“What Is for Me Is Not for My Master”

What is it about?

This article details the complex and delicate nature of apprentices' 'ownership' of their provision grounds and outlines the ways in which the gradual stripping away of the apprentice laborers' customary rights revealed the fragility of customary rights during Jamaican apprenticeship. Provision grounds were plots of land on plantations that provided enslaved people with a small space on which they could grow produce to either supplement the rations received on the plantation or sell in the weekend markets for profit. This land was essential to apprentice laborers' survival during apprenticeship, a short-lived and coercive labor system that preceded full emancipation in 1838. Customary rights were sometimes defined in primary documents as "allowances," such as permitting an elderly enslaved woman to care for infant children while their mothers labored in the field or receiving salt fish to supplement the food cultivated on the provision grounds. These customary practices were the norm in Jamaica for many decades before the abolition of slavery but were under attack during apprenticeship. As they struggled to survive seasons of drought and grappled with the plunder of their grounds, Afro-Jamaican apprentices utilized their rights gained during apprenticeship (the ability to seek out a stipendiary magistrate to file complaints against planters and overseers) in an effort to secure the customary rights that some apprentices had lost with the advent of apprenticeship.

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