Revising the Colonial Caribbean: “Three-Fingered Jack” and the Jamaican Pantomime

In 1780, the notorious rebel “Three-Finger’d Jack” Mansong escaped from slavery into the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and murdered hundreds of travelers. The dangerous outlaw remained at large for almost two years before he was captured and killed by the same Maroon who had allegedly taken two of his fingers in an earlier skirmish.¹ Jack’s exploits captured the British imagination, prompting over twenty biographical accounts in the Romantic period alone, including John Fawcett’s tremendously successful London pantomime, Obi; or Three-Finger’d Jack (1800).² Two hundred years after Jack’s execution, Kingston’s Little Theatre Movement (LTM) celebrated Jack as a freedom fighter in its annual pantomime. Written by playwright Ted Dwyer, Mansong (1980) amalgamates elements of British literary and theater traditions with Jamaican folk history into a creolized text that reflects the island’s troubled past as well as the syncretism of the Jamaican pantomime. Dwyer’s Mansong engages the problems and practices of representation from within a primarily oral culture, calling particular attention the transatlantic exchange and transformation of stories about slavery, colonialism, and their aftermaths.

The Jamaican Royal Gazette published the first known account of Three-Finger’d Jack in 1780, issuing the governor’s proclamation for the reward and capture of the runaway. Early the following year it reported Jack’s death at the hands of Maroons, runaway slaves who formed autonomous communities in remote areas. These early journalistic accounts emphasize Jack’s leadership of some sixty runaway slaves and their eventual dispersal; after 1799, however, accounts of his life—some more sympathetic than others—describe him as a solitary bandit allegedly protected by obeah (obi), an Afro-Caribbean system of beliefs.³ For the first three decades of the nineteenth century, fictional and stage adaptations of his life and his obi circulated in England, the provinces, and the United States. Despite Jack’s enduring reputation as a bandit, originated and perpetuated by the colonial British, Jamaican playwrights and directors have harnessed Jack’s energy to celebrate Jamaican independence from England and from a past of slavery and colonialism. To this day, Jack Mansong remains a significant though problematic figure in Jamaican oral and literary culture.

Although Jack’s story has circulated around the Atlantic for over two hundred years, critical accounts of his life have been largely Eurocentric and pay scant attention to the Jamaican perspective. Somewhat ironically, recent scholarship frequently invokes the vocabulary of loss and recovery.⁴ Chuck Rzepka, for example, suggests that the Obi plays offer Romantic period scholars a means to consider “our own cultural amnesia” (“Obi Now” 3). Debbie Lee identifies the cure for this amnesia in African American tragedian Ira Aldridge’s performance of Jack in the Obi melodrama of 1830: “The fascinating power of the obi bag,” she explains, “emerged complete in the character of Jack as played by Aldridge” (9). Lee’s suggestion of completion, however, speaks to what Paul Youngquist and I have called the “amnesia of Romanticism, the [largely] unremembered histories of diasporic Africans and creole cultures in the West Indies” (2). These often unremembered histories—in this case, the missing, forgotten, or elided texts about Jack Mansong—can illuminate the existing materials: each intersection and deviation tells a story of its own.

Shaped foundationally by archival research, field work, and performance theory, this essay uses literary texts, newspaper accounts, folklore, play texts, theater reviews, performance videos, musical scores, new media, oral histories, and interviews with Jamaican Maroons to assemble a narrative about Jack Mansong. Taking my methodological cue from Saidya Hartman, I contrive to “brush history against the grain,” using “forms of knowledge and practice not generally considered legitimate objects of historical inquiry or appropriate or adequate sources for history making” (11). By reading between and across these texts, I assemble fragments of a literary and historical past into a disjointed narrative that—like Jack’s three-fingered hand—tells a story of violence, loss, and retribution. My bricolage emphasizes the transformative and evolutionary aspects of transculturation: the mutual exchange of cultures and ideologies in the Black Atlantic.

The earliest...