JUNE 2000
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DIASPORA
Mary Seacole - the forgotten Nightingale
Mary Seacole was one of the two famous women who nursed the sick and wounded
of the British and their allies in the Crimea War. Whilst the other,
Florence Nightingale, became celebrated, Mary Seacole was consigned to
obscurity because she was black. On Easter Sunday, Baffour Ankomah and a
group of friends visited the grave of Mary Seacole in West London. This is
the first of his three-part series on the life and times of the woman who
should have been the queen of British nursing.
The cemetery attendant had never heard of her. “Who was she? Was she
famous?”, he asked in genuine astonishment. We had only asked him the way to
Mary Seacole’s grave. “Never heard of her, mate. When did she die?”
“1881,” I said.
“Blimey!”, he gasped.
In fairness to the attendant (in his late-20s), he was not in charge of the
part of the cemetery where Mary Seacole is buried. The Kensal Rise General
Cemetery, off the Harrow Road in West London, is a huge place, almost a town
itself. But it shares a common border and a common northern entrance with
the adjacent St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery where Mary Seacole is buried.
“There is an old man over there, ask him”, the attendant told us. But there
was no old man over there, so my friends and I decided to go and look for
Mary Seacole in the huge cemetery ourselves. It was like looking for a pin
in a haystack.
It took us about 25 minutes to locate her — her white marble headstone
glistening in the April sunshine. It is by far the newest, if not the most
beautiful, of the headstones in that old section of the cemetery which is
home to people who died in the 1800s and early 1900s. Mary’s grave was
restored in 1973 by the Vitae Club, a Jamaican women’s organisation in
London, and the British Women’s Nurses Memorial Fund.
The epitaph (in gold and black letters) was kept simple and sweet: “Here
lies Mary Seacole 1805-1881 of Kingston, Jamaica. A notable nurse who cared
for the sick and wounded in the West Indies, Panama and the battlefields of
the Crimea 1854-1856.”
So, if the Crimea made Florence Nightingale, why hasn’t the cemetery
attendant ever heard of Mary Seacole? And not only him. Millions in Britain
and hundreds of millions more outside Britain, have never heard of her. The
big question is: why?
Mary Seacole was born Mary Jane Grant in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1805. She was
a businesswoman, traveller, gold prospector, writer, doctress and nurse. Her
father was a Scottish army officer, and her mother a descendant of African
slaves. By Jamaican standards of the era, her family was reasonably
well-off. They belonged to the mulatto class, the legal classification then
in use by the British colonial government to describe mixed race people .
Because of that official race classification, “a crude but effective system
evolved in [the Caribbean] which the African was placed firmly at the bottom
of the socio-economic scale and the European at the top,” say Ziggi
Alexander and Audrey Dewjee who edited the 1984 reprint of Mrs Seacole’s
autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, first
published in 1857.
“For those intermediate gradations of colour,” Ziggi and Audrey continued,
“the maxim ‘the lighter the better’ was of crucial importance. This
deliberate colonial policy resulted in the ‘browns’, ‘coloureds’ or
‘mulattoes’ as they were variously called, being considered and generally
considering themselves to be, greatly superior to anyone darker. The colour
hierarchy dominated Caribbean life and its effects are still felt today.”
The race classification caused Mary Seacole a lot of identity problems.
Though proud of her African roots, being a mulatto she sometimes considered
herself “greatly superior to anyone darker”. In her autobiography (which she
wrote herself, but helped by an editor), she interchangeably used the terms,
“negro”, “nigger” and “black” depending on her mood . “Negro” and “black”
when she was not being contemptuous of a darker-skinned person, and “nigger”
when she was.
In their introduction to the 1984 reprint of Mary’s book, the editors Ziggi
Alexander and Audrey Dewjee say: “Her use of the word ‘nigger’ perhaps
demands some explanation. Although a common expression among white writers
of the time, particularly North Americans, the modern reader might find it
shocking coming from Mrs Seacole.
“In her and in her writing are combined the conflicting elements of pride in
her African ancestry and unquestioning acceptance of British culture and
attitudes, which sometimes manifested itself in her use of pejorative
European terminology. Whilst the Euro-American in such a term showed total
contempt for all black people, it is clear from Mary Seacole’s autobiography
that this was not the case with her, and that she had shaken off much of the
influence of the Jamaican colour and class hierarchy into which she was
born.”
But we are going ahead of ourselves now, so let’s return to Mary’s youth and
take the story from there.
Early life
Mary’s mother ran a boarding house in Kingston. A “notable nurse and
doctress” [an old word meaning “almost” a female doctor], Mary’s mother was
very experienced in the prognosis and treatment of tropical diseases and
general ailments based on the tradition of herbal medicine brought to the
Caribbean by African slaves. Her patients were mainly army and naval
officers and their families. Thus, surrounded by such military company in
her youth, Mary grew up into a fine woman with strong military attitudes.
