The Lamplighter

Contents
Missing Faces
Scene 1: Interior Fort
Scene 2: Shipping News
Scene 3: Interior Fort
Song: All
Scene 4: Herself Talking
Scene 5: Shipping News
Scene 6: The Story Coming Back
Scene 7: Shipping News
Scene 8: Sugar
Scene 9: Shipping News
Scene 10: Death – free at last
Scene 11: Runaway
Scene 12: Shipping News
Scene 13: British Cities
Scene 14: Shipping News
Scene 15: Resistance
Scene 16: Freedom
Useful Sources & Further Reading


MISSING FACES
We’re perhaps over-fond of dates, of going around in circles of a hundred years to mark the birth of, or the death of; trying to grasp, as we all get older, what time means, and particularly in these Covid-19 days and nights when we feel vulnerable, when we feel mortal. Anniversaries give us the perfect excuse to try and catch up on what we already should have caught up on. Anniversaries afford us a big noisy opportunity to try and remember what we should not have forgotten. But all of us who have ever loved know that it does not take an anniversary of a death to remember our dead. And all of us who have ever loved know that the dead have a way of staying around; as long as we are still here loving and remembering, then in a sense they are too.
We often distance ourselves from the people who once were slaves, as if they didn’t have mothers and fathers, as if they never became mothers and fathers themselves. But for those who are descended from slaves, these men and women are ancestors, great, great, greats … They are the long and the lost family.
Slavery is one of those subjects that we all think we know about. People repeat, like a litany, facts they think they know. Men were shipped, packed like sardines, as in the famous Brookes slave-ship drawing, commissioned by Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist. The Africans sold their own people – this gets mentioned so often, as if the reiteration of African complicity diminishes responsibility. But what spirit, eh, the African people? Mind you, there’s always been slavery, the ancient Romans were at it, and so on and so on. We are closed off to any more detail about slavery; we don’t want to know. We don’t want to imagine how slavery would affect each of the five senses. Too much information about the actual experience of it fills most ordinary people, black and white, with revulsion, distaste, or worse, induces boredom. We seem to think we’ve heard it all before.
When the BBC radio producer Pam Fraser Solomon first asked me to write something to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 2007, I replied that I thought enough had been written about slavery, and that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a black writer. Black writers are often expected to write about slavery and race. I also thought I knew a lot about the period, and had written the odd poem.
I had a long conversation with Pam and she persuaded me that I was wrong. I realised that the past was not past, as Faulkner had it, and that many of the inequalities and divisions in our society today were the direct result of the slave trade. I felt fired up then by a moral imperative: there can be no such thing as too many stories about slavery. I took Toni Morrison as my guide in realising there was more future in the past than there was in the future.
Months later, having immersed myself in original accounts and research, I realised how ignorant I was. The Lamplighter emerged out of these shocking original testimonies, and focuses on the lives of four women – Black Harriot, Constance, Mary and the Lamplighter – during hundreds of years of enslavement. As I wrote it I felt as if I was writing a love letter to my ancestors. I emerged from the experience wondering how I would write about anything else.
Most British people think of slavery as something that happened in America and perhaps the Caribbean. They know vaguely about boats, Bristol, Liverpool, and something about sugar maybe, but not that Britain was the main slave-trading nation. Nor do they know details of what that meant, for example that two days before a slave ship docked it could be smelt, the putrescence of blood, faeces, vomit and rotting bodies carried downwind into the port.
Being African and Scottish, I had taken comfort in the notion that Scotland was not nearly as implicated in the horrors of the slave trade as England. Scotland’s self-image is one of a hard-done-to wee nation, yet bonny and blithe. I once heard a Scottish woman proudly say: ‘We don’t have racism up here, that’s an English thing, that’s down south.’ Scotland is a canny nation when it comes to remembering and forgetting. The plantation owner is never wearing a kilt.
It was a not so delicious irony that the anniversary, the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery, was also the tricentenary of the union between Scotland and England, a union which allowed Scotland to profit from the slave trade in a big way, and changed the face of Glasgow in particular. When Bishop Pococke visited Glasgow in 1760, he remarked that ‘the city has above all others felt the advantages of the union in the West Indian trade which is very great, especially in tobacco, indigoes and sugar’.
I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town, but, alas, there is something the matter with Glasgow that’s going around and round. Glasgow does not readily admit its history in the way that other cities in the United Kingdom have done – Bristol, Liverpool, London. Other cities now hold major events to commemorate the abolition. What’s happening in Glasgow? – in the Gallery of Modern Art, for instance, which was originally built in 1778 as Cunninghame Mansion, the splendid townhouse of William Cunninghame, a tobacco baron? Or in Buchanan Street, the great shopping street, named after Andrew Buchanan, another tobacco lord, or in Jamaica Street, Tobago Street, the