No More, No More : Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans [1 ed.] 9780816695829, 9780816643264

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No More, No More

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No More, No More Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans

Daniel E. Walker

University of Minnesota Press ⏐ Minneapolis ⏐ London

Copyright 2004 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker, Daniel E. No more, no more : slavery and cultural resistance in Havana and New Orleans / Daniel E. Walker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-4326-1 (hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8166-4327-X (pb : alk. paper) 1. New Orleans (La.)—Race relations. 2. Havana (Cuba)—Race relations. 3. Slavery—Louisiana—New Orleans—History. 4. Slavery—Cuba— Havana—History. 5. Slaves—Louisiana—New Orleans—Social conditions. 6. Slaves—Cuba—Havana—Social conditions. 7. Social control—Louisiana— New Orleans—History. 8. Social control—Cuba—Havana—History. 9. New Orleans (La.)—Social conditions. 10. Havana (Cuba)—Social conditions. I. Title. F379.N59N484 2004 305.8´763´35—dc22 2004006605

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

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Contents

Introduction 1. El Día de Reyes and Congo Square: Links to Africa and the Americas

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2. De0ning Space: Social Control and Public Space

19

3. Regulating Domesticity: The Fight for the Family

59

4. Imagining the African/Imagining Blackness

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5. Negotiating Racial Hierarchies: The Threat of Unity

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Conclusion

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Acknowledgments

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Notes

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Index

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Introduction

argeting slave society in nineteenth-century Havana, Cuba, and New Orleans, Louisiana, this study examines mechanisms of social control directed at people of African descent and cultural resistance eforts embodied in public performances. Focusing on these slave societies’ diverse eforts to control their Africandescended populace’s de0nitions of space, family, social image, and community, it seeks to analyze representations found in the annual Día de Reyes (Day of the Kings) festival in Havana and the weekly activities that took place on Sundays at Congo Square in New Orleans as challenges to the dehumanizing dictates suggested by those in power. In terms of focus and chronology, the book is about the lives of people of African descent (black and mulatto, slave and free) living in these cities in the period from the initial years of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Civil War in the United States (1861) and the Ten Years War in Cuba (1868). At the core of this examination lie two fundamental premises. The 0rst is that although urban slave societies were qualitatively different from their rural counterparts, they still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of their Africandescended inhabitants to maintain power. With direct reference to Havana and New Orleans, this assault included de0ning physical space in a way that would cause people of color to associate speci0c sites with particularly violent or oppressive experiences, deterring the formation of fully formed (i.e., husband, wife, and children) familial units among African-descended peoples; socially degrading the image of the African and the racial concept of blackness; and quelling the

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Introduction

development of group consciousness among slaves speci0cally and/or racial consciousness among African-descended peoples generally. The other premise is that throughout the period examined, the Africandescended communities in New Orleans and Havana created and maintained institutions and exhibited cultural models that directly contested the slave regime’s assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of self and the social landscape. Because these individuals, especially those in bondage, did not have the power to more directly challenge the slaveholder’s assault on space, family, social image, and community (e.g., the ability to lobby against unjust laws, unfettered access to 0rearms, or viable opportunities to escape the slave society totally), they utilized a number of African, European, and New World– derived cultural practices imbued with new or additional meaning as their most salient means of contesting the dehumanizing social control objectives of their respective environments.1 This study situates itself within the existing literature on urban slavery and slave culture while also broaching a number of questions related to social control and the speci0c role of culture in contesting the dehumanizing eforts of speci0c regimes of oppression. Although its analysis is comparative in nature, it consciously departs from many of the major methods and assumptions embodied in the vast and much-chronicled tradition of New World comparative slave studies.2 Speci0cally, this work uses two localities not only to assess their degrees of departure but also to highlight their commonality.3 It contends that although Havana and New Orleans had distinct histories, their need to achieve a certain expectation of control over their African-descended populations united them in purpose, if not in the means of carrying out that purpose. From the standpoint of the enslaved and their “quasi-free” counterparts, the imposition of speci0c social-control mechanisms engendered a similar need to contest these measures, although the means of satisfying that need could be very diferent. The choice of Havana and New Orleans stems from these cities’ similar development patterns and the commonality of institutions and practices engaged in by slaves and free people of color living within their boundaries. Although Havana was a much larger city throughout much of the period examined, both areas served as the commercial and administrative centers of agriculturally based export economies founded primarily on slave labor. Each municipality also contained a signi0cant free black population and maintained a complex social hierarchy based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, and color.4 As a result of a number of international phenomena, including the success of the

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slave revolt in Haiti, Spain’s loss of the majority of its colonial empire, and the Louisiana Purchase, these cities also grew dramatically in both population and overall commercial tra2c throughout much of the nineteenth century. For slaves living in Havana and New Orleans in the early to mid1800s, life was dramatically diferent from that of their peers on rural plantations. In these cities, the enslaved came in contact with a host of Europeans and Euro-Americans, a diverse mix of native Africans, black Creoles from throughout the Circum-Caribbean, a signi0cant free black and mulatto populace, and, in the case of Havana, Chinese laborers and others imported from the Yucatán Peninsula. When one adds the signi0cant numbers of Native Americans still residing in close proximity to New Orleans throughout this period, it becomes clear that slave life in these areas was much more complex than what is generally proposed. In contrast to the relative isolation of the outlying plantations, urban slaves participated in mutual-aid societies, conducted large public festivals, engaged in organized African and Afro-Christian religious practices, and, like their rural counterparts, at times threatened the institution of slavery through their violent resistance. Although a number of studies examine outwardly similar festivals in the Americas, this work departs from the extant literature in a number of ways. Most studies of slave festivals contend that they are either a socially controlled attempt by masters to dissipate tension and potential violence, a temporary and highly constrained opportunity for slaves and free people of color to mock or jeer the actions of their oppressors, or an example of symbolic inversion where the society is, in essence, “turned upside down.”5 Although each of these phenomena may be at work in these festival traditions, they are by no means the only forces at play. Taking its cue from the extensive body of literature citing the capacity of African and African-descended culture to address social reality and to become a multidimensional life-a2rming force, this work seeks to discover these qualities in the activities of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square. El Día de Reyes, which took place annually on January 6 in Havana, is well known to most scholars of slave culture because of the pioneering work of Fernando Ortiz. Written in the early 1920s, his “La antigua 0esta afrocubana del ‘Día de Reyes’” is the most cited and respected depiction of this experience.6 Ortiz ofers a detailed description of the event, notes the African origins of speci0c actions and traditions that were a part of the festival, and then places the activities within a global performance-centered context. Even though Jean

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Stubbs has completed a much-needed translation of the work into English and David Brown added an exquisite annotated bibliography, in-depth scholarly analysis of the festival within the larger context of the nineteenth-century social and political realities facing AfroCubans has yet to be accomplished.7 Although Ortiz’s initial efort is by no means super0cial, its twenty or so pages simply cannot su2ce. Given that the festival encompassed song, dance, music, iconography, costume and dress, religious rituals, and a host of interracial and interethnic dynamics, to say nothing of its relationship to the overall power structure and its objectives, it begs for further study. Even though the festival-centered activities that took place in the section of New Orleans known as Congo Square are well documented, especially by scholars studying the roots of jazz, very little work, like that concerning El Día de Reyes, exists that seeks to analyze these actions with speci0c reference to the institution of slavery and the society’s overall treatment of people of African descent.8 For scholars not seeking to uncover a missing link between Congo Square and the cultural explosion that created jazz, a noted preoccupation exists with de0ning exactly when “African” dance ceased to be performed at the location. This interest, like that of slave-culture scholars who are only concerned with the super0cial discovery of African continuities in the Americas, tends to obfuscate any real discussion about the meaning of these expressive creations within their societal context. Complementing previous works, this examination seeks to break new ground by asking fresh questions of traditional sources while simultaneously engaging a new corpus of primary data. Although historical methods and analysis lie at the heart of this examination, these festivals were highly complex, multidisciplinary afairs and thus demand a multidisciplinary interpretation. Speci0cally, theories and approaches from the 0elds of anthropology, dance, art history, music, literature, ethnomusicology, and sociology will also be employed to support the analysis. More than just an examination of the festival arts as a form of social commentary, this study is about the use of a speci0c cultural aesthetic as a means of rea2rming connection to the human family despite the contradictory dictates of an oppressive environment. It is about individuals and groups maintaining more than just a history of their past, but also a healthy view of themselves, their culture, and their social institutions. It speci0cally focuses on the various forms of expression associated with Congo Square and El Día de Reyes as a means of establishing positive associations regarding the issues of space, family, social image, and community, but this struggle also involves, as

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Melvin Dixon suggests with regard to African American literature, the ability “to create alternative landscapes where black culture and identity can lourish apart from any marginal, prescribed ‘place’ . . . the power to reinvent geography and identity.”9 Chapter 1 begins by providing some contemporary descriptions of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square and placing them within the larger context of African-descended festival arts in the Americas during the period of slavery. It then examines the multifaceted essence of the festival in the West African culture areas that supplied much of the slave labor for New Orleans and Havana in the nineteenth century. It is concerned with establishing African and African-descended culture’s capacity to express a wide range of humanistic a2rmations (moral justice, identity, community, humans’ relationship to the creator, etc.). Departing from a large body of literature that espouses a direct correlation between the meaning of cultural expression in Africa and the Americas, it sets forth the proposition that although the behaviors exhibited in the Americas may show a remarkable resemblance to those of identical ethnic groups in Africa, once the social context changes one cannot simply assume that the meaning of a speci0c act remains unchanged. Using examples from African art studies and primary sources drawn from New World slave societies, this section stresses that at the core of both African and African-descended New World cultural expression is the necessity to address the social reality of a given group even when utilizing “traditional” models of behavior. A discussion of sacred and secular music, poetry, and slave narratives is presented as evidence of the reality-directed nature of the cultural expression of African-descended communities in the Americas. Moving to the crux of the argument presented in this work—that representations in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square serve as counterstatements to the social-control designs of their respective slave societies—chapter 2 outlines the speci0c measures enacted by the slave regimes of Havana and New Orleans to control and de0ne space. The actions cited as attempts to control movement and to give oppressive meaning to space include the structure of the slave trade from Africa into the Americas, enforced restrictive curfews, the public display of slave chain gangs and armed military troops, slave living arrangements, the strategic creation and positioning of slave jails, auction blocks, and military garrisons, the racial segregation of public venues, the de0ning of spaces as sites of symbolic slave punishments, and the threat of “the plantation” as a social-control mechanism. The goal is to provide the

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reader with a mental as well as visual picture of the public space that slaves and free people of color traversed on a daily basis. This entire discussion is integrated into an analysis of the cultural models that the African-descended communities of Havana and New Orleans expressed during El Día de Reyes and Congo Square activities. Central to this argument is the contention that these performances de0ned physical spaces in positive terms for blacks and mulattos primarily because they allowed the participants to achieve a form of reconnection with a host of social, familial, and spiritual networks that had been severed as result of the slave trade. An analysis of dance styles, masking, body painting, iconography, and religious worship in both Africa and the cities under discussion will be used to illustrate this point. Chapter 3 examines the measures enacted by the slave regimes of New Orleans and Havana to deter the creation and maintenance of African-descended familial units. These obstacles included the maintenance of highly disproportionate male/female sex ratios, the stigmatization of black males as potential marital partners, the intrusive actions of white males in eforts to gain control over the sexuality of black and mulatto females, and the total disrespect of issues related to maternity and child rearing exhibited by the slave regimes toward people of African descent. Each of these issues will be integrated into a larger discussion of models of expression exhibited in the Día de Reyes and Congo Square. Speci0cally, reactions evoked by representations (sculpture, iconography, forms of social organization, costuming, etc.) embracing male–female unity, black manhood, femininity, and maternity will be cited as evidence of the African-descended community’s embrace of the model of familial organization that ran counter to that dictated by the respective slave regimes. Chapter 4 examines the ways that the slave societies in Havana and New Orleans continually placed the image of the African and the racial concept of blackness at the bottom of all social hierarchies. In both cities, perceptions of social image will be examined in the context of the growing debate and fear regarding Africanization that began to be codi0ed in literature and political essays in the early 1800s. An analysis of black and African images in “scienti0c” literature and popular art (e.g., novels, dramatic productions, cigar-box illustrations, cartoons) will be used to illustrate the depth of this assault. Central to this chapter is the contention that the degradation of the racial concept of blackness and the image of the African not only served to justify the continued enslavement of African-descended people but also functioned as a rationalization for the denial of equal rights and

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opportunities to free people of color and mulattoes. In contrast, dress and costuming, religious iconography, dance styles, instrumentation, musical forms, and the decision to participate in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square despite the slave societies’ negative characterizations of these events will be presented as evidence of the African-descended community’s counterstatement to both cities’ social-control objectives. In chapter 5, the slave regimes’ attempt to deter interethnic and cross-class alliances among people of African descent in Havana and New Orleans is contrasted with the consistent ability of Congo Square and El Día de Reyes to draw participants from across the boundaries of color, class, and ethnicity. The regimes’ deterrents included enforced legislation prohibiting or curtailing free association of Africandescended peoples, the creation of ethnic and/or class-speci0c social and military institutions, legal and psychological enticements aimed at creating a so-called third racial or social group made up of lightskinned blacks, and the extremely violent punishments meted out after failed cross-class resistance eforts. Drawing extensively on reports of the high level of inclusiveness cited by most witnesses of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square, this section refers to a number of social phenomena that support the Pan-African, cross-class unity evidenced in Havana and Pan-African, slave-centered unity seen in New Orleans. These phenomena include cross-class and interethnic resistance eforts and the power of African and African American dance and musical models to serve as means of social communion. This section also analyzes the relative success of the New Orleans slave regime in creating an environment that compelled many, but by no means all, free persons of color to cast their lot with the white ruling class as opposed to the primarily dark-skinned, enslaved laborers. This point is especially signi0cant given the high level of political unity evidenced among people of African descent in Havana irrespective of class, color, or ethnicity.

A BRIEF NOTE ON SOURCES In an efort to adequately illustrate the context of social control visited upon slaves and free people of color in nineteenth-century New Orleans and Havana and to construct a more nuanced view of the representations found in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square, an eclectic blend of primary and secondary sources has been consulted. These include census data, religious iconography, literature, music lyrics, sculpture, cartography, dance theory, rhetoric, and popular art, as well as archival research from repositories in Cuba and the United States.

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The goal is to give as clear a picture as possible of the society as a whole and to expose how deeply the attack on space, family, social image, and community permeated the collective ethos of these slave regimes. In this respect, this study is guided by the comments of Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who contends that “unless we recognise that the reality of the slave situation was not the kind of reality that is most easily approached by academic research in our traditional senses, we will remain in danger of misinterpreting what was going on.”10

1 El Día de Reyes and Congo Square: Links to Africa and the Americas

or more than two centuries, scholars and contemporary observers have been intrigued by the elaborate processions that took place during Havana’s annual Día de Reyes festival and the weekly performances staged at New Orleans’s Congo Square. As much a part of these cities’ nineteenth-century characterizations as any landmark or political event, these gatherings of African-descended peoples have perplexed as well as fascinated. Objects of envy and, more often, ridicule, El Día de Reyes and Congo Square were eclectic events that brought together a diversity of elements from the cities’ enslaved and free black communities. Containing both the sacred and the secular, these spectacles were cultural hybrids that meshed artistic and religious traditions from Europe, Africa, and the Americas into a truly unique and meaningful form of representation. Outgrowths of a West and West Central African festival model that utilized a myriad of artistic elements to speak to the very real concerns of the communities from which they emanated, these events were but one facet of the larger resistance-focused ethos found in the expressive culture of people of African descent living in slave societies throughout the Americas. The festival tradition associated with El Día de Reyes dates back at least to the mid to late eighteenth century. Taking place annually on January 6 as a commemoration of the Catholic holiday of Epiphany or the Day of the Three Kings, the festival continued in ebbs and lows to until the late nineteenth century. The last known occurrence is said to have taken place in 1884, although some argue that the festival did not cease until the U.S. occupation of Cuba in 1898.1 Although Epiphany was celebrated in many forms throughout the Catholic

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world, in slave-era Cuba it was the o2cial annual festival day for the island’s African-descended population. According to Fernando Ortiz: That day, black Africa, its people, its costumes, its music, its tongues, its song and dance, its ceremonies, its religions and political institutions, were brought across the Atlantic to Cuba, especially Havana. The tyranny and might of slavery that coldly separated parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, compatriots, was for one day mitigated as the negroes came together in the streets, with their own, with those of their tribe, their caravels, proud in the ceremonial attire of their land, venting their rousing monotonous African chant, charging the air with the noise of their drums and their bells and other primitive instruments, enjoying above all an illusion of freedom, in an orgy of ritual, dance, music, song, and cane spirit.2

In addition to Ortiz’s twentieth-century synthesis, the descriptions left by a number of nineteenth-century observers provide evidence of the prevalence of El Día de Reyes in Havana’s collective consciousness. According to Ramón Meza: At midday the merriment was at its height. On Mercaderes, Obispo, and O’Reilly Streets, there was a continuous procession of diablitos (devil-like 0gures), all making their way to the Plaza de Armas. The place was soon crowded and it was hardly possible to pass the Government Palace. Onlookers packed the balconies and the sidewalks and climbed the bases of columns, windows and stone balconies surrounding the square. The rows of laurel trees with their spreading dark-green foliage, the variegated and lowing shrubs of the square, the slender palms cutting an elegant panache silhouette against the purest blue sky, the sailors of all nations coming down in groups to watch half-bewildered such an exotic sight, the soldiers guarding the nearby buildings, the many lags lying in the wind and the thousand and one colors adorning the negroes’ attire, in all truth, painted a picturesque spectacle.3

Visual interpretations of these performances were also left by the artists Frederic Miahle and Victor Patricio Landaluze. Like El Día de Reyes, the activities associated with Congo Square began in the eighteenth century. As far back as the 1740s the Africandescended population of New Orleans was using the clearing on Rampart Street, just behind what is now known as the French Quarter,

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for Sunday gatherings. Formerly the site of the Houmas Indians’ annual corn festival, the location housed a host of activities.4 A muchfrequented market where both slaves and free blacks sold produce and wares to one another and the white population, Congo Square soon came to be known almost exclusively as the site where Africandescended peoples, in the words of one nineteenth-century commentator, “would gather by the thousands in the afternoon under the shade of the sycamores, and romp in African Revelries to the accompaniment of the tam-tam and the jaw-bones.”5 The frequency of the performances at Congo Square luctuated throughout the nineteenth century. By the coming of the Civil War the activities had all but ceased. To get a good feel for what took place at Congo Square, one need only peruse the comments of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who stumbled upon the gathering one Sunday afternoon in February 1819. That day some 0ve to six hundred individuals accompanied by a host of uniquely African instruments were at the site. According to Latrobe: They were formed into circular groupes [sic] in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them), was a ring, the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the 0rst were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands, & set to each other in a miserably dull and slow 0gure hardly moving their feet or bodies. The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument. An old man sat astride a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, & beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hand and 0ngers . . . The women squalled out a burthen to the playing at intervals, consisting of two notes, as the negroes, working in our cities, respond to the song of their leader. Most of the circles contained the same sort of dancers. One was larger, in which a ring of a dozen women walked, by way of dancing, round the music in the center . . . A man sung [sic] an uncouth song to the dancing which I suppose was in some African language, for it was not French & the women screamed a detestable burthen on one single note.6

As opposed to being expressive anomalies, El Día de Reyes and Congo Square were parts of a larger public performance tradition carried out by people of African descent in the Americas throughout the slave period.7 This tradition included North American Pinkster (New York State),8 Election Day (New England),9 and John Canoe (North Carolina),10 as well as West Indian Jonkunnu (especially the Jamaican

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El Día de Reyes and Congo Square

contribution),11 the Big Drum Dance of Carriacou (Grenada),12 Venezuela’s Devil Dance,13 Brazil’s Maracatu (Bahai),14 and the expressive activities of people of African descent on Sundays in nineteenthcentury Rio de Janeiro.15 While these cultural productions spanned the geographic landscape, most contained a number of unifying characteristics. Almost always con0ned to European-derived days of leisure (Sundays, Christmas, Catholic saint’s days, etc.) or the coming of the new year, the vast majority of these performances involved the exhibition of some mode of public deference toward the master class, processions, masquerading, the use of religious and secular iconography, be it African or European-derived, and the employment of African dance, dress, song, music, and instrumentation.16 Although the carnival tradition was also very strong in many slaveholding regions dominated by Catholicism, formal participation in these festivities by African-descended peoples was very limited in the pre-emancipation period. Although the performance models of blacks and mulattoes in the Americas did exhibit a number of striking similarities that spoke to the common origins of their respective participants, it must also be remembered that the social-control desires of the slave regimes greatly impacted when, where, and how each festival, procession, or gathering took place. El Día de Reyes and Congo Square events must be assessed within an analytical framework that is conscious of the multiple capacities of the festival in West Africa and the reality-directed nature of slave culture in the Americas. This process must begin by deciphering the ethnic origins of the slave communities in Havana and New Orleans and then assessing the role of the festival and its constituent parts (e.g., masquerading, dance, music, icons) within the African societies from which they emanate. The expressions must then be linked to the main currents of slave expression in the Americas. Throughout this analysis, one must remain cognizant of the fact that one of the most consistent facets of both West African cultural production and that of slaves in the Americas is their functionality. In both instances, cultural and artistic production devoid of societal relevance is virtually nonexistent. The initial dimensions of the New Orleans slave community were established during the eighteenth century. During this period, both the French and the Spanish relied heavily on the importation of slaves directly from Africa as their main source of labor. Of the total number of slaves brought to Louisiana during the French period (to 1763), the Senegambia contributed 65.9 percent (3,945), the Bight

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of Benin 29.1 percent (1,748), and the Congo/Angola region 4.9 percent (294).17 Ethnically, these individuals were primarily Bambara, Mende, and Malinke (Senegambia), Ewe-Fon and Yoruba (the Bight of Benin), and Bakongo (Congo/Angola).18 For the period between 1763 and 1803, Gwendolyn Hall points out that “the Afro-Creole culture of New Orleans was strongly reAfricanized.”19 Although no speci0c data on the ethnic composition of the slave population of Spanish New Orleans exist, Hall’s breakdown for the Point Coupee outpost is instructive. From 1782 to 1802, the Senegambian percentages of the slave trade remained between 20 and 30 percent of the total. During this same period, the proportion from the Bight of Benin grew from about 20 percent in 1782 to almost 40 percent in 1802. Throughout the period there was also strong representation from the Congo/Angola region (approximately 30 percent in 1782 and 20 percent in 1802) and a signi0cant contribution from the Bight of Biafra (approximately 10 percent).20 Taking the above-mentioned 0gures into consideration, it is clear that the Mende, Bambara, Malinke, Bakongo, Ewe-Fon, and Yoruba, in addition to the Igbo, E0k, and Ejagham (Bight of Biafra), were all well represented in the New Orleans slave population at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Haitian Revolution signaled the beginning of the transformation of the slave community in Louisiana and New Orleans. With the loss of Saint-Domingue, Napoleon’s desires to reestablish a French presence in continental North America were dashed and the vast Louisiana Territory became available for purchase by the United States.21 Once opened to white settlers, mostly sugar and cotton farmers, the population of what eventually became the state of Louisiana grew tremendously. Evidence of this growth can be seen in the geometric explosion in the number of slaves. From an initial population of 34,660 in 1810, the number of persons held in bondage in Louisiana grew almost unabated until the Civil War brought an end to the heinous tra2c.22 Just prior to emancipation, the number of slaves residing in the state ballooned to 331,726.23 This same trend can be seen in New Orleans, where the free black and slave population grew from 823 and 2,126, respectively, in 1788, to 6,237 and 7,355 in 1820. Although the numbers ebbed and lowed throughout the nineteenth century, New Orleans eventually attained an antebellum high mark of 15,072 free persons of color and 18,208 slaves in 1840.24 In contrast to the French and Spanish periods, the majority of the slaves who came into the plantations of Louisiana after the Haitian

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Revolution arrived via the interstate slave trade. This complex amalgam of slave traders and emigrating planters transferred hundreds of thousands of slaves from the tobacco-producing regions of the Upper South to the cotton- and sugar-growing areas of the Deep South and the Southwest.25 Louisiana drew a disproportionately large number of these slaves from Virginia.26 Although the vast majority of these individuals, especially males, were dedicated to agricultural production, a relatively small number also became the property of slaveholders residing in New Orleans. The development of New Orleans’s nineteenth-century slave community was also inluenced by the 1809 inlux of refugees from Saint-Domingue. Responding to the French invasion of Spain, colonial o2cials in Cuba moved to expel the large number of SaintDomingue exiles. These individuals, both slave and free, white, black, and mulatto, soon began cramming into the port of New Orleans seeking political asylum. So many refugees arrived during this short period that territorial governor William Claiborne warned, “it is advisable for them to seek asylum elsewhere, than in the Territory of Orleans, for the Refugees from Cuba, who have arrived here are so numerous as to be embarrassing to our own citizens.”27 In total, more than 9,059 refugees entered New Orleans between May 1809 and January 1810.28 Of this number, 3,102 were free persons of color, 3,226 slaves, and 2,731 free whites.29 Comparing population 0gures from 1806 with the 1809 immigrant totals, one can see the tremendous impact of the Saint-Domingue refugees on New Orleans’s African-descended community. The total number of free persons of color who came in 1809 was more than the entire number present in Orleans parish (which included New Orleans) just three years earlier (2,312). Additionally, the 3,226 imported slaves were equal to more than one-third of the total 8,378 slaves in the area in 1806.30 To ascertain the ethnic composition of the 1809 additions to New Orleans’s slave community, one must consult 0gures for the slave trade to Saint-Domingue just prior to the revolution. In the period from 1751 to 1800, slaves from the Congo/Angola region made up 45.2 percent of the colony’s total slave population.31 The Bight of Benin (28 percent), the Bight of Biafra (8.5 percent), the Gold Coast (6.4 percent), and the Senegambia (5.4 percent) followed the Congo/ Angola region in total imports.32 The predominant ethnic groups hailing from these areas included the Bakongo (Congo/Angola), the Ewe-Fon and Yoruba (Bight of Benin), the Igbo, E0k, Ejagham, and

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Ibibio (Bight of Biafra), the Akan (Gold Coast), and the Bambara, Mende, and Malinke (Senegambia).33 Like Louisiana, Cuba’s nineteenth-century demographic makeup was greatly inluenced by the Haitian Revolution. The rebellion, coupled with the success of independence movements in other Spanish colonies, caused Spain to concentrate its eforts on transforming Cuba from a strategic outpost with underexploited economic potentialities to the world’s largest producer of sugar in the nineteenth century. The transformation of the Cuban economy necessitated the importation of African slaves. Although no one has been able to de0nitively ascertain the date on which the slave trade ended in Cuba, Manuel Moreno Fraginals estimates that of the more than 1,012,386 slaves imported into Cuba, more than 86 percent came after 1790.34 Of these, the period of greatest importation occurred between 1815 and 1844.35 Information regarding the ethnic composition of Havana’s slave community must be drawn from data concerning the island as a whole. In terms of ethnicity, Cuba’s slave population exhibited much of the same diversity as that of New Orleans. Between 1800 and 1820, the island’s sugar and cofee plantations were peopled by an ethnic mix that included 25.53 percent Carabali (E0k, Ejagham, Ibo, and Ibibio), 22.21 percent Congo (Bakongo), 19.18 percent Mandinga (Mandingo, Malinke, Mende, and Bambara), 8.38 percent Lucumi (Yoruba), 7.57 percent Ganga (a mix of ethnic groups hailing from southern Sierra Leone and northern Liberia), and 6.75 percent Mina (Popo).36 In the period from 1850 to 1870, a similar diversity continued, with the major groups, in descending order of total percentage, being Lucumi, Carabali, Congo, Ganga, and Mina.37 The community was also inluenced by a signi0cant number of Ewe-Fon imports who entered as a result of the Haitian Revolution and remained past the early period of deportation. It is clear that the slave communities of both New Orleans and Havana were made up of a diverse mix of West African ethnic groups, not to mention a relatively small number of East Africans who came from Mozambique in the last period of the slave trade.38 This reality contradicts the scholarly trend that has sought to conceptualize slave communities in terms of models drawn from the cultural and religious production of one dominant ethnic group.39 Following this line of thinking, scholars examine Haiti as a site of Fon culture,40 Virginia as Igbo,41 Jamaica as Twi,42 and New Orleans as Bambara.43 Although these ethnic groups and their primary modes of religious expression

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and social organization were present in the aforementioned regions, it is my contention that an overemphasis on one group, to the exclusion of all others, minimizes the very real process of exchange and reformation that was constantly occurring in the slave communities throughout the Americas. This 0xation also leads to a static depiction of West African culture in that it diminishes the high level of religious, linguistic, and intellectual interaction and borrowing that was and is so much a part of this region’s heritage. The reality is that societies like the Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, E0k, and the Ejagham did not exist in cultural vacuums in Africa, and neither did their enslaved counterparts in the Americas. Instead, because of physical proximity and the whims of African imperialism, these communities were constantly engaged in the process of expanding and reshaping their religious and cultural models to relect their reality. It is this model of lexibility, innovation, and inter-African syncretism, as opposed to one of rigid, static, cultural dominance, that should serve as the paradigm for inquiries into the complex workings of slave communities throughout the Americas.44 This point has been argued by Sterling Stuckey since the 1980s.45 Although both New Orleans and Havana contained slave communities that originated from multiple points along the sub-Saharan coast and hinterland, these groups displayed strikingly similar approaches to the festival. Most West African festivals encompass a wide range of aesthetic models that difer markedly in terms of their external attributes, but the psychosocial and religious foundations on which these events are constructed exhibit a number of signi0cant consistencies. Primary among these consistencies is the fact that West African festivals are social-religious happenings that address and express the concerns of the community from which they emanate. Dele Jegede calls them “moving spectacles, kaleidoscopes of colors in which the relationship between the secular and the spiritual is reinforced and the complementarities between art and life are reinvigorated.”46 Art historian Herbert Cole says that during the West African festival “life and art interpenetrate, creating a dynamic interplay between reality and illusion, man and god, form and meaning.”47 He notes that African festivals are “at once spiritual and serious, playful and entertaining” and that “it is in their nature to be meaningful on several levels.”48 The West African festival’s ability to express a multiplicity of social and religious concerns emanates from the widely held belief throughout much of the region that there is no strong dividing line between

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the sacred and the secular. Although groups such as the Yoruba, Ibo, Bakongo, and Akan believe that the living and the dead reside in separate worlds, one physical, the other spiritual, beings from the spiritual world are constantly at work in the physical world. With regard to commonalities in West African religious beliefs, John Mbiti states that “the spiritual universe is a unit with the physical, and that these two intermingle and dovetail each other so much that it is not easy, or even necessary, at times to draw the distinction or separate them.”49 Among the Bakongo, “though the dead are persons like the living, they are largely immune to the workings of organic processes, and they are more powerful than the living, whose fortune they largely control.”50 The spiritual potentialities of the West African festival are brought into sharp relief through an analysis of masquerading, iconography, and the interactions of dance and music—the most fundamental expressive components of the festival throughout the region. Through these mediums, the participants—in this case, the community at large—are able to access the advice and counsel of those who inhabit the spirit world to address concerns from the world of the living. In a very real sense, masquerading, iconography, dance, and music give both deceased ancestors and deities a “voice” through which they communicate their approval or disgust with the workings of temporal society. Through these vehicles, the spirits are also able to ofer their blessings on such signi0cant events as the movement from childhood to adulthood, the passing of life from the physical to the spiritual, the initiation of an individual into an exclusive socioreligious group, or the origins and remedy of infertility. Masquerading is an integral part of the West African festival. In the African context, masks and body painting are sacred arts that allow for sancti0cation of the secular, the animation of the inanimate, and the consecration of the lesh to allow the visitation of spiritual entities. Among the Igbo, who utilize masks in a multitude of public ceremonies and festivals, a word that equates to the traditional Western de0nition does not even exist. Instead, when referring to what are called masks in the West, they say either mmuo (spirit) or isi mmuo (spirit face).51 Once someone dons a mask, the individual and the mask become one. In the traditional Egungun festival of the Yoruba, the identity of the person under the mask is completely overshadowed by the more important fact that he is a chosen initiate given the supreme task of serving as the vehicle through which ancestors will communicate.52 Historically, the Egungun or cult of the ancestors appeared

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to hear disputes and uphold the moral values of the community. Not following the dictates spoken through the possessed wearer of the mask was punishable by death.53 Within the all-male Ngbe society of the E0k and the Ejagham, the leopard masquerader serves as “both the animal itself and the collective spirit of the Ngbe membership living and dead.”54 Traditionally, the Ngbe were charged with the administration of all village afairs, religious, social, economic, and political.55 Among the Senufo of the Ivory Coast, Poro maskers escort individuals into the world of the dead while also functioning as the unifying force among the community’s various kin groups.56 The traditional Poro were also responsible for mediating disputes, allocating community resources, and sanctioning the passage from boyhood to manhood. Its female counterpart, the Sande, serve many of the same functions as they pertain to the community of women; they also represent one of the longest-standing traditions of female mask wearers in West Africa.57 The ability of masks and other inanimate artifacts to serve as sites for the communication between the spiritual and the temporal emanates from the ability of many West African societies to consecrate articles, places, and other nonhuman vehicles with a type of life force. This “power to make things happen,” called Ashe by the Yoruba and Se by the Fon, can be imparted into objects that then function as if they were alive.58 To Western observers, this process and/or act has been given the negative moniker “fetishism.” Among the Bakongo the consecrating of a normally inanimate object with bilongo, a term related to supernatural potentiality, transforms it to a n’kisi (plural min’kisi), a spiritual object with immense social power.59 This consecration gives the article a mmoyo or soul.60 According to art historian Robert Farris Thompson, “the vital spark or soul of the spirit-embodying medicine [the n’kisi] may be, according to the Bakongo, an ancestor come back from the dead to serve the owner of the charm, or a victim of witchcraft, captured in the charm by its owner and forced to do his bidding for the good of the community (if the owner is generous and responsible) or for sel0sh ends (if he is not).”61 The use of icons in the West African festival is in many ways an extension of the socioreligious functionality associated with masks. Included in this category are sculptures (in both human and animal form), interwoven textile patterns, carved stafs, and other material artifacts that “encapsulate ideas and actions of central importance in human life.”62 During the festival they may be carried or worn as a

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part of a processional, situated strategically throughout a venue or locale, consulted as if alive, or presented to a masked 0gure for consultation or blessing. Although their forms and meanings are multiple, their interpretation, like that of a mask, is inextricably tied to the collective ethos of the community. In this respect, some forms of iconography, such as mother–child images, speak to the universal issues of maternity, while others may only be understood within a very speci0c communal setting. Like masks, they form a link between the dead and the living and in many instances are perceived as animate entities. Although the processes related to masking and iconography are in and of themselves truly powerful modes of symbolic communication, to become fully actualized, masks and icons are almost always accompanied by music and dance. In the culture zones that fueled the slave trade into Cuba and Louisiana, music, dance, iconography, and masking serve interrelated functions. Each contributes to the successful accomplishment of the larger purpose—in this case, the bringing on of the spirits to ofer advice and consent to the living on matters of communal importance. In many respects, music and dance serve as the 0nal catalyst severing the already thin line between the sacred and the secular. Edward Bowdich, an early-nineteenth-century visitor among the Akan, noted that for this society, it was “absurd to worship God in any way other than through singing and chanting.”63 The West African’s ability to converse with the spiritual world through music and dance is owing in part to the multidimensional nature of these two forms of communication. Among the Yoruba, the dundun or talking drum transmits thoughts to the living and the dead, as does the Akan’s atumpan.64 Drums have been continually cited as an instrument of communication among West Africans, but they were not the only articles capable of conversation. While residing among the Akan, Bowdich noted that they “declare that they can converse by means of their lutes, and an old resident at Accra has assured me he has heard these dialogues and that every sentence was explained to him.”65 He also notes that horns possessed this same capacity.66 Regarding music’s ability to act as a source of communication with the spirit world in the service of a communal value or goal, Mungo Park, who visited the Bambara from 1795 to 1797, noted that music spurred on soldiers “by reciting the great actions of their ancestors, to awaken in them a spirit of glorious emulation.”67 For the traditional African societies that helped populate much of the New World, music served as one of the most powerful mediums

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available for spiritual communication. The ethnomusicologist W. Komla Amoaku, a traditional Ewe musician, provides particular insight into this phenomenon: For me, it is the involuntary alteration that occurs in my psyche, the spiritual upliftment, my transcendental imaginations of a spirit world, my oneness with the gods and spirits of departed relatives, and that temporary transformation of my physical body into spirit. Whenever I participate in this music, whether physically, or silently, I look for properties that make the activity spiritually satisfying and ful0lling—properties that link me with the invisible world and constantly remind me of a world beyond, in which I believe without asserting it myself.68

Dance, which invariably accompanies music in West Africa, forms the last component of the operational quartet that constitutes the traditional festival. From the participatory standpoint, it is dance, with music ever present, that allows for the communalization of the spiritual experience brought on by the festival. Dance complements music, iconography, and masking because it is also a form of cultural expression that embodies a multiplicity of meanings. It can bring on possession by the ancestors, animate a piece of art or a mask, serve as a means of social or political organization, or simply be a mode of expression that is uniquely personal. Dance can also be a language, a form of communication that is not verbal, but kinesthetic. As a member of one of Cameroon’s Ngbe societies remarked after watching an older gentleman dance, “I like him because he uses the conversation with his body. Even an old man can dance conversation.”69 Like masking, iconography, and music, dance also serves as an avenue through which communion with the sacred occurs. In the Yoruba religious system, deities are identi0ed in the physical world by the speci0c liturgy of music and chants used to summon them and, once present, by the particular style of dance engaged in by the possessed devotee. This same process occurs among the Fon in their interaction with the vodun (religious deities). Of the Igbo, George Basden writes, “under its inluence [music] and that of the accompanying dance, one has seen men and women pass into a completely dazed condition, oblivious and apparently unconscious of the world around them.”70 In each of these societies, and numerous others throughout West Africa, dance and music create the environment that allows the spirits to possess, ride, or mount both willing and sometimes unwilling participants.

