Following a Ghost: “A Certain Mulatto Woman Slave Named Phibbah”

Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a counter memory, for the future.

—Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters

At the Advanced Institute on Literature and Suffering seminar sponsored by the University of Macau English Department, I presented a paper arguing that the eighteenth-century author Charlotte Smith’s children’s literature shaped her son Lionel’s leadership as governor of Barbados and governor general of the Windward Islands during the transition from slavery to apprenticeship in the British West Indies. Charlotte Smith’s didactic literature taught children to question received knowledge, gather evidence, and make comparisons in order to chart an ethical response to the major social problems of 1790s England. My paper argued that in his letters from Barbados to the Colonial Office between 1833 and 1836, Lionel Smith translated his mother’s ethical pedagogy into a rhetorical strategy for representing the suffering of slaves and apprentices. Thus I had come to the seminar in Macau immersed in thinking about the relationship between the representation of suffering and activism. During the intense discussions among the seminar participants, however, my mind turned not to Lionel Smith or social action, but to a slave called Phibbah or Fibbah.

Thoughts about Fibbah emerged, perhaps, because trauma dominated our discussions in Macau. Trauma theorists have taught us that trauma makes itself known by the intrusion of unassimilated memories into a consciousness that cannot will itself to remember. Literature can help us learn to hear the traumatic experience: “It is the specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet.”¹ My preoccupation with the eighteenth-century Barbados slave named Fibbah certainly existed at an intersection of knowing and not knowing, but this border was not the same as the intrusion of traumatic memory. Furthermore, Fibbah left no narrative in which one might sense the residue of any trauma that she experienced. Fibbah exists in the historical record only in brief references, and never in her own voice. Yet still, trauma theorists’ attention to traces of memory resonated with the traces I found of Fibbah in legal documents. If the literary imagination could help us hear the shape of trauma in narratives, perhaps it could help me listen to Fibbah beyond the scraps in the historical record. This essay explores the ways in which we might hear subjects of historical erasure, especially those who reside only in fragments within narratives writ en by their oppressors. One could argue simply that we cannot do so. Yet sometimes the erased, ignored, and silenced call out to us, unbidden and unexpected. As Avery Gordon argues, they haunt us. I felt called to follow Fibbah’s ghost, understanding a ghost in Gordon’s terms: “The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.”² In this essay, I tell the story of investigating that ghost.

I first encountered Fibbah in March 2011 in Barbados. I was not looking for her, and I had not yet begun to try to hear her story. I was conducting research in the Barbados Department of Archives on the history of Charlotte Smith’s family, a history that is interwoven with that of slavery and abolition on the West Indian island. Like many literary critics who work for years on a particular author, I identified to some degree with my subject. First as a graduate student, then later as a single mother and untenured faculty member, I related in kind if not in degree to Charlotte Smith’s...