Slavery’s Tortured Figure

J. R. Kerr-Ritchie reviews Randy M. Browne’s “The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery.”

By J. R. Kerr-RitchieAugust 20, 2024

• History

RANDY M. BROWNE’S new book The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery is the first intensive study of the plantation slave driver, the Black head man of the fields with the agonizing dual role of maximizing the owner’s harvest through any means possible, including torture, and being an enslaved person himself.

Browne’s thoughtful book tries to steer between the rock of slavery’s totalizing power and the whirlpool of slaves’ heroic resistance through a “messier story” of the driver’s occasional roles in uprisings and other less conspicuous means of rebellion and subversion. The canvas for this ambitious work is plantation societies throughout the 18th- and 19th-century Americas, drawing on evidence from colonial slavery’s legal records in the British National Archives, especially those of local administrative fiscals and protectors who were employed to adjudicate slaves’ complaints.

These sources, also employed judiciously in Browne’s award-winning first book, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (2017), offer unique insights into the drivers’ lives and their contested social relations with other enslaved people, slave owners, and the colonial state. They support one of his key claims: “Drivers inevitably found themselves at the center of conflicts with everyone around them because their role trapped them between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the resistance of other enslaved laborers.”

The Driver’s Story is organized thematically around the dimensions of drivers’ lives: their precarious condition receiving greater benefits while enduring constant surveillance, field production demands, family building and leadership roles, and the “agonizing dilemmas” that drivers faced during slave rebellions. Do they remain loyal to the enslaver or help their fellow people in bondage?

Browne makes an important conceptual contribution to our understanding of this key position. Using a man of color under bondage to be the leader of field production was at the “center” of Atlantic slavery and made it both effective and resilient. It also served as a “harbinger” of modern labor exploitation. Paraphrasing Guyanese radical historian Walter Rodney, Browne concludes that the driving system was “simply capitalism without a loincloth.”

These are significant points, indeed, but I would qualify them.

Plenty of locales in Atlantic slavery—the small farm, household, ship, city, and so forth—were also important sites but did not require a driver. Slavery’s effectiveness always depended on the resources of the colonial/national state backed by force. Slavery’s surplus extraction was of labor and the person, distinguishing it from industrial capitalism’s exploitative labor practices. That said, The Driver’s Story is the best study of this important figure in Caribbean historiography. The dilemmas facing the driver are lucidly presented, provocatively argued, and well researched. The author succeeds in telling a more complex narrative.

The Driver’s Story seeks to avoid the totalizing power paradigm that paints slavery as the only noteworthy experience for those under bondage. But Browne so expertly depicts the driver’s dual roles—both controller and slave himself—that one simply cannot overlook the omnipresence of the totalizing power paradigm that he seeks to transcend. So much surveillance, so much brutality, so much accountability renders structures of power more prevalent in drivers’ lives than anything else.

There are times when Browne does not consider the nuances of his evidence. On a sugar plantation in 1832 Berbice (now Guyana), for example, the enslaved man Curry added to the workload of his wife, Margaret, so that she would avoid being punished by the driver, Louis. The conflict is part of the fiscal’s report. But Browne’s focus on the driver’s relation to the worker downplays what was clearly a family work action that might have been a one-off or a strategy. How many other examples of slaves’ alternative actions, strategies, and outcomes did Browne overlook by focusing upon drivers’ strategies in fiscal records of labor disputes?

Browne rightfully discusses the notion of the “Big Man” as a dimension of the African diaspora. But rather than examine its African roots, he focuses on its use to drivers in securing more privileges and marrying the “best” women. It is not clear whether these resources and households were impacted by either retentive African political practices or real existing social conditions in Caribbean slave societies. Buried in an endnote in the final chapter, we learn that the enslaved population of Berbice expanded from 8,000 in 1796 to 28,000 by 1807. How could this massive Africanization not have impacted community formation, disruption, and reformation, together with the role of patriarchal power?

Browne concludes with a detailed examination of a slave conspiracy in 1813–14 Berbice. It illustrates, he argues, that drivers “had as much to lose as to gain by supporting the rebellion,” and that “most drivers, most of the time, were not rebels.” But this seems unpersuasive. Historical works by C. L. R. James, Michael Craton, Hilary Beckles, Eugene Genovese, Robert Paquette, Tom Zoellner, and others have long pointed to the role of drivers in slave revolts in the Caribbean. Browne himself concurs that revolts “were often organized and led by drivers.” Indeed, his own research turns up seven drivers in the bloody revolt of 1789 Demerara (now Guyana), two drivers in an 1804 plot, multiple drivers in an 1808 plot, and two drivers in the 1813–14 conspiracy. The most fascinating revelation of Browne’s research, in my view, concerns his all-too-brief reference to “insurgent memories” of rebellion.

Students of slave revolts grapple with the question of whether rebellions were inspired by these memories or were more spontaneous. Browne misses an opportunity to make a useful intervention by focusing on some nonrebellious drivers, especially the loyalist named Alexander, who received a medallion for siding with colonial authorities and fighting his fellow enslaved people. But surely, the most telling consequence took the form of the severed heads of drivers Quashie, Thomas, Pompey, Quamina, and John. They were hung for “treason” but, in actuality, executed for seeking their natural right of liberty like previous rebel leaders. It is not clear how the decision by some drivers not to rebel in 1813–14 Berbice replaces or complicates an older narrative of rebellious drivers.

Then there is the question of comparative studies of the driver. Genovese pointed out in 1972’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made that “the position of the driver […] had to differ markedly between a slave society of absentee owners, an overwhelmingly black population, and three-caste system [Caribbean], and a slave society of resident planters, a large white and free majority, and a two-caste system [the US South].” Most of the secondary literature on drivers in Browne’s notes draws from slave studies on the US South and Brazil without sufficiently recognizing this important distinction and how it might have differentiated drivers’ lives. Drivers on absentee plantations presumably enjoyed more power than those where the planter woke every morning and watched the fields. How much more likely was it that such power could lead to rebel leadership in the former scenario rather than the latter? All this invites skepticism toward his claim that the dynamics of the driving system across time and space “were surprisingly stable.”

Finally, there is the question of the driver beyond the archive. Browne refers briefly to the changing nature of this figure in music and literature. But cultural representations deserve more analysis and debate. How do we explain the legend of the brutal driver in Caribbean slave societies? When and why did this figure transform into a freedom fighter? Why did his refusal to join rebellions render him a sellout? Such questions have little to do with the archive and everything to do with the way in which people perceive the past and its relationship to the present.

These questions aside, Randy M. Browne is to be commended for exploring one of slavery’s most complex and even troubling stock characters. We may never understand why drivers made the choices they did, taking subversive action in some cases and remaining strategically silent in others. But this book lucidly and provocatively advances the discussion.