Eating Dirt, Being Dirt Backgrounds to the Story of Slavery Michelle Gadpaille Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about slavery, The Long Song (2011), 1 layers historical and fictional material to produce a rich text of women’s experience on a slave plantation in Jamaica. As a descendant of Jamaican immigrants to Britain, Levy draws upon the same black trans-Atlantic experience of cultural and ethnic hybridity that informed her novel Small Island (2004). Additionally, she taps the reservoir of slave memoir, testimony and narrative that survives in journals and reports from the early 19 th century. The anonymous Marly; or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica (1828) 1 as a contemporary, fictionalized account of Jamaican plantation life shares many motifs with Levy’s novel. This study examines one small square of this narrative palimpsest: fictional accounts of the striking fact of pica, the consumption of non-food items, often dirt. It will ask how this phenomenon from the age of slavery worked its way into early plantation literature (Marly), from there into fictional slave narrative in general, and ultimately into Levy’s novel, where it forms a structural motif. After analyzing historical and modern accounts, I posit that eating dirt may constitute far more than pathology or taboo and represent a means of negotiating power for the powerless: those of the African diaspora, especially its girls and women. 1. Introduction: Who eats dirt? In Andrea Levy’s award winning novel The Long Song (24) there is a single mention of slaves eating dirt: early in the narrative, slaves from the novel’s Amity plantation are described as having “been whipped for eating dirt.” This minor incident, just one link in a chain of food imagery 1 Page numbers in the article refer to the edition given in the References. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 39 (2014) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Michelle Gadpaille 4 that connects white greed to black malnutrition, can be traced back to an earlier, anonymous account of slave life in Jamaica, Marly; or, A Planter’s Life, where dirt-eating (medically referred to as geophagy, one type of pica) also occupies the margins of the plantation narrative. Marly is the name of the young Scottish bookkeeper who works on a plantation in the northern part of Jamaica. At the time the island was “the largest sugar colony in the British Empire […and] contained some 320,000 Negro slaves, or more than half the total of the British sugar colonies” (Sheridan 1976: 239). In a minor episode from Marly, a slave mother and father bring their daughter to the overseer to be treated because she has been eating dirt: After shell blow, a negro man and a woman brought their daughter, a girl about sixteen years of age, who belonged to one of the field gangs, with a sad complaint to the overseer, that for some time past she had been addicted to dirt-eating (eating earth), and though they had endeavoured to persuade her to desist, by the means both of gentle and harsh treatment, they had not been able to make her abandon this abominable and pernicious propnsity. (86) Other contemporary historical accounts testify that the practice of pica among slaves was sufficiently common to be mentioned by many authors, including plantation owners, magistrates and anti-slavery activists. An 1823 guide for planters speaks at length of “the hateful, fatal habit of eating dirt” (Roughley 1823: 118). African slaves ate dirt and European authors recorded this, accompanied by various explanations and judgments. Plantation slaves nevertheless had many other well-recorded types of experience. The anonymous author of Marly selected the anecdote to make a point about slave-planter relations, but why did Levy choose a similar motif from the historical material, and how does this apparently background presence fit into the patterns of theme and image from The Long Song? Does the long trail of historical argumentation affect what pica can mean in a neo-slave narrative? These questions will be considered from a broad perspective, including evidence from Marly, a survey of historical accounts, as well as medical and anthropological material dealing with pica. This paper is not an attempt to trace influence or to uncover dependence on the part of Levy. After all, Levy’s text contains a lengthy acknowledgement of sources used in the writing of the novel (310-312). To get the background right, she has been to history, anthropology, journals, reports and previous fiction. Moreover, it should be acknowledged to what extent the modern slave narrative is always historical fiction. As Vivian Halloran established in her useful study Exhibiting Slavery (2009), there is a museum quality to the neo-narrative of slavery. Artifact and accuracy are crucial to the mimetic effect, and authors incorporate and Eating Dirt, Being Dirt 5 need to incorporate well-established facts about slaves’ working conditions, accommodation, punishment and family life. Instead of hunting for sources or dependence, the present article will explore one text-unit (pica among the slave population) with historical origins and attempt to trace its appearance in a range of texts from different eras. I will look at pica from a historical perspective, with a glance at its medical etiology. The aim is to arrive at a fuller understanding of the original pica phenomenon during the time of slavery as well as the deployment of this phenomenon; first, in proand anti-slavery propaganda and, second, in the construction of authenticity in the neo-narratives of slavery. Young offers an extensive list of fictional works that employ the motif of pica in an Appendix to Craving Earth (2012); there is no shortage of neo-slave narratives featuring dirt-eating. Thus, we will ask how this slim item of testimony from the age of slavery worked its way into the fiction of different traditions of slave narrative, and ultimately into Levy’s novel, where it forms part of a structural motif. 