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In the traditional West African festival, all forms of cultural expression (music, dance, masking, iconography, etc.) work together in service of the whole. They complement one another and neither exceeds the other in importance to those who participate. They are all part of what constitutes the collective experience of the whole. The West African festival unites the spirit world with that of the temporal and it is always concerned with the issues most paramount to the community. It is a multilayered event where dances, rhythms, masks, and religious imagery serve to resolve social conlicts and to uplift the values of the community. The West African festival is the starting point for a discussion of Congo Square and El Día de Reyes. Its socioreligious thrust and ability to use varied, yet interrelated, forms of cultural expression to address communal concerns accompanied the ethnically diverse mix of Africans in the slave societies of the New World. Although this West African expressive model remained, the communal needs it addressed changed dramatically. In addition to a multiplicity of concerns related to the interactions of individuals within a given community, the festivals now had to address the institution of slavery and the nature of the new interpersonal relationships that it engendered. The festival is one way in which the African-descended populations of the New World slave societies gave voice to their collective reality. Its expressive foundation was African, but the target of this expression was purely American. In this respect, the festival is directly connected to other forms of expression that speak to the collective resistance ethos of slave communities throughout the Americas— what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls “nam” or “the total complex of cultural resistance resources available to an oppressed people.”71 Be it sacred or secular music, folktales, material culture, religion, dance, or the various avenues available for rhetorical communication (e.g., sermons, abolitionist tracts, poetry, and literature), the Africandescended populations of the New World slave societies fashioned reality-directed forms of communication that now serve as the legacy of their unwavering battle against the institution of slavery and its multiple manifestations. Sterling Stuckey contends that these forms of expression “could make the diference between a viable human spirit and one crippled by the belief that the interests of the master are those of the slave.”72 The expressive models used by slaves spoke to the complex yet nefarious workings of the slave regime, cruel masters and overseers, the overriding desire for liberation from slavery, and other concerns

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that were unique to the slave. At the core of many of these forms of communication was a continued socioreligious focus, multilayered modes of expression, multiple meaning, and both literal and 0gurative masking. Because of the repressive nature of the New World slave regimes, members of the African-descended community oftentimes concealed or “masked” their true sentiments behind socially acceptable forms of behavior and expression. In this respect, one can characterize slaves throughout the Americas, including those who participated in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square, as true masters of the art of subterfuge. The model of utilizing a diversity of cultural forms to make statements directed at the institution of slavery is evident throughout the Americas. From Jamaica and the United States to Cuba and Brazil, slaves displayed a remarkably uni0ed willingness to allow their cultural productions to serve as indictments of the labor regime in which they were forced to participate. Speaking to a collective sense of displacement and loss that had to be very real for the millions of Africans brought to the Americas, Jamaican slaves sang: If me want go for in a Ebo Me can’t go there! Since dem tief me from a Guinea Me can’t go there If me want to go for in a Congo Me can’t go there! Since dem tief me from my tatta Me can’t go there If me want to go for in a Kingston Me can’t go there! Since Massa go in a England Me can’t go there73

Like other forms of African and slave expression, this song is signi0cant on multiple levels. It addresses the severing of the slaves from their African communities, in this case Igbo and Bakongo, and the heartfelt loss related to familial disruption brought on by being “tief from my tatta” or mother. The song, with its allusions to Igboland, Guinea, and the Congo/Angola region, is also a strong example of the intra-African syncretization that was alluded to earlier. Given the improvisational nature of African and slave songs, one

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could easily see another group echoing this same lament but inserting the names of the Akan, the Bambara, or the Fon. In this example, the collective experience of enslavement unites Jamaica’s Africandescended community, be they residents of rural plantation zones or the urban environment of Kingston. The song also makes evident the slaves’ preference for a uniquely African identity and alludes to the disgust, anger, and at times outright hatred that many slaves felt toward the master class. For these individuals it was clear that slave masters, not malevolent African spirits, were the cause of their condition. It was the slave master—black Jamaicans referred to him as Bukra—who was the criminal, the “tief,” responsible for robbing the Africans of their ties to place, family, and community. Speaking to the daily toils of slaves throughout the Americas, the work songs of Rio de Janeiro’s enslaved lamented: The life of a black slave Is a burden of pain Working all day Without the night to rest74

Their counterparts in the Southern United States echoed many of the same sentiments as they worked and sang: No more auction block for me, No more, no more No more auction block for me, Many thousands gone No more peck of corn for me No more, no more No more peck of corn for me Many thousands gone No more driver’s lash for me No more, no more No more driver’s lash for me Many thousands gone75

Both these examples show how black expression in the Americas could be centered on the concerns of the enslaved. In the Brazilian case, the equation of the black slave with the world of work is signi0cant. It alludes to the fact that in many societies of the Americas, color and status were virtually inseparable. In the Southern example, one also sees the way in which one speci0c item, the auction block,

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could become for the slave a universal symbol of family disruption, displacement, the inhumanity of white slavers toward Africans, and other shocks to the collective psyche. This song also makes very plain the fact that many slaves lived in highly repressive environments that included constraints on the amount of food they could consume (“No more peck of corn for me”) and the extreme levels of physical abuse (“No more driver’s lash for me”). In another rendition of this song, the verses include “No more hundred lash for me” and “No more mistress call for me,” just two more indications of the psychosocial and physical burden that was so much a part of the slave’s life.76 In their religious observances, slaves concerned themselves with issues emanating from their condition of bondage. Even when they evoked images of the past or the future, it was in direct relation to the concerns of the present. In Jamaica, obeah men (spirit workers) used African-based religious rituals to cast dispersion on cruel white masters.77 In nineteenth-century Bahia, Islamic slaves retold tales of past jihads to spur them on in their attempt to overthrow the slave society, while traditional min’kisi were employed by Bakongo slaves during the Stono Rebellion.78 Easily the most successful efort at adapting past socioreligious modes of organization in the service of the present was the Haitian Revolution.79 When not attempting to violently overthrow the regimes of oppression that chained them to the New World plantation societies, the religious activities of slaves buttressed their collective psyche against the dehumanization eforts of the slave regime. In regions dominated by Catholicism, slaves syncretized African deities with those of the church in order to preserve a religious focus that spoke directly to their needs. This same process occurred in the United States, where the slaves equated themselves with the biblical Israelites in search of the seemingly ever-elusive Canaan or promised land, and sang: Walk together children, Don’t you get weary, Walk together children, Don’t you get weary. Oh talk together children, Don’t you get weary, There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land.80

The extent of the African-descended community’s need to address the institution of slavery through its own cultural productions was

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even felt by free persons of color, both black and mulatto. This shows a level of cross-class and cross-color cooperation that mimics the interethnic syncretism that occurred in the slave community. Although all slave societies contained a segment of the free black and mulatto population that tried every measure it could to distance itself from the enslaved, there also remained a signi0cant and, at times, highly vocal component who saw themselves inextricably tied to slavery and the destiny of their black and mulatto brethren in chains. The example of the politicized former slave comes through in the pages of The Narrative of the Cruel Treatment of James Williams ( Jamaica), The History of Mary Prince ( Jamaica), The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, and a host of narratives and polemics from former slaves and free blacks in the United States, including David Walker’s incendiary Appeal in Four Articles.81 Throughout these works the pervasiveness of the sentiment against slavery and the tendency toward a humanistic portrayal of the enslaved is almost identical to that asserted by slaves in their various forms of cultural expression. They tell of cruel masters, hellish work regimes, the pain of separation, the hollowness of the slave master’s Christianity, and the undying desire for freedom that engulfed the entire African-descended community. Walker warned unrepentant slave owners that “God rules in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, having his ears continually open to the cries, tears, and groans of his oppressed people; and being a just and holy Being will one day appear fully on behalf of the oppressed.”82 In addition to the direct statements these works make regarding the nature of slave regimes both urban and rural, the writings of freed blacks and mulattoes also provide insight into comprehending the masked actions of slaves. As the Reverend William H. Hunter, a former North Carolina slave, remarked in a sermon to newly liberated men and women just a week after emancipation, “I remember how we used to have to employ our dark symbols and obscure 0gures to cover up our real meaning. The profoundest philosopher could not understand us.”83 The slave engaged in such subterfuge on a daily basis. It was part of the public deference that Cuban slaves willingly gave the captains generals as they paraded through the streets of Havana during El Día de Reyes. On Sundays at Congo Square, it was the smile that slaves imparted to curious onlookers in their eforts to ensure that the secret meanings of their dances, songs, and gestures remained just that—secret.

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In the subsequent analysis, the socioreligious foundations of the West African festival and the sentiments embodied in the wideranging corpus of slave cultural expression will serve as the basis of the analytical model employed to examine representations in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square. Many of these representations, like the bulk of slave cultural expression, are counterstatements to the slave regime’s assault on the humanity of the enslaved. To arrive at an interpretation of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square that truly speaks to the concerns of the communities from which they emanate, both the externally pleasing veneer of Havana and New Orleans society and the at times “dark symbols and obscure 0gures” created by slaves must be stripped of their masks. In both cases, this unmasking reveals that there was much more going on than most observers, past or present, realized.

2 De0ning Space: Social Control and Public Space

ne thesis of this chapter is that the slave societies of nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans sought to control their African-descended populations by restricting their movement and by de0ning space in a way that would cause people of color to associate speci0c sites with particularly violent or oppressive experiences. The other is that through the actions carried out in Congo Square and El Día de Reyes these cities’ Africandescended populations rede0ned spaces in a manner that countered the debilitating efects of the slave regime’s space-centered socialcontrol initiatives. Central to this argument is the fact that places have psychosocial as well as spatial or geographic meaning. They exist not only in terms of their speci0c location within a city, region, or country, but also as cognitive spaces with attendant psychosocial signi0cance. As psychologically conceived spaces, their de0nitions, be they positive or negative, can vary widely depending on one’s position within a society or particular experiences related to a speci0c site. To illustrate the strength and commonality of the psychosocial de0nitions that individuals and groups attach to places, one need only run through a list of geographic sites that evoke de0nite emotional responses. These could include Nanking, Auschwitz, Wounded Knee, Rwanda, and Vichy, to name just a few. Although each of these locations may evoke diferent responses depending on one’s perspective and proximity to the events that gave these sites signi0cance, the fact remains that the mention of any of these place-names is almost always coupled with a number of very real, in some cases very emotional, descriptors that have little to do with the their geographic

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coordinates or topography. The meaning attributed to a particular site is drawn from a conceptualization of the actions that are believed to have occurred, or continue to occur, there. In this respect, a place such as Nanking may evoke pride among some Japanese as it was the site of one of their most convincing victories over the Chinese in the SinoJapanese War.1 Still others might view the same site as the source of shame and guilt based on the fact that this victory included the murder and rape of almost 360,000 men, women, and children in a period of less than three months. For the Chinese, the same place-name would undoubtedly bring forth feelings of sadness, outrage, hurt, loss, or revulsion, given that the massacre was more than just a strategic military maneuver to the hundreds of thousands of victims and their families. The point is that the meanings associated with speci0c places are not neutral, nor are they de0ned as being the same for all groups. The fact that places are associated with human actions and that an individual’s or group’s position in a society may directly inluence the meaning that they assign to a particular location grounds this chapter’s discussion of space-related issues of social control and resistance in nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans. The fact that speci0c sites within a larger geographic space can attain particularly oppressive meaning serves as a related extension of this theoretical foundation. Examples of this include the mass graves for victims of the Dominican Republic’s president Rafael Trujillo’s murder of more than twenty thousand Haitian immigrants in 1937;2 the site in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán where Hernán Cortés’s army transformed the Fiesta of Toxcatl into a bloodbath by massacring thousands of the festival participants;3 the furnaces and “showers” that leaders of the Third Reich constructed to expedite the extermination of more than six million Jews and others. Returning to the example of Nanking, speci0c places where people were decapitated, shot at gunpoint, or raped and mutilated evoke troubling emotional responses. The list could go on. These examples are relevant to the subject matter of this work in two ways. On the one hand, the slave societies of Havana and New Orleans made these cities “oppressive” spaces for their Africandescended populations through their actions in and around speci0c sites. On the other hand, it was by engaging in a uniquely diferent set of actions that their black and mulatto residents were able to resist the enormous pressure to conceptualize their physical environment in the debilitating terms suggested by their oppressors and to give these spaces meanings that assisted them in their constant battle for physical and psychological survival.

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Before getting to the speci0c actions that slaveholders in Havana and New Orleans used to give places oppressive meanings for their black and mulatto inhabitants, one must realize that the entire institution of African slavery in the Americas was, among other things, a successful assault on place. The term place is used to de0ne not only emotive connotations attached to geographic sites, but also the sense of belonging that one generally associates with having a respected “place” or position within society or group. The most vivid example of this assault was the slave trade itself. Like all forced migrations, it severed not only people’s connections to kin and community, but also their attachments to physical surroundings. The resulting psychosocial crisis related not only to the process of enslavement, but also to the success of slave traders in creating oppressive localities along the journey from the African interior to the Americas. Before slaves even reached coastal slave pens like the infamous Goree Island, many passed through a violent network of spaces that provided an unlattering illustration of the life that awaited them in the New World. Those unlucky enough to 0nd themselves ofered to Europeans as slaves usually began this experience by being marched for hundreds of miles from points inland to numerous African-run public markets. Sometimes they remained con0ned for weeks in holding cells until the market managers felt they had assembled enough bodies to hold a sales event. From this point, they were usually transported with hands bound, facedown, in huge canoes on their way to coastal trading points. Once sold to one of the many European merchant ships, the entrapped men and women remained con0ned in their holds until enough of their counterparts were acquired to make a pro0table voyage. In addition to its symbolic value as a 0nal break with Africa, the slave ship gained oppressive value as one of the most brutal and repressive spaces in human history: “the preponderance of blood and mucous on the loor made it resemble a slaughter house.”4 It was a space that, by its sights, sounds, and even scent, spoke of death, violence, and inhumanity. The emotions that 0lled many of the captured African men and women as they 0rst viewed the slave ship—a loating den of death, disease, sadism, child molestation, and rape— are described by Olaudah Equiano: The 0rst object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These 0lled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board . . . I was

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now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions, too, difering so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was very diferent from any I had ever heard), united to con0rm me in this belief. Indeed such were the horrors of my views and fears at that moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country.5

Equiano’s lament and longing for a return to his former place of residence, even in the most abject state, was no doubt echoed by many who found themselves in this condition. The heightened level of degradation and humiliation that accompanied life on the slave ship often led the captives to an intensi0ed recognition of the positive social networks that they were being separated from in Africa. In a 1791 British House of Commons report on the abolition of the slave trade, one of the committee’s witnesses, Dr. Thomas Trotter, explained that “on being brought on board [Africans] . . . show signs of extreme distress and despair, from a feeling of their situation and regret at being torn from their friends and connections.”6 They later sang “sorrow” songs whose subject was “their wretched situation and their idea of never returning home.”7 Some of those brought on board experienced “hysterical 0ts” after “having dreamed they were in their own country again, and 0nding themselves when awake, in the hold of a slave ship.”8 Those men and women who attempted violent rebellions during the Middle Passage were motivated by a similar sense of distress. When James Town, a British carpenter who made two trips on board slavers, asked an African gentleman why he and his counterparts had attempted an insurrection, the man answered, “What business he had to carry them from their country? They had wives and children whom they wanted to be with.”9 This emotional attachment to Africa and unceasing lament over their forced departure from their community continued to be a theme of African life in the Americas. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Negro spiritual “Motherless Child”: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sometimes I feel like a motherless child A long, long way from home

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The fact that many captured Africans also chose to give their lives— through acts of suicide—as a means of escaping the intensely oppressive environment of the slave ship speaks not only to the success of slave traders at creating an unbearable physical space, but also to the emotional attachment that the enslaved felt for their former communities. The use of suicide as a means of escaping slavery and seeking a reconnection to familiar spaces was centered on the belief in transmigration—a process similar to reincarnation.10 Many of the African ethnic groups brought to the Americas believed that at death an individual did not cease to exist, but rather the soul was transported back to the community of loved ones, as either a newborn family member or some other form of nature. For the Igbo there is “a strongly held belief in the perpetuation of individuals by the medium of repeated births. Provided a spirit conducts himself worthily . . . he will be reborn again at an appointed season and he will resume his life in this world. In due time he will be called ‘home’ once more and so the process will be repeated for all eternity.”11 Among the Ga “the dead can be born again only in their own families, a grandfather as a grandson, or a dead 0rst child as a second child . . . The Ga word for reincarnation is gblomo, signifying a recurring cycle.”12 According to Robert Farris Thompson, for the Bakongo, “assuming a life well lived, we may return within another dawn, emerging from the midnight world (death) carried back into the mainstream of living, in the name and body of grandchildren or succeeding generations.”13 Within this same ethnic group, extraordinary individuals may also be reincarnated as nonhuman objects and thus become part of the spatial environment as “pools, strange rock formations, streams, ravines, waterfalls, oceans and shells.”14 This belief system was also evident among the Akan, who contend that at death “the mogya [the physical aspect of one’s being] returns to the spirit world to await reincarnation,”15 and the Yoruba, who maintain “that persons live, depart, and are reborn and that every individual comes from either the god’s or one’s ancestors on the mother or father’s side.”16 Given all that the captive Africans had endured en route to the slave ship, the chances that the Middle Passage would be only a foretaste of a greater tragedy awaiting them in the Americas thrust many into such a psychological crisis that death became more appealing than life. Many developed “such an aversion to leaving their native places that they threw themselves overboard, on an idea that they should go back to their own country” (54). Jumping overboard as a means of

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committing suicide was so rampant that many slave ships placed netting over the deck to prevent excessive losses when they brought slaves up from the holds. Ecroide Clayton, a former ship surgeon, relates the complexities of the slave traders’ desire to deter suicide and the enslaveds’ unyielding belief in the practice as a means of escaping and, through transmigration, returning home: The captain in order to obviate this idea [of transmigration], thought of an expedient, viz: to cut of the heads of those who died, intimating to them, that if determined to go, they must return without their heads. The slaves were accordingly brought up to witness the operation. One of them seeing, when on deck, the carpenter standing with his hatchet up ready to strike of the head of a dead slave, with a violent exertion got loose, and lying to the place where the nettings had been unloosed . . . he darted overboard . . . a man was placed in the main chains to catch him, which he [the escaped African] perceiving, dived under water, and rising again at a distance from the ship, made signs, which words cannot describe, expressive of his happiness in escaping. He then went down and was seen no more. (Ibid.)

Although throwing themselves overboard was the most dramatic form of suicide engaged in by newly enslaved Africans, they also employed other tactics when drowning themselves was not possible. One eyewitness described a man who attempted to starve himself to death (51). When this act did not achieve the desired result quickly enough, he attempted to cut his own throat by picking and scraping at his neck with his 0ngernails. The night after the ship’s surgeon sewed up the laceration, the man began his mission again on the other side of his throat, in addition to removing the stitches of the previous night. Before dying of starvation a week later, the subject stated that “he would never go with the white men” (ibid.). A woman who starved herself to death despite being whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails, tortured with thumbscrews, and hanged from the ship’s riggings, remarked to her tormenters on the eve of her demise that “she was going home to her friends” (55). Enslaved Africans who made it to the Americas alive found that the myriad psychosocial assaults, including the attack on place, continued. Even though they survived the degradation of the slave ship, they were still “out of place” in the New World. For them, the rewards that suicide ofered still remained tangible. Nowhere was this more evident than in nineteenth-century Cuba, where masters often burned the

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bodies of suicide victims in a futile efort to end the belief in transmigration.17 On the island, suicides by slaves became so rampant that a colonial commission was organized to investigate. Between 1839 and 1846, Spanish o2cials in Cuba studied 1,337 suicides. African slaves accounted for 86.7 percent of the victims.18 Overall, the commission calculated that among newly arrived Africans, 6.1 percent committed suicide.19 In the Havana slave pens, traders tried to lift the spirits of the enslaved Africans to “prevent their sinking under that fatal home-sickness which carries of so many during the 0rst months of their captivity.”20 Attempting to assess the motivations of the Africans who chose to take their own lives, the commission concluded that: for committing suicide they never adopt other means except hanging themselves from trees or in their huts. And in doing so they put on all their clothes, put unconsumed food in their hats, and even bring to the place where they die the animals which belong to them, the better to return well supplied to their native land where they believe they go body and soul.21

Fredrika Bremer, who visited Havana and its environs in the 0rst half of the 1850s, observed with regard to the slaves’ use of suicide as a means of spiritually reconnecting with the African social networks that they had been torn away from: it is not long since eleven Luccomees [Yoruba] were found hanging from the branches of a guasima tree . . . they had each one bound his breakfast in a girdle around him; for the African believes that such as die here immediately rise again to new life in their native land. Many female slaves, therefore, will lay upon the corpse of the self-murdered the kerchief, or head gear, which she most admires, in the belief that it will thus be conveyed to those who are dear to her in the mother country, and will bear to them a salutation from her. The corpse of a suicide-slave has been covered with hundreds of such tokens.22

From the initial stages of the slave trade to the arrival of the human cargoes in the Americas there was a continuous exchange between the oppressors and the oppressed centered on de0nitions of space and the emotions that speci0c sites engendered. Although this process took on new forms in Havana and New Orleans, it continued to be one of the foundations of the control/resistance dynamic that pervaded life for these cities’ black and mulatto inhabitants. In both Havana and

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New Orleans, the oppression associated with space began with the living arrangements provided for slaves. Although the domestic slave’s accommodations within the owner’s house are usually characterized in a positive manner, in contrast to the usually dilapidated substandard housing of the plantation slave, living alongside one’s oppressor tremendously minimizes one’s personal freedom. Although the physical condition of one’s accommodations is not unimportant, some slaves may have favored a lower level of structural protection and inhome amenities in exchange for an escape from the constant presence of their master. Most slaves in Havana and New Orleans lived in tiny rooms of the main house or in similarly cramped back houses called dependencies. Given the small size of most homes in both cities during the nineteenth century, this arrangement left very little space that was not within earshot or eyesight of the owner. Worse yet, some personal slaves had the misfortune of being forced to live in the same room as their young mistress or master. Sometimes a small closet was converted for their use or they slept at the foot of their master’s bed. In either case, the amount of space available for these slaves to speak freely, worship, or just relax without the constant threat of an immediate call from their owners was minimal indeed. Wherever they went, their master was there. Even if the slave was blessed with an outwardly “kind” owner, the fact that he or she still kept the slave in bondage made the owner public enemy number one in the slave’s eternal quest for freedom. As one observer noted regarding Havana’s domestic slaves, “in whatever manner they are treated by their masters, the love of liberty soon renders them restless.”23 For women who became the object of their master’s unwanted sexual attention, living in the same house only compounded their level of exploitation. (This point is dealt with at length in chapter 3.) The proximity of the slave to his or her owner was particularly negative if the enslaved had the misfortune to be bought by a sadistic master. For these individuals, their place of residence could grow to resemble a torture chamber. Such was the case for those slaves purchased by Delphine Lalaurie, one of New Orleans’s most prominent and inluential society women in the early nineteenth century. On April 10, 1834, 0remen responded to a blaze at her home on the corner of Royal and Hospital streets.24 As this was one of the most opulent residences in the area, throngs of spectators raced to the site. When the 0re0ghters penetrated the attic, “their blood curdled by the horrid spectacle which struck their view—seven slaves, more or less

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mutilated, slowly perishing from hunger, deep lacerations, and festering wounds” (53). Among them were an eighty-some-year-old man, an elderly woman who could barely hold herself up, and a man with a “horrible gaping wound in his head” whose “body was covered with scars 0lled with worms.”25 In addition to the neglect, starvation, and numerous physical beatings that the victims endured, they were also found wearing iron collars equipped with sharp cutting edges (Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was, 54). It was initially thought that the mistress of the house set the 0re in hopes of disguising her actions, but it was later revealed that one of the victims had started the 0re “as the only means of putting an end to her suferings and those of her fellow captives” (60). Like so many trapped in the system of violently oppressive servitude, she simply came to the conclusion that the prospects death ofered, however uncertain, outweighed those of life in her present condition. For this woman and the six others found in Lalaurie’s attic, the fact that they lived in such close proximity of their owner was of no bene0t. The case of the slaves tortured by Lalaurie is signi0cant. On the one hand, it con0rms the oppressive potentialities of space within urban slave systems. On the other hand, it raises suspicion that Lalaurie may have not been alone in her misdeeds. The fact is that the heinous acts committed in the grand home on the corner of Royal and Hospital streets would never have been discovered if the tortured woman had not set the 0re. In fact, Delphine Lalaurie was one of the last persons anyone would have suspected of such acts. “In her manners, language, and ideas, she was re0ned—a society woman” (60). She “never neglected” her religious duties and “her purse was ever open to the hungry, the a6icted, and the sick” (ibid). Her home had been visited by former Governor W. C. C. Claiborne and many other prominent political and business 0gures. Despite this exposure, she was able to keep her sadistic tendencies a secret. One can only speculate as to how many others were as successful in similarly disguising their actions. Lalaurie may have been exceptional in the level of brutality that she personally meted out, but she was by no means the only slaveholder in Havana or New Orleans to rely on physical punishment to control black and mulatto servants. Unlike Lalaurie, however, most owners distanced themselves from overt acts of violence against their slaves by simply sending them outside of their residence to be beaten. In New Orleans, the section of the police jail reserved for blacks and mulattoes was used for this purpose. In Havana, an o2cial whipping

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house existed just beyond the city walls. The use of these violent edi0ces, controlled by a third party, in essence allowed the master class to keep its hands clean while still maintaining the use of physical beatings as a mechanism of social control. In Havana, slaveholders had a practice of sending one or two of their domestic slaves “once a month to the whipping post, not so much on account of any delinquency, as because without these periodical advertisements the whole family would become unmanageable, and the master and mistress would lose their authority.”26 Like many other oppressive sites in the city, the whipping house was not easily recognizable by the casual visitor. It was “a modest looking building protected from public gaze by lofty wooden parapets.”27 Inside were a series of whipping posts “where low whites do the logging of the city house-servants, men and women, at so many reals a head.”28 In describing these buildings, David Turnbull, the British consul in Havana in the early 1840s, remarked that, although “the authorities have succeeded in shutting out the inquisitive glances of the passers by, excluding from public view the streaming blood and lacerated lesh of the suferers, they have totally failed in shutting in their piercing screams and piteous shrieks for mercy.”29 The actions carried out in New Orleans’s police jail difered little from those of the Havana whipping house. In both cities, masters sent their slaves to these locations and paid for a speci0c number of stripes to be laid upon their backs with a whip. An eyewitness to this practice in the New Orleans police jail provides the following description: There lay a black girl, lat upon her face on a board, her two thumbs tied and fastened to one end, her feet tied and drawn tightly to the other end, while a strap passed over the small of her back, and fastened around the board, con0ned her closely to it. Below the strap she was entirely naked . . . Every stroke [of the whip] brought away a strip of scarf skin and made the blood spring to the surface. The poor creature writhed and shrieked, and in a voice which showed alike her fear of death and her dreadful agony screamed to her master who stood at her head, “Oh! Spare my life—do n’t [sic] cut my soul out!” But still fell the horrid lash; still strip after strip was broken from the skin, gash after gash was cut in her lesh, until it became a livid and bloody mass of raw and quivering muscle.30

In addition to its use as a whipping house, the police jail was signi0cant for a number of other acts that occurred there. Located behind the city’s administrative buildings at Jackson Square on Chartres and

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St. Peter’s streets, the jail was also where blacks and mulattoes were sent if they were caught out after the city’s nine o’clock curfew for people of color.31 Once brought in under this ofense, the accused held the burden of proving that they were free. The records of the police jail show that most people of color who contended that they were free were admitted to the jail with the designation “s. d. l.,” the French acronym for “so-called free.”32 For those con0rmed as slaves and others awaiting proof of freedom, being sent to the police jail usually resulted in logging and/or labor on the chain gang. In the latter case, they could usually be seen throughout the city “wearing an iron collar and dragging a ponderous ball and chain while at work on the public streets” (Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was, 133). Even though some whites were forced to labor alongside black and mulatto ofenders in the early part of the nineteenth century, a 1829 gubernatorial action made the chain gang an all-black afair (149). Although New Orleans always maintained a correctional facility for whites, whether a segregated portion of a central jail or a physically separate edi0ce, one should not assume that these buildings had the same symbolism for all races. Most persons of African descent were detained for violations of social-control measures that had no legal equivalent pertaining to whites. The most common black ofenses included loitering, verbally disrespecting a white person, and curfew violation. Blacks were often incarcerated even though they were not charged with any crime, but merely because their owners were experiencing 0nancial di2culties. Even though they had committed no ofense, they were forced to endure the same existence as convicted felons. On January 5, 1850, Fredrika Bremer visited a city jail in New Orleans where black women being held as security for a bankrupt owner’s debt were imprisoned alongside white women convicted of murder. When she asked why they were being held in this condition, her guide replied that “it is for their advantage that they are here” and that “at the furthest” they would remain “two or three weeks—quite a short time.”33 But when Bremer asked one of the women to validate the claims of the guide, she shockingly replied, “two weeks . . . we have already been here two years.”34 Although the police jail was New Orleans’s main public site for the punishment of slaves in the early part of the nineteenth century, as the city’s population grew, so did its need for additional space to con0ne and punish nonconforming individuals, whether slave or free, white, mulatto, or black. By the mid-1840s, when the city had been split into three municipalities to avert continued tensions between its

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varying linguistic and cultural groups, the police jail was just one of many correctional facilities in the city.35 Joining it were the parish prison, the police jail of the third municipality, and the workhouses of the third and 0rst municipalities. Each facility, although called by diferent names and having separate forms of governance, conducted business in much the same manner as the original police jail. In Havana, the proliferation of correctional facilities mimicked that of New Orleans. Here, the Presidio, the Nueva Cárcel (new jail), and the Depósito Central del Cerro all served as punishment sites for blacks and mulattoes. In the 0rst two facilities, whites and blacks were detained in segregated areas, while the latter was created solely for the detention and punishment of cimarrones or runaway slaves. The Presidio was noticeable to all visitors to Havana. Situated beside the Punta military fort, it was “one of the striking objects as you enter the harbor.”36 Despite the impressive 0gure that its silhouette created in the Havana landscape, the Presidio, like the whipping house, was nonetheless disguised. Richard Dana, who traveled to Havana in 1859, noted that “it has no appearance of a jail without, but rather of a palace or court; but within, it is full of live men’s bones and of all uncleanness . . . It is simply horrible.”37 Although whites and blacks were both subject to the Presidio’s horrendous environment, individuals with the 0nancial means could pay to be removed from the general population and placed in “Salas de Distinción.”38 Because all slaves and many free blacks and mulattoes were at the lower end of the economic ladder, this option was usually not available to them. For most African-descended prisoners held in the Presidio, each day promised work on the chain gang. Dana provides the following description of the city’s compulsory workforce: Each man has an iron band riveted round his ankle, and another round his waist, and the chain is fastened, one end into each of these bands, and dangles between them, clanking with every movement. This leaves the wearers free to use their arms, and, indeed, their whole body, it being only a weight and badge and a note for discovery, from which they cannot rid themselves. It is kept on them day and night, working, eating or sleeping . . . They look thoroughly wretched.39

Although the Presidio was Havana’s most noted public venue of incarceration for much of the city’s early history, in the middle of the 1840s colonial o2cials 0nished construction of the Nueva Cárcel.40 Even before its 0nal completion, the jail housed more than a thousand

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inmates, white and black. By 1842 the number had doubled.41 Like the Presidio, it also contained Salas de Distinción and compelled inmates to work on public-works projects as part of the chain gang. Even though the Presidio, the Nueva Cárcel, and the military fort at Cabanas, across Havana Bay, all held both black and white prisoners, like the police jail in New Orleans, race played a signi0cant role in the reasons for incarceration. For whites, one of the most common justi0cations for sustained con0nement in the nineteenth century was political. Having lost almost all of its colonies in the Americas as a result of the sweeping independence movements of the early 1800s, Spain embarked on a program of political repression in Cuba.42 As a part of its efort to deter all embryonic liberation attempts and to violently quell any insurrections, the crown 0nanced the building of military and correctional facilities. Initially, the latter were to house would-be revolutionaries, even though slaves, and common criminals, irrespective of color, were also to be kept there. Although slaves in Havana were usually held for the same type of social-control violations as those in New Orleans, their white counterparts were often enemies of the state held for such crimes as treason. In many cases, black and mulatto inmates who had done nothing more than violate the city’s curfew were subjected to the same treatment as whites who had committed serious felonies. As James Alexander notes, “from the murderer to petty thief, all were allowed to mingle indiscriminately.”43 The fact that whites could pay their way out of chain-gang duty and reside in Salas de Distinción, whereas many people of African descent were held for ofenses that had no white counterpart, shows that many whites charged with the highest crimes were still treated better than people of color charged with simple misdemeanor ofenses. In contrast to the multiracial inmate populations housed in the Nueva Cárcel and the Presidio, the Depósito Central del Cerro was the o2cial correction and detention facility for captured runaway slaves in the western portion of the island. More than 0fty thousand were incarcerated there between 1804 and 1854, so it was a site that gained oppressive signi0cance for Havana’s black and mulatto inhabitants.44 Although most of the record books for the facility are no longer extant or damaged beyond comprehension, a sample of records from July to September 1844 furnishes an informative glimpse of the daily workings of the detention center. In the period under consideration, the number of detainees at the Depósito Central consistently averaged around seven hundred.45 The

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daily ledger accounted for the total number of slaves housed in the facility, new arrivals and discharges, and the total number of deaths and runaways for the day. All slaves entering the facility were listed by name, ethnic identi0cation, and the name of their o2cial owner, and were assigned an inmate number. The inmate numbers were given in successive order and any slave who escaped and was later recaptured was always reentered under the same number originally assigned. Even though all the record books cannot be accounted for, the successive nature of the numbering practice gives some indication of exactly how long some individuals remained in the facility. Once the enslaved were brought to the Depósito Central, their owners were informed of their capture and asked to redeem them. Owners had the option of retrieving their slaves immediately or allowing them to remain inde0nitely as a means of punishment. Those awaiting retrieval spent the bulk of their time on public-works-related chain gangs or were rented out, usually for work on private plantations. From July 1 to September 30, 1844, a total of 317 runaways o2cially entered the Depósito Central. In the same period, 297 inmates exited. Just over 67 percent of all slaves leaving the center were retrieved by their masters, but a disturbing 16.5 percent were because of death. Given the length of time that some of the deceased inmates were incarcerated, it seems likely that they entered the facility after having sufered some sort of near-mortal injury in the process of being captured. This was the case for the creole woman María de la Sur. She was brought in on July 3, 1844, and died six days later.46 Another Creole named Amalia died on September 6 of the same year after just under two weeks at the facility.47 Other inmates, such as the Lucumi Maracio,48 the Carabalis Matais49 and María de Jesús,50 and the Gangas Ru0no51 and Elias,52 died less than two months after being admitted. One of the most troubling deaths to occur at the Depósito Central was that of inmate 1599. Described only as the hija (daughter) of prisoner 819, the infant was born in the Depósito’s hospital on August 27, 1844.53 By September 2 of the same year she was dead.54 Because of the diference in the inmate numbers assigned the mother and daughter it seems possible that the mother spent the majority of her pregnancy within the walls of the detention center. Given the rigorous work assigned inmates and the generally unhealthy living conditions that prevailed in the jail, it would have required nothing short of a miracle for the mother to go through a complication-free pregnancy and give birth to a healthy baby. There were no miracles for either inmate 819 or her 0ve-day-old baby girl.

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The specter of death was so routine for inmates of the Depósito Central that some attempted to escape by feigning death in the hope that they would be overlooked in the never-ending procession of corpses out of the center. This was the objective of the Ganga inmate Camilio. On September 18, 1844, his name was included in the death ledger.55 Oddly, the next day a Camilio Ganga was also brought into the facility along with a group of new captives.56 Because he was entered under his old inmate number (1619) while the others brought in were assigned numbers beginning with 1693, it is clear that the Camilio Ganga admitted on September 3 was the same Camilio Ganga taken to the hospital and pronounced dead on September 18 and the same Camilio Ganga readmitted a day later. A similar process of entry, death, and reentry was associated with the Creole Aniceto. He entered the jail as inmate 1446 on July 9, 1844, was taken to the Depósito Central’s hospital on July 11, 1844, and was listed in the logbook as a death that same day.57 Five days later he was returned alone and assigned his old inmate number.58 Although the short-lived departures of Camilio and Aniceto suggest that some of the other deaths listed on the logs were feigned, no doubt with the complicity of o2cial personnel, one must not forget that an extreme number of veri0able deaths over a signi0cant period of time was the prerequisite if this course of action was to be successful. The cases of Camilio and Aniceto provide insight into the level of success of inmates who escaped the Depósito Central. Throughout the three months studied, a signi0cant number of escapees were recaptured and returned to the detention center. This is indicated by persons who were logged in with an inmate number that was out of order with the numbers being assigned on a given day. In July 1844 there were a total of seven reentries, while August and September had nine and eight, respectively. Of these, some, such as the Carabali Andrea, remained free only six days.59 Others, such as the Macau Juan, remained free from November 27, 1843,60 until his recapture on September 28 the following year.61 Of course, an undeterminable number of escapees were never caught and thus were not listed in the reentry lists. Like the time between escape and recapture, the length of incarceration for people brought to the Depósito Central varied widely. Some were retrieved by their masters only days after they were captured; others stayed on more than a year. The Creole José Morales was brought in on August 17, 1844, only to escape eleven days later.62 Others, such as the Lucumi Felipe (inmate 11), who escaped on the day when new inmates were being assigned numbers beginning with

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1510, seem to have waited a much longer time before departing.63 The Depósito Central’s death rolls also reveal the great disparity in the time served by captives. On July 25, 1844, when new inmates were being assigned numbers beginning with 1536, the Ganga Antonio, inmate 17, died.64 The Carabali Alejandro, inmate 23, passed away on August 24, 1844, the same day that new inmates number 1593 and 1594 entered the facility.65 If one takes the three-month average of just over a hundred incoming detainees a month and projects backward, it seems likely that Felipe, Antonio, and Alejandro spent at least a year, and maybe up to 0fteen months, in the facility. Because of the frequency of new arrivals, the living conditions, the work obligations, the high numbers of deaths, the questionable prospects for successful escape, and the indeterminable lengths of stay, there is little doubt that the Depósito Central was seen by most slaves, and probably a signi0cant number of free blacks and mulattoes, as an oppressive space. For many servants working in the homes and 0elds in close proximity to the facility, its constant sight and the knowledge of its inner workings were no doubt a strong deterrent to escape. Its name was probably mentioned whenever a master wanted to quell a slave’s impulse to act on desires for liberation. Even though the Depósito Central was likely a signi0cant 0xture in the minds of people of color, most visitors to the city probably never even noticed it. Located in the opulent suburb of El Cerro, it was masked from the eyes of the casual observer. The suburb, about twenty minutes’ walk from the nearest part of the city, was lined with “beautiful residences and gardens.”66 Dana said of the area, “it is high ground, and commands a noble view of Havana and the sea.”67 For wealthy white Cubans, to live in El Cerro was the ultimate achievement. Its best residences were “very elegant and costly, with marble loors, high ceilings, piazzas.”68 With gardens “loaded with the perfume of a thousand tropical lowers and fruits,” its lifestyle was one that most whites dreamed of.69 For the thousands of black and mulatto slaves in Havana, El Cerro was not a dream but the symbol of a nightmarish fate—a place to be avoided at all costs. Although the o2cial correction facilities in Havana and New Orleans imbued these cities with oppressive meanings for their African-descended populations, they existed alongside many other edi0ces associated with equally troubling activities. High on the list were those places where black and mulatto men and women were bought and sold. Like many cities in the slaving areas of the Americas, Havana and New Orleans served as the slave-trading centers for a vast

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geographic region. Havana supplied labor for the majority of Cuba’s sugar planters in the western districts, and New Orleans was a major slave depot of the bustling Deep South. The slaving industry in both municipalities precipitated the construction of numerous facilities for the storage and sale of slaves. In both cities, speci0c zones were devoted to the smooth management of this odious commerce. Although a wide range of markets served Havana’s slaving enterprise for much of the period prior to the nineteenth century, by the early 1830s the warehousing, sale, and trade of slaves was conducted in two huge o2cial storage facilities generally referred to as the barracones. One of the buildings held up to a thousand inhabitants; the other had a maximum capacity of 0fteen hundred. As a means of added control against rebellion, the barracones were located “just under the windows” of the captain general’s residence.70 The main Paseo, along with the railroad, led directly to the warehouses. As the trains passed the barracones, the passengers were often “horri0ed by the unearthly shouts” of the slaves who “push their arms and legs through the bars of their windows.”71 Across Havana Bay in the suburb of Regla, an equally oppressive set of smaller barracones anchored a similar slaving network. Insight into the situation encountered by the enslaved inside of the barracones can be gleaned from a description from nearby Matanzas. Henry Tudor, who visited Cuba in the early 1830s, recounts: Three of these miserable outcasts were extremely ill, from the efects of close con0nement during a long voyage; particularly one of them, who appeared in a dying state, utterly unable to stand up, and who lay prostrate and groaning on the ground as naked as the day he was born. The unhappy creature was nothing but skin and bone . . . During the biddings the prostrate negro was attempted to be raised on his feet, to shew that he was not actually dead, and therefore not without hope to a possible purchaser . . . The gamblers for human blood, however, unutterably strange to say, ofered money for his thus wasted body . . . On inquiring the following morning, I was informed that this forlorn victim of the white man’s inhumanity had expired during the night, and thus escaped for ever from his cruel persecutors.72

Although the tendency of the managers of the warehouses was to treat slaves “favorably” so that they would not kill themselves, slavery as an institution was the antithesis of favorability. The people housed in the barracones, no matter how “well treated,” were there to be purchased by other human beings and to become their slaves in perpetuity.

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They held virtually no legal rights and were, as a rule, driven to premature deaths as laborers in the vast sugar plantation complex that fueled the island’s unquenchable demand for black labor. This fact could not have been lost on the inhabitants of the barracones or their counterparts working on the outside. The slaving enterprise in New Orleans was much less regulated than that of Havana. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, certain sections of the city became known for the tra2c in slaves. Included in these areas was the section known as Exchange Alley. Extending over six blocks along both Royal and Chartres streets from St. Peter to Canal, it was one of the busiest areas of the city. Its main competition was made up of a host of smaller trading areas. Upon approaching these sections of the city, one was “soon aware of their neighborhood from the groups of colored men and women, of all shades between black and light yellow, which stand or sit unemployed at the doors.”73 Although Maspero’s Exchange on the corner of Chartres and St. Louis streets was one of the leading auction houses in the early nineteenth century, by the mid-1840s no venue engaged in the sale or trade of slaves in New Orleans rivaled the Rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel. Situated at the western end of Exchange Alley, its domed rooftop was eclipsed only by the St. Louis Cathedral directly behind Jackson Square. In terms of height and breath, its rooftop jutted out of the New Orleans landscape and dwarfed nearly every other structure in sight. It “contained not only the 0nest bar-room in the city, but the principal auction mart, where slaves, stocks, real estate, and all other kinds of property were sold from noon to 3:00 P.M.”74 Many in the African-descended community no doubt cringed at the sight of the Rotunda, knowing that under its rooftop their counterparts were being sold away from family and friends. But the unknowing visitor could easily pass by the building and never sense the structured system of debasement that took place there.75 That is because the auctions conducted outside of the Rotunda did not resemble the typical slave auctions that nineteenth-century travelers and journalists most often spoke about. In contrast to the image of the half-naked, unkempt slave ofered up on some makeshift stage in the heat of the Southern summer, the Rotunda’s process was so sanitized that its true purpose, at least externally, was hard to decipher.76 The most obvious aspect of this disguise was the required dress of the individuals to be auctioned. Instead of the tattered wardrobe one might expect, the enslaved seated outside of the Rotunda were dressed

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as if they were going out for a night on the town. Men wore full suits or tuxedos, including top hats, while women dressed in colorful dresses. Before being brought to the auction loor, the slaves were led down a street in Exchange Alley by an equally impressive black master of ceremonies sometimes accompanied by an orchestra or band. As one former slave recalled, “some of the traders kept a big, good natured buck to lead the parade and uniforms for both men and women, so that the high hats, the riot of the white, pink, red, and blue would attract the attention of prospective buyers.”77 Even though the outward appearance of the Rotunda and the observable actions and dress of the slaves in the streets could have easily been mistaken for a carnival or fair of some sort, the internal workings of the slave mart, once the auctioning process began, were identical to those carried out in countless other sites throughout the Americas. Once the auction bell rang, black and mulatto men, women, and children were separated from friends and relations, publicly demeaned by being forced to display their physical 0tness in any number of silly acts of agility, physically violated by a host of semisexual examinations, and reduced to the status of property as they were traded from one owner to another for money, land, livestock, crops, and a laundry list of other material products. It was this image, not that of a joyous carnival, that most likely emerged in the minds of the African-descended populace as they passed the Rotunda or viewed its ominous rooftop from any number of places within the city. In addition to the list of speci0c sites just mentioned, Havana and New Orleans also maintained other systems of social control, grounded in de0nitions of space, that gave both cities an oppressive meaning for their black and mulatto inhabitants. These systems imparted a level of repression that transcended individual experience. Although a particular slave or free person of color in Havana or New Orleans could avoid public correctional facilities and auction houses, and reside in a home with a kind master—an oxymoron if ever there was one—each city created particular space-related social-control measures experienced by all. In Havana, the most wide-ranging method of social control was centered on the omnipresent military. Latin American independence movements and the desires of native-born white Cubans for liberation were two of the factors that led Spain to construct considerable military and correctional facilities in Havana in the early to mid-1800s. The other was the control of its growing black and mulatto population. Spurred on by a fear of a replication of the bloody rebellion

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that led to the self-emancipation of hundreds of thousands of people of African-descent in Haiti, Spain and many native-born Cubans believed that any large-scale military encounter between the crown and independence-seeking white Cubans would inevitably open the door for a massive rebellion on the part of blacks and mulattoes. As one leader in the Spanish Cortes stated, “the island of Cuba, if it does not remain Spanish, is bound to become Negro, inevitably Negro.”78 The extensive building program, coupled with a massive increase in military personnel, served the dual purpose of deterring revolutionary activity on the part of white Cubans and rebellion on the part of the sons and daughters of Africa. Havana in the mid-1840s had a large number of military-related facilities. As a holdover from its days as the key to Spain’s defenses of its New World empire, the city had always had a warlike character. The diference in the new era was that the target of this massive arsenal was now focused on internal, as opposed to external, threats. Among the most notable military structures were the fully armed and manned fortresses Punta, Morro, Cabanas, Atares, Príncipe, and Número Cuatro. Heading south from the Punta along the road that abutted the walled portion of the city were an execution site, the Nueva Cárcel, and an extensive set of barracks. Along the wall, in perfectly spaced intervals, ran ten small guard towers. Halfway to the other side of the city was another set of barracks along with the extensive Champ de Mars training ground where, every morning at 7 A.M., armed troops in full uniform conducted marching drills and practiced maneuvers.79 Just past the training ground stood the island’s o2cial arsenal and naval yard. Along the portion of the city that faced Havana Bay the system of small, strategically spaced fortresses continued. In the heart of the city were the Presidio, two armory depots (Compostela y San Isidro and Cuba y Chacón) and the station house of the city guard (Habana y Del Sol). Manning this extensive layout of hostile structures was a huge number of active military personnel. Historian Hugh Thomas estimates that the total Spanish occupying force numbered about forty thousand active personnel for much of the 1800s.80 In 1859 when Dana visited a local opera house, he could not help but remark that there were enough soldiers there “to put down a small insurrection on the spot.”81 In this same time period, Joseph Dimock commented that “one cannot turn around without seeing soldiers everywhere.”82 This constant need to show force continued even on the Sabbath. Every Sunday, soldiers marched through the streets proudly displaying their

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colors and arms. In the late 1850s it was also noted that the captain general “never goes about the city without his mounted guard of a hundred lancers.”83 The pronounced military presence in Havana had to be felt by slaves. It was no doubt a strong deterrent to rebellion and an efective means of ensuring day-to-day social-control objectives. This presence made the power of the state a very tangible force in the lives of the blacks and mulattoes of Havana. In its actions against the planned insurrection of José Antonio Aponte, a free black from Havana, and the repression meted out in Matanzas in 1844 in the “conspiracy of the ladder,” the Spanish government sent a clear message that its military force was there to ensure the viability of its colony as a leader in the international sugar market.84 Its extensive military apparatus, in the words of Thomas, “continued to provide the forces of order to restrain any slaves or free Negro revolt as well, of course, as any external threat.”85 In New Orleans, the space-related social-control mechanism was centered on the actions of the city guard and on an elaborate system of racial segregation.86 Throughout the city, blacks and mulattoes were barred from the full utilization of public spaces and services. In its theaters and public exhibition halls, people of color, no matter what their status or amount of wealth, had to sit in separate sections, usually in the balconies. This practice was so widespread that these sections soon gained the negative moniker “nigger heavens.”87 People of color were routinely excluded from restaurants, saloons, and hotels if the facility served whites. Even the famous Charity Hospital contained separate wards for blacks and whites. When the city opened the doors of its public schools in the 1840s, blacks and mulattoes were forced to attend segregated facilities.88 The policy of racial segregation extended to the dead, with separate cemeteries for blacks and whites.89 New Orleans’s system of “separate but equal” access to public accommodations long predated the famous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that upheld it. At 0rst glance, it may seem that New Orleans’s policy of racial segregation pales as a method of social control when compared to the militarization of Havana. But this practice had both physical and psychological objectives. From the physical standpoint the emphasis was to control people of color by restricting space in which they could move or interact. This practice also minimized the amount of time and space that whites had to share with a group that they viewed as their social and intellectual inferiors. From a psychological standpoint, the

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policy aimed to undermine the self-worth of the group being segregated. For those targeted by the system of de jure and de facto laws and codes of conduct, the ritualized behavior prescribed by these regulations gradually worked to create the feelings of inferiority that the slave society established as the rationale for the installation of the practice in the 0rst place. It was an insidious means of slowly draining the life force from people in the hope that one day they would simply accept their second-class status as an unalterable fact, a law of nature, or the will of God. Even though the system of racial separation had social control as its primary objective, it could also lead to a loss of control. This was the case in 1833 when a group of black men, tired of being denied the services of one of the city’s segregated streetcars, lashed out.90 After being summarily turned away one too many times, the men “went away and armed themselves.”91 They returned, carrying 0rearms, dispersed the passengers and the conductor with a lurry of gunshots, and took control of the train. Soon after the hijacking, the men were captured and charged with a number of criminal ofenses. Although their assault on the system of segregation was short-lived and may not have been worth the punishment that awaited them, which included a possible death penalty, they were simply fed up with the constant degradation they experienced as targets of the city’s policy of racial separation and control. In this context, they may have conceptualized their actions not as a crime, but as a last-ditch efort to resuscitate their battered sense of self-worth. They were simply putting into action one of black America’s most lasting a2rmations: “Better to die free than live a slave.” The most successful space-related social-control measures may have existed outside of Havana and New Orleans, in the rural plantations of Louisiana and Cuba, which were viewed by the Africandescended community as being much more violent and repressive than either of those cities. Consequently, the threat of sale or relocation into these areas could be used to exact a high level of conformity. As Juan Manzano, a domestic slave in nineteenth-century Cuba states: When I look over the huge number of accumulated vissitudes [sic] that have upset the most precious days of my youth with terrible blows, I tremble, I tremble not because of the past, but because of what mysteriously remains in the urn of my destiny: a sugar mill, a whipping. That for me has so much importance that I tremble at the mere thought of it.92

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The violent and oppressive character of plantations in Louisiana and Cuba can be evaluated from statements made by the enslaved in both areas. In general, these estates were viewed as places with minimal, if any, rights for people of African descent, debilitating labor expectations, and omnipresent, physically abusive masters or overseers. As Ceceil George, a woman sold from South Carolina to St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, stated, it was “de mos wicked country dat our God’s son ever died for.”93 Contrary to the belief that French slave owners were more lenient or benevolent than their Anglo-American counterparts, a former slave, Albert Patterson, contended that “de Frenchmen an’ de Dutchmen were mean, but the Irishmen was good.”94 Elizabeth Ross Hite tells of a plantation where the master “was so mean dat he died wid his eyes wide open. Whenever ya see a man die wid his eyes wide open he is a dirty rascal an’ mean to people.”95 Where Ceceil George lived, Everbody worked, young an’ ole, if ye’ could only carry two or three sugar cane ye’ worked. No school, no church—ye’ could’t sing, an Saturday night dey [the master] always have a dance, but ye’ worked. Sunday, Monday, it all de same, an if ye’ say “Lawd a’mercy”—de Overseer whip ye’. De ole people, de jes’ set down an’ cry—it like a heathen part o’ de country.96

Unlike the urban practice of sending slaves to a third party to receive physical punishment, on the plantation the overseer directed the work routine and punished those who did not conform to its dictates. Slack Wilson, a former slave who toiled on the Robbins Plantation in Clinton, Louisiana, remembered that “they used to whip slaves if they didn’t pick enough cotton. They put four pegs in the ground and tied one leg to one peg, the other to the other, and the arms were tied together. They were stripped of all clothing and whipped with a raw hide.”97 Some masters chose beatings as the most common tool of coercion; others found diferent means of exacting conformity. Albert Patterson, who had “seen de blood cut out o’ niggers dat deep, seen it wid my own eyes,” nonetheless had a master who refrained from the use of the whip as much as possible.98 “He wouldn’t whip, he’d punish.” Chief among his means of punishment was the use of the iron collar: He had a iron band, he’d rivet to go around the ankle, an’ he had a iron band to go round the neck, with a piece o’ iron standin’ up in de front, de back an each side, ye’ had to hold ye’ head jes so, an

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ye couldn’t lay down, an ye’ had to pad that iron band, ’cause it was so heavy it would cut ye’ neck.99

Hunton Love, a former slave who surprisingly attained the job of overseer during the Civil War, provides an interesting perspective on the variety of measures used to keep slaves in line on Louisiana plantations: “when ole Marse went to war, he left me overseer of the plantation . . . some of the slaves wouldn’t mind and I had to whip ’em . . . I had to show ’em I was boss, or the plantations would be wrecked.”100 He tells the story of a pregnant woman named Susan who was “bought an’ tol’ to follow her new master” but protested on grounds that “she wuz jus’ about in chile-birth.” Despite the fact that she was in the very late stages of pregnancy and was seen screaming “I won’t go! I won’t go! I won’t!” she was still given 150 lashes as a consequence of her insubordination. Love also tells of another woman who “was throwed on a big bed of ants which they had caused to ’semble. She was tied down with heavy weights, so she couldn’t budge; she was tortured awfully.” Although he was proud of the fact that he attained the position of overseer, he also admitted that “sometimes I cried when I went to bed, because of these whippings.” The treatment of the pregnant slave mentioned by Love was by no means an anomaly. Rebecca Fletcher informed her interviewer that “when a slave wuz erbout to produce a baby, an he [the master] wanted her whupped, he had a hole dug un the groun’ an’ made her lay acrost it an her han’s and foots were tied, so she had to submit quiet like to the beatin’ with a strap.”101 Carlyle Stewart, the former slave of Octavo de la Houssaye, recalls a similar practice: “we had no pleasure at all and when they went to beat us women, they dug a hole and put the women’s stomach in the hole, when she was pregnant, so they could whip them without having the child hurt, cause the children were worth money.”102 Although the number of 0rsthand accounts by slaves in the United States greatly outnumbers those available for Cuba, Juan Manzano’s autobiography is a vivid depiction of the author’s life as a domestic slave dividing his time between Matanzas, Havana, and his seemingly endless trips back to his master’s rural plantation, “El Molina,” for punishment. In one incident he describes how, as a teenager, he picked one of his mistress’s prized geraniums without her permission. As punishment, his “nose was shattered” and he “was sent to the stocks” at El Molina. There he “was forced to remain standing, frozen by the cold and with nothing to cover” himself in a room “where

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cadavers were stored . . . until it was time to carry them of to be buried.”103 The next day the administrator of the plantation arrived and gave him a beating. While serving time at El Molina on another ofense, Manzano was suspected of stealing a capon. For this infraction he was sent to the overseer, a Señor Domínguez, for punishment. He described the succeeding events: He [Domínguez] took out a rope made of limsy hemp, tied me up like a criminal, mounted his horse, and pushing me ahead, ordered me to run . . . We had gone about a fourth of a league when, tired of running in front of the horse, I tripped and fell. No sooner had I hit the ground than two dogs or beasts, which were following him, attacked me. One of them, holding my entire left cheek in his mouth, sank his fang all the way through to my molar. The other one perforated my thigh and my left calf, with the utmost voracity and speed. These scars persist in spite of the twenty-four years that have transpired since then . . . He grabbed me with one hand by the rope that bound me, hurling a stream of obscenities at me . . . This yank dislocated my arm right arm.104

Later that evening, Manzano began his o2cial punishment, “El Nueve”—the Cuban term for the nine-day-long whipping of a slave. On the 0nal day of his torture it was learned that the capon had not been stolen, only left behind in the kitchen after Manzano had efectively delivered it to its proper destination.105 Although the whippings did cease once the whereabouts of the fowl was determined, nothing erased the mental or physical efects of the nine days of beatings that Manzano endured. Although one cannot efectively assess which of the many spacerelated social-control measures was most efective in nineteenthcentury Havana or New Orleans, the cumulative efect of these measures created a highly oppressive environment for the vast majority of the cities’ African-descended populace. Even though the slave societies were successful at creating spatial landscapes focused on the systematic degradation and dehumanization of blacks and mulattoes, both slave and free, this reality did not stop attempts by people of color in both cities to impart competing psychosocial de0nitions on space. These attempts were integrally related to the actions carried out in Congo Square and El Día de Reyes. In both performance contexts, the use of music, song, dance, and masking facilitated the

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creation of habitable space that encouraged psychological survival and resistance in the face of the tremendous assault being waged by the oppressors. In both Havana and New Orleans the interactions of African music and dance de0ned space. This is most evident in the terms used by whites to describe these festival traditions. As one observer said of the New Orleans site: “the square takes its name, as is well known, from the Congo Negroes who used to perform their dances on its yard every Sunday.”106 In the 1822 city directory the square was characterized as “the place where the Congo and other Negroes dance, carouse and debauch on the Sabbath.”107 The identi0cation of Congo Square as a speci0c geographic locale de0ned by the presence of African music and dance also comes through in the testimony of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the source of the most detailed 0rsthand account of the activities that took place there. Although he was not searching for the square in particular, the dance led him to it. I was going up St. Peters Street and approaching the common I heard the most extraordinary noise, which I supposed to proceed from some horse Mill, the horses trampling on a wooden loor. I found however on emerging from the houses, onto the common, that it proceeded from a crowd of 5 or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square . . . They were formed into circular groups in the midst of four of which, which I examined (but there were more of them), was a ring, the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the 0rst were two women dancing . . . The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument. An old man sat astride a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter and beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hands and 0ngers.108

Dance and music are also central to descriptions of El Día de Reyes. P. Riesgo called it the day when “Negro men and women cross the big city in all directions, to the beat of the bass drum.”109 Another, more extensive portrayal was provided by Ramón Meza: All around, circles would be formed. The enormous drums would be placed to one side as the battery: astraddle the drummers, tirelessly beating the taut ox hide with their calloused hands, to which were attached hollow metal or wooden spheres, 0lled with small stones and decorated with feathers, shaking their shoulders, grinding their teeth, their eyes half closed as if possessed with

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inefable ful0llment. Two or three couples would dance in the middle, going into their most extravagant contortions, jumping and whirling, their steps in tune to the wild drumbeat.110

The fact that whites de0ned both El Día de Reyes and Congo Square almost exclusively in terms of music and dance was one of the main reasons the performances continued for as many years as they did. Using a primarily European evaluation of dance and music, many outsiders saw no threat in the gatherings. Because many held extremely derogatory views of African-descended people in general and summarily reduced the bulk of their cultural production to the realm of childish frolic, hedonism, superstition, or barbarism, the Western conceptualization of dance and music as vehicles of pleasure or super0cial celebration 0t squarely into their simplistic view of African-descended life and culture. In many ways, this ethnocentrism was actually an asset in the struggle of blacks and mulattoes to imbue public space with positive meaning. Because whites could not or would not step beyond a super0cial understanding of African-derived culture, the expressive impulse embodied in the festival (dance, music, icons, masking, etc.) could take on a much greater role in the survival struggle of the African-descended peoples. As Bakongo scholar K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau explains, “drumming, singing, and dancing is a powerful spiritual ‘MEDICIN/N’KISI’ [sic] that helps one to excel at work, and war, even under oppression.”111 In addition to being avenues for de0ning physical spaces based on Africa-derived actions, the public performances at Congo Square and El Día de Reyes also helped these cities’ African-descended populations to attain a metaphysical reconnection with the social networks that had been severed during the slave trade. Employing an African understanding of the functions of music, dance, icons, and masquerading, the participants in these festivals were able to bridge the gap between themselves and Africa in a manner that was similar to the reconnection that their peers sought through transmigrationinduced suicide. Dance was the most prevalent and widespread means whereby participants in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square achieved spiritual union with their friends and loved ones in Africa. As mentioned in chapter 1, West and Central African music and dance, especially when produced in a festival setting, have great spiritual potentialities. As dance scholar Jacqui Malone points out, “members of many traditional [African] societies believe that when they assume certain stances

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or when they dance, they are reenacting ancestral patterns that have been in existence for centuries; that indeed, through their African art in motion, they are regenerating all their ancestors back to the beginning of time.”112 Robert F. Thompson elaborates on this observation: There is further evidence on this point, centered on the notion that the ancestors, in ways varying with every culture, continue their existence within the dancer’s body. They created the steps; the dancer moves, in part, to bring alive their name . . . Thus African art and dance partially are de0ned as social acts of 0liation, extending human consciousness into the past and the time of the founding fathers. Evidence of this is found in the widespread belief in reincarnation in West and Central Africa, a belief that dissolves the primacy of time . . . We realize that Africans, moving in their ancient dances, in full command of historical destiny, are those noble personages, briely returned.113

Allegra Fuller Synder argues that dancers experience a “transformation” that “experientially builds a bridge between physical reality and conceptual reality.”114 As one of Thompson’s informants from Dahomey explained, “it is our blood that is dancing.”115 Making this point even more forcefully, Thompson asserts that in assessing African dance “zero allusion to incarnation of ancestral presence . . . relects, in all probability, lack of sophistication in observation.”116 Participants in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square could view their involvement in these ceremonies as an opportunity to reconnect with the family networks and individuals they left behind in Africa. In addition to the generalized conception of African dance as a means of spiritual reunion with the ancestors, dance forms employed in New Orleans and Havana were highly charged with the potential to transcend time and thus become additional forms of reconnection. The most signi0cant of these forms was the ring shout—a circular, counterclockwise danced con0guration charged with immense power in both Africa and the Americas. The most noted scholar on the ring shout, Sterling Stuckey, notes: “wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed . . . the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors or the gods . . . The use of the circle for religious purposes in slavery was so consistent and profound that one could argue that it was what gave meaning to Black art and religion.”117 In most 0rsthand accounts of the ring shout, the dance is seen as the primary means used by slaves to bring on possession. Although scholars have written extensively on the power of the shout in the

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United States, John DuMoulin notes that the ring was also one of the standard forms of the Afro-Cuban festival experience. He attests to its spiritual power: “in all the cults, the dance of the soloist [the person inside the ring] is at least potentially a supernatural manifestation. It is the drummer, inspired by the chorus, who calls out this manifestation with his rhythms; the dancer is attracted to the drum and salutes it. The drums themselves are sancti0ed in some cults.”118 In many parts of the United States where slaves were prohibited from having drums, foot stomping and hand clapping formed the percussive accompaniment to the singing and dancing in the ring shout. Sylvia King, who spent part of her life as a slave, describes how the “shout,” as it was commonly known, was conducted: De black folks gits of down in de bottom and shouts and sings and prays. Dey gits in de ring dance. It am jes’ a kind of shu6e, den it git faster and faster and dey gits warmed up and moans and shouts and sings and dances. Some gits x’hausted and drops out and de ring gits closer. Sometimes dey sings and shouts all night, but come break of day, de nigger got to git to he cabin.119

Laura Towne, a visitor to the Sea Islands of the coast of Georgia and South Carolina in the early 1860s, also remembered the ring shout: Tonight I have been to a “shout,” which seems to me certainly the remains of some old idol worship. The Negroes sing a kind of chorus—three standing apart to lead and clap—and then all the others go shu6ing round in a circle following one another with not much regularity, turning round occasionally and bending the knees, and stamping so that the whole loor swings. I never saw anything so savage. They call it a religious ceremony, but it seems more like a frolic to me.120

Accounts attesting to the religious/spiritual potentiality of circular dances during El Día de Reyes and Congo Square leave little doubt that the essence of the ring shout was present there also. In Havana, Ramón Meza, after noting that “all around, circles would be formed,” goes on to describe the actions of the dancers in the center of the moving rings: “two or three couples would dance in the middle, going into the most extravagant contortions, jumping and whirling, their steps in tune to the wild drumbeat. The joy and agitation bordered on frenzy.”121 Add to this his observation of dancers with “their eyes half closed, as if possessed with inefable ful0llment” and it becomes

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clear that the Afro-Cuban ring dances had much the same efect on their participants as did those in plantations of the United States. In New Orleans, where African drums were still very much in use during the Congo Square activities, a similar phenomenon took place: it took some time before the tapping of the drums would arouse the dull and sluggish dancers, but when the point of excitement came, nothing can faithfully portray the wild and frenzied emotions they would go through. Backward and forward, this way and that, now together and now apart, every motion intended to convey the most sensual ideas. As the dance progressed the drums thrommed [sic] faster, the contortions became more grotesque until sometimes in a frenzy the women and men would fall fainting to the ground . . . After one set had become fatigued, they would drop out [of the center of the circle] to be replaced by others.122

The ring shout carries signi0cance for the present discussion of reconnection because many of the ethnic groups enslaved in the Americas believed that possession was the ultimate form of communication between humankind and the spirit world or the ancestors. As one group of scholars has noted for the Yoruba, “the gods, regularly enter the world through their mediums—worshipers who have been trained and prepared to receive the spirit of their divinities during trances in the course of religious ceremonies. When the gods are made manifest in this way, they speak through their devotees, praying and giving guidance.”123 Through spirit possession, those “caught up” not only had the potential to embark on a temporary mental escape from the debilitating environment of the slave society, but they also became sources for others to receive advice and counsel from uniquely African spiritual 0gures and to make what was, for the African, a very real connection to the land of the ancestors: the ring shout, whether engaged for ordinary worship services or for occasions such as funerals and harvests, represented a point of reconnection. In Africa, participants experience the spirit realm by way of possession. But in North America [I would include Cuba] the spiritual dimension also represented a return to Africa. In Africa, the ring ceremony re-created that place in the timeless past when and where humans and gods were in perfect fellowship. In North America, the ring was shouted in an efort to re-create a time and space in which the African community was whole.124

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The fact that the ring shout could be used as a source of reconnection is also supported by Stuckey, who cites lyrics sung during a shout witnessed by Thomas Higginson in South Carolina in the 1860s: O, my mudder is gone! My mudder is gone! My mudder is gone into heaven, my Lord! I can’t stay behind! Dere’s room in dar, room in dar, Room in dar, in de heaven, my Lord! I can’t stay behind! Can’t stay behind, my dear, I can’t stay behind!

Another was: Jordon River, I’m bound to go, Bound to go, bound to go— Jordan River I’m bound to go, Bound to go, bound to go— And bid ’em fare ye well.125

Along with the interactions of music and dance, the extensive use of masquerading in Congo Square and El Día de Reyes also helped to address the mental anguish experienced by so many of the men and women torn from their loved ones. Christian Schultz, who witnessed the activities at Congo Square in 1807, relates the use of masking: In the afternoon, a walk in the rear of town will still more astonish their [visitors’] bewildered imaginations with the sight of twenty diferent dancing groups of the wretched Africans, collected together to perform their worship after the manner of their country . . . The principal dancers or leaders are dressed in a variety of wild and savage fashions, always ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller beasts, and those who appeared most horrible always attracted the largest circle of company.126

Almost every contemporary account of El Día de Reyes contains some mention of masqueraders, usually referring to them as diablitos or little devils. They were a hallmark of the festival. Commenting on a visual depiction of El Día de Reyes, Escolástico Gallardo cautions, “what about the monstrous Brichi, in his grotesque diablito trappings, in the middle of the engraving, right 0st raised, hands on hips, his posture imposing, his face indescribable, looking a thin black woman up and down?”127 Meza notes that “on Mercaderes, Obispo and

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O’Reilly streets, there was a continuous procession of diablitos, all making their way to the Plaza de Armas.”128 Antonio Lorcas wrote in 1859 “the tangos or cuadrillas are the most fearsome, for their thundering noise, for the leaps and assaults of the diablitos at their head . . . some dress as Indians with feathers, bells, and necklaces of nuts or buttons; others paint their face, arms and chest and legs.”129 The characterization of all Afro-Cuban masqueraders as diablitos was, like the simplistic depictions of dance and music, one more example of the slave society’s inability to delve beyond a super0cial understanding of cultural forms emanating from Africa. The African-descended populations of New Orleans and Havana probably conceived of these 0gures very diferently—as but one more means of reconnection. As already mentioned, masquerades in many West and Central African societies are seen as the embodiment of departed ancestors. The Yoruba Egungun, the Ngbe leopard dancers of the E0k and Ejagham, the Senufo Poro maskers, and many others are said to be the spirits of once-living persons who have come to give advice and counsel to the temporal world. Among the Igbo, “bene0cent ancestors, too, may revisit the living anywhere—on the road, on the farm, in certain animals, in dreams; they reappear also as masquerades, mmanwu, ‘to inspect and judge’ and to dance at ‘celebrations.’”130 Even though every masked 0gure or masquerade tradition in Congo Square and El Día de Reyes cannot be traced to a speci0c African analogue, the thoughts of the Igbo on masking are instructive. Herbert Cole and Chike Aniakor state that “however secularized they may have been or become, all Igbo masks are considered spirits, and thus even weak ones have a certain aura and mystique, particularly in performance and especially to those not initiated into their cults.”131 Although it is often overlooked in many evaluations of El Día de Reyes, participants also masquerade through the use of body painting. The most signi0cant manifestation of this practice involves the use of the color white. Among many West and Central African ethnic groups, white is a representation of the spirit world. People don the color or paint themselves white in an efort to symbolize communion with the other world or, more speci0cally, to imply that they are the embodiment of someone who has come directly from the world of the dead. As Wyatt MacGafey states regarding the Bakongo, “to wear white is to participate in the world of the dead.”132 In Havana, both P. Riesgo and Pérez Zamora note that speci0c participants in El Día De Reyes painted their faces white or other bright colors.133

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Coming from a tradition that conceptualized masqueraders as embodiments of departed individuals or deities, one can understand how the participants in both Congo Square and El Día de Reyes might have perceived of these entities as sources of reconnection. Further evidence of the continuation of African models of conceptualizing life as a form of existence where the spiritual and temporal continue to interact and inluence one another can be seen in a number of other aspects of black life in Havana and New Orleans. In Havana, one of the most vivid examples of the African-descended communities’ continued reliance on a worldview that encompassed permeable boundaries between the living and the dead and thus maintained the possibility that the ancestors and deities could be perceived as returning during El Día de Reyes can be seen in remnants of their material culture. The Fernando Ortiz collection of the Casa de África in Havana contains two peculiar-looking carved pieces of wood dating from the mid- to late nineteenth century (Figure 1). One of the pieces seems to be nothing but a forked tree branch a2xed with shells made to resemble facial features. The other is a more human-looking carving wearing a miniscule cape about its shoulders. To the untrained eye, these sculptures may represent “primitive art” or a futile but laudable attempt by their creators to represent “real people.” To the members of Havana’s African-descended community these 0gures represented the Yoruban deity Eshu/Elegba known as Ellegua in Cuba.

Figure 1. Ellegua/Elegba wood carvings. Courtesy of Casa de África, Havana, Cuba.

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In traditional Yoruba religion, Eshu/Elegba is seen as “a divine messenger, facilitator, transformer and provocateur.”134 He is usually conceptualized as the divine trickster, forever standing at the crossroads and serving as the gatekeeper to the spirit world. “His ritual objects often have faces pointing in opposite directions and/or 0gures playing lutes, references to his mediating and messenger roles. He plays the praises of the gods, encouraging them to enter the heads of worshippers during possession trance dances.”135 In Cuba, Ellegua is identi0ed by the colors red and black, usually presented as alternating color schemes on diferent sides of the body. Because of his essential role in the communication of the living with deities and those inhabiting the spirit world, he “transcends the limits of ordinary

Figure 2. Congo drum. Courtesy of Museo de Músico, Havana, Cuba.

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a2liation and turns up wherever traditionally minded Yoruba may be.”136 The presence of Ellegua was, at least for the Yoruba, essential in making connections to the spirit world. The fact that his image was still being created in the mid to late 1800s shows that, deep into the slave period, the necessary context for the belief that African ancestors and deities could make visitations into the slave societies of the Americas was still present. Among the Bakongo or “Congos” of Havana, material artifacts also attest to the continuation of the belief in the luidity of the temporal and spiritual worlds. This is evident in carvings made on nineteenthcentury drums used by the Congo cabildos, or mutual-aid societies (Figures 2 and 3). On one side, a cross with arrows at the four ends is

Figure 3. Congo drum. Courtesy of Museo de Músico, Havana, Cuba.

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bisected by the circumference of a circle. To the right of this image the word KALONGO is carved. Both impressions are direct carryovers from Central Africa. The cross bisected by the circle is usually referred to as the Kongo cosmogram (Figure 4). For the Bakongo, the diagram represents the life cycle of man. The four points extending beyond the circle represent the birth, maturation, death, and life in the spirit world. The circle signi0es the inevitable process of reincarnation.137 The four points are usually analogized with the movements of the sun. As MacGafey notes, “the setting of the sun signi0es man’s death, or the continuity of life. Bakongo believe and hold it true that man’s life has no end, that it constitutes a cycle, and death is merely a transition in the process of change.”138 In traditional society, this 0gure could be found on a variety of religious and artistic media. The cosmogram could also be drawn on the ground for oath taking. “The person taking the oath stands upon the cross, situating himself between life and death, and invokes the judgement of God and the dead upon himself.”139 As one proceeds along the circled portion from one point to the other, each turn is seen “as the point of intersection between ancestors and the living.”140 The word KALONGA, which is inscribed on the side of the drum, is integral to gaining a full understanding of the cosmogram and Bakongo beliefs about the interactions of the worlds of the living

Figure 4. Kongo cosmogram.

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and the dead. Usually written as “Kalunga,” it is the name given to the horizontal line on the cosmogram. It signi0es the dividing line between the temporal and spiritual worlds. “When that line, which extends from dawn to sunset, is evoked by the Kongo staf cross [cosmogram], it symbolizes the surface of a body a water beneath which the world of the ancestors is found.”141 As Fu-Kiau states, “Kalunga, meaning also ocean, is a door and a wall between two worlds.”142 Although the living and the dead occupy separate worlds, “others say that the land of the dead is quite close to the village [of the living] . . . so that the invisible ones are able to mix with the living in their work.”143 Like many forms of West and Central African art and religion, the cosmogram is brought to its full potential by the interaction of music and dance. This process is known as singing or drawing a point, yimbila ye sona. The Bakongo “believe that the combined force of singing Ki-Kongo words and tracing in appropriate media the ritually designated ‘point’ or ‘mark’ of contact between the worlds will result in the descent of God’s power upon that very point.”144 Standing on this mark also meant that a person “knew the nature of the world, that he had mastered the meaning of life and death.” A person who goes through this ritual “thenceforth could move about with the con0dence of a seer, empowered with insights from both worlds.”145 Whereas the material culture of slaves in Havana indicates the continuation of African modes of thought regarding the ability of the spirit world to inhabit that of the temporal, in New Orleans the very words and actions of African-descended people attest to this continuity. This point is clear from a sermon witnessed by Frederick Law Olmsted on a visit to a church in New Orleans in the early 1850s. With the exception of himself and two other whites, “the congregation consisted entirely of coloured persons.”146 Having entered the service a bit late, Olmsted’s comments begin with the main sermon, titled “I Have Fought the Good Fight, I Have Kept the Faith; Henceforth There Is Laid Up for Me a Crown of Glory” (ibid.). The message was punctuated by the congregation’s shouts of “Ha! Ha! Glory to the Lord” (242) and “Glory!—oh, yes! Yes! Sweet Lord! Sweet Lord!” (243). At the end of the emotionally charged presentation, there was “a tremendous uproar, many of the congregation on their feet, and uttering cries and shrieks impossible to be expressed in letters” (ibid.). One woman “suddenly rose and began dancing and clapping her hands; at 0rst with a slow and measured movement,

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and then with increasing rapidity, at the same time beginning to shout ‘ha! ha!’” As the minister took his seat, the woman continued: A voice in the congregation struck into a tune, and the whole congregation rose and joined in a roaring song. The woman was still shouting and dancing . . . Gradually her shout became indistinct, she threw her arms wildly about instead of clapping her hands, fell back into the arms of her companions, then threw herself forward and embraced those before her, then tossed from one side to side, gasping and 0nally sunk to the loor, where she remained at the end of the song, kicking, as if acting a death struggle. (244)

If Olmsted’s account were to end here, one would at least have evidence of the continued power of music to bring on possession and of what dance scholar Lynne Emery refers to as “a shout performed as a solo.”147 But the account continues. After the 0rst preacher ends his sermon, a second minister approaches the podium “to further elucidate the meaning of the apostle’s words” (ibid.). In his efort to make clear what his fellow minister has said, “sometimes he would turn from the audience and assume a personal opponent to be standing by his side in the pulpit” (245). This interaction with this unseen 0gure, whom he referred to only as “Sir,” soon became the focus of his remarks: Having made his supposed adversary assert that “if a man would only just believe, and let him bury him under de water, he would be saved,”—he caught up the big pulpit Bible, and . . . pretended to hurl from it the reply—“Except ye persevere and 0ght de good 0ght unto the end, ye shall be damned!” “That’s it, that’s it,” shouted the delighted audience . . . “Wha’s de use o his tellin’ us dat ar?” he continued, turning to the congregation with a laugh; “wha’s de use on’t, when we know dat a month arter he’s buried ’em under de water—whar do we 0nd ’em? Ha? ah ha! Whar? In de grog shop! (ha !ha! ha! Ha!) Yes we do, don’t we (Yes! yes!) in de rum-hole! (Ha! ha! ha! Yes! Yes! Oh Lord!) and we know de spirit of rum and de Spirit of God hasn’t got no ’0nities (Yah! Ha! ha! yes! Yes! Dat’s it! Dat’s it! Oh my Jesus! Oh! Oh! Glory! glory!) Sut’nly, sah! You may launch out upon de ocean a drop of oil way up to Virginny, and we’ll launch anudder one heah in Lusiana, and when dey meets—no matter how far de been gone—dey’ll unite! Why, sah? Because dey’s got de 0nities, sah!” (Ibid.)

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The remarks recorded by Olmsted speak to a particularly Bakongo mode of conceptualizing prospects for reincarnation and reconnection that had to have saliency in a city so de0ned by this culture’s beliefs and practices that one of the most popular sites for people of African descent—Congo Square—pays homage to this legacy. In fact, the words show striking similarities with ideas embodied in the Kongo cosmogram. As the preacher’s spiritual adversary shouts “let him bury him under de water” one cannot escape the parallels between his statements and the Bakongo conceptualization of Kalunga as the spirit world beneath the water. Likewise, the minister’s realization that “a month arter he’s buried ’em under de water—whar do we 0nd ’em? . . . In de grog shop . . . in de rum-hole!” is simply a restatement of the circularity of life and the inherent belief in reincarnation symbolized by the circle on the cosmogram and its equation with the rebirth of man after time spent in the land of the dead. Moreover, the preacher’s concept of “0nities” and his assertion that two drops of oil dropped on diferent sides of the ocean will be rejoined, as all souls are in Kalunga, ofers a hopeful prospect of reconnection for congregation members experiencing the pain of separation caused by the slave trade or the demands of the slave complex in the Americas— “no matter how far de been gone—dey’ll unite!” The actions of the African-descended participants in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square were powerful means of contesting the oppressive de0nitions of space dictated by the actions of the master class in both New Orleans and Havana. In many respects, the ability to carve out a speci0c, though extremely circumscribed, physical space was a victory in itself. Even though Congo Square was only “theirs” one day a week and El Día de Reyes occurred only once a year, these festival traditions helped the participants address psychosocial issues emanating from life in an oppressive environment and from the trauma of the violent uprooting from Africa. Because the interaction of music, dance, iconography, masquerading, and instrumentation could charge these spaces with the potential for temporary psychological escape and the visitation of ancestors and African deities, Congo Square and El Día de Reyes were sites of extreme emotional signi0cance. On the days before and after the performances, the Africandescended inhabitants of Havana and New Orleans could reminisce about the emotional release, spiritual sancti0cation, and metaphysical connections they would achieve or had achieved there and look forward to the next opportunity to bring the spirits out in public again. In much the same way that the Fon, Yoruba, Bakongo, Igbo,

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and others were able to animate icons and masks to serve spiritual purposes, during El Día de Reyes and Congo Square physical spaces came alive and the spirits and the ancestors walked about. The performances not only strengthened the power of the festivals as means of counteracting the space-centered social-control eforts of the slave societies, but also aided in the reconstitution of an African worldview in the Americas. This worldview was one of the mechanisms that gave the African-descended population the power to transcend the dehumanizing experience of slavery and to continue to de0ne themselves and their environment in terms that were conducive to survival and positive self-de0nition.

3 Regulating Domesticity: The Fight for the Family

n both Havana and New Orleans, the African-descended community was faced with a multifaceted assault on the family. The slave regimes constructed monumental hurdles to the development and maintenance of households made up of black and mulatto men, women, and children. These obstacles limited the ability of the African-descended population to ful0ll the roles of wife and mother, husband and father, and also greatly limited the possibility that black and mulatto children would grow up in households composed of blood-linked parents. Although this attack undermined many of the traditional institutions that buttressed the family in Africa, it did not eradicate the desire to re-create this form of social organization in the Americas. Like the assault on place, the slave regime attempted to destroy the African-descended family. In Havana and New Orleans, the slave regime created male/female sex ratios that militated against the natural development of familial units.1 This policy stemmed from the labor needs of the plantation complex in the agricultural areas around Havana and New Orleans, as well as from the demand for domestic servants within the cities. In both municipalities, the needs of the slave owners produced African-descended communities that lacked the most basic tools needed for the creation of stable, productive families—adequate numbers of men and women. In Havana, the main impediment to the development of fully constituted familial units among the African-descended population was the lack of women. Whereas free persons of color enjoyed almost even male/female ratios throughout the nineteenth century, the slave

I

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population was heavily skewed in favor of males. In Cuba as a whole, the number of male slaves consistently exceeded that of female slaves. In 1817, there were 166.1 male slaves for every 100 female slaves, and the numbers grew progressively worse until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1821, there were 177.7 male slaves for every 100 females in bondage. By 1841, the ratio of enslaved men to women had grown to 181.3:100.2 Although these numbers pertain to the island as a whole, local census data for 1841, an approximate midpoint for the institution of slavery in Cuba in the nineteenth century, provide more detailed information on the demographic realities of Havana3 (Table 1). During this year there were 146,480 men and 91,640 women classi0ed as black or mulatto. This amounts to a sex ratio of 159 men for every 100 women. Among slaves, the numbers were even worse with 184 men for every 100 women (122,405 males to 66,524 females). With almost two male slaves for every female slave, males were confronted with the fact that many of them would never be able to form familial units with females of their same social status. Coupled with the fact that they could not marry white women, this reality presented a signi0cant Table 1. Havana male/female sex ratios for total population, 1841 Major categories

Females

Males

Total

Males per 100 females

Total population African-descended Moreno (dark-skinned) Pardo (mulatto) European-descended

157,772 91,640 81,004 10,636 66,132

230,301 146,480 135,666 10,814 83,821

388,073 238,120 216,670 21,450 149,953

145.97 159.84 167.48 101.67 126.75

Free people of color Total population Moreno Mulatto

25,116 16,156 8,960

24,075 15,323 8,752

49,191 31,479 17,712

95.86 94.84 97.68

Enslaved Total population Moreno Mulatto

66,524 64,848 1,676

122,405 120,343 2,062

188,929 185,191 3,738

184.00 185.58 123.03

Source: Cuba, resumen del censo de población de la isla de Cuba a 0n del año de 1841 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1841).

