American Fun Read online

  Since at least as early as 1741, in Salem, Massachusetts, slaves and free blacks held celebrations for the purpose of electing their “Kings” and “Governors.” They took place in coastal and river-valley towns, sometimes in league with local Jack Tars, and they often followed the lead of local white elections, celebrating with parades and formal dinners and the array of toasts and liberty songs. But unlike the feasts of their white community members, which typically ended at dusk, “Negro Election Days” could last for several days of fiddling, dancing, feasting, drinking, foot-racing, gambling, and sports. The elections themselves followed a variety of practices—ballots, caucuses, viva voce, queues of supporters behind favorite candidates—but they could also involve tests of strength and agility. Sometimes the Governors held year-round authority, appointing their own courts and legislative committees, but often they served an honorary function. Sometimes Election Days dropped the elections altogether and cut straight to the games and merriment. Joseph P. Reidy notes that up through the turn of the century, in Salem and elsewhere, these predominantly African-American events were enjoyed by whites and blacks alike.

  During this same period, similarly parodic celebrations went by the name Pinkster Days. Pinkster coincided with the Dutch Pentecost, or the Anglican Whitsunday, and was held every May throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York. What for the Dutch began in the early 1700s as the strictest of religious holidays evolved over the decades into a secular, multicultural rite of spring, thanks mostly to the widespread contributions of free and enslaved African Americans. Records of Pinkster’s later iteration mention slaves “frolicking” together for days, eating colored eggs and dancing, sometimes joined by their reveling masters. Joyous memories of Pinkster festivals on her Dutch-American master’s estate nearly provoked runaway slave Sojourner Truth to turn herself in. James Fenimore Cooper’s 1845 novel Satanstoe relocated his turn-of-the-century memories of Albany’s Pinkster festival to New York City in 1757, possibly melding it with the Easter Monday event, possibly embellishing it, though his imagery itself has the ring of truth: “Nine-tenths of the blacks of the city, and of the whole country within thirty or forty miles … were collected in thousands in those fields, beating banjoes, singing African songs, drinking, and worst of all, laughing in a way that seemed to set their very hearts rattling within their ribs. Everything wore the aspect of good-humour, though it was good-humour in the broadest and coarsest forms.” In later years Pinkster celebrants “collected in thousands” in Manhattan’s City Hall Park. By the turn of the century, especially on Albany’s Pinkster Hill, the festival’s fleeting experience of liberty was attracting participants from various races, classes, and national identities—and though the celebrations themselves were an evident mélange of European, African, and Caribbean traditions, they were identified with, and largely attended by, blacks.

  As harmless and peaceable as the revels seemed, they preoccupied the young republic’s middle class. To judge from two documents published in 1803, a contest was roiling over what Pinkster meant. One is a colorful editorial in the Albany Centinel that sounds an alarm against these “seasons of dissipation.” The other, a pamphlet, is a long doggerel poem called A Pinkster Ode. Attributed to Absalom Aimwell, Esq. (a blatant nom de guerre), the Ode glories in Pinkster’s radically democratic fun and calls out the nation’s political leaders for being stingy and vicious by contrast.

  New York had ruled less than four years earlier to gradually (very gradually) phase out slavery (only slaves’ children could earn their freedom), and Albany had the region’s largest black population. Agitating readers in this moment of transition, the Centinel’s reporter depicts Pinkster Days as nothing less than a military takeover. During the days of drum-beating anticipation, “negroes patrol[led] the streets more than usual” and converted the public hill into their “theatre of action.” Throughout their vast encampment, “beastly” blacks and “beastly” whites broke into fights, cursed “in every language,” danced out in the open, and did unspeakable things out of sight. Most menacing of all was the “old Guinea Negro,” King Charles, “whose authority [was] absolute” and whose “will [was] law” all during the days-long celebration. The king’s grand entrance through Albany’s high streets, between ten and noon that Monday morning, would have reminded readers of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of Haiti’s slave revolt, who had died only two months earlier. Guided through town on his high blond steed by a pair of decorated “pedestrians,” preceded by his standard and a painted portrait that tallied his many years of reign, “their fictitious sovereign” commanded the crowd with “all the pomp of an eastern nabob”—cleaving through mobs of adoring spectators—trailing a train of “distinguished and illustrious characters.”

