—W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
What is the sacred sound of freedom? For continental and diasporic Africans in North America in the early eighteenth century, the sound would inevitably have been polyphonic. Freedom would have been a sonic cacophony of beats, rhythms, and melodies, clapping and stomping in syncopated time that moved between and beyond purely notational patterns. It would have resembled, reflected, and refracted the stirrings of an Atlantic world in motion.
The sacred sounds of freedom in the Americas included “the syncretic Afro-Brazilian religions of macumba and Umbanda, the black Catholic congado, and the quasisacred remnants of the otherwise secular batuque circle dance.” Eighteenth-century America served as a conjuring space for Black sacred sound. African religions—Abrahamic and indigenous—gave expression to the historical, cultural, and religious expressions of these communities. New world African communities deployed this sound in expressing the hopes, joys, dreams, histories, aspirations, and longings of a people with a history who were simultaneously an emerging people creating a new world. A dichotomous sacred and secular did not operate within this conjuring context. It was all one. Indeed, as the pioneering musicologist Eileen Southern notes, “The music is everywhere! Often, one needs only to stop and listen.”
Enslaved communities in North America were ethnically diverse. These continental and diasporic Africans forged a new world community with a new sound. The music in these communities not only captured the diverse traditions and cultures of Africans, it also developed in dynamic ways to reflect the contingencies of life in North America. Sacred sound transmitted histories, traditions, stories, myths, religions, and culture. “Song texts generally reflected personal or community concerns. The texts might speak of everyday affairs or of historical events; texts might inform listeners of current happenings or praise or ridicule persons, including even those listening to the song….But the most important texts belonged to the historical songs that recounted heroic deeds of the past and reminded the people of their traditions.”
The sheer diversity, complexity, and variety of musical forms and styles point to the depth and character of this soundscape in motion. Scholars have attempted to understand this music in a number of ways. Musicologist Guthrie Ramsey reminds us, “A most striking quality of early black music historiography ideology is how writers—particularly African American ones—negotiated the generally accepted ‘divide’ between Euro-based and Afro-based aesthetic perspectives.” Ramsey underscores the challenge of understanding eighteenth-century Black music: to develop an adequate knowledge of the music itself and translate it into an appropriate contemporary idiom. You run the risk of underdeveloping or overdetermining the immense African contributions shaping and forming the music when you make it conform to European-derived musicological registers. A further challenge is the need to hear the music absent the sound and play the music absent notes. You have to find another path to understanding.
Despite the diverse sources of Black sacred music in North America, spirituals were initially presented by Europeans in translation form, in the idioms of European notes and categories. But these translations were inadequate to the task of expressing the music’s rhythmic texture and robust sound. Dena Epstein writes, “Afro-American music included many elements not present in European music and for which no provision had been made in the notational system. For example, Lucy McKim Garrison wrote in 1862: ‘It is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat; and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on score, as the singing of birds or the tones of an Æolian harp.’ ” The worlds of continental and diasporic Africans could not be fully represented by the notational representation of latter-day ethnographers and musicologists.
So what is the sound of Black freedom? Perhaps it is best to begin by thinking reflexively about the probing question posited by W.E.B. Du Bois: “Do the sorrow songs sing true?”
1729–1734
AFRICAN IDENTITIES
Walter C. Rucker
Samba Bambara, forced to watch the torture and hanging of an unnamed woman compatriot, stood at the precipice between this world and the next. On December 10, 1731, he awaited his execution.
The leader of a slave plot in French New Orleans, Samba had a complicated past. A decade earlier he had served as an interpreter for the French Company of the Indies near Galam, a gold-producing state along West Africa’s Senegal River. Indirectly aiding and abetting the commerce in Black flesh, Samba reportedly led a 1722 revolt in Senegal that temporarily cost the French a trading post. When the fort was recaptured and Samba’s role was revealed, French authorities exiled him into Louisiana slavery.
Upon arrival in the French colony, he reassumed his role as an interpreter and used his linguistic skills to help his fellow Bambaras, when they had to appear in court, receive reduced sentences by translating testimony used against them in a favorable manner. His role as translator and his intimate knowledge of the French elevated Samba to the role of leader of the New Orleans Bambara. He leveraged his leadership role to conspire with other Bambaras to massacre all whites from Pointe Coupée to Balize, to free all Bambaras, and to force all Atlantic Africans who were not Bambara into servitude.
At this early moment in the long arc of African American history, concepts of a single Black race and of pan-African unity did not exist. Notions of Black people being one people had yet to be embraced fully by Africans and their American-born kin. Samba Bambara’s 1731 conspiracy was the product of a time when unifying labels like Black and African had yet to be internalized, had yet to reach their political potential.
