Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes

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      Figure 6. Illustration by Thomas Rowlandson, published by William Holland (London, 1796). Courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.

      The editorial does not, however, consider the explicit sexual tone of the sign posted above Polgreen. “Pawpaw, Sweetmeats & Pickles of all Sorts” advertised more than the culinary items available for purchase. Free(d) and enslaved women in towns played a significant role in the informal market economy, selling a variety of ground provisions to locals and incoming ships, and the sign above Polgreen clearly situates her within a well-established economic system. She can easily assume the part of a market woman seated outside her “shop.”³⁴ However, the artist’s phallic references on the sign also allude to sexual services offered. The language of “sweetmeats and pickles” worked to both mask and advertise the sexually overt activities within the tavern. At the same time, the image reinforces the positionality of enslaved black women as sexually available, consenting, consumable, and disposable. Many of Rowlandson’s works depict London and other maritime scenes and are filled with sexual references. These include sailors and prostitutes in various sexual acts and stages of undress. It may not be surprising, then, to find him dedicating an entire collection to what was then described as “erotic” art.³⁵ Rowlandson’s caricature of Rachael Pringle Polgreen depicts an extravagant woman of color in various stages of her life. In this single frame, she is racialized, discursively and visually sexualized, and carried across her life-span from a younger, lighter self to an older, darker, larger self. This visual production intertwines Polgreen’s race, gender, and sexuality with a complete narrative of her life story as the artist imagined it. The material fragments of Polgreen’s existence evident in her will, inventory and the lithograph exemplify Trouillot’s concept of archival power.³⁶ Operating on two levels, it influences what it is possible to know or not to know about her life. In the first instance, power is present in the making of the archival fragments during her lifetime. Her will, recorded by a white male contemporary, only leaves evidence of what was valued in Polgreen’s time—the material worth of her assets in property. She left no diary or self-produced records.³⁷ Second, illustrated by the lithographic representation, Polgreen’s image and life history were imagined by a British man whose own socioeconomic and racial reality limited and informed what he produced about a woman of African descent.

      In 1842, nearly fifty-one years after Polgreen’s death, Creoleana, or Social and Domestic Scenes and Incidents in Barbados in the Days of Yore, written by J. W. Orderson, was published in London. Orderson was born in Barbados in 1767 and grew up in Bridgetown. His father John Orderson owned the Barbados Mercury, a local newspaper, and J. W. became its sole proprietor in 1795.³⁸ Thus, he would have been a teenager when many of the events he wrote about in Creoleana occurred, although he wrote about them when he was seventy-five. It was likely, as evidenced in the numerous newspaper advertisements Polgreen placed in his paper, that J. W. Orderson knew the female hotelier.³⁹ It is important to read Creoleana as a “sentimental” novel of its time, for the historical context in and the literary conventions with which the novel was written are as pertinent as Orderson’s characterization of Polgreen. The novel was, as Newton suggests, both “a revision of slavery and a moral reformist tale to guide behavior in post-emancipation society.”⁴⁰ Slavery and apprenticeship had officially been abolished in Britain’s Caribbean colonies by 1842, only four years prior to the novel’s publication. Orderson was clear about his nostalgia for a time in which the enslaved were “happier” in their bondage than in freedom.⁴¹ The consequences for Polgreen’s historical reproduction are clear, as Melanie Newton notes in her critical reading of the novel:

      In the post-slavery era, as had been the case during slavery, stereotyped and sexualized representations of women of color, especially the “mulatto” woman, often served as the means through which white reactionaries expressed both anti-black sentiment and fear of racial “amalgamation.”⁴²

      Acknowledging the pro-slavery project constituent to such representations raises questions about how to use a text like Creoleana as a primary source for Polgreen’s historical “reality.” This is not to dismiss entirely the novel’s potential to historically inform readers or scholars, but rather to offer insight into its distorting representations of Polgreen. At the moment when the British and North American anti-slavery movements were storming across the Atlantic and into the Caribbean, Orderson articulated his pro-slavery beliefs while condemning the “perversion” of inter-racial sex.⁴³ In a pamphlet published in 1816, Orderson responded to British Parliamentary debates concerning the illicit international trade in Africans and the gradual abolition of slavery in their colonies, but his remarks center specifically on the growth of the free population of color in Bridgetown. Using less symbolic language than the novel to describe his abhorrence of inter-racial sex and unions, Orderson explicitly expressed his opinions guided by his own “moral” ideologies. Beyond even his disapprobation for the public display of interracial coupling between military men and women of color, he remarks on the moral decline of white society through this “licentious intercourse” with women of color: