Not exactly a book, rather a booklet—28 pages, printed on a cheap paper with small fonts—peddling stuff—a B movie poster trying to lure you in with a lengthy title loaded with superlatives: The Wonderful Life and Adventures of Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica! Giving an Account of his persevering Courage and gallant Heroism, in revenging the Cause of his Injured Parents; with an account of his desperate conflict with Quashee! Who, after many attempts, at last overcomes him, and takes his Head and Hand to Jamaica, and receives a large Reward for destroying him. The top of the page reads: Allman’s edition. London, 1829. Of course, comes with a catchy full-coloured and folding frontispiece representing the dramatic finale death scene—man! It wicked, as Jamaicans would say.
This is a Jamaicana gem, pretty rare—last offered for sale in 1992, according to the Rare Book Transaction History Search. It went for $300—without the frontispiece. The National Library of Jamaica, in Kingston, apparently owns a copy. This book tells the story of a Jamaican “folk hero”—Jack “Three Fingered” Mansong, a runaway slave who had lost two fingers—hence the nickname. Around 1780, he led a group of Maroons (runaway slaves) in the Blue Mountains, until being killed by slave hunters. English physician Benjamin Moseley, a resident of Jamaica between 1768 and 1784, brought his story to public attention for the first time in 1799, in A Treatise On Sugar. He writes that Jack was “descending into the plains and plundering to supply his wants, and his skills in retreating into difficult fastness, among the mountains, (...), where none dared to follow him, he terrified the inhabitants and set the civil power (...) at defiance, for nearly two years.”
By 1800, two English writers, William Burdett and William Earl, turned Jack’s story into two different novels—no historical contents, here; just pieces of imagination remotely based on the true story. Their works became very popular and Jack’s story even “became a hit pantomime, opening in 1800 at London’s Haymarket Theatre, and playing there and in regional theatres for several years after.” (brycchancarey.com). Our little book is an abridgement of Earle’s novel—Jack’s parents rescue a European sailor named Captain Harrop on the shores of Africa, feed him, shelter him. But the ungrateful White man captures them and takes them as slaves to Jamaica! Jack’s fiery mother raises her son so he’d revenge them one day. So he does, several years later, kidnapping Harrop and throwing him into a hidden cave in the hills. Two slave hunters, Sam and Quashee (a Maroon, who was baptized and changed his name to James Reeder), soon rat him out. The engraving of Allman’s edition is quite accurate here, with Jack leaning over Reeder while Sam is about to crush him with a stone. Moseley writes: “Sam came up just in time to save Reeder; for Jack had caught him by the throat, with his giant’s grasp. (...) Sam was umpire; and decided the fate of the battle. He knocked Jack down with a piece of rock.” Jack’s head and hand were then carried “in triumph to (the city of) Morant Bay.” End of Jack’s story. Well—wait a minute! “I dare say,” the narrator of our book writes, “you will wish to know what became of Harrop? I will tell you: starved to death in Jack’s cave, and then only was he discovered.” Pulpy.
This booklet was an advocacy for the abolition of the slave trade at a time when the issue was red hot in England. “Are we not men?” Jack’s parents ask Harrop at one point. A reference to the seal of the Society for Abolition of Slavery that shows a kneeling Black man asking: “Am I Not A Man, and A Brother?” Harrop is here the harrowing symbol of a harrowing trade.
Obeah, or Obi—Jamaican name for voodoo—is another interesting topic here. As a matter of fact, William Earl entitled his novel Obi; or the History of Three Fingered Jack—the Jamaicans pronounce it “obi-yah”. Ever since the terrible slave rebellion led by Tacky in 1780, Jamaica and the rest of the world had become aware of the African “black magic”. The Whites pretended to despise it as mere superstition, but they actually feared it—if the slaves felt invincible, what would stop them from fighting back? Moseley: “I saw the Obi of (...) Jack the terror of Jamaica in 1780. (...) His Obi consisted of the end of a goat’s horn, filled with a compound of grave dirt, ashes, the blood of a black cat, and human fat.” Notwithstanding, “even Jack himself was born to die.” So was the man, indeed—but not the myth.
Jack Mansong still resounds in Jamaican modern society as the ambivalent figure of the “soul rebel”. No matter Jack was also attacking his fellow Black people, and got killed by them too—he stood against the white masters, and proved an inspiring model. Jack represents, Francis R. Botkin writes in Thieving Three-Fingered Jack (Rutgers University Press, 2017), “the hyper-masculine “black badass” in Jamaican and US popular culture.” In a country riddled with crime, poverty and corruption, no matter the consequences; no matter what you do—the ends justify the means. The system is your enemy from the start and you’re entitled to do anything to get out of its reach. Just like in the days of Mansong, the idea is to get out of the s..t, or die trying. Quentin Tarantino could make a movie out of it: Three-Fingered Jack, the terror of Jamaica. Feel like watching it already!
T. Ehrengardt
