Jeanette - free negro woman

The rain beat so hard on the shingled roof that it was difficult to speak softly in the room where the old woman lay dying. Outside, the gusts seemed to turn the trees inside out. In the bay, the schooner ‘Crispin Whyne’ reared up on her mooring, twisting on her anchor chain. The ship’s boat plunged through the waves, driven by the easterly wind. Four big men were at the oars, another giant at the tiller. Their lone passenger, a bundle of damp oil cloths over wet clothes, shivered. Her rain-washed face held no expression.

They brought the long boat ashore with the help of the huge waves, running it up past the high water mark on the curve of sand and making fast to an old almond tree. Night had come quite quickly. The giant tiller man picked her up from her seat. His huge black arms cradled the little woman as they all set out up the hill to the old house above the main bay on the Caribbean isle of Petite Martinique.

Judith Philippe was just in time to see her mother die. Old, toothless, nearly bald, the dying woman glimpsed her daughter’s pretty face.  Her eyes, once sparklingly bright, still a light brown in her coal-black face, closed for the last time. “Jeannette Free Negro Woman” of Grenada, Petite Martinique and Carriacou, was dead. Around her, her fair-skinned, slim-built daughters in long white dresses tightly clasped at the waist, their heads tied in the old style, moved about the lamp lit room in slow motion. Her two sons sat at a table by the window, a bottle of rum and two shot glasses between them untouched. The rain fell unabated.

Many, so many years ago, she, Jeannette, her mother, had walked up to the big house above Tyrell’s Bay, Grenada. They had stood at the main door until the man had noticed them. They were both slaves, his slaves. Her mother had left her there. There were no words between them. She was remarkably beautiful in her youth. The painted miniature in Judith’s hand still attested to this. Monsieur Philippe gave her freedom. Together, they had ten children, five girls and five boys.

The free mulatto woman Judith, Jeannette’s third daughter, and her eldest son Honoré, were the executors of a considerable fortune. Judith herself was the matriarch of one of the Caribbean’s more significant families. This dynasty of black women heirs to estates on Carriacou, Grenada and the entire island of Petite Martinique is remarkable in that their descendants include revolutionaries in the Fedon revolution in Grenada of the 1790s, a very wealthy landowning family of south Trinidad, European-trained medical practitioners, and the celebrated author of ‘A Free Mulatto’, a paper presented to the House of Lords in Britain that was more than likely the first civil rights case upheld in the western hemisphere by a superior court. The Philippes also produced towards the end of the 19th century, a mayor of Port of Spain, a Solicitor-General of the Crown colony of Trinidad and an author.

In the publication ‘Description of the Grenadines’ by S.V. Morse, published in 1795 and quoted by Lorna McDaniel in her paper ‘Madame Philip-O: Reading the returns of an 18th century free mulatto woman of Grenada’, there is a description of Petite Martinique:

“Petite Martinique lies about a mile and a half south west from Petit St. Vincent - it is the joint property of Jeanette Philip, a free negroe woman, and a number of her Mulatto Children, Left them by a French Man of that name... it contains four hundred and seventy seven acres of which four hundred and sixty four are proper for cultivation. Both the soil and surface of this island are better than most of the Grenadines - There are three white men, five free coloured people, and eighty nine slaves - There is a large mountain near the middle of the Island which rises to a considerable height.”

It was from this island base that the course of destiny was charted and set. For reasons unknown, the brothers Honoré’s wealth was delivered to her in 1793 as was that of her other siblings Suzanne and Louis upon their decisions to relocate to Trinidad. The family generated wealth. Those who came to Trinidad took advantage of the Cedula of Population of 1783. Louis Philippe owned large sugar plantations in the Naparimas and was possibly the largest slave owner amongst the free coloured people in Trinidad at the time. Lorna McDaniel writes that Judith also had access to a leasehold house in England at 33 Great Coram Street in London, where she traveled in 1807.

“It is known that her nephews, Jean Baptiste and St. Luce, were students in England during that time and her mission to Europe most likely included their concerns.”

Judith was the generous benefactress to neighbours and friends, and godmother to 22 children. She could neither read nor write; neither could her sister Jeanne Rose. The school on Carriacou, established on her land, enrolled 96 free coloured children and 7 slave children. As Lorna McDaniel writes:

“African women like Judith’s mother, whether enslaved or free, were the source of this new mobile class, the ‘coloured’. They, mating with white planters, not only created a politically and military active progeny, but often acquired manumission, education, power and wealth for their mixed-race children and sometimes for themselves. The increase in social power within succeeding generations of the Philippe family is accompanied by the exclusive education that many mixed-race progeny acquired who were allowed education in Europe.”

