Hoecakes, Hambone, and All That Jazz: African American Traditions in Missouri
168
Hoecakes, Hambone, and All That Jazz: African American Traditions in Missouri
168eBook
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Overview
Nolen writes, “Instead of the bond of common ancestors and a common language, which families had shared in Africa, the enslaved in the United States were bound together by skin color, hair texture, and condition of bondage. Out of this experience a strong sense of community was born.” Nolen traces the cultural traditions shaped by African Americans in Missouri from the early colonial period through the Civil War and Reconstruction and shows how those traditions were reshaped through the struggles of the civil rights movement and integration. Nolen demonstrates how the strong sense of community built on these traditions has sustained African Americans throughout their history.
Nolen focuses on some of the extraordinary Missourians produced by that community, among them William Wells Brown, “the first black man born in America to write plays, a novel, and accounts of his travels in Europe, as well as a ‘slave narrative’”; John Berry Meachum, a former slave who founded a “floating school,” anchored in the Mississippi River and thus exempt from state law, where blacks could be educated; J. W. “Blind” Boone, the celebrated composer and concert pianist; Elizabeth Keckley, who purchased her freedom, started her own business, and became dress designer and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln; and Lucinda Lewis Haskell, daughter of a former slave, who helped establish the St. Louis Colored Orphan’s Home.
Hoecakes, Hambone, and All That Jazz recalls the many advances African Americans have made throughout Missouri’s history and uses the accomplishments of individuals to demonstrate the considerable contribution of African American culture to Missouri and all of the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826264473 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Missouri Press |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2003 |
| Series: | Missouri Heritage Readers , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
| Age Range: | 14 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Early Customs and Traditions
In 1821, following the Missouri Compromise, Missouri became the twenty-fourth state in the Union. Congress had worked out the compromise to maintain an equal number of slave and free states: Maine joined the Union as a free state, and Missouri was allowed to join as a slave state.
As the new state's population grew, the fertile bottomlands of the Missouri River drew more and more farmers until a line of settlements reached across the state to the border with the Kansas Territory. The larger slave populations came to reside in Missouri River counties such as Callaway, Cole, Boone, Cooper, Howard, Moniteau, Chariton, Lafayette, Ray, Clay, and Jackson. An area in central Missouri had so many settlers from the South that it became known as "Little Dixie." Counties along the Mississippi River in northeast Missouri also drew slaveholders seeking new land, most from Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. By 1840 the slave population of Missouri had grown to more than 57,000. One of the state's largest slave owners was Jabez Smith of Jackson County, who owned as many as 165 slaves at one time.
Most Missouri slaves lived on farms rather than large plantations, usually in crude cabins on the property of their owners. A typical slave cabin was made of roughly sawn logs, daubed with mud, sometimes not much different from the homes of their owners during early settlement. New settlers used slaves to help clear their land, raise crops, and maintain their property. Since workers were scarce in the newly settled areas, landowners found it easier and cheaper to keep slaves than to hire laborers. Owners could also rent slaves out to others to get extra income.
Slaves worked from sunrise to sunset without pay. There were few laws to protect them. Their treatment depended almost entirely on the whims of their owners, who often established rules of behavior based solely on their own best interests. Martha Smith, whose family owned slaves in Pettis County, recorded her memories of how the slave system worked on her family's farm:
It is melancholy to remember ... that Uncle Toby, Uncle Jack, and other gray-haired men and women, as well as the younger ones, were compelled to have written permission to leave home, and would come even to me, a little child, when the older members of the family were too busy, to give them a written pass to go to town. The law of the country was to keep the patrol out for the purpose of detecting negroes who might leave home without a pass; and all, the good and the bad, had to obey.
Most Missouri slaves never had the opportunity to learn to read or write, so others wrote much of what we know about them. It appears that owners usually selected names for their slaves, although some few slaves may have kept names of African origin. West-Central Africa used a naming system whereby children were named for the day of the week or the month of the year in which they were born. But these original names changed when spoken in a new language, and their true names were lost.