As a young woman, Mary developed a taste for adventure. Some people in fact
called her a female Ulysses. “I believe that they intended it as a
compliment,” Mary wrote later, “but from my experience of the Greeks, I do
not consider it a flattering one.”
Even before her brief marriage to Edwin Horatio Seacole on 10 November 1836,
Mary’s travels had taken her twice to England, and once to Cuba, Bahamas and
Haiti.
She particularly remembered her first visit to London and how boys poked fun
at her colour in the street. “I am only a little brown — a few shades
duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much,” Mary wrote in her
autobiography, “but my companion was very dark and a fair subject for their
rude wit. She was hot-tempered, poor thing!, and as there were no policemen
to awe the boys and turn our servants’ heads in those days, our progress
through the streets was sometimes a rather chequered one.”
It was not until 1829 that London got a police force.
Her married life was brief as her husband died early. It affected Mary so
much that she refused to marry again.
The death of her mother just before the great fire of Kingston in 1843 came
as a big blow. And when her mother’s boarding house was burnt down in the
fire, Mary could easily have given up hope. But she was not the kind of
person to be held down forever by sorrow. She soon rebuilt her mother’s
hotel, made it even better, and gradually eased herself into her mother’s
shoes as a “nurse and doctress.”
As a girl, Mary had seen so much of her mother and her patients that “the
ambition to become a doctress,” she reveals in her book, “took firm root in
my mind early; and I was very young when I began to make use of the little
knowledge I had acquired from watching my mother, upon a great sufferer — my
doll. I made good use of my dumb companion and confidante; and whatever
disease was most prevalent in Kingston, be sure my poor doll soon contracted
it.”
And not only the doll, she also made good patients of the dogs and cats
around her. By age 12, she was regularly helping her mother to nurse her
patients. Thus, by 1850 when a severe cholera epidemic hit Kingston, Mary
had all the nursing skills at hand to make her famous. “Sometimes I had a
naval or military surgeon under my roof, from whom I never failed to glean
instruction, given, when they learned my love for the profession, with a
readiness and kindness I am never likely to forget.”
Life in Panama
In 1851, the pull of gold in Panama during the Californian gold-rush was too
much to keep Mary in Kingston. Her brother was already living in Panama, and
off Mary went hoping to prospect for gold in Panama. But once a doctress,
always a doctresss. Mary soon found herself in the middle of another cholera
epidemic, and her nursing experience came in handy for the locals.
In fact it was in Panama that Mary performed her first, albeit illegal,
autopsy on a small child who had died of cholera. She wanted to understand
the disease better, and the only way to do it was to open up the child and
see what went on inside a person when cholera attacked.
“How the idea first arose in my mind I can hardly say, but I began to think
that, if it were possible to take this little child and examine it, I should
learn more of the terrible disease which was sparing neither young nor old,
and should know better how to do battle with it,” Mary wrote later.
“It was [a] cold grey dawn, and the rain had ceased when I followed the man
who had taken the dead child away to bury it, and bribed him to carry it by
an unfrequented path down to the riverside, and accompany me to the thick
retired bush on the opposite bank.
“Having persuaded him thus much, it was not difficult, with the help of
silver arguments to convince him that it would be for the general benefit
and his own, if I could learn from this poor little thing the secret inner
workings of our common foe; and ultimately he stayed by me, and aided me in
my first and last post mortem examination.”
Mary’s days in Panama coincided with the time when escaped slaves from
America’s deep south held sway over many towns and districts of Panama. The
Americans who came to Panama during the gold-rush hated being ruled by the
escaped slaves.
“Against the negroes, of whom there were many in the Isthmus, and who almost
invariably filled the municipal offices, and took the lead in every way, the
Yankees had a strong prejudice,” Mary wrote, “but it was wonderful to see
how freedom and equality elevate men, and the same negro who perhaps in
Tennesse would have cowered like a beaten child or dog beneath an American’s
uplifted hand, would face him boldly here and, by equal courage and superior
physical strength, cow his old oppressor.”
Mary disliked the Americans but loved the British. “My experience of travel
had not failed to teach me that Americans (even from the northern states)
are always uncomfortable in the company of coloured people, and very often
show this feeling in stronger ways than by sour looks and rude words,” she
wrote.
“I think, if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the
Atlantic — and I do confess to a little — it is not unreasonable. I have a
few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related — and I am
proud of the relationship — to those poor mortals whom you once held
enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns.
“And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes
and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors — let others
affect to doubt them if they will — is it surprising that I should be
somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have
endeavoured to assume over me? Mind, I am not speaking of all. I have met
with some delightful exceptions.”