The Music of East Port of Spain

An amazing subculture emerged in Port of Spain, in fact east Port of Spain, by the 1870s. It was significant because it contained the rootstock from which the Afro-Franco cultural matrix emerged into what we now call ‘born creole’. This heterogeneous assortment of people more or less covered the intermingling of that flotsam and jetsam of Trinidad’s Caribbean experience who had endedup here by the time of the British conquest in 1797. Despite attempts by the authorities, they had continued to preserve a fluid, free-wheeling lifestyle that contained the extremes of excessive religious piety and the working of obeah, drunken debauchery and the brave and ferocious activity of the stickfight.

In terms of syncretic movements, it was unique. From a social point of view, the people who lived on the eastern fringes of Port of Spain and across the dry river into the hills of Laventille and Belmont established a culture from shich calypso, Trinidad’s version of Carnival and later steelband was born. This culture was known as ‘diametre’ or jamette society (beyond the diameter of polite society).

Panders, ponces, pimps and prostitutes, chantwels, stickmen and dandies, kalinda drummers, men who played beast and devil, bats on roller skates and on bicycles, shago priestesses, seer men andmoco jumbies, real ligahoos, raconteurs and macos, comperes and macomers, and the gentlemen who comprised the Long John Cigar Smoking Club of Almond Wlak - their names were Congo Jack and Petit Belle Lilly, Alice Sugar, Massy Milly, Ocean Lizzy and Sybil Steel, Cutaway Rimbeau, Gumbo Gleaza, Gumbo Lili, Darling Dan, Zandolee, Ojuba the Slave, Boboloops Spit In The Sea, and Mahal Who Drove An Invisible Car. Music was everywhere, violins, guitars, cuatros, bandols, mandolins, maracas and drums.

African musical forms were maintained. Remembered from pre-emancipation days, they blossomed in the rich milieu of ‘behind the bridge’. Congo, sung in Patois, was dance music for weddings and christenings by people of Congolese descent, played on three drums and sung with a chorus. There were Rada hymns: chants, drums with sticks, iron, chac chacs, chatwel and chorus. It was the music for ceremonies of Rada (Dahomey) cult groups, a vehicle for the invocation of saints and induction of spirit possession. Shango blossomed, with its items associated with the imminence of particular dieties. Music for the rites of the cult groups of Yoruba origin was heard, including hymns, litanies and invocations.

On the other hand, east Port of Spain at times echoed with French choral singing, with the harmony of French folk and traditional ‘chansons de Noël’, Christmas cantatas. It was music for the house, polite music for visiting, not only at Christmas time.

On occasion, fandangoes were performed in the neighbourhood, rich traditional Spanish music, with its competitive and repetitive singing, accompanied by triple cuatroes, bandols, guitars and chac chacs.

Dancing was for pleasure. People knew how to do reels and jigs, but also bongo, veiquoix, chaties, limbo and the belé. Music was for festivals or crisis, and sometimes, music was associated with sacrifice to the ancestral spirits.

The traveller C.W. Day records his visit to a ‘yard’ where dances were held. He marvelled at the young men who stood transfixed for hours, torches held high in their hands, as the dancers reeled and tumbled to the hypnotic rhythm of dozens of drums way into the night.

The land over the dry river, known as Piccadilly, was called Grand Jardin. Further north was Mango Rose and even further north was Belle Eau Road, also known as Shapotie. The central area from Argyle Street to St. Paul Street was called Sorzanoville and later Gros Rouge. In those days, there was only one bridge across the dry river at Cadiz Road.

During the 1850s, many Africans rescued by British war ships from Portuguese slavers on the high seas (Portugal had not yet abolished slavery) were ‘freed’ in Port of Spain. Many of these made their homes in the wooded hillsides of Laventille and Belmont to the extent that this area was to be known for a time as ‘Free Town’ or ‘Yoruba Town’. Disbanded veterans from the West India Regiments came to live there, e.g. Sgt. Zampty who married Black Warner’s daughter and got a lane in Belmont named for him on Black Warner’s land.

Papa Nanee was a diviner from Dahomey. He owned land in Belmont Valley Road and maintained a Rada religious and ceremonial yard for many generations with great purity. It was here where up to the 1950s water percussion could still be heard - the eerie sound of calabash halves, floating upside down in a basin of water and hit with sticks.

