American Fun (11 page)

Douglass wanted to expose all the trickery behind slavery. Christmas holidays were his example of how masters distorted slaves’ ideas of freedom. Just as the master forced slaves to drink whiskey until they were miserable, or to overeat molasses until they were vomiting, he also coerced them to party hard on the holidays, so they would gratefully go limping back to work after New Year’s. This is how they were taught to confuse precious “liberty” with sickening “dissipation.” Undoubtedly these were the master’s intentions.
Henry Bibb, another former slave turned abolitionist lecturer, made a similar argument, saying slaves who had “
no moral religious instruction” absconded “to the woods in large numbers … to gamble, fight, get drunk, and break the Sabbath,” and also to dance and sing and “pat juber”—often by the coaxing of masters, themselves looking for “sport.”

Perhaps the most sympathetic account of Christmas frolics comes from former slave
Solomon Northrup, an expert fiddler whose talents brought out his drunken master’s best and worst—sometimes making him “
buoyant, elastic, gaily ‘tripping the light fantastic toe’ around the piazza and all through the house,” but often inspiring him to taunt exhausted slaves to dance all night for his amusement. Northrup was
also hired out to other plantations—a player in the era’s larger economy of “
slave minstrels,” enslaved musicians, singers, and dancers who brought their masters considerable profit. On Christmas, however, when they were left to themselves, Northrup’s “
beloved violin” gave him the “honored seat at the yearly feasts.” He taunts Southern whites (mocking the “listless and snail-like” movements of their “slow winding cotillion”) “to look upon the celerity, if not the ‘poetry of motion’—upon genuine happiness, rampant and unrestrained” of “slaves dancing in the starlight of a Christmas night.”

“Those who make no profession of religion resort to the woods in large numbers on that day to gamble, fight, get drunk, and break the Sabbath.” (From the
Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave.
Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations.)

Douglass describes these holidays as “safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.” Without such holidays, he warns the masters, slaves would rise up in an “appalling earthquake” and possibly tear the system down. This hydraulic model of control and appeasement has a familiar ring to it. It’s the same metaphor used to explain the medieval carnival: peasants were allowed a bit of Saturnalia to keep them contained for the rest of the year. Contemporary historians use it, as well, when accounting for antebellum black celebrations. Undoubtedly
the masters had “safety-valves” in mind when encouraging slaves to cut loose on holiday. What all of these arguments assume, however, is that African Americans who played on holiday were putty in the masters’ hands. They also underestimate the force behind fun—especially African-American fun.

Douglass gives the Puritan boilerplate on fun—it weakens the will, it’s a waste of time, it turns you into the devil’s plaything—and he sends this message with noble intentions. In the closing lines of
My Bondage and My Freedom,
he says he aims to liberate slaves by promoting “
the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation of the free colored people.” As a rising abolitionist—under the influence of his famous mentor,
William Lloyd Garrison—Douglass was more than an opponent of slavery; he was part of the Second
Great Awakening that was gathering force in the 1830s. (The “First” had seized New England a century earlier.) This national wave of revivalists and reformers targeted a range of society’s evils, from slavery and domestic abuse to promiscuity and drunkenness. But in giving the reformers’ party line on the profligacy of blacks, as he does in both of these books, Douglass also reinforces a common bias—that “by far the larger part” of blacks are childish folks with an incorrigibly hedonistic streak. This stereotype didn’t need his help. It traveled throughout nineteenth-century America, as later chapters will show, in the wildly popular form of
blackface
minstrelsy. Stiff, white society oversimplified black culture as a thoughtless, oversexed free-for-all. In many circles, they loved it for that; cartoon images of hedonistic blacks provided a nice holiday from whites’ own repression. Naturally Frederick Douglass hated this love, especially when it flickered in his master’s eyes. He wanted fellow blacks to stop fooling around and playing into white society’s hands. As a reformer, he wanted them to play by the rules. But Solomon Northrup saw it differently. For him, blacks having fun—fun of their own, not compulsory dances for their master’s sadism—was a human triumph inaccessible to whites.

When this reveling “class” is taken more seriously, a story of radicalism comes to light. What Douglass dismisses as foolhardy mischief—and hopefully there was a lot of that—starts to emerge as a peaceable revolution that created new strategies for staying free. Forced to survive under an authoritarian system far more forbidding than
Plymouth Plantation, slaves crafted kinds of play and
satire that made Merry Mount look like amateur hour. In resisting a nationwide system of tyranny protected by the
U.S. Constitution, they put their fun to more strategic uses than even the Sons of Liberty did: their need was that much more severe. Their celebrations formed regional and national webs, even when much of the antebellum Union was threatening to come apart at the seams. Their jokes, stories, songs, and dances modeled sly resistance. Their wrestlers, fiddlers, dancers, jokers, whiskey drinkers, and quoits players reclaimed ownership of the people’s body and soothed its lacerations with pleasure. In the process, they wrote the code for America’s most
American
popular culture—and made it deeply, richly smart.

