‘Washing the Blackamoor White’: Interracial Intimacy and Coloured Women’s Agency in Jamaica

Abstract

In the summer of 1804, Grace Donne died after ‘an illness of four or five days’. In a letter to his cousin, Simon Taylor, a wealthy white Creole planter and attorney, lamented that he was ‘like a Fish out of the Water by her loss’.1 For 36 years, Grace Donne lived with Simon Taylor in his home in the suburbs of Kingston and in St. Thomas in the East as his lover and, in many ways, his companion. Despite her central role in his life, in over 500 letters authored by Taylor to his family, friends, and associates, between the mid-eighteenth century and the time of his death in 1813, there are only a few references to Grace Donne threaded throughout. Despite the paucity of archival records, the relationship between Grace Donne and Simon Taylor presents a lens through which the nuances and complexities of interracial sex, agency, and the dynamics of power in Jamaican slave society can be viewed.