Piecing the Stories Together: An interview with Celia Naylor

The Rose Hall Great House Tour takes visitors through a historic slave plantation in Montego Bay, Jamaica, telling a version of history through the sensational legend of a white plantation mistress named Annie Palmer, known as the White Witch of Rose Hall. The tour is based on the 1929 novel by Herbert G. de Lisser bearing the same name. Celia E. Naylor, Professor of History and Africana Studies at Barnard College, attended this tour with her daughter in the summer of 2013. During and after, Naylor did feel haunted, but not by the White Witch or the men she murdered, as the tour intended. What haunted her were the tour’s gnawing silences. Naylor resolved to write a different history of Rose Hall, one about the people who actually had a right to haunt this place of terror and trauma: The enslaved. 

About the Book (from University of Georgia Press)

Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica (2022), Naylor deftly guides us through a strikingly different history. She introduces readers to the silences of the archives and unearths names and experiences of enslaved people at Rose Hall in the decades immediately before the complete abolition of slavery in Jamaica in 1838. She then offers a careful reading of de Lisser’s novel, which gave rise to the myth of the White Witch. Finally, Naylor concludes with a critical analysis of the Rose Hall Great House museum and its tours. Moving beyond the legend, she examines iterations of slavery’s afterlives in the ongoing construction of slavery museums, memorializations, and movements for Black lives and the enduring case for Black humanity. Alongside her book, she and a small group of collaborators have created a website as another way for readers to explore the truths of Rose Hall: rosehallproject.columbia.edu or unsilencing-slavery.org.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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SS: In reading your book, I gathered that a major impetus for writing was your visit to Rose Hall and the tour you went on with your daughter. Could you talk about that experience?

CN: Yes, so, I am originally from Jamaica. I was born in Jamaica in 1967. I don’t mind telling dates. I am a historian. We moved to the United States, to Miami, in 1977, and over the last many years I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel back there. The 2013 trip that I did with my daughter was actually her first time in Jamaica. She was born in 2000 and she was almost thirteen at the time.

So yes, there was this tour, the Rose Hall Tour, that we wanted to visit. Growing up, I had heard about the Rose Hall Plantation more so than I’d actually heard about the White Witch of Rose Hall. I had some idea that something happened there. There was this white woman who was continuing to haunt people in a ghost form. So, we went on the evening tour, which was fully focused on highlighting the ghost aspects of the story. During the tour there are people who are moving in and out making sounds and screaming. All to make it exciting for the people on the tour.

When we went, my daughter was just delighted by the tour itself, as was everybody else. Everybody was enjoying themselves, and I was just, the whole time, thinking to myself, I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is what they’re doing. And at the end I was thinking about the crime of it, the crime of what was being presented as the history of slavery at this plantation. What was being presented, and really not presented in terms of the absences of the enslaved. The people, their names, and their experiences.

At the time I thought at least a couple of enslaved people were named in the tour, even though no other significant information about enslaved people was included. And after doing some research, I realized that none of those names were actual names of people who lived there. And then I looked around to see: Has anybody written about this? And no one had. No one had really taken it seriously.

There was a lot online for sure about the White Witch of Rose Hall and all the fictional stories that are told about her. But there wasn’t any significant article or book, or anything about what happened there and who the enslaved people were who lived there.

I decided I would at least try to find out some of the actual names of the enslaved people and try to write even just a short essay about the Rose Hall plantation. That was the history part of it. And then the other part for me was how to engage a critical analysis of what’s actually happening on the tour.

I thought this would be important because this specific tour is also used by schools in the area as a field trip site for local students as a way of introducing them to slavery in Jamaica. This, to me, was really problematic. It was important to me to tell a different kind of story that was historically grounded, rather than a mythical one.

SS: That leads really nicely to my next question. You start off chapter one telling us what you are not doing with the book. Could you speak a little bit about that?

CN: I think it’s really important to set the purpose for something. What is it that I’m trying to present? Why do I focus on particular things and not on other things, right? These are all choices that we make as writers, whether we are in academia or not.

I wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t going to be a comprehensive history of Rose Hall Plantation. I also wanted to be clear that this was not going to focus in any significant way on the white people who lived at Rose Hall, though certainly there would be references to them to contextualize particular experiences, especially different dimensions of slavery at Rose Hall, and in terms of sugar plantations in Jamaica. I knew that I wasn’t going to write a book that did not include any white people, but what I was going to do was position them in marginal places. Not only in terms of the narrative I was telling, but also in in terms of the content. There are moments when I elaborate on something in a footnote that I didn’t want to include in the main text so that it wouldn’t distract from the story I was telling. I really wanted to focus on enslaved people.

SS: Yes, I’m thinking about how the erasure of Black individuals is part of what erases Black existence, when people are represented as collectives or generic fictionalized figures. When you realized how little information was known about individual lives at Rose Hall, how did you balance telling the stories of some while also telling a larger story about a shared experience?

