Carol and I returned from Barbados yesterday morning.  The wedding was grand and the people we met were solid and interesting. We were housed in a beautiful hotel, the Bougainvillea, in a three room with balcony and bath, on the first floor overlooking a pool with the beach sloping easily down to a narrow beach. 

Slavery was abolished by Great Britain in 1807 and Barbados became an independent nation in 1966.  The one hundred and fifty nine years freedom did very little to change the conditions of the black slaves who were freed with emancipation. During the time of sugar plantations, the slaves were housed in distinctive “chattel” structures. They could be dismantled easily and moved from place to place where the free, but indentured black workers, could still live in them as contract laborers. Workers and chattel housing followed the necessities of the planting, growing and harvesting seasons. Independence brought a tide of tourism that replaced sugar as a cash crop.

There are vast differences between “quaint” simple one-room “chattel” boxes with their distinctive sharply peaked roofs and the dwellings of free people and the mansions of Colonial owners. These are visible although ambitious attempts to eradicate the gulf that exists among Barbados citizens, allow a great many to continue to live in the ubiquitous “chattel” houses. The vast majority of Barbadians are Black people who work as taxi drivers, porters, police, baggage inspectors as well as the officials who stamp your documents when you arrive or depart. The whole of the Island subsists mainly on the tourist invaders whose cultivation has become an art with smiling, courteous workers who harvest this crop.

We were told that the schools, which are modern and free to all Barbados citizens, teach the culture of “welcome” to those from Europe, South, Central and North America who come to feel the breezes and relative non-humid tropical air and dip into a warm ocean.  Independence has come to mean a better standard of living although the shambling “free” mendicants and others who live on the margins (possibly in the ramshackle and falling-down examples of deteriorated “chattel” houses) that we saw in our trip across the narrow and bumpy roads of this independent and free island paradise.

You can tell a lot about extremes.  There are modern improvements but the remains of a colonial empire contrast vividly with them.  The Black citizens of Barbados once were chattels and did slave labor.  I wonder why they cling to the “chattel” houses from that all too familiar time.