When I first visited Erlene Downie in 2000, she had been living alone for 33 years, following the death of her husband from leukemia. Illnesses and premature deaths caused by blood diseases such as haemophilia (probably as a result of inbreeding) and diabetes have had a devastating effect on the community. Poor diet and a lack of dental care have left most of the older generation with either bad teeth or no teeth at all, and young people who don’t realize that this is preventable. Ill health, inadequate housing, little ownership of land to produce their own food, and a lack of job opportunities have locked the community into a poverty trap that has hardly improved in the last century. Though one man I met, Wilson Norris, is passionate about Irish music and has a collection of CDs, these people are poor and their main concentration is on survival, not the past.
They do not know much about Ireland except that some of their ancestors came from there. The Redlegs have retained a racial pride and a degree of aloofness from their black neighbors, mostly marrying within their own community. And as one of them exclaimed, “Ah, that makes you Bajan.” They were initially suspicious of me, but the fact that I had worked in the area helped to break the ice. In order to get to know them better, I spent time with them in 2000 and again in 20. And they are an insular community.ĭespite having lived in Barbados for a number of years, I had only glimpsed these conspicuously poor, bare-footed individuals hauling coconuts up the hill in the New Castle district of Saint John Parish on the east coast of Barbados. “If I need to eat, I go next door, and if they need to eat, they come to me,” 86-year-old Eustace Norris, who spent 30 years working in a factory in England before returning to Barbados, told me. There is a strong sense of community among the Redlegs. Ann worked in Bridgetown for many years including 13 years for Cave Sheppard, a large department store in town. Their grand daughter is the first to have gone to university from that community in Martins Bay on the wild east coast of Barbados where the Atlantic pounds the shore. She is shown with her husband Herbert and their grand daughter who is currently studying for a Masters in law. Ann Banfield proudly shows me the photograph of her grand daughter’s graduation. Today, the few hundred remaining Redlegs in Barbados, also known as the Baccra, a name they were given as they were only allowed to sit in the back row at church, stand out as anomalies in a predominantly black population, struggling for survival in a society that has no niche for them, looked down upon by both blacks and better-off whites. In 1689, the governor of Barbados, Colonel James Kendall, described the Redlegs as being “dominated over and used like dogs.” He suggested to the local assembly that the emancipated slaves be given two acres (0.8 hectares) of land, as was their due, but the assembly contemptuously turned down the request. The remainder formed a wretched, poor and isolated community. However, minute books from the island show that no more than a fifth of those who were freed became farmers, owners, or artisans. The slaves became known as Redlegs, almost certainly a reference to the sunburn they picked up in the hot tropical sun.īy the mid-1700s most were free, their places taken by Africans. In all, more than 50,000 Irish were transported from Ireland to Barbados (more were sent to other islands in the West Indies), many of them prisoners captured by Oliver Cromwell during the wars in Ireland and Scotland and following the Monmouth Rebellion. An Irish white slave could be sold in Barbados for between £10 and £35. That first small trickle soon became a human flood. Captain West was instructed to return to London to sell the sugar and then proceed to Kinsale to procure another cargo of Irish slaves. The remainder were sold, including ten to the governor of Barbados, for 450 pounds of sugar apiece.
By the time Captain Joseph West’s ship arrived in the Caribbean in January 1637, eight of the 61 had died. The descendants of Irish people sold into slavery in the 1600s live in a close-knit community beset by poverty and ill health.ĭuring the winter of 1636, a ship bearing a consignment of 61 men and women destined to be slaves on the plantations of Barbados slipped quietly out of Kinsale Harbor on Ireland’s rugged southern coast.