Festivals, U.S.

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Festivals, U.S.

From early colonial times to the present day, African Americans have created and observed an impressive calendar of celebratory and commemorative events: jubilees, festivals and anniversaries, "frolics" and seasonal feasts, fairs and markets, parades, and pilgrimages—not to speak of more private or secret ceremonies, such as church meetings and revivals, family reunions, baptisms and funerals, and spiritual cults. These customs have received the casual or sustained attention of travelers, visitors, and local observers. They have been praised or disparaged, extolled as the epitome of a festive spirit that should prevail in any society and as the expression of an enduring, authentic culture, but they have also been dismissed by some as primitive, low-brow manifestations of a subculture; an unsophisticated, burlesque imitation of mainstream life; or, at best, an adaptation or appropriation of Euro-American customs.

This festive mood with which African Americans have been credited has encouraged the persistence of many prejudices and stereotypes fostered by the minstrel tradition, which represented blacks as a happy-go-lucky, careless, lighthearted people, prone to dancing and singing. This inclination for mirth has been interpreted as a sign that the predicament of slaves and their descendants should not be such a burden to the white mind, and that their sufferings and the wrongs committed against them have been exaggerated.

Yet African-American celebrations, with all their unacknowledged complexities of forms and functions, are powerful symbolic acts that express—vehemently and with exuberance—not acquiescence to fate but needs, desires, and utopian will, as well as disenchantment, anger, and rebelliousness. Communal, playful, or carnivalesque in character, they are events through which the community endeavors to build its identity, in self-reflective scrutiny and in constant confrontation with "the black image in the white mind." These feasts not only give the lie to and articulate the pain of certain truths, including the ambivalence of a dream always deferred, they also define unexamined propositions in performances infused with subtle ironies and double entendre.

Coronation Festivals

Among the "hallowdays" observed by northern slaves and free blacks, the coronation festivals, or "negro elections," set the pattern for many civic feasts and festivals. Once a year in colonial New England, slaves were allowed to accompany their masters to election festivities where whites organized the election of their governors. In the 1750s, blacks started to organize their own similar celebrations, in which a leader—preferably African-born and of known royal ancestry, quick-witted, and ready of speech—was elected king or governor, a title that endowed him with authority among both blacks and whites. (The title "king" or "governor" was used by blacks according to each New England colony's specific status: governors were elected in colonies that were relatively autonomous, whereas kings were elected in colonies more closely tied to England.) According to this custom, which endured through the 1850s, bondsmen confronted their African origin—the king was intermediary to the ancestors. Bondsmen also expressed their desire to have their separate institutions and to prove their ability for self-government.

Elections were prepared for by weeks of debates and meetings. A strong political message was conveyed to the community and to white rulers in a spirit that blended parodic intent and high seriousness. By ritually transferring power from the hands of the masters to those of one of their fellows, slaves were paving the way for their emancipation. Election days were perhaps the first freedom celebrations that combined the memory of the freedom and power Africans enjoyed before their capture—with an anticipation of the freedom to come. The official recognition of African royalty and gentility reversed old stereotypes, which associated Africanness with savagery and lack of culture. The king was regarded as a civilized "negro" (the term "black" was not in usage as a noun then), composed and refined. These elections, prompted by the desire to counter forces of fragmentation and to ease conflicts, sought a consensus and struck a note of unity.

Coronation festivals were also indicative of white-black relations. The elected was often the slave of a prominent master, and slaves devised strategies to gain the support of masters to organize their ceremonies. The wealthier the slave owner, the greater the chance of having a grand festival, and, conversely, the greater the display, the stronger the evidence of the master's influence. While these feasts increased antagonism between blacks and poor whites, they offered an occasion to redefine slave-master relations, based on mutual claims and obligations. Negro kings held many roles—as opinion leaders, counselors, justice makers, and mediators who could placate black insurgency or white fearfulness when faced with such a display of autonomy and self-rule.

