What the eye hears, p.6
What the Eye Hears, page 6
By the time James Fenimore Cooper described a Pinkster celebration on a Manhattan parade ground in his 1845 historical novel Satanstoe, it was lore, a discontinued custom distinguished from the usual frolic by what Cooper called its African features: how the slaves danced not just to banjos but to drums. Cooper’s telling was fiction, set before the author’s birth. The researches of his contemporary Colonel Thomas De Voe are historically more trustworthy. Born in 1811, De Voe grew up as a butcher’s assistant and became an expert on the city’s markets. In his Market Book of 1862, he recounted how, at the turn of the nineteenth century, slaves from New Jersey and Long Island would gather on Pinkster at Catharine Market on the lower Manhattan side of the East River. They brought items to sell—roots, berries, fish—and they were always ready, De Voe wrote, “by ‘negro sayings and doings’ to make a few shillings more.” This they did by engaging “in a jig or break-down, as that was one of their pastimes at home on the barn-floor, or in a frolic.” Do what you love and get paid for it, as Buster Brown would say.
Each group of dancers brought its own dancing surface, a board called a “shingle,” about six feet long, “with its particular spring in it.” While one of the dancers jigged up a storm, two others would stand on opposite sides of the board, holding it down while beating time by dropping their heels and slapping their legs. Spectators rewarded the dancers with money, collected in a hat, and “if money was not to be had,” the slaves “would dance for a bunch of eels or fish.” (Eels were cheap and plentiful then, a staple of the poor.) Rivalry for reputation and spoils produced, as De Voe phrased it with patronizing quotation marks, “some excellent ‘dancers.’”
This was the account of a man writing in the 1860s about dancing he may or may not have witnessed. Though elements seem African, he did not describe them as such. To him, the dance was Negro, and it was a jig, a Negro jig about making rhythms with the feet against a wooden platform, about making money in the marketplace of Manhattan. Everything about it sounds like tap.
FREEDOM DANCING IN SLAVEHOLDING AMERICA
In 1841, Solomon Northup, a free black farmer from New York lured south with the offer of a job as fiddler in a circus, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. A dozen years later, after he escaped, he published an account of his ordeal (the one adapted into the Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave). In his book, Northup described how his master, soused and in the mood for sport, would call upon him to play the fiddle. The master would dance and would require his slaves to join him, slashing with his whip if anyone dared rest. (The master’s wife, disapproving, could not always suppress a laugh.) This scene was an exhibit of a master’s cruelty, but it was with pride that Northup wrote of slaves dancing in the starlight of a Christmas night: “If you wish to look upon the celerity, if not the ‘poetry of motion’—upon genuine happiness, rampant and unrestrained—go down to Louisiana.” On such occasions, Northup wrote, the slaves were “different beings from what they are in the field.”
Whether or not Northup’s account—written with the help of a white writer and with the expressed intention of converting whites to abolition—is entirely credible, those scenes capture the competing meanings of slave dancing. On one side was the coerced and degrading entertainment for slave owners, the stories told by former slaves about white folks coming to watch their dancing, coming to laugh, or about whites forcing them to dance, sometimes at gunpoint. And on the other was the happiness, genuine even in bondage, even if such a triumph of spirit could appear, to some, as a justification for slavery.
In an 1846 journal entry, the Harvard historian Francis Parkman described two slaves, chained together and dancing as another slave beat on a banjo: “They seem never to have known a care. Nothing is on their faces but careless, thoughtless enjoyment. Is it not safe to conclude them to be an inferior race?” A Virginia doctor, in an 1838 article, reported his wonder at slaves swigging persimmon beer and dancing to a banjo, merrily, percussively, ludicrously. The doctor recommended the scene as a rebuke to Northern abolitionists, as verification that the slaves were “the happiest of the human race,” and also as proof for his Southern readers “that God has placed us high in the scale of human beings.” These were the lines of thought, so pervasive as to be unremarkable, that led some abolitionists to insist that blacks did not dance and that all reports of slave dancing were proslavery propaganda.