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number of male slaves with dismal prospects of ever experiencing the psychosocial bene0ts of long-term male–female relationships. While Havana’s lack of females can be interpreted as an example of the sexual repression of male slaves, the interpersonal inadequacy that these individuals experienced by not having the ability to form meaningful emotional connections with females was probably much more devastating than their inability to 0nd appropriate outlets for their sexual desires. In New Orleans, the slave regime produced an African-descended population that was almost the direct opposite of Havana’s. In contrast to the latter’s male-dominated black and mulatto community, the ratios in New Orleans were reversed in favor of females. Although this reversal was a result of a similar phenomenon—the desire for male slaves on agricultural plantations—it manifested itself very diferently. Speci0cally, Havana’s dearth of females was a mirror image of the island’s demographic realities. No matter how great the demand for female domestics in Havana, the desires of the capital city simply could not alter what was a colony-wide shortage. Conversely, with so many of Louisiana’s nineteenth-century slave imports coming from the relatively gender-balanced mature plantation states in the southeastern United States, New Orleans was able to meet its demands for primarily female domestic workers while planters in the outlying areas were also able to staf their farms and plantations with both sexes, even though they had a decided preference for males. This is evident in New Orleans’s slave and free black population. In 1805, there were only 76.2 men for every 100 women within the New Orleans slave community.4 This ratio dropped to 58.3 by 1820 and to 55.9 by 1830. Although the number of men for every 100 women improved by 1840 (71.7), by 1850 it had fallen once again (66.9). Within the free black and mulatto population, women also predominated. For the census years 1820, 1830, and 1840, the respective numbers of free males for every 100 free females were 63.88, 67.47, and 78.03 (Table 2). The population dynamics of New Orleans’s African-descended community come into even sharper focus when one calculates sex ratios within speci0c age groups. Using the year 1830, an approximate midpoint for the institution of slavery in New Orleans during the nineteenth century, as an example, the trends are clear (Table 3). Among slaves under ten years of age there were 78.49 males for every 100 females. This number drops dramatically among individuals aged 10–23 (51.69), 24–35 (43.76), 36–54 (49.66), and 55–99 (62.25).

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The only age cohort that demonstrates any improvement over the under-ten-years group is that of slaves more than 100 years old. Even in this age group women still outnumber men by a factor of two. As opposed to ofering a signi0cantly more optimistic prospect for the creation of African-descended male–female unions, the free black population in New Orleans exhibits many of the same characteristics as that of the enslaved. Although males and females under ten years of age were closer in ratio than any other age cohort slave or free (90.09 men for every 100 women), females still maintained a noticeable numerical advantage. After the age of ten, the population of free

Table 2. New Orleans male/female sex ratios for free people of color, 1820, 1830, and 1840 Age

Females

Males

Males per 100 females

1820 Under 14 years 14–20 years 21–45 years Over 45 years Total

1,371 989 943 504 3,807

1,440 435 412 145 2,432

105.03 43.98 43.69 28.77 63.88

1830 Under 10 years 10–23 years 24–35 years 36–54 years 55–99 years Over 100 years Total

1,372 1,432 1,020 656 300 13 4,793

1,236 1,101 482 303 109 3 3,234

90.09 76.89 47.25 46.19 36.33 23.08 67.47

1840 Under 10 years 10–23 years 24–35 years 36–54 years 55–99 years Over 100 years Total

3,202 2,727 2,407 1,722 727 3 10,788

2,948 2,396 1,489 1,132 448 5 8,418

92.07 87.86 61.86 65.74 61.62 166.67 78.03

Source: U.S. Census, 1820, 1830, and 1840.

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men in New Orleans’s African-descended community decreases dramatically. Among those aged 10–23 there were 77.37 men for every 100 women. For those aged 24–35, the ratio was 47.25 men for every 100 women. This gap continues to expand and does not even improve among centenarians. The reason that the African-descended community contained so few males, especially those above age ten, is a direct result of the economic and social demands of the slave complex. In New Orleans it was illegal to sell a slave away from his or her family until the age of ten. Once males attained this chronological milestone, many were sold to the state’s booming sugar and cotton plantations. Interestingly, the city’s disproportionately female system of slavery also had a direct efect on the free colored population. Because women made up such a large portion of the slave population, it followed that they also constituted a large portion of those who were manumitted by their owners. Of the total 1,770 slaves freed between 1827 and 1846, 68 percent were female.5

Table 3. New Orleans comparison of male/female sex ratios by age and status, 1830 Age

Females

Males

Males per 100 females

Enslaved Under 10 years 10–23 years 24–35 years 36–54 years 55–99 years Over 100 years Total

1,339 1,919 1,876 745 204 10 6,093

1,051 992 821 370 127 8 3,369

78.49 51.69 43.76 49.66 62.25 80.00 55.29

Free people of color Under 10 years 10–23 years 24–35 years 36–54 years 55–99 years Over 100 years Total

1,372 1,423 1,020 656 300 13 4,793

1,236 1,101 482 303 109 3 3,234

90.09 76.89 47.25 46.19 36.33 23.08 67.47

Source: U.S. Census, 1830.

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The demographic situation in New Orleans created an environment that made it very di2cult for African-descended women to join with black and mulatto men to form conjugal unions. During the prime ages for marriage, most of these women, both slave and free, outnumbered their potential marital partners almost two to one. Thus, like the numerical imbalance facing the male slave population in Havana, almost half the eligible black female population in New Orleans had virtually no chance of a marital union with someone of their color and class. Although they could enter into relationships with white males, these were generally extralegal afairs that were far from the coming together of equals. (This point will be elaborated on later in this chapter.) It is clear that in both Havana and New Orleans a signi0cant portion of the African-descended population had no chance of ever 0nding a socially equal mate. In Havana, the demographics, though stark, were signi0cantly better than what most male slaves encountered on the outlying plantations. Female slaves in New Orleans may have actually fared better in their quest for a mate if they were sold away to a large plantation where more of a balance in age and gender distribution existed.6 The uneven male/female sex ratios in Havana and New Orleans represented an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of familial unions for over half of their African-descended inhabitants. But these demographic imbalances were only one aspect of the larger assault on the African-descended family. In both cities, black and mulatto men and women also had to struggle against a complex network of social-control mechanisms that only increased the di2cult task of creating and sustaining productive familial units. In addition to a lack of available female partners, dark-skinned men in Havana also had to 0ght through the social stigma that accompanied their enslavement. In 1841, these men made up 63.70 percent of Havana’s total slave population (Table 4). More damning was the fact that during the same year, more than 88 percent of all dark-skinned black males were in bondage.7 Because the chains of slavery so disproportionately bound dark-skinned black males, they became the symbol of slavery. From the standpoint of class and color, they were at the bottom of the social hierarchy and, given their rates of enslavement, their progeny, both male and female, had a very high probability of spending their entire lives as slaves. In the context of the social models of the Cuban slave system, conjugal unions with darkskinned black males greatly reduced a woman’s dreams of upward social mobility, whether for herself or for her child.8 This is supported by

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the fact that, in 1841, more than 98 percent of Havana’s slaves were classi0ed as moreno, or dark-skinned. Although moreno men in Havana were routinely associated with the institution of slavery, all males of African descent, whether slave or free, black or mulatto, were forced to combat negative stereotypes that eroded their viability as suitable partners for the city’s relatively small number of available African-descended women. Chief among these were those of the curro, calesero, and nañigo. The term curro referred to a type of black street hustler. Although the curro could be either male or female, the most common popular depiction is of a lashy dressing, unemployed, male semi-pimp9 (Figure 5). The calesero was the driver of the uniquely Cuban volante, or two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage (Figure 6). Like the curro, he was commonly portrayed as a type of street hustler always on the lookout for ill-gotten gains.10 Although Figure 6 gives the impression of high style, this can be misleading. As one observer notes, “The great point in the volante of fashion is the servant’s dress . . . He wears a huge pair—not of boots, for they have no feet to them—of galligaskins I may call them, made of thick stif leather . . . Nothing can be more awkward, and nothing more barbaric than the whole afair.”11 The nañigo was the masked member of Table 4. Rates of enslavement by color and gender, Havana, 1841 Category

Total

Free

Mulattoes Females Males Total

10,636 10,814 21,450

8,960 8,752 17,712

1,676 2,062 3,738

15.76 19.07 17.43

0.89 1.09 1.98

16,156 15,323 31,479

64,848 120,343 185,191

80.06 88.71 85.47

34.32 63.70 98.02

African-descended population Females 91,640 25,116 Males 146,480 24,075 Total 238,120 49,191

66,524 122,405 188,929

72.59 83.56 79.34

35.21 64.79 100.00

M o r eno s (dark-skinned) Females 81,004 Males 135,666 Total 216,670

Enslaved

% Enslaved

% of Total Enslaved

Source: Cuba, resumen del censo de población de la isla de Cuba a 0n del año de 1841 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1841).

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the Abakuá all-male brotherhood12 (Figure 7). Among Europeandescended Cubans they were often characterized as savage Africans guilty of human sacri0ce. For many, they were the island’s equivalent to the “bogeyman” and children were warned that if they misbehaved, they could expect a visit from the nañigo in their dreams. Echoing the sentiments of many nineteenth-century white Cubans, Fernando Ortiz comments that “curros y nañigos en La Habana fueron un tiempo tipos peligrosos, hampones, al margen de la ley y de la vida bien ordenado” (curros and nañigos in Havana were for a while dangerous types, thugs, on the margin of the law and of the well-ordered life).13 Each of these stereotypes was associated with the hampa negro (black underworld) and thus only increased the denigration of the black man as a potential marital partner.

Figure 5. Víctor Patricio Landaluze, El curro, from Tipos y costumbres de la isla de Cuba (Havana: Antonio Bachiller y Morales, 1881).

Figure 6. Víctor Patricio Landaluze, El calesero, from Tipos y costumbres de la Isla de Cuba.

Figure 7. Víctor Patricio Landaluze, El nañigo, from Tipos y costumbres de la Isla de Cuba.

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The social stigma attached to unions with black men was so strong throughout Cuban society that it is manifested in the popular art of the day. The cigar-box series Vida y muerte de la mulata (life and death of the mulatta) follows a biracial woman from birth to death in midnineteenth-century Havana14 (Figure 8). Because of her biracial birth and desirous looks, she is courted by white males, taken to extravagant balls, and out0tted with the 0nest clothes and jewelry. She proceeds throughout life with no real problems until she entertains the advances of a black man—more speci0cally, a calesero. At this point, a metamorphosis occurs. Gone are the beautiful clothes when she mingled in the company of whites. Because she entertains the calesero’s pickup line, “¡¡Caridad, quieres mecha!!” (Darling, you want excitement!!), the woman is now literally and 0guratively declassed. She now holds a bottle in one hand and seems to be in a location frequented by other men and women seeking “excitement.” Once the authorities discover her transgression, she is taken away and forced to spend the rest of her life in a type of symbolic brothel/prison. Although one cannot assume that an artistic representation precisely indicates the social reality, when viewed in the context of the status of dark-skinned black males described earlier, one can see that the author of this series was echoing in art what was true in life. By joining with a black man, the subject of the story efectively abdicates all hopes of upward mobility and is now, like the black man, hurled to the bottom of the social hierarchy. Dark-skinned males in New Orleans fought similar forms of ostracism that emanated from their equation with slave status. Like their counterparts in Havana, they were the antithesis of the social and class models put forth by the slave regime. Although these men were in short supply, most residents were well aware that their low number was a result of the need for their services as laborers on plantations. Also, because the city’s slave population, as late as 1860, was overwhelmingly dark-skinned (75.2 percent) and the free colored population was overwhelmingly mulatto (81 percent), the relationship between blackness and slave status was just as clear as it was in Havana.15 Darkskinned men in New Orleans were faced with the stark reality that a woman’s decision to join with them might involve a number of necessary calculations that had nothing to do with her need for emotional compatibility. Similar to the situation in Havana, prospects for the manumission of children were also greatly afected by color. For the period from 1804 to 1862, 88.8 percent of the children emancipated in New Orleans were mulatto.16 Thus, joining with a black man virtually ensured that one’s child would remain fettered to the institution

(a)

Figure 8. Life and Death of the Mulatta: (a) It promises the best results. (b) If you love me you’ll be happy. (c) My lover says there is hope. (d) We’re pretty, that’s why he’s following us. (e) You want excitement. (f) The punishment. (g) The consequence. (h) The end of all pleasure.

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

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of slavery. This reality was reinforced for the dark-skinned male on a daily basis. Possibly the most hurtful of these daily reminders was the fact that some of the black and mulatto women who ignored the advances of dark-skinned black men added insult to injury by walking through the streets of New Orleans displaying their biracial infants as a kind of prize. As one traveler noted, they “seem proud of their almost white children, holding the fruit of their adultery as an evidence of their charms.”17 This very visible symbol of their rejection probably cut deep into the core of the black man’s dignity and selfrespect. Coming from a sector of society that should have empathized with their plight, acts like these had the prospect of creating deep psychological scars. One should not get the impression that women of color, either in New Orleans or Havana, were free from the social-control network aimed at thwarting the development of African-descended families. They were the constant target of white males’ attempts to control their sexual and reproductive capacities. In both cities, sexual relations between white men and women of African descent, both slave and free, were common. It is true that an undeterminable number of the relationships between members of the master class and enslaved women were “consensual” and based on mutual afection, but the fact that white males brought with them the power of life, death, manumission, enslavement, and social mobility, to say nothing of the rewards they could ofer their biracial progeny, speaks to the inherent level of inequality of these relationships. As Saidiya Hartman explains with regard to sexual relations between masters and slaves, “The dual invocation of the slave as property and person was an efort to wed reciprocity and submission, intimacy and domination, and the legitimacy of violence and the necessity of protection.”18 Sexual unions between white males and slave women cannot be taken out of the overall context of slavery, in particular the fact that white males owned their black female sexual partners. This distinction is important in view of the trend of some scholars to depict enslaved women, both rural and urban, as a sexually promiscuous lot who enticed white males to have sexual relationships with them as a means of gaining favor. This interpretation positions white male slaveholders as naive victims of overtly persuasive and amoral slave women who, despite their condition of servitude, maintain the power to manipulate their owners through sex. Indicative of this approach is Robert Dirks’s assertion that enslaved women in Jamaica “courted” their slave masters and that their “sexual relations with whites can best be interpreted

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as . . . socially upward movement by women via mate selection.”19 Doubtless, some slave women did calculate the advantages of siring ofspring with white men versus black men, but to suggest that these women possessed the power to determine when, where, and with what white man they would join lies in the face of what is known about the power relations between men and women in oppressive labor regimes. If enslaved women did ofer sex as a means of gaining food, shelter, clothing, and a release from the backbreaking work of plantation society, that behavior should be seen as an act of survival, not of promiscuity. Another trend in scholarly circles is to minimize the oppressive nature of sexual relationships between owners and slaves. Usually, this argument proceeds like Eugene Genovese’s assertion that “many white men who began taking a slave girl in an act of sexual exploitation ended by loving her and the children she bore.”20 This tendency is further exacerbated by scholars’ need to point out that sexual unions did occur between black males and white females. Genovese argues that “heinously incestuous or not, white men slept with black women and less often black men slept with white women; and, much more often than they were supposed to, those who began seeking casual pleasure ended by caring.”21 This desire to impart emotional or romantic signi0cance to the sexual relationships of masters and slaves goes against the general expectation of male oppressors to have their female underlings submit to them sexually as a means of a2rming their dominant position. This is true not only of Havana and New Orleans, but throughout the New World plantation complex.22 Moreover, this proclivity of male oppressors, be they colonizers, enslavers, or warriors, to sexually exploit women over whom they have power is a phenomenon that has surfaced throughout human history. As Gerda Lerner points out, “the practice of using women as servants and sex objects became the standard for the class dominance of women in all historic periods . . . for women enslavement has inevitably meant having to perform sexual services for their masters or for those whom their masters might designate.”23 In the majority of these interactions, love, caring, and other forms of emotional attachment might arise only after the need to display power and a2rm control is accomplished.24 The reality is that enslaved women had little power to resist the sexual advances of their masters. This lack of power was a direct consequence of their legal status. Because they were property, these women were at the beck and call of the masters. It was their obligation to submit to all demands—

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agricultural, domestic, or sexual.25 If they refused any of these demands, physical and/or psychological punishment resulted. Both occurred in the case of Florencia, an enslaved mulatta in Havana.26 In the early 1830s, Don Ramon Saiz, Florencia’s master, told her that if she submitted to him sexually, he would emancipate her. After he had his way with the young girl, who was less than fourteen years old at the time, he reneged on his promise. He also physically punished her repeatedly for her continued insistence that he free her. He eventually “tried to place silver rings in the most secret parts of her nature.”27 When Florencia had endured all that she could, she complained to the local authorities, hoping to be transferred to another master. Although the colonial administration showed enough interest in her plight to make it a part of the public record, it eventually sent Florencia back to Don Ramón. The case of Florencia illustrates the lack of control that enslaved women had over their sexuality and the impunity that slave masters enjoyed in matters related to the abuse of the enslaved female’s body. Not only did female slaves have to submit to their master’s requests for sex in the missionary position—backed by the threat of physical retribution if they refused—but these women were also expected to ful0ll his requests for other sexual acts and favors, some no doubt bordering on what the slave might deem perverse. This latter point seems to be lost in the scholarship on slavery. Although depictions of lewd, promiscuous, highly sexed black women abound, discussions of sexual deviance on the part of slave masters seems to be taboo. In the case of Florencia it is clear that Don Ramón not only has a penchant for very young women, but that he also exhibits sadistic tendencies that were no doubt visited upon Florencia in even greater frequency after her failed attempt to leave him. In assessing the nature of sexual relationships between masters and slaves, the issue of control is always paramount. Masters may have committed sexual acts with slave women, not only out of curiosity or perversion, but also as a means of expressing power. In this case, they would be acting out what Desmond Morris terms “status sex.” He argues that, unlike many functions of sex (e.g., procreation, bonding, exploration), “status sex is concerned with dominance.”28 Like one of its most prominent manifestations—rape—status sex is by no means solely an outgrowth of unmet sexual desires. It is about exhibiting power and control. “The fact that he [the rapist] knows that the girl does not welcome his actions, but submits to them anyway, can even help to increase his feelings of power over her.”29

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Given that the need to exert power and control was an integral part of the slave system, it stands to reason that men would use status sex as one of the many social-control options available to them. It also seems likely that the behaviors that most degraded the female slave would best accomplish these goals. In this respect, child molestation, sadism, forced sodomy, bestiality, and other demeaning acts would all aid in rea2rming the dominant position of white males and also further the dehumanization of African-descended women and girls. It is no coincidence that, following the abolition of slavery, both Havana and New Orleans became known the world over for their sex-for-hire districts that specialized in many of the acts just mentioned.30 Joseph Roach argues that “the genealogy of New Orleans brothel performances has deep roots in representations and behaviors spawned in the slave culture of the antebellum period—and in the reconstructed memories and restored behaviors consciously evoking that period.”31 In this case, white males simply began to substitute prostitutes for female slaves while continuing to use sex as a means of exerting power and control over women, whether Africanor European-descended. Evidence of this practice is ripe throughout Al Rose’s Storyville, an examination of life in New Orleans’s infamous nineteenth-century sex district. Rose’s work contains interviews with former prostitutes, mostly biracial, who describe rampant pedophilia, sadism, and the account of “Violet,” who stated that, at age ten, “I started turning tricks myself just by blowing [fellatio]” and that “my mother was in the circus [brothel show], too. She’s the one who used to fuck the pony.”32 In addition to the numerous recollections of individuals with experiences similar to Violet’s, the memories of “Carrie,” a black former Storyville sex worker, ofer a vivid example of the white man’s use of sex and violence to exert control over black women: One time on d’Fo’th of July, a bunch of white pricks grab me outta my crib and ca’y me t’ d’ cohnuh. Dey taken of all ma clo’es an dey tie ma han’s an feet t’ d’ light pole. Den one of ’em stick a big salute [0recracker] up my cunt an anothan one up ma ass an he light both a dem! Shit! I done some holla’in! A fucking police, he standin’ right deah an he laughin’. . . Shit! Dem t’ings din go of . . . Dey ca’y me back to d’ crib. Shit! . . . Dey tells me to blow ’em all [perform fellatio] an dey says dey ain’t gon’ gimme a cent an’ dey tells me lucky dey din’ blow up ma cunt. So, you know! I done what dey said, man!33

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The use of sex as a means of social control is also evident in Harriet Jacobs’s classic narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Speaking of her own life at age 0fteen, she recounts: I was compelled to live under the same roof with him [her master]— where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must submit to his will in all things. My soul revolted against the mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inlicted by 0ends who bear the shape of men.34

Sex acts could also be used to further establish the slave master’s position and control over male slaves. This was accomplished by forcing the daughters, wives, and sisters of slave men to submit sexually to their masters or by forcing males into unwanted same-sex activities. Jacobs gives evidence of this latter manifestation, describing the oppression of a male slave named Luke by a disabled slave master: As he [the master] lay there on his bed, a mere degraded wreck of manhood, he took into his head the strangest freaks of despotism; and if Luke hesitated to submit to his orders, the constable was immediately sent for. Some of these freaks were of a nature too 0lthy to be repeated. I left poor Luke still chained to the bedside of this cruel and disgusting wretch.35

Noting the sexual implications of Luke’s bondage, Jacobs remembers that “some days he was not allowed to wear anything but his shirt, in order to be in readiness for his logging.” When one takes into account that Luke was this man’s personal servant, meaning that his subjection to his master’s whims was almost unceasing, the cumulative efect of the use of sex to control becomes evident. The ways in which sex was used by men with power can also be seen in the case of Pauline, a slave woman in New Orleans. She was described as a “statuesque quadroon beauty with lashing black eyes and pale golden skin with whom her master had become violently infatuated.”36 Her master had grown fond of forcing his white wife to watch as he and Pauline engaged in sexual intercourse. In this case, he was no doubt a2rming that he had power over “all” women in his household, not just those legally enslaved. It also seems that Pauline believed that she garnered some sense of power over her

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mistress by being “chosen” as her master’s preferred outlet for his sexual desires. This matter came to public attention when the police discovered Pauline’s mistress and her three children locked naked in a cabinet with visible signs of abuse all over their bodies. While her master was away, Pauline had been starving her captives, burning them with hot coals, and beating them with whips. For these actions she received the punishment of death by hanging. Although Pauline’s actions were horrendous, one should also not lose sight of her master’s use of sex as a means of establishing power and control. It should also be noted that her case stands as an extreme exception to the usual power relations in New World slave societies. The use of sex as a weapon of domination should come as no surprise. One must remember that the ability to reduce the enslaved to inhuman objects was a part of the psychological makeup of slaveholders, who routinely bought and sold human beings, separated children from parents, beat people with whips, chained them to posts and exposed them to the elements, castrated black men, and fathered children with slave women and then sold them like any other piece of property, just to name a few of their inhumane actions. The use of sex as a means of exerting control and power was just one more weapon in their arsenal. In New Orleans, the white man’s need to control the sexuality of black and mulatto slave women reveals itself in the ritual actions carried out during slave auctions.37 These events were imbued with symbols of sexual dominance. At the beginning of the public sales, the slave women were paraded out onto the stage. Their dresses were removed to the waist, exposing their half-naked bodies to potential purchasers and passing voyeurs. Before the o2cial bidding began, interested parties were given the opportunity to physically examine every aspect of the female’s body, commonly groping and placing 0ngers and hands in selected ori0ces. For many witnesses of the degradation of the slave woman on the auction block, the plight of the “fancy girls” seemed intriguing. Fancy girls were physically attractive, fair-to-almost-white-skinned, young females whose sale was usually the high point of a New Orleans auction. At a time when a prime 0eld hand was being sold for about $1,800, prices for these women could reach $5,000.38 It is clear that the masters who paid two to three times the going rate for a productive male slave for one of these fancy girls were not purchasing them because of their culinary skills or their prowess at handling a

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pitchfork. After spending so much money in acquiring his prize, the slave owner no doubt expected a positive return on his investment. Instead of bushels of cotton or cases of sugar, this return was to be paid in sex. Although one might assume that fancy girls lived a comfortable life owing to their good looks and the high price they brought at market, the fact that they represented a sort of dual entity—white but not free, slave but not black—may in fact have led to their further degradation. Fancy girls allowed white males to act out sexual fantasies while also psychologically reconciling their stated disdain for all things black. Although the plight of the fancy girls has captured the attention of commentators both past and present, this should not obscure the fact that dark-skinned women were being bought for the same purposes. After all, the mulatto is the product of the intermixing of two races, one white the other black. In New Orleans slave auctions, the actions associated with the buying and selling of black and mulatto women only further served to objectify them and to rea2rm white male control over their sexuality. As Roach states: In the staging of the New Orleans slave auctions, there is a 0ercely laminating adhesion of bodies and objects, the individual desire for pleasure and the collective desire to compete for possession. As competitions between men, the auctions seethe with the potential for homosocial violence. As theatrical spectacle, they materialize the most intense of symbolic transactions in circum-Atlantic culture: money transforms lesh into property; property transforms lesh into money; lesh transforms money into property.39

When it came to controlling the sexual and reproductive capacities of free black and mulatto women in Havana and New Orleans, slaveholders created an extensive extralegal system of concubinage. Although this network was partly a response to the lack of eligible white females, the fact that many men maintained both a white wife and a colored mistress indicates that it was not the only factor. As Verena Martinez-Alier states in her study of sexual values and racial attitudes in nineteenth-century Cuba: merchants, slave dealers and the colonial powers opposed interracial marriage to preserve slavery, but tolerated concubinage and sporadic sexual encounters, which rather than being an expression of equality of the races was only one more facet of a social system based on the exploitation of the coloured people by the whites.40

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Interestingly, justi0cations for the practice of black and mulatto concubinage spanned the gamut of social expression in nineteenthcentury Havana. One of the country’s leading intellectuals, José Antonio Saco, stated, “If mestizos were born of unions between white women and black men, this would be regrettable, indeed . . . but since the opposite occurs, far from considering it a menace I regard it as an advantage . . . This is the stepping stone by means of which the African race rises to mix with the white.”41 A Catholic archbishop in Havana explained this phenomenon in terms of a lack of domestic abilities on the part of white women: “since the coloured people do not shirk work, this is why the poor whites prefer them.”42 Although seemingly intellectual rationalizations for the coveting of black and mulatto females abound, white Cuban society’s projection of the stereotype of the overly sexualized colored woman also contributed to the coveting of these women by white males. In essence, this reduced all black and mulatto women to the rank of prostitute. Turning once again to the artistic depictions on nineteenth-century cigar boxes, the image of the black woman for hire is quite evident in Eduardo Guilló’s “Historia de la mulata”(Figures 9 and 10). With an exposed breast and an extended hand expecting payment of some sort, the African-descended women in these depictions are portrayed as exchanging sex for money. The respective captions, “Ataque directo al bolsillo” (A direct attack on the pocket) and “Poner los medios para conseguir los 0nes” (To provide a means to an end) also support this interpretation. As Vera Kutzinski states regarding some of these same images, “Their faces and bodies bear dis0guring traces of their presumed sexual and materialistic greed, and the symbolic association of exposed breasts with the fruit being sold can hardly be missed.”43 The nineteenth-century colloquialism “ni hay tamarindo dulce ni mulata señorita” (there is no sweet tamarind fruit nor a virgin mulatto girl) serves as one more example of the extent to which this perception permeated the society as whole.44 Although free black and mulatto women in New Orleans were subject to many of the same types of pressures to submit to white males as were their counterparts in Havana, their situation was exacerbated by the lack of males sharing their same color and class. For all the talk of the attractions that black and mulatto women supposedly held for white men, for half of this population, being a white man’s mistress was the only opportunity they had to enter into a sexual union with a man. Many African-descended women reconciled themselves to this reality.

Figure 9. History of the Mulatta: A direct attack on the pocket.

Figure 10. History of the Mulatta: To provide a means to an end.

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The concubinage of women of African descent in New Orleans was referred to as “placage.” Although some authors have sought to describe this institution as a system of common-law marriages, this interpretation minimizes the very real diferences between placage and marriage.45 In the 0rst place, married women, though still secondclass citizens, were still entitled to a number of bene0ts, legal and social, as a result of their sanctioned union. In case of their husband’s death, they, along with their children, inherited a substantial part of the family assets. Additionally, these women maintained a common, socially recognized residence with their partners and their children usually grew up with the bene0t of having their father present, if he were alive. For the placee, as the black and mulatto mistress was known, there was no guarantee of 0nancial support during or after the union. They lived in a secondary residence, usually much more modest than that of their male partners, and their children were, for lack of a better phrase, fatherless bastards. Although some white men did take care of their placees and their ofspring, most of these relationships were rather short-lived and the man was able to walk away with virtually no legal requirement that he support his former partner or his illegitimate children. In a very real sense, placage was nothing more than a cheap substitute for the mutually nurturing male– female relationships that black and mulatto women in New Orleans desired but were unable to attain as a result of the demographic, economic, and legal realities of life within the slave society. Frederick Law Olmsted, who visited New Orleans in the 1850s, ofers insight into the motivations of some white men who chose to take on a placee. For many young men, the life of placage was simply “much cheaper than living at hotels and boarding houses.”46 Describing the savings that such a lifestyle might bring, he notes the actions taken by one young man: He hired, at a low rent, two apartments in the older part of town; his placee did not, except occasionally, require a servant; she did the marketing, and performed all the ordinary duties of house-keeping herself; she took care of his clothes, and in every way was economical and saving in her habits—it being her interest, if her afections for him were not su2cient, to make him as much comfort and as little expense as possible that he might be more strongly attached to her and have less occasion to leave her.47

When one adds in the unlimited access to the placee’s body that was also part of the agreement, it is clear why white men favored this

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arrangement. In addition to the above-mentioned bene0ts, placage also came with an expectation of 0delity on the part of the placee and none on the part of the white male partner. As one author states, “according to custom, they [the placees] were esteemed as honourable and virtuous while they were faithful to one man. If in their amours, they became indiscriminate, they lost the advantage of this rank and became classed as prostitutes or slaves.”48 This declassing of colored women once desired by white men echoes that experienced by the female subject in Life and Death of the Mulatta. Although some concubinage relationships endured for years in New Orleans and Havana, most did not. Once the white partners were tired of sowing their wild oats and found a satisfactory white woman or even a more pleasing black or mulatto concubine, the former mistress was simply left to 0nd another eligible male. With the inevitable coming on of age and the fading of one’s attractiveness in the eyes of white males, most of New Orleans’s once-coveted lightskinned women were inevitably left with no male partner. Although the overabundance of black males in Havana ensured that the city’s black and mulatto women, even those discarded by former white partners, would still be in demand by black males, their years spent as concubines left them, like their counterparts in New Orleans, saddled with an indeterminable number of illegitimate children who had very little contact with their biological fathers. For many of the female children, their lives would be carbon copies of those experienced by their mothers. Although the impediments to the creation of African-descended marital units in nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans were extensive, the overall assault on the family also extended to reproduction and childrearing. Like the impediments to the creation of conjugal unions made up of black and mulatto females, the obstacles to normal levels of reproduction and reasonable prospects for raising children were multifaceted. They included low birthrates, high levels of infant mortality, and the constant threat of sale of mothers, fathers, and children away from blood-linked relatives. Very little data exist regarding childbirth and infant mortality rates in Havana proper, but the context of the crisis in maternity can be gleaned from statistics regarding Cuba as a whole. For the period from 1835 to 1841, only 19 out of every 1,000 slave women gave birth successfully. Of these, more than half (575 of 1,000) died within the 0rst year of life. Although the overall numbers did improve as time went on, for the period between 1856 and 1860 the birthrate was

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28 per 1,000 women, while the infant mortality rate improved to a similarly dismal 28 percent (283 of 1,000) of live births.49 By comparison, the birthrate among slaves in the United States averaged between 50 and 55 per 1,000 women throughout the nineteenth century.50 Although these numbers speak to the crisis in maternity among slave women throughout Cuba, an analysis of Havana newspaper advertisements regarding female slaves for sale or trade provides insight into the situation confronting pregnant women and new mothers there. For those slaves who were able to 0ght through the numerous health-related obstacles that kept so many of their peers from becoming pregnant, a new level of instability often accompanied their state of maternity: becoming pregnant moved female slaves into a new job classi0cation—that of wet nurse. This vocation was highly sought after and slaveholders knew it. Once their slaves became pregnant, they had a limited window of opportunity to exploit this situation. In an efort to maximize their 0nancial return, many slave masters rushed to ofer their pregnant female slaves to households desiring nursemaids. Evidence of this phenomenon can be seen in a January 10, 1815, advertisement ofering “una negra embarazada” (a pregnant black woman) as a nursemaid and another listing on February 27, 1817, showcasing “una negra, de edad como de 19 años, embarazada de ocho meses” (a nineteen-year-old black female, eight months pregnant.)51 Although the sale of pregnant women was not at all infrequent, the more general practice was to wait until these women gave birth and then to sell them quickly, as advertisements in the Diario del Gobierno de la Habana con0rm. On January 5, 1815, a Habanero seeks to trade a female washerwoman/cook for a nursemaid “sin cría o que esté en estado de despechar” (without child or currently weaning their child) (4). On September 19, 1825, another black woman “con abundante leche con cría y sin ella” (possessing abundant milk with or without child) is listed (3). On September 25, 1825, “una negra joven con quince días de parida, de abundante leche” (a young black woman who gave birth 0fteen days ago and who possesses abundant milk) is also being sold “sin cría” (without child) (4). On Christmas Day of the same year we see another black woman ofered “recién parida, con buena leche para nodriza, sin cría” (who has given birth recently, with good milk for nursing, without child) (December 25, 1825, 4). The pervasiveness of the practice of pushing new mothers, with or without their children, onto the slave market as nursemaids is shown

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in a sample of ads from January 16, 1841. On this day there are thirty-four total ads featuring slaves for sale. Of these, thirty involve females. The women being sold include a young woman who had given birth eight days earlier “con su cría” (with her child), a woman with “buena leche” (good milk) “solo or con cría” (with or without child), “una buena nodriza” (a good nursemaid) “sin cría” (without child), and a woman for rent “parida de dos meses” (who gave birth two months ago) (3–4). Other notices include “se alquila para nodriza una negra parida de dos meses” (a black woman for rent as a nursemaid who gave birth two months ago) and a solicitation to buy “una buena nodriza pero sin cría” (a good nursemaid but without child) (ibid.). Advertisements like these litter the pages of Havana’s most popular newspapers. While it is not possible to ascertain if the women being ofered “sin cría” are being sold while their child is left behind or if the child has died, in either case the psychological rami0cations of being forced to nurse someone else’s infant after being separated from one’s own by death or sale must have been tremendous. Moreover, it is clear from the number of women being sold “with or without child” that the slave master’s priority was to get the highest price possible and not to nurture the bond between mother and child. Instead of being given the opportunity to attend to the health and well-being of their infants, these women were quickly placed on the market and shipped of, with or without their children, to the highest bidder. Even though statistics regarding infant mortality and childbirth rates among slave women in New Orleans are not as dense as they were in Havana, the crisis in childrearing is clear. Looking at child–women ratios in 1850 (i.e., children under age 0ve divided by females age 0fteen to forty-four), Virginia Meacham Gould calculates a ratio of .260 for the New Orleans’s slave population.52 This compares with a ratio of .680 for free blacks and ratio of .485 for whites. Interestingly, free women of color also had an infant mortality rate (75 per 1,000) that signi0cantly eclipsed that of American slaves generally.53 Exacerbating the dismal prospects for reproduction among slaves in New Orleans was the ever-present specter of the sale of family members. In the overall scheme of social-control mechanisms available to slave regimes throughout the Americas, both rural and urban, Norrece Jones calls this strategy “the most efective long-term mechanism of control.”54 Men, women, and children, both light- and dark-skinned, lived with this specter as a constant challenge to the viability of their familial units. As mentioned earlier, New Orleans

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maintained a law throughout much of the nineteenth century that prohibited the sale of children under the age of ten. Although this decree kept some masters from selling children away from their parents, a careful examination of census data by age group reveals that it did not deter all. Turning once again to population statistics for 1830, one sees a notable discrepancy in the numbers of males and female under the age of ten (Table 3). Among slaves there are 1,051 males and 1,339 females. Given that the normal ratio of males to females should hover somewhere around 0fty-0fty, the fact that females so greatly outnumber males must be a consequence of human manipulation, namely, the selling away of male children. Although the numbers do get progressively worse as one proceeds up the chronological ladder, the numbers for the under-ten bracket stand out as evidence that the law against selling young children was not highly regarded or summarily enforced. Additionally, these numbers underscore the fact that being born male in New Orleans severely limited the prospects of growing up with even one blood-linked parent present.55 Given that more than 75 percent of the city’s slaves labored in a domestic capacity, it also seems quite evident that the often romanticized portrayal of the New Orleans slave owners’ supposed attachment to their servants, if it ever existed, extended only to the females under their care, and not to these women’s sons, brothers, or husbands.56 Interestingly, not even those supposedly privileged females who were the products of interracial unions were free from the possibility that they would be sold away. Evidence of this is provided by the son of Mary Harris, one of New Orleans’s former slaves, interviewed in October 1940 as a part of the Works Progress Administration’s Louisiana Writers Project. He angrily addresses the practice of slave masters selling their ofspring: Yes’m, I’m bitter and the more I think about it the madder I get. Look at me, they say I could pass for white. My mother is bright too. And why? Because the man who owned and sold my mother was her father. But that’s not all. That man I hate with every 0bre of my body and why? A brute like that who could sell his own child into unprincipled hands is a beast—The power, just because he had the power, and the thirst for money.57

The blatant disregard that some slave masters exhibited for the well-being of their biracial children is brought into even sharper focus by examining pictorial evidence. On January 30, 1864, Harper’s Weekly published a letter with an accompanying wood engraving describing

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the personal histories of eight emancipated slaves in New Orleans. The engraving was based on an actual photograph taken a year earlier. Included in the picture are the de0nitively black Wilson Chinn, a sixty-year-old man with the letters V. B. M., the initials of his master, branded on his forehead; Mary Johnson, a cook with more than 0fty lash marks on her back and mistress-inlicted cuts on her arms; Robert Whitehead, a carpenter who made thousands of dollars for his master and was “rewarded” with a quarter of a dollar as a token of his appreciation; and Isaac Watts, an eight-year-old child. Also included are four light-skinned individuals, three of whom appear decidedly white. Their stories make it clear that skin color, age, gender, and even one’s blood relationship to one’s master were no guarantee against sale: Rebecca Hughe is eleven years old, and was a slave in her father’s house, the special attendant of a girl [most likely her white sister] a little older than herself. To all appearance she is perfectly white. Her complexion, hair, and features show not the slightest trace of negro blood . . . Her mother and grandmother live in New Orleans, where they support themselves comfortably by their own labor. The grandmother, an intelligent mulatto, told Mr. Bacon [the leader of the school for emancipated children that the young subjects attend] that she had “raised” a large family of children, but these are all that are left to her. Rosina Downs is not quite seven years old. She is a fair child with blond complexion and silky hair. Her father is in the rebel army. She has one sister as white as herself, and three brothers who are darker. Her mother, a bright mulatto, lives in New Orleans in a poor hut, and has hard work to support her family. Charles Taylor is eight years old. His complexion is very fair, his hair light and silky. Three out of 0ve [white] boys in any school in New York are darker than he. Yet this white boy, with his mother, as he declares, has been twice sold as a slave. First by his father and “owner” Alexander Wethers, of Lewis County, Virginia, to a slavetrader named Harrison, who sold them to Mr. Thronhill of New Orleans. His mother is a mulatto; she had one daughter sold into Texas before she herself left Virginia, and one son who, she supposes, is with his father in Virginia. Augusta Beoujey is nine years old. Her mother is almost white, who was owned by her half-brother, named Solomon, who still retains two of her children.58

