![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
In the second edition of Benjamin Moseley's Treatise on Sugar (1799), Moseley, a doctor practicing in Kingston, nests a section on obeah into a discussion of the disfiguring illness yaws, which causes sufferers’ bodies to become “shocking grotesque figures, resembling woody excrescences, or stumps of trees; or old AEgyptian figures, that seem as if they had been made at the ends of the human, and beginnings of the brutal form.” This in turn is part of a larger section on “Miscellaneous Medical Observations” that also includes descriptions of cowpox, leprosy, and plague, illnesses defined by their rapid spread and their highly visible compromise of bodily systems and functions. Because of its inclusion here, obeah is classed as an infectious cultural disease that, like the illnesses Moseley discusses, can spread quickly through colonial populations, threatening the bodily and mental integrity of slaves and white planters alike. Taking a cue from Moseley, I analyze obeah as a cultural contaminant that embeds itself within the colonial and British imagination. Reading the Treatise on Sugar alongside the wildly popular British stage play, Obi, or Three-Fingered Jack (1800 and 1830), which tells the story of outlaw and murderer Jack Mansong, and Matthew Lewis’ autobiographical Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834), in which Lewis constantly struggles to stifle the practice of obeah on his Jamaican plantations, I argue that colonists and residents of the metropole responded to obeah much as they did to infectious agents like yaws and yellow fever – through a mixture of quarantine, suppression, ignorance, and failed treatments that ultimately allowed for its continued spread.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Jerome S. Handler and other members of H-Net Caribbean, who answered questions and pointed me to sources on yaws in the colonial Caribbean. I am also grateful to the staff of the National Library, whose help was instrumental in my research. Russell Sbriglia, Ph.D., Justin Wilkins, and Kristi J. Castleberry provided supportive comments, corrections, and insightful questions as I revised. Very special thanks to Kelly Wisecup, Michelle Burnham, Diana Paton, Emily Senior, and Tim Watson (my fellow panelists on the “Obeah and the Metropole” roundtable at the 2014 Society of Early Americanists’ conference), as well as to Kelly and Toni Wall Jaudon for their questions, feedback, and support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
J. Alexandra McGhee is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Rochester and an instructor in Writing at Warren Wilson College. Her dissertation examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of the Caribbean in the British imagination. Her articles have been published in Romantic Circles, The Edgar Allan Poe Review, and Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations.
Notes
1. Sayers, “Jonny Newcome.”
2. Details surrounding the distribution, readership, and reception of the comic remain something of a mystery. For information on the cartoon, see “Johnny Newcome,” Obeah Histories. For a discussion of other comics featuring Johnny Newcome and set in the Caribbean, see Brown, Reaper's Garden.
3. On the subject of racial degeneration, see Bindman, Ape to Apollo; and Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human. For a specific discussion of the link between degeneration and creolization, see Bauer and Mazotti, Creole Subjects.
4. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, 15.
5. For further discussion of the creole subject in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Americas, see Bauer and Mazotti, Creole Subjects.
6. Obeah's threat to the colonial order was not perceived until Tacky's Revolt in 1760, which “shifted European and colonial perceptions of obeah.” Brown, Reaper's Garden, 145.
7. Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, 90.
8. See “Case Histories.” The 1696 “Act for the better order and government of slaves,” though it does not mention obeah (which was not recognized as a serious issue until 1760), reveals that the threat of poisoning was serious enough to warrant legislation: “And whereas divers slaves have of late attempted to destroy several people, as well white as black, by poison; the consequences of which secret way of murdering may prove fatal, if not timely prevented: Be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any Negro, or any slave or slaves, before the making of this Act, have maliciously given or attempted to give […] any manner of poison […] the said slave or slaves, together with their accessories, as well before as after the fact, being slaves, and convicted thereof […] shall be adjudged guilty of murder, as if the party or parties that took or shall take the same had died; and shall be condemned to suffer death, by hanging, burning, or such other way or means as to the said justices and freeholders shall seem most convenient.” See “Development of Obeah.”
9. For a discussion of obeah's representation as a disease in the colonial Caribbean, see Lee, “Grave Dirt.” Handler and Bilby have put forth the now widely accepted claim that obeah practitioners saw the supernatural forces they attempted to wield as neutral and in service to the greater good, while whites understood obeah as “a catch-all term for a range of supernatural-related ideas and behaviours that were not of European origin and which they heavily condemned and criticized.” Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power, 87.