Lacu Harp and Lacu Pebwa were famous stickfighting yards (Laku is patois for ‘la court’ - the yard). Arnim ‘Mitto’ Sampson, known as Strongman, recounts in an article by Andrew Pearse and published in the Caribbean Quarterly, Volume 4, Nos. 3 and 4 of 1958:

“The drums would beat and canboulay stickmen sing

‘Djab se yo neg,

mé Die se nom-la bla,

Bamboula, Bamboula’

Roucou John fought the invincible Tiny Satan at Laku Pebwa (Breadfruit Tree Yard) in 1875. Tiny Satan caught him six consecutive blows and smashed his skull in. Yet, Roucou stood up. When he finally fell to the ground shortly before he died, he was still mumbling ‘‘Djab se yo neg, mé Die se nom-la bla..’

The use of this theme was condemned by the famous mulatto barrister, Mr. Maxwell Phillip. In his opinion it stigmatised the negro race atrociously, the words meaning:

The devil is a negro,

but God is a white man,

bamboula, bamboula.

The majority of the leading batonniers of the time refused to cooperate with Phillip, saying that when they sand ‘Djab se yo neg’ they were possessed by satanic spirits which made them feel nothing; they could walk into battle and meet sticks, stones, conch shells and even daggers..”

Behind the bridge in those days produced, just as it does now, some of this country’s most colourful characters and bizarre indicents.

When Hannibal the Mulatto died in jail, his last words were directed at his great rival Zandoli. “Zandoli,” he murmured, “why you ain’t find your hole?”

His death in 1873 was just as stormy as his life. Annie Coals and Myrtle the Turtle fought over his grave, and later his body was dug up and ghouls carried away his head and shroud, leaving the rotten carcass at the side of the grave. A vast crowd gathered in Lapeyrouse cemetery, led by Bodicea, the female chantwell and famous jamette, who had taken of her drew, waved it like a flag and sang:

“Congo Jack vole tet la Hannibal

U vole la mo, gade bakanal”

(Congo Jack steal Hannibal’s head

You steal from the dead, look bacchanal.)

Cedric le Blanc, the white calypsonian, later sang of the incident:

“Bodicea first and then Petite Belle

The Devil waiting for them in Hell.”

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A Question of Self-Respect

Unlike other colonies, Trinidad saw after the abolition of slavery in 1837 the emergence of a black and coloured middle class

A look at the composition of post-emancipation society in Trinidad reveals that black didn’t just mean black. As a person with African ancestry, you could have found yourself in different strata of the society, with different challenges and opportunities. The black and coloured middle class rose from several groups:

Firstly, from the small group of families of mixed African and European descent, who were the descendants of the free, slave-owning and land-owning people of colour, and who had settled after 1783 mainly in the Naparimas according to the terms and conditions of the Cedula of Population.

Secondly, from the group of descendants of ex-slaves, or of freed African immigrants, that is Africans taken by the British on the high seas from Portuguese slavers, bound for Brazil, and set free in Trinidad and Tobago. This group also comprised descendants of immigrants from other Caribbean territories and of Venezuelan immigrants with Spanish-African-Amerindian ancestry. Those people were self-made, that is, they worked in white-collar jobs which they got mainly through their command of the dominant British culture. Members of this group were both coloured and black.

In the fifteen years after the settlement of Trinidad by both white and coloured French Creole settlers in 1783, the whites and the free coloureds entertained much more cordial relationships than after the British conquest of the island in 1797. In their retention of culture, in their nostalgic cherishing of the past, in their manners and customs and in their catholicism, white and coloured French Creoles were very similar. When the British imposed their rule, however, white French Creoles tended to distance themselves from their coloured countrymen and -women, many of whom they were related to by blood. They stuck with the new rulers and tried to form the exclusive local white landed upper class. Notwithstanding that, many positions were closed to even the whitest of locals: only the English could hold the highest offices like governor, colonial secretary or chief of police. This concept of the foreign master was bitterly felt by all Trinidadians and Tobagonians up to the very last days of Crown Colony rule, as a speech from the 1930s by Captain A.A. Cipriani shows:

“A little country like ours would never become a piece of American territory either by sale or by barter; we will never become a Canadian provice, and thirdly and lastly, but by no means least, we are not going to carry on as at present under this iniquitous and mischievous form of administration known by Crown Colony Government.”

Middle-class status was reached when members of the family - men, to be specific, since women had no prospects of a professional career in the 19th century - started to work in white-collar occupations, such as in the law, in the teaching service, as a clerk in trade or in the government. The path to that was education, and schools were mostly to be found in the towns. Unlike other tropical colonies, over a quarter of Trinidad’s population were urban-dwelling by the 1870s.