BY THE DAWN
of the nineteenth century, postrevolutionary holidays—honoring the
Boston Massacre and the
Treaty of Paris and above all touting Independence Day—were turning into occasions for
partisan conflict. All throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, Republicans and Federalists and their warring newspapers often co-opted nation-building festivities for boisterous, even violent, political advantage. The year 1803 was especially hot. In Providence that spring, when Republicans celebrated the
anniversary of Congress, Federalists ran an
effigy of Tom Paine through the streets, “insulting and hooting at every person not in their sect.” In Trenton that July, thirty Federalists pummeled a Republican editor for depicting their festivities “as drunken and
‘riotous.’ ” African Americans—especially those who joined in these celebrations—were deployed
as
scapegoats by both sides in these wars. “
To Federalists,”
David Waldstreicher writes, “black participation in festivals and elections epitomized the low-class origins, and demagoguery, of the
Jeffersonians. Yet these same Jeffersonians constructed their republican virtue atop the symbolic foundation of the underclass—a black underclass.” Both groups presented blacks as civic toxins, as Newark’s Republican press did that August when they charged Federalists with “ ‘admitting black people and slaves’ into the courts.” By associating their opponents with blacks, they called them politically dangerous—or, worse, irrelevant.

Such partisan events provide an ironic backdrop for the “Election Day” and “Pinkster” events held by African Americans during this same time period. For while the dominant parties held now pompous, now divisive celebrations that mocked feast days of national unity, African Americans, the partisans’ objects of common scorn, hosted elaborate public blowouts that, by most accounts, flaunted the joys of participatory democracy—if only for a few precious days at a stretch. These celebrations showed citizens’ unguarded selves—citizens in the thrall of liberty—and whereas partisans enjoyed splitting the public sphere in half, often in sadistically violent ways, the
multiracial celebrants at Election Days and Pinkster showed
pride in racial and national identity, took pleasure in collective activity, made examples of amicable conflict, and throve on mutually granted freedom.

The earliest account of an
African-American holiday in the Northeast was in the 1736
New-York Weekly Journal
. Calling himself “The SPY,” the reporter describes whites and blacks en masse disporting in a field outside of town; the whites were simply “crouded,” but the blacks “divided into Companies,” possibly “according to their different Nations, some dancing to the hollow Sound of a Drum” and other percussion instruments while “others plied the Banger,” or banjo, and sang. Blacks also “exercised the
Cudgel,” probably a form of martial art. But everyone drank and swore and frolicked. In addition to gambling, pugilism, and cockfighting, and amid shaded booths selling unidentified merchandise (the SPY buys a beer), was a business that struck him as
a “Place little better (if anything at all) than a Brothel,” where the “mixt Multitude” sat with “Doxies on their Laps,” or “in close Hugg,” and tried to sell the disapproving SPY their services. What he clearly could not get over, however (he returns to the subject at least three times), was the festival’s radically “mixt Multitude.” The festivities were rude and showed “want of a better Education,” but they comprised more than blacks and lower-class whites. Most dangerously, they delighted all levels of New York society: “Gentlemen, Merchants, and Mechanics of different Occupations, and even Day Labourers, of different Ages, in different Garbs.” Under these free and liberal conditions, despite their highly stratified city, the motley participants “seemed to be all hail Fellow well met.” The event’s high spirits leveled their partiers’ biases. While
Shlomo Pestcoe and
Greg Adams make the strong case that the event took place on Easter Monday (and that “The SPY” was the prominent New Yorker
James Alexander), it remains unclear what common purpose threw this “mixt Multitude” together—apart, that is, from the chance to have fun. It does appear, in any case, that the party’s instigators were black.

Since at least as early as 1741, in Salem, Massachusetts, slaves and free blacks held celebrations for the purpose of electing their “Kings” and “Governors.” They took place in coastal and river-valley towns, sometimes in league with local
Jack Tars, and they often followed the lead of local white elections, celebrating with parades and formal dinners and the array of toasts and liberty songs. But unlike the feasts of their white community members, which typically ended at dusk, “Negro Election Days” could last for several days of fiddling, dancing, feasting, drinking, foot-racing, gambling, and sports. The elections themselves followed a variety of practices—ballots, caucuses, viva voce, queues of supporters behind favorite candidates—but they could also involve tests of strength and agility. Sometimes the Governors held year-round authority, appointing their own courts and legislative committees, but often they served an honorary function. Sometimes Election Days dropped the elections altogether and cut straight to the games and merriment.
Joseph P. Reidy notes that up through the turn of the century, in Salem and elsewhere, these predominantly African-American events were enjoyed by whites and blacks alike.

During this same period, similarly parodic celebrations went by the name Pinkster Days. Pinkster coincided with the Dutch Pentecost, or the Anglican Whitsunday, and was held every May throughout
Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and New York. What for the Dutch began in the early 1700s as the strictest of religious holidays evolved over the decades into a secular, multicultural rite of spring, thanks mostly to the widespread contributions of free and enslaved African Americans. Records of Pinkster’s later iteration mention slaves “frolicking” together for days, eating colored eggs and dancing, sometimes joined by their reveling masters. Joyous memories of Pinkster festivals on her Dutch-American master’s estate nearly provoked runaway slave
Sojourner Truth to turn herself in.
James Fenimore Cooper’s 1845 novel
Satanstoe
relocated his turn-of-the-century memories of Albany’s Pinkster festival to New York City in 1757, possibly melding it with the Easter Monday event, possibly embellishing it, though his imagery itself has the ring of truth: “
Nine-tenths of the blacks of the city, and of the whole country within thirty or forty miles … were
collected in thousands in those fields, beating banjoes, singing African songs, drinking, and worst of all, laughing in a way that seemed to set their very hearts rattling within their ribs. Everything wore the aspect of good-humour, though it was good-humour in the broadest and coarsest forms.” In later years Pinkster celebrants “collected in thousands” in Manhattan’s City Hall Park. By the turn of the century, especially on Albany’s
Pinkster Hill, the festival’s fleeting experience of liberty was attracting participants from various races, classes, and national identities—and though the celebrations themselves were an evident mélange of European, African, and Caribbean traditions, they were identified with, and largely attended by, blacks.