CN: I wanted to include as many stories as I could piece together of specific enslaved people’s experiences, knowing that no matter how comprehensive I was going to try to be, it would fall short, right? The archival records for enslaved people at Rose Hall, for example the Rose Hall Plantation Journal, only mention specific names of enslaved people related to particular events, including the birth or passing of an enslaved person, an enslaved person running away, and so on.

SS: What is actually in the records?

CN: Well, there’s more information beyond just a list of names, but people’s names appear in the triennial slave registers for Rose Hall between 1817 and 1832. In addition, the Rose Hall Plantation Journal includes summaries of what happened on a daily and weekly basis at Rose Hall, also between 1817 and 1832, such as the roles and duties of enslaved people, as well as their movements related to specific duties on the plantation.

The names of individual people show up in very specific situations. For example, when an enslaved woman gives birth, her name is included. Whether the child is a boy or girl may be recorded. The names of the children may also be included. But oftentimes it’s just: Name-of-the-woman delivered boy child. Another instance is when people die. It may be recorded what the person died from. If it was some sort of disease, that would be recorded as well.

So, people being born, people giving birth, people passing, and people being involved in different acts of resistance, specifically people who are running away from the plantation, those were the things that got recorded. In terms of those who ran away, there were records of whether they were tracked down, found, and brought back, or if they returned on their own.

So, my task was to piece together all these archival sources. When I saw that a particular child was born, it was important to make a link to a specific mother. Some people are mentioned just once, and others, like Dorinda, who is highlighted in the book, are mentioned multiple times. Dorinda was the midwife on the plantation. She had at least nine children and half of those children passed before the age of five. She also ran away, so there’s information about that.

There is more information for somebody like Dorinda because she had a role on the plantation that was significant to the record-keepers, but that is not the case for the majority of people. Because of this archival gap, I wanted to have a companion website for the book in which I could include everybody, whether they were mentioned one time or many times. The website was important in teasing out more information and thinking about the pieces as a whole.

SS: I was really interested in how you drew our attention to the more personal aspects of people’s lives. How did you go about telling these more specific details about friendships, motherhood, and emotions felt by all these people?

CN: Fortunately, there are amazing historians who have written about the experiences of enslaved women and mothers in the Caribbean. Sasha Turner has written about girlhood, motherhood, childbearing, and child-raising during slavery in Jamaica. Her work is so comprehensive in providing that historical context about a number of plantations that I was able to place the specific stories of Rose Hall within the broader context.

It is important to think about how these women were not only operating as individual people navigating their lives at Rose Hall. I cannot know a hundred percent the specific relationships women developed—friendships, intimate connections—but I also can’t not believe that none of these types of relationships developed because we’re human beings. I considered the full breadth of human interactions we have today. Human emotions have not changed significantly in terms of feeling and experiencing love, fear, anger, frustration, or jealousy. Those emotions also emerged in a place like Rose Hall Plantation in the early nineteenth century.

In the book, I present specific information about the different ways women might have coalesced, and one particular avenue for that would be working side by side on the plantations. Working month after month, or for some year after year, and even decades, there may have been not only emotional ties, right, but other kinds of connections between these women. I thought about men and women experiencing different life events together, women giving birth to children, thinking about how to take care of those children. And again, these would not have been solitary experiences but ones that involved other people on the plantation. So I include moments that ground these experiences in something more than just individuality to think about the different ways that people connected with each other and created community even during this period of enslavement.

SS: A big portion of the book is about this history that you’re describing. At a certain point the book shifts to the tours. You take us through what remains problematic and ahistorical about the tours, maybe centrally the fact that the tour script is extracted from Herbert G. de Lisser’s novel The White Witch of Rose Hall, about a white woman named Annie Palmer. It is quite absurd that a slavery plantation tour script is taken from a novel centered on a white man.. On some level this needs no explanation, but can you talk about what is problematic about his representations of Black women?

CN: So, Herbert G. De Lisser was the editor of the major newspaper in Jamaica called the Jamaica Gleaner. It still exists today. In addition to being a journalist and an editor, he also wrote short stories and this novel. He wrote the White Witch of Rose Hall in 1929. It was a fictional account of Rose Hall Plantation, focusing on Annie Palmer, as you said, who is also known as the White Witch. The overall story focused on an Englishman, Robert Rutherford, whose father was a slave owner in the Caribbean. This particular young man is sent by his father under the guise of being a bookkeeper so he can learn a little bit about plantations and how to run them and use that information to help his father with his plantations. When he arrives in Jamaica, in Montego Bay, it seems to be his first time in the Caribbean, so we are experiencing and learning about Rose Hall from his perspective. We find out about Annie Palmer through his interactions with her, as well as what other people, primarily white people, tell him about her. So, he is our guide to everything.

