Busha's Mistress or Catherine The Fugitive A Stirring Romance of the Days of Slavery in Jamaica

Cyrus Francis Perkins (with introduction by Paul Lovejoy and Verene Shepherd)

First published in a newspaper in Jamaica in 1911, this â??forgottenâ?? novel has been reconstructed from manuscript sources and the newspaper version. It tells the story of Catherine, a slave concubine of a cruel white overseer on the Greenside Estate, near Falmouth on Jamaicaâ??s north coast.
Catherine flees the overseer, finding refuge with sympathetic friends who take her to England. The descriptions of myal, obeah and Maroon resistance are poignant revelations of the tensions of slave life in Jamaica in the years before Emancipation. The author, born in Falmouth in 1813 was the son of a military doctor who had previously served on the Gold Coast in West Africa.
This book is important not only as an early Jamaican novel, but also because it provides an eyewitness perspective on Jamaicaâ??s slave system, in particular on the roles of colour, gender and racism in the exploitation of enslaved women.