the
canefields and irrigation ditches.
Readers get a sense of what life was like for slaves and slaveholders in East
Demerara villages, stripped now (though not completely) of their colonised
character – Plantation Nabacalis, Plantation Le Ressouvenir, Le Reduit,
Vryheid’s Lust, Mahaica, Felicity, Success – and reconfigured today as numbered
“Regions”, as if as places they never existed.
Nicole allows access to the August meeting of the Demerara Racing Club in Kitty, “a teeming, brilliantly coloured ant-heap, winning and losing, drinking and sweating, betting and gossiping”.
At Camp House, the Governor’s Residence “overlooking the silt-discoloured estuary of the Demerara River” , we listen as Governor Murray and Captain Bonning argue over what to do about rumours of slave insurrection, and how to deal with the rebels. We’re curious about a young English missionary John Smith who passes by “astride an emaciated mule, proceeding slowly up the coast.”
Nicole seems very much attuned to the speech rhythms of the ruling white
oligarchy (“Ah, Bonning,” Murray called. “Resting your men. Good. And this is
Packwood? Come inside with me, my man.”) He is on less certain ground with
his “invented” creole-slave talk (“She done sleeping. And it time. She going
feel them blows for she life.”) which often sounds invented, and might dismay
regional linguists; though no one can be sure what creole voices sounded likein
1823.
____
The central characters in Ratoon were born in Guiana: Joan Dart, daughter
of a plantation owner Peter Dart, but not “representative” of Demerara white
women of the time. Unmarried (at twenty six) she had spent allher life in
Guiana and had come to view Plantation Elisabeth as “home”. Then, Jackey
Reed, “a young negro, tall and slim”, drawn to the crusading ideas and energy
of the white missionary John Smith. He adopts Christianity and joins the
movement plotting the slave revolt.
Their contrasting plantation-creole identities converge one fateful day. Jackey
Reed makes a break for freedom but is pursued, captured and placed in the
stocks by Peter Dart who, multiple heartbeats later, collapses and dies. In that
instant his daughter must assume owner responsibilities.
Joan Dart had kept her father’s books; she’d helped him run the plantation after his wife died. But at the moment when she must give the order for the branding and flogging of a runaway, she hesitates.
It is a mind-altering moment. With responsibility suddenly thrust upon her, Joan
Dart begins to weigh issues of ownership, belonging (“Sugar and heat and mud
were in her blood”), the moral welfare of slaves; and the plantation as “home”.
Later with the leadership role thrust upon him, Jackey Reed, too, is forced to
grapple with complex emotions: duty to his race, the unchristian values of his
“Congo” brothers who indulge “their Damballas and their cane rum”; and an
eruptive desire for Joan Dart whose white body “behind the thin muslin” stood
six feet away from him in the stocks.
After the first 100 pages – of Dart family dispute, slave restlessness, gathering
clouds and screaming kiskadees – the weighty issues blur into background, and
the August 17, 1823 revolt gets under way.
With firm command of his material Nicole switches reader attention back and
forth between the clashing forces, tracking the shift in fortunes with movie-
making craft. There are set pieces done in graphic detail of violence and battle
and rape. The slaves win an encounter, but celebrate prematurely, settling
scores and drinking freed rum. Slave-General Jackey Reed, with the numbers
favouring a one-sided overrun of the plantation, finds his hopes for victory with
few casualties quickly dashed. He argues with his co-conspirators (Gladstone,
Obadiah, Quamina, Cato of Felicity, Paris of Good Hope) over tactics; he is
alarmed at how quickly the slave will to fight evaporates after sudden reversals.
At the height of the insurrection, Nicole shifts the focus away from confusion and bloodletting. Taking a page from old Hollywood movies – where amidst exploding ordnance or circling Indians the hero takes time out to cradle the head of a dying man, and share dying seconds of reflection – he asks readers to follow his conflicted couple as they slip away to share moments in the canefields. At issue, whether they should commit fornication.
Joan Dart, fighting back a “spasm of shudders” in her thighs, reminds Jackey
Reed that he is six years younger; in her eyes still a boy, and for all intents and
purposes still a slave. He reveals the lust he harbours for her, and the Christian
faith that has kept these feelings prudently locked away. In any case, he reminds her, he’s in control now of the plantation.
They argue and agonize for several pages, sorting through fears and desire, until Nicole’s pen breezily steps in to decide the issue: “Her arms moved of their own volition wrapping themselves round his neck in a paroxysm of delicious agony”.
_______ ≈ ↨ ≈ ________
If there’s a governing principle in Nicole’s “explosive bestseller” novel, it
frames issues of intercultural curiosity and biophysical play, evolving identity
and individual freedom (albeit at an unformed, ratoon stage) that engage the
two natives of Plantation Guiana; and how easily an eruptive interest in “the
other” can be swept up in the tide of “events”. This will not come as news to
tribe-wary Guyanese who observe each other’s ways and means with averted
post-plantation eyes and ship sinking feelings.
First published in 1962, round about the time a self-ruling Guyana was teetering toward those overseas-engineered “racial disturbances”, Ratoon is usually mentioned (if at all, and in a lowered volume of appreciation) – as among the best-known published works of Guyanese fiction. For some readers its consumerist treatment of grave historical matters might seem inappropriate. Christopher Nicole, its 1930 Guiana-born white author, no doubt had his reasons for inventing inserting characters in the maelstrom
of that pivotal year.
To bring lyrical closure to the predictable course of events Nicole serves up a
coda to remind readers his novel is not just about a doomed uprising and an
impossible romance.
Captured and held hostage for awhile, weary and disheveled from lovemaking in the cane fields, Joan Dart is rescued by a Colonel Leahy (“How long haveyou
been like this…? Anderson get a carriage… Damnation. Have a litter made, then, and I want four of your strongest men.”) But in the very next minute, on receipt of “an express from Mahaica Post” delivered by a horse militiaman, the Colonel places her under arrest for “consorting with the enemy”.
Readers interested in how the colonial justice system dealtwith white
women and their unconventional choices must get through the last 30 pages
to see how that turns out, if Joan Dart wins forgiveness and goes home again.
Those pages might also set in motion the kind of discourse on ‘broader issues’
that regional academics find pleasure in – “the whole question of the role and
responsibility of native white proprietorship in modern C/bean society”. Though not a few would argue that Ratoon‘s sensational account, its blood
low, authored liberties and subsidiary lust, is not a useful place to start this inquiry.
Book Reviewed: Ratoon: Christopher Nicole: Bantam Books/St Martin’s Press:
New York, 1962, 246 pages. A version of this article was posted elsewhere in
2008.
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 