2. Historical backgrounds There is considerable evidence of the existence of geophagy among the slave population of Jamaican plantations, some of it from unimpeachable sources and some from anonymous and fictionalized texts. One of the clearest testimonials comes from the Planters Guide of 1823. This compendium of statistics and observations about slavery in Jamaica was assembled by Thomas Roughley, who had been a sugar planter on the island for more than twenty years. His testimony is first-hand, though subject to the inevitable bias of his race and position. His information was also highly polemical, despite its apparent statistical objectivity, for it formed part of the inquiry into the economic state of slaveholding in the years between the abolition of the British slave trade (1807) and the abolition of slavery itself (1834). This Jamaican planter is clear in his attitude towards dirt-eating among slaves: “Nothing is more horribly disgusting, nothing more to be dreaded, nothing exhibiting a more heart-rending, ghastly spectacle, than a negro child possessed of this malady” (Roughley 1823: 118-119). As an opening indication of attitudes, this passage establishes several points that will mark subsequent discourse about pica. First, disgust mingles with fear in this account, accompanied by Roughley’s clear statement that he views dirt-eating as a disease (“a malady”). This account records an emotional reaction, as well as a classification - an early medicalization of the practice. The word “possessed,” however, hints at a possible paranormal explanation for the affliction; eating dirt might take its place among other types of “possession,” by demonic spirits or animist deities. Whatever the explanation, it is clear that for this planter, the dirt-eating Michelle Gadpaille 6 slave is not himself. Despite his repulsion at the practice, Roughley does signal some sympathy for the sufferers, since he calls the spectacle “heartrending” when witnessed in a child. Roughley, then, positions himself as a sympathetic man, not repulsed by his black slaves per se but clearly disturbed even to the point of physical aversion by the habit of dirt-eating: “Such is the craving appetite for this abominable custom, that few, either children or adults, can be broken of it, when once they begin to taste and swallow its insidious, slow poison” (ibid: 119). Dirt-eating emerges as a form of addictive behavior; Roughley’s use of the word “poison” seems to apply to the habit rather than to the substance ingested, which is an interesting and quite farsighted view of pica. Roughley’s account then turns to the treatment of pica on the plantation: “For if by incessant care, watchfulness, or keeping them [the afflicted slaves] about the dwelling-house, giving them abundance of the best nourishing food, stomachic medicines, and kind treatment, it is possible to counteract the effects and habit of it for some time, the creature will be found wistfully and irresistibly to steal an opportunity of procuring and swallowing the deadly substance” (Roughley 1823: 119). This “kind treatment” resembles that described in Marly, but one must bear in mind the function of Roughley’s text: plantation owners, denied a fresh supply of slaves by the trading ban of 1807, had an economic interest in exhibiting benevolence in their treatment of the remaining slave population. According to Roughley, treatment for dirt-eating includes surveillance (as with any addiction), improved diet and medicine. Although any available stomach medicine of the era would have been nasty and probably ineffective (Roughley mentions cowitch worm medicine, glauber salts and castor oil for the children, 121-123), at least his plantation did not criminalize the practice but instead attempted to medicate it. A big plantation in Jamaica would have made substantial allowance for medical treatment of plantation workers, having an infirmary, several women slaves as nurses and even a Negro doctor (Sheridan 1976: 241). In some cases, medicine was the responsibility of the lady of the plantation, as mentioned by Mrs. Carmichael in her 1833 report of conditions in the West Indies (Carmichael 1833: 21). The narrator of Marly mentions the existence of a Negro doctor and a dispensary on his plantation (Marly 44), and in the Journal of a West-India Proprietor, Matthew Lewis (1834: 238) records the planning of a new hospital on his Jamaican plantation, as does Phillips (1914: 545) for Worthy Park plantation. Amidst this enlightened care for the afflicted slave, however, Roughley (1823: 120) uses the noun “creature.” The ill slave becomes a creature rather than a human being; it appears that for Roughley the eating of dirt deprives the slave of her/ his humanity. Even Roughley’s pronoun use shifts to the neuter “it”: “The creature sinks into total indifference, insensible to everything around it, till death at last declares his victory in its Eating Dirt, Being Dirt 7 dissolution” (Roughley 1823: 120). The vocabulary here does suggest some acknowledgement of the psychological accompaniment, perhaps even cause of pica; depression could, naturally, have contributed to the custom and to the voluntary lassitude as a co-result. This early Jamaican text, then, declares a complex position on slaves, their diet and its relation to their humanity. Though African slaves are constructed as subject to bodily disorders in a manner similar to the European population, the effect of this particular disorder