American Fun (14 page)

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 affair. “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.”

Fun-loving, quick-witted “jubilee beating” also featured on Congo Square, where it injected some ego and biting
satire into the circle dance’s eros.

BY THE
1830s, such scenes of social harmony had grown quite rare in the overcrowded states.
Andrew Jackson’s 1829 inauguration kicked off the era in characteristic style. Thousands of gawkers and office seekers,
angered by too little ice cream and lemonade, too few government positions to go around, and only one presidential hand to shake, mobbed the
White House for their share in the feast. They pushed through doors, tumbled through windows, and smashed a fortune in cut glass and china. (Old Hickory himself skipped out the back door.) Washington socialite
Margaret Bayard Smith, the most-quoted witness of this infamous scene, sounds like
John Adams defending the
Boston Massacre: “
The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling fighting, romping. What a pity what a pity!”

Impromptu riots were common under Jackson. Despite the reformers’ shrill jeremiads, loudmouth, violent, disorderly mobs went to war in the city streets—fighting to achieve political goals, fighting to oust minority religions, fighting to suppress certain racial or ethnic groups—blacks and Irish, in particular. “
Hangings and public executions of any kind,” the historian
Edward Pessen notes, drew crowds from all levels of American society. Among all classes, personal differences were barbarously resolved through “stabbing, shooting, gouging out of eyes, biting off of nose or ears,” and personal differences cropped up frequently in this testy, preadolescent nation.
Michael Feldberg examines the violence during this period and distinguishes in particular between “
expressive” riots (in which self-identified groups of vigilantes, neighbors, partisans, and others come out swinging to show their solidarity) and “recreational” ones (in which “election riots, volunteer firemen’s riots, and street-gang battles, took on the character of organized team sports”). A popular recreation that was divisive and hateful, if not usually physically violent, was “Bobolition,”
Northern parades (and accompanying pamphlets, newspapers, and songs) that made public mockery of African Americans and their public bids for abolition. Such recreational violence can be considered “fun,” even when it is sometimes lethal. It’s rowdy,
satirical, ecstatic, spontaneously communal. But when the thrill of destruction trumps the joy of the crowd, it’s time to run for cover.

During this same era, however, dance became a form of peaceable defiance. For example, the fish market at New York City’s
Catharine Slip was a gathering place for black and Irish dancers who performed
and competed on elevated wooden shingles (chosen for their percussive effect) for prizes of cakes and eels. From the 1820s through the 1840s, these competitions pushed the limits of racial and ethnic dances—blending shuffles, breakdowns, and jigs—and brought men and women and blacks and whites into what the historian April Masten calls a state of “
friendly rivalry.” Charmingly, “
shindig,” Jackson Age
African-American slang for dance parties, derives from the smarting bruises and abrasions incurred from dancing Irish jigs.

In both New York and Philadelphia, each a hotbed of Jackson Age violence, the press and the courts were up in arms about a new craze in
fancy-dress balls: during the winter social season, better-off African Americans, often in carriages, sometimes attended by whites in livery, would arrive by the hundreds at rented ballrooms and hold elaborate waltzes and
cotillions that could carry on long into the night. Such balls were cause for alarm, and ridicule: they were frequent targets for mocking squibs and scrutinized by police for aberrant behavior. Still, the revelers didn’t mute their rebellion—they wore it with style and overt pleasure. Whites sneered that the balls were juvenile imitations, and black reformers scorned them as decadent, but an event in Philadelphia in 1828, as
Shane White argues, suggests that they were neither:
Frank Johnson’s celebrated orchestra performed, the dance floor was adorned with a map of Africa, a wall was decorated with broken shackles, and a visiting officer from
Haiti’s black republic was the toast of the evening. The pioneering chronicler of much antebellum black culture,
White acknowledges that these fancy-dress balls involved “imitation,” “parody,” and “showy performance of a northern urban African-American culture” but then pointedly adds: “They must also have been something else—something that historians in their bookish dourness often omit from their renditions of human behavior—namely fun.” To be sure. He includes under this category the revelers’ high style, their “mingling and gossiping with friends and acquaintances,” as well as their drinking and various shades of dancing, all of which point to “the way freedom was meant to be.” But must this “fun” be “something else,” something distinct from “parody” and “performance”? Something, it seems, lower? The fault doesn’t lie with Shane White’s argument but rather with our use of “fun.” As it was
redefined and practiced during this era by all classes of blacks, “fun” wasn’t frivolous, it was a community treasure. Black “fun” gave force to a host of virtues—pride, defiance, competition, and freedom—that were fast becoming white society’s vices. Without a doubt, the intimidating “sense,” as White puts it, “that blacks seemed to be having more fun than were their former owners” must in itself have been good fun. It also spoke volumes about black civility.