  It remains unclear whether King Charles was elected or self-appointed, but his coup wasn’t what you would expect from this account. Unlike Toussaint’s gory rebellion or Napoleon’s intercontinental invasions (which were taking a breather that year), King Charles’s putsch against stiff white Albany culminated in the wildest of parties. Pinkster Hill, an open patch of public grass, was ringed by vendors selling cheeses, fruits, breads, and liquors. Around them sprawled a massive tent city, housing visitors from the surrounding counties. In the center was the “theatre of action,” where the arrival of King Charles—preceded by bands of costumed children—detonated a hootenanny of drumming, rum drinking, and unabashedly erotic dancing, “presenting the eye of the moral observer,” as the reporter self-identified, “a kind of chaos of sin and folly, misery and fun.” The coup may not have caused bloodshed, but it threatened to poison the cultural well.

  A Pinkster Ode—the pamphlet—takes an opposite approach. It glories in the “graceful mien,” “pleasant face,” “princely air,” and “Pinkster clothes” of a “slave whose soul was always free.” The “Captain-General” King Charles who emerges from these lines is a fun-loving, liberating, agile lord who despises “Tyrants” everywhere and rises above the glory seekers, rioters, and slave-masters who would tear the young republic asunder. King Charles sets the tone on this Merry Mount of sorts, where courtesy reigns and “Every colour revels … from ebon black to lilly fair.” The Ode has a political axe to grind. It argues that a fun-loving democracy, like the rollicking one on Pinkster Hill, could douse the wildfires encroaching on the Union: the politics, greed, competition, and slavery. The bull’s-eye of its diatribe is a Republican politician, “Jo,” who ballyhoos liberty and fills his pockets while abusing his constituents in the Federalist fashion—by “barter[ing their] rights away.” By contrast, in the Ode, ethnicities and nationalities dance around the Hill, folks represented by their characteristic pleasures, “Troops … so gay, so delicate and sweet.”

  Absalom Aimwell claimed that “Peace” and “smiling” reigned in King Charles’s camps—that “no rude act his glory stain[ed]”—but we should also consider the contrary opinion, expressed in the Centinel, that Charles and his heavies went from tent to tent, exacting dollar tributes from black families and two-dollar tributes from whites, else their shelters would be “instantly demolished.” King Charles may have had a badass streak. And it is likely, in the mummers’ tradition, that he demanded a tax for his troubles. It may have taken a thug with a heart of gold to keep the peace in this boisterous horde, to keep them focused on having fun, to keep them from collapsing into a mob. Whatever he was—king? slave? thug? saint?—the people, to judge from the surviving accounts, couldn’t get enough of him—besides the ones who wanted to get rid of him.

  In 1867, James Eights, who had grown up among the Albany celebrants, gave a child’s-eye view of old “King Charley” for Harper’s Monthly—his high-domed pate, his brigadier’s redcoat and buckskin “small clothes,” his silver-buckled shoes and gold-piped tricorne. But when the adult panned back to recall the “gathering multitude” that quickly absorbed the dancing king, he marveled not at lurid excess but at the harmony of a turn-of-the-century crowd representing “individuals of almost
every description of feature, form and color, from the sable sons of Africa … to the half-clad and blanketed children of the forest.” (Even the Centinel’s reporter is impressed to see “blacks and [a] certain class of whites, together with children of all countries and colours,” but then calls on the powers of John Milton—“biographer of devils”—to describe them.) The crowd, as Eights remembered it, was civilized by their pleasure. Inspired by the children, dazzled by the horse tricks of Ricketts the Clown and the rubbery fire stunts of Monsieur Gutta Percha, emboldened by liquor and hilarity and ball games, the various pack of American strangers, some of them visiting from hundreds of miles away, broke into dancing at the sight of the king—energetic dancing that would last through the night, pick up the next day, the next and the next, and grooved until the masses had to hobble home to work.

