Dancing Many Drums: Excavations In African American Dance

1. Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance

1 Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance P. Sterling Stuckey No thanks to the slaveholder nor to slavery that the vivacious captive sometimes dances in his chains; his very mind in such circumstances stands before God as an accusing angel. Frederick Douglass, ‘‘Speech on American Slavery,’’ 1850 Highly prized for the labor extorted from it, the African body was also the object of exploitation for sexual reasons related to its labor value. Sexual abuse of Africans began during the Atlantic voyage, the passage of slave ships from Africa to the Americas ; so from the start of the slave trade, whites engaged in forced miscegenation with blacks. A repulsive yet desirable object to many whites, the black body posed problems of a psychological nature for them. This was unavoidable for those who associated blackness with din and lasciviousness and evil as did many white Americans. In this regard, their observations on slave dance reveal enough of their own anxieties and longings to form a chapter of the psychic history of white Americans. Reference to their psyche points up how fraught with irony the theme of the body and dance is when the black body is the object of inquiry. The gun and whip, prominent features of the apparatus of control in rounding up Africans, were used during the Atlantic voyage . At times during this voyage, there was the insistence that Africans dance to assure whites that they would remain lively enough to be delivered to the auction block in North America. In fact, the total being of African men, women, and children was the 39 40 /  1:  ‘‘Slaves Compelled to Dance during the Voyage to Keep Them Fit and Healthy and so Fetch a Higher Price,’’ ca. 1830 (Drawing by Ruhiere; reproduced with permission of the Mary Evans Picture Library) object of enslavement, and it was not uncommon for the branding iron to be used to identify them. But this was not the only brand they wore, for uncounted thousands wore that of the whip. In either case, to dance with such scars on one’s body meant that, no matter how true to traditional dance forms a particular African dance was, a new history of dance had begun. Like the sky above and the beat of anguished hearts, the moves of dancers were no mere social construct; their melancholy rhythms were as elemental as the flow of ocean currents, as real as the agony of those in the fetid holds of the death vessels. All who survived that passage would dance with such memories in mind. It is the greatest irony, therefore, that from the start in America dance by blacks was considered a measure of their frivolity. The failure of whites to understand African spiritual and artistic values made it easier for slaves to use dance to exploit crevices in the system of slavery. Attempts to wipe out African culture did not succeed largely because the master’s ignorance lasted :     / 41 throughout slavery. Slaveholders never understood that a form of spirituality almost indistinguishable from art was central to the cultures from which blacks came.1 Distinguishing between the two for the African was like distinguishing between the sacred and the secular, and that distinction was not often made. African religion, therefore, could satisfy a whole range of human needs that for Europeans were splintered into secular compartments. This quality of culture helps explain why, for the descendants of Africa in America, the sacred so easily satisfied the deepest ‘‘secular ’’ needs, and the two long remained the same when that which was sacred was labeled secular by outsiders. The sacred for slaves, as for Africans, was not demarcated by time: Threads of spirituality —of art itself—were woven into the fabric of everyday life. In fact, dance was the principal means by which slaves, using its symbolism to evoke their spiritual view of the world, extended sacred observance through the week. In an environment hostile to African religion, that denied that the African had a real religion, slaves could rise in dance and, in a flash, give symbolic expression to their religious vision. Dance was the most difficult of all art forms to erase from the slave’s memory, in part because it could be practiced in the silence of aloneness where motor habits could be initiated with enough speed to seem autonomous. In that lightning-fast process, the body very nearly was memoryand helped the mind recall the form of dance to come. For in dance...