Throughout this aggressive era—even after
Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 rebellion terrified the white nation—Sundays on
Place Congo held on strong. Festivities began in the morning, “
at a signal from a police official,” and they promptly dispersed after the 9 p.m. cannon. In a world where blacks didn’t own their own bodies, where their bodies were objects of industry and punishment, they seized on these parties to free themselves and build the bonds of essential community. Their parties were wild, rebellious, and sexy, but all they really threatened were Victorian sensitivities—and national feelings of white supremacy.

The novelist
George Washington Cable—such a prude that
Mark Twain said Cable made him “
abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it”—as late as 1886 wrote with deep ambivalence about Jackson-era “Congo Plains.” He called it a “
frightful triumph of body over mind,” but it is clear he also rather liked it. He trembled at its vision of wild democracy. He enjoyed the dancers’ embrace of freedom and their rolling spirit of innovation, “the constant, exhilarating novelty—endless invention—in the turning, bowing, arm swinging, posturing and leaping of the dancers.” He was so moved by their head-spinning diversity that he catalogued their national identities: the Senegalese, Mandingos, Foulahs, Popoes, Cotocolies, Fidas, Socoes, Agwas, Mines, Nagoes, Fonds, Awassas, Iboes, more and more—“
what havoc,” he cried, “the slavers did make!” At one point he lost himself completely and fell headlong into one of the rings:

At a time when so many citizens were abusing their liberties, Place Congo’s congregation of slaves performed democracy at its fiercest. Free within the narrow confines of law, the people—of warringly different origins—drew from their various cultural repertoires, took from whatever was lying around, and employed their talents for the delight of the whole. Every citizen played her part, whether it was beating drums, plucking strings, rattling gourds filled with corn, or calling and dancing around the ring. Each got his fifteen minutes of glory, and the group’s pervasive sense of fun managed to keep the riotous peace. And it didn’t take so much as a Pinkster King to rev it up and keep it running.

The revolution in early African-American fun lacked a
Samuel Adams. It also lacked a
Frederick Douglass. Its most notable publicity was mockery, ridicule, sensationalism, and the distorting burlesques of
blackface
minstrelsy. Even today, with our full knowledge of slave culture’s deep impact on America’s sense of humor—and freedom, empowerment,
self
—few call it political. Indeed, many historians, following
Orlando Patterson’s powerful theory that people under slavery suffer a “
social death,” examine the soul-killing institutions themselves, lest we develop romantic ideas about these victims’ utter depravity. For it is true. Slavery imposed a “social death.” Even Christmas holidays were a cynical ruse to keep enslaved people contained. But nobody knew this better, of course, than
antebellum blacks themselves. They recognized these weapons and stole them when they could. They hammered these weapons into tools and techniques for building a durable community. What helped their revolution endure—not for a year on Merry Mount, or a decade in Boston, but for centuries throughout the North and South—was their tireless attention to the vicious ironies that undermined the American republic. Denied the basic rights of citizens, even those of prisoners, “by far the larger part” of slaves didn’t rise up in bloody resistance. They channeled their frustration into electrifying fun whose white-hot core was strategic rebellion. Not merely for amusement or recreation, these risky pleasures were the “fun and freedom” that
Josiah Henson, in
the epigraph to this chapter, said even “the sternest and most covetous master” could not “frighten or whip out” of slaves. As he put it, they were “fixed facts.” The fun and frolic of early American blacks bred “national felicity,” not social death. And their raging parties spoke for themselves.