Lessons to 21st Century Children from the Enslaved Early 19th Children of the Fugitive Slave

A chance encounter with two little boys in the National Library in Bridgetown inspired my desire to show 21st-century children how early 19th-century children actively resisting enslavement in the fugitive slave ads of the Barbados Mercury Gazette could be identified as heroic freedom fighters. In 2014 I had been in the library to do research on Barbados around the time of Bussa’s 1816 rebellion and was using an ungainly, large microfilm reader to access disintegrating microfilm copies of the Gazette. As the text was almost impossible to read, fading and displayed as white on black, I was completely absorbed--until I was startled by two little boys, both about ten, who wanted to know what I was doing. Given my creeping horror at the day-to-day hell on earth Bridgetown must have been I couldn’t tell them, so turned the question asking them what they were doing in the library that sunny Saturday morning. Their faces fell as they told me they were doing research on slavery. “Did you know,” one boy asked, “that overseers used to prod slaves in the ribs with metal cattle prods?”  He demonstrated, poking a finger in his own ribs. I did know, but instead of responding about my reading, I told them a story about the sugar boycott of 1791 when British children and their families gave up sugar in an attempt to put economic pressure on the government to abolish the slave trade. They hadn’t known about the boycott, or about British children advocating for abolition in solidarity with enslaved children. The boys I encountered left the library smiling, pleased that they had a different story to take back to their classmates, one that was about child agency, about children advocating for children. Although I understood at the time that what the boys appreciated was that children—powerless by default—could be heroic, I knew that was not the story they needed. My story was about free, white, British children giving up a luxury item. Only later, once I’d campaigned for the digitization of the Gazette--and had then been part of the winning British Library grant to make digital copies of the paper publicly available—did I understand the viability of 21st-century children finding resistance heroes of their own in its pages.  In my own research, I read, for instance,  about a child in a “found” ad who simply, brilliantly declared herself free. There were also countless examples of resilient family networks resisting all separation attempts. My talk focuses on the children and families in the Gazette from around 1816, people who were Bussa’s de facto army.  By shifting my attention away from the standard scholarly focus rebellion’s leadership, I’ll be able to focus on the otherwise unrecognized people who made the rebellion at least temporarily successful. My work would stand as a pilot project which could be scaled up for recognizing the otherwise unrecognized resistance heroes found in the fugitive slave ads of other Caribbean and Canadian newspapers.

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