Her American experience
Mary tells about another occasion in Panama, on the anniversary of the
declaration of American independence, when a “sallow-looking American”
proposing the toast “to the ladies, with an especial reference to myself,”
made this short speech:
“Well, gentlemen, I expect you all support me in drinking this toast [to]
Aunty Seacole... We can’t du less for her after what she’s done for us, when
the cholera was among us, gentlemen, not many months ago. So I say, God
bless the best yaller woman He ever made, from Jamaica, gentlemen, from the
Isle of Springs.
“Well, gentlemen, I expect there are only tu things we’re vexed for, and the
first is, that she ain’t one of us, a citizen of the Great United States;
and the other is, gentlemen, that Providence made her a yaller woman, I
calculate, gentlemen, you’re all as vexed as I am that she’s not wholly
white, but I du reckon on your rejoicing with me that she’s so many shades
removed from being entirely black; and I guess, if we could bleach her by
any means, we would and thus make her acceptable in any company as she
deserves to be. Gentlemen, I give you Aunty Seacole.”
The “sallow-looking” American was loudly applauded by his fellow Americans.
But Mary was furious.
“Burning as I was, to tell them my mind on the subject of my colour,” Mary
took the floor and “thanked” the Americans in these words:
“Gentlemen, I return you my best thanks for your kindness in drinking my
heath... But I must say that I don’t altogether appreciate your friend’s
kind wishes with respect to my complexion. If it had been as dark as any
nigger’s, I should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much
respected by those whose respect I value.
“And as to his offer of bleaching me, I should, even if it were practicable,
decline it without any thanks. As to the society which the process might
gain me admission into, all I can say is that, judging from the specimens I
have met with here and elsewhere, I don’t think that I shall lose much by
being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and the general
reformation of American manners.”
There was a hushed silence at first. Then the Americans burst into an
applause, and as Mary wrote later, “[because] I was a somewhat privileged
person, they laughed at it good-naturedly enough. Perhaps (for I was not in
the best humour myself), I should have been better pleased if they had been
angry.”
Mary had one final blush with her American “friends” when the time came for
her to return to Kingston. She was the type who could not stay very long in
one place. So to sweet Kingston, she decided to return. As she prepared for
the journey, an American merchant friend warned her not to go with an
American ship, but to wait until an English steamer called. But Mary, the
Ulysses, took no notice. She took the first American ship that sailed by.
“So, with Mac and my little maid,” she wrote later, “I passed through the
crowd of female passengers on deck, and sought the privacy of the saloon.
Before I had been long there, two ladies came to me, and in their cool,
straightforward manner, questioned me.
‘Where air you going?’
‘To Kingston.’
‘And how air you going.’
‘By sea.’
‘Don’t be impertinent, yaller woman. But by what conveyance are you going?’
‘By this steamer of course. I’ve paid for my passage’.”
The two American women then went and fetched seven more of their number —
all nine of them surrounded Mary Seacole, asking the same questions.
“My answers — and I was very particular — raised quite a storm of
uncomplimentary remarks,” Mary recounted in her book.
‘Guess a nigger woman don’t go along with us in this saloon,’ said one.
‘I never travelled with a nigger yet, and I expect I shan’t begin now,’ said
another.
“Meanwhile some children had taken my little servant in hand, and were
practising on her the politeness which their parents were favouring me with
— only, as is the wont of children, they were crueller.”
One of the children in fact spat in the poor little servant’s face, only for
Mary to receive this “staid advice” from an elderly American lady who came
across the scene:
“Well now, I tell you for your good,” she told Mary, “you’d better quit
this, and not drive my people to extremities. If you do, you’ll be sorry for
it. I expect.”
In the end, feeling thoroughly harassed, Mary went to find a stewardess and
appealed to her to move her from the saloon. “There’s nowhere but the
saloon, and you can’t expect to stay with the white people, that’s clear,”
the stewardess told her matter-of-factly.
“Flesh and blood can stand a good deal of aggravation, but not that,” the
stewardess continued. “If the Britishers is so took up with coloured people,
that’s their business, but it won’t do here.”
The last remark, says Mary, was in response to an Englishman who had advised
her not to move an inch from her seat. “They can go to hell,” the Englishman
should have added for good measure, but he was too polite.
In the end, Mary could no longer stand the harassment and went to find the
captain. “He and some of the black crew and the black cook, who showed his
teeth most viciously, were much annoyed” when they heard the story. But the
captain could not help much more, as he said “it was the custom of the
country”, and so asked that Mary’s fare be refunded to her so she could
leave the ship.
“So, at 12 o’clock at night, I was landed again upon the wharf of Navy Bay.”
Mary had to wait for two more days before an English ship came by and
carried her homeward to Kingston.
(The reprint of Mrs Seacole’s autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs
Seacole in Mand Lands, is published by Falling Wall Press, 75 West St, Old
Market, Bristol, BS2 OBX, England. Tel: 0117 924 8828 Edited by Ziggi
Alexander and Audrey Dewjee, it costs £7.95 paperback. 247 pages)
Copyright © IC Publications Limited 2000. All rights reserved.
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