There were other occasions when blacks gathered around a self-appointed leader, such as Pinkster, another well-known festival. Derived originally from the Dutch Whitsuntide celebration called pfingster, which the "Africs" took over in the late eighteenth century, Pinkster reached its peak in the early 1800s in Albany, New York. There, the choice of a hill as the site for the celebration had many symbolic meanings. From the top of this hill, blacks could look down on the world—an interesting reversal of the usual situation, as well as a mock imitation of the hills on which rulers like to set their capitols. Pinkster Hill was close to the place where many executions of blacks (accused in 1793 of having set fire to the city) had taken place. It was also close to a burial ground, a military cemetery, and an all-black cemetery.

Thus, death presided over the festivities, reminding blacks of the limits set on their freedom, of punishments inflicted on black rebels, of the failure to acknowledge or reward the achievements of black soldiers who had participated in the nation's wars, and of the intricate game of integration and segregation. The epitaphs and names inscribed on the graves in the black cemetery emphasized the enduring character of African customs and rites. Cemeteries may have been the ultimate freedom sites, since only in death could blacks reach the absolute freedom they were celebrating.

Coronations and Pinkster exemplify a significant trend in the role granted to feasts: the official recognition of blacks' special gift for creating festive performances—and their capacity for infusing it into other groups (Native Americans, Germans, Dutch, and French attended the Pinkster). Feasts thus offered an arena for interaction and for the dream of a utopian and pluralistic order in a society divided by many social and political conflicts. Feasts were also an ironic comment on a republic that claimed to be dedicated to freedom but could still enslave part of its population, as well as a demonstration of the resilience of victims whose spirits could not be crushed.

Emancipation Celebrations and the Fourth of July

Throughout the postrevolutionary era and in the antebellum years, African Americans evolved a tradition of emancipation celebrations that charted the different stages toward gradual, then complete, liberation. The future that was at stake was not only that of slaves and freed blacks, it was also the destiny of the nation and its aspiring democracy. These yearly occurrences were not marginal to black life; they were a political manifestation of jeremiad and claim making that was pursued deliberately, was announced and debated in the press, and involved major institutions, societies, and associations (churches, societies for mutual relief, temperance and benevolent societies, freemasons, etc.).

Emancipation celebrations were occasions for public appearances in marches and parades or at universal exhibitions. Many leaders, both religious and political, seized these opportunities to address the world in sermons, speeches, orations, or harangues, developing race pride and race memory. They assessed the contribution of black people in the building of the nation, their progress, their capacity for self-government, and their commitment to liberty as a universal right. These feasts were not merely opportunities to celebrate on a large scale, they also held out a promise to fashion new roles in a better world and to wield new power. In addition, they heralded a season of change, from enslavement and invisibility to liberation and recognition.

Both freedom and power were present in the ceremonies, not as mere allegorical figures but as fully developed ideas whose force needed to be conveyed to large audiences. Images and symbols were evolved and played out—in words, gestures, movements, and visual forms, with much ado and a will to adorn. The talents and gifts of black folks were put to use in a collective effort to stir and arouse consciousness and encourage action.

In the black calendar of feasts, Independence Day was the most controversial and bleakest celebration. The solemnities of the Fourth of July encouraged African Americans to organize their own separate ceremonies and formulate their own interpretation of the meaning of these national commemorations. One is reminded of Frederick Douglass's famous 1852 address, "What Is to the American Slave Your Fourth of July?" Many black leaders urged their members not to observe that unholy day and proclaimed that persecution was not over and final emancipation still out of reach. July 4 thus became a menacing and perilous day, one on which blacks were more tempted to plan insurrection than to celebrate the republic. It was also a day when they were most exposed to violence, riots, arrests, and murder, as in New York in 1834 or New Hampshire in 1835. It is no wonder that they looked for other sites and landmarks to construct an alternative memory.

After 1808, January 1 was adopted as a day of civic celebration, in commemoration of the official end of the slave trade. Yet, as in similar feasts, thanksgiving was tempered by ardent protest, and rejoicing by mourning and memories of the hardships of the Middle Passage. January 1 induced a heightened consciousness of Africa, where the black odyssey had begun. Africa became the central symbol and the subject of heated debate, especially when the colonization movement encouraging free blacks to return to Africa divided the community.

