The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (review)

In this provocative book, Rucker argues forcefully that transplantation to North America did not deracinate African slaves. Slaves brought with them values and practices that long continued to exert influence on their thinking and behavior as they adapted to their new environment. In America, slave resistance galvanized the blending of African cultures and the eventual forging of African-American identity. According to Rucker, this process proceeded in two stages. Before the ending of the African slave trade to the United States in 1808, cultural mixing occurred on the regional level, where the imprint of distinctive African cultures remained strong. After 1808, as fewer and fewer slaves from Africa appeared, and the slave population became more widely dispersed, slave folklore based on African folk tales became the vehicle through which a common outlook on the world was fabricated.

Rucker advances these propositions not in the abstract but by revisiting the six most famous episodes of collective resistance in early America—the 1712 rebellion and the 1741 conspiracy in New York, the Stono rebellion (1739) and Denmark Vesey's conspiracy (1822) in South Carolina, and Gabriel's plot (1800) and Nat Turner's revolt (1831) in Virginia. In each instance, he assembles evidence of African influences on the conspirators or others in the area who engaged in resistive behavior. With the entire Atlantic world as his canvas, he employs a variety of methods to build his case. To demonstrate continuity between the continents, he combs anthropological and archaeological studies of African peoples who were transported across the ocean in large numbers for information about practices reproduced in the Americas and the material objects associated with them. To bring fragmentary evidence from New York and Virginia into sharper relief, he draws parallels with slave societies in Brazil and various islands of the West Indies. Examining such familiar documentary sources as trial records and correspondence with the eyes of someone sensitive to West African cultures, Rucker discerns telling details that hint of African beliefs.

Rucker's reinterpretation of each of these major events will surely interest specialists, but his overarching thesis is bound to spark debate. He contends that the formation of African-American identity involved a process of cultural amalgamation among people of African descent, accomplished through "cultural bridges—conjurers, animal tricksters, martial dancing, burial customs, and beliefs associated with ironworking—that promoted collective action and collaboration between African ethnic groups" (7). But this approach minimizes the significance of the cultural interplay between Africans and EuroAmericans, calling into question the conclusions of a galaxy of historians who have been far less sanguine than he about the persistence of African values in the American slave community. Given the sparseness of evidence concerning African elements in early American life, Rucker necessarily resorts to conjecture at times. Even more problematical is his resolve to foreclose the possibility that people of African descent might, at certain junctures, have deemed it wiser or more practical to appropriate elements of European culture for their own purposes. His single-minded adherence to one line of argument weakens a study that otherwise complicates our understanding of the genesis of African- American culture in fruitful ways.