Woman with Parasol and Pineapple

This watercolour depicts a Black woman standing in front of a hilly landscape with palm trees. She holds a parasol over her head with her right hand and a pineapple at her side with her left. She wears a white dress, a striped headwrap, blue shoes and a braided necklace with matching earrings and bracelets.
A handwritten inscription running vertically up the left-hand edge of the drawing appears to read: ‘I lub you Massa [or Missa/Missus] Buck’. This text features spellings used in nineteenth-century British and American texts to represent the dialects of enslaved and formerly enslaved people: ‘lub’ represents ‘love’, and ‘Massa’ (or ‘Missa/Missus’) represents ‘Master’ (or ‘Mistress’). Many of these texts were extremely derogatory. The phrase ‘I lub you massa’ (and variants thereof) was often used in the context of the ‘white affection’ trope, in which enslaved people were represented expressing affection towards white individuals (for the term ‘white affection’, see the Digital Library on American Slavery’s ‘Glossary of Terms’: https://dlas.uncg.edu/petitions/glossary/). Examples include Frederick Marryat’s ‘Mr Midshipman Easy’, published in 1836, in which Mesty – a formerly enslaved Black sailor serving on a Royal Navy ship – states at one point ‘By de powers, Massa Easy, but I lub you with my hole [sic] soul’.

It has not yet been possible to identify the ‘Buck’ referenced in the inscription (if this is a correct reading of the name), and the precise place and date of the drawing’s creation are uncertain. Although the inscription references a master/mistress, the depiction of the woman on her own, in fine clothes, allows the image to be read as communicating a sense of her autonomy. Part of the Michael Graham-Stewart slavery collection.