is to render the slave non-human. This would therefore be one of several ways in which even the relatively enlightened slave owner or inhabitant of a slaveowning society could rationalize the sub-humanity of the slave. To eat dirt is to engage in an activity that ranks the eater among the non-human mammals. Roughley’s account shows that attitudes towards geophagy could encompass disgust, condemnation and sympathy, while remedies were rough and ready. Other Jamaican planters of the era also described dirteating among slaves. Writing in 1815, Lewis mentions it briefly in connection with a slave uprising (1834: 224-25). On Worthy Park estate in the 1790s, two newly-acquired slaves are reported to have died of dirteating (Phillips 1914: 546). This account affirms that dirteating was seen as fatal, whether because it actually led to death or because it functioned as a convenient explanation for death from other causes, and allowed the owner to displace responsibility onto the slave himor herself 2 . It is rare to find in the historical materials a report of a planter who took responsibility for the slave’s practice of pica. One such was a Doctor Collins, who reported on dirt-eating among slaves in James Stephen’s Report of 1830. Collins saw pica as the result of poor slave nutrition (Stephen 1830: 371). According to Collins, when a better master took over the plantation, the practice of pica dwindled (ibid. 372). Above all, Collins stressed that dirt-eating should not be treated as a crime or a moral issue. This, however, is exactly how geophagy was perceived on all sides of the slavery issue. Once anti-slavery journalism became established in the United States, for example, accounts from emancipated or escaped slaves elaborated on the conditions of slavery for readers who did not live in the slave states. In a journal such as the Emancipator, dirt-eating became one of the daily horrors of slavery: When we [the slaves] complained they would send for us to come to the house, and then they felt of us, and if we had not got the fever, they said it was all sham,--that "nigger had been eating dirt,"--and then they sent us 2 Ariela Gross (2000: 142) says that dirt eating sometimes figures in court cases, whereby slaves were blamed for their own diseases because they ate dirt. Michelle Gadpaille 8 straight off to the field, and we had to do our tasks the same as though nothing was the matter. (“Recollections of Slavery”) A similar account comes from The Anti Slavery Reporter (1832) in the form of court testimony in a hearing against a brutal Jamaican overseer named Chapman: Between the 18 th and 20 th October, can’t be positive, the two negro boys were in the hospital for eating dirt; they were ordered out at two o’clock on one of those days by the overseer to work, but they did not go, and were flogged; he again ordered them to be flogged; witness said, oh! No let them alone, they will go to their work tomorrow, probably; the house boy said they had dirtied themselves; Chapman said, make them eat it […] (283-84) This punishment of one unacceptable practice by further taboo breaking will become relevant when we consider the extended context of food in The Long Song. As a final historical example let us take an 1844 case, not from the islands, but from South Carolina, in which two “Negro girls” were sold off by their owner because they had “an objectionable habit of eating dirt” and he felt that dirt-eating would make them reproductively unfit and thus unprofitable (Lodge 1998). These young women were rejected for potential infertility, with dirt-eating ascribed as the only cause of this predicted effect. Thus, the diagnosis/ accusation of pica had multiple uses for a slave owner. It could be used to demedicalize any non-specific ailment (anything without accompanying fever), making the slave the perpetrator of his own disease (Gross 2000: 142). It could function as a rationale for resale of any slave. This monstrous unfairness constitutes a curious cession of control over the slave body; through this reasoning, the body became subject to its owner’s control through its digestive system. Though not owners of their bodies, slaves were responsible keepers of their digestive systems. To eat dirt could thus be a creative, self-destructive way of robbing the owner of his property, through either death or re-sale. In the case of the two dead slaves from Worthy Park, the fact that they were newly-acquired suggests other causes. Perhaps eating dirt was a voluntary way of ending an intolerable situation? Or perhaps it was an involuntary reaction to the psychological stress of being captured and sold? The medical literature provides support for both interpretations. These historical testimonies need to be considered as we unpack the significance of Levy’s dirt-eating slaves in The Long Song. Are we to see this as a disgusting habit, akin to coprophagy and a holdover from Africa, or are we to interpret it as a suicidal act of despair? Or perhaps it is a rebellious act, one intended to rob the master of the slave’s work and even life? Eating Dirt, Being Dirt 9 Contributing to the interpretive background of the contemporary novel, there is the account of the dirt-eating young slave in Marly, which forms the deep background to Levy’s neo-slave narrative. Though fictionalized, the anonymous account in Marly is contemporaneous with slavery (1828) and displays familiarity with plantation life in Jamaica (Williamson 2005: xii). Marly, therefore, straddles the border between historical source and fiction. Its relatively benign presentation of slave conditions cannot disqualify it as evidence, despite its participation in a crucial debate on “The West India Question” (Williamson 2005: xvii). After all, every