American Fun Read online

  Brother Rabbit shucking corn—that would be a thing to see.

  But the little trickster has no such intentions. On the day of the contest, Wolf takes them to his mountain of corn—and leaves his starry-eyed daughter to supervise. Rabbit holds back and lets Coon get busy. While the guileless beast makes his way through the heap—clawing back husks, glistening with sweat, eager to muscle his way to the prize—Rabbit sidles up to his gorgeous foreman and gives her a taste of his native charms. He thrills her with a few of his slick dance steps. He cracks jokes that rack her little body with laughter. He woos her with sweet talk, softens her up with a fiddle serenade. He doesn’t do a lick of work, of course, but when Wolf returns at the end of the day, both he and Coon claim the shucked pile as theirs. Unable to decide who’s telling the truth, Wolf leaves it up to his moonstruck daughter, who naturally chooses the irresistible Rabbit. Brother Rabbit scoots on home with his prize (the storyteller hams his excited strut), but sad old Coon, broken with fatigue, can only drag himself on home.

  There was a lot to be learned from Brother Rabbit, and the storyteller brought those lessons to life. If white ministers told slaves that they were beasts, soulless and doomed to serve their masters, the storyteller, especially through Brother Rabbit’s example, taught them their minds were their best resources and their souls were full of irrepressible joy. In this case she teaches Frederick Douglass’s frequent message: don’t let anybody own your labor, certainly not if you can help it. But she also urges them to have some fun. This sybaritic little trickster takes every opportunity to cut loose and dance—to steal honey, pull pranks, generally to pursue his own happiness, and often that of his wife and his children. His sense of justice is fickle and selfish, just like the cruel old world he lives in, but the slaves claimed his triumphs as their own and winced at his occasionally brutal failures. His singular brand of daredevil fun served a serious purpose. It modeled a sane response to tyranny.

  The trickster cycles of the East African Hare, the Nigerian Tortoise, and the West African Spider Anansi resurfaced in the New World in the updated forms of Brother Rabbit, Aunt Nancy, and the wily slave John. As Lawrence W. Levine demonstrates, these New World tricksters emboldened slaves to rebel. They reinforced valuable lessons in survival. The trickster’s antebellum students learned to be “merciless” in reversing the cruel tactics of the powerful. They watched the weak but clever make the most of meager resources, and they laughed at the “meaningless etiquette” and “rigid hierarchies” that characterized the world of the master, who also has cameos as an inexorable trickster. Levine lists the ways slaves put these lessons to use: “slaves lied, cheated, stole, feigned illness, loafed, pretended to misunderstand orders they were given, put rocks in the bottom of their cotton baskets in order to meet their quota, broke their tools, burned their masters’ property,” even “mutilated themselves in order to escape work.” Knowing their language and their fun mystified their masters, they turned that to their advantage as well, employing, for example, “music as a deceptive form of communication” (Randolph B. Campbell’s terms) to warn other slaves of lurking bounty hunters. Fittingly, then, their hero Brother Rabbit often hid his celebrations and neatly illustrated George P. Rawick’s claim that slaves “created for others from sunup to sundown,” but from “sundown to sunup, and at all other times they managed to get away from work”—holidays, Saturday afternoons, and Sundays—“they created and recreated themselves.” Having fun was essential to such re-creation. But it also follows that their masters, like Asa and Margaret May of Jefferson County, Florida, feared and abominated slaves’ nocturnal behavior, while ignoring their role in bringing it about. “Negroes like to do everything at night in the dark, showing that their deeds are evil.”

  Even—especially—Frederick Douglass, despite his ostensible distaste for fun, was obviously warm to Brother Rabbit’s game. Tricksters are everywhere in his autobiographies, as they are throughout African-American literature. His most memorable one may be John Covey, the mean and crafty overseer, but usually he casts himself in the role—as the picaro who slips through the hands of power. He doesn’t say where he learned these lessons, but his highly animated oratorical style (getting laughs “by imitating the voices of slaveholders and southern politicians”) suggested the strong influence of a well-documented storytelling culture.

