Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa

2. “These Sons of Freedom”: Black Caribs across Three Diasporic Horizons

chapter 2 “These Sons of Freedom” Black Caribs across Three Diasporic Horizons The eastern part, which is chiefly in wood, is inhabited by about 2000 natives, who owe their origin (truly poetical) to a ship freighted with Negroes, from Africa to Barbadoes, and wrecked on these coasts. . . . Thus descended, and by Providence thus chartered, these Sons of Freedom are armed for their defence, and grown tenacious and jealous of their liberties. Sir William Young, Some Observations Garifuna diasporic religion presupposes a distinction from something else from which it departs, namely Garifuna religion as it developed at home. But Garifuna homeland religion, too, emerged from a historical and spatial journey, out of dislocations from Africa to St. Vincent to Central America to the United States. It was formed across three diasporic horizons and out of the memories of three different homelands left behind. Only one of these, the Central American Caribbean coast, is today actually visited by New York Garifuna. The other two, St. Vincent and Africa, are imagined places, in the sense that few contemporary Garifuna have visited their shores. Nevertheless, they are also places that strongly influence even contemporary religious practice, and a grasp of these layered pasts is needed to understand the ritual events of the present. This chapter revisits the Garifuna passage through each of these multiple homelands and the reasons for each of these spatial dislocations. 60 “THESE SONS OF FREEDOM” 61 An Afro-Amerindian “Colonial Tribe” Black Carib religion provides a stunning example of the religious transculturation and syncretizing events that occurred throughout the Caribbean Basin during the centuries after Columbus’s landing.1 Seventeenth-century French accounts—from the Dominicans JeanBaptiste du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste Labat, and Raymond Breton to the Protestant Charles de Rochefort and the Jesuit affiliate Sieur de la Borde—described Island Carib rites and beliefs on Dominica, Guadeloupe, and St. Vincent. Often the early reports described the residents as having no religion whatsoever (see, for example, Breton 1992: 110; G. Davidson 1787: 6). Carib religion was consistently read in relation to the religious polemics that divided Europe. La Borde accused them of being “not unlike the Calvinists” for want of priests, altars, or sacrifices (1704: 523), and British colonists in the eighteenth century found the Black Caribs’ Catholicism, along with other “French” tastes, abhorrent. figure 4. A Family of Charaibes Drawn from the Life in the Island of St. Vincent. Engraving from a painting by Agostino Brunias (ca. 1770). Source: Edwards 1794. 62 “THESE SONS OF FREEDOM” In comparison with the urgency with which Europe devoured Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica, many of the small, “lesser” Antilles in the southeast corner of the Caribbean archipelago remained relatively undisturbed until well into the eighteenth century. It was onto one of these islands, St. Vincent, and a world that was still largely the province of the Island Caribs, that Africans were propelled by the Atlantic slave trade. Out of this sudden copresence, an encounter not chosen by either group, a new synthetic ethnicity and religion— what Mary Helms (1969) called a “colonial tribe”—was born. whence the africans? Enslaved Africans destined for Caribbean labor were abruptly thrown onto the shores and mercy of the Island Caribs of St. Vincent, an island first named, and claimed, by the Spanish, then by the British, but thoroughly ignored by both. The rapprochements by which the Africans survived and, together with the Indians, founded the new ethnicity and religious culture of the Black Caribs remain something of a mystery. The presence of a large number of “negroes” on St. Vincent elicited explanations from various European observers. The British major John Scott ascribed it to two Spanish slavers intended for Barbados that were shipwrecked in 1635 off the coast of St. Vincent (Great Britain Calendar of State Papers 1661–68: 534), an account recapitulated often enough to become the standard account of the origins of the Black Caribs (La Borde 1992 [1674]: 150; W. Young 1764: 7; P. Gibbs 1786: 32–33; G. Davidson 1787: 7; Morris 1787; Edwards 1799: 104; Kerns 1997: 38; Gonzalez 1988: 26; Hulme and Whitehead 1992: 171; Leblond 2000 [1813]; Coelho 1995: 36). Sir William Young, Britain’s future governor of Dominica, referred in 1764, and more specifically in papers published posthumously by his son in 1795, to a similar shipwreck of a Portuguese vessel in 1675 (W. Young 1764; 1971 [1795]: 6). In...