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Although it is commonplace for discussions of parent–child relationships to be presented solely in terms of the mother–child bond, evidence from Havana also alludes to the toll that family separation had on fathers. In a number of grievances 0led in the middle of the nineteenth century, enslaved black men made it very clear that they cherished their relationships with their children and would go to great lengths in their eforts to ensure a better life for their ofspring. On June 8, 1864, Manuel Valerio, a slave of Don Juan Bautista Núñez and a native of the Congo, ran away from his master as a means of protesting his inability to visit his children. In his complaint 0led later that month, he stated that he was sold to Núñez “under the condition that each month he would be given permission to travel to the capital to see his children.” When Núñez continued to breach the contract, Valerio felt he had no other recourse than to lee in the hope that he would one day regain the right to visit his children.59 Given the potential dangers that faced runaways, including imprisonment in the Depósito Central, Valerio’s actions point to the high value he placed on his relationship with his children. In addition to running away, slave men also tried to be a meaningful part of their children’s lives by legally working to buy their freedom. Even though this was a right guaranteed by the Spanish crown through the institution known as coartación, it was not without its problems. In many cases, slaves had to make formal petitions to the colonial authorities to ensure that masters actually freed their children when the agreed-upon sum of money had been raised. This was the case with both José Agustín Cepero and “Miguel,” two moreno slaves in Havana. Agustín Cepero was 0ghting for the freedom of his daughter Juana. Earlier that year, he had paid to have her freed, but her former master later came back to reclaim her with the intention of transporting her to an outlying plantation far away from her father. In his response to the former master’s claim against him, Agustín Cepero asked the court to recognize the validity of the previously executed contract.60 Miguel’s complaint arose out of the refusal of his daughter’s slave master to free her despite the fact that he had ful0lled his end of the court-sanctioned agreement.61 Both cases speak to the level of love, pain, and sacri0ce that seems to have characterized black family life during slavery. Like their female counterparts, these and other men struggled daily to maintain families despite the fact that the societies in which they lived were constantly at odds with their desires. The African-descended family was in a state of crisis in nineteenthcentury Havana and New Orleans. Barriers to the formation of

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conjugal unions, the denigration of the black men as potential marital partners, the objecti0cation of the black female as an outlet for white male sexual desires, and the total disrespect for issues surrounding childbirth and parenting all served as pieces of an elaborate web of social control aimed at wresting every vestige of humanity from blacks and mulattoes, both slave and free. Given that the family is the most basic form of social organization, the consequence of these devices served the slave regime well in its attempt to undermine the cohesion of this community and to dilute its potential for rebellion. Although this assault was taxing on the psyche of all African-descended peoples, it did not preclude them from having alternative visions of social relations within their own community, as can be seen in the activities of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square. These alternative expressions were communalized evocations tied to a year-round battle to combat the efects of the family-centered assault. Encompassing music, dance, iconography, masquerade, religious ritual, and other expressive forms, these representations speak to the presence of a family-oriented ethos, centered on the dei0cation of the male– female union, which continued to exist within the African-descended communities of New Orleans and Havana despite the actions of the larger society. One of the most commonly described occurrences in accounts of El Día de Reyes is the procession of the Abakuás or nañigos. Ramón Meza, a late-nineteenth-century commentator, states: “In the more distant parts of the city and on the less crowded streets, nañigos did as they pleased . . . It was a sight to see the wild mass following from among the lowest class of people.”62 Because he accepts the common depiction of the nañigo as a savage African, Meza cannot understand why so many members of the African-descended community are enamored by these “gross” and “barbaric” 0gures that parade through the streets, “incessant in their ofensive convulsions, shaking the many bells tied around their waists.”63 To understand the reaction of the crowds to the appearance of the Abakuá and the central 0gure, “the Ireme” or nañigo, one must go beyond their external attributes and the perception of white Cubans.64 The Abakuás, who still exist today, were originally an all-male secret society made up of slaves from the Cross River region of Nigeria. Referred to as either Ngbe, Ekpe, or the leopard society in West Africa, its members were responsible for maintaining the well-being of the community.65 While white Cubans continually looked upon this group with disdain and even moved to bar them from El Día de

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Reyes because of their “antisocial” behavior, the African-descended community admired them as strong examples of black manhood. To be selected as a member of the Abakuá society required ful0lling four very strict criteria. An inductee could only be nominated after he had shown clear evidence of being a good father, a good brother, a good friend, and a good husband. On the day of induction, the new initiate would come out of the male-only compound donning the dress of the Ireme, said to be the spirit of a deceased ancestor. During the public procession he responded only to the word of god, called Abasi, as it emanated from the sacred Ekue drum. Not only did the Abakuás represent the most positive attributes of men in the slave community, but the fact that they punished transgressions such as adultery, stealing, and disrespect with physical beatings or even death gave them authority in a community that was in constant battle with a slave regime that denied most vestiges of black manhood and questioned whether the slaves possessed even a semblance of a moral code or ethical system. In contrast to the white perceptions of black men that embraced perverse characterizations of the Abakuá, attributed criminal aspirations to the calesero and the curro, and equated almost all other black men with slaves, black and mulatto Cubans, both slave and free, could see in the Ireme a symbol that directly countered these negative depictions. While the Abakuás presented a positive portrayal of manhood during El Día de Reyes, the fact that “a good many” of the other participants “carried glass-cased Virgins of Regla or Brown Virgins of El Cobre” speaks to the resurrection of the female image and the institution of motherhood among Havana’s African-descended community66 (Figures 11 and 12). The Virgins of Regla and El Cobre are syncretized, respectively, with Yemaya and Oshun, two of the most recognized orishas of the Lucumi/Yoruba religious pantheon.67 Yemaya is the mother of all orishas and is the symbol of maternity. She rules over the seas, is the saint of all pregnant women, and is the mother of Shango, the god of war and thunder. She wears seven blueand-white veils to symbolize the seven seas and is referred to as the mother of the 0sh because her progeny are said to be so numerous. Oshun is the orisha of rivers and cool water and is most associated with female sexuality, although all initiates to the faith must 0rst travel through her waters as she is also the spokesperson of Olodumare or the creator. Although she is often depicted as a sort of femme fatale, she is always in control of her body and has used her alluring ways on more than one occasion to help restore the human community.

Figure 11. Contemporary glass-cased Virgin of Regla.

Figure 12. Contemporary glass-cased Virgin of El Cobre.

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Although she is usually depicted as a peacock to symbolize her beauty, she is also analogized with the vulture in homage to the fact that she once gave up all her physical beauty to convince Olodumare to save the world from destruction. Taken together, Yemaya and Oshun represent the slave’s acceptance and espousal of a set of values and beliefs that ran counter to the paradigms encouraged by the slave regime. The two female orishas not only promote femininity, motherhood, and child rearing, but they are also respected for women’s central role in maintaining the human family. In Oshun one also notes a characterization of healthy black female sexuality that is in direct contradiction to the depiction of the black female as a prostitute. Evidence of the level of Havana’s African-descended community’s embrace of these symbols can be seen in the surviving Yemaya and Oshun miniatures that were clandestinely created throughout the nineteenth century and are presently housed in the Casa de África in Havana (Figure 13). The concern that Havana’s African-descended communities exhibited with the issues of maternity was also evident in the creation and usage of Imaguey dolls (Figure 14). These anthropomorphic creations are the equivalent of Yoruban Ibeji dolls. They can be made out of almost any substance, are created in twin (usually male and female), and symbolize the Yoruba’s care and concern for children and the institution of maternity. They take the place of a deceased twin and also serve as protective 0gures for a mother whose twins have died. In the former case, they protect the surviving sibling from being called to join his or her deceased twin. In the latter example, they serve to encourage mothers to continue their eforts to give birth to other children.68 Although they are most often identi0ed with the Yoruba, the Ewe and the Fon also make common use of them.69 In nineteenth-century Havana, African-descended women created Imaguey dolls as one more attempt to encourage pregnancy and successful childbirth. As they danced with their Imaguey dolls, the women sang: Beji, beji la O be ekun iya re Give birth to twins! And be rich! Give birth to twins! And be rich! Twins console their weeping mother. (She will weep no more from hunger)70

Figure 13. Yemaya and Oshun miniatures. Courtesy of Casa de África, Havana, Cuba.

Figure 14. Imaguey/Ibeji dolls. Courtesy of Casa de África, Havana, Cuba.

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Although Yemaya, Oshun, and the Imaguey dolls are of Yoruban origin, the other ethnic groups that made up Havana’s Africandescended community would easily have been able to embrace the symbolism of these artifacts. Fertility inducements such as dolls and the worship of deities whose primary concern is with childbirth are common throughout much of the West African areas that served as the principal suppliers of Cuba’s slave labor pool. In Ghana, the Asante use dolls to cure infertility. In Burkina Faso, Mossi dolls called biiga help to ensure that a bride will have many children. In Cameroon, Namchi women who have had trouble getting pregnant, nurture small wooden dolls until they conceive.71 One early-twentieth-century traveler among the Ibibio noted that women who desired children walked naked through a stream dedicated to the spirit of Isemin, who was seen as “the bestower of fertility.”72 This traveler’s informant explained the practice: “As a bride on her wedding night . . . yields herself in all ways to the will of her new-made lord, so at harvest time maids and matrons present themselves before the great juju Isemin, unrobed and awaiting his will, that perchance he may enter within those he chooses, thus shedding the blessing of fertility upon our town.”73 Just as Yoruba slaves in Havana syncretized Yemaya with the Catholic Virgin of Regla, other ethnic groups also syncretized their deities of fertility and motherhood with Yemaya. A perfect example of this inter-African syncretism occurred among the Bakongo, whose female fertility deity Maeaguas, “the mother of waters,” accorded nicely with Yemaya.74 Interestingly, Maeaguas’s colors are also blue and white. The discussion of the symbolic power of dolls is especially relevant to El Día de Reyes because, along with the identi0able images of Yemaya and Oshun, female participants also carried a host of dolls referred to as anaquille (Figure 15). Given the crisis in maternity relected in low birthrates, high infant mortality rates, and the threat of family dissolution by the sale of new mothers as wet nurses, it seems quite likely that anaquille were also a type of fertility inducement, especially in view of the fact that they were associated with followers of Yemaya/the Virgin of Regla.75 In addition, the coupling of the anaquille with the black and mulatto woman walking the streets of Havana during El Día de Reyes created another image heavy in symbolism for slaves imported from Africa—that of the mother and child. Art historian Herbert Cole contends that one of the most enduring and consistent iconographic images over time and space in Africa is that of the mother and child. It symbolizes “continuity, the perpetuation of society through repopulation.”76 These images pervade

Figure 15. Woman with anaquille.

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African art and, like fertility dolls, emphasize the importance of children and maternity among African peoples. In the case of the 0gure of a woman carrying an anaquille through the streets of Havana during El Día de Reyes, the couple (woman and doll) becomes the icon. Like sculptured, carved, or painted icons, the meaning of this image was clear to many in the African-descended community. When placed in the context of the other images discussed, the mother-and-child model served only to strengthen them in the face of the societal impediments to their ability to constitute functional familial units. The embrace of the images of Yemaya and Oshun, the creation of Imaguey dolls, and the public display of the mother-and-child icons point to the fact that, despite the societal barriers, African-descended women in Havana still embraced the concept of maternity and longed to be mothers. This point is especially important given that many primary and secondary accounts argue that the widespread use of infanticide and abortion by slave women was responsible for the low birthrates and high levels of infant mortality in many slave societies.77 This may have been true in some instances. What seems to be missing from this discussion is the monumental change in social values that enslaved Africans had to have undergone for this to become as widespread as some authors have suggested. In most of the African societies that fueled the slave communities of both Havana and New Orleans, high value was placed on women’s roles as mothers and on their ability to bear children. Among nineteenth-century Yoruba, J. Lorand Matory notes that a woman possessed “her most guaranteed authority, sense of achievement, and sense of belonging—in short, her foremost wealth in people—among her children.”78 For the E0k, “the great ambition” of newly married women is “to become a mother at the earliest possible moment.”79 The same can be said of Bakongo women, whose “sole duty” is “to give birth to children that her family may not die out.”80 As for the Igbo, one author states that “children are priceless possessions” and that “the mother’s love for the child, and vice versa, are perhaps the most remarkable elements of the family relationship.”81 Speaking of the importance of childbearing in West Africa in general, Elisabeth Cameron states that “the pressure to become a mother is enormous” and that “a childless woman cannot move to the highest level of knowledge, simply because the holders of the most high ritual positions must be mothers.”82 Childbirth is such an important function in much of West Africa that at the onset of puberty or just before marriage (in preparation for impending childbirth) women routinely endure

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painful scari0cation and tattooing to physically show the world that they are prepared to become mothers. The importance of childbearing in the West African societies that peopled Havana and New Orleans is also evidenced in how these communities treat woman who do not give birth. A Bakongo woman who is barren “is ridiculed by women of her district, and is treated with scorn by her own family, for she has failed to add her quota to the maintenance of the clan.”83 Although the Fon treat barren women with honor, it is only because they believe that the afterlife of these women, “with no children of their own to look after them, will be hard.”84 For the Edo of Nigeria, a woman who has not given birth will have no one to bury her and no one improperly buried can enter into the society of the dead.85 This negative characterization of childless women is common throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Among the Lunda Ndembu of Zambia, at death an “X” is burned into the back of a childless woman, who is then “buried face down, spit upon in the grave, and cursed.”86 For the Igbo, to be “childless is the greatest calamity that can befall a woman.”87 In view of the widespread emphasis that African societies place on women’s role as mothers and on children, the contention that slave women, en masse, made the decision through infanticide and abortion to remain childless, if true, speaks volumes about the horrendous nature of New World slavery. If correct, this is one example of the changes in beliefs and worldview precipitated by the transferring of millions of Africans to the slave societies of the Americas. Although this may have been the case in rural plantation zones of Jamaica, SaintDomingue, Brazil, and parts of Cuba, the representations found in El Día de Reyes place in serious doubt whether this phenomenon applied to nineteenth-century Havana. Although the available depictions of Congo Square activities do not ofer the same level of speci0city that one can glean from those of El Día de Reyes regarding counterstatements to the assault on maternity, they do provide evidence of strong support for the familial unit. Such evidence can be seen in the dance forms performed during the event. Of the many dances at Congo Square, accounts of the CongoChica (also referred to as Bamboula) and the Calenda were most often spoken of by observers.88 In their performance, the Africandescended population was able to express its vision of male–female relationships and make a strong statement about the importance of these unions. Like Cuban images embracing maternity and children, Congo Square dances show a desire to refashion the social landscape

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in a manner that directly contradicted the state of afairs dictated by the slave regime. Both the Chica and the Calenda were danced by slaves and free blacks throughout the Caribbean and in many parts of North and South America. Both were performed by male–female couples in the middle of a larger communal dance circle that was alive with music, usually drumming and other percussive accompaniment, and calland-response singing. Both dances consisted of gender-distinct roles and dance movements that conformed to speci0c male and female parts. According to dance historian Lynne Emery, during the performance of the Chica, “the role danced by the woman was apparently one of coquetry, while the man pursued and enticed.”89 One of the most complete and informed descriptions of the dance is provided by Moreau de Saint-Méry: When one wants to dance the Chica, a tune especially reserved for that type of dance is played on crude instruments . . . For the woman, who holds the ends of a kerchief or the sides of her skirt, the art of this dance consists mainly in moving the lower parts of her loins while maintaining the upper part of her body practically immobile. Should one want to enliven the Chica, a man approaches the woman while she is dancing, and, throwing himself forward precipitously, he falls in with the rhythm, almost touching her, drawing back, lunging again, seeming to want to coax her to surrender to the passion which engulfs them. When the Chica reaches its most expressive stage, there is in the gestures and in the movements of the two dancers a harmony which is more easily imagined than described.90

The Calenda, which involved a dancing line of men and women facing one another in the middle of a dancing circle, was considered by many white observers to have highly sexual overtones.91 About this dance, Moreau de Saint-Méry states: All one sees is the man spinning himself or swirling around his partner, who, herself also spins and moves about . . . The woman holds both ends of a kerchief which she rocks from side to side. When one has not witnessed it himself, it is hard to believe how lively and animated it is as well as how the rigorous following of the meter gives such grace. The dancers ceaselessly replace each other, and the blacks derive such pleasure from this entertainment that they must be forced to stop.92

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Saint-Méry’s descriptions were drawn from observations made in Saint-Domingue, just prior to the Haitian Revolution. In New Orleans, the members of the African-descended population continued to perform these dances in a manner that was almost identical to that described by Saint-Méry. In most cases it was associated, many times inaccurately, with individuals hailing from the Congo region, but, as Emery states, these “dances were enjoyed by nearly all slaves.”93 In the performances of the Chica and the Calenda, slaves were able to display a model of male–female relations that was imbued with deep signi0cance. Given the intense social pressure that Africandescended women were under to ignore black males as potential partners, the simple fact that they came to Congo Square and danced intimately with these men exhibited a level of independence of thought and action that is often ignored. Despite the fact that many of their peers shunned any association with black men, the women who came to Congo Square embraced them. In the movements associated with the Chica and the Calenda, the actions of black men are also noteworthy. Even though the dynamics of the slave trade lessened their numbers dramatically and the slave regime commonly placed them at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the male dancers at Congo Square did not seem to have internalized this perception in such a way as to deem themselves personally un0t to join with African-descended women. In fact, in their highly stylized dance movements, these men exhibited a model of male strength and a level of chivalrous romanticism that must have been attractive to the African-descended women who abhorred the notion of joining sexually with their white oppressors. Instead of ripping the clothes of of black women and callously groping their body parts as their white pursuers had, male dancers in Congo Square displayed an ideal of manhood that left intact their partner’s ideal of womanhood. It was not manhood at the expense of womanhood, but manhood working in conjunction with womanhood. It was a display of a model of male– female relations that was symbiotic and not parasitic—to be a man, these dancers did not have to violate the very essence that made their partners women. By dancing together, African-descended women and men also created a visual image of the conjugal unions that were so hard to establish in reality (Figure 16). This image, like that of the motherand-child image associated with El Día de Reyes, also harks back to African artistic paradigms of social organization and functioning that would be signi0cant to many in the African-descended community.

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Throughout West Africa, artistic depictions of the male and female couple abound. Although the speci0c meanings vary from one society to another, each of these interpretations springs from the universal embrace of the man and the woman as central characters in the drama of human life. According to Herbert Cole, these images can represent revered ancestors, primordial couples that symbolize creation, male–female afection or intimacy, marriage, procreation, and even the opposition and reciprocity that are at the foundation of the gendered and sexual de0nitions of man and woman.94 Each of the meanings associated with the artistic portrayal of the male and female couple would have signi0cance for the Africandescended community in New Orleans. The image could be interpreted as a reverential act to remember kin sold away to a plantation or as an attempt to maintain ties to individuals and ethnic groups in Africa. For an individual struggling to establish or maintain a productive union with an African-descended partner, the dances could represent courtship, marriage, and the eventual birth of children. In either case, it is clear that the representations exhibited by male and female dancers at Congo Square had the capacity to be models of the African-descended population’s desire to constitute a form of social organization that was in opposition to the reality that they faced as a result of the slave regime’s assault on the family. In contrast to the disharmony created by the disproportionate numbers of female slaves in the city, during the equally paired dances harmony reigned. Evidence of a similar form of representation can also be seen in El Día de Reyes.

Figure 16. George Washington Cable, The Dance in Place Congo, from Century Magazine 31:4 (February 1886): 525.

Figure 17. George Washington Cable, The Dance in Place Congo, from Century Magazine 31:4 (February 1886): 525.

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Havana’s slaves also danced the Chica and Calenda during El Día de Reyes, and expressed a model of male–female relations that ran counter to the desire of the slave regime through a practice called the royal procession. One account after another mentions the fact that Havana’s mutual-aid agencies, called cabildos, conducted a highly reverential ritual that paid homage to the “king” and “queen” of each association.95 This practice was also a feature of slave festivals throughout the Caribbean.96 Central to the performance was the honoring of a male and female couple by the members of the cabildo. As Arelio Pérez Zamora, a nineteenth-century observer notes, the participants “respond in chorus to the African king” while they continue “moving to the noise of the drums and whistles around a negress they have proclaimed queen.”97 He goes on to state that “all the individuals that belong to the same tribe proclaim one of their nation as a mother superior, giving her the name maestra.”98 The treatment of this maestra is similar to that aforded queen mothers among the Akan. According to Robert Sutherland Rattray, “the Queen mother is to an Ashanti (Akan) the personi0cation of motherhood” and that “respect and honour has always been the queen mother’s right.”99 This respect stems not only from her ability to give birth in a general sense, but from her role in the human drama. As one Akan proverb appropriately states, “Oba na owo obarima” (A woman gave birth to a man).100 When approaching the kings and queens during El Día de Reyes, their subjects exhibit the utmost respect and honor. A. de García, who wrote about the royal processions that he witnessed in 1842, made it a point to “marvel” at the “gravity with which the cabildos practice their ceremonies” and “the veneer of religious solemnity that they give these profane acts.”101 Like the display of the male and female couple image in Congo Square, the participants in El Día de Reyes showcased the model of the African-descended man and woman. In their representations, male participants also honored the female image and modeled behaviors that respected femininity while maintaining an almost heroic male archetype. For example, describing an 1856 performance of El Día de Reyes in Matanzas, Léon Beauvallet says that a male participant “gave his hand gravely to a sort of female blackamoor who represented some queen or other. He walked with a deliberate, majestic step, never laughed, and seemed to be relecting deeply on the grandeur of his mission to this world.”102 In Congo Square and El Día de Reyes, the African-descended communities of New Orleans and Havana exhibited portrayals that

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ran counter to what one would expect given the social context in which they lived. Even though they were faced with a multipronged assault on their ability to create and sustain familial units composed of black and mulatto men, women, and children, these groups were still able to fashion a performance model that embraced a level of familial organization that the slave regimes denied. In their dances, songs, and iconography, both animate and inanimate, it is clear that although the master class saw little value in the continuation of African-descended familial units, they remained of paramount importance to the black and mulatto women and men who participated in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square.

4 Imagining the African / Imagining Blackness

n both nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans, the seemingly omnipresent and potentially rebellious black and mulatto populations caused a great deal of concern for the respective slave regimes. This concern can be evidenced in the growth of antiblack and anti-African expression and in the continuous eforts to divide the African-descended community along every color and class-based designation possible. The latter issue will be dealt with in the next chapter, but it is the former that is at the center of the present discussion. Although racial prejudice and derogatory depictions of Africans were not exclusively nineteenth-century phenomena, the growth of the black and mulatto populations of both Havana and New Orleans gave the white citizens of both cities one more excuse to tap into a wellspring of antiblack and anti-African sentiment that, in many cases, had served as the rationale for the enslavement of Africans from the beginning of the slave trade.1 In terms of the overall social-control objectives, the degradation of the image of the African and the racial concept of blackness served two complementary purposes. On the one hand, the continuous characterizations of blacks and Africans as subhuman, childlike, lazy, criminally driven, sexually promiscuous, and in need of custodial care, to name just a few of the portrayals, helped slaveholders to rationalize the institution of slavery in a world that was growing increasingly antagonistic to perpetual servitude as the primary source of labor. On the other hand, these depictions also served as a justi0cation for the harassment and repression of free persons of color and mulattoes.2 In the nineteenth century, much of the Western world became 0xated with attempts to arrive at scienti0c “proof” that various racial

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groups were diferent, not only in outward appearance, but, more importantly, in intellect, cultural achievement, and relative levels of civility.3 This preoccupation is clear from race writings in both Havana and New Orleans during the period. Moreover, expressions of popular culture (art, literature, music, drama, etc.) in both cities attest to the fact that the denigration of the image of the African and the racial concept of blackness were central to the larger socialcontrol objective of both regimes. The institution of slavery in the Americas was predicated on the notion that the enslavement of Africans was in part justi0ed by their supposed inferiority to Western Europeans, and both nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans owed much of their existence and continued growth to this belief. At the core of many nineteenth-century writings on race was an implicit assumption that the Caucasian “type” was the paradigm by which all other races or physically distinct branches of the human family were to be judged. Using the physical and cultural attributes of the Western European male as the model, natural scientists, clergymen, politicians, and anyone else with an advantage to be gained by socially degrading competing phenotypes, worldviews, political systems, or religious and moral constructs actively engaged in the larger debate on the nature of Man and, more speci0cally, the origin and character of non-Europeans. Many in the Americas used conclusions drawn from scientists as the foundation of an argument for or against slavery. Inluenced primarily by the biblical theory of creation, many nineteenth-century race scientists contended that all humans emanated from one common origin. Generally described as the monogenesis theory, they argued that physical variations within the human species were a result of environmental factors. Adopting this argument, many abolitionists contended that the African was essentially “a black white man” and was thus entitled to the same rights and opportunities as their lighter-hued counterparts. Adherents to this strain of the monogenesis theory further contended that any observable diferences in intellect or “civility” between blacks and whites were a logical consequence of life under slavery. Although monogenesis was readily invoked by those 0ghting to end perpetual servitude in the New World, the theory could also be used by proponents of slavery. For many pro-slavers, the fact that Africans and Europeans might have come from the same source was not the issue. They were concerned with the present status of the races. In this respect, they argued that centuries of existence in a tropical

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environment had thwarted Africans’ intellectual, cultural, and moral progress and left them, at least up to the nineteenth century, developmentally inferior to Europeans. This was the case for the inluential Cuban naturalist Felipe Poey. In his La unidad de la especie humana (1861) he echoed a classic biblically inluenced belief that all human beings emanated from one source, Adam and Eve, but that it was a curse placed on Noah’s son Ham for looking upon his naked father that led to the blackening of a subdivision of humanity, which became the race contemporary thinkers were calling the black or negroid race. According to Poey, there was no such thing as an inferior or superior race and any observable diferences between Africans, Asians, and Europeans were attributable to causes such as environment and nurturing. According to this line of monogenesis thinking, slavery aided African-descended people by exposing them to proper models of civility and technological development. Using this rationale, one day, after a long apprenticeship at the knee of the European, the African could catch up.4 Although both abolitionists and pro-slavery activists could embrace the view of creation advocated by monogenesis, a large faction of the intellectuals who argued that the races were unequal contended that Africans and Europeans were actually two separate species. Championing the approach known as polygenesis, these individuals argued that white Europeans were created separate from and superior to black Africans and that God, Mother Nature, or whatever force was the creative impetuous behind the birth of the human species had made the concepts of hierarchy and subordination a part of the master plan. Because the European type represented normality, its antithesis, the African, logically became the model of abnormality. Among the major proponents of this theory were Samuel Morton, Louis Agassiz, Josiah Nott, and George R. Gliddon, some of the most notable names in nineteenth-century American anthropology and ethnology. In Cuba, scientists, naturalist, and intellectuals associated with the Sociedad Económica de Amigos de País and many in the burgeoning anthropology profession also adhered to this belief, although its support was always tempered in the early nineteenth century by the strong inluence of the Catholic church. For those championing the cause of white privilege and black servitude, the fact that seemingly objective scientists concluded that Africans were a completely separate race simply a2rmed much of what they already believed to be true. Moreover, in the context of the ever-growing international and domestic debates over abolition, the 0ndings of these individuals were

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cited as proof that slavery was the most bene0cial status for Africandescended peoples. In New Orleans, the depth and breath of the pseudo-intellectual assaults on the image of blacks and Africans are evident in the pages of DeBow’s Review.5 In addition to being one of the city’s most successful and widely distributed publications, it was also considered by many to be “the most important journal of southern opinion” in the antebellum period.6 The magazine provided information on planting techniques, crop prices, the management of slaves, and highlighted the latest “scienti0c” data on race. It showcased pro-slavery writers from throughout the South and used its editorial pages and an inluential group of New Orleans writers to construct a persistent, multifaceted assault on the social image of African-descended people. At the heart of most of DeBow’s Review’s negative portrayals is the implicit assumption of the inferiority of all African-descended people compared with all whites. One editorial echoes the standard polygenesis line: .

The African negro, as domesticated in the South, possesses the moral faculty of yielding implicit obedience to superiors; and being naturally gifted with the power of imitation, his mission upon earth seems to be to become the servant of the Caucasian race; for what is most remarkable, the negro and the Caucasian are the only two races that can harmoniously exist together in the same social community; each occupying its own appropriate sphere—the one constituting the labor class, the other the supervisory and intellectual class.7

Although the contributors to the magazine, like their counterparts in much of the Western world, also applied this notion of inferiority and superiority to groups such as the Irish, Italians, and many Eastern Europeans, descendants of Africa and Native Americans were always considered subordinate to any ethnic group or nationality made up of whites. Although many writers bought into the notion that black Africans were a part of the human species, albeit an inferior one, a signi0cant number were not convinced of this argument. They contended that Africans were some type of subhuman being whose innate character, in the absence of the supposed civilizing inluence of whites, was that of barbarous savages. As a letter to the editor in DeBow’s Review remarks: barbarism is the negroes [sic] natural state, above which he is incapable of raising by any eforts of his own; and that his

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comparatively elevated condition in this country is altogether arti0cial, and can only be maintained by continual contact with, and subjection to, the controlling will of the white race. When that will, support and protection is withdrawn, he inevitably lapses into his original barbarity.8

This quote is important not only for its statement of the general thinking regarding the character of African-descended people, but also because it is written in support of the writings of Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a resident of New Orleans, and one of DeBow’s Review’s most frequently published “experts” on the issue of race. One of his most interesting theories concerns the physical anatomy of Africans. Arguing against the abolitionist’s contention that Africans were simply “black white men,” Cartwright, a medical doctor, countered that the diference in pigmentation extended all the way to “muscles, tendons, and in all luid secretions.”9 In a bizarre article, he challenges the generally accepted biblical interpretation of the fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. Responding to a British writer who contended that Eve was not tempted by a serpent, but by “a creature of the ape or orang outang [sic] kind,” Cartwright argued that, had the writer “lived in Louisiana instead of England, he would have recognized [the serpent as] the negro gardener.”10 Cartwright’s views on the fall of Man may have placed him in a minority faction among biblical scholars of his day, but his confounding of the image of the ape and the African was commonplace in nineteenth-century race writings. This practice is evident in the following passage from the New Orleans Delta, a local newspaper: Pity the sorrows of a European traveling through the bush and partaking the hospitality . . . of a native [African], there is 0shed up out of the big pot of soup a black head, with lips drawn back and the white teeth grinning, and such a painful resemblance to the faces around him that for a moment he wonders which of the younger members of the family has been sacri0ced to the exigencies of the occasion. But he is assured, and discovers that he is not eating man, but monkey.11

One of the most inluential nineteenth-century race theorists to champion the supposed similarities between Africans and primates was the Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz.12 Even though he was publicly committed to the cause of abolition, his attempts to classify the human species soon became cannon fodder for pro-slavery advocates

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throughout the Americas. Initially a proponent of monogenesis, after his inaugural visit to the United States he quickly switched allegiances. Central to this epiphany was his 0rst encounter with people of African descent. After meeting black domestics in his Philadelphia hotel, he felt compelled to write: it is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. In seeing their black faces with their thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their head, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large curved nails, and especially the livid color of their palms, I could not take my eyes of their face in order to tell them to stay far away.13

With his new acceptance of the polygenesis argument, Agassiz set out to classify the human species. Like many of his peers, Agassiz’s classi0cations always used the European male as the archetype. From there, he believed, the human species incrementally digressed. At the end of the continuum, in his view, was the African and then the primate. The hearty acceptance of this typology by avid racists and proslavery advocates is evidenced in Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s tragically classic Types of Mankind, a book that visually manipulated the image of blacks and Africans in an efort to make their supposed similarities with primates seem self-evident.14 Although Agassiz’s thoughts on race and abolition might seem to be in conlict, many nineteenth-century abolitionists held similar views. This was the case with José Antonio Saco, one of Cuba’s leading liberal abolitionists. Although he referred to Africans as the “evil race,” he still advocated an end to slavery.15 His was an abolitionism not grounded in the belief in the equality of the races but fueled by his belief that slavery as a form of labor was thwarting Cuba’s eforts to modernize. Instead, he advocated free-wage labor and massive European immigration as the way to ensure that the island would not be left behind by its huge industrializing neighbor to the north: What a misfortune that the good fathers of the epoch did not ask for the abolition of the slave trade and clamor vigorously for the importation of white colonists! Had they promoted so great a bene0t, the present generation would bless their names, and adore them as saviors of their country. But even in the midst of the terrors instilled in them by the destruction of Saint-Domingue, they still longed for Negroes, believing that without them there could be no prosperity for Cuba.16

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Although many nineteenth-century intellectuals difered as to whether or not African-descended people were part of the human family, most agreed that without the supposed civilizing inluence of whites, blacks reverted to a state of barbarity. Citing the American colony of Liberia as his evidence, Edmund Ru2n of DeBow’s Review writes: If the long-continued aid of the Colonization Society was even now withheld, and also the benevolent guidance and inluence of the intellect of the white guardians and protectors, this much boasted and falsely eulogized colony, and now “Republic of Liberia,” would rapidly decline below its present low condition; and all the residents, who could not escape from it, to 0nd shelter under the shadow of the white man’s presence and government, would sink to the state of savage barbarism and heathen ignorance and vice, such as had formerly overspread the land.17

In Cuba, where the number of people of African descent eclipsed that of whites for much of the nineteenth century, there developed a unusual but logical twist to the belief that Africans, when not in the company of whites, reverted back to their supposed state of barbarity. In the eyes of some Cuban race thinkers, the threat of continued contact with too many Africans could lead to an uncivilizing of the European race. This view is evident in comments by Félix Tanco in a letter to Domingo Delmonte: Who sees us in the movements of our young men and women when they are dancing contradanzas and valses, an imitation of the mimic of the blacks in their cabildos? Who does not know that the lows of the dancers of the country are an echo of the drum of the tango. Everything is African and the innocent and poor blacks . . . properties of the savages of Africa.18

Although the innate inferiority of all persons claiming any connection with Africa is accepted as fact by most race writers in New Orleans, some felt the need to document the “logic” of their beliefs through supposedly empirical examinations. Haiti is usually cited as the test case. The authors proclaim that they are not predisposed to any negative characterization of African-descended people and that the only goal of their endeavor is to 0nd truth. They usually argue that if Africans were truly equal to Europeans, then one to two generations after the Haitian Revolution, that country and its citizenry should perform economically and socially in much the same manner

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as the United States had two generations after its break with England. Soon after the expulsion of their former masters, W. W. Wright, a New Orleans writer, argues, “it might reasonably have been expected that prosperity and happiness would soon be restored, and the industry of the country be developed.”19 Because the free persons of Haiti chose to embark on a developmental model that championed peasant farming and detested any form of labor extraction that resembled that of the former slave colony, logicians argued that this choice constituted unquestionable evidence that the Haitians were “relapsing into their former savage state.”20 Wright again uses an association with whites as the supposed solution to this problem: The inference to be drawn from this and indeed from the whole history of Hayti during the past 0fty years is that by suddenly and violently depriving negroes . . . of their white masters in the western world, even though these be not perfect, you deprive them of protectors and leave them prey to civil wars, discord, massacres, vice, and consequent disease, danger of famine from improvidence, and what is perhaps worse than all, the despotism of their own rulers.21

Because many held that Africans and blacks were “mentally, morally, and physically inferior to the Caucasian race” it stood to reason that their descendants, slave or free, black or mulatto, were also inferior.22 Moreover, because they were supposedly born to serve, freedom put them out of touch with their true nature and guaranteed them a life lacking purpose. As a contributor to DeBow’s Review commented, “still to this day, and with but few exceptions, the free negroes in every state of this Confederacy, are noted for ignorance, indolence, improvidence, and poverty—and generally also, for vicious habits, and numerous violations of the criminal laws.”23 The belief that free blacks became useless drains on society was also prevalent in Cuba. There, Cristóbal Madan, a leading nineteenthcentury intellectual, expresses a similar sentiment: The colored people scarcely contribute to the efective working class on the island, in proportion to their numbers. They do not dwell on their plots of land, but congregate in towns and villages, where they degenerate more each day into a lazy and vicious bunch. Their women possess the most depraved habits and it can be said that the race is almost of no use, either to itself or the country in which it lives; a signi0cant portion is mulatto.24

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In contrast to the lack of purpose that was believed to characterize the free status of former slaves, many of DeBow’s Review’s writers argued that blacks became “the most loyal of all human beings” when properly supervised by their white masters. As a matter of fact, with regard to the Haitian Revolution, most writers cited the French, the English, or the mulatto class, but hardly ever the huge African populace, as being central to the destruction of slavery on the island. An editorial in the magazine states, for example, that “the full blooded negro, born on the soil, had no share in the contrivance, and aided in the execution of the plot only as a mere passive instrument.”25 Another contributor contends that “it was not the slaves of St. Domingo, but the wealthy and educated class of free mulattoes that commenced the insurrection.”26 The notion that Haitian slaves had nothing to do with the rebellion or that they were co-opted by other forces is based on the belief that people of African descent were naturally suited for subservience and slavery and thus would not or could not work against an institution that made them content. It was also a logical consequence of the belief that these people did not possess the mental skills necessary to succeed in such a venture. Another DeBow’s Review editorial states: No Southern man, who is in the least acquainted with the character of the negro, can be intimidated by the Vandal cry of servile insurrection . . . The idea that the Southern Negro will, at some future day, rise in mass to assert his so-called natural right of freedom, as the political and social equal of his master, is not only absurd, but, judging from the natural course of things, it is an utter impossibility. Even if the insurrectionary element could be concentrated to strike a simultaneous blow, the negro possesses neither the physical nor the moral abilities to accomplish anything except his own destruction.27

Of course, many in New Orleans and Havana did have real fears of insurrections, but these fears were linked to the potentially destructive force that mulattoes and free persons of color represented. This phenomenon will be dealt with at length in the next chapter. With regard to the slave population, they generally held on to a tenuous guarded optimism grounded 0rmly in their belief in the diminished mental capabilities of the enslaved. Although Cuban intellectuals described Africans in such negative terms as “the most despicable and ignorant human race”28 and characterized Haiti as a “stupid, insigni0cant, impotent government of orangutangs,”29 it is the expressions of popular culture that show how

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pervasive the idea of African inferiority and subhumanity was. Taking into account the discussion in chapter 3 regarding the degradation of the image of the black male as a potential marital partner through negative characterizations of the curro, the calesero, and the naniñgo, and the insidious workings of the pervasive image of the overly sexualized and promiscuous black woman, this assault was truly impressive and oppressive. Some of the images circulating in nineteenth-century Havana were grounded in the paradigms championed by the gurus of scienti0c racism, others in the social realities of Cuba. One of the most interesting examples of the degradation of the image of African-descended people in Havana is an 1866 calendar series depicted on a set of cigarrillo boxes (Figure 18).30 In contrast to cigars, which were packaged for international markets, cigarrillos (cigarettes) were generally targeted for domestic consumption. Cigar boxes were usually decorated with beautiful scenes from the Cuban countryside or the image of a supposedly pristine white woman, whereas cigarrillo boxes appealed to base sensibilities. They contained vulgar humor, were strong on caricature, and generally tapped into common vernacular and colloquialisms in an efort to be entertaining. Cigarillo boxes often gained their humor at the expense of Africandescended people. In the case of the 1866 calendar, consumers were treated to a year’s worth of derogatory images of blacks. Although the generally negative nature of the images printed on the calendars is obvious, an analysis of the larger aesthetic paradigms grounding these portrayals makes them even more disturbing. Chief among these is the manner in which Africans and blacks are drawn. In each of the selected vignettes, the depictions of the physical features of the black subjects tie in to Western beliefs about the intellect and character of African-descended people. The facial features, especially lips, noses, jaws, foreheads, and eyes, are drawn to coincide with contemporary pseudoscienti0c thinking regarding the supposed link between skull structure and levels of civility and intellect. Following the lead of the eighteenth-century Dutch taxonomist Peter Camper, many nineteenth-century race theorists argued that the greater the angle between forehead and lips, the lesser the level of intelligence.31 Again drawing analogies to primates, these theorists contended that there was an angular continuum that positioned Europeans: those thought to have the smallest forehead–lip angle, at one end, and primates, thought to have the greatest angle, at the other end. Although Camper was one of the initial proponents of the forehead–lip-angle hypothesis, the idea that the contour of one’s head

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was an indication of innate intellect and civility gained widespread acceptance in the nineteenth century because of the work of the American scientist Samuel Morton and the “American school” of ethnology. According to Morton’s and Camper’s theories, Africans’ skull structure and forehead–lip angle positioned them closest to the primate end of the continuum. It is in part in homage to this belief that the calendar’s black subjects have backward sloping foreheads and protruding jaw lines and lips. Another aesthetic theme, this time founded squarely on social constructs emanating from Havana, involves the calendar’s depiction of women. All the black females portrayed in the series exhibit highly exaggerated physical features and are situated in social settings that hint at questionable morals. The most obvious physical characteristics of the female subjects are their size, color, and lack of modesty when it comes to clothing. Each woman is decidedly overweight and darkskinned, and most are either exposing a huge amount of cleavage or have nothing at all covering their breasts even though they are situated in public settings. Although the large, dark-skinned slave women featured in the calendar series could be mistaken for the popular mammy 0gures in wide circulation at the same time in the United States, the Cuban image difered qualitatively from the American archetype. The quintessential American mammy was generally portrayed as a loyal, primarily asexual domestic, whereas the Cuban variant on this physical model was usually depicted as being almost manlike in terms of strength and potential for physical labor, raucous, and highly sexual.32 In addition to extensive partying and merrymaking (December), the black female subjects in the Cuban calendar series are involved in love triangles (April), dance topless ( January), and after what seems to be a sexual liaison with a now sleeping beau, drink liquor at sunrise before departing for the day’s chores ( July). In many respects, the calendar’s stereotyping of the large, dark-skinned woman can be viewed as an artistic confounding of the myths of black female hypersexuality and African barbarity accentuated by the Caribbean plantation colloquialism “white women were for marrying, black women were for work and mulatas were for sex.”33 The two motifs on the borders of the calendar reveal another set of negative beliefs regarding Africans and blacks in nineteenth-century Cuba. In one, a half-dressed man carrying a spear chases another who is similarly clothed. The latter is in pursuit of a large, dark-skinned woman who seemingly snubs her nose at him while clutching a piece

(a)

Figure 18. 1866 Cuban calendar series: (a) Enero (January); (b) Abril (April); (c) Julio (July); (d) Diciembre (December).

(b)

(c)

(d)

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of fruit. The creator of this image summarizes several popular, yet highly prejudicial, characterizations of African-descended people, presenting them as savage—the uncontrolled black in the absence of white guidance, and the robust, sexualized black woman. On the other border, a black man standing on the shoulders of another grins while sneaking a glimpse of a group of seemingly virtuous and oblivious white women. This scene taps into one of the most dangerous and proli0c myths of plantation society—that all black men desire to sexually conquer white women. This fear is exempli0ed in an editorial in La Verdad, a leading annexationist newspaper in the middle of the 1850s. Its Cuban editors repudiate “the most lamentable spectacle, the most repugnant liaisons to our instincts, the most shocking to our present state of civilization and public opinion, the most degrading and shameful to our race, marriages between white women and blacks, mulattoes, zamboes, and mestizos.”34 Besides highlighting some of the prevailing negative social myths pertaining to African descended-people in nineteenth-century Havana, these images also underscore the functionality of popular art as an aspect of the larger social-control apparatus. Although some might consider them simply tasteless attempts at marketing, their function was to keep the general public ever mindful of the necessity of maintaining strict control over the black and mulatto populace and to keep the ideas, myths, and beliefs that the slave system was predicated on fresh in the minds of the public. The calendar series reinforced the image of the savage, lazy, promiscuous, and criminally motivated African-descended man and woman. It was an omnipresent reminder of what supposedly would be the state of afairs if freedom were given to the enslaved or if equal rights were granted to those already emancipated. Although motionless visual representations and rhetoric in both New Orleans and Havana contributed greatly to the continued debasement of African-descended people, both cities’ embrace of dramatic portrayals showcasing negative stereotypes of blacks and mulattoes reinforced these conceptions by ofering living, breathing caricatures that 0t squarely into many of the theories being profered by race thinkers and apologists for slavery. Throughout much of the slave era in nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans, artists and theatrical companies specializing in the exposition of “authentic” examples of the manners, dances, humor, and customs of black people played to sold-out audiences searching for a good laugh at the expense of the African. Termed “blackface minstrelsy” in the United States and teatro

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bufo, teatro vernáculo, or obras catedráticas in Cuba, the practice of whites darkening their faces, donning curly wigs, and speaking in a maligned Spanish- or English-derived dialect was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in both countries. In the United States, blackface minstrelsy as a popular art form is usually traced to various individuals who gave the genre its initial push in the period between 1828 and 1840, among them Thomas “Daddy” Rice, Dan Decatur Emmett, and Stephen C. Foster.35 Rice is considered the father of minstrelsy and was the creator of Jim Crow, one of the most enduring characters and dances of the genre. Emmett was a founding member of the Virginia Minstrels, one of the 0rst and most popular minstrel companies. Foster is generally credited as being the most innovative and proli0c songwriter in the 0eld. The high point of popularity for minstrelsy by whites in the United States was in the twenty to twenty-0ve years prior to the Civil War, even though blackface performances, including those with black actors, continued on into the early part of the twentieth century. In Cuba, Francisco Covarrubias and Bartolemé José Crespo y Borbón are generally credited with popularizing teatro bufo.36 Although many credit Rice with being the 0rst actor to successfully don blackface on an American stage in 1828, Cuban art critics Jorge Castellanos and Isabel Castellanos point out that Covarrubias made his caricatured debut on January 16, 1815.37 Although Covarrubias initiated the form in Havana, it was Crespo y Borbón, more commonly known by the stage name Creto Ganga, who expanded the medium by writing numerous plays and being one of the genre’s top performers. After a slight lull in the interest in teatro bufo in the late 1850s, the genre was reenergized by the creation of catedráticos (spoofs of black intellectuals) by Francisco “Pancho” Fernández Vilaros. Interestingly, the heyday of teatro bufo corresponded approximately to the quarter century prior to emancipation and the genre continued, many times with black actors, well into the twentieth century. Although it is beyond the scope of this volume to analyze the history of blackface performance in the Americas, before discussing the images presented in these productions, it is important to establish the prevalence of these performances in the life of Havana and New Orleans, especially because most of the analysis of the genre has focused on the northeastern portion of the United States. Havana and New Orleans were the theatrical centers of their respective regions. In Cuba, all the major theaters and opera houses were located in Havana. In fact, when one speaks of the performing

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arts in Cuba during the nineteenth century it is generally understood that one is speaking of occurrences in Havana. It was the site of the majority of the Covarrubias, Crespo y Borbón, and Francisco Vilaros performances and the city prided itself on both its 0ne arts infrastructure and the diversity of oferings available to its white citizens. In the 1860s, these oferings included tours by the Campbell Minstrels, George Christy, and many other top minstrel performers from the United States.38 From opera, to classical music, to the theater, Havana was the place to be. The primacy of New Orleans in the larger Southern arts scene mimicked that of Havana in relation to the rest of Cuba. In the 1840s, the city had no fewer than nineteen theaters. One would be hardpressed to 0nd a Southern city that enjoyed blackface performance more than New Orleans, judging from the frequency of shows performed there and the notoriety of the artists and troupes that toured the city.39 As early as April 1835, Thomas Rice himself was performing Jim Crow in New Orleans. This performance received such a great response that Rice created a special French rendition of the production to satisfy the throngs of Francophones wanting to see the show. He returned to the city frequently over the next few years and presented two of his most famous plays, Oh Hush! Or, The Virginny Cupids and Bone Squash, there early in the 1840s. Other noteworthy performers to frequent the city included the Virginia Minstrels, Kunkel’s Nightingale Opera Troupe, and Rumsey and Newcomb’s Campbell Minstrels. George Christy, one of the most noted minstrel stars, was performing there the night the Civil War broke out. As Kaye DeMetz, a scholar of New Orleans theater, points out, “during the late 1850s minstrel troupes were booked so frequently at New Orleans theatres that often rival companies played concurrently in the city.”40 She states that “nowhere in the South was the minstrel show more popular than in New Orleans . . . for over a half a century audiences watched this sentimentalized slavery develop from a simple one-man song and dance act to a full evening of elaborately staged minstrel shows involving up to one hundred performers.”41 Although teatro bufo, catedrático, and blackface minstrelsy were known by diferent names, even a cursory analysis of the genres reveals that there was a great deal of commonality in the extent to which these forms disseminated negative views of African-descended people. In teatro bufo, the main characters usually included los bufos bozales (comical African-born plantation blacks), mulatas, and cheches y curros (streetsmart urban blacks). In the United States, patrons of the minstrel

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show could generally expect a performance that included a “plantation darky,” best symbolized by Rice’s Jim Crow, a “black wench,” and an “uppity” urban black, best known as the “dandy.” In contrast to these two forms, catedrático focused primarily on free urban blacks. Although this may seem like a welcome departure and an attempt to present African-descended people in a positive light, the humor of the catedráticos centered on the failed attempts of its black subject to assimilate white culture and values.42 Despite considerable variation in the setting, dialogue, and plots of blackface minstrelsy and teatro bufo, there was a great amount of unity in the generally negative way they depicted African-descended people. The plantation darky and the bufo bozal were portrayed as ignorant simpletons who loved their status as bondmen and their white masters. Like all black characters in these performances, none ever mastered the language of their New World homes. Through stupid applications of logic, reliance on superstition, and extreme acts of loyalty to their masters, these characters supported the stereotype of ignorant blacks who bene0ted from slavery because it exposed them to proper models of civility and, in the long run, saved them from themselves. Instead of presenting blacks as a threat to white power and the plantation complex, the darky and the bufo bozal were harmless, childlike caricatures whose contentment underscored the pro-slavery argument that blacks enjoyed slavery and thrived under the custodial care of whites. The following passage from the Stephen Foster minstrel song “Ring, Ring the Banjo” exempli0es this point: Once I was so lucky, my massa set me free, I went to old Kentucky to see what I could see: I could not go no farder, I turn to massa’s door, I lub him all de harder, I’ll go away no more.

Although only a few of Crespo y Borbón’s works are extant, his 1847 production Un ajiaco o La Boda de Pancha Jutía y Canuto Raspadura (A Cuban stew or the wedding of Pancha Jutía and Canuto Raspadura) conforms to this pattern. In the play two negros de nación (bozales bufo) Lucas and Rafael are invited to a slave wedding for Pancha and Canuto. The event is hosted by Geromo Pachato, the slave master. Their broken Spanish mixed with supposedly authentic African and Afro-Cuban colloquialisms presents an image of the simple African trapped by innate intellectual limitations. The story revolves around preparations for the big event and climaxes with Geromo Pachato granting both Pancha and Canuto their freedom as a wedding gift.

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In reading the master’s pronouncement of liberty, one cannot help but notice, as in “Ring, Ring the Banjo,” the extreme level of devotion and loyalty shown to the slave master by both Pancha and Canuto. Geromo notes that they displayed the “lealtad de un amigo” (loyalty of a friend) and displayed “el amor de un pariente” (the love of a relative).43 Moreover, after a violent hurricane left Geromo trapped under the ruins of his home, it was Canuto who came to the rescue carrying his master out of the debris on his shoulders.44 The extreme level of devotion exhibited by the standard plantation characters in blackface minstrelsy and teatro bufo must be placed in context. This idyllic portrayal of the master–slave relationship countered the abolitionist’s characterization of slavery as an oppressive institution while simultaneously reinforcing the notion that blacks enjoyed being slaves. Moreover, the slave characters’ lack of indignation or malice toward their masters also underscored the claims of the innate diference between whites and blacks made by polygenesis apologists for slavery. This latter point is most obvious when contrasted with the fact that the concepts of freedom, equality, and liberty were seen by most contemporary Western thinkers as the foundations of civility and ordered living. From the Enlightenment to the application of its ideas in the Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and the Latin American wars of independence, these concepts were viewed as innate desires of all humans. Because the slaves in blackface performance did not desire these basics, in the view of those supporting slavery they most certainly could not be considered fully human. Josiah Nott makes this point in an introduction to published lectures delivered in New Orleans: We will take occasion here to remark, that no one respects the rights of man more than ourselves; that no one detests slavery, or loves that beautiful abstraction, liberty, more than we do. We will go farther, and say, that we are willing to lay aside all personal considerations, and devote our life and feeble powers to the cause of emancipation whenever it can be shown that the condition of the negro is to be improved by this course. The negroes of the South, however, are now the most contented population of the earth, and we must have something more than abstractions to guide us, before we can consent to rash and reckless changes.45

In addition to the negative interpretations of black life and intellect ofered by the stock plantation characters in teatro bufo and blackface minstrelsy, female subjects were used to reinforce the belief in the

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hypersexuality of African-descended women. Usually the center of a love triangle, the subject of a male character’s sadness owing to her in0delity, or, in the case of teatro bufo, the seductress of a supposedly helpless or sexually naive white man, chastity, 0delity, and modesty were hardly ever associated with these characters. A sample of extant teatro bufo lyrics supports this contention. The following is from a song called “María Belén”: La negra María Belén dice que fue seductura y sin rival bailadora de danzas y de minué. Y hoy vive desesperada porque ya no vale nada Al ponerse ella una bata y un panolito en la sien, era la negra mas sata la negra María Belén46 The Black woman María Belén said she was seductive and an unrivaled dancer of dances and the minuet. And today she lives in desperation because she is no longer worth anything And, when she put on a robe and a kerchief over her forehead, she was the most lirtatious Black woman the Black woman María Belén46

The female subject of this song is, like most portrayals of Africandescended females in nineteenth-century Havana, totally de0ned in terms of her sexual potential. As long as she is “seductive” and “lirtatious” she is the center of attention. Her problem, in the view of the songwriter, comes when her physical attributes seem to be fading. Once this happens, like the discarded concubines discussed in chapter 3, she “lives in desperation because she is no longer worth anything.” The constant equation of African-descended women and sex in teatro bufo is also present in the following lyrics about a mulatta:

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Yo soy la reina de las mujeres en esta tierra promisión; yo soy de azúcar yo soy de fuego yo soy la llave de corazón No sé lo que tengo aquí, ni lo que me da ay, ay, ay! No tiene cura de mi enfermedad Yo soy la causa de que hombres a las blanquitas no den amor, porque se mueren por mis pedazos y los derrito con mi calor Es más dulce que el azúcar cuando quiere una mulata entre todas las mujeres sin duda es la lor y nata I am the queen of women in this promised land; I am made of sugar I am made of 0re I am the key to the heart I don’t know what I have here nor what a6icts me Ay, ay, ay! There is no cure for my sickness I am the reason why men don’t love their little white women, because they die for parts of me and I melt them with my warmth It is sweeter than sugar the love of the mulatto girl among all women she is undoubtedly the lower and the cream47

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The focus on sex here is mimicked in the characterization of Miss Dinah Rose, the main female character in Oh Hush! Or, The Virginny Cupids. The play, with none other than Thomas Rice himself in the lead role, was presented in New Orleans in the early 1840s.48 The work centers on a conlict between two male characters, Sambo Johnson and Cuf, over the afections of Miss Rose. From her initial entrance on the stage, it is clear that chastity and modesty are not her most notable characteristics: Rose (appears at window and sings) Ah, who’s dat knocking at my door, Making such a noise wid his saucy jaw? Ise looking down upon de stoop, like a henhawk on a chicken-coop. So clar de kitchen. Johns ’Tis Sambo Johnson, dearest dove, Come like Bachus, God of Love; To tell his lubly Rosa how He’s quit his old perfesion now. So clar de kitchen. Rose Oh, hold yer hat and cotch de key, Come into de little back room wid me, Sit by de 0re and warm your shin And on de shelf you’ll 0nd som gin, So clar de kitchen.49

When Sambo comes in, he does not realize that Cuf has already been “visiting” Miss Rose and is now hiding in the closet. Soon Cuf is discovered and a 0ght ensues between the two men. The story ends when Cuf, feigning a truce sealed by a communal dance, takes a 0ddle and smashes it over the head of Johnson. The connection between Dinah Rose and the supposed hypersexuality of African-descended women is obvious, but the play also demeans the image of the free black through the Sambo Johnson character. He conforms to the dandy role by exhibiting many of the common characteristics of the traditionally caricatured, lashy-dressing, pompous-speaking urban black. Johnson is a former bootblack whose lottery winnings have allowed him to leave his former profession and embark on a life of leisure. In the opening scene, he is seated outside

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the bootblack shop holding a newspaper upside down. In true dandy form, he demands to be referred to as “Mr. Samuel Johnson, Exquire, an I don’t wish to be addressed by such (pointing to the crowd) low common, vulgar trash!” (3). His soliloquy in response to a request to enlighten the cast “upon de principal topicks ob de day” is quintessential dandy (4): Well, Mr. Cuf, I hab no objection, ’kase I see dat you common unsophisticated gemmen hab not got edgemcation yourself, and am ’bliged to come to me who has. So spread around, you unintellumgent bracks, hear de news ob de day discursed in de most luid manner. (He reads out some local items.) Dar has been a great storm at sea and de ships hab been turned upside down. (Ibid.)

The language de0ciencies of Sambo Johnson were similar to the vernacular faux pas of the “little professors” in catedrático. In the case of teatro bufo’s black urban characters, the language problems were usually coupled with a host of criminal behaviors. Indicative of this tendency is the following song used in a teatro bufo performance: Aquí hea llegado Candela negrito de rompe y raja que con el cuchillo vuela Y corta con la navaja Candela no se rebaja a ningún negrito valiente en sacando la navaja no hay nadie que se presente Candela has arrived a little black rough and tumble boy he is swift with his knife And he cuts with his razor Candela will not lower himself to any brave black man When he pulls out his knife there is no one who will challenge him50 These negative depictions of free blacks, like the other images, had roots in contemporary thinking regarding the races and also supported ideas fundamental to the social-control apparatus. They directly attacked the abolitionist notion of the “black white man” by

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presenting individuals outside of the institution of slavery who exhibit the same inability to assimilate Western culture as their enslaved counterparts. These images also underscored the necessity of maintaining close supervision and control over free blacks because of their presumed tendency for criminal behavior and malingering. In addition to the negative images onstage in nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans, the media attached to these shows were equally disturbing: the playbills and sheet-music covers associated with these shows, like the cigarillo box covers, were just one more aspect of the broader attempt to degrade the image of the African and the concept of blackness. Speci0c associations with space were also used in Havana and New Orleans to publicly debase African-descended people, particularly black and mulatto women. In Havana, this was directly related to the control of white women. Here the attempt to govern the actions of the supposedly pristine white female found its most salient expression in the practice of seclusion. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, white women were prohibited from venturing outside of their homes, and especially from walking in the street.51 Usually they were con0ned to the inner chambers of their residences and made contact with the outside world through conversations conducted through barred, glassless windows. For foreigners, the seclusion of white women was one of the most intriguing aspects of Havana’s social arrangements. Richard Henry Dana, for example, notes that “there are no women walking in the streets except negresses” and that in their homes the “windows come to the ground . . . and there the ladies and children sit sewing, or lounging, or playing. This is all very strange.”52 Joseph Dimock adds: “rarely ladies [white women] are seen in the street unless they are English or Americans, but negresses and low Spanish duennas, homely enough to frighten a man, are seen going to market or in and out of church from Mass, etc.”53 Another visitor notes that “the ladies of Havana do not promenade in the city; indeed the absence of the female form in the busy crowds that pass before the eyes of the stranger, constitutes one of its most striking features.”54 Even though seclusion was an attempt to ensure chastity and make a social distinction between white and black, it was also an attempt to protect white women from interaction with undesirables. As historian Luis Martínez-Fernández observes, “through seclusion, high regard for female virginity and chastity, and legislation obstructing interracial marriages, [Havana] society ‘protected’ white women and

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their race—and by extension their class—from what was perceived as racial pollution.”55 The practice of seclusion, a vivid example of white male dominance over the actions of white females, also had a chilling efect on the perception of black and mulatto women because they were not deemed worthy of seclusion. Black women’s presence in the streets— one of Havana’s most salient expressions of loose morals and the lack of purity—in essence branded them as being loose and lacking purity. This is striking in view of the fact that even white prostitutes were barred from walking the streets.56 Martínez-Fernández’s contention that this double standard was one way in which “women of color, slave and free, appeared to enjoy greater liberties than women of the master class” is plausible, but this “freedom” came with a price.57 That price was a direct association between African-descended women and sex and loose morals. The same association of black and mulatto women with spaces considered un0t for “respectable” women was also evident in New Orleans. Spaces such as the Orleans Ballroom, one of the sites of the (in)famous “quadroon balls,” were the target. These events are best known as the places where white men and mulatto women met and formalized placage, or institutionalized concubinage. These may have been externally glamorous events, but one cannot escape the fact that, despite their ballyhooed opulence, the exchange of money for sex was one of the elementary tenets on which they were founded.58 As culture critic Monique Guillory points out, “the 0ne cedar parquet of the quadroon balls amounted to little more than the rough planks of the auction block—each supporting a 0nancial trade in raced bodies.”59 Despite the fact that placage was one of the few ways for almost half of the colored women in New Orleans to achieve a relationship with a man, the quadroon ball’s reliance on the commodi0cation of colored female bodies reinforced degrading the images of the black and mulatto woman. Although some white women began to attend these balls in the 1830s, their participation did not remove the public stain. As the acting mayor of New Orleans commented on November 27, 1835: The information which I received from all quarters on the composition of the masquerade [quadroon] ball . . . imposes on me the duty to call your attention to the necessity for repressing the scandal and disorders at such balls. I know from positive information that these meetings are the sink of the most dissolute class of women; and that the spectacle of their abominations is

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constantly ofered to the public gaze . . . Let me ask, gentlemen, do you think we ought to authorize any longer such schools of immorality . . . I do not hesitate to say NO!60

There was a pervasive attempt by the slave societies of both nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans to socially degrade the image of the African and the concept of blackness. Coincidentally, this same web of negative beliefs and images was also associated with the actions of the participants in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square. By invoking negative stereotypes regarding the dress, music, dance, body posture, and interactions of the festivals’ participants, whites in Havana and New Orleans tapped into contemporary myths about African-descended people in an attempt to underscore the supposedly innate diferences between blacks and whites and to remind everyone of the constant need to control the behavior of people of color. A demeaning image of African-descended people is evident in many of the reports on Congo Square and El Día de Reyes. One observer of Congo Square, making the popular association between African-descended people and primates, states that “their postures and movements somewhat resembled those of monkeys. One might, with a little imagination, take them for a group of baboons. Yet as these poor wretches are entirely ignorant of anything like civilization . . . one must not be surprised at their actions.”61 Another commentator, who appears to believe that blacks relapsed into barbarity when removed from the civilizing inluence of whites, describes “wretched Africans . . . dressed in a variety of wild and savage fashions.”62 Aurelio Pérez Zamora echoed this sentiment with regard to El Día de Reyes in Havana: they chant in disagreeable monotone, in African language, the memories of their peoples . . . All half-naked, kings and subjects, in their diferent groups, form the most repugnant sight possible to the eyes of civilized man. Some play the discordant instruments already mentioned above [drums, horns, and whistles] that are damaging to the hearing, while other wretches dance feverishly, contorting their bodies in such a way as to be ofensive to the sight.63

In the 1866 calendar series discussed earlier (Figure 18), the picture for January (Enero) illustrates Pérez Zamora’s comments. Note the manner in which the characters, presumably celebrating El Día de Reyes, are drawn. The caption reads: “LOS DIABLOS CORONADOS GASTIGARON TUS PECADOS” (The crowned devils punished your sins).

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The remarks of contemporary observers of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square show that any association with these events linked the participants to negative images in the minds of whites. This point 0nds support in the comments of John Paxton, editor of the 0rst New Orleans city guide, and in an editorial in El Museo, a leading nineteenth-century magazine in Havana. Paxton asserts that Congo Square “is a foolish custom that elicits the ridicule of the most respectable persons who visit the city.”64 A similar negative reductionism is applied to the participants in El Día de Reyes by the editors of El Museo: No tiene razón de ser el día de reyes en La Habana. Los individuos libres de las razas Africanos pierden, pierden mucho de la dignidad que han adquirido entregándose a los desórdenes de ese día. Los que aún sufren de algún modo las consequencias del sistema antiguo deben irse preparando para ejercer dignamente los derechos adquiridos.65 There is no reason for El Día de Reyes in Havana. The free individuals of the African races lose, they lose much of the dignity that they have acquired by giving in to the disorders of that day. Those who still sufer in any way the consequences of the old system should go about preparing themselves to exercise with dignity the rights they have acquired.

Given the prevalence of these negative assessments of Congo Square and El Día de Reyes, the decision to take part in these events might be interpreted as a counterstatement to the attempt to degrade the image of African-descended people. By choosing to join these festival traditions, participants rejected negative perceptions that whites attached to black life and culture and thereby embraced an image of themselves that was not dependent on white validation. In some ways, these individuals were acting out what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls negative or regressive creolization. He de0nes this as “a self-conscious refusal to borrow or be inluenced by the Other, and a coincident desire to fall back upon, unearth, recognize elements in the maroon or ancestral culture that will preserve or apparently preserve the unique identity of the group.”66 Although these festivals were by no means solely “African” or ancestral expressions, the fact that commentators tended to see them as such tied their participants to the negative perceptions whites had of Africans. In the few instances when commentators did acknowledge

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the assimilative behaviors evident in the festivals, they were perceived as negatively as those deemed to be African. Much like the relationship between the bufo bozal and the curro or the plantation darky and the dandy, these behaviors were interpreted by whites as expressing the same phenomenon, each reinforcing the belief in the innate inferiority of all African-descended people. Given the pervasiveness of the negative perceptions of blacks and mulattoes in nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans, the participants in Congo Square and El Día de Reyes had to know that their involvement in these events would be construed as one more example of their supposed inferiority and barbarity. Nevertheless, they still chose to participate. Both festivals were potentially positive social events in the eyes of the black and mulatto men and women who crowded the streets of Havana every January and the small clearing at the back of the French Quarter in New Orleans every Sunday throughout much of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Through these two festival traditions, the African-descended population had the opportunity to de0ne a social identity based on values and beliefs that emanated from within their own communities, in opposition to those that were being foisted upon them by the slave society.

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5 Negotiating Racial Hierarchies: The Threat of Unity

he slave societies of nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans implemented social-control measures targeted at space, the family, and social image, but none of these concerns eclipsed the need to destroy the potential unity of the Africandescended community. More speci0cally, because blacks and mulattoes outnumbered whites or signi0cantly challenged them for numerical superiority throughout much of the period, the slave regimes needed to keep this community divided.1 By creating rewards for division and punishments for solidarity, each society tried to guard against the possibility that a uni0ed, politically conscious African-descended community would rise up to assert its claims for liberty and equality. Worse yet, in the minds of white slaveholders, was the possibility that this potentially rebellious lot would follow their brethren in Haiti and embark on a path that sought the expulsion or subjugation of their former masters and the imposition of a society where people of African descent ruled. Although beliefs in the supposed inferiority of blacks and mulattoes helped allay these fears, the reality of the slaves’ victory in the former Saint-Domingue led Havana and New Orleans to enact every possible measure to avoid a repeat of this event. Although El Día de Reyes and Congo Square could be pointed to as evidence that these festivals helped counter this assault on community, they also attest to the success of the slave regime in achieving its objective of social control. Owing to their unique relationship to the Republic of Haiti, fear of black insurrection was rife throughout nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans. These cities were more closely linked to the former

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colony of Saint-Domingue than any other slave society in the Americas. For example, the areas encompassing the state of Louisiana and the colony of Cuba were home to more Saint-Domingue refugees than any other place in the hemisphere. These refugees told horri0c stories of the events that had taken place in their former country and, more important, were accompanied by large numbers of economically independent free persons of color and a horde of potentially rebellious bonded men and women. Although both Havana and New Orleans had signi0cant populations of free blacks and mulattoes throughout much of the eighteenth century, their growth and transformation into two of the most important economic centers of the nineteenth-century international plantation economy precipitated a reexamination of the role that free persons of color would play in that new system. As the century progressed, both cities evaluated and, if necessary, adjusted the position of free blacks and mulattoes. At times, free persons of color were seen as allies of the slavocracy and defenders of the status quo. At other times they were viewed as the potential spark that could ignite the lames of a uni0ed black rebellion. Both societies initially took the former view, but the watchword of Francisco Dionisio Vives, the captain general in Cuba from 1823 to 1832, was always foremost: The existence of free blacks and mulattoes in the middle of the enslavement of their comrades is an example that will be very prejudicial some day, if efective measures are not taken in order to prevent their [the slaves] constant and natural tendency towards emancipation, in which case they may attempt by themselves or with outside help to prevail over the white population.2

Slaveholders attempted to create intraracial 0ssures along class, color, ethnic, or gender lines by creating inducements and deterrents aimed at establishing a society in which freedmen and slaves detested one another or in which mulattoes and dark-skinned blacks were at odds. In Cuba, where many people of color were less than two generations removed from Africa, Old World animosities could be rekindled. The slaveholders could also create enmity between black men and women and establish a society where the sexes grew to shun association with each other. With the exception of the use of ethnicity in New Orleans, both municipalities used every option available to them, even though the manner in which they did so varied signi0cantly. Any discussion of eforts to sever communal ties among Africandescended people in nineteenth-century Havana must be separated

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into pre- and post-1844 time frames. This was the year of the infamous conspiracy of La Escalera (the ladder) and it marks the point when Cuban slave society began to disregard the notions of color, ethnicity, and class in conceptualizing the threat of black insurrection.3 Although scholars still debate whether the conspiracy was real or not, they agree that the torture, execution, expulsion, reenslavement, and harassment of thousands of blacks and mulattoes, the majority of them free, was the consequence of a belief that the African-descended community was preparing for a Haitian-styled revolt in which “many of the whites . . . without discrimination of age or sex, were to have been massacred.”4 Even though o2cial documents like the census continued to take account of morenos, pardos, libres, and esclavos (darkskinned blacks, mulattoes, freedmen, and slaves), in the wake of La Escalera, Cuba’s social-control eforts began to be targeted at a generalized “raza de color” (race of color) that included all people of African descent regardless of their legal standing or variations in pigmentation. As historian Aline Helg comments, “Spain’s violent repression of the conspiracy and the racist legislation that followed further restricted the rights of free people of color and thus brought them even closer to the slaves.”5 In the period prior to La Escalera, the slave regime in Havana tried to separate the African-descended community along a wide array of social distinctions. Although this efort was far-reaching, it never truly met its objectives because the slave society created so many institutions to promote disunity that many actually counteracted one another. This was the case with the free colored militias and the ethnically based mutual-aid societies known as cabildos. The “batallones de pardos y morenos” (battalions of mulattoes and dark-skinned blacks) date back to the middle of the sixteenth century in Cuba.6 Initially conceptualized as a necessary part of the colonial defense force and a viable source of labor for large-scale public-works projects, the Havana militias were made up of armed free black and mulatto males under the charge of white commanders. Morenos and pardos served in separate battalions and were further diferentiated by pay, uniforms, and titles. In the context of the concern with creating division among the African-descended populace, these regiments encouraged animosity between free blacks and mulattoes and, because they were often used to quell slave revolts, also gave bondmen a reason to despise those who were free. If one adds to this mix the potential psychological elitism that could have been a part of the militiamen’s self-concept, given their conceptualizations

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of the factors, real or imagined, that caused them to escape the yoke of slavery, this institution could be a very efective vehicle for creating discord. The problem, from the standpoint of the slave regime’s objectives, was that the militias’ potential to serve as a catalyst for intraracial disharmony was often counteracted by the level of unity across color and class lines that the cabildos created.7 The “cabildos de naciones de afrocubanos” were initially established as a means to facilitate the acceptance of Catholicism among African-descended people while simultaneously serving “as a means of controlling the increasing African immigrant populations in the urban areas.”8 In addition to being a vehicle for the maintenance of African languages, religious systems, and forms of art and dress, these associations were o2cially recognized sociopolitical entities that represented the concerns of Havana’s various ethnic communities to the colonial administration. Although the cabildos in theory reduced the possibility of Pan-African solidarity, the fact that they were made up of both slaves and free persons of color worked directly against the potential class animosity represented by the militias. Whereas the militias could create a divide between both free morenos and pardos and between free blacks and slaves, the cabildos brought these groups together. More speci0cally, high ranking o2cers in the militias were routinely the leaders of the cabildos. As sites of private gatherings where African folkways were practiced, the cabildos ofered an opportunity to nurture an intimate level of black-on-black interaction that the militias had a hard time matching. In this clandestine world, the prospect of hatching the type of widespread, cross-class insurrectionary plot that the regime so feared was ripe. As historian Robert Paquette notes, “the cabildo could be converted into a political hothouse.”9 In 1812, under the leadership of José Antonio Aponte, one of these hothouses almost set the island on 0re. On the surface, Aponte 0t the pro0le of the type of free black that the slave regime could count on in its larger quest to segment the African-descended community. A corporal in the “battalones de pardos y morenos libres,” he lived in a modest home within the city walls and was well respected among his mostly free black neighbors. He was an active member of the Catholic church and made his living usually by carving religious icons for the church and its parishioners. Although he had been dismissed from the militia because of his advanced age, Aponte still seemed to be the type of person who accepted his place within Havana society and, if pressed into duty, would lay his life on the line to protect the slavocracy and his relatively

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privileged position within it. No one could have expected that he would organize what historian Alain Yacou terms “la más vasta y peligrosa conspiración de negros que hasta entonces existiera en la isla” (the most vast and dangerous conspiracy that ever existed on the island).10 The problem with Aponte was that he simply did not conceptualize himself in the manner suggested by his public life. It seems that his constant association with slaves as a part of a Lucumi cabildo and the various roles that he played within this organization created a greater level of psychological identi0cation for him than that presented by membership in the militia. As a creator of African religious icons, the head of the Cabildo Shango Tedum, and a member of the Ogboni secret society, he no doubt enjoyed a high level of respect and prestige within the African-descended community.11 Enjoying a connection with the Divine necessary to bring inanimate objects to life, being the earthly representative of the Yoruban orisha of thunder and lightning, and possessing the wisdom and discretion necessary to gain admittance into one of the most powerful clandestine organizations within his ethnic group, Aponte had all the attributes necessary to construct and carry out the grand efort that would be needed to liberate the slaves from bondage and the colony from Spanish domination. The revolt, initially planned to coincide with the celebration of El Día de Reyes, successfully organized people across geographic, class, color, and ethnic lines. Although his former commanders had begun to suspect a decrease in Aponte’s devotion to Spain, it was not until two slaves betrayed his plan to launch a Haitian-style, island-wide revolt that the authorities discovered that he rejected the divisive model encouraged by membership in the militia in favor of a Pan-African unity that demanded freedom for all people of color.12 His band of rebels included free blacks and slaves from throughout the island, numerous active militia members, like-minded blacks and mulattoes from the United States, Brazil, and Panama, veterans of the Haitian Revolution, white abolitionists, and members of the Carabali, Congo, Mandinga, Lucumi, and Mina cabildos from throughout Cuba.13 This cross-ethnic component directly contradicted the “tribal lure” that colonial authorities believed superseded all other forms of identi0cation for blacks, especially native Africans. Instead of conceptualizing themselves solely as Lucumi, Ganga, Arara, Mandinga, Carabali, or any one of the numerous subgroups, these associations led to a greater awareness of the common plight of all people of color irrespective of class, ethnicity,

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color, or place of birth.14 As Philip Howard comments, the Aponte conspiracy “demonstrated how government repression designed to intimidate blacks and restrict their right of association only radicalized them, causing some to plot against their oppressors.”15 Even though Aponte and his compatriots were hanged for their roles in the conspiracy, its model of Pan-African unity would not be lost on succeeding generations of Afro-Cubans. In 1835, the leaders of the so-called Conspiración de Lucumi, which included Juan Nepomuceno Prieto, a retired second sergeant in the militia and the captain of the Cabildo Lucumi Ello u Oyo, presented Havana authorities with another reason to fear the existence of a revolutionary brand of cross-class solidarity within the African–descended community.16 This was also the case in 1839 when o2cials discovered that León Monzón, a captain of the Havana “batallones de morenos” with more than thirty-nine years of service, was “trying to overthrow the order of the country” by persuading others “to devise plans of conspiracy in the diferent sociedades [cabildos].”17 Recent scholarship on La Escalera takes note of this high level of collusion between the militias and the cabildos as a model for Pan-African unity in the quest of liberty for all.18 Like many other New World slave societies, Havana established a strict social hierarchy based on color. Table 4 in chapter 3 shows a great disparity in rates of enslavement by color and gender. Whereas 17.43 percent of all mulattoes were enslaved, as a percentage of the entire slave population they represent just under 2 percent. Among morenos, 85.47 percent were enslaved and, as a group, they made up 98 percent of the slave population. These numbers suggest that the process of granting freedom to the products of sexual unions between white men and slave women was rather prevalent. In many slave societies, this practice was one of the principal means by which blacks gained their freedom. Its consequence was the creation of a fairly obvious social hierarchy within the African-descended community where color and status were almost directly correlated. This distinction could be used to split the African-descended community in such a way that the “third caste” allied itself with the slave regime in an attempt to preserve its precarious, though extremely functional, position. Although this could have been the situation in Havana, a competing institution known as coartación worked against it. Coartación was the legal right of all slaves in Cuba to purchase their freedom based on an objectively determined price.19 Although this right was often denied, especially on rural plantations, in Havana coartación was the most common means whereby morenos gained their

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freedom. Table 4 shows that although a higher proportion of mulattoes were free, morenos outnumbered mulattoes 31,479 to 17,712. Thus, while the slaveholders worked toward creating an African-descended community where morenos were slaves and mulattoes were free, coartación ensured that color and status were not inextricably linked. In terms of the overall social-control objectives, this relationship guaranteed that any class-based designation favoring free blacks also included a potential cross-color alliance. Add to this the cross-class emphasis of the cabildos, and it makes for a very confusing and often inefective attempt to create division within the African-descended community. The fact that this system was at times in conlict with itself does not relect a lack of interest in creating division. On the contrary, it was because the slave society was so concerned with segmenting this community that it employed so many vehicles to try to achieve its objective. As time went on, it became apparent that the institutions were working against one another and that corrective action was needed. La Escalera was this corrective.20 Whereas the slaveholders of Havana tried a number of diferent approaches to splinter the African-descended community, in New Orleans the creation of a distinct “third caste” made up primarily of free mixed-raced men and women proved to be highly successful. Known variously as quadroons, octoroons, “créoles de couleur,” and “gens de couleur libres,” this physically and socially distinct group occupied a peculiar, yet highly functional, space between the city’s black and white communities.21 Although a considerable amount of scholarly energy has been expended trying to ascertain the root of the “threetiered caste system” in the slave societies of the Americas, the concern here is to analyze the functionality of this group within the larger socialcontrol objective of fragmenting the African-descended community and reducing the possibility of large-scale insurrectionary actions. In contrast to the conlicting alliances created by the numerous divisive institutions in Havana, just about every social and political apparatus in New Orleans supported strict divisions between slaves and free persons of African descent. In terms of color, the slave community and the free community were almost direct opposites of each other. In 1860, 77 percent of all free blacks were mulatto or light-skinned, whereas 74 percent of slaves were black.22 Moreover, many free persons of color owned slaves themselves. As late as 1830, this group controlled 2,351 or just over 16 percent of the city’s 14,476 slaves.23 Although free blacks had a much higher rate of manumitting their slaves than whites and often purchased relatives to protect them

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from harsh treatment, they also purchased slaves for the same economic and domestic reasons as their white counterparts. Kimberly Hanger remarks that “ownership of black slaves fostered free black identi0cation with white society and thus dissipated white fears of racial collusion.”24 As a result of both the protective and economic motives, free persons of color in New Orleans were by far the largest Africandescended slave-owning community in nineteenth-century America. The divisions between light and dark within New Orleans’s African-descended community infused many aspects of black life. Because of the color distribution of the free and slave populations, New Orleans’s colored militia, a holdover from the Spanish period, was made up almost entirely of light-skinned men. Regarding the potential political leanings of the militias, historian Ira Berlin notes that, after an initial purge in the period following the transfer of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803, the Battalion of Free Men of Color was made up of “an elite corps of free Negroes whose style of ruling whites found most compatible with their own.”25 In addition to the separation found in the militias, the free people of color attended their own private schools and, in contrast to the African orientation of Havana’s cabildos, the “gens de couleur libre” possessed a decided a2nity for those things French. Whether in language, dress, or cultural sensibilities, the “gens de couleur” were more apt to conceive of themselves as displaced Frenchmen than as persons stolen from the shores of Africa. As Charles Gayarre, a member of the Louisiana legislature in the 1830s and author of one of the earliest scholarly examinations of the “gens de couleur,” noted when given the task of determining the feasibility of resettling the state’s free colored population in Liberia: A colored man of French origin, born in Louisiana, would not voluntarily go to Liberia if it pleased the Almighty to transform that favored spot into paradise. Africa is a word which will always sound harsh in his ears and he will shrink from the very utterance of that hateful name. This may sound strange to the stranger but not to a long resident of Louisiana.26

