Island on Fire Quotes

“I feel like I’m on holy ground here, do you?' she called to the crowd through her mic. 'Special spot, special spot,' somebody called back. They were not wrong: what happened here in a mountainous backwater of a colonial outpost had gathered enough momentum to shift the course of history.
Shepherd told the story of the anonymous woman who was said to have started the first trash house fire on the night of December 27, 1831. 'Yes, it led to her death,' she said, 'but it gave birth to abolition within the British Empire. I’m going to rename her tonight. Guess what I’m going to name her? ‘Fire.’ Tonight we christen ‘Fire.’ This time we want to have the flames of passion in our hearts. As I look across the hills, I can almost see the fires lit in 1831. I believe the hills were joyful that night as they witnessed our ancestors stand against oppression and torture.' Her voice rose: 'Ancestors, we see you! We hear you every time we sing or dance. Everything we do, the roots are in what our ancestors did to survive.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“It was this 'ripening' that the slaveholding classes of North American seemed to fear above all else: the dawning consciousness of enslaved persons that they had an inborn right to be free--and that they might take further steps to make it happen, because they already had superior numbers. All they would need in the future was a little more knowledge, a little more discipline, and some more key allies among the whites.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“A basic reality awaited those who surrendered and were not shot: the dismal existence of a slave, with all of its pain, indignity, physical punishment and humiliation. For a brief while – though they were hunted – they had had a taste of self-government and freedom. Giving up had to have been indescribably bitter.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“The growth of literacy was sparking an awakening – welcome to some, dreadful to others – across the slave-empire of Jamaica. Reading seemed to ignite a hidden store of fuel within an enslaved person.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“More than price depressions or war with the French, more than even machetes or guns, the sugar elite of Jamaica was most afraid of an idea: the consciousness spreading among the enslaved people that they deserved freedom and that it was within their power to achieve it. Literacy not only could give a slave a higher sense of worth and a new sense of self-awareness. It could bring imaginative access to the broader world, an ability to communicate beyond the boundaries of the plantation, and perhaps the means to spread a conspiracy across long distances.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“Samuel Sharpe’s movement was different: resistance on a dazzling scale. It was well organized, spread across a wide geographic area and inspired by Baptist salvation thinking. More than 30,000 enslaved people were eventually brought into a plot rooted in nonviolent idealism that anticipated 20th century movements such as those led by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the proponents of liberation theology in Latin America.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“The house of leaves burst into full orange-yellow combustion, as the crowd stood up with the reflections shining on their faces and called back as a chorus; the gathered voices grew louder as the flames danced upward and filled the valley with light and shadows.
'Burn it down!' he said.
'Burn it down!' they said.
'BURN IT DOWN!”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“Then the congregation listened as the clock chimed the twelve bars of midnight. At the last one, Knibb shouted: 'The monster is dead! The negro is free! The church 'broke out into one loud and long-continued burst of exultation and joy,' that awoke Knibb’s young son and rattled all the windows. 'Never did I hear such a sound,' Knibb wrote later.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“The revolt Samuel Sharpe had started on a Caribbean island was building to a culmination at Westminster – a final drive to asphyxiate slavery throughout the British Empire. But it came not through a spectacular legislative duel or an inspiring floor speech, but rather through the grind of parliamentary process and the unromantic reality of dickering in the shadows.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“The Jamaican violence had given humanitarians powerful evidence that the institution was costing Britain far more than it was giving back, and the humanitarians could now make extended pragmatic arguments as well as moral ones.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“If Samuel Sharpe had been trying to seize the attention of the mother country – just as Nat Turner had given the American South a brief window through which to reconsider slavery – he succeeded far beyond what he might have hoped. Never before had enslaved people spoken so loudly in Britain.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“[Sharpe's] only goal had been to make people free, he said, and what had been a peaceful movement had spun out of control. But he remained defiant to the end about the idealism of his cause, if not the means.
'I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery!' he said. Belby reported that Sharpe's frame expanded, his spine stiffened, and his eyes seemed to 'shoot forth rays of light' when he said this.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“The question also had an ominous spiritual dimension. To which God would they submit? There was the one proclaimed by the Baptists who said they could no longer serve two masters, and that freedom was a birthright. And then there was the one of the Church of England who commanded them to obey their masters and serve in thankfulness and humility.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“The burning hillsides seemed to make the relentless daylight of Jamaica even sharper and more dazzling, and the visual effect of flames spreading in all directions at night was like nothing anybody had ever seen before, as if the combined anger and desperation of three hundred years had been unleashed on the hills. The white people, it seemed, had been magically dispelled.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“Before the night was over, Bleby, Morris, and thousands of others watched awestruck as new fires spread on neighboring plantations, in an unstoppable chain, as if the universe itself was answering the first call of flames and setting free some beautiful and terrifying spirit that could not be called back.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“No correlation exists between sugar and nutritional benefit. Its presence in food assures the tongue that energy and protein reside within, but sweet foods deliver a benign-tasting venom. A crowning irony of the sugar-slave symbiosis was that it was not fatal just to Africans; it could also be fatal to their masters.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“When a lump of cane sugar from the West Indies enlivened the Briton’s favorite brew, the teacup transformed into something different altogether: a bringer of quick calories; a clarifier of thought; a mood lightener; an appetite suppressant; a pleasant mingling of bitter and sweet; and a small ritual of friendship, hospitality, and cultural pretense that anybody with a few pence could enact in their homes. Tea with sugar was the soft drug that brought a moment of peace and a resolve to keep laboring.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire

“Here was a remarkable admission of Jamaican weakness, as well as a revealing disclosure that the sugar gentry were as afraid of an idea as they were of knives.”
― Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire