History of Bajan Chatte House

A House that Could Walk. The Barbados Chattel house arived in the years after emancipation, when flexibility came without land. Plantation owners expected freed people to remain in the very same location, working the very same fields, in the very same reliance. However Barbados had other concepts-- therefore did the people who developed their lives on its fields of sugar walking cane and coral plains.
Envision it: a society of people who owned their home, however not the soil beneath it. The effects home resolved a contradiction that the colonial system never intended to fix. Built on loose coral stones instead of foundations, it could be lifted, moved, swung around, mounted on a cart, rolled by neighbours, and replanted somewhere else-- typically overnight.
It was architecture as resistance.
Ingenuity disguised as simpleness.
A home that refused to be imprisoned.
The older leaned forward, reducing his voice as if sharing a trick.
"You understand what a movable home does to a people? It teach them that belonging is not something to wait for-- is something you bring."

Based upon: Rogues in Paradise.