In a period that saw the intensification of rivalries between the Spanish, French, and English crowns in North America, Atlantic Africans and American-born Creoles demonstrated their resilience in carving out freedom spaces in a hostile world. In November 1729, a number of enslaved women and men—many from the Bambara nation—joined a Natchez nation assault on a French outpost near present-day Natchez, Mississippi. They killed 237 French men, women, and children and burned Fort Rosalie to ash. Five years later, in June 1734, an enslaved woman named Marie-Joseph Angélique was accused of setting fire to the merchant quarter of Montreal to mask her attempted escape.
Surrounded by French and Spanish colonies on the North American mainland, the British colonies—numbering thirteen with the establishment of Georgia in 1733—faced the same realities and perils as their neighbors. Slavery and enslaved peoples were everywhere; thus, resistance was ubiquitous. By the 1730s, enslaved Africans and their descendants could be found in the Chesapeake colonies (Virginia and Maryland), the Lowcountry and Southern colonies (Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina), the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania), and the New England colonies (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire). Even though Georgia banned slavery in 1735, enslaved Africans were present in the colony at its inception in 1733. In addition to hosting resident maroons, Georgia was part of an African corridor between British Carolina and Spanish Florida through which enslaved people seeking refuge in St. Augustine, and later Fort Mose, would travel. Indeed, Georgia was founded to serve as a military buffer to deter enslaved women and men from reaching freedom in Spanish Florida.
Within the thirteen British colonies, enslaved Africans and their descendants made the best of the hellish circumstances they faced. Key to their ability to survive were the ritual technologies carried with them across the Atlantic. These complex systems of belief and worship sustained them and, over time, became the cement that connected peoples from many African ethnic groups who had no prior history of contact. The sojourn into American enslavement, far from being a story about the Americanization of African peoples, was punctuated by cultural innovation and experimentation between en
slaved Africans from varying backgrounds.
The epicenters of Black culture in colonial North America were wildly disparate. Though African-born captives and their American-born kin could be found in all thirteen colonies, they clustered principally in the Southern and Chesapeake colonies of the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland. By 1731, however, enslaved Africans accounted for 18 percent of the total population of New York City. In the 1730s, New York had the largest population of Black people of any colonial city north of Baltimore and was second only to Charleston as the urban region with the highest concentration of Africans in North America. Populating Chesapeake tobacco and Southern rice plantations as well as prosperous port cities in the urban North, enslaved peoples were critical to the commercial success of British colonial efforts.
Just as the colonies they came to were varied, enslaved Africans embarked on European slavers from a wide range of coastal regions. Of the 26,107 souls who were carried to British North America in the cargo holds of slavers between 1729 and 1734, known points of origin ranged from the Bight of Biafra (5,531 souls) and Greater Senegambia (4,730 souls) to West-Central Africa (4,636 souls) and the Gold Coast (513 souls). Moreover, within each coastal region were many polities and ethnolinguistic groups. The men and women who would be transformed by Europeans into enslaved “commodities” did not belong to “tribes” and did not live in “backwaters”; nor were they ignorant of the worlds around them. Some understood the intentions of Europeans and, as a result, developed rich folkloric traditions about them as witches, demons, or flesh-eating cannibals. Some imagined their fate across the ocean as a descent into a hellish world populated by evil spirits. Untold thousands met their fears with the hope that suicide would offer either relief or salvation. Others mobilized Africanized Christianity, Islam, or local religious faiths and ritual technologies to aid them in the travails ahead. Three generations into their sojourns in British North America, enslaved Africans and their descendants had not forgotten about Africa.
The creation of African nations or intentional communities was the principal means by which enslaved women and men maintained memories of their homelands. While European enslavers created many of the labels that identified the boundaries of these communities, these categories took on new meanings as enslaved Africans embraced them over time. Among the many ethnolinguistic labels that became part of a new African cultural geography in British North America were Bambara, Mandingo, and Gullah (Greater Senegambia); Eboe and Calabari (Bight of Biafra); Coromantee and Chamba (Gold Coast); Mina (Bight of Benin); and Congo and Angola (West-Central Africa). These identities were continuously reinforced by new streams of enslaved imports. Each of the thirteen British North American colonies witnessed fluctuations in the slave trade due to limited access to African coastal markets and the development of ethnic preferences. In this regard, Senegambians were heavily concentrated in South Carolina and Louisiana during the 1720s due, in part, to their proficiencies in cattle herding and rice cultivation. Enslaved peoples from the Bight of Biafra, widely regarded and rejected as “sickly” and “melancholy” “refuse” in prosperous colonies like Jamaica, were shipped to commercial backwaters like Virginia, where planters had less ability to influence the market. West-Central Africans from around modern-day Angola, representing 40 percent of the total traffic in enslaved Africans, were found everywhere in large numbers due to their ubiquity in the cargoes of slavers.
