The White Witch of Rose Hall
Wild Sargasso Sea
The White Witch of Rose Hall—Jamaica’s most enduring ghost story— whispered to tourists seeking echoes of the past. Annie Palmer, the infamous mistress of the grand colonial estate, her name synonymous with cruelty. They say she mounted the severed heads of enslaved men on posts outside her veranda, a macabre gallery of power and terror, her legend carved into the bones of the island. Her plantation, home to some 5,000 slaves.
Kristine and I walked those haunted halls decades ago. The guides, solemn and knowing, assured us the doors were bolted shut at night—no security dared patrol after dark. And beneath the house, where shadows stretched and history refused to be silent, lay the dungeon. They told us that even now, if you listen closely, you can hear the tortured cries of those who perished there, trapped forever in the blackened earth.
But it wasn’t just the tale of brutality that captivated me—it was the way the story shaped itself around her, the spectral figure of Annie Palmer lingering in the carved headboards of her grand four-poster bed, her presence tangled in the restless air of Rose Hall. And outside, beyond the estate, her grave—a lonely resting place some suggest she was placed in a special tomb sealed to prevent her spirit from escaping. Beneath the swaying palms, as though the land itself wanted distance from her, three husbands lay buried.
Johnny Cash knew this. He felt it in the bones of Cinnamon Hill, the estate he called home, a stone’s throw from Rose Hall's haunted corridors. It was here, beneath the weight of history and the glow of an ever-watching moon, that Cash gave voice to her tale in "The Ballad of Annee Palmer." With that signature boom-chicka-boom cadence, his voice crawled through the melody like the shadow of something unseen but deeply felt—an outlaw ballad for a ghostly queen.
Perhaps that is the real ghost of Rose Hall. Not just a spirit, but an idea—how history twists women into legends, how suffering turns to cruelty, how power, when taken, always comes at a cost.
Yet, like all legends, the truth folds into myth, reshaped by those who survive to tell it or make up along the way. Was Palmer truly the ruthless White Witch, or a woman swallowed by the violence of empire, forced to wield power the only way she could? In another world, another story, she is Antoinette Cosway—Jean Rhys’s tragic creation—haunted by her own reflection, a woman torn by colonialism, race, and gender, consumed by the very forces that denied her humanity in the novel Wild Sargasso Sea.
Both stories resonate with me, and they do so with a composer’s ear.
Much like the piano—its weight, its endless possibilities, the way a single note can hang in the air like a question waiting to be answered. There’s something about composing that feels like tracing the ocean’s bottom with your hands, letting the currents shape the sound before it even reaches the surface. It’s never a straight line. It’s improvisation—raw, immediate, slipping between intention and accident.
I remember the heat, the kind that settles deep into your bones and refuses to leave. The night humming with humidity, voices spilling from open doorways, the distant call of a fog signal somewhere past the ship wrecks. A piano in the corner, keys worn thin by a hundred hands before mine. I press down gently, listening for the ghosts, the echoes of something half-formed yet already alive. And then it arrived. In an unguarded moment. Piano and visuals.
By 1993, literary adaptations were flooding the film landscape, each vying for a slice of highbrow respectability. But Wide Sargasso Sea, directed by John Duigan, wasn’t just another period piece—it was a fever dream wrapped in the colonial past, thick with the heat of 1840s Jamaica, where passion and betrayal intertwine like the roots of the island’s banyan trees.
At its core, this is Jean Rhys’ counter-narrative to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—a haunting prequel that gives voice to Antoinette Cosway, the woman fated to become the infamous "madwoman in the attic." In Karina Lombard’s portrayal, Antoinette is both luminous and tragic, a Creole heiress caught between her own fractured identity and the rigid expectations of a world that refuses to claim her. Nathaniel Parker’s Edward Rochester—though never named explicitly as Brontë’s brooding anti-hero—arrives as a man burdened by his own failings, seduced by the island’s beauty, and ultimately undone by his own prejudices.
Duigan directs with an intoxicating sensuality, lingering on the lush landscapes and the slow-burning tension between Antoinette and Rochester. The film revels in its eroticism, its slow, deliberate pacing mirroring the way desire curdles into distrust. Composer Stewart Copeland’s score thrums beneath it all, a mix of foreboding and seduction, while Geoffrey Simpson’s cinematography bathes every frame in gold and shadow, mirroring the psychological descent that drives Antoinette to her fate.
This Wide Sargasso Sea isn’t interested in restraint; it’s a film of fire—literal and figurative—where love burns bright, but so does destruction. It’s a tale of colonialism, gender, race, and madness, wrapped in the tragic inevitability of a woman whose fate was sealed the moment she said, I do.
Rhys’ novel was already a rebellion against the sanitized versions of Victorian fiction, and Duigan’s adaptation does its best to honour that defiance. It may not have set the world alight in ’93, but like the best slow-burn tragedies, it lingers—much like the ghost of Antoinette herself, whispering from the attic, reminding us that every story has another side.
Like those lost vessels, these women exist in liminal spaces—neither fully belonging to one world nor another. Antoinette, born to Creole privilege but never truly accepted, is doomed to become the madwoman in the attic. Her voice silenced in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, just as Annie Palmer’s legend was rewritten by men who never knew her.
The White Witch. The Woman in the Attic. Fact or fiction.
Both ghosts are trapped in the stories of others.