The opportunities for slaves to dance varied from region to region and master to master. Although slave owners feared that slaves in large gatherings might plot rebellion, they also regarded recreation as a reward for good behavior and a safety valve of the kind Frederick Douglass meant when he characterized holidays as among “the most effective means in the hands of slaveholders of keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” Holidays at Christmas, Easter, or the Fourth of July were occasions of license, often of liquor, and they always included dancing. Corn shuckings, quiltings, logrollings, and rice threshings all culminated in a feast and a dance, which served as a goal to inspire effort. Many masters allowed weekly dances or would allow slaves to attend dances on other plantations. “On Saturday nights,” recalled the former slave James Campbell, “we’d dance long as de can’les lasted.”
In their owners’ eyes, the slaves were labor, merchandise, collateral, capital that reproduced itself. That they might also be family was among slavery’s most awful complications. Through dancing, the slaves could reclaim their bodies for themselves. That was worth the effort of walking great distances after a long day’s labor, worth the risk of a whipping or worse for attending a dance without a pass. Some slaves would recall dance explicitly as a form of resistance, glorying in remembrance of when they danced without permission. “Might whip us de nex’ day,” said Charles Grandy of Virginia, “but we done had our dance. Stay as late as we want—don’t care ef we is got to be in de field at sunrise. When de dance break up we go out, slam de do’ ef we wants, an’ shout back at de man what had de party.”
The slammed door resounds, flaunting the defiance involved whenever the slaves redirected energy to their own ends. Some meetings were secret, and thus required a short-term escape, as implied by the slave term for them, “steal away.” But even sanctioned dances were interludes of freedom. In a clean shirt, a spare dress, adorned with a treasured ribbon, these people were different beings from what they were in the field, individuals who valued themselves for their fine dancing and could be so valued by others. Saturday evenings and holidays were the slaves’ own time, and dancing was how they chose to spend it. Setting a high value on the community-strengthening powers of rhythmic synchronization came with the slaves’ African heritage; associating dance with freedom became part of their American one.
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Take it as heroic metaphor or as rules of the game, the dances of the slaves were dances of endurance. Solomon Northup, playing his fiddle in Louisiana, saw a man with a “placid bosom” and “legs flying like drumsticks” get cut out by a man shuffling and twisting his body into every conceivable shape as a woman outlasted them both, thereby sustaining her reputation as “the fastest gal.” This was couple dancing but also individual competition. Slaves around the counterposed couple kept up the rhythm with foot tapping and body clapping. The Virginia doctor’s similar account of jigging adds the slaves’ comments, their aesthetic encouragement and criticism: “Molly move like the handsaw, see how she shake herself.” “Cut him out, Gabe.” Both scenes sound syncretic.
So does the competitive dancing that followed corn shuckings, events that blended European and African harvest customs. The slaves, divided in teams, worked to a beat in call-and-response with a singer who improvised rhymed commentary, commonly at the master’s expense. For the dancing that followed, the slaves were said to prefer a plank floor or even the bottom of a wagon bed, concerned as they were with audible rhythms. (This observation, credible enough, comes from the 1914 memoir of a slaveholder’s son, a man who missed the “faithful, patient, submissive, and happy creatures” of antebellum days.) Sharing a plank, two dancers would face off, spurred by the clapping and encouragement of those ringed around them into ever more rapid and violent motion until one of the dancers gave up.
Some former slaves would recall this use of a platform for public events, a sounding board that was also a stage. Yet Isaac Williams (in his as-told-to autobiography) attested that the clay floor of his slave cabin was hard enough to transmit the perfect time of bare feet as his friends danced to the music of his homemade fiddle, Saturday night right through Sunday morning. “Setting the floor,” other slaves would call this practice, a couple squaring off and slapping their feet down on dirt. (The phrase also crops up in Scottish Gaelic songs for and about dancing.) Williams also remembered how he and his fellow slaves did the same dances—or at least dances with the same names—for their master’s guests and how the best dancer won twenty-five cents.
