If we are looking for memory as history, as a process of genealogical continuity and reconstruction, which is the way Patterson and Craton posit it, then it is inevitable that the descendants of Worthy Park, like their slave ancestors, had little of it left. However, if we are to locate the process of remembering in what Pierre Nora has called lieux de memoire (sites of memory), then what made the past important and meaningful, even in its fragmentation, was much more than the subject's connection to a real environment of historical continuity or reconstruction; rather, separated from history, this kind of memory would remain in “permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived.”46 What would appear to have been the shallow memory of slaves and their descendants, then, was also what enabled the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. The shallowness of memory and the thinness of genealogy would give slaves a space for maneuver; to have a shallow memory was to be liberated from the burden of genealogy; without concrete claims to historical antecedence, slaves could be free to imagine an alternative world of space and play. In turn, loose ties to the past would enable the symbolic inversion of the meaning of work and time on the plantation.47 My assumption here is that the search for genealogical connections and cultural antecedents or the quest for “real memory” could hinder rather than enhance the slaves' phenomenological presence in the new world; in this context, shallow memory, rather than complete forgetfulness, was one way the enslaved could reorient themselves in social space.48
What this reorientation demanded, among other things, was the slaves' recognition that memory was best doing its work when it was affective, magical, and ritualistic. As Nora aptly notes, memory, “insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, globalor detached, particular or symbolic—responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection.”49 As magic, memory would be summoned to respond to the lived condition of the slave rather than a real past. So when they were asked by researchers to remember their “real” history, slaves were probably aware that what was at stake was not just the meaning of the past but also the meaning of the present—the site of enunciation and interrogation. As a speech act or performative, the act of remembering had the capacity to either censor memory or enhance it. In neither case were truth claims paramount.
There is another dimension to this debate on the shallowness of recollection: the slaves' capacity to differentiate their own sites of memory from the larger plantation complex and thus to exist as “self-interpreting beings.”50 Writing on the category of the person, Taylor has argued that what is involved in “being a person” is not simply consciousness or self-awareness but also what he calls “holding values”—the capacity to form representations that are invested with “peculiarly human significances.”51 Those are the kinds of self-interpretation and holding of other value implicit in the slaves' capacity to define their own time and to separate it from the regimen of forced labor. The most important insignias of the slaves' self-interpretation and their capacity to hold values at odds with their enslavement were precisely those objects of representation whose connection to Africa was most tenuous, the Juba dance mentioned in the last chapter and the Sloane drum above being some of the most prominent examples. These were objects of remembering/forgetting—they enabled both the censorship and projection of memory.52 For example, accounts exist of slaves who chose to build their individually designed houses in what they considered to be the “African” style of their ancestors, often against environmental odds and the wishes of planters, rejecting the European log cabin for “clay floors, wattle-and-daub walls, and thatched roofs”53
Why did slaves go out of their way to build and maintain these allegories of ruins? Apparently, for those born in Africa, building in the “African style” was often a concerted attempt to deploy fragments of African architecture to claim the affective and magical possession of space. A former slave, Ben Sullivan, would later remember this struggle over the meaning of the place of dwelling among his peers: “Old man Okra said he wanted a place like he had in Africa, so he built himself a hut. I remember it well. It was about 12 by 14 feet, it had a dirt floor, and he built the sides like a woven basket with clay plaster on it. It had a flat roof that he made from brush and palmetto, and it had one door and no windows. But Master made him pull it down. He said he didn't want an African hut on his place.”54 Here, building a hut in the “African style,” such as the one belonging to Tahro, “a native Bakongo, one of the last slaves imported into the United States” (fig. 6.5), or the cabins at Mulberry Plantation in North Carolina, painted by Thomas Coram around 1770 (fig. 6.6), was a calculated way of laying claim to the American landscape.55 Within the landscape of slavery, these places of dwelling were crucial to the reconstruction of black selfhood. With their African symmetry, these cabins were intended to turn the place of enslavement into a habitat, that place which, in Gaston Bachelard's formulation, “transcends geometric space.”56
6.5 House built by Romeo, an African. From Charles J. Montgomery, “Survivors from the Cargo of the Negro Slave Yacht Wanderer,” plate 10.
6.6 Thomas Coram, View of Mulberry House and Street. Circa 1800. Oil on paper. Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina.
