Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture

5. Ritual Reenactments

5. Ritual Reenactments Re-enacting the role of a slave or [a free] woman allows me to pay homage to my African ancestors who were enslaved. People often ask, “Why the role of a slave?” And my response is easy: “My ancestors were slaves.” Is there any reason why I should feel ashamed of my heritage? —Donna Woodley, volunteer reenactor, “Civil War Encampment,” press release for Strawbery Banke Museum, June 14, 1998 The slave-auction controversy discussed in the previous chapter represents only one facet of slavery reenactment, which is a prevalent and diverse activity that blends elements of performance with the reverence of commemoration . Despite the reticence or aversion to frank public conversation about America’s slave past, multiple forms of reenactments persist to promote a variety of visions of American slavery. In the course of this project, I have identified several modes of slavery reenactment: ritual, historical, and participatory . Ritual reenactments are usually performed in church or for larger spiritual purpose. In 1995, St. Paul Community Baptist Church (SPCBC) in Brooklyn, New York, started the The Maafa Suite, which now has offshoots throughout the United States, St. Croix, and Puerto Rico. African Holocaust Day in Chicago and another form of Maafa commemoration at Harambee United Church of Christ in Pennsylvania are but two examples of ritual remembrance. Historical reenactments range from quotidian (daily-life activities in Colonial Williamsburg’s programming and Monticello’s Plantation Community Weekends) to imperiled slave life presented in scenes of auction (Colonial Williamsburg’s 1994 program) or in moments of escape (the “Jerry Rescue” reenactment in Syracuse, New York, or the “Peter” story line in Dunmore’s Proclamation Weekend at Colonial Williamsburg). There are also participatory reenactments where individuals or groups might either volunteer or, by their presence at a particular site, become incorporated into a reenactment. Conner Prairie, a living-history museum in Indiana, features a popular “Follow the North Star” program, whereas Motherland Connex- Ritual Reenactments 133 ions, a black-owned touring company in upstate New York, incorporated immersion experiences in their heritage tours. Similarly, but for younger audiences, YMCA Camp Campbell Gard in Ohio and YMCA Camp Cosby in Alabama offer middle school students an “Underground Railroad Living History” program. Afrocentric scholar Tony Browder travels around the United States with his “The Middle Passage Experience” that blindfolds its participants for a “mental journey from the African homeland, though captivity and enslavement, to present-day struggles.” The National Geographic Web site hosts a virtual participatory reenactment where visitors, given the role of a slave—“You are a slave. Your body, your time, your very breath belong to a farmer in 1850s Maryland”—can decide at different moments whether to accompany Harriet Tubman from Maryland to Canada. These three reenactment categories—ritual, historical, and participatory— suggest the endurance of the slave past in the popular imagination. At the same time, these activities—despite their varied goals—are all characterized by an impulse to engage the limits of discursive representation of slavery as it appears in the academy. By this I mean that each activity, performance, or program tacitly acknowledges the printed word through which narratives and histories of the slave past reach our contemporary moment. Tour guides at Colonial Williamsburg’s Dunmore’s Proclamation Weekend, for example, contextualize the living-history program of performed slave characters (who speak in the first person) with the documentation and historical research on which the slave character is based. St. Paul’s Maafa Suite’s interpretive literature (program guide and souvenir newspaper) refer to several slave narratives and a few histories from which they draft their unique liturgical practices. Popular intellectuals are aware of the discursive priorities of academe and high culture. However, they elect not to privilege that discourse in their slavery performances. Though they recognize that their gestures are indeed performances (rather than manifestations of the actual slave past), their work is less inclined to emphasize its representational aspect. Their authority to speak, reenact, imply, or suggest the slave past is linked to the same textual and narrative sources that academic intellectuals turn to in their work. A crucial difference, and one that marks the popular as a singular form of intellectual activity, is the vernacular’s willingness to suspend dependence on discourse and affix belief instead to spiritual, emotional, personal, community, and even the broadest racial group concerns. In this way, the popular or vernacular sphere of intellectual activity around slavery explores a unique possibility of and for performance that might be paraphrased , to...