...within Barrett family itself. Strange Music may be more accurately described as a work of bio-fiction, where the distinction between fact and fiction becomes clouded. It is set between 1837 and 1840 in Torquay in Devon and at the Great Houses of Cinnamon Hill and Greenwood, former homes of the Barrett family in Jamaica. The title is taken from the first letter Robert Browning sent to Elizabeth, dated January 10, 1845:



I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,--and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write.... I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought--but in this addressing myself to you, your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these Books with all my heart--and I love you too. (1)

The two main texts that led me to conceive of the work in its current form are Elizabeth's poem "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (2) and Easton Lee's "Strategy." (3) Elizabeth completed "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" for American abolitionists during her honeymoon. It was first published in the anti-slavery annual The Liberty Bell in 1848. (4) "I am not mad: I am black" is the slave woman narrator's haunting refrain. The poem expresses Elizabeth's hatred of slavery and the plantation system from which her family wealth was derived. It is with extraordinary power and depth of emotion--considering Elizabeth's situation at the time--that the poet deals with the multiple rape by white plantation workers of a slave woman and the birth of the mixed race child from whom she feels estranged. I will look at some of the factors that enabled Elizabeth to express such a sentiment later in this essay. The slave mother runs away from the plantation where her lover was earlier murdered, suffocates the child, and buries the corpse in black earth, the blackness of the earth symbolizing the color of the mother's own skin: "I am black you see,--/ And the babe who lay on my bosom so, / Was far too white, too white for me." The slave is caught, flogged, and dies, so it is suggested that both mother and child find union and liberty in death.

Easton Lee's "Strategy" presents an opposing but equally controversial and challenging narrative point of view, that of an elderly black woman advising a young female slave to sleep with a white master. The older woman's stance presents a strategy for obtaining power and security from the white man. Her advice is explicit:

so no tell no man for dem won't understand. Some a di Busha dem love black flesh When you get in a him bed shut you eye tight, grit you teeth for all you want is a brown baby that guarantee privilege and the more the merrier. Is a sure way fi start teck whey Backra power.

Black women's experiences of slavery differed significantly from those of men. In the last thirty years some historical work has drawn attention to these differences, and at the same time there has been increasing awareness that this is a subject area that has been overlooked in literature.

The diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a white estate overseer and small landowner, provides records of births, infant mortality rates, and the high numbers of miscarriages, runaways, and acts of rebellion, giving valuable insights into health issues and women's resistance to Jamaican plantation life in the mid to late eighteenth century. (5) Thistlewood had sexual relations with female slaves with remarkable regularity. (6) The Family of the Barrett, Jeanette Marks' book on the Barretts' Jamaican backgrounds, includes passages that describe mixed race relationships as commonplace. For example:

When a large West Indian proprietor was being examined by a committee of the House of Lords in 1832, he was asked: "Can you name any overseer, driver, or other person in authority, who does not keep a mistress?"

The Proprietor replied, "I cannot." (7)

Evidence shows that the miserable working conditions and harsh treatment female slaves received from overseers were no less severe during pregnancy and childbirth. Barbara Bush's study illustrates that overseers who made concessions for childbearing women were few:

As slave owners and overseers had little regard for women slaves in their reproductive capacity, it is hardly surprising that they suffered from so many gynecological disorders.... "Monk" Lewis who was genuinely concerned about the welfare of his female slaves, commented strongly on the general atmosphere of callous indifference to the female slaves. Having received several reports of white book-keepers and overseers kicking women in the womb, often crippling them or their unborn children, he felt entitled to state that white overseers and book-keepers "kick black women in the belly from one end of Jamaica to another." (8)

By weaving together three first-person narratives (one of them based on Elizabeth's runaway slave), I illustrate the degrading nature of the position of women in Jamaican slave society. By repositioning and offering new perspectives on the Barretts, my novel also echoes some of the themes of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, (9) which is an important example of writing back to, or rewriting, the nineteenth-century canonical text Jane Eyre (1847). In Charlotte Bronte's novel, Bertha Mason, Creole heiress and first wife of Mr. Rochester is not only marginalized in the narrative, but is literally hidden away, confined to the attic of Mr. Rochester's house as a madwoman. In Rhys's novel, Bertha, formerly Antoinette Cosway, from the Creole plantation-owning class, is locked into a troubled marriage with the cold and increasingly cruel Englishman, Mr. Rochester. Wide Sargasso Sea is partly set in Jamaica and draws upon Rhys's experience of visiting her grandfather's estate in Dominica as a child. Rhys's interest is in recuperating the life of Bertha/Antoinette and, although she is portrayed as a tragic Caribbean female character, re-centering the hitherto marginalized West Indian and female narrative. The novel is particularly interesting and relevant for its representation of the Creole woman's experience, her dependence and vulnerability, and her relationship with other ethnic groups in the Caribbean.

Like Antoinette, Kaydia, one of the main protagonists in Strange Music, looks to a white man for her salvation. In Rhys's work the narrative perspective alternates between Mr. Rochester and Antoinette, and the legacy of slavery appears to destroy the possibility of characters moving forward. As with Wide Sargasso Sea, each voice in my novel arises in a setting where the question of whether anyone will listen is real and urgent (the reader listens, of course, but this is outside the frame of the fiction), and the voices take the reader on a journey into a character and a society. The juxtaposition of the three female voices in Strange Music provides the basis for another more speculative journey, one that shows how people might imaginatively understand and have solidarity with those they do not directly know. I have wanted to sustain a tension between the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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