14 February 2022
A piccaninny is a Black child. The word is offensive, especially when used by white people. Like many slurs, it began as a neutral term, but acquired its offensive connotation as it was used in offensive and condescending contexts. Piccaninny comes to English from a Portuguese-based West Indian creole. In Portuguese, a pequenino is a boy and pequeno means small. Piccaninny was first used in English by enslaved people in Barbados and other West Indian colonies, presumably brought there by Portuguese slavers or from Brazil.
The word appears in Richard Ligon’s 1653 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. From a passage about the daily life of enslaved women on the island:
At the time the wife is to be brought a bed, her husband removes his board, (which is his bed) to another room (for many severall divisions they have, in their little houses,) and none above sixe foot square) And leaves his wife to God, and her good fortune, in the room, and upon the board alone, and calls a neighbour to come to her, who gives little help to her deliverie, but when the child is borne, (which she calls her Pickaninnie) she helps to make a little fire nere her feet and that serves instead of Possets, Broaths, and Caudles. In a fortnight, this woman is at worke with her Pickaninny at her back, as merry a soule as any is there: If the overseer be discreet, shee is suffer’d to rest her selfe a little more then ordinary; but if not, shee is compelled to doe as others doe. Times they have of suckling their Children in the fields, and refreshing themselves; and good reason, for they carry burdens on their backs; and yet work too. Some women, whose Pickaninnies are three yeers old, will, as they worke at weeding, which is a stooping worke, suffer the hee Pickaninnie, to sit astride upon their backs, like St. George a horse back; and there spurre his mother with his heeles, and sings and crowes on her backe, clapping his hands, as if he meant to flye; which the mother is so pleas’d with, as shee continues her painfull stooping posture, longer then she would doe, rather than discompose her Joviall Pickaninnie of his pleasure, so glad she is to see him merry. The worke which the women doe, is most of it weeding, a stooping and painfull worke; at noon and night they are call’d home by the ring of a Bell, where they have two hours time for their repast at noone; and at night, they rest from sixe, till sixe a Clock next morning.
Piccaninny could also be used as an adjective for anything small, not necessarily a child, although this use has all but disappeared. From a 1707 description of the lives of enslaved people in the West Indies by Hans Sloane:
They have Saturdays in the Afternoon, and Sundays, with Christmas Holidays, Easter call’d little or Pigganinny, Christmas, and some other great Feasts allow’d them for the Culture of their own Plantations to feed themselves from Potatos, Yams, and Plantanes, &c. which they Plant in Ground allow’d them by their Masters, besides a small Plantain Walk they have by themselves.
By the early 19th century, the term had spread to Australia and New Zealand where it was used to refer to Aboriginal and Maori children. Here’s an example from the Sydney Gazette of 4 January 1817 in an article that references children in a residential school. When the Aborigine chief says the child “will make a good Settler” I don’t think the comment was actually meant in gratitude and pleasure:
The chiefs were then again called together to observe the examination of the children as to their progress in learning, and to the civilized habits of life.—Several of the little ones read, and it was grateful to the bosom of sensibility to trace the degrees of pleasure which the chiefs manifested on this occasion.—Some clapped the children on the head, and one in particular turning around towards the GOVERNOR, with extraordinary emotion, exclaimed “GOVERNOR,—that will make a good Settler—that’s my Pickaninny!”—and some of the females were observed to shed tears of sympathetic affection at seeing the infant and helpless offspring of their deceased so happily sheltered and protected by British benevolence.
Racism knows no bounds.
Sources:
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. piccaninny, n.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1653). London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657, 47–48. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. piccaninny n. and adj.
Sloane, Hans. A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, vol. 1 of 2. London: 1707, lii. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
“Sydney.” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Observer, 4 January 1817, 2. Trove.