Culture and Leisure Overview

What was the nature of slaves' leisure time, and what kinds of cultural institutions did they craft therein? Or, as historian Kenneth Stampp asked in The Peculiar Institution, "What else was there in the lives of slaves besides work, sleep, and procreation? What filled their idle hours? What occupied their minds?" (1956, p. 361). This is a difficult question, an answer for which has only slowly, and recently, emerged through the careful study of slave folklore and narratives.

In early twentieth-century interpretations of slavery, the space of the plantation allowed for little leisure time or cultural formation, but much work and white domination. Historians such as Ulrich Phillips (1877–1934) posited the plantation as a sort of slave school run by white masters, an engine of acculturation that trained African American men and women for a subordinate place in modern society. Even more sympathetic historians such as Stampp, writing during the civil rights era of the 1950s, lamented that little would ever be known about slave culture, because of the paucity of sources. However, as John Blassingame (1972) and other scholars of slave culture have shown since the 1970s, there was a slave community, and important elements of that community were formed in leisure time.

The work of the plantation did consume a tremendous amount of slaves' time and energy, and therefore leisure activities were usually limited to the nighttime, holidays, and Sundays. Typically slaves received two or three days off at Christmas, a holiday usually accompanied by gifts, feasts, dances, weddings, and athletic contests; in John Canoe (or John Kunering) festivals, especially in North Carolina, slaves dressed in elaborate masks and wigs. In a particularly ironic turn, considering their bondage as chattel laborers, the Fourth of July was another festival time for plantation slaves. The fall harvest was an important time of work as well as recreation, as slaves sang corn-shucking songs, barbecued, and drank alcohol in a carnival-like atmosphere. Harvest was also a time for celebrating fertility. Although slave weddings were not legally binding, marriage rituals such as "jumping the broom" were essential for creating and preserving the slave community.

On a more regular basis, Sunday was an important day of rest and worship, as many slaves put away their bland work clothing and donned their nicest apparel. Women wore dresses dyed in bright colors, and some former slaves recalled that girls occasionally fashioned hoops of grapevine to make their skirts fuller. Although many plantations required slaves to attend white churches, a number of slaves developed their own forms of worship that embodied syncretic religious beliefs. In emotional sermons and hymns, slaves expressed their desire for freedom and found a therapeutic release that white religion did not embody.

In slave music—and life in general—there was not a clear divide between the sacred and the secular. As Charles Joyner (1999) has shown, songs were sometimes ironic and sometimes literal, but in either case music was an important coping mechanism for the harsh realities of slave life; sometimes, moreover, song lyrics also enabled clandestine communications about secret meetings. During holiday festivals, slaves sang, danced, or patted juba, using hands, knees, and shoulders to create elaborate, syncopated clapping patterns. They also played instruments such as gourd fiddles and banjos crafted from sheep hides, as well as drums, tambourines, and flutes. A number of these instruments had their origins in Africa, like much of slave culture in general. However, like African American cultural forms in general, music did not pass across the Atlantic without important transformations.

Enslaved peoples began to shape a distinct culture during the Middle Passage, and this cultural transformation was continued in America. As historian Sterling Stuckey (1987) has shown, the counterclockwise dance ceremony, or ring shout, was an important space for creating a pan-African consciousness and establishing crucial relationships with ancestral spirits. Another important space for the continued shaping of culture was the slave quarters, the relative privacy of which allowed a place for slaves to interact on their own terms beyond the overseer's watchful eye. Women created quilts that were valued both for their utility and their decoration, and sometimes were able to grow gardens of potatoes, pumpkins, and other fruits and vegetables, to supplement meager rations. Likewise, in their spare time men often provided food by hunting or fishing in nearby wooded areas.

A pervasive element of slave culture was the telling of stories, which included morality tales that warned against working on Sunday or talking too much. A distinct genre of slave tale, though, was the trickster narrative, which typically admired smaller or weaker protagonists who outwitted larger, or stronger, opponents. In this way, tellingly, slaves inverted white society's interpretation of the trickster's significance. During the antebellum period, sentimental culture warned against the confidence man, the urban trickster who took advantage of others by earning their trust. However, slaves, locked into unfavorable power relations, crafted stories that admired legerdemain employed for the benefit of the powerless. For example, artful and quickwitted heroes such as Br'er Rabbit outsmarted their ponderous opponents, using trickery for good. Similarly, stories about John (or Jack) showed a common slave using rhetorical skill and guile to make fools of whites and to escape his master's punishment.

Power relations between slaves and masters were shaped at a young age, even during play. Slave children typically had more freedom than their elders, and sometimes played marbles or hide-and-seek. In some instances, slave children played with planters' children, and remarks and actions by the white children ultimately demonstrated the subordinate place of slaves on the plantation. As children grew older, the cessation of integrated play invariably indicated a line of demarcation between the innocence of childhood and the realities of adult life; according to Eugene Genovese (b. 1930), "[t]he etiquette of race relations began early" (1974, p.516).

As these examples demonstrate, although the oppressive nature of slavery cannot be overlooked, it is important to understand how leisure activities and cultural forms permeated the otherwise stifling peculiar institution. As Blassingame has noted, "The slave's culture bolstered his self-esteem, courage, and confidence, and served as his defense against personal degradation" (1972, p. 56). Ultimately, slaves' leisure and culture helped them to survive the ordeal of their bondage.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community; Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Joyner, Charles. Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619–1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South. New York: Knopf, 1956.

Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South [1985]. New York: Norton, 1999.

                                    Brian M. Ingrassia