Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of modernity

Burnard, Trevor

Abstract

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur is one of the key delineators of the American national character, a man whose Letters from an American Farmer has a canonical status in early American literature. He is primarily known for his bucolic depiction of rural Pennsylvania, as the originator of the notion of America as a mostly harmonious melting pot of different ethnicities and religions, and as the author of that most famous of American questions, "What, then, is the American, this new man?" What is little appreciated is that Crèvecoeur had a more complicated, less sunny and optimistic view of national character than that customarily presented in his Letters from an American Farmer. We have become aware since the publication in English in 1995 of his unpublished work that Crèvecoeur's America is a more complicated and darker place than that depicted in all of the letters in his famous book. The exception in Letters is Letter IX, his atmospheric portrait of Charleston, a place on the one hand seen as full of the "gayest" people in America, the "center of our beau monde," including "a great number of valetudinarians from the West Indies, seeking for the renovation of health, exhausted by the debilitating nature of their sun, air, and modes of living," but also seen on the other hand as being characterized by litigiousness, physical debility, moral decadence, and a brutal slave regime. The most haunting image of his description of the sights of Charleston is an infamous encounter between the narrator, James, and a tortured slave, put in a cage in a tree, left to starve to death by his master, with birds of prey picking out his eyes and attacking his flesh. This description of the caged slave has usually been seen as a dystopic rupture where the relatively coherent narrative voice of the early, sunny sections suffers an irrevocable collapse. Elizabeth Cook, for example, argues that Crèvecoeur's belief in the cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment is fatally undermined by the paradoxical status of the slave's body as both agent of labor and agent of property, confronting the unnerved narrator with an uncanny form of rebellious agency.2 Letter IX has always proved difficult for commentators because its themes and dark tone seem to provide an abrupt and discordant disjuncture from the utopianism of the earlier letters on the American North. It seems out of place. But it is not. As Christopher Iannini notes, Crèvecoeur's work is neither a work that offers a celebratory account of an ideal America nor a work that struggles to reconcile a set of conflicts internal to an emergent mainland society. It is instead, once we look at Crèvecoeur's unpublished works, especially the "Sketch of a Contrast between the Spanish and the English Colonies" and "Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects," a truly Atlantic work in which Charleston is not at the southern end of a north American mainland but at the northern periphery of an extended Caribbean that was thoroughly implicated in a global commercial revolution, based on slavery, that threatened the foundations of Enlightenment rationality. Crèvecoeur's account of Jamaica was likely based on a visit to Kingston. We can see this in his attention to how business was done and to the constant crowds that attend his narrator when trying, and failing, not to be duped by the sharp practices that passed for business on the island. It can also be seen in a description of some of the cruelties of slavery, related through the person of an "English-born Lady" with whom he lodged, presumably in Kingston, and who whipped her house Negroes in what seems most likely to have been an urban setting. For Crèvecoeur, Kingston was deeply disturbing in ways that Spanish America-lethargic, indolent, superstitious, and backward- was not. Kingston was indubitably modern, a place displaying what were for Crèvecoeur the characteristics of modernity-restless wandering, corruption, and pervasive dishonesty. He noted that Kingston was a model of some sort. It was, after all, a place where there was "a great Glare of Richesses." But his narrator was "shocked at that perpetual Collision & Combination of Crimes & Profligacy which I observed there," the "severity Exercised agt ye Negroes" and the excitement of illicit sexuality that raised some black females to "Pomp" derived, Crevecoeur thought, from "a perversion of appetites." In a place with no religion "save [a] few Temples," everything was sacrificed to business and sensuality-"a perpetual pursuit of Gain & Pleasures seem'd to be the idol of the Island." For the outsider and tourist, Kingston was bewildering a "Chaos of Men Negroes & things which made my Young American head Giddy." Fighting his way "through this obnoxious Crowd," the now not so innocent narrator reflected that "the Island itself looked like a Great Gulph, perpetually absorbing Men by the power of Elementary Heat, of Intemperance by the force of every Excess" so that "Life ressembled a Delirium Inspired by the warmth of the sun urging every Passion & desire to some premature Extreme." His only response to these extremes, to the "Exhausting Climate" and to "the perpetual struggle subsisting between the 2 great factions which Inhabit this Island," was to take his leave of Kingston, resolving not to think about it again.4 Thoughts of what passed in Kingston cast doubt upon the Enlightenment project of cosmopolitan adventuring. Both Letter IX on Charleston and the unpublished "Sketches of Jamaica" reveal the disillusionment of a previously innocent narrator going to decadent plantation societies.

Citation

Burnard, T. (2016). Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of modernity. In J. Cañizares-Esguerra, M. D. Childs, & J. Sidbury (Eds.), The Black urban Atlantic in the age of the slave trade : the early modern Americas (122-144). University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Press). https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812208139

• Online Publication Date: Jul 1, 2013
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 1, 2022
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Press)
• Pages: 122-144
• Series Title: The Early Modern Americas
• Book Title: The Black urban Atlantic in the age of the slave trade : the early modern Americas
• Chapter Number: 6
• ISBN: 9780812223767; 9780812245103
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812208139
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3579683