Moreover, the process of creolization—and the imminent end of slavery—presented the festival with a new set of pressures that forced it to develop new forms to account for its relevance. These pressures were most manifest in the evolution of another Christmas festival in the West Indies, the so-called Set-Girls, groups of glamorous performances associated with Haitian Creoles. At a time when the authority of Africanism had diminished, the Set-Girls, who appeared more European, presented an alternative aesthetic, a counter-counter-aesthetic, as it were. If the masked figures of John Canoe embodied an imaginary Africa, the descriptions and sketches of the Set-Girls looked toward an imaginary Europe. When the English painter Isaac Mendes Belisario presented the world with his glamorous lithographs of the Set-Girls on the eve of emancipation, the Christmas festival had become part of a pure exhibition order that no longer claimed to be connected to ancestral worlds (fig. 6.13). By the time John Canoe retreated into the Jamaican countryside in the second half of the nineteenth century, it had come to be perceived, together with the Set-Girls, at best as pure play and at worst as a pale imitation of Englishness.
Had John Canoe been transformed from a performance whose goal was to disturb the established rule of taste and good manners to a harmless minstrel show? Once again, white reaction to the festival offers some useful clues to its changing contexts. In its beginnings, John Canoe set out to terrorize white sensibility. Writing from Jamaica in 1687, for example, Sloane noted that slaves tied cow tails and other “odd things” to their bodies in order to give them what he called “an extraordinary appearance.”158 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, John Canoe was being described as a colorful costume party. If in the early years of enslavement, John Canoe costumes were deliberately intended to call attention to black distinctiveness, by the end of the slave period in the West Indies festival participants sought ornaments that repressed Africanness; it had become a medium of displaying the black's mastery and possession of white fashion. Describing a John Canoe festival in 1806, John Stewart was struck by how the slaves were able to alter their “race of being” through ornamentation: “They show themselves off to the greatest advantage, by fine clothes and a profusion of trinkets; they affect a more polished behaviour and mode of speech; they address the whites with greater familiarity.”159
When the slaves appeared in front of Lewis's house to perform in a festival ostensibly in his honor, they turned up in ornaments that seemed to defy their “natural” order, striving to cover their blackness with the veneer of Englishness:
About two o'clock they began to assemble round the house, all drest in their holiday clothes, which, both for men and women, were chiefly white; only that the women were decked out with a profusion of beads and corals, and gold ornaments of all descriptions; and that while the blacks wore jackets, the mulattoes generally wore cloth coats; and inasmuch as they were all plainly clean instead of being shabbily fashionable, and affected to be nothing except that which they really were, they looked twenty times more like gentlemen than nine tenths of the bankers' clerks who swagger up and down Bond Street.160
6.13 I. M. Belisario, “Red Set-Girls, and Jack-in-the-Green, 1837–38.” From Isaac Mendes Belisario, Sketches of character, in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica.
If the African masks of the early John Canoe were alien and alienating, like the fetishes that haunted early modern travelers to the West African coast, the ornaments of the late festival seemed easy to explain in familiar terms, such as bankers swaggering up and down Bond Street, or Creoles dancing familiar European steps such as the aire and bolero. The bullroarers of the old John Canoe might have scared well-bred ladies, but when they appeared before Lady Nugent in December 25, 1801, they were easily fitted into an existing grid of explanation: the “blackies” dancing with “the greatest glee amused,” she noted in her journal.161 It is erroneous, however, to argue that the later, creolized version of John Canoe was just a misplaced form of entertainment. Beneath the mimicry of European form, the festival seemed to have been calibrated to account for changed circumstances, for transformed moral economies.
