Nathalie Dessens. Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by KaaVonia Hinton

Nathalie Dessens. Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. 213 pp. $55.00.

Happy darkies, southern belles, Samboes, Mammies, southern hospitality ... The American South. From where did southern myths come, and how were, how are they exacerbated? In an informative introduction, six core chapters, and a conclusion, Nathalie Dessens examines the origins of southern mythmaking in Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies. As the book's title implies, Dessens takes the reader on a journey set in motion by Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, by European settlement, and by whites' reliance on slave labor, and ends with what Dessens calls "Abolition and its Aftermath" and "Mythmaking and Cultural Exception."

Dessens draws on slaveholders' diaries, slave narratives, and travel narratives to provide a detailed comparative analysis of slavery (from genesis to abolishment) in both the West Indies and the American South. In her first core chapter, she delineates various reasons for colonization in the Americas: economic, religious, and political expansion as well as easy access to the Indies. Colonies in the American South and the West Indies also endured a stifled development due to Spanish control and European dominance. Furthermore, they naturally gravitated toward agriculture and a subsequent desire to become slave-holding societies. Despite the features common to the West Indies and the American South, the onset of divergence appears as early as initial colonization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it stems from several advantages the northern colonies possessed. For example, US colonies were continental and thus they could consume a vast amount of land; moreover, southern settlement colonies were "mostly unaffected by the pirating that reigned in the Caribbean." According to Dessens, the less stable West Indies colonies did not share these characteristics. They were conversely dominated by opportunists who left their investments in the hands of overseers while they returned home to Europe. As absentee planters, they comfortably reaped the profits of plantation ownership.

Though native peoples are not a primary topic in this book, Dessens does illuminate their relevance to her discussion. She notes that the slaver societies put in place divergent methods for using and abusing the bodies of native people. While both societies, eventually, and to varying degrees, attempted to enslave, torture, manipulate, and massacre native peoples, Dessens claims those in the West Indies sought to decimate indigenous people at a greater rate partly because they had less land mass. Since the colonies in what is now the United States had a greater amount of space, for a while--or at least until the "land hunger of the colonists became unquenchable" in the nineteenth century--native populations were not systematically attacked. Yet Dessens does point out that large numbers of natives died due to European diseases and alcohol, a substance introduced by the Europeans.

Throughout colonization, planters in the West Indies and the American South relied on African slave labor to produce commercial agriculture. Hierarchical social structures were quickly put in place, with slaves occupying the lowest rung. Within both slaver societies, plantation landscapes were generally similar. There was a big house or master's dwelling, slave cabins, and other buildings essential for farming. But because the Caribbean produced sugar, there structures also included sugar mills, boiling houses, sheds, workshops, distilling houses, and the like. The demographics of slave(r) societies also differed. Generally, into the nineteenth century, whites outnumbered blacks in the American South, though few states including South Carolina and Mississippi, were exceptions; in contrast, blacks outnumbered whites then in the West Indies. Southern master-slave relationships seem to have been more paternalistic than those in both the West Indies and the US North largely because southern masters resided with slaves on the plantations. Conversely, the master-slave relationships in the West Indies were fragile, and there were more runaway slaves due to planter absenteeism.

At the heart of Dessens's book is one major way that US southern slaver society diverged from that in the West Indies: its regional mythmaking. While the nineteenth century brought ideals of glorification of the South, Dessens reports, "no parallel mythologizing of West Indian societies existed." Dessens argues that it is the southern slaver society's uniqueness that has contributed to its cultural distinctiveness. This difference from West Indian cultural norms she links to the South's interest in permanent settlement and prosperity for future generations. Dessens maintains that Caribbean fiction is often critical of slavery: "Very little Caribbean fiction was written to defend the institution of slavery or the society that developed around it." But 19th-century US southern literature glorifies the South and perpetuates positive images of slavery. Images of "happy darkies," plump mammies, and grinning Samboes abound.