Africans brought to the United States had been tribal peoples in their native lands, linked in kinship by common ancestors. Under the conditions of slavery, families could be broken at any time. The slave communities soon devised a system of "fictive kinship" that created extended families. When relatives died or were sold, those left behind took over the care of children and others who had been separated from their kinfolk. These caretakers, who were usually older people, often became known as "uncles" and "aunties," and the children taken in became "brothers" and "sisters."
Many people think of slaves brought to the United States as having originally belonged to a particular homogenous group bearing the same physical characteristics and traits and speaking a common language. Although most came from West Africa, the ancestors of the Africans who came to Missouri as slaves were from many kingdoms and many tribes; they ranged in color from very dark to light brown. Some belonged to the taller tribes, such as the Ashanti of the Gold Coast; others to the shorter Bantus from the Congo. Whatever their color, the U.S. census defined anyone with any mixture of African blood as "Negro."
Africa is a continent with many languages and language families. The Republic of Nigeria alone, with a population of about 130 million people, has four major languages used in different parts of the country, as well as dozens of languages (and hundreds of local dialects) used by smaller groups of people. Slave traders, hoping to keep Africans from plotting to organize or escape, would not buy groups who spoke the same language. They also broke up families, forcing those they took as slaves to become accustomed to strangers and learn a new language as best they could.
When modern-day Americans refer to dialects spoken by African Americans as "Black English," many do not realize how this language came into existence. Because slaves did not have common languages, they were forced to speak the language of the field bosses or members of households where they were servants. They received very little instruction, so they learned to use a kind of pidgin English. Sometimes they would use words from their native languages, like "cooter" for turtle, "goobers" for peanuts, and "buckra" for a white man. Some of their words, like "okra" and "gumbo," passed into English and are commonly used today.
As they learned more and more, the slaves spoke a kind of English that was more complex, but it was still not exactly like their owners' language. Because African languages have few consonants at the end of their words, the slaves had trouble saying words like "cold." Since the slaves and servants lived in highly segregated environments, they learned from one another and began to speak alike, passing their own kind of English and their pronunciations on to later generations. Many speakers of "Black English" are simply continuing to use the language of their community, just as whites in Appalachia and along the coast of Maine continue their own ways of talking.
In Missouri, French continued to be spoken in communities such as St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve for several decades after the Louisiana Purchase, and new German immigrants established settlements in which they maintained their native language in church services and business establishments for more than a century. During the years of slavery and afterward, African Americans often learned enough of these languages and the various dialects to communicate in such places as St. Charles, New Melle, Hermann, Bethel, and Concordia.
Instead of common ancestors and common languages, which families had shared in Africa, the enslaved in the United States came to be bound together by skin color, hair texture, and condition of bondage. From this experience a strong sense of community was born. As enslaved people, their survival often depended upon the actions of individuals in the community. If one slave broke the rules, it could, and often did, bring hardship on the group as a whole.
The conditions of their enslavement meant that many slaves knew nothing but slavery. Some heard that they could be free in territories or states bordering Missouri and longed to escape. In spite of the danger to themselves and their community, some tried to escape. The Marshall Democrat reported that in Saline County, between 1858 and 1859, twelve slaves ran away. Reports of runaways and occasional stories of slaves killing their owners in escape attempts led slaveholders to watch their slaves closely. When a slave ran, the owner was likely to punish the whole slave community until the runaway was caught.
To slave owners their slaves were tied together by color and condition of servitude. The enslaved, on the other hand, chose to bond on the basis of real and "fictive" kinships. Those relationships formed the foundation of community for them and made it possible to endure lives of unremitting labor.
The daily work of enslaved men, women, and children in Missouri varied with their owners and the seasons. On farms, much of the work involved planting in the spring and harvesting the crops in the fall. The main crops produced by Missouri farmers were hemp, tobacco, wheat, corn, oats, hay, and, in the southern part of the state, cotton. In addition many slave owners planted orchards and gardens. They bred livestock, and most farms had cattle, sheep, horses, pigs, and chickens.