writer who passed through the island and mentioned slavery had some kind of agenda. There are no unbiased slave narratives, testimonies or accounts 3 . When the narrator of Marly recounts the sight of the parents bringing their daughter before the overseer, there is pity rather than disgust in his tone. Notably, the parents find their daughter’s habit unacceptable; to them, this is no normal cultural practice carried over from Africa. They are portrayed as seeking help from the plantation officials and, unusually, as receiving it, for the Marly narrator testifies that this young girl will be taken to the plantation infirmary and fed for a while on the same food as the inhabitants of the big house. All participants in this small tableau seem mildly optimistic that a change of scene and diet will help the young teenager. Nevertheless, the incident takes place in the overall amelioration agenda of the anonymous author; close consideration of his discourse shows that he was not against slavery per se, but against its non-benevolent forms. The incident, by stressing two levels of paternal care (the parents and over them the plantation owners) contributes to the picture of slavery as potentially benign under well-intentioned slave owners. This sub-textual agenda tends to close off other interpretations of the pica - rebellion and willful suicide are not in the narrator’s purview. As modern readers, however, aware of the way pica could be manipulated by pro-slavery writers, we are free to seek other readings of the act of dirteating, readings informed by cultural, historical and medical information. Before focusing on any interpretation of pica in either The Long Song or Marly, it is necessary to survey medical opinions about geophagia, from both the 19 th century and more modern scholars. 3. The medicalization of pica There is no intent to cover the subject exhaustively, especially since this has recently been done in Sera L. Young’s monograph on the subject, Craving Earth: Understanding Pica - the Urge to Eat Clay, Starch, Ice and 3 See, for example, the deployment of Mary Prince in the anti-slavery debate in ”Trans-Colonial Collaboration and Slave Narrative” (Gadpaille 2011: 75). Michelle Gadpaille 10 Chalk (2012). Instead, we will look at historical medical opinion in addition to modern findings on the subject. There exist two streams of thought in the medical account of pica: the first considers whether pica is a disease or a cause of disease (Abrahams 1996: 65); while the second and more recent one suggests that pica may be a beneficial nutrition practice, equivalent to the modern practice of consuming vitamins. Young’s recent study (2012: 31) considers the “adaptive value” that pica can have in certain populations and under particular circumstances. Even those researching the behavior report on the challenge of defining its scope, or determining the extent to which it is involuntary behavior (Lacey 1990: 31). In the case of the young female slave who had been eating dirt, the narrator of Marly exhibits some confusion about whether pica is a crime, a disease or a symptom. All three possibilities are latent in his report of the incident: “She was rather a good looking negress, but like many others had fallen into this detestable negro practice of eating earth, a species of disease, which if persisted in for any length of time, uniformly terminates in dropsy and death” (Marly 86). Roughley (1823), in contrast, is committed to the disease theory, paying close attention to the details of the symptoms of the dirt-eating ailment: The symptoms arising from it are a shortness of breathing, almost perpetual languor, irregular throbbing, weak pulse, a horrid cadaverous aspect, the lips and whites of the eyes a deadly pale (the sure sign of malady in the negro), the tongue thickly covered with scurf, violent palpitations of the heart, inordinate swelled belly, the legs and arms reduced in size and muscle, the whole appearance of the body becomes a dirty yellow, the flesh a quivering, pellucid jelly. (120) The writer is being as medically objective as he can manage, using a Latinate vocabulary to signify the “scientific” nature of his observations (e.g. cadaverous, pellucid). The list both affirms Roughley’s familiarity with actual cases of diseased slaves and raises the question of whether all these symptoms can be blamed on eating dirt. Certainly some of them concur with the list of symptoms for pellagra - a disease associated with slaves and the descendants of slaves in the American south. Pellagra is a nutrition-deficiency disease, often associated with high levels of corn consumption and low niacin levels in the diet (Kiple 1977: 411-412). The situation was complicated by the existence of other diet-related diseases among plantation slaves in Jamaica: yaws (Lewis 1834: 208; Phillips 1914: 545), lockjaw (Lewis 1834: 96-97) and dysentery (Phillips 1914: 545), in addition to more mysterious ailments such as “crab-yaws,” “bonions” (Roughley 1823: 109) “chiga” or “cocoa-bag” (Lewis 1834: 215; 144). Eating Dirt, Being Dirt 11 Pica has also been studied medically as an informal means of providing missing nutrients in a deficient diet - especially as a source of iron (Lacey 1990: 33). Another common deployment of clay in the diet is as a remedy for either poisoning (Young 2012: 33-34) or gastrointestinal complaints, such as indigestion (Young 2012: 42). Slaves who arrived in the West Indies from Africa carrying hook worm even used clay as a treatment for stomach pain (Abrahams 1996: 65). This medicinal use of clay is in direct contradiction to Roughley’s concept of dirt as itself being poison to the slaves. In modern medical accounts, pica is most commonly reported in conjunction with pregnancy (Lacey 1990: 31; Abrahams 1996: 63), when the consumption of dirt, especially chalk, could be a folk remedy for nausea during pregnancy (Grivetti 1978: 172-173; Fessler 2002). For Young (2012: 41-42), the eating of clay in many African communities is associated with fertility, pregnancy and birth in a variety of ways. Pica has also been reported as being common among emotionally disturbed or mentally deficient people (Abrahams 1996: 68-69; Williams and McAdam 2012: 2050). Moreover, dirt consumption was still prevalent in the 20 th century among institutionalized children in Jamaica (Abrahams 1996: 67-68), the setting of both Marly and The Long Song. This brief survey of varied medical opinions shows that “no single theory satisfactorily explains geophagy” (Abrahams 1996: 71); the multiplicity of potential causes thus opens several new avenues of explanation for the dirt-eating episode in The Long Song and especially for the young woman in Marly. Perhaps we are meant to see the afflicted girl as suffering not just from an obsessive habit or a nutritional deficiency, but also from some underlying condition, perhaps an emotional problem or developmental delay. Certainly, the concern of her parents testifies to extra worry over this particular young woman, who is presented as under the control of her parents, even in a plantation society where the nuclear family (regardless of pro-slavery depictions) was not a stable institution. One could read the incident as marking the moment (late puberty - she is 16 years old) when the parents may have finally needed to face a deficiency in mental or physical capacity that had until then been less noticeable. As described by Carmichael and Lewis, the children of slaves had to graduate from the picaninny gang in the fields (Marly 83; Nugent 1966: 68-69) and move on to their particular roles on the plantation. Most women would end up as field hands. Only a few would qualify for more skilled work. A mentally deficient girl would be destined for a hard, outdoor life, one that her parents would wish to spare her. If, however, one accepts that the consumption of dirt or clay was merely a common diet-related practice among the slaves, then one could assume that it would be of less concern to the parents. However, it is also possible that life on the plantation Europeanized their value systems so that the slave Michelle Gadpaille 12 parents, far removed from Africa and its practices, internalized to some extent the European condemnation of pica. All of these explanations lead to a stress on the care ethic within the slave family; this is something that was downplayed or even denied by pro-slavery activists. It was more convenient to depict slaves as immoral people who did not form family units but were promiscuous and uncaring about their offspring. In severe contrast, the anonymous author of Marly specifies that this is a two-parent family and that both parents are concerned about their daughter. This forms part of the ameliorative atmosphere of this book; the author, though a man of his times, was critical of the abuses of slavery and inclined to support improvements in the slaves’ situation. In contrast, the brief mention of the off-stage whipping in The Long Song allows for little or no sympathy for the dirt-eaters. The episode only takes on added significance when considered together with a narrative built around the “foodways” (Singleton 1995: 125) of a plantation and its slave quarters. We will return to this later and give a close exegesis of the food spectrum of The Long Song. Before advancing this interpretation of the novel, it will be useful to consider pica as a non-medical issue. 4. Pica as cultural practice There is also a strong vein of anthropological research that views pica as merely a harmless habit, with a tendency to cluster among certain population groups: “Some researchers of the American south considered clayeating as just a long-standing, tenacious cultural habit, relatively harmless to the body” (Lacey 1990: 32). Similar observations have been made about West African societies (Abrahams 1996: 68). There, pica is often associated with rituals surrounding pregnancy and takes its place in the phenomenon of pregnancy cravings and altered eating patterns. In such cases it is not considered a pathology (Fessler 2002: 2050) but part of a pattern of culturally sanctioned practices. Eating dirt, clay or chalk while pregnant can be considered a practice in the normal range of human food behavior. In some communities in Africa and India (Abrahams 1996: 68), custom dictates the consumption of particular kinds of earth. The custom apparently continues among some women in the American south, although with some degree of secrecy and shame. The consensus seems to be that, except in excess, the practice is harmless and could even provide some digestive and nutritional benefit (Fessler 2002: 2050-51; Young 2012: 31). Eating earth could also have had ritual or spiritual significance, as one scholar suggests (Grivetti 1978: 173) and may have been associated with the fertility of the earth (Abrahams 1996: 63) or specifically with human fertility (Young 2012: 41-42). More controversially, it has been suggested Eating Dirt, Being Dirt 13 that dirt-eating was a form of mass suicide (Grivetti 1978: 173; Abrahams 1996: 64-65). Both scholars also hypothesize that the particular form of pica practiced by slaves (dirt-eating), might be symbolic of unity with a lost homeland (Grivetti 1978: 173) or even a promised afterlife (Abrahams 1996: 64). Neither scholar substantiates this idea. Such speculation unfolds against a background of evidence about what slaves actually ate. Evidence comes from plantation accounts, journals such as those of Trollope, Lewis