Voices for Freedom

Shane White and Graham White. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 288 pp. CD, notes, and index. $29.95 (cloth); $17.00 (paper).

Shane White and Graham White are celebrators of African American culture. In their highly original work of 1998, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit, they examined facial expressions, body movements, tonsorial and sartorial fashions, and public celebrations for insight into the African American experience in North America. The Sounds of Slavery treats the verbal culture that enslaved Africans created and their descendants sustained over the past four centuries. The authors distill their analysis into the simple statement "that the speech, voices, and even laughter of most slaves sounded different from those of their owners and that wherever there were substantial numbers of slaves in American those sounds saturated the landscape" (p. 95). White and White add additional weight to the firmly established propositions that African American culture has deep roots in West African cultures and that it simultaneously reflected and sustained the struggles for freedom and dignity during slavery and beyond.

The authors sample the varying genres of vocal communication, such as songs, stories, and sermons and the corresponding settings of work, recreation, and worship. Observing that "[t]he sounds made by free blacks and slaves hawking their goods, singing, whistling, or humming, arguing, shouting, playing in the street, and merely going about their work were a part of the fabric of life . . . in most American urban centers," they also treat the sounds of slavery in Charleston, New York, New Orleans, and Richmond (p. 184). As cities differed from rural areas, so too did the North differ from the South, and the authors direct their attention accordingly.

The range and depth of their treatment depends on extant sources, which vary considerably in quantity and quality over time. For the colonial period, for instance, runaway slave advertisements provide considerable insight into African and African American speech, suggesting both the Babel of languages and dialects that served as the vehicles of verbal communication and the strategies Africans and creole African Americans employed to talk their way into freedom. By way of contrast, the authors lament the "as-yet-unexplained lack of historical evidence" about slave music in eighteenth-century sources, "a subject that one might expect would have been, in those years, integral to the slave experience" (p. 25). The revolutionary and early national periods witnessed a dramatic increase in literary accounts of African American verbal communication styles, particularly in the popular press of the urban Northeast. Whereas the runaway advertisements documented considerable linguistic diversity—in numerous cases describing the runaways' command over English and other European languages—the newspaper accounts from the nineteenth century presented "an increased standardization and the development of an orthography of 'black dialect'" (p. 81). "The conventions of this white version of black speech—the inclusion of numerous malapropisms and the use of phonetic spellings," the authors note, painted an unflattering portrait against the backdrop of the First Emancipation, when "large numbers of free blacks were becoming a highly visible and often raucous presence" (pp. 81–2). In time minstrel shows broadcast the stereotype far beyond the newspaper-reading public, perpetrating a view of African American speech that in some quarters survives to this day.

During the nineteenth century, the growing popularity of travel in the southern states gave rise to a body of source materials documenting virtually every aspect of how slaves communicated. By the 1830s, partisans on both sides of the slavery debate, including a growing number of former slaves who published narratives of their bondage and escape, offered commentaries on African American verbal culture. Frederick Douglass, for instance, noted the scarcely hidden "'double meaning'" whereby references to the Promised Land in slave spirituals actually signified the North (p. 117). And the pioneering collection of slave music, Slave Songs of the United States (1867), was a direct product of...