10. Contemporary European medical practitioners in the British Caribbean already connected yaws and obeah for a number of reasons, recognizing that obeah treatments for yaws were often more effective than white remedies. See Lee, “Grave Dirt,” para. 4. Among blacks, obeah men afflicted with yaws were thought to have a greater degree of power and knowledge. This belief was familiar to government officials in Jamaica, who, in the House of Commons Papers on the practice of “Obiah,” mention that the most revered obeah men are “peculiarly harsh and diabolic in their Aspect,” indicating their likely affliction with late-stage yaws, which is particularly debilitating and deforming. Aravamudan, “Introduction,” 26.
11. After Tacky's Rebllion in 1760, obeah “became the target of legal interdiction and morbid interest in Jamaica” because “many of the slave rebels believed that magical powers gained by obeah practices would make them immune to the weaponry of the plantation-owners.” The rebellion was followed by Act 24 Section 10, “passed by the Jamaican Assembly on 13 December 1760, outlawing the meetings and practices of obeah, specifying death by burning at the stake as the sentence if convicted.” Aravamudan, “Introduction,” 18.
12. After Tacky's Rebllion in 1760, obeah “became the target of legal interdiction and morbid interest in Jamaica” because “many of the slave rebels believed that magical powers gained by obeah practices would make them immune to the weaponry of the plantation-owners.” The rebellion was followed by Act 24 Section 10, “passed by the Jamaican Assembly on 13 December 1760, outlawing the meetings and practices of obeah, specifying death by burning at the stake as the sentence if convicted.” Aravamudan, “Introduction,”, 11–14.
13. The pantomime was rewritten as a melodrama in 1830 by William Murray.
14. Another early adapter of Jack's story, William Earle, uses Moseley's account of Jack almost verbatim and is more concerned with the direct transmission of Jack's story through a mock-epistolary narrative represented as first-hand experience. Earle's novel, Obi, or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack, was published in 1800. I am more interested in the theatrical adaptation because of its greater poetic license with the source material and its accessibility to audiences.
15. Moseley received his training in Europe and moved to Jamaica in 1768, where he held the post of surgeon-general.
16. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 188.
17. In the plantation zone, the containment of yaws was a major concern for slaveowners, who built specially designated yaws huts on their properties expressly for the quarantine and treatment of sufferers. Despite the fact that many medical practitioners believed yaws could not be passed to whites, the debilitating and grotesque effects of late-stage yaws, the high level of transmission, and the ineffectiveness of most treatments meant that many doctors were unwilling to care for yaws patients and preferred instead to quarantine them, sometimes with a black attendant. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 83.
18. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 187.
19. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 189.
20. Aravamudan, “Introduction,” 37.
21. Aravamudan, “Introduction,” 37.
22. Lee, “Grave Dirt,” para. 4; and Aravamudan, “Introduction,” 9.
23. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 196.
24. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 196–197.
25. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 197–198.
26. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 197.
27. Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo,” 27; Handler, “Slave Medicine and Obeah,” 75.
28. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 163.
29. This is evident in Moseley's account, in which he remarks that he “saw the OBI of the famous negro robber, Three fingered JACK, the terror of Jamaica in 1780 and 1781. The Maroons who slew him brought it to me.” Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 197. The story of Jack's crimes and capture had appeared long before Moseley's account in the Jamaican Royal Gazette. See “Three-Fingered Jack.”
30. This point is considered by Alan Richardson, who argues that obeah was considered a specifically African threat. The alien nature of the obeah practitioner was emphasized by the use of the term itself, which both made it more threatening and simultaneously removed it from its social and historical context, linking it to stereotypes of the barbarous African savage. Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo,” 27.
31. Brown, Reaper's Garden, 152.
32. This is particularly notable since the original accounts of Jack in the Royal Gazette made relatively little mention of his obeah practice, focusing instead on his crimes and his role as a leader of outlaws and runaway slaves. His link to obeah in the British imagination is evidenced by the title of Earle's novel, Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack, and Fawcett's pantomime (and later melodrama), Obi, or Three-Finger’d Jack.
33. Rzepka, “Introduction,” para. 6.
34. Handler, Diseases, 12; and Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 19.
35. Fawcett, Obi I.iii. The costume is described as “Tawdry dress of rags, rude head dress and drapery, bare black arms, Obi horn.”
36. Fawcett, Obi I.iii. The costume is described as “Tawdry dress of rags, rude head dress and drapery, bare black arms, Obi horn.”