The slave trade into North America had flows and fluctuations across time and space, but it was patterned. As a result of the concentrations of specific Atlantic Africans in particular colonies and the formation of new African ethnic “nations,” the developing slave cultures left indelible marks on what later became African American culture. Thus within the mother wit of many contemporary African Americans is the idea that dreaming about fish means that a close relative is pregnant (West-Central Africa). Some, especially in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, have family memories of the ring shout (West-Central Africa), and many in and near Charleston still produce sweetgrass baskets (Greater Senegambia). Others, especially in Edenton, North Carolina, remember and continue to commemorate the Jonkonnu festival in December (Gold Coast).
Many African Americans still eat black-eyed peas at New Year’s for good luck (Greater Senegambia). In the early twentieth century, some African Americans deployed prayer beads, prayed to the east multiple times each day while kneeling on mats, and were even interred—upon death—facing east (Greater Senegambia). Some recall that the folktale entitled “Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby” has an ancient and dignified origin (Gold Coast and Greater Senegambia) that extends far beyond Disney’s racist mangling of this epic tale in the 1946 movie Song of the South. All these expressions—aspects of mother wit, ritual technologies and knowledge systems, festivals, and folktales—emerged from the processes by which enslaved Africans from varied backgrounds shared cultural values, merged political interests, and became, over time, one people.
1734–1739
FROM FORT MOSE TO SOUL CITY
Brentin Mock
Black Republicans often urge Black Democrats to “flee the plantation,” meaning to join the Republican Party, or to cease using what they perceive as the victimizing language of civil rights and racial justice.
The “flee the plantation” cri de coeur is applied to conjure the memory of enslaved Africans escaping their forced labor camps in pursuit of freedom. For many Republicans, the Democratic Party, or liberals in general, represent the slaveholders, while the Republican Party represents emancipation. Alternately, Black Democrats often fancy themselves as emancipators from the Republicans and their plantations that are conserving the racist status quo. In reality, neither side can claim the title of emancipator.
The plantation is a powerful symbol, as the foundational unit for racial capitalism and chattel slavery in the United States. It represents the enduringly difficult living conditions of African Americans as well as the enduring reality that their labor goes primarily not to benefit themselves but to enhance the profits of white people. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, conservatives nor liberals, have been able to upend that racist order. Nor has either provided sanctuary for African Americans from “the plantation.” In fact, the Black experience in America can be defined in large part as the never-ending search for refuge, sanctuary, and safe spaces to live, away from the plantation in all its forms, but to no avail.
One of the earliest hopes for Black sanctuary was Fort Mose, Florida, the first known free Black settlement in British North America. It was built in 1738 by Africans who had fled the plantations of the Carolinas for the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine in northeastern coastal Florida. While St. Augustine had a somewhat integrated population, comprising Indian tribes and formerly enslaved Africans who had been arriving there since as early as 1683, Fort Mose was established outside the city exclusively for the newer African refugees from the plantation. The Spanish policy, decreed by the crown in 1693, was that any enslaved person who made it to Spain’s American territories would be at least eligible for freedom.
As South Carolina’s enslaved African population swelled in the 1730s, particularly in Charleston, word began circulating about the opportunity for liberty in St. Augustine. All the enslaved would have to do was survive a journey of hundreds of miles of swamp, marsh, and sometimes-hostile Natives along the coast to reach Spanish Florida. But liberty would come in limited form. “Spanish bureaucrats attempted to count these people and to limit their physical mobility through increasingly restrictive racial legislation,” explains historian Jane Landers. “Officials prohibited blacks from living unsupervised, or, worse, among the Indians. Curfews and pass systems developed, as did proposals to force unemployed blacks into fixed labor situations.”
African migrants had to adopt the Spanish Catholic religion to gain entrance to St. Augustine. They were accepted as laborers and received wages, but only the lower rates paid to St. Augu
stine’s Native residents.
While the migrants’ living conditions were not as grueling here as in the Carolina plantations, where they had been treated as property, their situation in Spanish Florida might have been only slavery in a slightly more elegant font. They were still subject to European rule, and they were not in control of their destiny as long as they lived in the Spanish domain. This was but one of the earliest indicators that freedom for African Americans, no matter how promising, would never be complete, no matter where and when they moved throughout the North American landscape.
That tenuous freedom persisted after the Civil War. In 1887 the town of Eatonville was founded, just one hundred miles south of St. Augustine, outside Orlando. It was the first town to be “organized, governed and incorporated” by Black people. It existed in “relatively idyllic isolation” until the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision imposed “forced integration.” For African Americans, fleeing the plantation would rarely if ever mean finding safe harbor from white surveillance.
In the 1970s, civil rights activist Floyd McKissick gave the Black sanctuary experiment a shot when he founded Soul City. He planned to build a Black city—an urban oasis in the middle of rural North Carolina—from scratch. Soul City was to serve as a sanctuary from the racism that had taken the lives of Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers—taking out the hopes and morale of many Black families in the process. Breaking ground in 1973, Soul City was the closest and most recent corollary to Fort Mose. But the trajectory to freedom was different: Soul City sought to draw African Americans to North Carolina, the general territory from which enslaved Africans had been escaping for Fort Mose some 240 years earlier.
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