The Battle for Christmas

by Stephen Nissenbaum

  “John Canoe”: Wassailing Across the Color Line

  Finally, in some places the veil of irony was dropped altogether and replaced by ritual encounters that bordered on direct confrontation. Those encounters make up the single most intriguing and aggressive Christmas ritual practiced by American slaves.

  “Christmas is coming,” wrote the editor of the Wilmington (North Carolina) Daily Journal on December 23, 1851, and he proceeded to warn his readers to expect “the little and big niggers begging for quarters.”56 What the editor was referring to was a ritual known by the name “John Canoe” (or “John Kooner”). This ritual was practiced only in a single region of the South, the coastal area of North Carolina, from Edenton (near the Virginia line) in the north to Wilmington in the south. (A similar ritual, with the same name, was practiced—and still is—on the islands of the British West Indies, especially Jamaica.)

  The John Canoe ritual was described at length by a number of contemporary observers, and it has subsequently been analyzed at some length by modern folklorists. Essentially, it involved a band of black men—generally young—who dressed themselves in ornate and often bizarre costumes. Each band was led by a man who was variously dressed in animal horns, elaborate rags, female disguise, whiteface (and wearing a gentleman’s wig!), or simply his “Sunday-go-to-meeting suit.” Accompanied by music, the band marched along the roads from plantation to plantation, town to town, accosting whites along the way and sometimes even entering their houses. In the process the men performed elaborate and (to white observers) grotesque dances that were probably of African origin. And in return for this performance they always demanded money (the leader generally carried “a small bowl or tin cup” for this purpose), though whiskey was an acceptable substitute. One of the best accounts of a John Canoe ritual was written by a Northern woman—an abolitionist, in fact—who was shocked and embarrassed by what she took to be a degrading display of unabashed begging. Her account was published in 1837 in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist magazine The Liberator:

  I was passing to church on this morning [December 25], with a party of ladies in an open carry-all, when we perceived a rabble advancing. The sound of bells, clashing of tin plates, and blowing of stage horns, were all heard, accompanying a loud screaming voice to these words, sung in the peculiar negro accent:—“We bees Jonny Cooner, good masser, missus, chink, chink, and we drink to Jonny Cooner, Cooner.” The gesture to these words was the extending and passing round a hat for the collection of pence.

  John Cooner was represented by a slave in a mask, with a tall, hideous figure, twice the length of a natural man, with patches of every shade and color hanging from him, and bells attached to him to gingle [sic] at all his grotesque motions….

  Such uncouth gestures, shrieking, dancing, and fighting of boys, who were ragged and without hat or shoes, were enough to frighten our horses as they passed. We were filled with pity and disgust, and felt it a relief, when our little black driver turned down a bye-way, for very shame at the sight. There are grades amongst the slaves, as in all other classes of society; and those who rank highest, will not join in this species of beggary and frolic combined…. My heart sickened when I thought to myself, “Is this the happiness of slaves at Christmas?”57

  John Canoe in Whiteface. Also from Jamaica, this eighteenth-century picture shows John Canoe performing a mocking parody of white fashion: He has donned whiteface and is wearing a gentleman’s wig and fancy gloves. (The houseboat on his head was part of the John Canoe ritual in Jamaica, though not in North Carolina.) (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  John Canoe Band. This picture comes from Jamaica, but it suggests something of the aggressiveness of the John Canoe marchers. (Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

  But Southern slave owners generally did not take offense. In 1824, Dr. James Norcom of Edenton, the future “owner” of Harriet Jacobs, personally defended the custom against the charge that it led to disorder:

  Although trifling evils sometimes result from these extraordinary indulgences, they continue to be tolerated and practiced. It is so to be regretted that drunkenness is too common on these occasions; but this also is habitually overlooked and never punished, unless it becomes outrageous or grossly offensive.58

  Writing to his daughter thirteen years later, Norcom even suggested that the John Canoe bands provided the only manifestations of Christmas cheer: “Had it not been for the John Koonahs that paraded through the town in several successive gangs[,] Christmas day would have pass’d without the least manifestation of mirth cheerful joy or hilarity.”59

  As it happens, Harriet Jacobs, too, left a positive account of the John Canoe ritual (conceivably of the same 1837 bands that Dr. Norcom described so affectionately). Like her owner, Jacobs remembered the John Canoe bands as the single “greatest attraction” of Christmas (although, like the Northern woman who found the ritual so degrading, Jacobs wrote that the slaves who performed it were “generally of the lower class”—mostly field hands, she noted). Jacobs, too, provided a detailed description of John Canoe:

  Two athletic men, in calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows’ tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box. A dozen beat on this, while others strike triangles and jawbones, to which bands of dancers keep time.