Touring the South in 1851, Frederick Olmsted met the son of a small-scale Mississippi planter who informed him about the dancing favored “among common kind o’ people.” More than cotillions and reels, the young man enjoyed dancing on a plank balanced across two barrels “so it’ll kind o’ spring.” Two people faced each other and danced as fast as they could while everyone else clapped and stomped and hollered phrases such as “Old Virginny never tire!” and “Heel and toe, Ketch a-fire!” The plank heightened the sport and turned up the volume. Between those barrels, it was like a door. But if dancing on a plank echoes Irish lore, it—and the competitive play and the clapping encouragement—equally resembles the dancing of African-American slaves.
The rowdy style of a country frolic was common ground. A handful of reports attest to whites dancing with slaves at communal events. A Rhode Island man who taught school in Georgia in the 1840s (and went to prison for aiding in the escape of a slave) wrote of dancing to fiddle music after a logrolling, whites and slaves together, inebriated and joking. But what astonished the Rhode Islander was the slaves’ ability, the usual list of rapidity, accurate time, physical power, humor. “The sound of a fiddle makes them crazy,” he wrote, speculating that in the case of insurrection, someone would merely have to strike up a tune and the slaves would drop their rebellion to jig. Dancing to the fiddle, he wrote, they were “at home.”
The slaves, as they become excited, use the most extravagant gestures—the music increases in speed—and the Whites soon find it impossible to sustain their parts, and they retire. This is just what the slaves wish, and they send up a general shout, which is returned by the Whites, acknowledging the victory. Then they all sing out, “Now show de white man what we can do!”
The ground might have been common, but not quite even.
ERECT AND DIGNIFIED
“Us slaves watched white folks’ parties,” remembered one former slave, “where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march … then we’d do it, too. But we used to mock ’em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it. I guess they thought we couldn’t dance any better.”
Those words were written down in 1960, when the black actor Leigh Whipper, eighty years old at the time, recalled what his “nurse” had spoken on an occasion in 1901, when she was more than seventy. The events she was recounting had taken place some sixty years before that, when she was a young “strut gal” enjoying privileges for being a good dancer, taken from one plantation to another for competitions upon which her master wagered. This statement, so far from direct, is almost the only documentation of slaves imitatively mocking their masters in dance, the quote itself supplying one reason why evidence might be scarce: white folks’ misinterpretations. Yet there’s plenty of evidence of slaves mocking their masters in song, transcribed words whose meanings, overt and coded, we can now read. And it makes sense that from an African perspective a minuet might have appeared comically rigid. It makes sense that slaves would have been eager to send up the pretensions and hypocrisies of the planter class.
Derision, however, can’t fully account for why people of African descent, to whom dance meant so much, borrowed from or adopted European dance. Certainly among black domestics and artisans, dance functioned as a mark of status. In his 1856 book Virginia, especially Richmond, in By-Gone Days, Samuel Mordecai fondly remembered the “colored aristocracy” of the early nineteenth century. Though Mordecai considered their “aping” of genteel behavior to be ridiculous, his account of the “erect and dignified” slave fiddler Sy Gilliat seems believable. Imagine the appeal of holding your body erect and dignified when, as Solomon Northup put it, “the attitude and the language of the slave,” the demeanor expected and enforced by whites, was one of downcast eyes and bowed heads, a bodily lexicon of servility. An upright carriage, by contrast, was a show of pride, a trait disturbing enough to slaveholders that it merited mention in runaway slave notices.