  King Charley worked hard to keep the party rolling. Even at seventy he was long and lean and “still retained all the vigor and agility of his younger years.” And when he put down his drum and entered the dance, his sovereign sense of rhythm and comedy spread like medicine throughout the crowd. Pinkster Hill’s most common dances were “the jug,” “the double-shuffle heel-and-toe break-down,” and what the Centinel reporter called “most lewd and indecent gesticulations,” possibly some version of the ring shout. These infectious dances of African origin demanded athletic, sweat-streaming activity. But the refreshing sight of King Charley’s grizzled head, smiling and bobbing above the others, kept the masses in youthful spirits:

  [T]here, enclosed within their midst, was his stately form beheld, moving along with all the simple grace and elastic action of his youthful days, now with a partner here, and then with another there, and sometimes displaying some of his many amusing antics to the delight of the crowd, and which, as frequently, kept the faces of this joyous multitude broadly expanded in boisterous mirth and jollity.

  In Eights’s recollection, King Charles brought the rowdiest crowd into focus. But in these volatile early years of the republic, he would have been more than a lovable wag. King Charles, though a slave, was liberty personified, and his unlikely sense of fun was contagious.

  Following the lead of Melville J. Herskovits’s ethnographical classic, Myth of the Negro Past, scholars have long read Election Days and Pinkster as acts of “cultural syncretization,” as mixtures of a variety of cultural practices: Joseph P. Reidy and Shane White, who wrote groundbreaking studies of both celebrations, explored the cultural marriage of Afro-Caribbean religious and legal traditions with European Saturnalia, Whitsuntide, and May Day revels, as well as North American elections. Without question, Election Days and Pinkster arose from an array of cultural traditions, European, African, Caribbean, and North American. And it is likely that their syncretism of different rites and practices, ranging from African coronation ceremonies to various forms of medieval carnival, may itself have been a source of pleasure: the revelers’ took ownership of their racial heritage while experiencing some measure of (if at the same time mockery of) national assimilation. And yet of course the international traditions that fed them had died on contact with the nineteenth-century United States. It defies reason, for instance, to describe these events, as many witnesses and scholars have done, as “safety valves” that follow the logic of carnival. On the contrary, as both the Centinel’s warning and the Ode’s rallying cry make plain, Pinkster did not preserve the social order in the manner of medieval Saturnalia, whose topsy-turvy “misrule” was a sanctioned act of parody. It wasn’t a legal ritual, and all of society didn’t observe it: many mocked it and looked on in horror. It was a bizarre and extralegal practice that, as Absalom Aimwell recognized, was a moral affront to a young republic that identified with virtues of liberty and equality that it refused to practice.

  Like the “merry boyes” on Merry Mount and Boston’s Jack Tars rioting for their civil rights, the revelers at Pinkster—black, white, young, old—did not affirm the republican system. They tested the strength of the existing civil society by needling its racism, prudery, and fear and inviting its citizens to join their wild party. They strutted their joys and forbidden freedoms in the face of a riven, slave-owning nation that made false claims to democracy. In these ways their fun was neither syncretic nor transatlantic. It was fun unique to the United States and fun proper to its moment. It was the fun of challenging a young nation that was struggling to find its footing. Nor, for that matter, were Election Days or Pinkster the return of African coronation rites. For all of their value to the community’s integrity, even in the election of leaders, they did not affirm the racial community by asserting a free-standing power structure; at the end of the day, the black community remained socially and politically subordinate.

  But the political thrust of their fun deserves to be taken more seriously. Paul Gilroy makes the strong case that African-American “subversive music makers” stand for “a different kind of intellectual”—in the broader sense of Antonio Gramsci’s organic “intellectuals” who grow out of their immediate social conditions and find new ways to strive for power. Standing this music culture up against a verbal intellectualism associated with “bourgeois democracy,” an intellectualism that “serve[d] as the ideal type for all modern political processes,” Gilroy views black music as an intellectual activity that allows for, as he puts it, other political “possibilities” and other “plausible models” for advancing the people. The musical technique he lights on is “antiphony,” or “call and response,” and yet, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, many black-cultural displays of pleasure also supported a democratic public sphere beyond the reach of print technology, usually one grounded in bodily practice.