  Fun—not survivalism, but balls-out fun—remains Brother Rabbit’s biggest attraction. The star of these tales is utterly outrageous. He wrings the pleasure out of every conquest. He double-crosses anyone (outside of his family) to satisfy his cravings and revels in the trickery as much as the prize. In a story recorded by Joel Chandler Harris, “Brother Rabbit Has Fun at the Ferry,” he pulls pranks for pranks’ sake: he beats Brer Bear and the Man in three battles of wits, then smiles and keeps his secrets to himself. It’s more fun (he teaches) to hide your smarts than to strut them in front of the powerful. The folklorist Daryl Cumber Dance shows how Rabbit’s bad behavior gave listeners no end of joy. They didn’t care that he was “underhanded, unsportsmanlike,” and “immoral.” All that mattered was “that he bucked the system (a system which never had the slave’s happiness at stake anyway).” The fact that he usually comes out on top “gave them immeasurable psychological pleasure.”

  But for all of his violent and selfish behavior, Brother Rabbit is terribly sociable. He smiles, he bows, he pays compliments—impeccable manners that set him apart from the boorish Native American Trickster, from whom he is at least in part derived. The barbarian Trickster—whose story cycle is remarkably consistent among most Indian tribes and nations, whether he takes the form of Hare, Coyote, Spider, or others—has two distinct sides. According to Paul Radin’s classic study, he is both the “divine culture-hero,” responsible for the creation of the world and culture, and the “divine buffoon,” who begins his story by breaking every law and custom and lives out his days playing nature’s fool—abandoning his children, killing everything in sight, carrying his insatiable penis in a box, scorching his own anus to punish it for farting. The Trickster, as such, is a figure of fun. His hilarity resides in his idiocy and his flagrant opposition to Indian values.

  Brother Rabbit has the opposite appeal. He isn’t divine (he’s wonderfully human), and he takes his place at the center of society—which is nothing kinder than a battle royal of wolves, bears, foxes, and men, all of whom aim to cook him in their stewpots. He thwarts these opponents with legerdemain, and often they don’t know what hit them. And unlike the Trickster’s morality tales against breaking rules and indulging whims, Brother Rabbit tells you to break any law whose only intention is to break you first, which for rabbits and slaves meant all of them. But you also have to abide by customs—how-do-you-dos and RSVPs. Only by participating in civil society can you ever get ahead and ever get in on its limitless fun. The slaves’ society was a deadly minefield, but Rabbit’s unique ideas of civility, and his techniques for getting what he wants, taught folks to dance around those mines with the grace and agility of old King Charles.

  ……………

  ONE MORNING in January 1819, dashingly handsome Benjamin H. Latrobe, the architect who designed the famous White House porticoes, arrived in New Orleans by water from Baltimore. Even to a world-weary Pennsylvanian who had been wounded as a volunteer Prussian hussar, the diversity of New Orleans was overwhelming—“from round Yankees to grizzly and lean Spaniards, black negroes and negresses, filthy Indians half naked, mulattoes curly and straight-haired, quadroons of all shades, long haired and frizzled, women dressed in the most flaring yellow and scarlet gowns, the men capped and hatted.” But among the mass influx of new Americans and the constant amusements of the carnival season, nothing jarred him like the “assembly of negroes” he encountered on Place Congo.

  What at first he thought were “horses tramping on a wooden floor” turned out to be “a crowd of five or six hundred persons,” all of them black but for “a dozen yellow faces,” the mass of them moving in “circular gr
oups” no wider than ten feet in diameter. Latrobe half admired their little orchestra—comprising an older man rapidly beating a drum, a few other drummers, and the plucker of a strange African instrument—but the singers and dancers at the centers of these rings filled him with disgust, horror. On an earlier occasion he had admired the “perfect grace” of French Creole ballroom dancing, but here he disparaged two African-American women who held crude handkerchiefs by the corners and “set to each other in a miserably dull and slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies.” He dismissed another group of women who “walked, by way of dancing, round the music in the center,” and he mocked the “women who squalled out a burden to the playing, at intervals, consisting of two notes.” It appalled him to hear them singing a work song.

