by John Beckman
90. “public diversions as promote Superfluity”: Samuel Adams to John Scollay, reprinted in Irvin, Samuel Adams, 151.
3 TECHNOLOGIES OF FUN
1. “Ours is a light-hearted race”: Josiah Jenson, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life. With an Introduction by Mrs. H. B. Stowe (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland: Henry P. B. Jewett, 1858), 20–21. Important sources consulted for this chapter are Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Jean Stearns and Marshall Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo, 1994); Larry Eugene Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 162–209; Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 50–91, 129–66; Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 115–90; Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Biography, vols. 1, 6, and 16 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida, 1821–1860 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1973); Lynn Fauley Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1989); Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972; New York: Pantheon, 1974).
2. “slave in form”: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (London: H. G. Collins, 1851), 68.
3. “The staid, sober, thinking and industrious ones”: Ibid., 68–70.
4. “no moral religious instruction”: Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself with An Introduction by Lucious C. Matlack (New York: Published by the Author, 5 Spruce Street, 1849), 21–23.
5. “buoyant, elastic”: Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northrup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853), 180–81, 218; electronic edition, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html, accessed August 5, 2012.
6. “slave minstrels”: Leslie Howard Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 169.
7. “beloved violin”: Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, 180–81.
8. “the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation”: Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 248.
9. “It was Christmas morning”: Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, 282.
10. “To Federalists”: Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes, 230, 231n. Len Travers, in his version of the rise of partisan holidays, gives a sparkling account of Philadelphia’s “Grand Federal Procession” on July 4th, 1788—a partisan take on Independence Day that was also “the largest, most lavish procession ever seen in the United States” (Celebrating the Fourth, 71).
11. The earliest account of an African-American holiday: All quotes in this paragraph are from “UTOPIA, April 10 _____” (letter), The New-York Weekly Journal: Containing the Freshest Advices, Foreign, and Domestick, March 7, 1736, 1, cited in Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg C. Adams, “Zenger’s ‘Banger’: Contextualizing the Banjo in Early New York City, 1736,” forthcoming in a yet-untitled collection of essays from the University of Illinois Press to be edited by Robert Winans.
12. Joseph P. Reidy notes: See Joseph P. Reidy, “ ‘Negro Election Day’ & Black Community Life in New England, 1750–1860,” Marxist Perspectives (Fall 1978): 102–17.
13. “Nine-tenths of the blacks”: James Fenimore Cooper, Works of J. Fenimore Cooper: Oak Openings. Satanstoe. Mercedes of Castile (New York: P. F. Collier, Publisher, 1892), 277.
14. “collected in thousands”: Southern, Music of Black Americans, 53.
15. “negroes patrol[led] the streets”: “Pinkster,” Albany Centinel, June 17, 1803, 3–4; emphases in original.
16. “graceful mien”: Absalom Aimwell, Esq., “A Pinkster Ode, for the year 1803, Most Respectfully dedicated to Carolus Africanus, Rex: Thus rendered in English; King Charles, Captain General and Commander in Chief of the Pinkster Boys” (Albany, NY: Printed Solely for the Purchasers and Others, 1803); Geraldine R. Pleat and Agnes N. Underwood, eds., “A Pinkster Ode, Albany, 1802,” New York Folklore Quarterly 8 (Spring 1952): 31–45.
17. “King Charley”: James Eights, “Pinkster Festivals in Albany,” in Readings in Black American Music, 2nd ed., ed. Eileen Southern (1971; New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 42.
18. “blacks and [a] certain class of whites,” “biographer of devils”: “Pinkster,” Albany Centinel, June 17, 1803, 3–4.
19. “still retained all the vigor”: Eights, “Pinkster Festivals,” 42–45.
20. “most lewd and indecent gesticulations”: “Pinkster,” Albany Centinel, 3–4.
21. “[T]here, enclosed within their midst”: Eights, “Pinkster Festivals,” 42–45.
22. “cultural syncretization”: See Melville J. Herskovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). More recently, Claire Sponsler makes this same critical point and reads Pinkster, through Paul Gilroy’s transatlantic theory, as the product of a “compound interculture … a transgeographical culture without national boundaries that thrives on syncretism and lateral networks.” Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 49.