In Back of the Big House, his study of the architecture of plantation slavery, John Vlach makes several points that are crucial to what I am calling the ontology of space. First, he argues that slaves were engaged in their own definition of space, investing the landscape of slavery with their own thoughts and deeds. Second, he shows that the creation of slave landscapes was a strategy of survival: “Taking advantage of numerous opportunities to assert counterclaims over the spaces and buildings to which they were confined, slaves found that they could blunt some of the harsh edges of slavery's brutality.”57 Third, Vlach notes that the creation of these slave landscapes amounted to a counterclaim, “a reactive expression, a response to the plans enacted by white landowners” who had set out to mark the landscape both as a geometric and aesthetic space, one expressing their “tastes, values, and attitudes.”58
The masters' idea of organizing space was, of course, explicitly connected to their power over the slaves; it was a play of order. Vlach quotes a Mississippi planter who, in an 1851 article, expressed the first rule of running a plantation as follows: “There shall be a place for every thing and everything shall be kept in its place.” The rule was spelled in bold and capital letters. In fact, slave masters considered order to be essential to their mastery of the landscape, and order was about power and control: “The ideal order among planters was a rigorous order intended to confirm their final authority in all matters. It was important that their domains be planned with care, defined with clear and certain boundaries, and run on efficient, unwavering schedules. Striving constantly toward this goal, planters used every means—but especially the manipulation of the built environment—to convince themselves that they were both physically and symbolically above their slaves and other less wealthy whites as well.” Vlach concludes that slaves “overturned the logic that their owners used to place themselves well up in the social landscape” and, in the process, affirmed their self-worth.59
Still, something more than a structural reversal was involved in the process of redefining space: overturning the logic of the masters also implied an appeal to African disorder as the counterpoint of the culture of taste. Consider the “African House” that Marie Thèrése Metoyer, the matriarch of a free Creole slave-owning family, built in Melrose (Yucca), Louisiana, sometime in the early 1830s (fig. 6.7) The house was built using local materials; the basic construction of its walls and lower level was in the existing bousillage entre poteaux (mud in the wall) French style, but its overhanging roof reflected a distinctively African style, more spec
ifically the hanging roof of West African adobe granaries.60 It is the only building of its kind recorded in Louisiana. Other buildings built by the Metoyer family were strictly in the French Creole planter style.61 How do we explain this brazen Africanism in the middle of a thriving planter culture? Why would Marie Thèrése, a free woman of color, desire such a provocative symbol of Africa on her property at a time when Louisiana Creoles were keener to identify with France?
6.7 African House, ca. 1798–1800. Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Picture by Billy Hathorn. Courtesy Billy Hathorn / Wikimedia Commons.
The brazen expression of difference in this house becomes even more perplexing when the house is located in its in its social geography, for in all other aspects of their lives the Metoyers cultivated the habits and tastes of the Louisiana plantocracy, and apart from their touch of color they were not very different from other slave owners. Traveling in the Deep South in the years 1853–1854, Frederick Law Olmstead noted that although the owners of the Yucca plantation were “a nearly full-blooded Negro,” their plantations appeared “no way different from the generality of white Creoles; and on some of them were large, handsome, and comfortable houses.”62 The main house at the Melrose Plantation (fig. 6.8) affirmed similitude, not difference.
6.8 Melrose Plantation, State Highway 119, Melrose, Natchitoches Parish, Lousiana. General View of Plantation House. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey or Historic American Engineering Record, Reproduction Number (HABS LA,35-MELRO,1–4).
Why, then, would a wealthy woman, the owner of more than eighteen thousand acres of land and hundreds of slaves—the largest number owned by a black planter—want to construct a house that would recall the ontology of African architecture? There are no obvious social or political reasons why Marie Thèrése Metoyer would have wanted to invoke African difference in colonial Louisiana, nor did she have a compulsion to subvert the spatial logic of the plantation system or its systems of values, to which she apparently subscribed. It has been suggested that Marie Therese had fond memories of her African great-grandmother and that she might have built the house as a memorial, but legend also has it that the African House was conceived as a ghost house, a place for spooking rebellious slaves. Did she, then, want a building that stood out in its environment in memoriam to an imagined Africa? Or was the African House intended to be the depository of an unknown and thus frightening ghost?
Either way the house would serve as a place of psychological habitation and deep cultural mapping, of the assemblage and disassemblage of memory, a site of comfort and terror. In this house, built in the style of African granaries, Marie Therese Metoyer could psychologically dwell in the house of imaginary ancestors without occupying it; this habitation in absentia, as it were, was a way of marking another space of identity outside the plantation house, what the philosopher Martin Heidegger would term “that domain to which everything that is belongs.”63 Far from using the house to reorder her world symbolically, Metoyer was inserting herself in an ontological order that was independent of even the institution of plantation slavery to which she belonged. And if we recall that her goal was not to abolish slavery but to thrive in it, then it is highly possible that she valued the African House for its pure symbolism, the measure of an essence of being that was above the political economy of slavery. Disconnected from utilitarian goals, the African House would become a work of art.
