Enslaved Women and Male Slave Drivers in the Caribbean

This paper explores the relationships between enslaved women and high-ranking enslaved men known as drivers in order to develop an intersectional analysis of gender, power, and sexuality in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean. Drivers were ubiquitous on Caribbean plantations, where planters or their representatives promoted trusted enslaved men to positions of authority and charged them with supervising other slaves at work and inflicting punishments. Yet we know surprisingly little about these crucial go-betweens, who were almost always men thanks to European and African gender biases, especially when it comes to their relationships with other enslaved laborers. Evidence from slave societies including Jamaica, Cuba, and British Guiana both confirms certain well-known generalizations about drivers and reveals some troubling findings. Drivers were more likely than other enslaved men to find marital partners and support families that were sometimes quite large, which were major challenges in societies where men outnumbered women and material resources were scarce. Yet drivers’ efforts to exert patriarchal authority also had a darker side, with some drivers abusing their position to sexually coerce women or defeat other enslaved men they viewed as sexual rivals. Moreover, drivers could often count on the support or at least tacit approval of their male enslavers, with whom they shared certain assumptions about female subordination. Understanding the relationships between drivers and enslaved women thus helps us better understand the gendered nature of Caribbean slavery and in particular the little-studied sexual politics of slave communities.