  In antebellum New Orleans dance was nearly as regulated as race. Mixed cotillions were tolerated up through Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion, and a general racial “blending” could be found in “less respectable places like taverns.” But quadroon balls, fashioned after white debutante balls, followed such rigid social codes that they were considered respectable venues for courtships between married white men and light-skinned mistresses. (The only black males in attendance were the musicians.) Far below such high social rungs, Place Congo was the bottom of the ladder. Latrobe’s snobbery followed the local fashion, but musicologists would smile at his opinion that he had “never seen anything more brutally savage and at the same time dull and stupid, than this whole exhibition.” For what he had the privilege to taste was the roux that would flavor American music in the centuries to come: a pungent blend of Senegambian banjos, Congolese drums, and—according to Ned Sublette’s fine analysis—early Caribbean syncopated rhythms that would inform everything from the tango to rock ’n’ roll’s backbeat. Spicing this stone soup over the decades were innumerable improvised ingredients: strings and skins, percussion devices, voodoo practices, and North American folk songs.

  The rumbling, chanting, fiddling ensembles seemed to have inspired all kinds of dancing: “jigs, fandangos, and Virginia breakdowns,” according to the music historian Henry A. Kmen, and the list was always growing: “However much of the primitive there was in Congo Square dances, it seems apparent they were borrowing rapidly from the culture around them.” So some of these dances were born of black and white exchanges, as was the case up and down the coast. But the circle dances that appalled Latrobe and other observers were a different matter altogether. James Creecy, who went there some fifteen years later, better appreciated the dancers’ “movements, gyrations, and attitudenizing exhibitions,” noting in particular how “the most perfect time is kept, making the beats with the feet, head, or hands, or all, as correctly as a well-regulated metronome!” While it is hard to say with precision which circle dances dominated on Congo Square, it’s a fair bet they were relatives of the basic ring shout.

  The “ring shout”—believed to come from the Afro-Arabic word saut, which refers to the walking or running around the Kaaba—was danced by most sub-Saharan tribes, but it took on new value among American slaves, for whom it was, Sterling Stuckey argues, “a principal means by which [their] physical and spiritual, emotional and rational, needs were fulfilled.” It appeared all throughout African America on Sundays, “ ‘praise’-nights,” and whenever else possible—and not only when the master or the law decreed. For sheer numbers and diversity of participants, the circle dances on Place Congo served a grander civic function, as the whirling hub of an otherwise scattered racial community. Though there is evidence of similar Sunday gatherings in the late eighteenth century, Congo Square had been gaining force since its inception in 1803, when Napoleon’s Code Noir—under which “any assembly of [enslaved] Negroes or Negresses, either under pretext of dancing, or of any other cause,” was punishable by lashes, branding, imprisonment, even death—was eradicated under the Louisiana Purchase. Immediately thereafter the dance parties appeared, and their sound could be frightening. In 1804, a visitor from Massachusetts thought Congo Square called for civic order: “Oh, where are our select men of Salem?” But even after the German Coast Uprising of 1811, when Charles Deslondes’s army of five hundred slaves was halted within fifteen miles of the city, the government let the show go on.

  What Latrobe couldn’t have felt from his place on the sidelines was the dance’s heart-thumping sense of intimacy. Its thunderous rings—men bare-chested, women in sweat-drenched muslin work dresses—probably shuffled in a counterclockwise direction and carved a deep, dusty track over the course of many hours. Their bare feet likely tapped out small, precise motions, but their central movement—grinding, shaking, swishing, swaying—emanated from the tirelessly gyrating hips that fitted them together in a moving social organism. Their calls and responses, from deep in their throats, echoed the rumbles of the musicians. Bold new couples, one after the other, edged into the open center of the circle and executed free-form, improvised dances.

