Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures

4. Obeah, Slave Revolt, and Plantation Medicine in the British West Indies

127 Chapter 4 obeah, slave Revolt, and Plantation Medicine in the British West indies Secret Knowledge, Rebellion, and James Grainger’s West-India Georgic J ust as Africans throughout North America continued to use knowledge of inoculation to maintain the health of their communities , so enslaved Africans in the British West Indies also employed their medical knowledge to strengthen communal bonds. In several locations , they drew on obeah—a “medicinal complex” of interconnected herbal and spiritual practices—to maintain the health of slaves on plantations as well as to signal their relationship to other New World Africans and to colonists throughout the Americas.1 Africans in the Caribbean often employed these medical practices in secret, to accomplish purposes that were perceived as beneficial by the participants. In Jamaica in 1760, rebelling slaves were inspired by an obeah man, who offered them medicines said to make them invincible to planters’ bullets. Led by a slave named Tacky, the rebels attacked several plantations and a fort in Saint Mary Parish; they escaped to the hills for nearly a year before colonial authorities re-enslaved and punished them.2 One of the first colonial texts to describe obeah after Tacky’s Rebellion, as the 1760 uprising was called, was the physician James Grainger’s 1764 georgic poem The Sugar-Cane, which, as its title suggests, celebrated sugar and its commercial importance to the British Empire by offering practical 128 chapter 4 instructionsregardingsugarproductionandcultivationinneoclassicalpoetic language imitative of Virgil’s Georgics.3 But Grainger’s “West-India georgic” poeticized many more subjects than sugar cane, including tropical flora and fauna, hurricanes, tragic love stories, and, in its final book, African and colonial medical knowledge.4 In particular, Grainger described obeah, explaining that it was composed of “magic spells” (4.381) that both healed and produced disease and therefore did “mischief” as well as “good” on plantations (144). Scholars have cited colonial histories from the 1770s and 1790s as the most influential representations of obeah, while in the nineteenth century sensational novels such as William Earle’s Obi; or the History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) contributed to making obeah a popular literary and dramatic subject.5 However, The Sugar-Cane described obeah at a particularly crucial moment, just after Tacky’s Rebellion began to make clear to colonists that obeah could pose a major threat to plantation hierarchies. Grainger’s poem also participated in an English “georgic revolution,” in which poets imitated the structure and themes of Virgil’s Georgics by writing four-book, didactic poems that suggested agriculture would usher in the Roman Empire’s Golden Age of peace and prosperity. As Anthony Low has argued, the georgic revolution responded to a literary taste for classical poetry andtosociopoliticaltransformationsbroughtaboutbyEngland’semergenceas a nation-state and empire. Georgics accorded new significance to labor, with the goal of increasing enthusiasm for agricultural innovation.6 While the hard work of farming had rarely been considered an appropriate subject for poetry, eighteenth-century georgics such as James Thomson’s The Seasons, John Dyer’s TheFleece,andChristopherSmart’sTheHop-Gardenelevatedtheworkoffarmers and field hands while also celebrating the superiority of British commodities . Describing otherwise prosaic, utilitarian practices with the “address of a Poet”7 neoclassical georgics followed Virgil’s classical example by transforming hard work and skilled labor “from [their] shameful place at the bottom of the social ladder to a new pioneering role as the shaper of history and the benefactor of humanity.”8 Patriotically linking agriculture to the expansion of the British Empire and providing pleasing descriptions of English country life as well as didactic advice regarding agricultural innovations, georgics presented farming as a civilizing, progressive activity crucial to Britain’s imperial glory.9 Similarly, in the British Americas, poets imitated classical georgics by employing their themes and conventions to celebrate colonial staples, from indigo to sugar cane, and to depict the cultivation and civilization of wild lands.10 Obeah, Slave Revolt, and Plantation Medicine 129 Yet Grainger departed from the georgic’s conventional form in a number of ways, with the result that, scholars have argued, the poem fails to achieve the georgic’s formal and thematic conventions. Georgics were narrative poems whose structure mirrored the linear process of producing a crop; they opened with images of uncultivated wilderness and moved on to describe acts of planting, cultivating, and harvesting, before concluding with visions of productive , settled estates. For example, Book 4 of Virgil’s Georgics opens with instructions...