Let me clarify this point: In his famous essay on the moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, E. P. Thompson has noted that grievances of ordinary people in the English countryside were structured or overdetermined by a popular consensus as to what was legitimate and illegitimate in the political economy of food production and distribution. What enabled this consensus, Thompson argued, was not so much the presence of tangible grievances but a general understanding of a set of communal expectations. Social consensus, then, was “grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor.”162 Thompson further noted that “an outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation was the usual occasion for direct action.”163
Slaves, too, had a consensual sense of their grievances, and they had a deep understanding of the “social norms and obligations” that ensured their selfhood in conditions that tended to abnegate their identity. What we see in the transformation of John Canoe, as a field of play intended to clear a space of identity in the midst of its denial, is how an even keener sense of norms and obligations would change as the idea of Africa came to be supplemented by the reality of the new-world plantation. The early John Canoe favored the grotesque exhibition of the body, adopting and rehearsing the elements of the African that the culture of taste feared most. It was seditious. The later John Canoe favored mimicry; it preferred the familiar over the distant, making European ornaments central to its cultural project. However, what might have appeared to be an emptiness of meaning in this later version was also a form of resistance, because, as Jones and Stallybrass have shown, clothes, like masks, are informed by an economy of “animatedness,” an “ability to ‘pick up' subjects, to shape them both physically and socially, to constitute subjects through their power as material memories.”164
The irony, of course, is that in both its two guises—as a form of extreme ugliness or affected beauty—John Canoe, like other slave festivals, enabled the displaced Africans to assert their sensorium and thus to constitute themselves as feeling subjects. This claim is ironic in a double sense: First, in recognizing the space of play as a site of identity, the slaves were deploying the field of the aesthetic, of manners, of sense and sensibility, from which they had been excluded by the ideologists of taste, to imagine an alternative way of being, detouring slavery and displacing the claim that they were mere objects. The second irony is that in mastering and presenting what white observers saw as mere noise, rudeness, and boisterousness, the slaves had unwittingly recognized and invested in one of the original premises of the aesthetic ideology—namely Alexander Baumgarten's claim that the aesthetic constituted “the science of sensual cognition.”165
Does this mean that the slaves' aesthetic could will into being an alternative, transcendental space, above the conditions that generated it in the first place? Clearly, nothing the slaves did during the Christmas festival could alter the condition of enslavement itself or the phenomenology of bondage. But in the realm of the aesthetic, or simply of sensuousness, slaves could deceive reality itself by performing happiness in place of suffering and sorrow or by generating and sustaining pathos where they were supposed to be content. But there are some outstanding questions: did the performance of happiness (or melancholy) ameliorate enslavement, thus enabling slaves to acquire a measure of humanity, or was the so-called consolation of art itself an illusion, a form of false consciousness, the opium of beauty in conditions of abjection?
Paradoxically, it is the culture of taste itself that had made the palliative of art central to the autonomy of the self in conditions of subjection, and the simulation of happiness a key condition of modern identity. In the Theory of
Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith had argued that the simulation of happiness, one animated by desire and imagination, was crucial to the development of civilization. For Smith, the simulation of happiness was the deception that aroused and kept “in continual motion the industry of mankind”: “It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth.”166
A similar act of dissimulation seemed to be at work in the ontology of African slaves in the West Indies and elsewhere. In the days of festivities, slaves imagined themselves living somewhere else, back home in Guinea, or performing in European courts, free and happy. In reality, however, they knew that the work of art articulated the absence of these imaginary homelands and the lack of freedom, the essential condition of a modern identity. A Jamaican slave song aptly called “If Me Want for Go in a Ebo” captured this absence well:
If me want for go in a Ebo,
Me can't go there!
Since dem tief me from a Guinea,
Me can't go there!
If me want for go in a Congo,
Me can't go there!
Since dem tief me from my tatta,
Me can't go there!
If me want for go in a Kingston,
Me can't go there!
Since massa go in a England,
Me can't go there!167
This slave song in Jamaican Creole was calling attention to the state of unhomeliness that defined the condition of the black as a modern subject: when they wanted to go back home to the Ebo of their imagination, the slaves found themselves stranded, because they had already been stolen from Guinea; they couldn't go back to Congo or Kingston either, and they would not go to England, where the master had retreated. How, then, could the slaves, given this perpetual homelessness, inscribe their identity?
My argument in this chapter is that whether they were produced in defiance or imitation of the culture of taste, the works of art imagined and implemented by slaves, from buildings to dances and festivals, enabled the enslaved to redefine their relation to time and space, to reconstitute their own bodies and social relationships outside the shadow of their masters, and thus to display bodies that were not mere chattel. The animatedness of the slave in festival, the explosiveness of the body, the celebration of excess, was at odds with all the assumptions that governed white taste and polite behavior, the essence of Englishness and modern identity.
In positioning itself against the norms of polite behavior and its regimes of controlled or regulated feelings, the slaves' negative sensorium became one of the most important arsenals in the making of the black self. As Sigmund Freud noted in his study of negativity, symbolic negation has the capacity to free the self from “the limitations of repression.”168 It was through this kind of negation that African slaves positioned themselves against the systems that excluded them and found a way out of social death. But as one colonialist discovered to his dismay, aesthetic autonomy was not a substitute for true freedom, nor was dissimulation an alternative to the real condition of enslavement and its pathologies.