In the modern world of tractors, milking machines, and other conveniences, it is hard to imagine the effort required for pioneer families to survive. On small farms with only a few slaves, work was unending. Missouri had some large slaveholders, such as Jabez Smith and John Ragland, the largest slaveholder in Cooper County, who had seventy slaves in 1850. But in Missouri's Black Heritage, historians Lorenzo Greene, Gary Kremer, and Antonio Holland report that only 36 of Missouri's 114 counties had "one thousand or more" slaves, and anyone who owned ten slaves was considered rich. Many times owners and slaves worked together, a situation not always welcomed by the enslaved. Slave women often had to work in the fields along with the men. Otherwise women and children helped the owners' wives with the household chores.
They would help plant, tend, and pick the family's fruit and vegetables and preserve them for later use; help cook the three daily meals; prepare the wool and flax to be spun into thread on the spinning wheel; clean the house and take care of the children. Since there were no electric lights, slave women had to fill lanterns and lamps with oil and make candles from tallow or beeswax. Before they could cook, they had to build a fire in the fireplace or the stove. They had to churn cream into butter by hand in large wooden buckets.
With no washing machines or permanent-press fabrics, women had to wash and iron by hand, first drawing the water for the wash from a well or carrying it from a creek, heating it on the stove or over a fire, and filling large washtubs. They put the clothes and household linens into heavy iron pots over fires, either outdoors or in washsheds. After soaking the wash in boiling water with soap they had made, the women scrubbed the clothing or laid it out on a board and beat it with a club before rinsing it. Since there were few clotheslines, they often spread laundry over bushes and fences to dry. Then they had to iron the clothes. As the name suggests, irons were made of heavy cast iron. The woman doing the ironing heated four or five "flatirons" on the cookstove while she worked. It was hot, hard work, and if the owner's wife had a bad temper, she might punish a slave who allowed an iron to get too hot and scorch the clothes.
For those who labored in the fields, tending the crops from which their owners earned a living, work was even harder. Hemp was one of the main crops grown in Missouri. This plant was made into rope and into the twine used to bind bales of cotton. Harvesting hemp was demanding work. Slaves had to cut the tall plants, which grew up to eight feet, and spread them on the ground to dry. Since only the stalks were used, the rest of the plants had to rot away. Workers might either leave plants on the ground to rot from the dew and rain or dunk them in heated water to hurry the process. Once the stalks were ready, workers had to bundle them. On many farms, each slave had to break at least one hundred pounds of hemp a day. In Agriculture and Slavery in Little Dixie, Douglas Hurt quotes a saying of the time: "Small hands ... can raise and take care of tobacco; hemp requires the stoutest men."
But tobacco, as Hurt writes, still required "many hands to plant, cultivate, tend, harvest and process the crop." It was year-round labor, from preparing the land in January to sowing the tobacco bed, setting the plants, hoeing weeds, then cutting, curing, and shipping the tobacco just in time to start preparing the land for another crop. There were no chemical pesticides. "Slaves picked off the terminal bud and hornworms by hand," Hurt reports.
In addition to planting, harvesting, shucking, or threshing other crops, the slave men also had to construct and repair fences and buildings as well as keep the tools in good repair. They cared for the farm animals and helped butcher those that had been raised for food. Most landowners raised their own cows, and the slaves had to do the daily milking, carry the milk to the house, and process it for the owner's family to use for drinking and cooking.
The children of slaves learned to work from an early age. They did small household tasks such as sweeping or beating the rugs. In wealthy families male slave children sometimes served as footmen. They opened carriage doors for the owners and held the horses until the driver was ready. Girls helped with cooking and serving the meals and cleaning the kitchen.
