[...] Unlike the racialized segregation in the slave states of the Deep South or in apartheid South Africa, racial difference in the Caribbean was not legally entrenched. Voting criteria were based not on race but on property. Race formed part of an informal system and a source of tacit social knowledge. Informal systems of meaning leave a good deal of room for ambiguity and negotiation. However, it mustn’t be assumed that because of this informality, infractions of the social rules had no social or psychic penalties. The situation in the Caribbean, though clear-cut and vindicated by common sense, was in practice fraught with exceptions, slippages and misreadings. The discursive negotiations which these slippages set in play were the stuff of the social transactions of everyday colonial life, animating anything from hushed opprobrium to full-volume public commentary.