In contrast to the cross-class unity displayed in acts of rebellion by people of color in Cuba, when faced with the prospects of ending slavery in Louisiana, New Orleans’s free people of color took up arms alongside white slaveholders in an efort to protect their own property rights and to prove their loyalty to the slave regime. Interestingly, less than a year before Havana’s cabildos and colored militias

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came together in the ill-fated Aponte conspiracy, New Orleans’s colored militia was marching up the Mississippi to quell one of Louisiana’s few major slave insurrections of the Antebellum period. Late in the evening of January 8, 1811, a mulatto slave by the name of Charles who resided on the plantation of Colonel Manuel Andry began an act of insurrection that would arouse in many whites the fear of “a miniature representation of the horrors of St. Domingo.”27 After murdering Andry’s son and wounding the father, the conspirators, who included slaves from surrounding plantations and a signi0cant number of maroons, joined together at a previously determined destination and began their march down River Road toward New Orleans. With a history of armed battle forged in defense of both Saint-Domingue and Spanish Louisiana, the free colored militias were faced with two choices: they could fall in alongside the rebels in hopes of ending slavery or they could ally themselves with the slavocracy and make it clear that they could be trusted with the rights and responsibilities demanded by their position within the society.28 Unlike their counterparts in Havana, they chose the latter and thereby further cemented their position as the loyal, antirevolutionary third caste that could be counted on to do its part to protect the status quo. Within a few days the revolt was put down. The leaders of the insurrection were tried, found guilty, shot to death, and beheaded. In an interesting continuation of the practice of creating oppressive associations with space, the skulls of the conspirators were placed on poles along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. John the Baptist Parish. In a January 14, 1811, letter to the secretary of state, William Claiborne, territorial governor of Louisiana, assessed the efect of the rebellion in deterring future insurrections and establishing New Orleans’s free community of color as 0rm allies in the maintenance of the institution of slavery: The insurrection among the negroes is quelled; and nearly the whole of the insurgents either killed or taken. The prompt and judicious movement of Genl. Hampton contributed much to the public safety; and the ardour activity and 0rmness of the Militia have made an impression among the Blacks that will not (I suspect) for a long time be efaced . . . The free men of color also on this occasion manifested the greatest zeal for the public safety. Their services were tendered and one company placed by my orders under the Command of a respectable citizen Major Dubourg, performed with great exactitude and propriety a Tour of duty.29

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Although a considerable amount of scholarship and popular literature has attempted to counter the idea that New Orleans free people of color “sold out” the slave community through their complicity with the slave regime, their lack of fervor for abolition throughout the Antebellum period seems to support such a conclusion. As Caryn Cosse Bell, the author of a work seeking to cast the “gens de couleur” in a more favorable light, admits, “although free black intellectuals did not openly attack the institution of slavery during the pre-war years, disafected Romantic writers repudiated the Anglo-American social order and promoted the interests of their caste.”30 It was this extreme identi0cation with their caste that kept the “gens de couleur” from forming a revolutionary alliance with the enslaved. Nowhere was this more evident than in the initial decision of free colored men to form a battalion known as the Native Guards and to 0ght against the advancing Union Army at the onset of the Civil War. The probable motivations for these actions can be seen in the comments of one former guard member: Driven by the noble feeling which impels every man to defend his native country when threatened with invasion, urged by the desire to protect their families that they believed were in danger, fearing the coming of men from the North that southern newspapers compared every day to the furious hurricane which destroys in its rage the abode of the innocent as well as the guilty, men of this city [New Orleans] organized . . . a regiment with the name of the Native Guards.31

Although their allegiance to the Confederate forces was short-lived, the actions of the Native Guards show how New Orleans’s community of free persons of color worked against the liberation of the enslaved. Attempts to accurately characterize the motivations of these free people of color are di2cult, but when looking for explanations as to why the third-caste designation was so successful at quelling crossclass unity among people of African descent, one needs simply to examine more closely the demographic composition of the free colored community and the manner in which it developed. Although it is often ignored, the fact is that the free black population was composed primarily of women who, owing to the lack of eligible black males and the possibility of upward social mobility for their ofspring, were encouraged to engage in the most intimate of relations with white men. Just as the cabildos in Havana fostered alliances that belied obvious class distinctions, the fact that a signi0cant segment of the free

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population of the New Orleans had sexual and/or kin relations with the dominant class made it very hard for them to conspire in its destruction. Although the possibility of social mobility and the urge to lighten one’s skin were also present in Havana, the huge number of eligible black males, both slave and free, and the positive association with things African fostered by the cabildos, were factors that mitigated, to some degree, the type of divisiveness created within New Orleans’s African-descended community. In New Orleans, the “gens de couleur” chose class interests over those of race. Instead of 0ghting to end slavery, they struggled to bring about legal and social equality between themselves and what they considered to be their free white peers. In this respect, they mimicked the actions of the free coloreds in prerevolutionary Haiti. Comparing the two societies, historian Laura Foner underscores these similarities: In both societies the three-caste system succeeded in turning potential allies—slaves and free coloreds—into antagonists by granting special privileges to the free coloreds and thereby winning their loyalty to the prevailing order of domination. Although the free people of color were forced to form a separate caste, it was one which mirrored the values of white society and the planter class. Thus they attacked the racial barriers but not the class subordination of the three-caste system, and aspired to full participation in society rather than its destruction or transformation.32

With regard to the larger discussion of the relationship between social-control objectives targeting people of African descent and the performance of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square, the eforts to deter communal solidarity in Havana and New Orleans had two very diferent efects. In Havana, the cohesiveness resulting from the overlapping of potentially distinct social groups within the major institutions afecting black life displays itself to the fullest in El Día de Reyes. In New Orleans, the strict distinctions between light and dark extended to Congo Square, where one of the most notable aspects of contemporary descriptions was the festival’s dearth of light-skinned participants. As eyewitness Benjamin Henry Latrobe notes, “all those who were engaged in the business seemed to be blacks. I did not observe a dozen yellow faces.”33 Although the color composition of Congo Square is one more example of the efectiveness of the “thirdcaste” designation in New Orleans, this segmenting of the Africandescended community also resulted in strong solidarity among slaves

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born in the Americas and Africa, dark-skinned free people of color, and a select number of fair-complexioned individuals who saw themselves as part of a larger, similarly oppressed racial group. One of the most intriguing aspects of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square is their ability to bring together very disparate factions of people. With the exceptions noted in New Orleans, these events brought together difering ethnicities, classes, genders, ages, and colors. In El Día de Reyes, a number of ethnic groups participated alongside one another, including: The Congo and the Lucumi, with their great feathered hats, blue striped shirts and red percale pants; the Arara, with their cheeks lacerated from cuts and branding iron, covered in shells, crocodile and dog teeth, threaded bone and glass beads, the dancers from the waists down in a voluminous vegetable-0ber hooped skirt; the Mandingo, very fancy in their wide pants, short jackets, and blue or pink silk turbans, and the many others with the di2cult names and whimsical costumes that were not entirely of the style of Africa but changed and modi0ed for civilized industry.34

The same type of conglomeration was evident in Congo Square where “Mandingos, Congos, Minas, Fulahs and Gangas” were all represented.35 In terms of the varying social classes, the two festivals were equally adept at attracting both the free and the enslaved. One commentator summarized this inclusion in El Día de Reyes: The Negroes in Havana have no greater joy at any other time of the year than on the Day of the Holy Kings. They spill out in all directions like black cloud over the city from the morning hours; it is as if the slave servants were spirited from the house of their masters; those who have achieved their freedom also partake of the enthusiasm and general frenzy.36

Less lattering is James Creecy’s statement that in New Orleans “the lower order of colored people [poor mulattoes] and negroes, bond and free, assemble in great numbers in Congo Square, on every Sunday afternoon in good weather, to enjoy themselves in their own peculiar manner.”37 Although mulattoes did not make up a numerically signi0cant part of the Congo Square dancers and musicians, this was not the case in Havana, where, “in small groups or parties, elegant Negro and mulatto women pass through the city with rattles, maracas, or bells.”38

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Witnesses to El Día de Reyes or Congo Square would also note the participation of elderly men and women. In the former festival, the captain of one of the cabildos was described as “a poor, brokendown bundle of lesh” who, despite his age, “surely relived the days of his youth for he not only shouted till he was hoarse but often delighted in joining the group of dances.”39 Similarly, “the old Negro women . . . were the ones who most shook on high their hollow gourd rattles covered in netting.”40 In New Orleans, one “old man sat astride of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, & beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hands and 0ngers,” while another gentleman, “apparently 80 or 90 years old,” played “a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa.”41 El Día de Reyes also drew in both Creoles and native Africans. As Ramón Meza states, “not all the Negroes joined the cabildos, which the Creoles and certain of those belonging to the nation thought less of. Rather than attire themselves in the outlandish dress that made up the costumes of their countrymen, they would dress in their Paris dandies.”42 Even though these people physically distinguished themselves through dress, they were still very much a part of the overall performance environment. Although it is important to cite the varying social distinctions of the participants in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square to support the assertion that these festivals modeled a form of community solidarity that countered the slave regime’s attempts to create intraracial division, it is equally important to explain the factors that made this coming together possible. Central to this explanation is the role that a speci0cally African approach to the festival and its constituent parts (music, dance, icons, song, masquerade, etc.) played in melding disparate social groups into a functioning whole. Rather than merely relecting the clichéd notion of “the enticing rhythms of the African drum,” most participants in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square brought with them an understanding of the festival that not only encouraged but mandated the incorporation of diverse and at times mutually exclusive elements into a whole that was more powerful than the sum of its parts. Within the context of the larger festival, speci0c approaches to dance and music helped to further facilitate the solidarity of the larger African-descended community. In both Congo Square and El Día de Reyes, the dance movement known as the ring shout helped to break down the potential discord among the various ethnic groups. The ring shout was a counterclockwise dance formation that was

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highly signi0cant for many people of color because it served as a means for communing with the Divine and the living dead. Because so many of these ethnic groups had similar views of both the potency and the centrality this movement occupied in their lives, it helped to underscore what they had in common. Sterling Stuckey argues that the ring shout was “the main context in which Africans recognized values common to them.”43 Historian Michael Gomez echoes this sentiment: Although individuals were drawn to it out of their own understanding of the ring’s signi0cance, the fellowship resulting from the corporate worship would have steadily eroded the parochiality of ethnicity, and a kind of pan-African religious synthesis would have been under way . . . The shout brought them together, transcending cultural barriers and hastening the creation of a pan-African cultural mix with numerous points of intersection.44

After remarking on the multiplicity of ethnicities present in Congo Square, one observer states that, at least initially, “the Minas would not dance near the Congos, nor the Mandingos near the Congos.”45 After the participants go through an intensely emotional and physically draining “shout” experience, “they would drop out [of the circle] to be replaced by others then stroll of to groups of some other tribe in a diferent part of the square.”46 From this example it seems clear that although these participants did acknowledge their African ethnicity, the power of the ring shout also caused them to realize that, at least in the Americas, their common position within the larger slave society superseded this form of identi0cation. Although the ability of Havana’s community of color to maintain alliances across ethnic lines is clear from the Aponte conspiracy and other insurrectionary movements, it is also important to point out the role that dance played in fostering the rebels’ acknowledgment of their common plight. For example, the cabildo-sponsored social dances called tumbas were often the pretext for various ethnic groups to come together. The unity created at many of these dances often served as the foundation for insurrection. Noting the Havana component of the Escalera conspiracy, Philip Howard points out that Esteban Penalver, one of the key conspirators, hosted tumbas for various ethnicities at his home.47 Under the umbrella of dance, the participants no doubt discovered greater recognition of their commonality and plotted the overthrow of the government.

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The unifying power of the ring shout was also one of the most enduring aspects of the traditional African festival. As discussed earlier, in much of West and Central Africa the festival is a socioreligious event that utilizes song, music, dance, icons, and masquerades in an attempt to speak to the larger concerns of the community. It is a potpourri of sights and sounds that work together to make distinct statements that are of relevance to the larger society or group. Although it is often assumed that the inclusive diversity of African festivals pertains only to such artistic or cultural phenomena as songs and dances, individuals and groups from a variety of stations in life are also a part of the milieu. A model of this melding of social groups and artistic products is provided by the Igbo commentator Olaudah Equiano, who describes the composition and function of the festivals in the late eighteenth century: Thus every great event, such as a triumphant return from battle or other cause of public rejoicing, is celebrated in public dances, which are accompanied by music suited to the occasion. The assembly is separated into four divisions, which dance either apart or in succession, each with a character particular to itself. The 0rst division contains married men, who in their dances frequently exhibit feats of arms and the representation of battle. To these succeed married women, who dance in the second division. The young men occupy the third, and the maidens the fourth. Each represents some interesting scene of real life, such as a great achievement, domestic employment, a pathetic story, or some rural sport; and as the subject is generally founded on some recent event, it is therefore ever new. This gives our dances a spirit and variety which I have scarcely seen elsewhere.48

Among the Akan in the early part of the nineteenth century the British traveler Edward Bowdich made similar observations as he witnessed a large festival: The king, his tributaries, and captains, were resplendent in the distance, surrounded by attendants of every description . . . More than a hundred bands burst at once on our arrival, [all playing] the peculiar airs of their several chiefs; the horns lourishing their de0ances, with the beating of innumerable drums and metal instruments . . . At least a hundred large umbrellas, or canopies, which could shelter thirty persons, were sprung up and down by bearers with brilliant efect, being made of scarlet, yellow, and the most shewy cloths and silks.49

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Much in the same way that the Igbo and Akan festivals incorporated diverse social groups and artistic media to form a uni0ed whole, Congo Square and El Día de Reyes brought together wide continuums of classes, colors, and ethnicities. Just as the African festivals relected the diversity of their respective societies, so too did their New World counterparts in nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans. Despite the notable attempts of the respective slave regimes to divide the African-descended populace, the unifying power of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square created a model of interaction that allowed disparate groups to come together.

Conclusion

his volume has examined mechanisms of social control targeted at people of African descent in nineteenth-century Havana and New Orleans and assessed counterstatements to these objectives in representations found in the performances of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square. Although in no way exhaustive, the evidence presented sheds new light on prevailing interpretations of urban slave society, slave-centered public performances, and cultural expression by African-descended peoples in the Americas. By embarking on an integrative comparison stressing the use of diverse and at times nontraditional source materials, this work has also aimed to validate truly interdisciplinary study as a preferred methodological paradigm. As demonstrated in the case of both Havana and New Orleans, focusing on aspects other that those generally accepted as indices of ill treatment can often yield meaningful results. Too often the characterization of urban slavery that comes through in the historiography is a consequence of an implied comparison with rural plantation society and a concentration on what might be called “the three w’s”— whippings, wear, and work. Because the image of plantation slavery has become the predominant model of the slave experience in the Americas, most scholars enter into any discussion of slavery with this paradigm 0rmly implanted in their minds. When confronted with urban slave societies where public whippings are not the norm, where domestic slaves dress in clean and sometimes extravagant clothing, and where the work of cooks, butlers, chaufeurs, and maids is a far cry from the backbreaking routine of their counterparts on sugar,

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rice, and cotton plantations, it becomes di2cult for some to assess the social-control mechanisms that may be at work. The concentration on space, family, social image, and community in this volume led to a characterization of slave society in nineteenth-century New Orleans and Havana that was by no means benign. Among the most oppressive characteristics of these cities were male/female sex ratios that ensured that the African-descended community would never reach its full numerical potential; an extensive web of spaces associated with the beating, punishment, and selling of black bodies; pseudointellectual trends and popular artistic images that equated people of African descent with primates and savages; and numerous institutions and social mores that attempted to drive wedges between various groups of blacks and mulattoes in an efort to maintain slavery, black subservience, and white rule. If this work had remained focused on the standard questions asked of most slave regimes, these aspects of the larger social-control apparatus might never have been revealed. Any analysis of social-control mechanisms within an urban slave regime should also take into account the efect that these measures have on the population of free people of color. Although it is true that many freedmen and freedwomen lived very diferent lives than those of their enslaved brethren, this does not mean that they were not directly afected by the measures instituted to control slaves. In fact, as this study has shown, very few aspects of the larger socialcontrol apparatus were without serious and direct consequences for free people of color. Moreover, owing to the threat of rebellion posed by a uni0ed African-descended community, the social-control apparatus was always concerned with both slaves and free people of color. Given this reality, the experiences of liberated blacks and mulattoes must be included in any discussion of the workings of social-control measures in Havana, New Orleans, and other urban locales. With regard to the study of slave-centered public performances, the assessment of these activities in relationship to their historic foundations and their contemporary contexts impacts the current historiography of African-descended festivals in the Americas and the larger question of African cultural continuity in the Western Hemisphere. Informed directly by artistic and religious models founded in West and West Central Africa and by assimilated, yet recon0gured practices borrowed from their new American homelands, participants in both El Día de Reyes and Congo Square presented an image of their community that, although greatly afected by the dictates of the slave regime, nonetheless relected values central to their collective survival. These

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included a longing for productive conjugal unions, the desire for children, a veneration of elders and ancestors, the continuation of an African conceptualization of the life cycle and the workings of the spirit world, and communal unity. Taken together, these values made for the creation of an individual and collective identity among Africandescended peoples that had very few similarities with the individual or collective identity advocated for them by the slave regimes. Although numerous aspects of El Día de Reyes and Congo Square clearly relected assimilation, the functioning of the spectacles as a whole seems to be tied to a decidedly African performance model. As the 0eld of slave studies matures, new questions need to be raised and new materials need to be examined. Most important, historians claiming to be advocates of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches need to do more than pay lip service to the concept. This means more than just citing a song lyric or showing a work of visual art. It also involves immersing oneself in the scholarly literature pertaining to a particular source and seeking the aesthetic or philosophical inspiration that led to its creation. This study ofers a point of departure that, it is hoped, will encourage historians to expand the lens through which they interpret the experiences of Africandescended communities existing within the diverse slave societies of the Americas. Although a great deal remains to be done in ascertaining the nature of social-control mechanisms in Havana and New Orleans, and in understanding the representations in El Día de Reyes and Congo Square, judging by the initial 0ndings presented here, it seems that the multidisciplinary approach ofers the greatest chance of success in attaining this goal.

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Acknowledgments

n 0nally reaching what has at times seemed an unattainable goal, I must take the opportunity to acknowledge those individuals and institutions that have helped make this achievement possible. Foremost of these was Janeé Reed-Walker. Without her thorough critiques, timely jokes, love, encouragement, devotion, and extreme level of personal sacri0ce, I would not have been able to continue along this road. Additionally, without our union I would not have been able to experience the joy of fatherhood nor have had the blessed experience of trying to 0nish this project with my daughter Aeron and son Isaiah constantly tugging at my feet, grabbing at the keyboard, and continually demanding that I 0nish that book so that we can make popcorn and watch PBSKIDS. In addition to these very special people, I must take the time to thank my mother, Linda Coleman, for always encouraging me to excel and for making it a priority that each of her children had adequate amounts of love, food, shelter, and books. Because of this interesting mixture of “necessities,” I have never felt out of place in the halls of academia and because of her decision, in her mid-forties, to go back to college, I have never been without inspiration. In this same vein, I would also like to acknowledge the contributions made to this efort by my father, Franklin Walker. It was he who instilled in me both the work ethic and the sense of personal sacri0ce that I would need to withstand all the possible distractions that could have derailed this project. Among the other important people whom I would like to mention are my brothers Matthew and Peter, my “twin” sister Dina, my

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mother-in-law and father-in-law Gwendolyn and Glenn Ennis, my sister-in-law Tanisha, my grandmother Beadie Graham, and my “Fannie” Marjie Mosley. I would also like to thank Stella, Lamont, Debbie, Tracy, Little Glenn, Shannon, Aunt Dee, Auntie Selena, Justin, Little Matt, Raquel, Jacob, Lauryn, Sheba, and the loving memory of my “homie” Michael Flowers and my grandfathers Bill Graham and Tony Walker. I hope that each of you realize how important you have been to this project and my life. Additionally, the likes of Alvin “A-Luv” Harris, Rickerby Hinds, Paulette BrownHinds, Michael “White Mike” Baslee, Willie “Big Charles” Franklin, Shawn Ginwright, Tracy Willis, Jackie Cooper, Tracy Simmons, Damita Myers, Leonard Moore, Bernadette Pruitt, Ron Goodwin, Jef Paige, Tora Cureton, Robert Perez, Walter Rucker, Ed Gomez, Fred Knight, Arthur Brown, Isaac Williams, Lawrence “DJ Black” Lee, Majadi, Ghangis and Stephanie Carter, and all the members of SDSU’s Most Wanted need to know that without each and every one of you I really don’t know how I would have made it through. With regards to the members of the academic community who have been of assistance, I must single out Susan Kellogg, Claude Clegg, and Iris Rosa. Sue directed me through the doctorate and has grown to be just as good a friend and colleague as she was an adviser. Claude continually inspires me to new heights through his own scholarly excellence and is an individual I am proud to call a brother and a friend. In Iris I found both a mentor on my journey into the world of African Diasporic dance and a sister who always opened her doors to my family while we lived in Bloomington. My thanks also go out to Elizabeth Brown-Guillory for always being there for me and for giving me the encouragement to pursue my interests outside of history and to Richard Blackett for always being there to pull me back if I went too far. To Tom O’Brien and Kairn Klieman, your thoughtful comments and advice have made this project in0nitely more interesting than it would have been without your input. Additionally, Cheryl Thomas, Tracy Howard, Angela Williams-Phillips, Steven Pitts, Elias Bongmba, Nicole Alexander, Chariesse Simpson, JoEllen Fitzgerald, Rebecca Bryant, Mary Medley Byers, Nancy Ashley, Alexia Bock, Tyrone Tillery, Alma Infante, Dolores Yanez, Donna Butler, Daphyne Pitre, Robert Buzzanco, Christine Womack, Mary LeBlanc, and especially Linda Reed and Lorena García all deserve special mention for putting up with me during the graduate years and being great friends after. At the University of California, Riverside, Robert Patch

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and Sterling Stuckey have always made it a point to be there for me when I needed them. I also need to give respect and thanks to the Africana Studies Department at San Diego State University and its faculty and staf for serving as models of both scholarly excellence and commitment to the community. Most notably, Shirley Weber, Norman Chambers, Joanne Cornwell, and the late Danny L. Scarborough need to know that they continue to inspire their former students to do great things. Finally, I must give “props” to all my students at Houston Community College, Texas Southern University, the University of Houston, Indiana University, Occidental College, San Bernardino Valley College, and the University of California, Riverside. Because many of my initial thoughts on the subjects presented in this book were 0rst ofered to you as a part of class discussions and lectures, I am eternally indebted to you for your questions and critiques. Institutional support for this project from entities at the University of Houston include the Murry Miller Dissertation Fellowship Program, the Institute for African American Policy Research, the African American Studies Graduate Fellowship Program, the Department of History, and the African American Studies Program. Indiana University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, African Studies Program, Department of History, and College of Arts and Letters have all contributed 0nancially to the completion of this project. Research sites in the United States that have been particularly bene0cial to this project include the Historic New Orleans Collection at the Williams Research Center, Tulane University’s Amistad Research Center and Latin American Library, the Special Collections Division of the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans, the Special Collections Division of the Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University, the Louisiana State Museum, the Library of Congress Maps Division, the University of Houston Interlibrary Loan Department, and Celestina Wroth at the Indiana University Library. While many scholars complain about the lack of access to resources in Cuba, this was by no means my experience. Among the institutions that opened their doors to me were the Casa de África (Ester Nicole Pérez y todas mis tías), the City Museum of Havana, the Casa del Caribe (Raúl Ruiz Miyares y Abelardo Larduet), the Museo de Músico (Osmani Ybarra Ortiz), the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (Tomás Fernández Robaina), the Archivo Nacional de Cuba,

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and the Fundación Fernando Ortiz (Henrietta Price). Additionally, a number of individuals provided me with encouragement, contacts, and camaraderie while in Cuba. They include Jorge Duany, Christian Geppert, Jorge Hernández Glez, Gloria Rolando, Jabier Bulgar Zaya, Jorge Ruiz Miyares, everyone at Global Exchange, and especially Nelson and Araminta, “mi familia segunda en Santiago de Cuba.”

Notes

Introduction 1. For similar approaches to the issue of native culture serving as a basis of resistance to social control in oppressive work regimes, see Aviva Chomsky, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Michael Gonzales, Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, 1875–1933 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985); and June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 2. Since the initial publication of Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), and Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), most comparative studies on slavery in the Americas have concentrated on deciphering which respective slave regime, Latin America or the United States, was more harsh. Representative examples of this historiography include Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Walker and Company, 1964), David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), Herbert Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), and Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971). 3. Taking the lead from Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s often overlooked Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), a group of contemporary scholars are expanding the use of the comparative model as a means of deciphering commonality among slave regimes and communities of slaves. 157

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Three noteworthy examples of this trend are Roderick McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), and Richard D. E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). 4. For analysis and interpretations of Cuba’s social hierarchy, consult Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). For New Orleans and Louisiana, see Laura Foner, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Societies,” Journal of Social History 3 (1970): 406–30, and Virginia Dominguez, White by De0nition: Social Classi0cation in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 5. The inversion model is best exempli0ed in Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978); and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans: A People’s Uprising at Romans 1579–1580, trans. Mary Feeney (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1981). 6. Fernando Ortiz, “La 0esta antigua afrocubana del ‘Día de Reyes,’” Revista Bimestre Cubana 15 ( January–June 1920): 5–26. 7. Both works are contained in Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz, eds., Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993). It was reissued in 2001. 8. Regarding Congo Square, the most cited reference is George W. Cable, “The Dance Place in Congo Square,” Century Magazine 21 (February 1886) 517–32. For an example of the jazz-oriented approach to Congo Square, see Henry Kmen, “The Roots of Jazz and the Dance in Place Congo: A Re-Appraisal,” Inter-American Musical Research Yearbook 8 (1972): 5–16. For a detailed history of Congo Square, consult Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans’ Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Cultural Formation,” Louisiana History 32:2 (spring 1991): 117–57. Joseph Roach, “Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square,” in African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, ed. Harry J. Elam and David Krasner (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 101–14, also provides insight and ofers a number of methodological suggestions regarding the issue of memory and nineteenth-century Congo Square depictions. 9. Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 2. 10. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Commentary Three,” in Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies, ed. Michael Craton (Toronto and New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 150.

Notes to Chapter 1

1. El Día de Reyes and Congo Square

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1. Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 66, contains a short discussion of the debate regarding the last performance of El Día de Reyes. 2. Fernando Ortiz, “The Afro-Cuban Festival ‘Day of the Kings,’” in Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 7. For clarity and to aid future researchers, English translations of Ortiz’s “La antigua 0esta afrocubana del ‘Día de Reyes’” are drawn from Jean Stubbs’s annotated translation in this work. 3. Ramón Meza, “Día de Reyes,” La Habana Elegante, 5:2 ( January 11, 1891), and El Hogar ( January 11, 1891). Translation is from Stubbs’s “The Afro-Cuban Festival,” 9–10. 4. Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation,” Louisiana History 32:2 (1991): 127–28. 5. Henry C. Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978 [1895]), 158. 6. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Sketches, 1818–1820, ed. Samuel Wilson Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 49–51. 7. The best general overview of the festival/carnival tradition in the Americas is Judith Bettleheim and John Nunley, Caribbean Festival Arts: Each and Every Bit of Diference (Seattle and London: Saint Louis Art Museum in association with University of Washington Press, 1988). Also consult Caribbean Quarterly 4 (1956): 3–4, 36 (1990): 3–4, and Plantation Societies in the Americas 3:1 (1990). Each of these issues is dedicated to a discussion of carnival. For speci0c references to Trinidad, see also Michael Anthony, Parade of the Carnivals of Trinidad 1839–1989 (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Circle Press, 1989); Errol Hill, The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971); Michael Lieber, Street Scenes: Afro-American Culture in Urban Trinidad (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1981); and Richard Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), especially chapters 4 and 5. For New Orleans, see Samuel Kinser, Carnival American Style: Mardi Gras at New Orleans and Mobile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997); Harper Barnes, “Mardi Gras Indians: Once They Fought—Now They Dance and Sing,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, June 23, 1985, 18–19; Maurice Martinez, “The Plume and the Feather,” Black New Orleans 1:2 (1982): 23; idem, “Delight in Repetition: The Black Indians,” Wavelength 16 (1982): 4; and idem, “Two Islands: The Black Indians of Haiti and New Orleans,” New Orleans Museum of Art-Arts Quarterly 1:7 (1979): 7. For Brazil, see Roberto DaMatta, Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma, trans.

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John Drury (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991); Daniel Crowley, African Myth and Black Reality in Bahian Carnival (Los Angeles: UCLA Museum of Cultural History Monograph Series, 1984); and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 66–72. 8. Shane White, “Pinkster in Albany, 1803: A Contemporary Description,” New York History 70 (April 1989): 191–99, and “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley,” Journal of American Folklore 102:403 (1989): 68–75; Renee Newman, “Pinkster and Slavery in Dutch New York,” Halve Maen 66:1 (1993): 1–8; A. J. Williams-Myers, “Pinkster Carnival: Africanisms in the Hudson River Valley,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 9:1 (1985): 7–17; Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 50–53; Lynne Farley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press Books, 1972), 141–45; Sterling Stuckey, “The Skies of Consciousness: African Dance at Pinkster in New York, 1750–1840,” in Going through the Storm: The Inluence of African American Art in History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 53–82; and idem, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 80–83. 9. Katrina Hazzard Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 42–43, and Stuckey, Slave Culture, 76–79. 10. Ira Reid, “The John Canoe Festival,” Phylon 3:4 (1942): 349–70, Stuckey, Slave Culture, 67–73, and Emery, Black Dance, 111. 11. Michael Craton, “Decoding Pitchy-Patchy: The Roots, Branches and Essence of Junkanoo,” Slavery and Abolition 16:1 (1995): 14–44; Martha Warren Beckwith, Christmas Mummings in Jamaica (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Publications of the Folklore Foundation, Vassar College, 1923); Cheryl Ryman, Jonkonnu: A Neo-African Form,” Jamaica Journal 17:1 (1984): 13–23; 17:2 (1984): 50–61; Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkunnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process,” Jamaica Journal 4:2 (1970): 34–48; Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967); Judith Bettleheim, “Jonkonnu and Other Christmas Masquerades,” in Bettleheim and Nunley, Caribbean Festival Arts, 39–83; Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conlict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987); and Burton, Afro-Creole, 65–83. 12. Lorna McDaniel, The Big Drum Ritual of Carriacou; Praisesongs in Rememory of Flight (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998). 13. Angelina Pollak-Eltz, “The Devil Dances in Venezuela” Caribbean Studies 8:2 (1968): 65–75.

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14. Crowley, African Myth and Black Reality, 16–17. 15. Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 241–47. 16. This larger model of slave performance was 0rst recognized by Herbert Aimes in “African Institutions in America,” Journal of American Folklore 18:68 (1905): 15–32. 17. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 68. 18. With the publication of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992) an increasing amount of attention has been focused on the question of ethnic provenance in Louisiana and New Orleans. Whereas Hall maintains that the vast majority of slaves from the Senegambia were Bambara, Peter Caron cautions against overgeneralization. He notes that both French slave traders and colonial o2cials in Louisiana used the term Bambara as an all-inclusive phrase for just about anyone arriving from the Senegambia. He also notes that in Louisiana the term Bambara was at times a designation of Africans accused of criminal ofenses. Among African traders, the term was used to designate a nonMuslim slave. Given this high level of ambiguity regarding Hall’s terminology, I have chosen to heed Caron’s cautionary remarks and to depict slaves from the Senegambia as being from any one of the three major ethnic groupings in the region at the time. For Caron’s comments, see his “‘Of a nation which others do not understand’: Bambara Slaves and African Ethnicity in Colonial Louisiana, 1718–60,” in Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Eltis and David Richardson (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 98–121. 19. Hall, “The Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” 83. 20. Ibid., 85. 21. For a thought-provoking look at the role of the Haitian Revolution in creating the availability of Louisiana for the United States’ purchase, see Robert Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 204–25. 22. Population statistics for Louisiana are taken from The Negro Population of the United States 1790–1915 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 57. This publication is a reprint of the United States Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790–1915 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing O2ce, 1918). 23. Ibid. 24. Population 0gures for nineteenth-century New Orleans are drawn

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from Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cosse Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850–1900,” in Hirsch and Logsdon, Creole New Orleans, 206. 25. Although the exact number of slaves transferred from the Upper South to the Deep South is still debated, Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 207–12, ofers a general overview of the debate and also a number of qualitative examples of the efect of this trade on familial organization. 26. Negro Population, 64. 27. W. C. C. Claiborne, O2cial Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816 ( Jackson: Mississippi State Department of Archives and History, 1917), 5:4. 28. Paul LaChance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration, and Impact,” Louisiana History 29:2 (spring 1988): 110–11. 29. Ibid., 111. 30. Ibid., 112. 31. Phillip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 200. 32. Ibid. Cross-referencing a sample drawn from French slave ships and plantation inventories in the eighteenth century, David Geggus arrives at similar estimates for the entire eighteenth century. His top 0ve areas of origins for Saint-Domingue slaves in the eighteenth century are Congo/Angola (45.6 percent), the Bight of Benin (23.0 percent), Senegambia (8.2 percent), the Gold Coast (5.8 percent), and the Bight of Biafra (3.2 percent) (“The Demographic Composition of the French Caribbean Slave Trade,” in Proceedings of the 13th and 14th Meetings of the French Colonial Historical Society [Natchez, Miss.: University Press of America, 1990], 14–30). The percentage breakdown is found in Table 6. 33. Curtin, Atlantic Slave Trade, 192–97 and Geggus, “The Demographic Composition of the French Caribbean Slave Trade,” Table 5. 34. See Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “Africa in Cuba: A Quantitative Analysis of the African Population in the Island of Cuba,” in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), 189. 35. Ibid. 36. Information on the ethnic percentages of the slave population of Cuba is drawn from ibid., 191–92. The ethnic descriptions for the Cuban ethnicity names are drawn from Jorge Castellanos and Isabel Castellanos, “The Geographic, Ethnologic, and Linguistic Roots of Cuban Blacks,” Cuban Studies 17 (1987): 95–110. 37. Moreno Fraginals, “Africa in Cuba,” 192. 38. For an informed analysis of the East African contributions to the international slave trade in the mid-nineteenth century, see Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

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Press, 1987), 21–25, and Reginald Coupland, The Exploitation of East Africa, 1856–1890: The Slave Trade, the Scramble (London: Faber, 1968). 39. The major theoretical work outlining this approach is Mervyne Alleyne, The Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1988). 40. See Alfred Metraux, Le vaudou haïtien (New York: Octagon Books, 1975 [1971]), and Harold Courlander, The Drum and the Hoe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973 [1960]). 41. Douglas B. Chambers, “‘He Gwine Sing He Country’: Africans, Afro-Virginians and the Development of Slave Culture in Virginia, 1690– 1810,” Ph.D diss., University of Virginia, 1996, and “‘My Own Nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (April 1997): 72–97. 42. Alleyne, Roots of Jamaican Culture. 43. Hall, “Formation of Afro-Creole Culture,” and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993). 44. David Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo in the Eighteenth Century: Language, Culture, Resistance,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Latein Amerikas 28 (1991): 21–51; Guerin C. Montilus, “Africa in Diaspora: Myth of Dahomey in Haiti,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 2:1 (1981): 73–84; and Phillip Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations, and New World Developments,” in Eltis and Richardson, Routes to Slavery, 122–45. Morgan argues that “Whether the focus is on African regional origins, American destinations, or New World cultural developments, the emphasis should be on luid boundaries, on precarious and permeable zones of interaction, on hybrid societies, on mosaics of borderlands where cultures jostled and converged in combinations and permutations of dizzying complexity” (142). 45. Stuckey, Slave Culture. 46. Dele Jegede, “‘Art for Life’s Sake’: African Art as a Relection of Afrocentric Cosmology,” in The African Aesthetic: Keeper of Traditions, ed. Kariamu Welsh-Asante (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1993), 244. 47. Herbert Cole, “The Art of the Festival in Ghana,” African Arts 8:3 (spring 1975): 61. 48. Ibid., 12. 49. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 2d ed. (Oxford: Heinemann, 1997), 74. 50. Wyatt MacGafey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 6. 51. See Herbert Cole’s illuminating article “Art as a Verb in Iboland,” African Arts 3:1 (autumn 1969): 34–41, 88. This piece spearheaded the movement of Western scholars to begin to evaluate African masks in terms of the context in which they were used. Instead of evaluating masks in terms of their shape or form, Cole argues that the contextual signi0cance of the mask de0ned its aesthetic value or worth.

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52. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 219–26, William Bascom, Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), 50–51, and Akin Euba, “Drumming for the Egungun: The Poet-Musician,” in Yoruba Masquerade Theater in the Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, ed. Rowland Abiodun, Henry J. Drewal, and John Pemberton III (Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 161–71. 53. Thompson, African Art in Motion, 221. 54. Elliot Leib and Renée Romano, “Reign of the Leopard: Ngbe Ritual,” African Arts 18:1 (November 1984): 52. 55. Ibid., 48. 56. Till Forster, “Senufo Masking and the Art of Poro,” African Arts 26:1 ( January 1993): 30–41, 101. 57. Sidney Little0eld Kaskir, “Elephant Women, Furious and Majestic: Women’s Masquerades in Africa and the Diaspora,” African Arts 31:2 (spring 1998): 18–27, 92, and Anita Glaze, “Woman Power and Art in a Senufo Village,” African Arts 8:3 (spring 1975): 24–29, 64–68, 90–91. 58. Robert Farris Thompson, The Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 5; Henry John Drewal and John Pemberton III, eds., Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York: Center for African Art in association with Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 1989), 16–17; and Rowland Abiodun, “Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics: The Concept of Ase,” African Arts 27:3 ( July 1994): 68–78, 102–3. 59. For a larger discussion of the ritual power of objects in traditional Bakongo society, see MacGafey, Religion and Society in Central Africa, especially 135–69, and his collection of translated texts, Art and Healing of the Bakongo, Commented by Themselves (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 60. Thompson, The Flash of the Spirit, 117. 61. Ibid., 118. 62. Herbert Cole, Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of African Art in association with Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 12. 63. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 6; this observation is culled from Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1819). 64. Daphne Harrison, “Aesthetic and Social Aspects of Music in African Ritual,” in More Than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin American Music and Musicians, ed. Irene V. Jackson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 51–52. 65. Quoted in Eileen Southern, Readings in Black American Music, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 13. 66. Ibid.

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67. Quoted in ibid., 7, and drawn from Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, Performed under the Direction and Patronage of the African Association in the Years of 1795, 1796, and 1797 by Mungo Park, Surgeon (New York, 1800). 68. W. Komla Amoaku, “Toward a De0nition of Traditional African Music: A Look at the Ewe of Ghana,” in Jackson, More Than Drumming, 37. 69. Thompson, African Art in Motion, 7. 70. George Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931), 192. 71. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Commentary Three,” in Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies, ed. Michael Craton (Toronto and New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 152. 72. Sterling Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,” in Going through the Storm, 14. 73. This song is taken from J. B. Moreton’s West Indian Customs and Manners, quoted in Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Jean D’Costa and Barbara Lalla (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 12–13. 74. Quoted in Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 239. 75. This version of “No More Auction Block,” also called “Many Thousands Gone,” is from The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 12. 76. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 218. 77. Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 182–95. 78. For Bahia, see João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Bahia: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). For the Stono Rebellion, see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), and John Thornton, “The African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” American Historical Review 96:4 (1991): 1101–13. 79. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Allson and Busby, 1980 [1938]), and Geggus, “Haitian Voodoo.” Geggus argues that religious factors, namely, voodoo, did not precipitate the Haitian Revolution, but that they “served to sacralize a political movement that had already reached fruition” (45). 80. Gates and McKay, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 9. 81. James Williams, Narrative of the Cruel Treatment of James Williams, a Negro Apprentice in Jamaica from 1st August, 1834 till the Purchase of his freedom in 1837, by Joseph Sturge, Esq., of Birmingham, by Whom he Was Brought to England (Glasgow: Aird and Russel, 1837); Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself, ed. Robert J. Allison (Boston and New York: St. Martin’s Press,

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1995); David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles: Together with a Preamble, to the Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992 [1829]). 82. Walker, David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles, 3. 83. Quoted in Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 466.