Curiously, January 1 never became a black national holiday. It was celebrated for only eight years in New York, was abandoned in the 1830s in Philadelphia, and only after general emancipation was proclaimed on January 1, 1863, did it assume new significance. The strengthening of the "peculiar institution," the development of the dreaded domestic slave trade, and the illegal perpetuation of both the domestic and the foreign trade, may explain the decline in popularity of this memorial celebration. Blacks in many states chose instead the days when emancipation law was passed into their state constitutions, such as July 14 in Massachusetts. After 1827, New York blacks institutionalized July 5 as their freedom day, setting it apart from the American Fourth of July.

The abolition of slavery in the British West Indies by an act of Parliament on August 1, 1834, brought new hopes, and henceforth this memorable date became a rallying point for all freedom celebrations and for the black abolitionist crusade. State emancipations were indicted for having brought little improvement in the conditions of slaves and free blacks. The rights of blacks were trampled in the North, where racial violence and tensions continued to rise, while in the South slavery was entrenched more solidly than ever.

England and Canada became the symbols of the new celebration—the former was praised for setting an example for the American republic, while the latter was hailed as the land of the free and a refuge for the fugitives. Black orations became more fiery, urging the righting of wrongs and of all past errors. Orations also called for self-reliance, respectability, and exemplary conduct among blacks, for a distrust of whites, and for a stronger solidarity with the newly freed population of the West Indies and between the slaves and free blacks in the United States.

Big Quarterly and Other Local Celebrations

Increasingly, blacks sought sites that would commemorate events or figures more related to the African-American diaspora or to their community and its own distinctive history. Sometimes towns set the calendars—Baltimore for the Haitian Revolution, Cleveland for Nat Turner's Rebellion, and Boston in the late 1850s for Crispus Attucks. In 1814, Wilmington, Delaware, created its own celebration, Big Quarterly, which was observed for many years. Held at the close of the harvest season, it honored the founder of the Union Church of Africa, Peter Spencer.

Similar to religious revivals and patterned after the early meetings of the Quakers, Big Quarterly celebrated the struggles endured by leaders to achieve full ecclesiastical autonomy. This feast can be seen as the prototype of many religious services; it included praying, singing, the clapping of hands and stomping of feet, the beating of drums and tambourines, the playing of guitars, violins, and banjos. There was also a characteristic use of space at such gatherings. The feast began in the church, then moved outside on the church grounds, and it finally moved out to the open—Baltimore's famous French Street, for instance—where, late in the century as the feast grew more popular (in Baltimore attendance reached 10,000 in 1892; 20,000 in 1912), revival preachers urged repentance from sin and wandering minstrel evangelists played spirituals on odd instruments.

It was then also that educated "colored people" criticized the celebrations for giving way to weird cult practices and worldly pleasures, and for being outdated relics of old slavery times. In antebellum days, this religious feast was closer to a freedom celebration. Occurring in a region where slave-catching activities were intense, where slaves—who had to have a pass from the master to attend—were tempted to escape to Philadelphia or to the free states, Big Quarterly became a "big excursion on the Underground Railroad," with the presence among the pilgrims, who became potential fugitives, of both vigilant spies and marshals in addition to helpful railroad conductors.

In Syracuse in 1851 another major festival emerged in protest against the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law and honoring the rescue of a slave named Jerry. Jerry Rescue Day, which established Syracuse as the slaves' City of Refuge, embodied the spirit of defiance and of bold resistance to "iniquitous power" and to an infamous act that prevailed in the prewar years. Significantly, black leaders, rebels, warriors, and fugitives became heroic figures in celebrations and were chosen because they could demonstrate the unending fight against tyranny and for freedom. The oratory became more exhortative, the mood more impatient and indignant.