There is an incident where an enslaved woman is being beaten by a Black Jamaican driver. The first time, he interjects. The second time, Annie Palmer is there. She is the one who is demanding the beating of the woman and a couple of other people. Rutherford rides off on his horse. He’s not going to intercede because Annie is the person in control of what’s happening.

So, the novel essentially leads us through different moments at Rose Hall. But it’s a very short period of time. It’s just a matter of weeks that he experiences these events.

And all of them are fabricated: There is no person named Rutherford. Lisser comes up with this entire story. Even the story of Annie Palmer killing multiple husbands. All of this is his creation.

SS: And this was the basis of the tour.

CN: Yes, the novel is the source for the Rose Hall Great House tour narrative.

SS: So, you give us a step-by-step account of the tour. After we’ve been exposed to the archival history, after we’ve been able to break the silence of what really happened through the individual accounts you give us. Because of this structure we are able to see the tour in a critical light. Is that how you intend readers to experience the book?

CN: You’re working on something for years and you’re so in it that it’s hard to imagine somebody coming to it not knowing anything about Rose Hall, so you’re trying to think, how do I present this so that readers can get some sense of the historical exploration and archival research, and then also pull different pieces of this together?

I could have done it in the reverse. I could have started with the novel, then gone to the tour, and then to the archival materials. Actually, one time I was talking about the book with somebody else, and they’re like, That’s two books. You write the archive book and then you write the next book, which is about the novel and the tours. But it was important to me that they stay together and that I start with the history of enslaved people.

SS: One question remains for me about tours like these. You mentioned that slavery museums can be a tangible way to acknowledge the legacy of slavery. I can see how that could be true, if not at Rose Hall, so how do we reconcile this possibility with the fact that they often reenact their memorialized violence?

CN: I don’t a have a specific prescription that people should follow. What I do think is that we need to move away from these anesthetized versions of history. People talk about historical amnesia. So much of what actually happened on these plantations, whether we’re talking about the Caribbean or the United States or in other parts of the world, is shown with such a limited view. Often that view is so devoid of most dimensions of violence that people come away thinking about it as a fairly benign and even benevolent institution.

It’s partly because many of these tours are open to children and school children. For curators and others working at these museums or plantations, they want to make it accessible to children of all ages, and not too overwhelming, and as a result of that, they present a narrative of slavery this is ahistorical.

My position on it now is that there are so many ways that young people are watching, listening to, or hearing about violent acts, either in the current day or from decades ago. There’s already a desensitization to particular acts of violence. You do not necessarily have to reenact all of these scenes, for example, whipping somebody as part of a tour. But certainly talking about it, that is reasonable to include.

SS: Do you have any hope that the Rose Hall Tour could change?

CN: I actually reached out to the Rollins family, specifically to Michele Rollins. I wrote letters. I sent emails. I called the Rose Hall Development Inc. Office, left messages, and did not receive a response. But I did try to do that because I was interested in the possibility of—not necessarily the whole thing changing—but the possibility of adding another tour that would actually increase their profits because I understand that it’s a business. I understand why having a ghost story is good for profit.

But I didn’t get any response from them. I talked to people who work there, who are local Jamaicans, and some were interested in telling more of the story of enslaved people. But it’s hard. Because when you’ve heard this story so many times, you believe it’s true, especially when people tell you it’s a true story. So, for some, it was hard to even imagine that the story they were telling wasn’t true, and then for others it was like, Well, but why do we want to talk about what actually happened here?

Since I started talking to some of the people there, including the manager of the Rose Hall Great House, they’ve included some new, huge posters of Johnny Cash and Jamaica, which don’t tell the story of enslaved people, but might be an opening to include more of the narratives, like about Johnny Cash, Jamaican culture, and other interesting tidbits. So I’m hopeful for that at some point down the road. That wouldn’t completely move them away from making the money that they’re making on the tours, but it could still provide some additional information.

SS: Is there anyone doing the right type of work with slavery museums and memorials?

CN: A colleague and friend of mine, Tiya Miles [Professor at Harvard University], has done incredible work at the Diamond Hill Plantation in Georgia. You can learn more about this Vann House Public History Project online. She went through the tour, and she worked closely with the staff there to include more information about the enslaved people at that site. And certainly there are other plantations that are including more information about enslaved people like Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, and some plantations in Louisiana. And even the National Park Service is trying to engage with slavery at specific sites. There are a number of places where I think it is changing. I am just not sure that will happen with Rose Hall.

But I can remain hopeful. You have this book out there now and we don’t know where it could go. One of my friends who lives in Jamaica encouraged me to reach out to some of the folks in the Ministry of Education and Youth to see if it would be possible to include some excerpts of the book in the curricula in schools. That is something I would be interested in because part of my concern with the tours has been how it will impact the children going there. This is something they are learning. So, if there is a way for me to at least change what they know about Rose Hall, that would be monumental.