  The ring shouters’ undulations spread down the dancers’ legs and out to the tips of their tapping, shifting toes. They also spread upward, throughout the chest, where they caused “a jerking, hitching motion which agitates the entire shoulder, and soon brings out streams of perspiration.” As P. Amaury Talbot observed in southern Nigeria, this movement caused an “unceasing, wave-like ripple which runs down the muscles of the back and along the arms to the finger-tips” and made “every part of the body dance, not only the limbs.” John and Alan Lomax, witnessing the dance in the twentieth century, reported that the ring shout was “ ‘danced’ with the whole body, with hands, feet, belly, and hips,” all of which kept its “focus on rhythm.” Its quick, propulsive action—usually involving front-and-back contact between dancers arranged by alternating gender—made it a likely cousin of King Charles’s more intimate dances. It may also have been akin to what eyewitness Liliane Crété described as “sensual, even blatantly erotic dances, in which the dancers mimicked the motions of lovemaking.” A white observer in the 1880s admitted “not altogether to understand” the dance but judged that it looked “more or less lascivious.”

  Southern blacks made major concessions for Methodist missionaries. Many dropped their fiddles, drums, and drinking. They also radically modified their dance. By agreeing not to cross their feet (an action missionaries considered sinful) they were inspired to fashion new “rhythm and excitement … that would satisfy and still be ‘in the lord.’ ” What resulted was an even more intimate ring shout that pulled the dancers into tighter circles, much like the ones that troubled Latrobe. Not all missionaries were satisfied, of course. Laura Towne, a New England reformer who witnessed a Sea Islands shout, was shocked to see dancers “turning around occasionally and bending the knees, and stamping so that the whole floor swings. I never saw anything so savage. They call it a religious ceremony, but it seems more like a regular frolic to me.”

  The dance grounded dancers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds in a common bedrock of African experience. It also let them sidestep certain Western prohibitions. Early blacks sat through sermons that forbade their freedoms and insulted their humanity—“Obey your massa and missy, don’t steal chickens and eggs and meat, but nary a word ’bout havin’ a soul to save.” The ring shout, however, was a religious practice that maximized eroticism, dexterity, and joy. In the cheeky spirit of Brother Rabbit, it eluded Christian prohibitions and roused the people’s sense of soul. In the words of Richard Carruthers, a Texas slave during the 1830s: “Some gits so joyous they starts to holler loud and we has to stop up they mouth. I see niggers git so full of the Lawd and so happy they draps unconscious.”

  But is it accurate to call such rebellious dancing—especially properly religious dancing—fun? Christian Schultz was at Congo Square in 1808 and called what he saw both “worship” and “amusements,” as if refusing to choose. Thomas Nuttall, twelve years later, judged that “the sole object of their meeting appears to be amusement.” Clearly, in both cases, the word “amusement” was meant to trivialize the whole affai
r. “Fun,” however, as this book contends, encompasses the dancers’ risk and rebellion while accounting for their constant levity. The fact that they opened channels between races and classes also turned up the voltage. And the fact, moreover, that ring dancers there and elsewhere may have been practicing their chosen religion—under the noses of bewildered missionaries, under the batons of police officers—must have only heightened the fun, the exhibition of joy in risk and transgression, as their inscrutable pleasure also gave them moral and spiritual high ground. The fact that some of the dances were spiritual practices would have hardly contradicted fun, despite solemn Calvinist ideas of religion.

  Where the ring shout brought dancers into shivering ecstasy, Juba, from the African “Giouba,” cut them loose in wild improvisation. Juba borrowed freely from European moves—for one observer it resembled an Irish jig, for another it applied “the steps and figures of the court of Versailles with the hip movements of the Congo.” Like the ring shout it was a circle dance, but it involved a more intricate call-and-response and put a premium on trickster technique. Traditional Juba told an ever-changing tale—animals and characters came and went; verses, refrains, and plot twists were decided by constant improvisation; and over the years it spawned a variety of new steps like the “Long Dog Scratch,” “Yaller Cat,” “Jubal Jew,” “Pigeon Wing,” and “Blow That Candle Out.” Its most characteristic innovation was “patting.” As drums were forbidden in many slave quarters, the dancers made do with their handiest resources—clapping, slapping, and thumping out rhythm on everything from their own thighs, arms, chests, and heads to the corresponding parts of their neighbors’ bodies. Juba’s rapid-fire comedy allowed for send-ups of the master. Even Frederick Douglass gave his reluctant approval, admitting that among Juba’s “mass of nonsense and wild frolic, once in a while a sharp hit was given to the meanness of slaveholders.”