Novel: A Life of an enslaved woman in Jamaica

       My name is Nanny Jones and I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1789. My first master Mr Williams was a excellent lawyer and he was kind to his slaves. My mother was born in Barbados and she was sold to Mr Williams when she was at the age of fourteen. She had worked as a domestic servant for about thirty years when she died of tuberculosis. According to my mother's narration, my father was a slave of another planter and he used to behired by Mr Williams as a cooper. I have never seen him when I was sensible, because the marriage between him and my mother was illegal and he was sold to Antigua soon after my birth.

        I lived with my mother and became a player of my little master Anne, the daughter of Mr Williams. That time was one of my happiest time in my life and I doesn't know the distinction between Anne and I. When I was twelve years old, however, the misfortune came down on me. Mr Williams died and Mrs Williams had to sell me and several other slaves to pay for the fees of funeral. I remembered that how I wept for parting with my mother and Anne.

         I was sold to a sugar planter and began to suffer a great number of adversity. I worked as a field worker, which was considered the most terrible work to slaves. The most field workers were women and they were divided into four gangs according to the age and physical ability. The first labor gang was the most important labor gang and the members of it were at ages from 16 to 54. They digged cane holes, planted the canes, and cut off the stalks. Children like me picked up the stalks and bunched them. Yonger children were responsible for weeding. I became a member of first gang at age of 16 and was much busier than before. During the out-of-crop season, I worked from daybreak to sundown, 5:00 am to 7:00 pm, or eleven and one-half hours, excluding meal breaks. There was a half-hour midmorning break for breakfast in the field and a two-hour break at noon for dinner. The work was much busier in the havest period. The work time expanded to about seventeen hours. Sometimes I even worked for twenty hours every day. In addition, we usually received severe punichment for just a little fault. I had been tied up in a tree and recieved the whip for several hours because I trampled on some stalks carelessly.

           That time was really a terrible time. I desired to get freedom every minute. I heard that some female slaves collected money to earn their freedom through selling something at the absent of master. Some even earned money through prostitution. I had not such thought and chance to do that, however. I had worked for the field for eleven years when I met a free person of color, James Davis. He was a carpenter and we fall in love. He bought my freedom from my master, and we married. I was a free woman now.

Cited: Thomas Cleveland Holt, The Problem of freedom, race, labor, and politics in Jamaica and Britain 1832-1938. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1992.