and Carmichael, slave narratives and the various reports commissioned in the early 19 th century. Some sources stress the abundance of the slave’s vegetable diet while, in contrast, the Marly text depicts slaves adding meat to their diets by catching and eating both cats and rats (Marly 55; 46-47). Evidence about slave nutrition in Marly appears contradictory. On the one hand, the slaves’ provision grounds are shown as yielding a lavish vegetable harvest (Marly 61; 81), and breakfast for the field gang is reported to be boiled plantains with herring, lemon juice and hot sauce (Marly 44), a menu which, though not “sumptuous” still appears nutritionally adequate. On the other hand, plantation slaves are eating cats, rats and dirt. If the first assertion is true, then the second must reflect either choice on the part of the slaves or selective reporting on the part of a writer with an agenda. Thus, even the best accounts of slave foodways cannot clarify the extent to which they reflect cultural choices among the slaves, or regimens imposed by the owners (Singleton 1995: 125-26) - or by necessity born of deprivation. For instance, one finds the plantation owner Lewis seriously maintaining that the slaves “cannot endure animal food of any kind” (1834: 99) - an assertion which sounds suspiciously like a rationalization for depriving them of expensive protein. Similarly, in Marly, the new bookkeeper notes that the slaves cannot abide clean water but have a “preference for muddy water” (Marly 57), a highly dubious assertion. Despite this control of both food sources and their rationale, it has been argued that slaves nevertheless developed zones of autonomy in their plantation lives (Higman et al. 1998: 1-2). It is therefore possible to view pica as a symptom of such a zone, however counter-intuitive this might seem. Even this harmless practice of pica could have attracted attention and concern from overseers and owners, two groups that were not otherwise much concerned with slave welfare. The alleged threat to property erosion or even destruction would explain this refusal to accept this, just one among many customs that survived the Middle Passage. Moreover, as Lewis (1834: 224-25) clarifies in his journal, dirt-eating, no matter how normative a cultural practice in general, had also been coopted into the area of the taboo. Dirt featured as part of an oathing ceremony among rebellious slaves from the Jamaican parish of St Elizabeth in Lewis’s account. Far from being culturally normal in this case, dirt-eating was a taboo act, marked, forbidden, and with the power to bind transgressors. Lewis would not have been the only European to cluster taboos Michelle Gadpaille 14 associatively and identify them with rebellion and disrespect for authority. This detail from Lewis establishes how the practice of dirt-eating could be transmuted from normative custom to taboo - in the eyes of both the slaves and their masters. In The Long Song, therefore, we must recognize that the briefly mentioned incident of dirt-eating could have several cultural explanations, some overlapping and some contradictory. This plurality of explanations is especially marked in Marly, where it is difficult to identify any cultural tolerance of pica, and potential explanations range from pregnancy to mental disturbance, without any clear reading except the depth of parental care and paternal benevolence by the plantation. For plantation slaves, one cannot completely separate diet from culture and custom; explanations connected with nutritional deficits fit our modern concept of pica as symptom, but are insufficient to capture 19 th century eating habits. If one posits that the young woman could have been suffering from anemia or iron deficiency, this explanation inevitably leads back to the question of the diet of a plantation slave. In both Marly and The Long Song, there is supplementary evidence that slave diet was not ideal, although the general fertility of the slave garden-plots would seem to have precluded starvation in most parts of Jamaica, which is a large island (approximately 11,000 km²). Evidence from contemporary commentators suggests the abundance of the foodstuffs available to plantation slaves who cultivated their own plots (Lewis 1834: 83; 105-106, 108; Carmichael 1833: 166-173; Trollope 1859: 28). A dietary deficiency is, in fact, how the case is classified in Marly. The girl is put in the sanitarium and fed the white people’s diet for a while. In the real plantation accounts, however, nutritional deficit was not a popular explanation with masters; it settled too much of the onus on them and placed their profits in jeopardy. Even when dirt-eating can be classified as a custom, responses to it varied from punishment, whipping and restraint, to medical treatment and a change of diet. Marly depicts the more benign response, The Long Song the more stereotyped punishment reaction. There is the possibility that neo slave narratives reflect only one side of the pica story - a version filtered through the anti-slavery literature and the medical reports. Thus, a practice sanctioned by folk medicine and village practice may have been demonized by medicalization and by the need for anti-slavery testimony. 