Williams, Francis

c. 1700
1770

Francis Williams was a Jamaican poet and classical scholar. The freeborn son of John and Dorothy Williams, Francis was educated in England from the age of ten as an experiment to test the assumed intellectual inferiority of blacks. Sponsored by the Duke of Montagu, Williams studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics over a period of years.

Williams's life and work must be traced mainly from the biased account given by Edward Long in his History of Jamaica (1774), but a rich discussion of the significance of his achievements may be found in Michele Valerie Ronnick's valuable 1998 study. For philosophers of the Enlightenment such as David Hume, the case of this black classical scholar-poet threatened existing ideas regarding the role of race in the divine order of the cosmos. Indeed, racial justifications for slavery were to become less secure in the face of Williams's achievements.

Williams remained in England after completing his studies, during which time he wrote a popular satiric ballad, "Welcome, Welcome, Brother Debtor." Full of classical allusions, it characterizes human existence as a prison: "every island's but a prison / strongly guarded by the sea / Kings and princes for that reason / Prisonner's [sic] are as Well as We." Long casts doubt on Williams's authorship, but Jean D'Costa and Barbara Lalla present strong alternative evidence in Voices in Exile (1989) that Williams was indeed the author.

Williams returned to Jamaica during the governorship of Edward Trelawny (1738–1751). This was a crucial period in Jamaican history, for some eighty years of Maroon warfare had just ended with the treaty of 1739 to 1740. The island was therefore now internally safe for its English colonial overlords. In the subsequent three decades of his life, Williams witnessed the doubling of the African slave population and the economic explosion of the sugar plantations.

Intended for a position in government, Williams was rejected by Governor Trelawny. Instead, he founded a school in the capital, Spanish Town, teaching reading, writing, Latin, and mathematics with some success. Long describes a schoolmaster of fashionable dress and manner. During this period, Williams is said to have written a number of Latin odes addressed to successive governors of Jamaica. Long points to "An Ode to George Haldane" (1759) as exemplifying Williams' poetic style: a panegyric filled with classical allusions, lavishing praise on the new governor, George Haldane. Much of its forty-six lines deal with Williams's blackness and the racial abyss separating his poem's white subject (Haldane) from the poem's speaker. Here one may see the fractured Williams, living the double exile of a free black among enslaved blacks and of a cultivated mind in the intellectual wilderness of eighteenth-century Jamaican society.

See also Literature of the English-Speaking Caribbean

Bibliography

D'Costa, Jean, and Barbara Lalla, eds. Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.

Long, Edward. History of Jamaica. London: Lowndes, 1774. Reprint, Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002.

Patterson, Orlando. The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967.

Ronnick, Michele Valerie. "Francis Williams: An Eighteenth-Century Tertium Quid." Negro History Bulletin (April–June 1998).

jean d'costa (2005)