23. “subversive music makers”: To quote Gilroy’s statement more fully: “I want to endorse the suggestion that these subversive music makers and users represent a different kind of intellectual not least because their self-identity and their practice of cultural politics remain outside the dialectic of pity and guilt which, especially among oppressed people, has so often governed the relationship between the writing elite and the masses of people who exist outside literacy.” Then he goes on to dignify the content produced by these intellectuals—“the unrepresentable, the pre-rational, and the sublime”—while acknowledging the difficulty of reading such texts. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76–77.
24. the fun expression of free-spirited community: If collective fun, as suggested here, is the Pinkster Days’ most legible text—how should it be read? How can it be read, as speech, in an objective way that doesn’t once again project its reader’s will? How can these “intellectuals,” as Gilroy might call them, be understood? An intriguing solution comes from the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s book Rhythmanalysis: Time, Space, and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2004), which sets out to establish a scientific “analysis of rhythms”—“repetitive time and space”—“with practical consequences.” Several elements of Lefebvre’s theory and method combine to make it relevant to Pinkster Days. The persistent dancing and drumming and singing, performed with variation in a single setting, presented an ever-changing dynamism that at the same time had unity and positivity. Hence, as musical events where “rhyth
m dominates” and “supplants melody and harmony (without suppressing them),” Pinkster had what Lefebvre calls “an ethical function,” for intensely rhythmic music mirrors the body’s internal functions and uses the body as its “resource.” Lefebvre writes: “In its relation to the body, to time, to the work, [music] illustrates real (everyday) life. It purifies it in the acceptance of catharsis. Finally, and above all, it brings compensation for the miseries of everydayness, for its deficiencies and failures” (62; emphasis in original).
The dance on Pinkster Hill, to the extent that our meager evidence allows, presents a complex illustration of everyday life that stands in highest relief alongside the partisan celebrations taking place during the same era. If these contentious Fourth of July showdowns reflect a republic characterized by “arrhythmia”—what Lefebvre calls “disturbances” to rhythm “that sooner or later become pathology”—then Pinkster reflects “the eu-rhythmic body, composed of diverse rhythms, each organ, each function, having its own” and yet coexisting in harmony. As Claire Sponsler claims, the black participants’ experience will never be known except as tendentiously reported by whites; put differently, the predominantly black revelers at the Albany Pinkster Days, like Gayatri Spivak’s theorized subaltern, will never have the chance to “speak”—unless, perhaps, we broaden our sense of speech to include expressive bodily acts, much as Spivak does in interpreting Bhubaneswari Baduri’s suicide for its political content. When we do, the clearest and most positive evidence of that experience, among all of the competing accounts of Pinkster, is in the participants’ various displays of pleasure: bodily pleasure, ironic pleasure, rebellious pleasure, communal pleasure. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
25. Albany’s Common Council passed: See Shane White, “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley,” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (January–March 1989): 68–75.
26. “The language of the slave’s speech and song”: Owens, This Species of Property, 175.
27. The storytellers themselves: Blassingame, The Slave Community, 57–59.
28. In a rustic opening in the Georgia pines: Fictional composite of a storytelling session drawn from a variety of works. The story itself was collected in Georgia by Emma Backus and cited in Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness, 110–11. Other sources include Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, in The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, compiled by Richard Chase (1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983); Charles C. Jones Jr., Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888); J. Mason Brewer, American Negro Folklore (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).
29. “We started shuckin’ corn”: Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1993), 112. Quilting parties had a similar appeal among plantation women, as did the “Coonjine” among river workers—the latter being “a combination of song and dance connected with freight handling on the steamboats” (Emery, Black Dance, 146). Deborah Gray White’s landmark work on female slave culture emphasizes the relevance of work, fun, and community building in the “double duty” practices of laundry and quilting, arguing that a “saving grace … was that women got a chance to interact with each other”: “On a Sedalia County, Missouri, plantation women looked forward to doing laundry on Saturday afternoons because, as Mary Frances Webb explained, they ‘would get to talk and spend the day together.’ Quiltings, referred to by former slaves as female ‘frolics’ and ‘parties,’ were especially convivial. South Carolinian Sallie Paul explained that ‘when dey would get together den, dey would be glad to get together.’ ” Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 122.
30. “extra swig of liquor”: Emery, Black Dance, 112.
31. “usually the most original and amusing”: Letitia Burwell, quoted in Abrahams, Singing the Master, the essential work on the culture of corn shuckings, 92.
32. “merciless,” “meaningless etiquette,” “rigid hierarchies,” “slaves lied, cheated, stole”: Levine, Black Culture, Black Consciousness, 122.