5. Pica in neo-slave narrative Twentieth-century writers of fiction about slavery have the freedom to employ the motif of pica in the service of their individual agendas. Andrea Levy, Edward P. Jones and others explore varied narrative functions Eating Dirt, Being Dirt 15 and signifying purposes for dirt-eating. The motif can be used for more positive signification, as for instance in the opening chapter of Jones’s novel The Known World (2004): Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back […] He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need […] he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life. (1-2) Jones has Moses acknowledge pica as a feminized habit but affirms its spiritual and practical utility for him as a man and a farmer. His dirteating is different; he tastes the soil as part of a folk-science test of its readiness for a crop. In this case, pica has been denuded of most negative connotations. A historical motif from the slavery era has been reworked to erase shame and powerlessness while connoting folk wisdom. Levy’s neo-slave narrative will achieve a similar transformational effect. In The Long Song the pica incident remains in the background of the books’ major events, yet it feeds into a salient image pattern in the novel. Although no further dirt-eating occurs, one passage does show how far dirt has penetrated the slave identity: “And then the overseer, holding the negro-man up before him like some stinking rag, started to shake him fierce, as if all the dirt of the world resided within this black-man’s bones” (Levy 129; my emphasis). The enraged overseer of Amity plantation embodies the community’s metonymical thinking: from eating dirt to being dirt. The Long Song is a narrative that “was born of a craving” (1). Having begun with one kind of hunger, Levy rapidly introduces several variations on the motif. First, there is food from the point of view of white plantation owners, what the narrator calls “The puff and twaddle of some white lady’s mind” (Levy 8). Levy undoubtedly had in mind the journal keeper Lady Nugent, who came to Jamaica as the wife of the island’s Governor: “Two pages upon the scarcity of beef. Five more upon the want of a new hat... No butter but only a wretched alligator pear again! ” 4 . Food in Levy’s novel clearly separates the European from the acclimatized or Creole plantation resident. To reject avocado flesh and favor real butter was to be truly European. Levy extends the European/ Creole contrast with reference to jam. On first arriving in Jamaica, Caroline Mortimer praises the locally produced jelly made of guava fruit (23-24); her brother John Howarth, who has 4 This is a clear allusion to Lady Nugent, who comments on the indignity of having to use avocado as a butter substitute (Nugent 1966: 26). Michelle Gadpaille 16 been on the island for many years, takes a more cynical view 5 . It is within this context that the dirt-eating of the two absent slaves is mentioned: She [Caroline] wanted to try everything - oh yes, everything. ... Bring on the duck, guinea birds and jack fish, for Mrs Caroline Mortimer was eager to nibble upon their bones. Even breadfruit that was destined for the slaves’ tables. ‘Why should I not try it too? ’ she asked her brother, who replied sternly that several of his slaves had been whipped for eating dirt - did she propose to try that delicacy also? (23-24) The mention of pica thus comes as a taunt, replete with contempt for such practices. Dirt-eating signifies a boundary between the merely exotic (guava) and the genuinely unacceptable (dirt), but the experienced plantation owner perceives a slippery slope, much more dangerous than the slippage from butter to avocado. The resident European must be careful not to fall out of the human condition and into that of the slaves, in other words, to become dirt. Another European food, imported strawberry jam, is used by Levy as a metonymical signifier to accompany the labour and childbirth of the slave Kitty. This will result in the birth of July, the novel’s narrator. Kitty is told by the overseer, who is the baby’s father, to hush up while in labour because he is trying to enjoy a gift of strawberry conserve. The “dollop of strawberry jam” (Levy 14) on his cheek displaces and replaces the byproducts of birth, while clearly marking the boundary between civilized practices of indulgence and those more bloody events that must be excluded from European notice. Overall, Levy generates a symbolic economy of food in The Long Song, using various food items in a coded way to track the fictional July’s life against the historical background. Since the main action of the novel take s place in 1831-32 at the time of the Christmas slave rising (sometimes called the Baptist War), the festivities of the plantation owners receive careful attention, especially the dinner menu. Levy loads the owner’s table with pigeon pie, mutton pie, roast pork, guinea fowl, barbecued pork, liqueurs and two kinds of soup (vegetable and turtle), while rebellion is brewing outside the big house. The selection of delicacies accurately reflects those listed in contemporary accounts (Lewis 1834: 103-104; Carmichael 1833: 34-35). In the matter of slave food, Levy was also historically exact, mentioning pigeon peas, sweet potato, limes, star apples and pawpaw (236); even the unlikely-sounding episode where July is passing liquor out the window of the big house during a dinner party turns out to be based on an account of slave pilfering by Mrs. Carmichael (1833: 35-36). Levy, however, alters the perspective on this event from owner to slave, in the process losing the tone of moral condemnation and 5 Mrs. Carmichael (1833: 38-39) provides a source for the European opinion on local and British preserves. Eating Dirt, Being Dirt 17 achieving an atmosphere of chaotic carnival at the Christmas dinner (Levy 73). Levy uses a specific food item, pickles, as shorthand for sexual activity in conversation between July and her master Robert Goodwin (Levy 221- 22). The sexually charged conversation between master and servant happens at the dinner table in front of the mistress; pickles are a euphemism for sex. Goodwin and July discuss whether he wants pickles with his meat and whether these