2. Defining Space

1. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). 2. James Ferguson, Papa Doc and Baby Doc: Haiti and the Duvaliers (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1987), 66. 3. Miguel León-Portillo, ed., Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, trans. from Nahuatl to Spanish Ángel María Garibay, trans. from Spanish to English Lysander Kemp (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 62–78. 4. Marshall Cook, ed., Abstract of the Evidence Delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, In the Years 1790 and 1791 on the Part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (Cincinnati: American Reform Tract and Book Society, 1855), 50. 5. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself, ed. Robert J. Allison (Boston and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 53–54. 6. Cook, Abstract of the Evidence, 44. 7. Ibid., 46. 8. Ibid., 45. 9. Ibid., 56. 10. Other works that comment on the transmigration belief as a motivation for suicide include Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 116–20; Daniel E. Walker, “Suicidal Tendencies: African Transmigration in the History and Folklore of the Americas,” Griot 18:2 (fall 1999): 10–19; Lorna McDaniel, “The Flying Africans: Extent and Strength of the Myth in the Americas,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids/New West Indian Guide 64 (1990): 28–40; and William D. Pierson, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 62:2 (April 1977): 147–59. 11. George Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931), 119–20. 12. Margaret Field, Religion and Medicine of the Ga People (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 197. 13. Robert Farris Thompson, The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981), 28. 14. Ibid.

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15. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 112. 16. Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton, and Rowland Abiodun, eds., Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York: Center for African Art in Association with Harry Abrams Publishers, 1989), 14. Subsequent references are given in the text. 17. Maturin Murray Ballou, History of Cuba; or, Notes of a Traveller in the Tropics (Boston: Phillip Samsom and Company, 1854), 180–82. 18. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 22. Also see María Poumier Taquechel, “El suicidio esclavo en Cuba en los años 1840,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 43 (1986): 69–86. 19. Hall, Social Control, 22. 20. David Turnbull, Travels in the West: Cuba; with Notices of Porto Rico, and the Slave Trade (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1840), 60–61. 21. Ibid., 21. 22. Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, trans. Mary Howitt (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1868), 2:332. 23. Robert Francis Jameson, Letters from the Havana during the Years 1820; Containing an Account of the Present State of the Island of Cuba and Observations on the Slave Trade (London: John Miller, 1821), 41. 24. Henry C. Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life (New Orleans: L. Graham and Sons Printers, 1895), 52. Subsequent references are given in the text. 25. Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 1988 [1945]), 237. 26. Turnbull, Travels in the West, 54. 27. Ibid., 53. 28. Richard Henry Dana, To Cuba and Back, ed. C. Harvey Gardiner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966 [1859]), 126. 29. Turnbull, Travels in the West, 53. 30. James Redpath, The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, ed. John R. McKivigan (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 247. 31. For more on New Orleans’s policing of people of African descent, see Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), especially chapter 1. 32. The o2cial ledger books for the police jail are housed in the Louisiana section of the New Orleans Public Library. 33. Bremer, Homes of the New World, 2:211. 34. Ibid. 35. New Orleans was partitioned from 1836 to 1852. 36. Dana, To Cuba and Back, 92.

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37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 94. In 1859, the fee for being moved to the Salas de Distinción was six reals. 39. Ibid., 19. 40. Turnbull, Travels in the West, 55, and Joseph J. Dimock, Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: The Travel Diary of Joseph J. Dimock, ed. Louis Pérez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1998), 12. James Edward C. B. Alexander provides a detailed look at the Cárcel in his Transatlantic Sketches (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 1:350–59. 41. John George F. Wurdeman, Notes on Cuba (Boston: James Monroe and Company, 1844), 59–61, 235–39. These observations are cited in Louis Pérez, ed., Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801–1899 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1992), 137–42, which also provides a numerical breakdown of prisoners and ofenses by race. 42. For detailed analysis of the repressive political situation for Cuban nationals in the mid-1800s, see, among others, Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 93–107 and 193–99. 43. Quoted in Pérez, Slaves, Sugar and Colonial Society, 133. 44. Gabino La Rosa Corzo, “Apuntes sobre el hospital para cimarrones de la Habana,” Estudios de Historia Social 1–4 (1988): 561. 45. Information for this paragraph is drawn from an evaluation of ledger books containing information for September 1843, and July, August, and September 1844. September 1843 is contained in the Achivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC), Gobierno Superior Civil (GSC), 0le 942, no. 33225. The books for the 1844 months are contained in ANC, GSC, 0le 944, no. 33294. 46. ANC, GSC, 0le 944, no. 33294, July 3, 1844, and July 9, 1844. 47. Ibid., August 21, 1844, and September 6, 1844. 48. Ibid., July 3, 1844, and August 8, 1844. 49. Ibid., July 10, 1844, and August 17, 1844. 50. Ibid., July 24, 1844, and September 4, 1844. 51. Ibid., July 15, 1844, and August 22, 1844. 52. Ibid., July 10, 1844, and August 29, 1844. 53. Ibid., August 27, 1844. 54. Ibid., September 2, 1844. 55. Ibid., September 18, 1844. 56. Ibid., September 19, 1844. 57. Ibid., July 9, 1844, and July 11, 1844. 58. Ibid., July 16, 1844. 59. Ibid., September 10, 1844, and September 16, 1844. 60. ANC, GSC, 0le 942, no. 33225, November 27, 1843. 61. ANC, GSC, 0le 944, no. 33294, September 28, 1844. 62. Ibid., August 17, 1844, and August 28, 1844. 63. Ibid., August 8, 1844.

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64. Ibid., July 25, 1844. 65. Ibid., August 24, 1844. 66. Dimock, Impressions of Cuba, 137. 67. Dana, To Cuba and Back, 92. 68. Ibid. 69. Dimock, Impression of Cuba, 137–38. 70. Turnbull, Travels in the West, 59. 71. Ibid., 60. 72. Henry Tudor, Narrative of a Tour in North America, Comprising Mexico, the Mines of Real del Monte, the United States, and the British Colonies with an Excursion to the Island of Cuba (London: James Duncan, 1834), 2:131–33. 73. Bremer, Homes of the New World, 2:202. 74. Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans and Environs (New York: Will H. Coleman Publishers, 1885), 77. 75. This paragraph is strongly inluenced by ideas expressed in Joseph Roach’s article “Slave Spectacles and the Tragic Octoroons: A Genealogy of Antebellum Performance,” Theatre Survey 33:2 (November 1992): 167–88. 76. The most detailed and extensive examination of the workings of the New Orleans slave market is Walter Johnson’s masterful study Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 77. Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya, 226. 78. Vicente Sancho, Diario de las Sesiones, III, 1836–7; cited in Thomas, Cuba, 198. 79. Dana, To Cuba and Back, 106, and Turnbull, Travels in the West, 59. 80. Thomas, Cuba, 102. 81. Dana, To Cuba and Back, 29. 82. Ibid., 21. 83. Dimock, Impressions of Cuba, 10. 84. For information on the Aponte conspiracy, see Thomas, Cuba, 91; José Luciano Franco, La Conspiración de Aponte (Havana: Publicaciones del Archivo Nacional, 1963); and Philip Howard, Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 73–79. For the conspiracy of the ladder, refer to Robert Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conlict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988). Both topics will be discussed in chapter 6. 85. Thomas, Cuba, 110. 86. Information for this paragraph is drawn from Roger A. Fischer, “Racial Segregation in Antebellum New Orleans,” American Historical Review 74:3 (February 1969): 926–37. 87. Ibid., 931. 88. Ibid., 932. 89. Ibid., 933. 90. Argus, August 1, 1833, and Niles Register, August 24, 1833.

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91. Niles Register, August 24, 1833. 92. Juan Manzano, “Letter to Domingo del Monte,” June 25, 1825, in Autobiografía, cartas y versos de Juan Francisco Manzano (Havana: Municipio de la Habana, 1937), 84, cited in Ivan A. Schulman, The Autobiography of a Slave/Autobiografía de un esclavo, by Juan Francisco Manzano, Bilingual Edition, trans. Evelyn Picon Gar0eld (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 15. 93. Works Progress Administration, Ex-Slave Narrative Project, Louisiana State University Libraries Special Collections (hereafter WPA-LSU), “Ceceil George Interview,” February 15, 1940, 3. 94. WPA-LSU, “Albert Patterson Interview,” May 22, 1940, 2. 95. WPA-LSU, “Elizabeth Ross Hite Interview,” unspeci0ed date. 96. WPA-LSU, “Ceceil George Interview,” 3. 97. WPA-LSU, “Slack Wilson Interview,” January 1941, 1. 98. WPA-LSU, “Albert Patterson Interview,” 2. 99. Ibid. 100. WPA-LSU, “Hunton Love Interview,” unspeci0ed date. 101. WPA-LSU, “Rebecca Fletcher Interview,” August 21, 1940, 3. 102. WPA-LSU, “Carlyle Stewart Interview,” March 5, 1940, 1. 103. Quoted in Schulman, Autobiography of a Slave, 91. 104. Ibid., 95. 105. Ibid., 97. 106. “The Congo Dance,” Daily Picayune, October, 12, 1879, 1. 107. John Adams Paxton, The New-Orleans Directory and Register (New Orleans: Privately printed, 1822), 40. 108. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe 1799–1820: From Philadelphia to New Orleans, ed. Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Lee W. Formwalt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 3:203–4. 109. P. Riesgo, “Día de los Santos Reyes en La Habana,” La Prensa (Havana), January 6, 1859. 110. Ramón Meza, “Día de Reyes,” La Habana Elegante, 5:2: 3–4, in Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 9. 111. K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, “A Powerful Trio: Drumming-SingingDancing,” unpublished manuscript; cited in Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 11. 112. Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues, 11. 113. Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 28. 114. Allegra Fuller Snyder, “The Dance Symbol,” in The Dimensions of Dance Research: Anthropology and Dance (New York: Cord Publishers, 1972), 221. 115. Thompson, African Art in Motion, 28. 116. Ibid., 41.

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117. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11. 118. John DuMoulin, “The Participative Art of the Afrocuban Religions,” Abhandlungen und Berichte des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden 21 (1962): 64. 119. Federal Writers Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, vol. 16. Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1941), 294, quoted in Lynne Farley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press Books, 1972), 124. 120. Laura Towne, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884 (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1912), 20; also cited in Emery, Black Dance, 122. 121. Meza, “Día de Reyes,” 4. 122. “The Congo Dance,” Daily Picayune, October, 12, 1879, 1. 123. Drewal, Pemberton, and Abiodun, Yoruba, 15. 124. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 267. 125. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 28. 126. Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage through the States of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee and through the Territories of Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Orleans; Performed in the years 1807 and 1808; Including a Tour of Nearly Six Thousand Miles, with Maps and Plates. (New York: Isaac Riley, 1810), 2:197. 127. Fernando Ortiz, “The Afro-Cuban Festival ‘Day of the Kings,’” in Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 16. 128. Meza, “Día de Reyes,” 4. 129. Antonio Lorcas, “Los diablitos o el día infernal en La Habana” Prensa de la Habana, January 6, 1859; quoted in Ortiz, “Afro-Cuban Festival,” 12. 130. Richard Henderson, The King in Every Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 110. 131. Herbert M. Cole and Chike Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos (Los Angeles: Museum of Cultural History, 1984), 113. 132. Wyatt MacGafey, Religion and Society in Central Africa: The Bakongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 52. This same use of the color white occurs among the Igbo (see Cole and Aniakor, Igbo Arts, 39). 133. Riesgo, “Día de los Santos Reyes en La Habana,” and Pérez Zamora, cited in Ortiz, “Afro-Cuban Festival,” 14. 134. Drewal, Pemberton, and Abiodun, Yoruba, 25. 135. Ibid. 136. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 19. 137. Ibid., 109.

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138. MacGafey, Religion and Society, 43–44. 139. Wyatt MacGafey, cited in Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 108. 140. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 109. 141. Stuckey, Slave Culture, 13. 142. K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, The African Book without Name (Privately printed, 1980), 3, cited in Thompson, Four Moments of the Sun, 33, n. 5. 143. MacGafey, Religion and Society, 55. 144. K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau, N’Kongo Ye Nza Yakun’zungidila: Nza Kongo (Kinshasa: O2ce National de la Recherche et de Développement, 1969), 14, cited in Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 109. 145. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, 110. 146. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953 [1861]), 241. Subsequent references are given in the text. 147. Emery, Black Dance, 121.

3. Regulating Domesticity

1. Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Strati0cation in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), discusses gender imbalances throughout much of the New World slave complex. See especially 32–46. 2. Data taken from Kenneth Kiple, Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 1774–1899 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1976), 45. 3. Slavery in Cuba was abolished in 1886. 4. The sex ratios for the New Orleans slave community are taken from Virginia Meacham Gould’s excellent essay “‘The House That Was Never a Home’: Slave Family and Household Organization in New Orleans, 1820– 1850,” Slavery and Abolition 18:2 (August 1997): 92. 5. This statistic is drawn from Lawrence J. Kotlikof and Anton J. Rupert, “The Manumission of Slaves in New Orleans, 1827–1846,” Southern Studies 19:2 (1980): 176. 6. See Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), especially 116–66. 7. Ibid. 8. For a broader discussion of the social rami0cations of color and class on marriage opportunities within Cuba’s African-descended community, see Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), especially 91–99. 9. For the most detailed description of the curro, see Fernando Ortiz, Los negros curros (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1986). 10. See José E. Triay, “El calesero” in Tipos y costumbres de la isla de Cuba, ed. Miguel de Villa (Havana, 1881), 105–11.

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11. Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), cited in Slaves, Sugar, and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801–1899, ed. Louis Pérez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1992), 16. 12. The most extensive work done on the Abakuá has been carried out by Lydia Cabrera. See her La sociedad secreta Abakua (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1970), La lengua sagrada de los nañigos (Miami: Colleción CR, 1988), and Anaforuana: Ritual y símbolos de la iniciación en la sociedad secreta Abakua (Madrid: Los de Hoy, 1975). 13. Ortiz, Los negros curros, 5. 14. For another interpretation of this series, see Vera Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 70–80. 15. Kotlikof and Rupert, “Manumission of Slaves in New Orleans,” 180. 16. Ibid. 17. Henry T. Johns, Life with the Forty-ninth Massachusetts Volunteers (Pitts0eld, Mass., 1864), 126. 18. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80. 19. Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conlict and Its Ritual Expression on British West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1987), 125. 20. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 415. 21. Ibid., 419. I do not deny that some black men did engage in sexual relationships with white women, but these instances were greatly surpassed by the number of white men who formed sexual unions with black and mulatto women. To state these two very disparate phenomena as if their frequency and level of social acceptance were equal obscures the reality. 22. Referring to this practice in the slave societies of the United States, Ervin L. Jordan has coined the term sexual racism or “the sexual exploitation of African Americans by whites, especially but not limited to the rape or involuntary concubinage of African American women” (Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia [Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1995], 132). 23. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 88. 24. For an illuminating discussion of the power dynamics embedded in sexual relations regarding women of color, see Ann Stoler, “Making the Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16 (November 1989): 634–60, and Catherine Clinton, “With a Whip in His Hand: Rape, Memory, and African American Women,” in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed.

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Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 205–18. 25. This concept of the expectation of sexual labor is dealt with extensively in Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner Publishers, 1999), especially chapter 2. 26. Florencia’s story is told in Digna Castenada, “The Female Slave in Cuba during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (London: J. Currey; Kingston, Jamaica: I. Randall, 1995), 145. 27. Ibid. 28. Desmond Morris, The Human Zoo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 100. 29. Ibid., 116. 30. For a candid description of New Orleans’s postemancipation sex industry, see Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974). For references to the rampant prostitution in Havana just following emancipation, see Benjamin de Cespedes, La prostitución en la ciudad de la Habana (Havana, 1888); Alfred Padula and Lois Smith, “Women in Socialist Cuba,” in Cuba Twenty-Five Years of Revolution 1959–1984, ed. Sandor Halebsky and John M. Kirk (New York: Praeger, 1985), 79–92; Luis Salas, Social Control and Deviance in Cuba (New York: Praeger, 1979), 97–103; and Teresa Rojas, “La prostitución en Cuba,” Mujeres 13 (August 8, 1973): 63–69. 31. Joseph Roach, “Slave Spectacles and the Tragic Octoroons: A Genealogy of Antebellum Performance,” Theatre Survey 33:2 (November 1992): 183. 32. Rose, Storyville, 149. 33. Ibid., 159–60. 34. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 27; emphasis added. 35. Ibid., 192. 36. Robert Tallant, Gumbo Ya-Ya (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 1988 [1945]), 237. 37. This discussion is inluenced by Joseph Roach’s article “Slave Spectacles and the Tragic Octoroons.” 38. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 416. 39. Roach, “Slave Spectacles and the Tragic Octoroons,” 174–75. 40. Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour, 38. 41. José Antonio Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y especial en los países América-Hispánicos (Havana: Cultural, 1938), 1:xxxiv–xxxvi, cited in ibid., 36. 42. Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour, 57. 43. Kutzinski, Sugar’s Secrets, 74. 44. Ibid., 115.

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45. John Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 18. 46. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854. (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904 [1856]), 2:247. 47. Ibid., 248. 48. Annie Lee West Stahl, “The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 25:2 (April 1942): 311. 49. Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World, 103. 50. Ibid., 101. 51. Diario del Gobierno de la Habana, January 10, 1815, 4; February 27, 1817, 4. Subsequent references to advertisements in this newspaper are given in the text. 52. Gould, “The House That Was Never a Home,” 98. 53. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 14. 54. Norrece Jones, Born a Child of Freedom Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 37. 55. Virginia Meacham Gould estimates that only approximately 76 percent of all slaves under the age of fourteen lived in discernible family units and that this percentage decreased dramatically with age (“The House That Never Was a Home,” 99). 56. Ibid., 91. 57. Works Progress Administration Ex-Slave Narrative Project, Louisiana State University Libraries Special Collections, “Mary Harris Interview,” October 28, 1940, 3; emphasis added. 58. C. C. Leigh, “White and Colored Slaves,” Harpers Weekly, January 30, 1864, 70–71. 59. Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Gobierno Superior Civil, 0le 1056, no. 37611. 60. Ibid., 0le 938, no. 33089. 61. Ibid., 0le 948, no. 33476. 62. Ramón Meza, “Día de Reyes,” La Habana Elegante 5:2:4, in Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 11. 63. Ibid. 64. For additional work on the Abakua, see Eugenio Matibag, Afro-Cuban Religious Experience: Cultural Relections in Narrative (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), 120–52; Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 225–69; and, most important, Cabrera, La sociedad secreta Abakua, La lengua sagrada de los nañigos, and Anaforuana. 65. The November 1984 issue of African Arts (18:1) is devoted to the Cross River culture. Elliot Leib and Renée Romano’s “Reign of the Leopard: Ngbe

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Ritual,” 48–57 and 94–96, is particularly helpful regarding the public procession of the Ireme. 66. Ibid. 67. Comments regarding Yemaya and Oshun are inluenced by several sources, including Joseph Murphy, Santeria: An African Religion in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), William Bascom, Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), Lydia Cabrera, Yemaya y Ochún (Madrid: Ediciones CR, 1974), and Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, Tales of the Orishas (New York: Original Publications, 1985). 68. Comments regarding the multiple capacities of Yoruban Ibeji dolls are drawn from Elisabeth Cameron, “In Search of Children: Dolls and Agency in Africa,” African Arts 30:2 (1997): 18–33, 93; Robert Farris Thompson, Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977), chapter 13, 1–5, and “Sons of Thunder: Twin Images among the Oyo and Other Yoruba Groups,” African Arts 4:2 (winter 1971): 8–15, 77–80; and Marilyn Houlberg, “Ibeji Images of the Yoruba,” African Arts 7:1 (autumn 1973): 20–27. 69. Thompson, Black Gods and Kings, chapter 13, 1. 70. This song is in Fernando Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba Editorial (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1981 [1951]), 353. I have chosen Robert Farris Thompson’s translation of the Yoruba-based Cuban dialect in “Sons of Thunder,” 8. 71. Cameron, “In Search of Children,” 32. 72. D. Maury Talbot, Woman’s Mysteries of a Primitive People: The Ibibios of Southern Nigeria (London: Frank Cass, 1968), 109. 73. Ibid., 110. 74. John DuMoulin, “The Participative Art of the Afrocuban Religions,” Abhandlungen und Berichte des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden 21 (1962): 68. 75. David H. Brown, “The Afro-Cuban Festival ‘Day of the Kings’: An Annotated Glossary,” in Cuban Festivals: A Century of Afro-Cuban Culture, ed. Judith Bettelheim (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2001), 49. 76. Herbert Cole, Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of African Art in association with Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 12. 77. Morrisey ofers an overview of this debate and cites the major advocates in both primary and secondary sources (Slave Women in the New World, especially 115–16). 78. J. Lorand Matory, Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 109. 79. Talbot, Woman’s Mysteries, 85–86. 80. John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo: A Record of Thirty Years’ Close Intercourse with the Bakongo and Other Tribes of Equatorial Africa, with a Description of Their

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Habits, Customs and Religious Beliefs (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1914]), 107. 81. G. T. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria (London: Frank Cass & Company, 1966), 64. 82. Cameron, “In Search of Children,” 23. 83. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo, 107. 84. Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 1:343. 85. Cameron, “In Search of Children,” 29. 86. Ibid. 87. Basden, Among the Ibos of Nigeria, 68. 88. See George Washington Cable, “The Dance Place in Congo Square,” Century Magazine 32:4 (February 1886): 519; Henry C. Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978 [1895]), 158; Herbert Ashbury’s citation of a New York World correspondent in his The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Publishers, 1938), 252; and Henry Didimus’s quotes in Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of American Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 83. 89. Lynne Farley Emery, Black Dance in the United States from 1619 to 1970 (Palo Alto, Calif.: National Press Books, 1972), 26. 90. Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Danse, trans. Anthony Bliss (Philadelphia, 1796); repr. Brooklyn, Dance Horizons, 1976), 45. 91. A signi0cant discussion of the Calenda as a Circum-Caribbean phenomenon is ofered by Dena Epstein in her masterful work Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977) 30–38. 92. Moreau de Saint-Méry, Danse, 45–46. 93. Emery, Black Dance, 21. 94. Cole, Icons, 52–73. 95. The most up-to-date study of the Afro-Cuban cabildos is Phillip Howard’s Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1998). The most-cited work on this topic is still Fernando Ortiz, “Los cabildos afro-cubanos,” Revista Bimestre Cubana 16:1 ( January–February 1921): 5–39. 96. See Hubert Aimes, “African Institutions in America,” Journal of American Folklore 18:68 ( January–March 1905): 15–32. 97. This quote is taken from Arelio Pérez Zamora, “El Día de los Reyes en la Habana,” El Abolicionista Español 2:7 ( January 15, 1866), cited in Fernando Ortiz, “The Afro-Cuban Festival ‘Day of the Kings,’” in Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 15. 98. Ibid.

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99. Robert Sutherland Rattray, Ashanti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 85. 100. Ibid., 79. 101. Ortiz, “Afro-Cuban Festival,” 15. 102. This quote is from Léon Beauvallet, Rachel in the New World: A Trip to the United States and Cuba (New York: Dix, Edward and Company, 1856), 363, cited in Aimes, “African Institutions in America,” 21.

4. Imagining the African / Imagining Blackness

1. Regarding early perceptions of blacks and Africans by Europeans, see Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550– 1812 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977); Barbara E. Lacey, “Visual Images of Blacks in Early American Imprints,” William and Mary Quarterly 53:1 ( January 1996): 137–80; and Jennifer Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” William and Mary Quarterly 54:1 ( January 1997): 167–92. 2. Regarding the usage of negative depictions of African-descended people as a justi0cation of social-control eforts in slave societies, see Gordon Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), especially 94–170; Ronald Takaki, “The Black-ChildSavage in Ante-Bellum America,” in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America, ed. Gary B. Nash and Richard Weiss (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 27–44; and George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: the Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), especially 71–96. 3. For an overview of the major trends and theories regarding race and science in the nineteenth century, see William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scienti0c Attitudes towards Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969); Stephan Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996 [1981]); Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 71–96; and Herbert H. Odom, “Generalizations on Race in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 58 (spring 1967): 5–18. 4. Consuelo Naranjo Orovio and Armando García González, Racismo e inmigración en Cuba en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1996), 34–35. 5. The magazine began publication in New Orleans in 1846. Although Washington, D.C., and Charleston, South Carolina, also shared publication responsibilities from 1853 to 1860 and 1861 to 1862, respectively, only in 1864, when the business was briely transferred to Columbia, South Carolina, during the Civil War, did the name New Orleans not appear on its title page. 6. The quote is from Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 85. 7. “Our Position and That of Our Enemies,” DeBow’s Review 31:1 (1861): 27.

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8. W. S. Forwood, DeBow’s Review 31:1 (1861): 99. 9. Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race” DeBow’s Review 4 (1851): 65. 10. Samuel Cartwright, “Dr. Cartwright on the Serpent, the Ape and the Negro,” DeBow’s Review 31 (1861): 507. 11. New Orleans Delta, November 21, 1858. 12. For more information on Agassiz, see Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 13. Louis Agassiz, letter to his mother, December 1846 (Haughton Library, Harvard University), quoted in Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 44–45. 14. Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia, 1854). 15. José Antonio Saco, La vagrancia en Cuba (Havana: Dirección de Cultura, 1946 [1832]). 16. José Antonio Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el nuevo mundo (Havana: Talleres de Cultura, 1938), 3:29. 17. Edmund Ru2n, “Equality of the Races—Haytien and British Experiments: The Dogma of the Natural Mental Equality of the Black and White Races Considered,” DeBow’s Review 25:1 (1858): 31. 18. Félix Tanco, letter to Domingo del Monte, in Domingo del Monte y Aponte, Centón epistolario (Havana: Academia de la Historia de Cuba, 1957), 7:86, cited in Naranjo Orovio and García González, Racismo e inmigración, 16–17. 19. W. W. Wright, “Free Negroes in Hayti,” DeBow’s Review 27 (1859): 529. 20. Ibid., 531. 21. Ibid., 545. 22. “Our Position,” DeBow’s Review, 33. 23. Ru2n, “Equality of the Races,” 31. 24. Cristóbal Madan, El trabajo libre y el cambio en Cuba (Paris: n.p., 1864), cited in Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 97. 25. “Our Position,” DeBow’s Review, 31. 26. Ru2n, “Equality of the Races,” 31. 27. “Our Position,” DeBow’s Review, 31. 28. Antonio Bachiller y Morales, Apuntes para la historia de la letras y de la instrucción pública en la isla de Cuba (Havana: Colección de Libros Cubanos, 1936 [1859–61]), 1:9. 29. Gaspar Betancourt to Domingo del Monte, December 11, 1842, in Centón epistolario, 5:85, cited in Robert Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conlict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 115. 30. The images for August 1866 are no longer extant. 31. Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes” American Art 9:2 (summer 1995): 53.

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32. For a discussion of the mammy image in the Antebellum and post– Civil War United States, see Patricia Morton, Dis0gured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (New York: Praeger, 1991), and Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 46–61. 33. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezama, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Rede0nition (New York and London: Routledge, 1998), 155. 34. “Cuestión negrera,” La Verdad 8, cited in Luis Martínez-Fernández, Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 139. 35. Information on blackface minstrelsy in the United States is drawn from Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1974); Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27:1 (March 1975): 3–28; Carle Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1930); Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962); and William Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 36. For teatro bufo and obras catedráticas, see Pedro Barreda, The Black Protagonist in the Cuban Novel, trans. Page Bancroft (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 23; Jorge Castellanos and Isabel Castellanos, Cultura afrocubana: letras, música, arte (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1994), 4:210–40; La Enciclopedia de Cuba, vol. 2, Prosa y Teatro (San Juan and Madrid: Enciclopedia y Clásicos Cubanos, 1975), 392–93; Jill Lane, “Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840–1868,” Theatre Journal 50:1 (1998): 21–38; and Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and the Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920–1940 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 41–61. 37. Castellanos and Castellanos, Cultura afrocubana, 4:210. 38. Ibid., 222–23. 39. Information for this paragraph is drawn from Kaye DeMetz, “Minstrel Dancing in New Orleans’ Nineteenth Century Theaters,” in In Old New Orleans, ed. W. Kenneth Holditch ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 9–40. 40. Ibid., 36. 41. Ibid., 30. 42. Castellanos and Castellanos, Cultura Afrocubana, 4:224. 43. Ibid., 221. 44. Ibid., 220. 45. Josiah C. Nott, Two Lectures on the Connection between the Biblical and Physical History of Man (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 [1849]), 20. 46. Samuel Feijoo, “African Inluence in Latin America: Oral and Written Literature,” in Africa in Latin America: Essays on History, Culture, and Socialization,

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ed. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, trans. Leonor Blum (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1984), 159. 47. Ibid., 159–60. 48. DeMetz, “Minstrel Dancing,” 32. 49. Gary D. Engle, This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 1–12. Subsequent references are given in the text. 50. Feijoo, “African Inluence in Latin America,” 160. 51. For a discussion of this practice in Havana, see Luis MartínezFernández, Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean: The Life and Times of a British Family in Nineteenth-Century Havana (Armonk, N.Y., and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 65–83. A similar practice in nineteenth-century Brazil is the central theme of Sandra Lauderdale Graham’s House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). 52. Richard Henry Dana, To Cuba and Back, ed. C. Harvey Gardiner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966 [1859]), 10–11. 53. Joseph Dimock, Impressions of Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: The Travel Diary of Joseph J. Dimock, ed. Louis A. Pérez (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1998), 21. 54. John George F. Wurdeman, Notes on Cuba (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1844), cited in Louis Pérez, ed., Slaves, Sugar and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801–1899 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1992), 7–8. 55. Martínez-Fernández, Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean, 67. 56. Ibid., 167 n. 12. 57. Ibid., 69. 58. For general information on the structure and customs of the quadroon balls, see Albert A. Fossier, New Orleans: The Glamorous Period, 1800–1840: A History of the Conlicts of Nationalities, Languages, Religion, Morals, Cultures, Laws, Politics and Economics during the Formative Period of New Orleans (New Orleans: American Printing Company, 1957), 356–66; Monique Guillory, “Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls,” in Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jefrey Tucker (New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), 67–92; and Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans (New York and London: Century Company, 1933), 177–86. 59. Guillory, “Under One Roof,” 70. 60. Cited in Fossier, New Orleans, 362–63. 61. Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans (New Orleans: Robert Crager and Company, 1954), 233. 62. Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage (New York: Isaac Riley, 1810), 2:197. 63. Aurelio Pérez Zamora, “El Día de los Reyes en La Habana,” El

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Abolicionista Español, 2:7 ( January 15, 1866), cited in Fernando Ortiz, “The Afro-Cuban Festival ‘Day of the Kings,’” in Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 15. 64. John Paxton, Paxton’s Directory of New Orleans (New Orleans, 1822), 40. 65. “El Día de Reyes,” El Museo ( January 7, 1883): 3. 66. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conlict of Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831–32,” in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), 54.

5. Negotiating Racial Hierarchies

1. For a discussion of the tactics of divide and rule within a slave community, see Noreece Jones, Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave (Hanover, N.H., and London: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1990), 98–128. 2. Francisco Dionisio Vives, “Un interrogatorio,” in José Antonio Saco, Historia de la esclavitud, cited in Robert Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conlict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 105. 3. For a discussion of the relationship of La Escalera to Cuban racial ideology, see Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 3–4. 4. John G. F. Wurdemann, Notes on Cuba (New York: Arno Press, 1971 [1844]), 357. The best treatment to date of La Escalera is in Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood. Although the conspiracy is traditionally considered to be a Matanzas phenomenon, historian Philip Howard, using documents in Cuban archives, discovered that Havana’s African-descended community was also involved in the attempted insurrection and, like their counterparts in Matanzas, were harassed and tortured by colonial authorities in an efort to identify the principal conspirators (Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century [Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1998], 89–96). A good historiography of La Escalera is contained in Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood, 3–26. 5. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 4. 6. For a history of the free black battalions, see Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, Los batallones de pardos y morenos (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1976); Herbert Klein, “The Colored Militia of Cuba 1568–1868,” Caribbean Studies 6 ( July 1966): 17–27; and Allan J. Kuethe, “The Status of the Free Pardo in the Disciplined Militia of New Granada,” Journal of Negro History 56 (April 1971): 105–17. 7. For a discussion of the overlapping of the membership between the two institutions, see Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood, 108–9.

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8. Howard, Changing History, 27. This work is the most comprehensive study on the cabildos. Previously, the most-cited study was Fernando Ortiz’s “Los cabildos afrocubanos,” Revista Bimestre Cubana 16 (1921): 5–32. 9. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood, 125. 10. Alain Yacou, “La conspiración de Aponte (1812),” Historia y Sociedad 1 (Puerto Rico) (1988): 39–58. The most complete examination of the Aponte conspiracy in English is Matt Childs, “The Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Transformation of Cuban Society: Race, Slavery, and Freedom in the Atlantic World,” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 2001. 11. Extensive descriptions of Aponte can be found in José Luciano Franco, La conspiración de Aponte (Havana: Publicaciones del Archivo Nacional, 1963), 21–26. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. Ibid., 26. See also Howard, Changing History, 75–78. 14. Howard refers to this awareness as “a consciousness of kind: an identity that mitigated, to a certain degree, diferences of language, ethnicity and customs, an identity that allowed them to discern the common problems all people of color confronted on a daily basis” (ibid., xvii). 15. Ibid., 78. 16. Ibid., 79. 17. Ibid., 84. For a description of the Monzón afair, see Deschamps Chapeaux, Los batallones, 83–86. 18. Howard, Changing History, 86–96. 19. For a discussion of the history and practice of coartación, see Hubert Aimes, “Coartación: A Spanish Institution for the Advancement of Slaves into Freedom,” Yale Review 17 (February 1909): 412–31, and Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor 1860–1899 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 13–14, 74–77. 20. After 1844, the cabildos became heavily monitored by the colonial authorities and soon evolved into ethnically nonspeci0c associations of free blacks that helped incorporate Afro-Cubans into free Cuban society. This transition is detailed concisely in Philip Howard, “The Spanish Colonial Government’s Responses to the Pan-Nationalist Agenda of the Afro-Cuban Mutual Aid Societies, 1868–1895,” Revista/Review Interamericana 22:1–2 (1992): 151–67. 21. The better works on New Orleans’s free people of color include, for the Spanish period, Kimberly Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1997); for the Antebellum period, H. E. Sterkx, The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972); and, covering the French, Spanish, and American period, Caryn Cosse Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the AfroCreole Protest Tradition in Louisiana (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), and Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early

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New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999). 22. John Blassingame, Black New Orleans: 1860–1880 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 21. 23. Ibid., 11, and Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cosse Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans 1850–1900,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 206. 24. Kimberly Hanger, “‘The Fortunes of Women in America’: Spanish New Orleans’s Free Women of African Descent and Their Relations with Slave Women,” in Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past, ed. Patricia Morton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 162. 25. Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 125. Citing fears of the free people of color’s allegiance to France or Spain and the potentially subversive model of freedom that they represented to slaves, the legislature of territorial Louisiana disbanded the militias in October 1804, only to recommission them, in a diminished capacity, in 1812. Their participation in the repression of the slave rebellion of 1811 was the result of an executive action by territorial governor William C. C. Claiborne. In addition to Berlin’s Slaves without Masters (112–28), the conlict over the retention of the militias is recounted in Sterkx, The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana, 91–92; Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 29–36; and Donald E. Everett, “Emigres and Militiamen: Free Persons of Color in New Orleans, 1803–1815,” Journal of Negro History 38 (October 1953): 377–402. The best book-length study of the militias is Roland McConnell, Negro Troops of Antebellum Louisiana: A History of the Battalion of Free Men of Color (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1968). 26. Journal of the House of Representatives (1831) 10th Legislature, 1st session, 83–84, cited in Sterkx, The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Louisiana, 294. 27. “A Gentleman at New Orleans to a Member of Congress,” January 11, 1811, cited in the New York Evening Post, February 19, 1811. The best secondary account of this event is James H. Dormon, “The Persistent Spector: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 18:4 (fall 1977): 389–404. 28. In 1810, slaves and free persons of color were 63.3 percent of New Orleans’s population. 29. W. C. C. Claiborne to the secretary of state, January 14, 1811, in O2cial Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816, ed. Dunbar Rowland ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), 5:100. 30. Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 136. 31. Cited in ibid., 232. 32. Laura Foner, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St.

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Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Societies,” Journal of Social History 3 (1970): 430. 33. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Sketches, 1818–1820, ed. Samuel Wilson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 49. 34. Ramón Meza, “Día de Reyes,” La Habana Elegante 5:2 ( January 11, 1891): 5–6, cited in Fernando Ortiz, “The Afro-Cuban Festival ‘Day of the Kings,’” in Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, ed. Judith Bettleheim and Fernando Ortiz (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 10. 35. Daily Picayune, October 12, 1879, 1. 36. Aurelio Pérez Zamora, “El Día de los Reyes en La Habana,” El Abolicionista Español 2:7 ( January 15, 1866), cited in Ortiz, “The Afro-Cuban Festival,” 14–15. 37. James Creecy, Scenes in the South, and Other Miscellaneous Pieces (Washington, D.C.: T. McGill, 1860), 19–23. 38. Antonio Lorcas, “Los diablitos o el día infernal en La Habana,” Prensa de la Habana, January 6, 1859, cited in Ortiz, “The Afro-Cuban Festival,” 12. 39. Meza, “Día de Reyes,” 5. 40. Ibid., 6. 41. Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans, 50. 42. Meza, “Día de Reyes,” 6–7. 43. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 16. 44. Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 271. 45. Daily Picayune, October 12, 1879, 1. 46. Ibid. 47. Howard, Changing History, 92. 48. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Praeger, 1967 [1789]), 3–4. 49. Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 34–35.

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Index

Abakuá, 65–67, 89–90 abortion, 97 Bakongo beliefs in New Orleans and Havana, 53–57 Battalion of Free Men of Color, 140 battalones de pardos y morenos, 135–36 birthrates: in Havana, 83; in New Orleans, 85 blackface theater in Havana and New Orleans, 119–27 cabildos, 103, 111; royal processions, 103–105; as sites of political activity, 135–38 Calenda, 99–100 calesero, 65–68 Chica, 99–100 city guard in New Orleans, 39 coartación, 138–39 concubinage, 79–83 Congo Square: basic description, x, 2–3, 44; negative portrayals, 129–31 curro, 65–66

Depósito Central del Cerro, 31–34 Día de Reyes: basic description, ix–x, 1–3; negative portrayals, 129–31 dolls: as fertility inducements 95– 97; Ibeji, 93; Imaguey, 93, 95 Elegba/Ellegua, 51–53 fancy girls, 78–79 “gens de couleur libre,” 139–43 Havana: general description, viii–ix Historia de la mulata, 80–81 icons in African festivals, 10–11 infanticide, 97 infant mortality: in Havana, 83; in New Orleans, 85 insurrections: in Cuba, 136–38; in New Orleans, 141 Ireme. See Abakuá jails: in Havana, 30–34; in New Orleans, 28–30 187

188

Index

festivals: in the Americas, 3–4; in West and West Central Africa, 8–13 folklore and culture, comparative: literature, 17; songs, 14–16 La Escalera (the conspiracy of the ladder), 135, 138 living conditions of urban slaves, 26–27 Manzano, Juan, 40, 42–43 masquerading in African festivals, 9–10 military fortresses in Havana, 37–38 military troops in Havana, 38–39 motherhood: importance in West and West Central Africa, 97–98 music and dance in African festivals, 11–12 Nanigo. See Abakuá Native Guards, 142 New Orleans: general description, viii-ix

seclusion of white females and its efects on black women, 127–28 segregation in New Orleans, 39–40 sex as social control, 73–79 sex ratios: in Havana, 59–61; in New Orleans, 61–64 slave markets, 34; in Havana, 35–36; in New Orleans, 36–37 slave owners of African descent in New Orleans, 139 slave trade: in Africa, 21; to Havana and Cuba, 7–8; to New Orleans and Louisiana, 4–7 stereotypes: Afro-Cuban men, 64–68; Afro-Cuban women, 73, 80–81, 115–18, 123–25 suicide: in the Americas generally, 24; during the Middle Passage, 22–24 third caste in New Orleans, 139–43 threat of sale as a method of social control, 85–89 transmigration, 23–25

Oshun, 90, 93–95 Pan-African unity in Día de Reyes and Congo Square, 144–48 placage, 82–83, 128 plantations as threats, 40–43 quadroon balls, 128 race and science, 105–14; as visual art, 114–18 reproduction: in Havana and New Orleans, 83–85; value in West and West Central Africa, 97 ring shout, 46–49, 145–47

Vida y muerte de la mulata, 68–73, 83 Virgin of El Cobre, 90, 92 Virgin of Regla, 90–91 wet nurses, 84–85 whipping houses: in Havana, 28; in New Orleans, 28 Yemaya, 90, 93–94 Yoruba beliefs in Havana, 51–53, 90–97

Daniel E. Walker is founding director of the Center for History, Media, and the Arts, a division of the Black Voice Foundation.