“Erect and dignified” describes the manner of the black wedding party in Christian Mayr’s 1838 painting Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia. Up north, the formal balls held by free blacks provided ripe matter for nasty cartoons and newspaper articles, often prompted by court proceedings treating the events as disturbances of the peace. The Pennsylvania Gazette rated one Philadelphia occasion of 1828 as “a joke of no ordinary magnitude.” The mockery concentrated on fancy attire and high modes of address, yet most of the information about the dancing of Northern blacks comes in this form, with reported fact nearly indistinguishable from jest. A few genuine-sounding black voices cut through, such as the woman in a court proceeding who asked simply, “If the big white folks dance, why should not people of color?” That’s a fair question, yet how did the people of color do the big white folks’ dances? The most suggestive clue is the judgment of a white observer that Frank Johnson, a renowned black Philadelphian composer and bandleader who played at black functions and white resorts, showed “a remarkable taste in distorting a sentimental, simple, and beautiful song into a reel, jig, or country-dance.” The “distortion” sounds rhythmic, a remix bent toward the preferences of rhythm-oriented dancers.
Interviewed in 1883, Sylvia Dubois would recall the superior dancing of her youth in the first decades of the century, when she was a house slave in New Jersey; the superiority, in her telling, lay in the quick, nimble crossing of feet (“ninety-nine times in a minute”): a value that sounds Irish. In the mind of the former slave Hannah Crasson, the way her aunt could “tote herself” was part of what distinguished her as a “royal slave.” Crasson’s aunt “could dance all over the place wid a tumbler of water on her head, widout spilling it.” Many slaves would recall similar dances of balanced water. Water on the head was part of Set the Floor and other competitive pastimes. The idea could be an Irish dancing master’s, or a game that conforms to the African aesthetic of the cool: the bosom placid while the lower limbs fly like drumsticks, the dancing style of people accustomed to toting loads on their heads. Beyond the allure of status markers, the slaves (and free blacks, too) must have been attracted to aesthetic qualities of European dance—to, say, the “easy careless manner” stressed by the influential dancing master William Turner. As much as African-derived dancing could strike whites as alien or absurd, the aesthetic of the cool was not incompatible with a European-derived ideal of grace.
We might speculate that slaves took to dancing with water on their heads much as some of them, recalling, if only dimly, the water deities and cleansing rituals of Africa, took to baptism. Efforts to convert the slaves to Christianity found greatest purchase in early-nineteenth-century camp meetings, where modes of worship were musically and emotionally ecstastic, drawing slaves in with resemblances to African spirituality that the slaves’ participation reinforced. Yet among the most successful sects were Methodists and Baptists, who taught that dancing was sinful, causing many a pious slave to swear off it altogether. For people of African descent, this was an epochal conversion. It meant that the black church, already becoming a powerful, community-binding institution, set itself against dance, a proscription that persists in certain black churches to this day.
At least doctrinally. An 1819 catalogue of Methodist errors and excesses detected in the camp-meeting singing of blacks a rhythmic “sinking” of the legs, “producing an audible sound of the feet at every step, as manifest as the steps of actual Negro dancing in Virginia.” Visiting a Georgia plantation in 1845, Sir Charles Lyell noted that while the Methodist missionaries silenced violins, the slaves were permitted to move around in a ring, “as substitute for the dance.” Such dances became known as shouts. Northerners who journeyed south during the Civil War registered a shuffling dance of hand-clapping, foot-drumming, knee-bending, body-rocking motion that accelerated to a fever pitch. The shocked teacher who wrote home that the shout seemed “the remains of some old idol worship” and “like a regular frolic” was more right than she knew. In African-American culture, the line between feeling the spirit on Saturday night and feeling it on Sunday morning would ever remain thin—or rather, in tension, the body-denying doctrine contradicting a mode of delivery that forced the body to respond. And the expressive urge that kept the dance in church is among the urges that forged tap.
A SHARED LANGUAGE
Separately derived traditions could share much, and it was at points of commonality that they were most likely to blend. In dance, however, the most plentiful evidence is the most tenuous: a shared vocabulary of casually applied terms. Words that might reveal genealogies might just as well disguise them.
