Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual by Tyler D. Parry (review)

The recent publication of histories and literary histories of slave marriage has blown open the field of marriage studies. Explicitly challenging the view of marriage as a legal or religious convention between a man and a woman, scholars such as Tera W. Hunter and Frances Smith Foster have shown the various ways slaves participated in marriage despite operating outside its traditional conventions. It is now almost impossible to consider the history of U.S. marriage without considering—for better or for worse—the ways it has been shaped by slavery. By drawing on multiple sources, from Welsh and Irish folklore to transcribed oral interviews with former slaves, novels, movies, and television, Tyler D. Parry’s Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual takes the recent historical scholarship into entirely new territory. What is “surprising” about this now well-known custom are its origins. Contrary to popular opinion concerning jumping the broom, the custom “transcends racial, cultural, and national identities,” making it a truly multicultural, transatlantic phenomenon (p. 9). The methods and conclusions of Parry’s research have far-reaching implications regarding how we think about and practice marriage today.

While instances of the broom wedding can be found in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, Parry traces the custom to the eighteenth century in the British Isles, “though it probably had roots reaching far deeper into the medieval era” (p. 14). Devoting the first chapter to these origins provides an important historical foundation for the ceremony’s later manifestations in the United States. Just as in eighteenth-century Wales and Ireland, marriage over the broomstick in the U.S. context had “associations with uneducated and illiterate populations” (p. 108).

Divided into nine chapters spanning more than two centuries of material with reference to almost every sphere of culture from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, Parry’s book aims to present an exhaustive study of jumping the broom, taking seriously both the symbolic value of the practice and its real-life implications. But in his drawing on such a wide-ranging temporal framework and archive, we begin to notice that some historical moments and texts are more valuable than others. Parry’s reading of the hundreds of slave narratives collected by George P. Rawick in his multivolume work The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1972, 1979) is particularly noteworthy. Coupling the first-person accounts of particular slaves such as George Womble and Benjamin Henderson, both formerly enslaved in Georgia, with folklore, published slave fiction and non-fiction, and literature by canonical writers such as William Wells Brown, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt reveals Parry’s particular strength in reading the voices of the marginalized. Parry pays close attention to the notable details in Womble’s account of the broomstick wedding as well as to aspects of the ceremony on which he was entirely silent. This attention to detail stands in sharp contrast to Parry’s reading of literature that does little more than summarize and skim the surface. Parry’s reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) contends that it “never refers to the broomstick custom” and that “few details are provided about [George and Eliza’s] wedding” (p. 97). If he had applied the close-reading methods he employs to read Womble and other former slaves to Stowe’s novel, he would have found a rather rich description of George and Eliza’s wedding in its second chapter, in which the couple was “married in her mistress’ great parlor, and her mistress herself adorned the bride’s beautiful hair with orange-blossoms, and threw over it the bridal veil.” Perhaps this description was left out because it does not conform to the conventions of the...