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Abstract
This article centers what provision grounds meant to and for Afro-Jamaican apprentice laborers, and it details the complicated nature of customary rights, which were under attack after abolition in 1834. Although the apprentices’ provision grounds did not belong to them legally, they believed this land was theirs by customary right. Maintaining provision grounds allowed some apprentices to increase their capital and carve out autonomous spaces. For others, provision grounds led to familial and communal disputes over land rights. Furthermore, this study highlights rights lost and gained for apprentices after abolition and emphasizes how apprentice laborers sometimes exercised their newfound right to file complaints against overseers to secure their customary rights. By evaluating the factors that encouraged and discouraged the careful cultivation of one’s grounds during apprenticeship, this article also evaluates the role that these grounds played in the wider Afro-Jamaican community forged on pens and plantations.
Abstract
Few early eighteenth-century Caribbean paintings survive. Among them is an important pair of previously unpublished Jamaican portraits of Chief Justice Thomas Fearon Jr., of Clarendon, and of his wife, Mary Peters Fearon, with their oldest son, Thomas Peters Fearon, from the 1730s. Colonial reflections of London art and society, although distorted by distance, occupied unique spaces where fantasies and realities collided. This article examines the historical context, provenance, and interpretation of the large, three-quarter-length paintings by an unidentified artist as well as the little that is known about the Jamaican art world at the time. Two unpublished drawings by Pierre du Simitière of Black West Indian women—one enslaved, one free—provide a counterpoint, as do other colonial depictions. The Fearon portraits form a rare pictorial record of a family at the apex of a transatlantic human pyramid of visible privilege and unseen pain, a century before that world ended.