Chapter One
Testing and Testifying The Hart Sisters
Elizabeth Hart Thwaites (1772-1833) and Anne Hart Gilbert (1773-1834) of Antigua were pioneering educators and social workers on their native island. Born into a black slaveholding family, they were devout Methodists who worked to redefine the status of free blacks and slaves in Antigua. Reverend Richard Pattison, an English missionary stationed on the island of Nevis, asked both women to write separate accounts of the rise and progress of Methodism in Antigua. Both complied in 1804, each writing a brief "History of Methodism." Their narratives differ in tone and content, and this is perhaps reflective of their different status and personality. Yet their narratives are complementary in their functional aspects; each is exemplary spiritual autobiography as well as church history and women''s history. Anne''s narrative focuses on the religious project in its historical aspects and her activism on behalf of Methodism and the women and children of Antigua, while Elizabeth''s is a more personal account of the process of conversion and the sisters'' commitment to personal salvation, church ministry, and social reform.
As converts to Methodism, the sisters had direct access to influential metropolitan-based organizations ideologically and actively opposed to slavery and the plantation system. While their conversion to Wesleyan Methodism in 1786 and subsequent religious and social activism deepened the process of acculturation in the African Caribbean community, Methodism gave them a legitimate alternative institutional base for organized resistance to an oppressive colonial system. Moira Ferguson concludes: "Their role as religious educators offers them an important status and public voice in Antigua and simultaneously allows them a cover of sorts for abolitionist and emancipationist activities" (Colonialism and Gender 3).
As the daughters of Barry Conyers Hart, a free black who reportedly agonized about his role as plantation owner and slaveholder (Ferguson, Hart Sisters 5), Anne and Elizabeth were educated according to their privilege and status. They were well positioned to assume leadership roles in the Methodist Church in Antigua. Their status afforded them a certain measure of protection, and their color gave them access to free and enslaved blacks of all classes. Anne Hart Gilbert writes that on her arrival in English Harbor "my complexion exempted me from those prejudices and that disgust which the instability of their white Bretheren had planted in their hearts & they tremblingly ventured to receive us as friends" (Ferguson, Hart Sisters 72). As Methodist converts, preachers, teachers, and writers, the Hart sisters asserted their independence as free black women working for the social betterment and spiritual uplift of free and enslaved Africans. They cultivated liberal metropolitan alliances and assumed leadership roles in an alternative community that challenged the ideology and practice of colonial slavery.
Anne Hart Gilbert and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites were a formidable pair. They repeatedly challenged social and political conventions of plantation society, first by converting to Methodism on an island where the white ruling class was largely Anglican and hostile to the spread of evangelical Christianity; by marrying white men of influence in Antigua and in the Methodist Church in Antigua; and by embarking on a program of preaching, teaching, and good works with the explicit intention of changing the image and status of free and enslaved Africans in general and women in particular. In the face of concerted opposition from friends and the ruling elite, the sisters worked for the spread of Methodism among Africans and in the process helped to establish an ideological alternative to the antispiritual, anti-intellectual materialism of the plantation system. They offered religious instruction to slaves and free blacks and taught them to read. Thanks to their energetic intervention, the rituals of church membership generated a new basis for self-definition and with it a new sense of community grounded in spiritual difference and church-sanctioned assembly (Ferguson, Hart Sisters 43, 44). The plantation hierarchy had to contend with organized resistance facilitated by the rise of a black and colored church leadership that traveled from plantation to plantation and an influential and powerful founder in Nathaniel Gilbert.
The sisters'' stalwart Methodism was not without its downside. Their Methodist devotion to the Bible as sacred text and to literacy inevitably deepened their psychological and cultural dependence on England and gave new impetus to Europeans'' sweeping rejection of African and African Caribbean cultures as pagan and barbaric. If the African convert was the equal of the European in the new religious order, ancestral Africa and African-derived customs were rejected as signs of ungodliness, ignorance, superstition, and sin (Ferguson, Hart Sisters 58-60). The ensuing tension between an African spiritual base and a European one continues unabated in our time, but what the Hart sisters exude in their lives and their works is the zealous pursuit of social and political change. Piety and patriotism, salvation and emancipation are intertwined in their work and writings. If the acculturative, assimilative disposition of the Methodist Church and its puritanical values were antithetical to an existing slave culture of survival, the Hart sisters nonetheless make a strong case for racial equality, for the empowerment of women, for a developing sense of native community, and for Christianity as a site of resistance. As Moira Ferguson concludes: "By thematizing their concerns as black Antiguans while foregrounding the occupiers'' religion, they established a specific black Antiguan cultural identity" (Hart Sisters 47). Both women had a highly developed sense of racial solidarity and of Antigua as their native land. In their writings the drama of the antislavery movement is located in Antigua, and they are center stage of their own volition.