  Pinkster affirmed the racial community by asserting its immediate virtues: active, lively, playful civility. To this extent, as an act of cultural syncretism, it marked the obsolescence of Old World rituals, European and African alike. As an act of vivid and playful upheaval in an otherwise hotheaded republic, it posed a threat. It was the fun expression of free-spirited community that belied the sarcasm and exclusivity of Republican and Federalist politics. The threat to which all of these documents testify is Pinkster’s lurid and tantalizing spectacle of unchecked inclusivity, a virtue the fun-loving people craved. Pinkster should be seen, therefore, as more than another ethnological specimen—and something other than a “safety valve.” It was a disruptive performance in the early republic that reflected an enslaved people’s will. When African Americans refurbished their heritage to fit the volatile New World’s constraints, their actions obtained new ritual purpose and seeded an important new tradition: the wild block party, to which everyone is invited.

  In 1811, probably acting under middle-class pressure, Albany’s Common Council passed an ordinance outlawing Pinkster Days. (The theater of action is now the site of New York State’s Romanesque capitol.) Throughout New England, however, Negro Election Days expressed their scorching irony up until the 1850s, when black leaders themselves began phasing them out in the interest of gaining more permanent power. In Rockford, Illinois, they continued as late as the 1930s.

  SUCH ANNUAL CELEBRATIONS often put African Americans on display, but far more common were the private gatherings when they stole some time from their daily oppression to crack jokes, worship, and tell their stories. These gatherings were their churches, courthouses, and schools. “The language of the slave’s speech and song,” writes Leslie Howard Owens, “was the embodiment of his community.” The storytellers themselves, avatars of African griots, were often teachers and charismatic leaders to rival the Governor or even the preacher. Their curriculum sparkled with all kinds of mischief.

  In a rustic opening in the Georgia pines, a short walk from the slaves’ quarters, a couple dozen members of a plantation community sit on logs, lean on trees, and relax on the layers of soft pine needles that make the floor a sumptuous mattress. Pine-knot torches trace a rough perimeter, crackling and dribbling streams of pitch. Spanish moss drips from branches. Most of their number hail
from West Africa, four or five generations back. Many arrived by way of the Caribbean or from far-flung plantations to the north and south that are still the homes of lost families and friends. Their wrists and ankles are scarred from shackles. Many are branded. Many of their backs are disfigured by the lash. Some of the wounds are still tender, or open. For all the misery that clouds their days, tonight their attention is riveted by one stunningly energetic woman. Her makeshift stage is a fallen tree.

  They know her stories—or versions of them—and chime in with laughter and sound effects. Many of their number could tell the tales themselves, but she is one of the best, and the lightning-quick gestures and pantheon of voices that spring from her strangely elastic body intensify her status as a village elder. Her authority doubles, triples, explodes when the woman vanishes into thin air—and in her place walks Brother Rabbit, a slack, easy, loping fellow. He stops in his tracks, one paw extended. He does a double take at Brother Wolf’s daughter. The adults let out a knowing chuckle. The kids up front laugh and cheer. Everyone is thrilled to see Rabbit on the scene.

  Little Wolf bats her eyes and turns away. She’s going to make him work for it. Then he gets some irritating competition from oafish Brother Coon, whose heartfelt appeals hardly turn her head. Soon Brother Wolf comes trotting along and sees an opportunity. Wolf has a mountain of corn to be shucked. He tells them the one who shucks the most corn wins his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  The mention of corn shucking sets the crowd on fire. In one sense, it was the worst of jobs. In the autumn, all across the South, slaves would travel to neighboring plantations for the hand-splitting, back-aching shucking of corn. But it was also the biggest chance to celebrate—and to build lifelines throughout the region. Corn shuckings worked a bit like the Sons of Liberty’s committees of correspondence: they were social hubs in an unofficial network that buzzed underneath a tyrannical regime. A single corn shucking could draw five hundred participants from all of the surrounding plantations. “We started shuckin’ corn ’bout dinnertime and tried to finish by sundown so we could have the whole night for frolic. Some years we ’ud go to ten or twelve corn shuckin’s in one year.” The corn shucking itself was made bearable by fun, inspiring a marathon of circle dances, animal dances, challenge dances, jokes. The shucking itself was a rhythmic, dancelike practice, accelerated by patterns of call-and-response and peppered with improvised rewards, like the free kiss or “extra swig of liquor” (for anyone who found a red ear of corn), and it was often conducted by an elected captain, “usually the most original and amusing,” a former slave recalled.