33. “music as a deceptive form”: Campbell, An Empire for Slavery, 174.
34. “created for others”: Rawick, The American Slave, 1:32.
35. “Negroes like to do everything at night”: Rivers, Slavery in Florida, 167.
36. “by imitating the voices of slaveholders”: James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 24.
37. “underhanded, unsportsmanlike”: Daryl Cumber Dance, Shuckin’ and Jivin’: Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 181.
38. “divine culture-hero”: Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken Books, 1956), 125. Though Harris declares it “extremely doubtful” that any of “Uncle Remus’s stories” (as he calls them) could have been “borrowed by the Negroes from the red men,” Jay Hansford C. Vest has responded with a thorough and convincing study to the contrary, especially as it concerns the “aboriginal Rabbit-Trickster motif.” Tracing Brer Rabbit tales to various stories in the Hare cycle as well as charting the countless sites and situations (not the least of them the institution of slavery) where African Americans and Native Americans commingled, Vest establishes the likelihood that more of these stories have North American than African origins. Harris, Complete Tales, xxii; Jay Hansford C. Vest, “From Bobtail to Brer Rabbit: Native American Influences on Uncle Remus,” American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 19–43.
39. And unlike the Trickster’s morality tales: For a more optimistic response to Levine’s and others’ arguments for Brer Rabbit’s “amorality and brutality,” which argues that his tales contain a deeper Christian morality, see William Courtland Johnson, “Trickster on Trial: The Morality of the Brer Rabbit Tales,” in Ain’t Gonna Lay My ’Ligion Down: African American Religion in the South, ed. Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 52–71.
40. “from round Yankees”: This and subsequent quotations in this and the following paragraph from Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe, Being the Notes and Sketches of an Architect, Naturalist and Traveler in the United States from 1769 to 1820 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1905), 161–63.
41. general racial “blending”: Interview with Henry Kmen, quoted in Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 20.
42. a pungent blend: Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008), 274–81.
43. “However much of the primitive”: Henry Kmen, Music in New Orleans: The Formative Years, 1791–1841 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 229.
44. “movements, gyrations, and attitudenizing exhibitions”: Creecy, quoted in Sublette, World That Made New Orleans, 282.
45. While it is hard to say with precision: See Southern, Music of Black Americans, 161–62.
46. “a principal means by which”: Stuckey, Slave Culture, 24.
47. “ ‘praise’-nights”: William Frances Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: Peter Smith, 1951), xiii.
48. “any assembly of [enslaved] Negroes or Negresses”: Code Noir, cited in Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), 239.
49. “Oh, where are our select men”: Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 227.
50. “a jerking, hitching motion”: Allen et al., Slave Songs, xiv.
51. “unceasing, wave-like ripple”: T. Amaury Talbot, quoted in Stuckey, Slave Culture, 11.
52. “ ‘danced’ with the whole body�
��: Stuckey, Slave Culture, 362.
53. “sensual, even blatantly erotic dances”: Crété quoted in Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 65.
54. “not altogether to understand”: Asbury, The French Quarter, 253.
55. “rhythm and excitement”: Emery, Black Dance, 121.
56. “turning around occasionally”: Ibid., 122.
57. “Some gits so joyous”: Former Texan slaves Wes Beady and Richard Carruthers quoted in Rawick, The American Slave, 1:36, 37.
58. “worship,” “the sole object”: Schultz and Nuttall quoted in Sublette, World That Made New Orleans, 281–82.
59. “the steps and figures of the court”: Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 28.
60. “Long Dog Scratch”: Ibid., 29.
61. “mass of nonsense and wild frolic”: Douglass, My Bondage, 155.
62. “The Majesty of the People had disappeared”: Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society: Portrayed by the Family Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 295.
63. “Hangings and public executions”: Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 12.
64. “expressive,” “recreational”: Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot & Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 55.
65. “friendly rivalry”: Discussion following April Masten’s presentation, “Shared Traditions: The Origins of Negro Jigging in Early America,” at the conference Triumph in My Song: 18th & 19th Century African Atlantic Culture, History, & Performance, University of Maryland, College Park, June 2, 2012. For Masten’s groundbreaking analysis of the “friendly rivalry” between dancers and musicians during this period, see “Partners in Time: Dancers, Musicians, and Negro Jigs in Early America,” Common-Place 13, no. 2 (Winter 2013), http://www.common-place.org/vol-13/no-02/masten/.