Freedom celebrations culminated in the early 1860s in Emancipation Jubilees and in the famous "Juneteenth," still observed today in Texas and surrounding states. In Texas, emancipation was announced to slaves eighteen months after its proclamation. This oddity of American history explains why Juneteenth, and not January 1, became a popular celebration in that area.

The Tradition of Celebration

Thus, from Election Day to freedom celebrations, African Americans created a ritual tradition of religious and community life. Momentous appearances in public places became challenges to the established order, calling attention to the danger of overlooking or forgetting iniquities, setbacks, and sufferings, as well as heroic acts. By reiterating a commonality of origin, goals, and strivings, feasts served to correct the inconsistencies of history and to cement a unity that was always in jeopardy.

Feasts also emphasized the necessary solidarity between the enslaved and the free, between African-born and American-born black people. Although most celebrations occurred in the North, they were symbolically and spiritually connected with slaves in the South, and a dense network of interaction was woven between various sites, places, and times. Former celebrations were often referred to and used as examples to follow or improve upon. The feasts themselves became memorable events to be passed on for generations to come and to be recorded in tales, song, and dance and in physical, verbal, kinetic, or musical images. The festive spirit became ingrained in African-American culture as something to celebrate in black speech, where it is inscribed in the literature and the arts that bear incessant testimony to the tradition.

The tradition created by colonial and antebellum celebrations has continued into the twenty-first century, still in anticipation of a freedom and justice that general emancipation failed to accomplish. Numerous associations founded after the Civil War resorted to ceremonial and commemorative rites to continue to enforce the idea of freedom, and they patterned their meetings and conventions on earlier gatherings. Freedom celebrations remained a model for the great marches and demonstrations—the protest against the 1917 riots, the parades of the Garvey movement, or the marches of the civil rights movement. The persistence of the tradition attests to the participation of African Americans in the struggle for democracy and to the crucial significance of these ritual stagings in cultural, intellectual, and political life.

Yet civil celebrations underwent some dramatic changes. More and more they became occasions of popular rejoicings. Boisterous festivity, screened out at first, crept in. Abundance and plentifulness replaced the earlier sobriety. As they grew in scope (the most popular were in urban centers, where the population was largest), they sometimes lost their original meaning and became essentially social occasions for convivial gatherings. It was the orator's and leader's duty and the role of the black press to remind participants of the seriousness of the purpose, and they did so with authority and eloquence. Nevertheless, the celebrations sometimes got out of control. With the changes brought by migration and demographic shifts, by the development of the media and of mass culture, and by the impunity of profit-seeking sponsors, some feasts turned into large commercial and popular events and lost their civil and political character, while others continued to meet white opposition and censure.

Rituals played an important role in celebrations and, whatever the occasion, shared certain features. They included the same speeches, addresses, or sermons; parades, marches, or processions; anthems, lyrics, and songs; banquets or picnics; dances and balls. They used all black people's skills—from the oratorical to the culinary, from the gift to adorn to polyrhythmic energy—to create their own modes, styles, and rhythms, always with an unfailing sense of improvisation and performance. And as they drew more people, many folkways, many rites of ordinary life (the habit of swapping songs, of cracking jokes, or "patting juba"), found their way into the ceremonies, blending memories of Africa with New World customs and forms, in a mood that was both solemn and playful, sacred and secular, celebratory and satiric. In many respects also, feasts were a privileged space for the encounters between cultures, favoring reciprocal influences, mergings and combinations, syncretism and creolization.

Carnival

Nowhere is the creolization of cultures more evident than in the Carnival tradition, which emerged in the New World in Brazil, Trinidad, Jamaica, and the other islands. Found in its earlier forms mostly in the South, it continues its modern forms in the great Caribbean festivals of Brooklyn and Toronto. These carnivals, perceived as bacchanalian revelry or weird saturnalia, were often associated with a special season and with rites of renewal, purification, or rebirth. Usually seen as more African—and therefore as more "primitive" and exotic, more tantalizing than the more familiar Anglo-European feasts—they have elicited ambiguous responses, ranging from outright disparagement on moral and aesthetic grounds (indecency and lewdness are judged horrid and hideous) to admiration for the exuberant display of so many skills and talents.

