Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-Slavery Jamaica, 1834-1882

Jemmott, Jenny M. Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-Slavery Jamaica, 1834-1882. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2015, x + 263 pp.Jemmott's study of the family life of African-Jamaicans from the formal end of slavery to 1882 is a lightly revised version of her 2005 University of the West Indies, Mona, doctoral dissertation. (Her bibliography has not been updated: nothing appears that was published after 2005.)At the outset, Jemmott takes note of the long history of ideas about dysfunctional and "broken" black Jamaican family forms, but insists that she is less interested in such forms as defined both by nineteenthcentury commentators and by modern scholars; her focus is on "black familial values and interrelationships rather than on family structure" (p. 4). Her aim is "an in-depth historical investigation of the black family, with its rich and diverse tapestry of challenges and advocacy on behalf of kin" (p. 5). And she sees the major historiographical contribution of her book as resting on "its focus on the agency of black families in the maintenance of freedom on their terms, a vision which for many was closely linked to the protection of familial rights and well-being" (p. 11).In addition to contributing to the historiography of post-slavery Jamaica and, by extension, the Caribbean, Jemmot wants her work to resonate with present-day discourses on the black family. In particular, like Erna Brodber in her 2003 Standing Tall: Affirmations of the Jamaican Male, she wants to engage the trope of black male "marginalization" and general absence from the family setting. She does this by providing "important evidence of black male activism on behalf of family" between 1834 and 1882, showing the African-Jamaican man as "a sig- nificant and central" figure "both in terms of his image of self and in the activation of these familial roles" (p. 7).Since Jemmott wants to probe deeply inside the post-slavery Jamaican family, and understand its members' interrelationships and worldviews, she must confront the usual problem of sources: how to hear the voices of the excluded, the weak and the oppressed, in a premodern society where literacy was not widespread? Like many others, she searches for black testimonies (petitions, affidavits, depositions, interviews, evidence in courts or to commissions or magistrates, public speeches), and she also considers what black people actually did. While she accepts the well-known problems of such testimonies, such as the copious evidence given by ordinary Jamaicans to the Jamaica Royal Commission (JRC) in 1866, she believes that to dismiss such testimony as merely whites engaged in "ventriloquizing" blacks is to deny them the power of self-articulation in different media. But of course Jemmott has no choice but to rely heavily on the writings of white men, governors, clergy, abolitionists, newspaper reporters or editors and, above all, the Special/Stipendiary Magistrates (SMs), whose voluminous reports remain perhaps the key primary source for the years between 1834 and about 1860, and not only for Jamaica.The uneven distribution of surviving sources relevant to her subject and focus leads Jemmott to concentrate on the Apprenticeship period and just after, in chapters 2 and 3 - this is when the SMs' reports are especially voluminous, frequent and detailed. Similarly, chapter 5 on the repercussions of Morant Bay on families in St Thomas relies almost entirely on evidence given to the JRC. In chapter 3, she devotes several pages (pp. 98-111) to the efforts of a few families to recover relatives, mostly boys, lured away from Jamaica to Cuba and the USA where they were illegally enslaved. Like similar cases of Trinidadians who found themselves held as slaves in Venezuela before 1854, these efforts - though few in absolute numbers - generated significant paper trails because British consuls and the Foreign, as well as the Colonial, Office became involved. …