  And she stressed the elaborate preparations made by the participants:

  For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed to go around till twelve o’clock, begging for contributions. Not a door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out, but carry the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal [there]. These Christmas donations frequently amount to twenty or thirty dollars.60

  I would love to see the texts of the songs that the John Canoe bands spent a month preparing. But we do have something that’s every bit as good, thanks to Harriet Jacobs. In her account of the John Canoe bands, Jacobs notes that “[i]t is seldom that any white man or child refuses to give them a trifle.” But she adds that “[i]f he does [refuse], they regale his ears with the following song”—and here she records words to a song that ridicules the ungenerous individual by making him out to be a poor man (that is, poor rather than stingy). The strategy is brilliant, as is its tactical execution (especially the sarcastic refrain so dey say):

  Poor massa, so dey say;

  Down in de heel, so dey say;

  Got no money, so dey say;

  Not one shillin, so dey say;

  God Amighty bress you, so dey say.61

  In fact, a twentieth-century folklorist has retrieved another such verse, and it is identical in its tactic of employing ridicule to shame the object of its attention:

  Run, Jinnie, run! I’m gwine away, Gwine away, to come no mo’.

  Dis am de?’ house,

  Glory habbilulum! [i.e., hallelujah]62

  Such tactics may even cast some light on an ostensibly very different begging song, one from the British wassail tradition. It is the familiar song that concludes with the lines: “If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do; / If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!” In the context of the John Canoe songs, it is possible that this final “blessing” was intended to convey similar sarcasm—that it was, in effect, a curse.

  Anthropologists have argued inconclusively about the origin of the John Canoe ritual. The general nature of the debate is whether John Canoe was an African ritual or an English (or American) one.631 would argue that it was both, and that what is striking is how many elements were shared by African and English traditions. One contemporary observer casually referred to the band as “mummers.” The John Canoe ritual may well have been African in origin, but it surely found its mark in antebellum America, where Chri
stmas begging was still commonplace, and specifically in the South, where the wassail tradition itself was still being practiced by those roving bands of young white males who startled prosperous householders with nocturnal gunfire and entered their houses demanding food, drink, and money. At the very least, there was a convergence of African and European traditions, and the John Canoers understood that convergence and exploited it. Its origins and “exotic” content aside, what makes the John Canoe ritual so fascinating is the degree to which its structure and its content were almost wholly comprehensible to the white people who were its immediate objects.

  Winslow Homer, Dressing/or the Carnival (1877). American artist Winslow Homer painted this oil canvas in southern Virginia at the very end of Reconstruction. An immensely respectful and dignified representation, it shows John Canoe being dressed by his wife and another woman as the children watch in fascination. Behind the group stands a picket fence—presumably there for the same purpose as the picket fence in the illustration, to divide black space from white space. (Homer made this painting in the summer—thus the leafing trees—but records suggest that it was a Christmas ritual that the black family was reenacting for the artist.) (All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lazarus Fund, 1922. [22.220])

  Take, for example, the “ridicule song” that was recorded by Harriet Jacobs. In writing about this very song, one folklorist argues that “the parallel with African songs of derision is evident.”64 But so is the parallel with the wassail songs of English begging bands, or at least the part of those songs that contained a threat (“Down will come butler, bowl, and all”). To be sure, instead of the threat of physical damage characteristic of the wassail songs, the John Canoe songs resorted to ridicule. But it is easy to see why. The ridiculing strategy could be (as this folklorist implies) an expression of ongoing African traditions, but it could also indicate that the John Canoers knew that they were not in a position to threaten their white patrons with physical harm. Ridicule was as far as they could go. In any event, it is easy to see how songs of ridicule would have been not merely understood but even brilliantly effective in white Southern society, where generosity was a sign of gentility (and the lack of it a sign of vulgarity). The overt message of such a song was not that its object was stingy but that he was poor. And such an announcement, even if it was meant sarcastically, amounted to a direct charge of low social status. In any case, the very prospect of being subjected to ridicule was an implicit threat, a threat that could have been just as effective as the threat to do damage. In that sense, the song of ridicule was a threat song. The song (like the entire John Canoe ritual) constituted behavior that must have marked the very limit of what was acceptable among slaves.

  WAITING FOR THE JUBILEE: THE “CHRISTMAS RIOTS” OF 1865

  John Canoe marked the limits of what was permissible, but not of what was possible. On occasion slaves used Christmas to take control of their lives in ways that were far from symbolic. For example, the season offered them unique opportunities to escape slavery altogether by running away, taking advantage of the common Christmas privilege of traveling freely (and along roads that might now be crowded with unfamiliar black faces).65 Christmas also presented a tempting occasion for more aggressive forms of resistance. Sanctioned disorders could always overstep the bounds and edge into violence, riot, or even revolt. A striking number of actual or rumored slave revolts were planned for the Christmas season—nearly one-third the known total, according to one historian. Accounts of Christmas insurrections were especially rampant in 1856, when they were reported in almost every slave state.66

  But the most serious rumors of planned insurrections at Christmas—rumors that amounted, in the end, to very little—came just after the slaves were finally emancipated, with the end of the Civil War, in December 1865. That is the point at which the memory of the traditional rituals of the Southern Christmas converged with a moment of serious political crisis in the lives of both black and white Southerners.

