Love Child comprises eleven chapters, spanning the history of Barbados from pre-Columbian times to the present. We shall summarize these chapters in a moment. But first let me quickly mention why Barbados is unique.
Highlights of the book's eleven chapters are as follows:
"One Child, Three Parents" describes the early settlement of Barbados as a blending of European, African, and Amerind heritages.
"Race or Class, The Two-Edged Sword" tells how imported Africans clung to their own class-stratified society, even as slaves.
"The Cry for Christian Mercy" describes the clergy's gatekeeper role in admitting the fair-complexioned offspring of exogamous relationships into the Coloured or White Barbadian castes. Pages 38-40 are particularly useful in itemizing caste assimilation, parish by parish.
"The Record of the Unregistered" examines neglected primary sources to observe the permeability of the island's three-caste system. Page 49 is particularly useful in showing how African folklore permeated Barbados via Gold Coast nannies. This chapter also lists common given names in various West African languages. Note that the similar lists in Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1974) are much more complete.
"Assimilation or Emigration" explains why many Coloured Barbadians emigrated.
"Where Did the Amerindian Family Go?" suggests that the so-called "Red Legs" of Barbados (whom many think of simply as poor Whites) actually have significant Native American ancestry.
"Possessed by Love" surveys the many White planter wills that left wealth and property to biracial offspring. It provides persuasive evidence that many, if not most, sexual relations between male Euro-Barbadian planters and female Afro-Barbadian laborers were loving relationships, "contrary to the current unbalanced view of wholesale sexual exploitation and rape" (p. 101).
"Black Secrets in M'Lady's Chambers" narrates accounts that invert the common image of male planters' relationships with female slaves. It also mentions, on page 123, the 1733 Jamaica law that "regarded quadroons as legally white." This was similar to the 1785 Virginia law under which Sally Hemings became White, except that the Jamaica law was limited to baptized Christians while the Virginia law was limited to non-slaves. Both were very different from the 1721 Barbados law mentioned on page 126, whose definition of "white" reads remarkably like a one-drop rule. Obviously, the Barbados law must not have been enforced.
"The Love Child of the Nineteenth Century" reviews travelers' tales of the Free Coloured of Barbados. The most memorable of these (p. 151-2) is Anthony Trollope's 1850 visit to the island, when he reported that only White men could legally run for public office, but then said, "How it is decided whether a man be white or not, I did not hear."
"The Love Child Takes Centre Stage" outlines the early twentieth-century struggle for workers' rights, led by Barbados's middle ("coloured" or biracial) caste. It also highlights their increasingly distancing themselves from the poor Black caste. Interestingly, page 159 mentions the then-common theory (also found in Frederick Douglass's 1859 Massachusetts and in Ben Tillman's 1895 South Carolina) that the striking intelligence of the middle caste was due to their European brains plus their African tenacity.
Finally, "The Twentieth-Century Melt-down" describes the formation of the current nation-state.
On the minus side, I had two problems with the book: one minor, one major.
The minor problem is that the book seems to have been written with local (Barbadian) readers in mind. It focuses so tightly on caste permeability that one must already know the overall history of Barbados in order to fully grasp what it is talking about. For instance, chapter three's narration of clandestine baptisms by clergymen of planters' biracial offspring makes sense only if you already know that the pre-eighteenth-century Anglican Church forbade the baptism of non-Whites (a fact not mentioned in the book). Similarly, the biracial Diaspora (to South Carolina, among other places) described in chapter five makes sense only if you know why virtually every inch of Barbadian land belonged to large plantations. (The reason is in this review's third paragraph.) The book's tight focus is a minor problem, however, because you can easily work around it. Do this by reading the one-page history of Barbados in Britannica 2:718 or, for a complete picture, by reading the definitive Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University, 1990).
The book's major problem is its lack of numbers. It lacks tables showing what fraction of children of a Black parent rose into Coloured society or what fraction of biracial offspring rose into White society. It lacks rates of intermarriage across either of the two color lines (Black-Coloured or Coloured-White). In my view, the very essence of caste permeability is its numerical measure. For example, even at the nadir of the U.S. Jim Crow wave of terror, about 11,000 B/W interracial couples lived in the United States and about 2,800 young men per year switched race. As percentages, these examples mean that the U.S. color line was then stricter even than India's Hindu castes. My point is that some permeability always exists; what counts is its rate. Love Child leaves you wondering whether Barbados's castes were comparatively strict or lenient. One doubts that the book can accomplish its stated goal (of dispelling the myth of caste impermeability) without offering numbers. For an example of how this might have been accomplished, see Christopher Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541-1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1994), a book using similar (church and civil) data sources, but enhanced by the inclusion of a few tables in the appendix. Admittedly, this reviewer is a bit of a fanatic about numbers. Some readers are satisfied with qualitative narration, even though this means that caste phenomena cannot be matched up against, say, Trinidad, Brazil, or Minnesota. For such readers, my objection will rightly seem to be a purist engineer's quibbling.
