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 in his
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 the places 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 as a
young
English missionary John Smith 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 like
in
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 all
her 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
mention (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
and 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 have you
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 dealt
with 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 flow,
author
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 