In her new book, Sugar in the Blood, Andrea Stuart weaves her family story around the history of slavery and sugar in Barbados. Stuart’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather landed on the island in the 1630s. He had been a blacksmith in England, but became a sugar planter in Barbados, at a time when demand for the crop was exploding worldwide. Stuart is descended from a slave owner who, several generations after the family landed in Barbados, had relations with an unknown slave.
Stuart was well into her research and writing of the book before she fully accepted the reality of her family’s story. It was, she tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, «not until maybe four years into the research that I realized that this was the truth of it … of my family’s story that … one side of my family had owned another, and that that was as bleak and as straightforward as it got. … That is the quintessence of the hideousness of slavery, isn’t it? That a family member could own their child … or own a series of children and live with that, and … keep them in continued slavery and live comfortably with that. It made me understand slavery or see it in a very, very personal, intense way.»
Stuart says that it was «completely common in the Caribbean» for planters to have many different family groups, meaning that a planter would have his legitimate, white family and then father children with enslaved women.
The thinking behind this practice was, in one sense, that the planter was breeding his own slaves to work the plantation after Britain outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807. More psychologically speaking, however, Stuart says, the practice also provided a «sense of claiming your … total power over everybody in the plantation world over which you preside.»