These "festivals of misrule" were often banned or strictly regulated by city ordinances and charged with bringing disturbances and misconduct—boisterous rioting and drunkenness, gambling, and undue license of all sorts. The same criticism, phrased in similar words, was leveled by some members of the black community itself, especially those concerned with respectability and with the dignity of the "race," every time they suspected any feast of yielding too much to the carnivalesque propensity of their people.

Yet the carnivalesque is always present in festive rituals to correct excesses—of piety, fervor, power—and as an instrument of emancipation from any form of authority. In the African-American quest for liberation, it became an essential means of expression, allying humor, wit, parody, and satire. It had ancient roots in African cultures; and in North American society, where the weight of puritanism was strong, where work, industriousness, sobriety, and gravity were highly valued and had become ideological tools to enforce servitude, the Carnival tradition became part of the political culture of the oppressed. Artistically it developed also as a subversive response to the Sambo image that later prevailed in the minstrel tradition. It created, as coronation festivals did, possibilities for the inversion of stereotypes, and it challenged a system of representation that was fraught with ideological misinterpretations. Paradoxically, black carnivalesque performances may have nourished white blackface minstrelsy, providing it with the artistic devices on which it thrived.

jonkonnu

The most notorious manifestations of the tradition are perhaps to be found in the North Carolina JonKonnu (John Canoe) Festival or in the Zulu and Mardi Gras parades of New Orleans. JonKonnu probably originated in Africa on the Guinea coast; was re-created in Jamaica in the late seventeenth century; spread through the Caribbean, where it was widely observed; and was introduced by slaves in the United States in isolated places—on plantations like Somerset Place or in city ports like Wilmington, North Carolina, or Key West, Florida. Meant to honor a Guinean folk hero, the festival became an elaborate satirical feast, ridiculing the white world with unparalleled inventiveness and magnificence.

The festival could last weeks, but it climaxed on Christmas Day and was attended by huge crowds. The procession, which took a ragman and his followers from house to house and through the streets, came to be known as a unique slave performance. "Coonering," as it was called, was characterized most of all by spectacular costumes and by extravagant dance steps to the music of "sinful" tunes. The rags and feathers, the fanciful headdress and masks, the use of ox or goat horns and cow and sheep bells, and the handmade instruments wove a complex web of symbolic structure, ritualization, and code building. The dressing in white skin encouraged slaves to claim certain prerogatives, even to organize revolts. In many feasts an implicit analogy was established between the "beaten" skin of the (often forbidden) drums and that of whipped slaves.

Christmas, the season of merrymaking and mobility that favored big gatherings and intense communication, became a dreaded time for planters who tried to stifle the subversive and rebellious spirit of coonering and to change a disquieting performance into a harmless pageant. Still held today, but now mostly controlled and observed by whites, it has lost part of its magnificence. In its heyday in antebellum America, JonKonnu was an artistic and political response of the slave population to its situation; it echoed in its own mode the freedom celebrations of the North. The lampooning liberty and grotesque parody of southern festivals turned them into arenas in which to voice anger and protest.

the zulu parade

In New Orleans, when Carnival came into existence in the late 1850s, blacks were not supposed to participate. The Zulu parade, which grew out of black social life, was created by a section of the population concerned about publicly asserting its status. It developed into a wholly separate street event, a parody of the white Krewes. The African Zulu, a new king of misrule, precedes Rex and mocks his regal splendor. The Carnival figures—shrunken heads of jungle beasts, royal prognosticator, or voodoo doctor—the masked or painted faces, and the coconuts emphasize both the African and minstrel motifs. Neither elite nor low-brow, neither genuinely African nor creole, the Zulu parade came under attack as too burlesque. Later, in the 1960s, it was criticized as exemplifying an "Uncle Tom on Wheels" and not fitting the mood of the times.

