Read The Battle for Christmas Online
Authors: Stephen Nissenbaum
The Battle for Christmas (50 page)
S
LAVES SOMETIMES WENT
beyond even this ritual in stepping out of character. Planter’s daughter Susan Dabney Smedes phrased this in idealized terms: At Christmas “there was an affectionate throwing off of the reserve and decorum of every-day life.” To demonstrate her point, Smedes herself offered the following anecdote: “One of the ladies of the house had heard
an unfamiliar and astonishingly loud laugh
under her window, and had ventured to put an inquiring head out [emphasis added].” What the woman saw didn’t quite make sense. It was “one of the quietest and most low-voiced of the maidservants.” The quiet maidservant, realizing that her mistress wished to know what was going on, replied to her tacit question “in a voice as loud as a sea-captain’s.” The words she used only confirmed the point already made by the unfamiliar sound of her voice. They were:
“Hi! ain’t dis Chris mus?”
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Christmas also offered slaves an opportunity to openly imitate—even mimic—white behavior. Stories abound that tell of slaves “dressing up” at Christmas. For the most part this was surely a matter of looking their best at a time when they did not have to dress for work (and when they
had often just received gifts of finery). In 1853 one planter noted that as Christmas approached his slaves were all “brushing up [and] putting on their best rigging.” Whites were characteristically amused by the sight of their slaves dressing like genteel white folk. But it could also become a parody of white manners. To grasp what may actually have been happening, we need to penetrate the invariably patronizing tone in which white reporters described these situations. Rebecca Cameron recalled a family slave known as Uncle Robin, who at Christmas “dressed in my greatgrandfathers regimentals, and looking, of course, supremely absurd.”
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We don’t know what was going on in Uncle Robins mind, of course. But putting on the master’s clothing was surely a gesture that carried profound symbolic implications. One example will make the point. In the course of the Nat Turner rebellion, several black men who had just murdered their owners employed the first moments of their freedom to perform this very ritual gesture—they dressed themselves in the clothing of their dead masters, whose bodies were even then lying in the same room.
We can get a hint of what “putting on airs” sometimes meant to slaves by looking at the way they sometimes behaved under those circumstances, imitating the manners as well as the dress of genteel white people. A Northern visitor, listening “to the Christmas revelry that sounded from the negro quarters,” summed up her reaction by writing, simply, that “it seemed almost a burlesque of the performances inside the mansion.”
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The “burlesque” was surely a complex gesture, a mixture of high spirits, mockery, and envy. One patronizing account of Christmas on the plantation, written by a white man in 1854, describes the “assumed refinement” of slaves during the “holiday festivities”:
In these imitations of “white folks,” some “sable [black] wild flower,” that it was supposed had never looked into a parlor, will put on airs that would be quite impressive amidst ton [i.e., high society] at Saratoga or Newport; while a “field nigger” will hit off some of the peculiarities of master, or of an eccentric visitor, that are instantly recognized, but had never been noticed before.
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We might well ask, Who is really getting the last laugh here? And what was really going on in
this
story, told by Bessie Henry, a white woman from Salem, Massachusetts, in an 1832 letter to her sister back home (Henry was teaching school on a Tidewater plantation near Richmond). After saying the usual things about how slaves behaved at Christmas (“they take the kitchen for a ball room and dance all night and sing all day”), Henry concluded her report by recounting a scene she had just witnessed: “Yesterday I saw one of them pick up an old leaf of a book and fold it up very carefully. I asked him what he was going to do with it. [He replied,] Oh Missus, I jest goin in there [referring presumably to the slave quarters] to hold it up and make tence [i.e., pretense] read and [hear] all the niggers say ‘See, he like white folks, he read.’”
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“High Life” at Christmas
. A white Southerner’s later recollection of the Christmas dance performed by her family’s slaves. The couple in front have dressed in high style and are imitating—or parodying?—the elegant and coy gestures of the white gentry. A report in one antebellum magazine described the slaves’ “high life” at Christmas in this way: “They now drop their plantation names of Tom, Bill, Dick, and Caesar, Moll, Kate, and Nancy, and use, in addressing one another, the prefix of Mister, Mistress, or Miss, as the case may be; and the highest compliment that can be paid them is to be called by the surnames of their masters.” Interestingly, the very same reversals are described in a 1759 British play,
High Life Below Stairs
, that was often performed at Christmas in England and America well into the nineteenth century.
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)
Bessie Henry reported this story without trying to explain it. The man she wrote about did not do this in order to be observed by white peopie;
Henry came upon him as he was taking the sheet of printed paper into the slave quarters. When he was discovered, the slave said simply that he was going to pretend to read. There may have been envy or even ambition in his purpose, but surely there was parody in it (even, perhaps, if this slave really did know how to read). The mimicking of white manners was something whose meaning the whites failed to grasp—just as they failed to grasp the meaning of black spirituals. Both involved what might now be termed “signifying”—a gesture that was intended to appear “cute” to white observers but was laden with an irony that only fellow slaves were able to appreciate.
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.”
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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?”
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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.
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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.”
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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:
