Woodcraft

Though there are few remaining artifacts of their work, many African and African American slaves were woodcarvers. They were among the numerous craftspeople—including weavers, seamstresses, metalworkers, carpenters, and silversmiths—who worked as enslaved skilled laborers. These skilled slaves worked in plantation enterprises, or their labor was hired out as a source of income for the slaveholder. George Washington's list of his slaves in 1799, for example, relates that approximately one-quarter were skilled workers such as carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, and bricklayers. The woodwork created by slaves in the Americas may be considered in two categories: work that was directly connected to slaveholders' enterprise, and work that was intended for personal use.

On plantations, enslaved carpenters and woodcarvers constructed buildings for slaveholders' use, often embellishing their exteriors and interiors with architectural ornamentation, and they built utilitarian structures for plantation enterprises. Slaves were commonly apprenticed or hired out to cabinetmakers and carpenters; in the early 1800s slave apprentices in New Orleans figured prominently in the production of furniture.

In the Low Country of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, woodworking skills were directly related to rice production. Planters there paid higher prices for slaves from the Windward Coast of West Africa (from present-day Senegal to the Ivory Coast), who brought skills that were essential to rice cultivation and processing. Skilled slaves created traditional tools for processing the grains, including winnowing baskets and mortars. The rice mortar was created from a hollowed-out section of a tree trunk, in a distinctly West African style; it was used, along with a carved wooden pestle, to remove the outer husk of the grains of rice. The carved wooden mortar and pestle were used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Low Country. Similar tools were still in use in the early twentieth century on Georgia's Sea Islands.

The carved wooden objects created by slaves for their own use are linked to African woodworking traditions and may illustrate, as John Michael Vlach suggests, "the delicate cultural balance between the African past and the American present" (1990, p. 5). Among the oldest carved artifacts is a wooden drum from colonial Virginia that was acquired by Hans Sloane of London in 1645. A richly carved replica of a West African chief's drum, it is thought to be the work of a highly skilled enslaved woodcarver. The significance of the drum in West African culture, as an instrument for ritual, dance, and communication, suggests the cultural importance of the woodcarver, both in West Africa and in the transplanted slave cultures in America. Many slaveholders prohibited the making and use of drums (and South Carolina prohibited them by law in 1739), apparently fearing their potential use for rebellion, so the scarcity of such artifacts is hardly surprising, despite their cultural importance.

Another carved wooden artifact that survives (primarily in the later work of African American folk artists) is the walking stick, which is connected to West African ritual and to the figure of the tribal chief. The sticks were carved in low relief, often with motifs featuring reptiles, reptile and human figures together, or human figures alone. An ornately carved walking stick, now in the Yale University Art Gallery, is attributed to Henry Gudgell, who was born a slave in 1826 in Kentucky. Though made for sale in 1867, the stick, decorated with a lizard, a tortoise, and a human figure, is considered a superb example of an African woodcarving tradition that survived slavery in the Americas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Morgan, Philip. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Patton, Sharon F. African American Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Vlach, John Michael. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

                                       Dorothy Bauhoff