Enslaved people had no retirement plan. As women got too old for heavy work, they did such jobs as sewing, nursing the sick, serving as midwives, and looking after infants while their mothers worked. Older men sometimes served as herbal doctors or worked repairing farm tools. Since by law slaves were personal property, owners could punish or sell those who were poor workers. Older slaves had to continue working as long as they could.
Since slaves had to devote most of their time to work, it is only natural that one of the African American community's most celebrated traditions grew out of the work experience. At work slaves created the Negro spiritual and the many kindred songs that are the basis for the African American musical tradition. Most of their work was drudgery. Making music was one of the few freedoms they could enjoy, and they used their songs to turn misery and sorrow into art.
Work songs, shout songs, sorrow songs, and jubilees are among the names African Americans gave to these oral compositions. In the tradition of their African ancestors, the slaves would make up the story they wanted to tell, putting into words whatever thoughts came to mind, and pass it along in song. In the African tradition, all events, large and small, work or play, happy or sad, became the stuff of stories that could be put to song. Owners often forbade slaves to talk as they worked, so singing became a way of passing information as well as providing emotional relief and furnishing entertainment. For the slaves, the field shouts or hollers and other forms of the songs that developed were means of communicating with one another. Through this means of communication many slaves learned of freedom. Yet their singing may also have been the reason many slave owners considered the slaves happy and carefree.
The songs would usually begin with one worker singing out a sentence, to which the others would respond by singing back. In this way, the form of leader and chorus, call and response, an African American musical tradition began. The songs that the slaves used while they worked soon found a new home in what has come to be called the "invisible church."
Although they were not required to do so, most owners introduced their slaves to Christian teachings, often by reading to them from the Bible. Some demanded attendance at their churches, of whatever denomination, where slaves sat in a balcony or in a separate area in the back of the church. Just as French and Spanish slaveholders had converted many slaves to Catholicism, the slaveholders emigrating from the Upper South introduced their particular Protestant beliefs to those they owned. Most owners considered the slaves simple people, likely to accept the call to religion and, they hoped, obey their owners while they were on earth in the expectation of rewards in heaven. It was clearly in the best interests of the slaveholders to teach the enslaved the evils of stealing, lying, and disobeying, and so most instructed slaves on the Christian virtues.
Owners probably felt that they had made good slaves of their people when they heard songs from the nearby slave cabins:
I've got a robe,
Some slaves, however, persisted in hoping that they could gain their freedom on earth, either by buying themselves from their owners or by escaping to the North. Furthermore, although owners tried to teach slaves that it was the owners' right to hold them in bondage, most slaves found it hard to understand why some men should be masters and some slaves.
Perhaps, it was those of this mind who sang out:
Hear that freedom train a-coming, coming, coming, Hear that freedom train a-coming, coming, coming, Hear that freedom train a-coming, coming, coming, Get on board, oh, oh, get on board.
Some of the enslaved found that for all the preaching about goodness and kindness they heard, their owners thought nothing of lashing them with a whip or selling them away from their families. Still, most slaves took to heart the words of the Bible, if not their owners' interpretations of those words, and embraced Christianity wholeheartedly. Many came to feel that they had found a friend in Jesus and that He wanted them to be free, even if their owners did not. And for the slave, freedom was everything. And so they sang:
Oh, freedom! Oh, freedom! ... An' befo' I'd be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave An' go home to my Lord an' be free.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hoecakes, Hambone, and All That Jazz"
by .
Copyright © 2003 The Curators of the University of Missouri.
Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents Preface 00 Introduction 00 Chapter 1. Early Customs and Traditions 00 Chapter 2. Dreams of Freedom 00 Chapter 3. Let My People Go 00 Chapter 4. Building New Lives 00 Chapter 5. Living with Jim Crow 00 Chapter 6. The Slow Death of Jim Crow 00 Chapter 7. A Charge to Keep 00 For More Reading 00 Index 00Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: African Americans Missouri Social life and customs, African Americans Missouri History, Missouri Race relations