THE PLANTER'S WIVES. In the film, Epps' wife is portrayed as a complex individual; bitter at her husband's obsession with a pretty slave girl; vengeful, and ultimately cruel and sadistic.
It is a portrayal often repeated by those who recorded daily life in 18th Century Guiana. The Dutch women are invariably portrayed as unattractive; pale; care-worn; diseased; old before their time. In Sranan Tongo, the slave dialect that has survived in Suriname, Dutch women are 'patata umas', literally 'the potato women'.
And there were plenty of women like Mrs Epps. Frustrated by their husbands’ Olympian feats of infidelity, the wives often took it out elsewhere. ‘They are also rigid disciplinarians,’ wrote a diarist in the 1770s, ‘as the backs of their poor slaves, male and female, sufficiently testify.’
In one incident, in Paramaribo (see photo), a pretty slave girl was given a hundred lashes for breaking a piece of china. It was quite common for slaves to kill themselves, usually jumping out of windows. The Dutch women were never punished for their excesses. One used to get particular satisfaction from beating the breasts of her girls, whilst another once stabbed a ‘quadroon’ with a red-hot iron, killing her at once. It’s hard now to imagine how they worked up such hatred, and I’ve often wondered whether, in the Sranan term ‘potato-women,’ there isn’t a lingering hint of revenge.
Slavery, oddly enough, was also killing their husbands, the planters. The abundance of everything was suffocating. There was even talk of a ‘vortex of dissipation’. Men would do whatever they dreamed, and then drown in their fantasies. Drink and the pox killed most, but some just faded away. Meanwhile the wives seemed to survive. Often, they were widowed two or three times before they’d find another dissolute husband. It was almost as if the colony was about some gruesome masque, dancing itself to death.