"And there raise yams": Slaves' Gardens in the Writings of West Indian Plantocrats

Weaving together a coming-of-age narrative with a retelling of Jamaica’s colonial history, Michelle Cliff’s novel Abeng (1984) traces the development of an adolescent girl as she comes to grips with the contradictions of contemporary Jamaican society and its attitudes toward race, class, and gender. Apparent on every page is Cliff’s acute sensitivity to old patterns of behavior and ways of thinking, to thoughts and practices that are African and Amerindian in origin or grew out of slavery or in resistance to slavery. For instance, the protagonist Clare, a city girl, goes to the country to spend her summers with her grandmother, Mrs. Freeman, a figure of moral strength and stern religious conviction who raises the same fruits and vegetables that slaves grew in their eighteenth-century provision grounds. “Mr. Freeman grew a few acres of sugar cane, and Mrs. Freeman kept a patch of yam, cassava, plantain, banana, okra, citrus; and there was wild ackee, guava, mango, tamarind, cashew, avocado.” ¹ Mr. and Mrs. Freeman, their names apt, practice a kind of agricultural cultivation that historians and anthropologists associate with a sturdy and independent peasant class. This form of West Indian agriculture, which is “devoted to satisfying local subsistence needs,” has its origins in the provision grounds of slaves who labored on sugar plantations. ²

Mrs. Freeman’s garden and the fruits and vegetables that Cliff names possess a mythic quality in this text. Cliff has recaptured quite subtly in her descriptions of gardens and marketwomen the political importance of such agricultural systems to Afro-Caribbeans now and in the past, political in the sense that the food produced in these gardens was crucial to the survival of enslaved Africans who worked on West Indian sugar plantations. The spiritual and political power that emanates from Cliff’s descriptions of yams, plantains, and cassava can be understood, in part, by recovering the cultural and economic context of the provision grounds of slaves in Jamaica and other British West Indian islands. ³ This essay will focus on the significance of the food grown in slaves’ provision grounds as described by British travelers, sojourners, and planters, whose writings reveal (albeit somewhat begrudgingly) the skill, knowledge, and enterprise of Africans and Afro-Caribbeans who created the bounty of the provision grounds and the marketplace.

Scarcity and Provision Grounds

Slaves on West Indian sugar plantations had two kinds of gardens: small plots of land, sometimes called kitchen gardens, in the yards surrounding their houses, and much larger plots of land, called provision grounds or polinks, on the margins of the plantation. Most households and family units had a kitchen garden. Slaves in Antigua and Barbados did not have provision grounds, as the land is fairly flat and mostly arable, so that nearly every acre was put into sugar cultivation. Islands, like Jamaica and St. Vincent, with their more hilly terrain and central mountainous region, contained land too steep or inaccessible to be suitable for growing sugar cane. On these islands, planters would set aside marginal lands for provision grounds, which were sometimes located several miles from the slaves’ dwellings. While slaves did not legally own their provision grounds, they developed customary rights to the land and owned the production of their labor. ⁴ In both the provision grounds and the kitchen gardens, slaves grew vegetables, fruits, tubers, and plantains to supplement their otherwise meager diets.

In the eighteenth century, slaves working on sugar plantations in the British West Indies were usually given by their master a weekly allotment of two to three pounds of salted fish and sometimes salted beef or pork as well as a few pints of corn meal. Salted cod or herring was imported by planters from New England in exchange for raw sugar that was then refined in New England into molasses and distilled into rum, this exchange making up a portion of the complex triangle trade of slaves and sugar that criss-crossed the Atlantic. A few pounds of salted fish and a few pints of corn meal, clearly, was neither a very plentiful nor...