by Jenny Davis
I've been reading today, a density of academic articles, which I have tried to decipher. The language...every genre, discipline has its jargon and we knew of course from the onset, that our creative task would be that of translation, interpretation and interpolation.
What am I trying to insert here? My own subjective experience, I bring to bear my shadowy weight on the research, the process, and the discussion.
There has been an abiding image that has been floating around in the background since last week and coming into sharp relief as I tried to make sense of the Osteology of the Newton Plantation.
I was invited to the Bristol Old Vic, a Press night of their new production. Knee High's latest production 'The Lovers' based on that painting by Marc Chagall. I'm not digressing really, stay with me here. Anyway here I was in that space, hundreds of theatre goers, and I am the only Black face, well okay there was two of us. Money flows in the Bristol Old Vic's direction, public and private, and part of its history is the money to set up the Old Vic, so I'm told was from the Merchant Venturers.
Why should it matter that I was in a space that felt like being a Where's Wally picture?
Because in that moment I saw a blanket of white, a totality of faces, a wall. And I came away feeling deflated, vulnerable, frustrated. This is still here in 2016.
The past is still here, we are very much in touching distance. I can still be shoulder brushed by a merchant.
And all for a sweet tooth, that cursed sweet, sweet tooth. I wondered about tooth decay mouldering and mottling in a Clifton drawing room. And I read about arrested growth lines on teeth, in the Osetology of a Plantation.
Is Osetology the Archeology of teeth?
While I was still feeling the brush of a merchant, I read that Barbados was the richest colony in the new world, at one point. A sugary jewel in a crown. I read about lead toxicity found in teeth, thanks to the tainted rum, workers drank.
Pipe smoking, incisor mutilation, the markings of residual culture.
'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.'
Just because we don't know, doesn't mean it didn't happen. So there were other articles ruminating on the absence of babies, or rather infants, and 'sub adults' in the family burial grounds. And an image was tossed out in the hypothesis, of babies not buried, babies being thrown into bushes.
We fill in the gaps only too well, there is much to see in the absence.
Healed and active lesions, venereal disease, babies with congenital' syphillis being thrown in the bush.
Lesions and trauma, and life expectancy on Newton Plantation, that sugared jewel is only 20 years old.
And for women it is less. In fact Newton females were dying earlier than other reported enslaved groups.
Caribbean women had highly intensive work loads, low fertility through infections. The Newton women suffered combined effects of pregnancy, childbirth and intense labour.
From the arrested growth line in a tooth, one can tell traumatic post weaning.
I think of my son and daughter in law with my first grandchild and baby number one. A bundle of preciousness coated with parental anxieties. Will he feed? Timed naps, mother's milk and colic. The days wandered into weeks, until the time was right, and colic and tears were healed.
Extreme stress and labour, so utters the tooth sayer. The arrested growth lines do not lie, like bands on a tree, they tell the tale of trauma, malnutrition and a blow to the side of the head.
And I can't imagine with the wildest furtherest reaches, my daughter in law, taking up my grandchild and going straight back into a field to work. Still leaking milk.The act of thrashing, hoeing, kneeling and digging. The shins have it. As do the teeth.
Skeletal trauma. And all for a sweet tooth. Lesions on lower limbs, measles, tuberculosis and consumption.
Oh today has been a right laugh.
And what's this got to do with standing like a dark beacon in a sea of white. Paradoxical Invisibility.
But I'm not comparing.
A Newton female if bones and teeth do not lie, suffered a life of brevity, albeit thanks to cane harvesting, corporal punishment, concubinage, taken by the master, and possibly your baby buried in the bushes.
And all because the lady liked....