37. Lee, “Grave Dirt,” para. 14.
38. Murray, Obi I.i.
39. This is the final scene in the pantomime. The melodrama ends with the fight between Jack, Quashee, and Sam.
40. Fawcett, Obi, II.viii.
41. Rzepka, “Introduction,” para. 7.
42. For a discussion of Kemble and Aldridge in the plays, see Cox, “Theatrical Forms.”
43. Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo,” 12.
44. Cox, “Theatrical Forms,” para. 9; and Aravamudan, “Introduction,” 1.
45. See “Three-Fingered Jack,” Obeah Histories.
46. Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law,” 238. Adam, the obeah man in Matthew Lewis’ Journal and the subject of analysis in this section, allegedly murdered twelve slaves before his deportation. For a comprehensive discussion of obeah law, see Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power. The first law to address obeah practice, “An Act to Remedy the Evils arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves,” came into effect in Jamaica in 1760 and made obeah practice punishable by death or deportation. Other colonies followed suit, and by 1838 obeah was illegal in most of the British Caribbean. See “Legislation” for a timeline of obeah legislation.
47. The first document that identified the mosquito as a potential vector was published in 1882. See Finlay, “El mosquito.”
48. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 215. Despite the belief that whites were more susceptible to yellow fever, colonists were still confounded by blacks’ ability to live dissolutely and still avoid the illness. In 1775, Henry Warren, a resident of Barbados, asked, “How is it that the negroes, whose Food is mostly rancid Fish or Flesh, nay often the Flesh of Dogs, Cats, Asses, Horses, rats, & c., who mostly lead very intemperate Lives, and who are always worse clad, and most exposed to Surfeits, Heats, Colds and all the Injuries of the Air, are so little subject to this Danger?” McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 67. In parts of Central and Western Africa where yellow fever was endemic, the local population did develop some resistance. The majority of slaves in Jamaica were from these areas, and thus suffered less from the disease, although slaves from other areas could be severely affected. Slaves’ perceived lower rate of infection made doctors interested in black remedies for the illness.
49. This parallel was made more explicitly in the French Caribbean. As John Savage notes in his exploration of obeah-related slave resistance in the nineteenth century, in those periods when yellow fever epidemics raged in Martinique, obeah's influence was considered more active and pernicious. Savage, “Slave Poisons,” 162–165. Also see Paton, “Witchcraft,” on the differences between French and British colonial understandings of witchcraft and poisoning.
50. See Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 215; and Clark, “A Treatise on the Yellow Fever,” 74.
51. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 215.
52. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 215.
53. Also known as the Christmas Rebellion, the eight day uprising led by Jamaican preacher Samuel Sharpe was thought to speed the process of emancipation.
54. Lewis, Journal, 41–42. Subsequent references to the novel will appear in textual parentheses.
55. Marshall, “Performing Anansi,” 142.
56. Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law,” 253, 256.
57. There is actually evidence within the text that Edward is an obeah practitioner himself. Lewis, Journal, 84–86.
58. Moseley, Treatise on Sugar, 217.
59. I use “atmosphere” in the metaphorical sense of the word here, both to highlight the sociocultural effects of obeah on the plantation and to draw a parallel between the social environment of the plantation and the British colonial understanding of tropical ecology as hostile.
60. Plasa, “Conveying Away the Trash,” para. 11.
61. Compare his reflections here to his earlier dismissal of environmental threats when he is told not to go walking at midday. Lewis, Journal, 45.
62. The reference here is to Polonius’ death in Hamlet. When Hamlet is asked if Polonius is at supper, he replies, “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain / convocation of politic worms are e’en at him.” Shakespeare, Hamlet IV. iii, 20-21. As D. L. MacDonald notes, Lewis “conceptualizes unpleasant experiences in terms of death […] It is common enough for travellers to speak of being eaten alive; it must be more unusual to compare the experience to that of decomposition after death.” MacDonald, “Isle of Devils,” 195.
63. Terry, “Introduction,” x.
64. See Handler, “Anti-Obeah Laws,” 3; and Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law.”
65. Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo,” 12.
66. Rzepka, “Introduction,” para. 9.
67. Despite the fact that missionaries like James Phillippo were “[exultant] over the fact that ‘obeahism’ [was] in decline” after emancipation, Aravamudan traces obeah's influence in “newer [forms] of religious syncretism” like revivalism, Pocomania, and Shangoism and notes that although obeah seemed to “[disappear] into other syncretic religions, there are also those who argue for the continuous tradition of obeah in Jamaica, where the obeahman continues to be a ‘professor’ or ‘knife-and-scissors man’ and scholars of religion can refer to a ‘Revivalist-Pocomania-Obeah complex.’” Aravamudan, “Introduction,” 31.