The histories of Anne Gilbert and Elizabeth Thwaites, short as they are (eighteen pages and seven pages, respectively), bear explicit resemblance to nineteenth-century African American spiritual or conversion narratives. As church historians, the Hart sisters control the substance of the ensuing discourse though not the circumstances of their literary production. Their narratives testify to their spiritual and ministerial experiences as dedicated members of the Methodist Church in Antigua, and each is written in the form of a letter to Pattison. The letters bring the sisters together in a common agenda, yet their individual histories are different in style and content. They diverge along the lines of private and public, personal and historical. The sisters worked so closely together and their individual histories are so sharply divergent in function that it is easy to suspect collusion. In some respects Anne Hart Gilbert and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites appear to be mirror images of each other. Born one year apart, they died one year apart. Both converted to Methodism at the same time, made radical changes in their lifestyle, and worked closely together with their white husbands on projects that had a dramatic influence on Antiguan life. Working together, the sisters established the first Sunday school in the West Indies in 1809 and founded the Female Refuge Society of Antigua in 1815; in the absence of Anne Hart Gilbert, who had returned to St. John''s with her husband when his position at the naval base in English Harbour was eliminated, Elizabeth Hart Thwaites oversaw the girls'' department of English Harbour Sunday School. Pattison asked the sisters to write him a letter "regarding the rise and progress of Methodism in Antigua" (Ferguson, Hart Sisters 57), and both complied in 1804, barely a month apart, Elizabeth on May 5 and Anne on June 1. Anne wrote that she had done this once before, in 1790.
Their individual histories negotiate very different territory. In Anne Hart Gilbert''s "History" personal narrative is subsumed in her account of the religious-historical project. Anne''s history details crises and successes in the Methodist program for religious conversion and social reform and her concerns as an activist, teacher, and preacher''s wife. She documents instances of superstition and ignorance among slaves, free people of color, and "those called white people" alike (Ferguson, Hart Sisters 59-60). Hers is the impassioned discourse of a "full heart" (66), the emotional centerpiece of which is a brief ecstatic affirmation of her personal salvation (65-66). She inscribes herself with some effort at humility as a model of nineteenth-century Methodist womanhood. She makes herself known in protestations of faith and good works, through her championing of black women and children and her denunciation of a corrupt plantocracy. Though she is married at the time and her husband is intimately involved in church activities, she mentions him only casually and makes no mention at all of the public insults that they suffered when they announced their marriage. In Antigua and the Antiguans Frances Lanaghan throws some light on the matter:
In 1798, Mr. Gilbert, (a relation to the Mr. Gilbert, the founder of Methodism in Antigua), for many years the superintendent of his majesty''s dockyard at English Harbour, was united in the bands of wedlock to a highly respectable and accomplished coloured lady of Antigua. The iniquity! of this action, as they deemed it, was resented by his brother whites; himself and his lady were openly insulted; and some wag of the island, who, with the brains of a calf, fancied himself an Ulysses in wisdom, gave to the world an example of his would-be wit, by painting Mr. Gilbert''s office-door half black and half white. (2:178-79)
In their respective histories the sisters do not refer to such public humiliations; they focus instead on the high drama of the Methodist mission in Antigua.
