The Value of Land

I never once stopped to evaluate or entertain that thought when I was younger; in fact, I would laugh at the mere thought of numerous family disputes over its division. That “insignificant” plot of land, that land, the source of much contention, that overgrown plot of land tucked away in the forgotten crevices of the island was somehow tied to me and I wanted nothing to do with it.

I remember looking down, steering intently at my white patent leather shoes, whose surface was soiled with the iron-enriched soil. This red, blood drenched dirt, home to my ancestors, was the definitive signal of death, burial and my forced reconnection with a piece of property that was the site of my discontent. The body usually made its grand entrance through the central area, not much to look at with the exception of a few overgrown bushes, snaking its way through the yard, past the make shift board houses, past the latrine, past my numerous other ancestors. This body, though now lifeless, was still integral within the family’s trajectory; these remains now provided an additional aspect to the complex identity imbued beneath the soil. The yard presented the opportunity to bond these various distinct lines of family under one common identity that served to “bind together nuclear family units and an extended family network in a single social and physical space”.

On August 1^st 1838, freedom was granted to the people on the island, the plantation system that was then in place had died with the authoritarian monarchy that once prevailed. These now freed men, expected to “ break totally with the plantation and, where vacant land available, to move as far from it as possible, establish themselves as an autonomous peasantry, and henceforth produce subsistence crops by and for themselves alone while continuing, as under slavery, to sell some staples and livestock on the alternative proto peasant economy that had emerged in the interstices of the plantation system itself.“  Instead, these ex slaves remained in their negro villages, “ here they had their huts, their grounds, and more often than not the graves of their forebears…by the time of emancipation the slaves were, as we have seen, owners by custom if not in law of provision grounds their forebears had cultivated for generations.”

This created a blaring disconnect as the "love of home on the estate" insanely contradicted the previous efforts of rebellion against the same estate they had grown and claimed part ownership of. The freed men and those that died before them, dwelled within the earth, their corpses were the embodiment of power, resistance and opposition; the foundation of the pulsating Creole culture that emanated from the plantation system. The land in turn served as the testament to the creation of " a dynamic Caribbean Culture" that formed a Caribbean identity.