pickles should be sweet or hot. Food and sex become intimately related in this illicit relationship. This prepares the ground for July’s choice of revenge on Goodwin, which will come through food served up as she has been served up to her master. In order to fully decode the moment when Robert Goodwin is served a dish of cockroaches, one must return to the place in the novel where Goodwin commissions a family portrait (223) to record his power and position. The portrait includes him and his wife, but also July, his servant and mistress. In the painting she is holding a tray, immortalized in a position of servitude, offering up “sweets” (with all the connotations from the pickle conversation) to her master. When Goodwin abandons her to marry the despised Caroline, July plots a symmetrical revenge. Once again she will serve a choice dish. This time, however, she will choose the opposite of food: she settles on a dish of cockroaches: “July spent many days gathering up those cockroaches for Robert Goodwin’s leaving dish […] more than one hundred July managed to capture […] all were diligently hoarded by July, for far too easily had she just been discarded” (270-71). Levy’s choice of insect could have been influenced by the passage in Lewis’s (1834: 203) Journal where he mentions that cockroaches are “absolutely in legions.” These insects are appropriate not just because Goodwin has an established phobia of cockroaches, but also because in the symbolic economy of Jamaica, a cockroach is the one thing lower than dirt. Many proverbs still repeated today affirm that the cockroach occupies the unenviable position in the pecking order (Watson 1991: 41- 43), for example, “Brown man wife nyam cockroach a corner, save money fe buy silk dress,” or “Wen cockroach tink im backra, lil time im av fe change im skin” 6 . The identification between dirt and identity is further cemented here. For July has become what Goodwin fears and repudiates; she is the object at which his stomach now turns. Having thought of herself as the server, she discovers too late that she has also been the dish - and just as easily discarded as consumed. The rules of sympathetic magic therefore dictate revenge by externalizing her transformation - into a dish of cockroaches. 6 The brown man’s wife eating cockroaches in the corner is saving money to buy a silk dress; when a cockroach thinks himself a white person, he will soon have to change the colour of his skin. Michelle Gadpaille 18 It is quite permissible to see this tableau as related to slave magic, since Abrahams (1996: 67) notes the connection between pica and the Caribbean religious and magical practice of obeah. The dish chosen as a container is adequate to the occasion, oval, domed and silver lidded (Levy 267); its European opulence both masks and mirrors the dirt within. At the dinner table, Goodwin lifts the lid: A thousand black cockroaches suddenly freed into the light, scurried from out that dish. They swarmed across the table-top like a spill of dirty water to drop pitter-patter from the table on to the wooden floor. Some fell into his lap. Robert Goodwin was too stunned to feel the crawl of them. He sat entranced, staring at a hideous mound of dead and crushed roaches that were piled high upon the salver. He took a while to start yelling. (268) With this satisfying revenge, July negotiates her freedom from Goodwin as the cockroaches scatter. In common with West Indian slaves in general, July would find that freedom did not mean automatic prosperity or happiness. July’s fate after the Christmas rebellion, emancipation and the end of the plantation system will not be pretty. Levy leaves many years blank in her heroine’s history, but uses food to reunite the aging July with her grown son late in the narrative’s chronology. It is for stealing a chicken that July is hauled into magistrate’s court in the town of Falmouth, there to find that one of the jurors is her son, returned to the island after an English education. The Long Song, then, did begin with “a craving” - for a chicken in the soup pot, as well as the author’s craving to tackle the subject of slavery. Apparently an incidental reference, the novel’s pica emerges as the keystone in the novel’s signifying pattern of food. Levy imports from her sources not just the fact of pica’s existence among slave populations on the island, but the fact of European disgust, as well as European deployment of pica to dehumanize the slave and erect an impassable barrier between European and African. Although the pica motif was used in antislavery literature in the US to imply poor nutrition or even starvation, and to raise sympathy for slaves by implying their abjection and disease, Levy chooses instead the West Indian reality, where pica was a crime as much as a disease, regardless of its benign treatment in Marly. What Levy achieves is to recuperate a practice that was once folk, African and primarily female, but that had been historically recorded from perspectives that were imperial, western, scientific and often masculine. Moreover, Levy’s character July recovers the potential communicative function of pica, the possibility that is elided in the account of the young girl from Marly. In neo-slave narrative, pica can be used reflexively to signal a mute space of autonomy, and to give voice to silenced complaints and conditions, an agenda that underlies many neo-slave novels and that may even form a mirror of authorial activity. 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Karina Williamson (ed.). Macmillan. xi-xxxii. Young, Sera L. (2012). Craving Earth: Understanding Pica - the Urge to Eat Clay, Starch, Ice and Chalk. New York: Columbia University Press. Michelle Gadpaille Faculty of Arts Maribor Slovenia