Yet the Zulu is a complex ritual that brings together several traditions: satire and masking, minstrelsy and vaudeville, brass bands, song, and dance. Another version of the coronation festival, the Zulu fuses elements of the European carnival with African, Caribbean, and Latin American practices. It establishes African Americans' rights to participate in the city's pageant, not as mere onlookers or indispensable entertainers whose various skills as musicians and jugglers had often been used to increase the glamour of white parades, but as creators and full-fledged citizens who could demonstrate both their role in the city's history and their potential role in its future.

indian masking

The Mardi Gras Indians, consisting of ritual chiefs, each with a spy, flag boys, and followers, march in mock imitation of the king's court and follow secret routes through the city. They enact their own rituals of violent physical and verbal confrontations between tribes. These wild warriors chant disquieting songs and speak in tongues, accompanied by haunting drumbeats and an array of other percussive sounds as old as ancestral memories (in preference and contrast to the orderly military music of the official bands). They dance weird dance steps (e.g., the famous spy dance) and wear elaborate costumes made of beads, sequins, rhinestones, ribbons, and lace.

The tradition of Indian masking is old—originally found in Brazil, it appeared in the Caribbean in 1847. Meant to celebrate the Indian's fighting spirit and resistance, it also relates to communal rites of ancestral worship and to Dahomean ceremonial dances also found in jazz funerals. It is no accident that Mardi Gras Indians perform in the same area of New Orleans where jazz emerged out of the brass bands of Congo Square dances. Their festival may be a resurgence of the early drum gatherings that started in 1730 near the marshes of Congo Square, a market site where slaves bought merchandise from Native Americans and danced to African beats.

Today, the black Indians also appear on another festive day, March 19, at the intermission of the Lenten season. St. Joseph Day, originally an Italian Catholic feast that stylized altar building, blends the cult of saints (St. Joseph, "Queen Esther") with that of Indian heroes (Black Hawk) as well as that of voodoo spirits. Thus, religious and pagan rites, cult and carnival practices, indoor ceremonies and outdoor parades complement each other, converge, and merge.

Later in the year, Easter Rock, another feast that is still observed in rural Louisiana, celebrates the resurrection and similarly blends pagan and Christian elements. Its hero and emblem is both son and sun. The Son of God's rise from the dead is likened to that of the sun "rocking from the earth." All night long, prayer, "the shout," and dance herald and accompany the rocking of the sun/son.

Although the South has been the cradle of a diverse black carnivalesque tradition, in the prejazz and jazz ages another form of Carnival celebration found its way to the North. The modern West Indian festivals of Brooklyn in New York City and of Toronto, Canada, give further evidence of a process of Caribbeanization that has always been at work and that repeatedly intensified during periods of great migration. The importation of slaves from the Carib Basin, the arrival of many slaves from Santo Domingo after the Haitian Revolution in the early nineteenth century, and the late twentieth-century West Indian migration to the United States have all in various degrees brought many changes to "black" celebrations. They have intensified the creolization that brought together people of African, Hispanic, Indian, and French descent. The recent festivals are also generating a pan–West Indian consciousness that expresses itself artistically through costumes, masks, music, and dance. On a much-contested terrain, they enact their own rituals of rebellion, resistance and protest, inclusion and exclusion. Chaotic, playful, or violent, Carnival offers a delicate balance between many complementary or contradictory elements.

African-American celebratory performances are special occasions to celebrate freedom; they consist of various cycles of ritualized events that have rich semantic and symbolic meaning, fully a part of African-American and American history and culture. They invite us to reconsider stereotyped representations of "the race" and to revise the assumptions upon which conceptions of important figures, events, and places have themselves become objects of celebration and commemorative fervor. They are potent weapons and arenas through which to voice anger, strivings, and desire. They are efficacious and eloquent tools to educate, exhort, or indict. They are witty parodies and satires that help distance reality and change "mentalities." Crucial agents of change, celebratory performances demonstrate a people's faith in words and ideas, in the force of collective memory and imagination, in the necessity of finding powerful display. These entertaining and instructive ceremonies exhibit a gift for adornment and an inventiveness that emphatically proclaim the triumph of life over all the forces that tend to suppress or subdue "the souls of black folk."