What do I mean by this? Most of the theoretical attention to space that has dominated cultural studies under the influence of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and postmodern geographers such as David Harvey and Edward Soja has explored the functional symbolism of the spatial, focusing on its openness to human creativity, its function as a marker of identity and as a vector defined by its users, what Certeau aptly called “space as a practiced place.”64 In all of these accounts, symbols function as a medium of ordering social space. What is often missing in these postmodern stories, however, is the notion of a symbolic space as something that exists, to borrow Hans-Georg Gadamer's words, outside the logos, one that has meaning in itself. According to Gadamer, the symbol, unlike other hermeneutical figures, “is not related by its meaning to another meaning, but its own sensuous nature has meaning”; it is “something which is shown and enables one to recognise something else.” Through the sensuousness of the symbol, argues Gadamer, “members of a community recognise one another,” and irrespective of the context in which it appears, “the meaning of the symbolon depends on its physical presence and acquires its representative function only through the fact of its being shown or spoken.”65
As a symbol, then, the Metoyer African House did not denote a connection to a real or imagined Africa, nor did it represent collective yearnings; on the contrary, it was valued for strictly personal reasons. It was almost like a family chapel, a place of solitary worship. Perhaps the only meaning the building held for Marie Thèrése Metoyer was her sensuous desires as a master who was also the other; like an ancient shrine, the African House enabled her to map out whatever private grievances she may have had about the system that she presided over. We do not know what these grievances were, of course; so in the end we have to see pure symbolism as an alternative to other, allegorical projections of the African self in the public spaces of enslavement, such as the nsunsu and Juba dances discussed in the previous chapter.
The obvious contrast to be drawn here, then, is between forms of desire that were collective and public, such as dances, and others that were strictly private, such as houses built in the “African style.” My contention, however, is that desires cultivated in private could not perform the work of memory or identity, because they were locked in the interiority of the self. While it is true that it was in these private shrines that a radical subjectivity could be asserted, desires that were expressed privately would be cut off from the larger project of community building, an essential aspect of the slaves' self-fashioning in the Americas. African-style houses, unlike their Creole counterparts, could appear estranged from their localities and could thus be cut off from the project of creating new identities and meanings for the enslaved. For this reason, slaves needed to find ways in which private desires and anxieties could be projected in the public sphere, because publicness was one of the essential conditions of being a modern subject, and slaves had indeed been conscripted into modernity.66 Rituals and performances would become important weapons of resistance and of coping with imposed identities.
3
From the very beginning of slavery in the Americas, observers of slave cultures were struck by what appeared to be the centrality of ritual and festivity among the Africans who were struggling to reconstruct their lives in the new world. Reporting from Barbados around 1647, Richard Ligon was one of the first eyewitnesses to note the connection between modes of performance and the Africans' attempt to clear a cultural space in the harsh regimen of the plantation. Ligon noted that on Sundays, their day of rest and pleasure, the slaves would gather under the mangroves and make ropes out of the bark. In the afternoon they would sing songs and perform dances. Ligon complained that the Africans' drum had only one tone, but their singing was impressive, although he wished he was able to give the slaves “some hints of tunes” to add to their harmony, because “if they had the variety of tune, which gives the greater scope in Musicke, as they have of time, they would do wonders in that art.”67 Similarly, writing on his experiences in the West Indies in 1707, Hans Sloane noted that the slaves were “much given to Venery, and although hard wrought, will at nights, or on Feast days Dance and Sing.”68
Slaves were so passionate about their songs and dances, George Pinckard noted in 1806, and devoted so much time to amusement on Sunday that “instead of remaining in tranquil rest, they undergo more fatigue, or at least more personal exertion.”69 Even Thomas Jefferson, who had excluded blacks from the realm of taste, declared that they were “more generally gifted than the whites” in music.70 Clearly the preponder
ance of singing and the role of music in the slaves' lives occupy almost every major description of slave society from the early accounts by Ligon and Sloane to later works by leading African American cultural historians such as John Blassingame and Sterling Stuckey.71 Almost all major descriptions of slave culture have underscored the use of music and dance as mechanisms for ameliorating the difficult conditions in which African slaves worked.
White praise for black performances should be enough to raise suspicion. This is especially the case when the praise came from members of the powerful planter class, who rarely had anything positive to say about black slaves when it came to matters of culture and taste. And because of the context in which these observations were made and the interests of the eyewitnesses scholars, there are at least three specific reasons why we should be suspicious of the privileging of rituals in the aesthetic of slavery. First, because music and the rituals surrounding it attracted the attention of plantation owners and defenders of slavery more than any cultural event, there has been a tendency to see them as an imposition, from above, of the masters' cultural ideology. This is particularly the case in the West Indies and the antebellum South, where, for most of the eighteenth century, masters pointed to ritual performances by slaves as either evidence of African bestiality or a sign of their contentment. Second, because most of the observations on ritual that are available to us from the archive of slavery are by white observers who were not clued in to the inner lives of slaves, we are not sure how to use them as evidence. Rarely do we find testimony on ritual from the enslaved themselves. In fact, the slaves who ended up producing narratives about their experiences were largely silent on cultural activities that they considered inimical to their identities as modern subjects. Writing in the context of abolitionism or the vantage point of Christian conversion, former slaves were defensive about Africanism in their communities and fearful that a recentering of African rituals in the plantations might detract from the project of abolitionism by reviving the slander of African barbarism. Frederick Douglass simply consigned such rituals to the domain of superstition.72 Third, there have been doubts that rituals and performances, often produced within the infrastructure of slavery and white consent, could actually have been able to subvert the cultural system that enabled them in the first place. Claims that rituals and performances represent a form of revolt against the established culture are troubled by the possibility that the revolt embedded in them was limited and could actually end up enforcing that order.
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 34