Among the families of French free coloured origin, there were the Romains, who produced the first Mayor of San Fernando, and the Philips, whose Jean-Baptiste won the first human rights case in the New World for the free coloureds in 1829. St. Luce Philip became the first coloured unofficial member of the Legislative Council. Michel Maxwell Philip became Solicitor-General from 1869 - 1888. He also was the first non-white Mayor of Port-of-Spain. The Saturnins were another prominent middle class family. They produced a doctor as early as 1838, when they were able to send one of their sons to the University of Paris. The Maresse family produced vocal, anti-clerical men and women who wrote letters in French and English to the newspapers, condemning the churches’ influence in schools.

The Angeron and Montrichard families, the Beaubruns and the Regis families - all of those were respected and educated coloured families of the Naparimas. Many of them faced economic desaster after 1838 and much like many of the white planters, were squeezed out of the sugar production.

For the second group within the black and coloured middle-class, upward mobility began after the removal of slavery.

“Numbers of ex-slaves and their children became petty traders and artisans after 1838,” writes Dr. Bridget Brereton in ‘Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad’. “They were better off than estate labourers, more mobile, and more ambitious for their children to go to school. They formed a ‘respectable’, ambitious, potentially mobile working class, and their children might well achieve the climb to middle class status. Most of these men were professionals, teachers, civil servants or clerks; a few were planters: even fewer were in business.”

The Brown family, descendant from a Vincentian coloured immigrant, Joseph, who was a merchant, was one of those exceptions. Joseph’s three sons all became professional members of the black and coloured middle-class: Vincent and Lionel were barristers (with Vincent even rising to the office of Attorney-General), Leopold was a surveyor. Another lone coloured merchant was H.B. Phillips, coloured native of Barbados, who served as Mayor of Port of Spain. But other than that, the large commercial firms were dominated by white families at that time. Black and coloured men owned only small businesses: W.B. Laurence had a bookshop, L.O. Innis ran a pharmacy, and Joseph Lewis, William Herbert and Samuel Carter owned printeries and produced newspapers.

Access to capital was difficult for black and coloured people. If one had not inherited land or wealth, it was almost impossible to become a planter. Amongst the few coloured planters were Nicholas Brunton of Diego Martin, who ran successful sugar and cocoa estates. M.M. Philip bought Phillipines sugar estate, and Joseph Brooks, son of a black soldier of the West India regiment, owned at the time of his death several cocoa estates in the Arima and Guanapo district.

“Most middle-class and coloureds, then, were employed in white-collar jobs; the majority were involved neither in agriculture nor in commerce. They were teachers, journalists and editors, lawyers, doctors, civil servants and clerks.” (Bridget Brereton)

To become a primary school teacher was the ultimate goal for many black middle-class aspirants. This respectable occupation gave one the status of an authority, but it required no university education like becoming a lawyer or a doctor. J.J. Thomas was probably the most outstanding self-made teacher of the last century. Others were H.A. Nurse, the son of a Barbadian ex-slave, as was Henry Sylvester Williams, who also became a succesful teacher and later founded the Pan-African Association in London.

For those who were black but could somehow get a tertiary education at a British university, medicine and law became the favoured professions. Brilliant Stephen Laurence won a scholarship to QRC and an island scholarship to Edinburgh University, where he qualified as a medical doctor in 1888.

But, as the list shows, the legal profession was the one most open to black and coloured middle-class men.

“John Joseph and Jean Pierre, said to be ‘of pure African descent’, were among the first three men to qualify as solicitors under a new Ordinance permitting solicitors to qualify in Trinidad instead of having to go to Britain.” writes Brereton. “Increasingly, America came to be seen as a land of opportunity for young blacks, because it was far easier to support themselves while at a university there than in Britain, and because it was easier to enter an American university.”

Only one or two men became clergymen. P.H. Douglin, for example, was ordained in 1887. There was a common prejudice, however, against people of colour from both the side of the churches and the side of the congregations, who preferred white priests.

Trinidadians of the black and coloured middle class adhered feverishly to European values, that is, they were often better mannered and educated than their white counterparts or the black lower classes. As Brereton puts it:

“They attached so much importance to culture because they had no other valuable and valued possession to hold on to. (...) But they possessed one attribute which the mass of the population did not have, and which the society, as a whole, valued: and that was cultural and intellectual skills. It is not surprising, therefore, that members of the coloured and black middle class often took the lead in literary or intellectual activities.”