Elizabeth Hart Thwaites inscribes herself quite differently in her "History." Whereas Anne moves directly to the historical events preliminary to Methodism on the island and the progress of the Methodist ministry in Antigua, Elizabeth gives "more circumstantial detail of my spiritual course" (Ferguson, Hart Sisters 89). Anne writes, "The remotest period to which I can trace the Preaching of the Gospel, in these Islands, is in the year 1671" (57), whereas Elizabeth identifies herself by place of birth and parentage:
I am, as you know, a native of Antigua. My deceased Grandmother, who was converted to God by the ministry of Rev. Francis Gilbert and who died in the Faith, with my Dear Mother (gone to Glory) were united to the Methodists and trained up the younger branches of the Family, myself among them, in the fear of God and the observance of religious duties. I was also blest with an affectionate Father who ever watched with the tenderest solicitude over the morals of his Children, as did others of our near Relations, who by their kind attention prevented our feeling the want of Mother''s care after her Death. (89)
She dwells on the intimate details of her spiritual life. Her "full heart" is a discourse of interiority while Anne''s is a passionate discourse of social justice and individual rights. Elizabeth describes the internal conflict generated by her class and privilege and the drastic changes in lifestyle that membership in the society brings. She is in conflict about her love of music, books, and dancing. She must endure the criticism of friends who find her conversion foolhardy: "There were no young persons, that I knew of, who were in the Society at this time, that were not slaves; on this, and some other accounts, I proudly held out as long as I could, from wholly joining them, tho I gained admittance to many of the private meetings" (92). Elizabeth creates a moving portrait of her close relationship with Anne, intimating that not only did they join the Methodists at the same time but that Anne "was brought to God in the same way" (92); spiritual autobiography thus doubles as biography and as conversion narrative. This foregrounding of self, family, and friends stands in sharp contrast to Anne''s foregrounding of the historical project. Between them they reinscribe black womanhood so as to project both their own sense of innate value and their social mission in ideal terms.
The Hart sisters seized Methodism with the fervor with which the Anglophone Caribbean seized upon English cricket and not dissimilarly. The sisters are both possessed by evangelical Christianity and possess it to their own ends. Twentieth-century texts of Caribbean cultural and intellectual history have richly explored the ensuing cultural ambiguity and the creative energy that it generated. More immediately, the effect of their work and influence was discernible in the community of slaves and free blacks whom they served and who sought and found in the sisters'' resistant brand of evangelical Christianity strategies for circumventing an oppressive plantation hierarchy. These Antiguan natives were "outsiders" from birth, but armed with a Methodist gospel of personal salvation and social reform, they testify to a feminist resistance that reconfigured their relationship to colonial Antigua. Frances Smith Foster''s observations about African American women''s literature in the antebellum period seem tailored to the Hart sisters: "The imperatives of sanctification led the converted to challenge traditional beliefs and practices. They created a gospel of social reform that included a more secular feminism and the claiming of authority for civil disobedience" (Written by Herself 77). In fact, authorities subsequently brought Elizabeth Hart Thwaites before the Antigua Assembly to answer for her anti-slavery activities. She was allowed to go free but her co-conspirator, Joseph Phillips, was imprisoned and pauperized for his antislavery efforts. James MacQueen, editor of the Glasgow Courier, denounced both in the November 1831 issue of Blackwoods Magazine as miserable tools of "anti-colonial faction and rancour" (Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender 58). In their parallel histories of Methodism the sisters illuminate the shaping influence of religious activism on their developing sense of selfhood and resistant consciousness as advocates of radical social reform.
Chapter Two
The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave The History of Mary Prince
Mary Prince was born in Bermuda around 1788. She worked as a household slave in Bermuda and Antigua and in the salt mines of Turk''s Island under the most brutal conditions. In 1828 she traveled from Antigua to England with her owners, Mr. and Mrs. John A. Wood, and hoped to secure her freedom there and return to Antigua a free woman. England had declared slavery illegal in 1772, but this law did not apply to British slave colonies in the Caribbean, and Prince''s owners rejected all attempts to buy Prince''s freedom in England. During the ensuing conflict with the Woods in England, she told her story to Susanna Strickland, amanuensis, abolitionist, poet, and a guest of Thomas Pringle, Prince''s employer. The resulting manuscript, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, was published as an anti-slavery tract in England in 1831, with supporting documentation provided by Pringle, who served as Prince''s editor and publisher and was secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. Two years after the publication of her book and a brief court appearance, Prince disappeared entirely from the public record in 1833. Her narrative endures as a pioneering effort, both as slave narrative and as autobiography.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CARIBBEAN AUTOBIOGRAPHYby SANDRA POUCHET PAQUET Copyright © 2002 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Excerpted by permission.
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