Festivals

Festivals are generally public events that celebrate religious or cultural traditions. Nonetheless, they can also be construed as public performance spaces in which conventional assumptions of power can be challenged or renegotiated. According to the theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984), at a festival the powerless can subvert the role of the powerful—albeit often humorously—and reconfigure the public square. Samuel Kinser argues that they can also function as a liminal, in-between space where new cultural forms and identities may emerge (1990, p. 31). For enslaved African Americans during the colonial and antebellum periods, public festivals represented both kinds of spaces. Although slaves ostensibly mimicked the actions and rituals of the ruling class during their parades, they often engaged in ironic, subtle jabs at their slaveholding masters. This undoubtedly provided some respite from the harsh and dreadful conditions that they were forced to endure. But they did not merely exaggerate or humorously reference white customs.

Whereas most of the slave festivals centered around the public or ritual events to which white society subscribed, the descendents of slaves also developed distinctly African American performances and rituals that were an amalgamation of traditional African cultural practices and the European, Native American, and Caribbean forms they encountered in the New World. Both the Christmas masking festival of Jonkonnu in the Carolinas and Virginia and Negro Election Day in New England are examples of distinctive African American public celebrations. Like most slave festivals they included energetic dancing formations, singing, sporting-like competitions, and parades led by an outlandishly garbed king who was accompanied by fantastically dressed musicians and by militiamen who fired muskets in the air. William Pierson notes that festivals that included parades such as the Negro Election Day "typically featured boisterous, improvised music and back-and-forth interaction between male and female spectators and parade performers," that were common to cultural rituals in the Caribbean and West Africa (2002, p. 256).

Author Robert Farris Thompson concludes that Yoruba and Bakonga performance aesthetics were particularly influential in the development of American slave festivals and parades. Thompson states that the Yoruba verb pagbo, to parade, combines concepts of joining things together (pa bring things in contact with one another) and circularity, agbo stands for circle (Thompson 1988, p. 19). The Bakonga (people from the Congo) as Thompson suggests, "believed that processioneering around a village can mystically heal its hidden problems, [and] can 'cool' the entire settlement with circularing gestures of felicity and good faith" (Thompson 1988, p. 20). Slaves continued this parading tradition and also adapted the percussive rhythms, the "calland-response" between groups of performers, and the "battles of aesthetic virtuosity" between dancers in their own festivals (Thompson 1988, p. 19).

One of the most important West African features that slaves maintained were the circular dance patterns. The circling, which involves negotiation between the groups and between the performers and the audience, also suggests a negotiation of power spaces. In discussing the Jonkonnu festival, Pierson suggests that this "exchange was purposely subversive to artificial distinctions of power and prestige"—specifically to the distinctions set in place by the white slave owners (2002, p. 264). In other words, the communal, ecstatic bond between dancers as they ritually reenacted age-old African dance patterns, allowed them to deny their subservient enslaved position. That slaves were allowed to hold such gatherings may seem surprising. Undoubtedly, such festivals were "more palatable for white society to swallow than serious, solemn gatherings" (Kinser 1990, p. 57).

Though there were a variety of other popular slave festivals, especially the corn shucking contests that occurred throughout the country, the remainder of this essay will focus on the Pinkster in New York and the contribution of African American dance traditions to the Mardi Gras festival in New Orleans. The Pinkster, the most famous of which occurred in Albany, New York, was originally a Dutch festival that celebrated the Christian feast of Pentecost. By the eighteenth century however, it had been reconfigured as a slave celebration. Like the Negro election days and coronation festivals in New England, the Pinkster involved a parade, dancing, singing, competitions, satire, and other forms of merriment. During the festival, which lasted anywhere from three to five days, the slaves constructed tents or built twig-like shelters reminiscent of those in Africa. They voted for a ruler who, while dressed in Harlequin-like attire and mounted on a horse, led them down from the hill where the New York capitol now stands, and then through the Albany streets. As Kathlyn Gay notes, this "ironic display'" represents the Bahktinian "reverse of power" (2007, p. 182). Here, the African ruler is overlooking the white street below. Nevertheless, to his white observers, he was a figure of ridicule who unsuccessfully copied white dress and used the "most lewd and indecent gesticulation" (White, 1989, p. 61).

