Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery

4. Backstage: "White folks do as they please, and the darkies do as they can"

99 4 Backstage “White folks do as they please, and the darkies do as they can” It was a typical Sunday on that September 9, 1739, in South Carolina. The enslaved communities throughout a burgeoning North America customarily gathered on this day for the upkeep of their homes, to enhance family solidarity, and to exchange the collective cultural expressions of music, song, and dance. These gatherings allowed for a “temporary relaxation, the brief deliverance from fear and from the lash, producing a metamorphosis in their appearance and demeanor.”1 The black community relished the times they were able to come together for these music and dance gatherings, affectionately known among blacks as frolics, so when dozens of slaves began to gather, they did not initially garner attention from the white community as out of the ordinary. But then the insurrection began with several slave conspirators killing a local storekeeper before ransacking the store to steal firearms, ammunition, and other weapons.2 Led by a bondsman named Jemmy, twenty slaves marched through town killing any white person and burning down every plantation they came across. The rebels marched, “calling out Liberty,” and beat “two drums” while pursuing “all the white people they met with, and killing Man Woman and Child,” according to one witness, General Oglethorpe. During their march, the rebels “set to dancing, Singing and beating Drums to draw more Negroes to them.” One of the few witnesses recalled that the music and dance inspired other enslaved blacks to join the rebellion. “They increased every minute by new Negroes coming to them, so that they were above Sixty, some say a hundred.”3 With 100 chapter 4 the sound of music encouraging the rebels and spurring more to revolt, these bondsmen and bondswomen, “acting boldly,” battled the militia before eventually being dispersed and some defeated. Later, however, several slaves formed another group and proceeded toward the maroon city of St. Augustine in the free Spanish colony of Florida. About ten of them were caught fleeing the next day. The insurrection was still not over, however. A week later, a small group of slaves fought the militia about thirty miles from the original rebellion site. Stono’s Rebellion, named in honor of the Stono Bridge where the insurrection began, within twenty miles of Charleston, represented the complicated nature of music and dance within the emerging Southern plantation society in the early eighteenth century. Although whites used music and dance to assert and legitimize their dominance, the performing arts always held a concealed power for the enslaved populations. Their dances and drums were used as tools of encouragement for the rebels. Throughout West Africa, continued in the Middle Passage and brought to the New World, the South Carolina enslaved population carried with them their homelands’ culture of music and dance. Drums in this insurrection could have represented two roles, first as a means of communication , for throughout West Africa the “talking drum” was an aspect of many societies, and second as a means of encouragement similar to “war drums” that were used during battles through their homeland region. Also, dancing was a political, cultural, and social expression that held long traditions throughout many areas of West Africa and parts of Central Africa as building martial acrobatic skills. Dancing to prepare for war, to express hand-to-hand combat, to train, and to establish stability, reflexes, and parrying skills was common in many West African cultures. Specifically, the war dances of the Central African kingdom of Kongo were well known at this time, and many African slaves in South Carolina originated in that region.4 In some of the cultures that West and Central Africans brought to North America, dancing was a tool for sedition. South Carolina experienced a continuous influx of African slaves entering the region to tend the growing rice fields. In the early eighteenth century, South Carolina was estimated to have three times as many blacks as whites.5 South Carolina planters preferred slaves from Gambia, the Gold Coast, and Angola because rice was grown in these regions and so these slaves would have had previous experience with rice cultivation. Bondspeople from these areas accounted for 70 percent of the thirty-nine thousand blacks in South Carolina, more than half of whom had been there fewer than ten years by the 1730s.6 The insurgents also illustrated the influence of a developing North American culture Backstage 101 through...