  Some political history, then. If ever there was a time when the hopes of African-Americans were at fever pitch, it was in 1865. Those hopes had been raised by a set of executive orders and congressional acts, passed during the war itself, and for essentially military purposes. The Union army of General William Tecumseh Sherman had marched irresistibly through Georgia late in 1864, finally taking Savannah in late December. (Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln a famous message offering him Savannah as a “Christmas present.”) Sherman’s march had created a refugee army of slaves, tens of thousands of newly liberated people who were now impoverished and homeless, and who turned for assistance to the Northern troops. To deal with this army of refugees, General Sherman issued, in January 1865, a proclamation that would have important consequences: Special Field Order No. 15. This proclamation set aside for the freedmen any lands (in the area of his recent march) that had been confiscated by the Union army or abandoned by their white owners. These lands, to be divided into forty-acre lots, included some of the best real estate in Georgia and South Carolina.

  Two months later, in March, the United States Congress established a new federal agency, the Freedmen’s Bureau, designed to deal more systematically with the slaves’ difficult but imminent transition to freedom. The Freedmen’s Bureau adopted Sherman’s policy and extended it to the entire Confederacy. In late July, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued to his staff “Circular No. 13” (a circular was a memorandum intended to circulate to all agents of an organization). The circular contained a set of procedures that would divide abandoned or confiscated Southern plantations into forty-acre lots and distribute them to black families. Each of these families would receive a written certificate of possession. (The policy became associated with the catch phrase “forty acres and a mule.”)

  But in the summer of 1865, with the war over, Lincoln dead, and Andrew Johnson in the White House, federal priorities in Washington underwent a significant change. President Johnson decided that the most important task facing the United States was not that of dealing with the freed slaves but rather that of reestablishing the loyalty of white Southerners. To accomplish this it was necessary to “restore” abandoned lands to their former owners. The President now instructed General Howard to reverse his policy and to withdraw Circular No. 13. The Freedmen’s Bureau was ordered to persuade the former slaves to abandon their hopes for land—and instead to sign labor contracts for the coming year with their former masters.

  Both blacks and whites knew this was a crucial issue. Each side knew that the key to the future lay not just in legal freedom from slavery but also in the linked questions of land and labor. Whoever was able to own the one would also be able to control the other. Without working on land that belonged to them (or that they could later purchase), the freedmen and their families would be at the mercy of their former owners. And both sides knew that plantation owners would never voluntarily sell their land to blacks. Without land reform, the freedmen could never control their own labor. They would be working under conditions that were almost identical to those imposed under slavery.

  The situation was profoundly muddled during the fall of 1865. Most agents of the Freedmens Bureau—though not all—were then dutifully engaged in trying to extinguish the very hopes they had earlier helped to spread.67 In reality the cause of land reform was lost. But many freedmen could not bring themselves to believe that they were being betrayed by the very people who had just liberated them.

  At this time of mixed and confusing messages, large numbers of Southern blacks came to pin their lingering hopes on the coming Christmas season. Word passed through the African-American community, often spread by Union soldiers, that when Christmas arrived the government would provide them with land and the other necessities of economic independence. An ex-slaveholder from Greensboro, Alabama, wrote to his daughter that the Union troops who were stationed near his plantation had assured his former slaves “that our lands were to be divided among them at Chr
istmas,” and he added in frustration that they had already ceased doing any work: “Almost all are living along thoughtless of the future [and paying no attention to] what they will do after Christmas, when all will be turned adrift.”68

  It should not be surprising that the freedmen chose to hold such high hopes for the Christmas season, since for African-Americans Christmas had long been associated with a symbolic inversion of the social hierarchy—with grand gestures of paternalist generosity by the white patrons who had always governed their lives.69 In 1865 those white patrons happened to be the government of the United States. To intensify black hopes still further, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (abolishing slavery) was due to take effect on December 18, one week to the day before Christmas.

  By mid-November of 1865, Southern newspapers were publishing stories about these Christmas dreams. One story insisted that blacks throughout the South continued to believe “that about Christmas they were to have lands partitioned among them; and their imaginations have been heated with the expectation of becoming landholders, and living as their old masters used to do without personal labor.” Another story (titled “The Negroes at Christmas Time”) reported that blacks throughout the South entertained expectations of “being furnished, about Christmas, by the Government, with the necessities of ‘housekeeping’… waiting in a life of ease and idleness, for the jubilee….” And a newspaper in Mississippi reported that “wildly credulous and wildly hopeful men are … awaiting the millennium of the 25th of December, who expect a big division of land and plunder on that day.”70