Unlike a white monarch, the Pinkster King did not merely rule over his subjects. He was expected to participate in the traditional asking for gifts and in the drumming and dancing that accompanied the parading. In fact, the well-known Angolan King Charley was renowned for his dance ability, which he derived from the Congo circular patterns that had been around for centuries (Stuckey 1994, p. 60). This suggests that his knowledge of traditional and sacred African dance belies the notion that he was imitating white movements or that his dance was lewd. Indeed, the dance and performance, which included exaggerated gestures and heel and toe movements that later evolved into tap, was clearly mystifying to whites (Stuckey 1994, p. 69). For slaves, the festival engendered communal spirit and allowed them to establish a sense of identity and belonging. Not surprisingly then, the Pinkster festival was a favorite among northern slaves. It allowed them to both subvert the dominant white culture and to remember their African identities.

Though some of the slave festivals in the South paralleled those in the North (such as the corn shucking), there were also some marked differences between them. Nowhere is this more evident than in New Orleans with its unique political history and blend of French, Spanish, Caribbean, Native American, and African American cultures. It was from this cultural mélange that the well-known and spectacular Mardi Gras festival emerged. The slave dancing at Congo Square in New Orleans and the free black carnival groups and balls played an important role in this development.

Before the 1830s, when slaves were forbidden from participating in public celebrations, assemblies of slaves would gather and engage in dancing and singing at Congo square. Though little information is available about what occurred, some white writers have recorded their impressions about these performances. In 1826, Timothy Flint, a minister from New England recorded the following:

The great Congo-dance is performed. Every thing is license and revelry … By [the dancer's] thousand mountebank tricks, and contortions of countenance and form, he produces an irresistible effect upon the multitude. All the characters that follow him, of leading estimation, have their own peculiar dress, and their own contortions. They dance, and their streamers fly, and the bells that they have hung about them tinkle. (Kinser 1990, p. 35)

For dancers, though they may have mimicked white traditions, it was important that they win the attention and support of the audience; otherwise they might be cut from the circle. Hence, they employed humor and exaggerated gestures to solicit an audience response. As noted above, white observers generally did not have any knowledge as to what the dances represented—or to the traditions they recollected. According to historian Sterling Stuckey, "slave dance was the most difficult for slaveholders to suppress … and could constitute an act of resistance" (1994, pp. 52-53).

Although the Congo square gathering was banned in the early nineteenth century, slaves participated in balls and other festive events that were supposedly closed to them. In New Orleans, which had been governed by the French and then the Spanish before being acquired by the United States in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, there was a long-established tradition of throwing balls for almost any occasion. Generally private events, they were distinctly segregated affairs. Public balls for free blacks (an established class before the Louisiana Purchase) and whites were licensed in the early nineteenth century. Though slaves were not allowed to participate, they went to the free black balls and injected their dancing and performance aesthetics into the celebrations. Like the many whites who also attended, slaves could assume different identities when they wore the masques that were common at these events.

Well-to-do free blacks and those of lesser means also formed their own carnival groups prior to the Civil War (1861–1865) in order to participate in what had been a French Catholic traditional holiday that occurred before the beginning of Lent. As Kinser contends, the anomalies of New Orleans three-tiered caste system were thus disregarded because Mardi Gras "allowed for kinds of contact between blacks and whites, male and female, which were unthinkable in the streets" (1990, p. 24). Thus slaves, though nominally excluded from carnival groups, undoubtedly wore the costumes of colorful feathers that reflected both Native American and African traditions—costumes that are still donned at Mardi Gras today. According to Thompson (1988), "feathers on masks or headdresses in Congo are medicines, referring to confidence and strength built into the vaunting of the power to fly" (p. 25). They allow the individual to get outside oneself, so to speak. Like the Pinkster parade, during the carnival slaves could subvert the position in which whites had thrust them. At these festivals, they could reenact the traditions of their African past, hold a "distorting mirror" up to white society, and construct or imagine a new way of life (Kinser 1990, p. 318). Festivals, in other words, were more than carnivalesque.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Gay, Kathlyn. African American Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations: The History, Customs, and Symbols Associated with Both Traditional and Contemporary Religious and Secular Events Observed by Americans of African Descent. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2007.

Kinser, Samuel. Carnival, American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Pierson, William D. "African American Festive Style and the Creation of American Culture." In Riot and Revelry in Early America, eds. William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.

Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Thompson, Robert Farris. "Recapturing Heaven's Glamour: Afro-Caribbean Festivalizing Arts." In Caribbean Festival Arts: Each and Every Bit of Difference, eds. John W. Nunley and Judith Bettelheim. Seattle, WA: Saint Louis Art Museum and the University of Washington Press, 1988.

White, Shane. "Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley." Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (January-March 1989): 68-75.

                                   Anna M. Dempsey