In June 1834, in the “apprenticeship period” leading to the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies, Richard Robert Madden, an Irish doctor and special magistrate in Jamaica, set out on a sentimental journey to the town of Claremont to seek an old slave previously owned by his grand-uncle. Given the long years the old African had faithfully served his uncle (forty as a “waiting boy”), Madden approached the encounter like a family reunion, and his first goal was to establish a genealogy between dead masters and surviving slaves and to share what he assumed were common memories. On meeting the old slave, Madden wanted to know, among other things, whether the old slave was sorry to hear that his old master had died in England; he also wanted to explore their common past as a way of reconnecting with the other side of his “family.” After all, as noted earlier, West Indian and antebellum masters considered their slaves to be kith and kin, and Madden had no reason to doubt that masters and slaves shared a common bond.
But this family drama did not turn out the way Madden had expected. Much to Madden's chagrin and puzzlement, the old slave would not have anything to do with this family romance or be a willing participant in what he perhaps considered to be contrived sentimental encounters or recreations of painful pasts under the guise of shared memory. Simply put, the old African slave went out of his way to deflate any filial connections to his old master and to renounce any empathy for the gentleman he had served and ostensibly revered for forty years. In fact, the old slave had nothing but scorn for the man who had “brought him out of a Guinea ship when a piccanini boy.”169 This is how the encounter ended:
The man was now becoming impatient. I thought it time to awaken his sensibility by telling him at once that I was the nearest relative of old master he had seen for forty years. I was ready to extend my hand for a hearty shake. I was prepared, as I have said before, for an affecting scene; judge of my disappointment—
“For true! you belong old massa: well, what you want here? you come to carry away old stones from Marley—plenty of old stones on grounds at Marley—you come carry away more old massa's money—whara you find it?—no more poor niggers to sell at Marley.”
The old man, as he made the concluding observation, gave me a look which I would not willingly meet at the day of judgment. He turned away with the greatest indifference, humming to himself as he toddled toward the garden that sentimental negro air:
“Hi, massa buckra, sorry for your loss,
Better go to Lunnon town, and buy another oss.”170
This encounter between Madden, a reluctant heir to a ruined plantation, and an African slave in the apprenticeship of freedom contains useful insights into what an air of real freedom could do to the human soul. Madden, a man of liberal sympathies presiding over the end of slavery in a Jamaican county, had misjudged the nature of slavery and its mnemonics. He had mistaken the old man's affectation of happiness in bondage as affection. He had mistaken the master/slave relationship for kinship. Above all, he had misjudged the moral economy of freedom, the transformation of obligations and responsibilities engendered by the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833 and the coming of freedom, which, painfully in the West Indian case, was to be put in abeyance for five years. The old African's indifference—and his mocking air—was his recognition that freedom, even when it was postponed to save the plantation system, had changed his status and his sense of expectations. Freedom had created a different context for the “sentimental negro air.” Negro airs, as aesthetic objects (songs) or expressions of attitudes, had already anticipated this moment, conjuring another way of being in the world, a counter-aesthetic. The ghost of slavery, however, would have a long life—a life as long as that of the category of taste, one of its twins in the making of modern identity.
Coda:
Three Fragments
FRAGMENT I
On February 13, 1819, James Tallmadge Jr., the Republican representative from New York, rose in the U.S. Congress to introduce an amendment to the bill seeking to grant statehood to Missouri. He proposed that “the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited” in Missouri as a condition for its entry into the union and that “all children of slaves, born within the said state, after admission thereof into the union, shall be free at the age of twenty-five years.”1 Since Alabama, a slave-owning state, had recently been admitted into the union, the overt goal of the amendment was to ensure that the balance of power between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states was maintained.
Tallmadge's amendment had more dramatic consequences than the congressman had intended, for rather than lea
ding to a simple resolution of the question of power and its balance between the states, it provoked what has been described as the most “remarkable week of debate in the history of Congress.”2 The amendment put slavery at the center of debates on the nature of the union and its republican virtues, and by the end of 1819 and continuing into 1820, the Missouri issue provided a forum for the most candid discussion of slavery, caught between the guilt and shame it provoked and its value as a special form of property. For if Tallmadge's motives for introducing the amendment were driven by the moral sense that slavery was wrong, or that it went against Christian values and republican virtues, his opponents from the slaveholding states considered the institution central to the well-being of their economies and a key pillar of the Southern way of life and its civilization.
7.1 A Slave-Coffle Passing the Capitol. From William Cullen Bryant and Sidney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States (New York, 1881), vol. 4, p. 266.
But whether it was considered an absence in the North or a presence in the South, slavery informed the ideologies of the new republic; it constituted that powerful American Africanism that, in Toni Morrison's words, has “provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.”3 In fact, even as the Missouri debate was in progress, the ghost of slavery—the figure that enabled and disassembled modern identity—would appear on the streets of Washington, D.C., in the form of a slave coffle (fig. 7.1).
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 38