A Nineteenth-Century Portrait
- A Nineteenth-Century Portrait
When Mister Robert Scarlett, master of Cambridge and Druckett plantations, stood for his portrait, the good man made a point of having his personal slave-boy, Oliver, beside him, waist high, holding his game bag, with which he'd ride to hunt wild hog and occasional runaways. At his other side his favourite dog. How well the boy's dark visage serves design, matching the dark of the trees to cast in relief the pale, proprietorial white.
Those were the good days; they didn't last. After the slave revolts of 1831 great houses, factories, everything was gone; only the family tomb remained. And what of Oliver? History has left no afterword; a boy in a picture, a period-piece, on which poets may stretch out a fiction.
Edward Baugh, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica), is author of Derek Walcott and editor of Walcott's Selected Poems. Baugh's second book of poems, It Was the Singing, was published in 2000.
