“Some Place to Live In”: Slavery, Fugitive Homemaking, and the Jamaican Rebellion of 1831–32

On Christmas of 1831, enslaved people rose up in rebellion across Cornwall County in Jamaica, in what became the largest slave rebellion in the British Caribbean. As Cornwall burned, enslaved people 250 kilometers away in Surrey County staged their own protest. They fled their plantations by the hundreds and built temporary huts in the woods, only to abandon them and return to their plantations a few days later. This paper examines one short-lived village and the community of people who made it. It follows the tense collective process as enslaved people imagined, created, and then abandoned a new home. To do so, it pairs the robust archival material produced following the rebellion with material and environmental history to place the moment of rebellion within the longer lived history of this community of enslaved people.

Examining the impact of material deprivation and natural disasters on slave villages, this paper shows how enslaved people built and rebuilt houses and households in the face of cycles of destruction. This paper uncovers the ways in which the project of homemaking under duress governed the decisions enslaved people made before, during, and after rebellions.