Searching for the invisible man : slaves and plantation life in Jamaica

Though centered on a single Jamaican sugar estate, Worthy Park, and dealing largely with the period of formal slavery, this book is firmly placed in far wider contexts of place and time. The "Invisible Man" of the title is found, in the end, to be not just the formal slave but the ordinary black worker throughout the history of the plantation system. Michael Craton uses computer techniques in the first of three main parts of his study to provide a dynamic analysis of the demographic, health, and socioeconomic characteristics of the Worthy Park slaves as a whole. The surprising diversity and complex interrelation of the population are underlined in Part Two, consisting of detailed biographies of more than 40 individual members of the plantation's society, including whites and mulattoes as well as black slaves. This is the most ambitious attempt yet made to overcome the stereotyping ignorance of contemporary white writers and the muteness of the slaves themselves. Part Three is perhaps the most original section of the book. After tracing the fate of the population between the emancipation of 1838 and the present day through genealogies and oral interviews, Craton concludes that the predominant feature of plantation life has not been change but continuity, and that the accepted definitions of slavery need considerable modification. Frontmatter Prologue: Worthy Park and Its Context, 1670-1975 (page 1) Part One: The Slave Population at Large (page 51) 1 The Population before 1783 (page 53) 2 Demographic Patterns, 1783-1838 (page 60) 3 Mortality, Fertility, Life Expectancy, 1783-1838 (page 85) 4 Death, Disease, Medicine, 1783-1838 (page 119) 5 Economics, Employment, Social Cohesion, 1783-1838 (page 135) Part Two: Individuals in Slave Society, Selected Biographies (page 189) Introduction (page 191) 6 Bunga-Men: Six Africans (page 197) 7 Conformists: Ten Ordinary Slaves (page 209) 8 Specialists: Five Slave Craftsmen (page 223) 9 Accommodators: Five Patterns of Miscegenation (page 235) 10 Resisters: Five Slave Nonconformists (page 245) 11 Backra: Three Plantation Whites (page 255) Part Three: The Sons of Slavery (page 273) 12 The Transition to Free Wage Labor, 1834-1846 (page 274) 13 Continuities: Worthy Park's Modern Workers (page 316) 14 The Rope Unraveled and Respliced: The Evidence of Genealogy (page 331) 15 From House Slave to Middle Class: The Descendants of John Price Nash (page 341) 16 From Field Slave to Peasant-Proletarian: The Descendants of Biddy and Nelson (page 355) 17 Coda and Conclusion: The Seamless Cloth (page 367) Appendixes (page 385) A. The Slave Data and Its Deficiencies (page 387) B. The Computer Programs (page 394) C. A Doctor's Views on Childbirth, Infant Mortality, and the General Health of His Slave Charges, 1788 (page 395) D. Medicine at Worthy Park, 1824 (page 398) Notes (page 401)