All in all, despite my frustration with its lack of numbers, I recommend this book to anyone interested in caste formation, especially regarding the oddities of Barbados's three-caste system with its two color lines and its (apparently) relatively high inter-caste permeability. Be warned, though, read up on overall Barbadian history first, and do not expect graphs or charts.
Incidentally, the author of Love Child is now working on a new book on White bondage in the seventeenth century (before the large-scale importation of Africans). Although Dr. Anthony Philips headed the History Department at UWI's Cave Hill campus while Ms. Salazar was earning her degree, she did take one or two courses under the current department head -- Dr. Hilary Beckles. According to Beckles (1990, p. 17-18), many of the features that we nowadays associate with African slavery (laborers could not leave the plantation without a pass, they were legally property -- not people -- without legal rights, their owners could torture or kill them with impunity) were invented in Cromwell's time to control European involuntary laborers, usually Irish ones, not Africans. Being married to a woman who takes her Irish heritage very seriously, I eagerly look forward to Salazar's forthcoming book, White Bondage in Barbados.
Lila E. Salazar worked as Secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister of Barbados from 1982 to 1987 and is now a Hansard
Reporter at Parliament. She is a native of St. Michael, Barbados and descends from multiracial planter families. Her book, Love Child, is an expansion of a Caribbean Studies paper she wrote on the "Free Coloured of Barbados" for her history degree from the University of the West Indies.
Although often considered part of the Lesser Antilles, geographically the 14-by-21-mile island is not volcanic, but a coral-capped sedimentary seamount, a hundred miles to the east -- upwind -- of the nearest other island (the way that Bermuda lies off South Carolina, but not as far). It is the first New World landfall for ships following the trade winds, and this made it unique in three ways. First, it was never attacked because there is nowhere to stage an assault. Invasion fleets must refit and resupply shortly before attacking, oceangoing ships could not sail upwind very well, and Europe or Africa are too distant. So, unlike all other Caribbean islands, who bled their wealth into defense, Barbados could single-mindedly develop its economy. Second, Britain used Barbados as military staging area for its near-constant warfare against the downwind Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonies. Barbados was usually crawling with imperial soldiers. So, unlike every other slave-based economy in history, Barbados did not need a yeoman class to crush slave revolts. Finally, since Barbados did not need a landowning middle class, the younger sons of Euro-Barbadians and upwardly mobile biracial Barbadians were economically driven off the island. (Some of these exiles founded South Carolina.) Consequently, Barbados quickly evolved into a unique population of wealthy Euro-Barbadian planters who owned every scrap of land, a large number of Afro-Barbadian slaves who did all the work, and a small, landless, biracial caste sandwiched uncomfortably between.Summary
Ms. Salazar says that prior histories have not erased the myth "that Barbados remained among all her sister islands as the bastion of white purity, the land which did not allow the taint of miscegenation to penetrate its ruling families." (p. i) She considers this myth triply hypocritical. First, it allows European-looking Barbadians to falsely claim racial purity. Second, it encourages African-looking Barbadians to falsely deny lucrative African participation in the slave trade. Third, it enables both groups to blame "coloured" (biracial) Barbadians, on the one hand, for having slave ancestry and, on the other, for socially siding with the planters. She wants her book to dispel this myth by showing that virtually all Barbadians descend from a blending of Afro-Euro-Amerind heritage. She hopes that this revelation will lead to social reconciliation.Evaluation
On the plus side, this book touches all the bases for its topic. Wills, baptismal records, marriage records, manumission records, are all scrutinized for evidence of caste permeability. Even people's given and family names are inspected for African roots. This gives the book additional usefulness beyond its stated goal (of merely revealing caste permeability to dispel a myth). The additional usefulness is implied in the book's subtitle. By including examples of so many different primary sources of documentation, the book can truly be used as a genealogist's guide or checklist.
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