Martin Henry

Vincent Lawrence, former chairman of the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), appears before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament this week to be questioned on the multibillion-dollar cost overruns on the Sandals Whitehouse hotel project.

In the circus of political campaigning, PAC Chairman Audley Shaw hollered to Jamaica Labour Party faithful in Portland that "We a go pepper fi him backside too," as the president and CEO of the UDC, Marjorie Campbell, was 'peppered' when she appeared before the PAC.

The Gleaner got on Shaw's case in an editorial saying, "it seems that Mr. Shaw's primary motivation at this point is scoring political points rather than getting to the root of why it cost more than US$40 million (J$2.6 billion) of taxpayers' money than originally budgeted to build the hotel." This premeditated plan to pepper Dr. Lawrence's backside suggests that Mr. Shaw is far more intent on putting on a show than gathering facts and arriving at the truth."

Vacate the chair

Shaw bowed. "In order to avoid questions of motive being raised with the conduct of the proceedings," he announced in more civil language, "I have decided to vacate the chair and I invite someone on the committee to take the chair."

Peppering backsides is no mere metaphor, inappropriate as it may have been coming from a high public official in free and independent Jamaica. The Gleaner began publishing a mere six weeks after Emancipation, August 1, 1834. Peppering was a fact of slavery. Historian Douglas Hall has rescued for us an account of peppering from the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood in his book In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-86. The title, of course, is quite a misnomer since Thistlewood, the slave manager and owner in the middle of the 18th century, would hardly have thought of slavery as 'miserable slavery'.

Thistlewood came to Jamaica at 29 in 1750 as an overseer for a plantation in Westmoreland, and went on to become an independent small penkeeper. He wrote some 10,000 pages of daily diary entries in Jamaica over a 36-year period up to his death in 1786. The originals now reside in the Lincolnshire County Archives, but Hall obtained a copy which is at the University of the West Indies, Mona, library.

On Friday, July 30, 1756, the runaway slave Punch and some others were punished. Thistlewood's diary entry reads: "Punch catched at Salt River and brought home. Flogged him and Quacoo well, and then washed and rubbed in salt pickle, lime juice & bird pepper; also whipped Hector for losing his hoe, made New Negro Joe piss in his eyes & mouth."

And that wasn't the limit. A couple of months earlier, Thistlewood noted for Wednesday, May 26, 1756, "[Derby] catched [by fellow slave] Port Royal eating canes. Had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in his mouth."

When Port Royal himself ran away in July and was caught, Thistlewood noted, "gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put in a gag whilst his mouth was full and made him wear it for four or five hours."

Punishment

In his novel, Die the Long Day, our sociologist of slavery, Orlando Patterson, created a dramatic passage of the slave woman Quasheba going out of her mind after she was punished by being stripped naked and exposed in front of fellow slaves.

On August 1, 1756, a date 78 years short of becoming Emanci-pation Day, the end of 'miserable slavery', Hazat, who had absconded in April, was caught and punished. "Put him in the bilboes both feet; gagged him; locked his hands together; rubbed him with molasses & exposed him naked to the flies all day, and to the mosquitoes all night, without fire."

Beneath the pepper metaphor, lightly lipped for comic relief in front of the children of slaves, lies deep historical meaning, meaning mostly lost in the murky haze of a miserable past.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist.