African Religious Retentions in Florida Robert L. Hall Knotty issues in African American culture and religion are raised by an examination of the religious experiences of blacks living in Florida from the founding of Saint Augustine in 1565 through the early 20th century. This essay addresses the cultural distinctiveness of African Americans by placing spirit possession and ritual ecstatic dance at the heart of the controversy over African cultural survivals in the United States. Because the cultural transformation of African Americans is best viewed as a dynamic process that occurred over a long period, a consideration of the 18th century is critical to an understanding of the relevance of African cultures to American culture. The bulk of the essay, however, describes the African survivals in 19th century Florida. Although ritual scarification, naming practices, magical beliefs, and material culture are mentioned, emphasis is on religion as the matrix of 19th century African American life and the centerpiece of African cultural influences in Florida. Revisiting a Controversy In discussions of African American religious life, two troublesome and interlocking concerns usually emerge. First is the question of the degree to which African culture survived enslaved communities. Second, and closely linked, is the question of whether slave religion was essentially docile or basically rebellious. Too often, as David Stannard observed, historians have confronted these issues with a “sharply dichotomous approach”: a given element of antebellum or postbellum black American culture either is or is not considered African. Such an approach creates several problems. The assumption that a particular aspect of black culture can be neatly pigeonholed as either African or European in origin obscures a fundamental similarity in the general pattern of the cultures of Africa and Europe that anthropologist William Bascom believed “justifies the concept of an Old World area which includes both Europe and Africa.” This approach also obscures the cultural blending process that Melville Herskovits illuminated. One unconquered problem of the Africans survivals theory advanced by Herskovits is identifying, as precisely as possible, the cultural and geographical core areas in Africa that are relevant to the particular local New World black populations being studied. That is where earlier theorists went astray or were stymied by the truncated state of African historical studies in the United States at the time they were working. A significant part of the problem derives from an imprecise or shifting labeling of the coastal and geographical areas from which the African ancestors of U.S. blacks came. Some writers and speakers who say that the African ancestors of black Americans came from “West Africa” mean the entire Atlantic Coast, from the Senegal River to Angola. Others use the same term but then proceed to cite ethnographic examples only from the area between the Senegal River and the Cameroons, omitting Kongo-Angola almost entirely, as did George Rawick. But recent research has shown that Angola and the Kongo are relevant to studying retentions, not only in the Caribbean and Brazil but also in the Southern United States. Robert Thompson, citing linguistic and artistic evidence, raised serious questions about the primacy of the Dahomean and Yoruba groups in the New World and suggested that the Congolese and Angolan influences were scarcely less important than either South America or the United States. As Bennetta Jules-Rosette suggested, “many of the ambiguities concerning African musical retentions may be clarified when the central African cultural complex [as distinguished from the narrowest definition of West Africa] is viewed as a source for Black American expressive form. Linguistic evidence in data summarizing the origin of African newcomers to the lower south during the middle of the 18th century suggest that Central African Bantu and influences were more prominent in the coastal zones of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina then heretofore recognized. The study of African American religious practices and magical beliefs it is central to the controversy over African cultural retentions. In The Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovits wrote that “African religious practices and magical beliefs are everywhere to be found in some measure as recognizable survivals, and are in every region more numerous than survivals in other realms of culture,” such as material aspects of life or political orientation. In Herskovits’s scheme of things, then, if one cannot find Africans survivals or influences in African American religious practices and magical beliefs, one cannot find them anywhere. Although subsequent research by historical archaeologists has forced reconsideration of Herskovits’s a statement that “Africanisms in material aspects of culture are almost lacking,” it remains accurate to say that religion constitutes the centerpiece of his tapestry of African survivals. The 18th Century As Mechal Sobel indicated, “it seems likely that during the 18th century large enclaves of several tribal peoples existed from Maryland south, although among each group many languages were spoken.” 18th century planters in the lower south had clear ethnic preferences among African groups and appear to have attached greater importance to origins than did their counterparts in the Chesapeake area. Ira Berlin argued persuasively that during the 17th and 18th centuries, three distinctive slave systems evolved in North America: the northern nonplantation system, the Chesapeake Bay system, and the Carolina and Georgia low-country plantation system. According to Berlin, “the mass of black people, however, remained physically separated and psychologically estranged from the Anglo American world and culturally closer to Africa than any other blacks in continental North America.” Low country blacks, Berlin argued, incorporated more of West African culture—as reflected in their language, religion, work patterns, and much else—into their new lives than did other black Americans. Throughout the 18th century and into the 19th century, low-country blacks continued to work the land, name their children, and communicate through word and song in a manner that openly combined African traditions with the circumstances of plantation life. The experience of blacks in Florida during the colonial period was closer to Berlin’s Carolina and Georgia low-country slave system than to the other two systems. Indeed, well into the 19th century several Florida slave-holders perceived a particular style of speech among slaves as “low-country.” It was said that Primus, a runaway slave from Conecuh County, Alabama, “speaks after the manner peculiar to most Negros raised in the low country.” Jacob, who escaped from E. T. Jankes in Florida in 1841, spoke “thick like an African negro.” And John, a stout, dark complexioned man who ran away from Gadsden County, Florida in 1852, was described as, “slow and low-country spoken, having been raised in East Florida.” The evidence provided by language and naming practices strongly supports Sobel’s notion that “several African languages may well have survived the initial slave trade into the Americas.” The “Nine New Negroe Men” from the Gold Coast who were advertised for sale near Savannah in 1764 surely spoke their mother tongues. Over one-fourth of the advertisements for runaways printed in the Georgia Gazette during 1765 indicated that the fugitives in question spoke no English. Since more than 40% of the African slaves who arrived in the British Colonies of North America between 1770 and 1775 arrived in South Carolina, the Carolina experience has direct relevance to the history of blacks living in Florida during the 18th century. Black fugitives from South Carolina and later Georgia established a maroon tradition in Florida that persisted well into the 19th century. Other fugitives from colonial South Carolina sought and received asylum, nominal freedom, and Catholic religious instruction near Saint Augustine during the first period of Spanish rule. Fugitive blacks from the Carolinas and Georgia had been finding refuge in Florida since the late 1600s because, as John Milliken pointed out, the area’s semi-tropical climate, sparse white settlement, and chronic political instability made it an ideal haven for runaway slaves. Asserting the particularly aggressive character of the Florida maroon, Milligan concluded: “Quite clearly, if in the first place newly imported Africans had been encouraged by a propitious environment to found the maroon and mold its activist character, once they had established a tradition, American-born fugitives took advantage of that same environment to continue the maroon.” The peak of the colonial import trade in slaves was probably reached between 1764 in 1773, a period that overlaps nine of the 21 years of British occupation of Florida. More narrowly, more than 8,000 black newcomers were landed in Charleston alone between November 1, 1772 and September 27,1773. Thus, the most recently purchased among the slaves brought to Florida by refugee Loyalists during the American revolution were likely to have come directly from Africa. By 1767, Richard Oswald had more than 100 blacks on his East Florida Plantation, many of them shipped directly from Africa. Probably most of the Africans were secured through Charleston slave traders such as Henry Lawrence. It was in 1767 that the first cargo of 70 slaves arrived from Africa in British East Florida. In the same year, Governor James Grant estimated that 600 slaves were working in the province. Thus, even in the unlikely event that none of the remaining 530 slaves was born in Africa, no fewer than 11.7% of the blacks in East Florida in 1767 were shipped directly from Africa. Between 1764 and 1770, two ships from Africa arrived at Saint Augustine (one in 1769 and the other in 1778). Then on the night of November 18, 1773, the Dover, with 100 Africans aboard, wrecked near New Smyrna, losing two mariners and about 80 of the Africans. We also know that at least a few slaves residing in Pensacola in the 1760s and 1770s spoke African languages. A fugitive escaping Pensacola early in 1770 was described by his master as speaking African and Indian languages but no English. The persistence of African naming practices during the era of British control of East Florida (1763-84) underscores the probability that African religious patterns exerted continuing influence among St. Augustine’s black population. Wright discovered the names of 50 East Florida blacks from the British era, roughly half of whom were clearly of African origin, including Qua, who was publicly executed for robbery in St. Augustine in 1777. Qua is a popular West African day-name (Akan group), meaning male child born on Thursday. Even as late as 1840 an occasional Ashanti day-name appears in advertisements for runaway slaves, including another Qua, who had “one front tooth a little shorter than the others.” AN When the government of East Florida was transferred back to the Spanish in 1784, 450 whites shifted their allegiance to the new Spanish government and remained in the colony. Remaining with them were 200 blacks, the surviving nucleus of an East Florida black population that may have numbered more than 9,000 at the peak of the Loyalist refugee period. The immediate geographical and cultural roots for most of them were in the English-speaking colonies of Georgia and South Carolina, especially the coastal region stretching from Cape Fear to Cumberland Sound. They partook of the Creole cultures developed during the 18th century in those regions. Evidence of the persistence of African naming practices during the second Spanish period is contained in a 1792 inventory of the estate of Dona Marie Evans, an Anglo American who had migrated to Florida and South Carolina in 1763. The inventory lists a total of 28 blacks, organized into three nuclear family units of four, six, and two members, respectively, and eight unattached individuals. Some had African-sounding names: Zambo, Pender, Sisa, Fibi, Ebron, Congo. The 18th century then, was not only the century in which the United States was launched politically; it was also the incubation period for what some historical linguists have called a creolization of African American culture. Religiously and intellectually, the question of whether to convert the African and African American slaves to Christianity was a focal point of debate among white clergy and slave owners. Peter Wood suggested that the controversy over African American conversion was also a topic of heated debate among African Americans themselves and hence constituted “a forgotten chapter in the 18th century southern intellectual history.” The 19th Century In 1804 about fifty Africans, almost evenly divided between men and women, arrived in Florida and were settled on the Saint John’s River, where their importer and owner, Zephaniah Kingsley, consciously eschewed the imposition of Christianity and other aspects of European culture. Kingsley, who generally purchased slaves directly from the African Coast, adopted a policy of nonintervention in all areas of slave culture except for manual training: “I never interfered with their connubial concerns, nor domestic affairs, but let them regulate these after their own manner.” If these Africans continued their native dances for a number of years after their arrival, as Kingsley asserted, the likelihood is great that they also continued African styles of worship. In fact, most of the “native dances” that they perpetuated were probably part of their indigenous religious patterns. Although “salt water Negros” from Africa became less numerous following the official close of the overseas slave trade by the U.S. Congress in 1807, illegal imports from Africa continued. Some of the Africans entered the United States through Florida, which remained under Spanish control until 1821. In October 1812, Richard Wright, an Irish-American and a U.S. citizen, made a slaving voyage from Rio Basso on the windward coast to Pensacola Bay. During the waning years of Spanish jurisdiction over Florida, a considerable stir arose over slaving activities from Amelia island. Toward the middle of January 1818, two privateers, carrying a combined total of 120 slaves, arrived at Amelia island. A week later a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives issued a report on the illicit introduction of slaves into the United States from the island. Besides the black populations concentrated around St. Augustine and, to a lesser extent, Pensacola, there were maroons who had managed both to escape their owners in South Carolina and Georgia and to avoid the areas of Florida that were effectively controlled by the Spaniards. Large, quasipermanent maroon communities thrived in border areas that generated international rivalry. Close relations that had developed between blacks and American Indians in Florida when it was a Spanish Territory continued into the American period. These black fugitives frequently settled among the Indians of Northern Florida, usually living in “Negro towns” associated with Indian villages. Although sources describing their religious behavior are scarce, provocative linguistic clues to their cultural status exist in the form of Florida place names conventionally described as being of unknown origin. The river and town of Aucilla are near the site of the old Negro fort (now known as Fort Gadsden). Variant spellings include Assile, Agile, Axille, Aguil, Ochule, Ocilla, and Asile. Winifred Vass, for 12 years the editor of one of the largest and oldest vernacular periodicals in Central Africa, suggested that Aucilla might derive from the Bantu verb ashila, which means “to build or construct a house for someone else.” Vass also suggested that the name of the Suwannee River might derive from the Bantu word nsub-wanyi, which means “my house, my home.” A large black settlement along this river was destroyed in 1818 during the Seminole wars. Perhaps as many as 1,200 African American maroons were living in Seminole towns by 1836. Because the black fugitives were better acquainted with the language, religion, and other ways of white men than were their Indian hosts and nominal masters, the blacks served as cultural go-betweens for native Americans and whites. That this was the case in matters of religion is strongly suggested by the Reverend Isaac Boring’s stratagem of preaching to the blacks of an “Indian town” as a way of gaining missionary access to the Indians themselves, the principal aim of his visits. Even after Florida became a part of the United States in 1821, it was not unusual to find Africans bearing tribal marks. In 1835, for instance, Charles, aged 40, who ran away from Henry Maxey near Jacksonville, bore “the African marks on his face of his country.” While some “illegal aliens” from Africa may have been shipped directly, others probably arrived in Florida in the clandestine Cuba-to-Florida trade. Despite wildly clashing estimates of the extent and significance of the trade, there is no doubt that some Africans bound for Cuba ended up in Florida. Milo, one of eight slaves transported to Florida on a schooner Emperor in 1838, said not only that he was from Africa but “that he was brought here from Havana.” There is also the example of the lucumi slave encountered by the Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer during her visit to Florida in the 1850s. When Bremer asked the middle-aged African whether he had “come hither from Africa,” he replied yes, “that he had been smuggled hither from Cuba many years ago.” Illegal slave trading persisted in South Carolina as late as 1858, when the slave yacht Wanderer arrived and small parcels of its cargo of 400 Africans were sold into Florida. The African roots of modern African American culture in Florida had weakened considerably even as early as the Reconstruction era, especially in terms of the presence of individuals who had actually been born in Africa. By the middle of this era, we clearly are dealing primarily with a U.S.-born black population in Florida, as elsewhere in the South. Only 88 African born persons were enumerated in Florida in the 1870 U.S. census. Among the more elderly of these Africans was Jeff Martin, age 102, who had been born around 1768 in an identifiable region of Africa. Martin, who resided in Jefferson county at the time of the census, was the sole black Floridian who listed his occupation as “root doctor.” He was one of 12 African born persons residing in Jefferson county in 1870. Of 17 other Florida counties having African born residents, only Leon had as many as 12. Of the 9,645 blacks counted in the entire 1870 census who were born outside the United States, 1,984 (20.6%) were born in Africa. 88 (4.4%) of all the African born residents of the United States in 1870 lived in Florida. If Martin reached American shores at age 10, he would have arrived legally in 1778, the year Virginia outlawed the overseas slave trade. If he arrived legally between the ages of 10 and 20, he may have entered a port in Pennsylvania, Maryland, South Carolina, or Georgia, which abolished the slave trade after Virginia did. Martin was by no means the only practitioner of herbalism or the occult. Both before and after the Civil War, black and white Christians were embedded in a cultural milieu in which “conjurer” and other rural folk beliefs exercised considerable power. In her memoirs, Ellen Call Long mentioned Delia, a slave who “began to droop at about age 18” and soon died. After death the nurse (a character on every plantation), brought to my mother a small package of dingy cloth, in which was wrapped two or three rusty nails, a dog’s tooth, a little lamb’s wool, and a ball of clay. Trembling with awe, she said: “This is what killed Delia, Ole Miss. I most knowed it was jest so. I most knowed as how she was conjured, and jest found dis under her matrass where she die.” On enquiry we found that she was the cause of jealousy to a companion negro girl who had made threats towards her; and moreover, we learned, that every negro on the plantation had known all the time what power was at work upon Delia, but dared not, as they expressed it, “break the spell,” for the evil spirit would have turned on the one that told it. The slaves on this Leon County plantation obviously believed in the potency of the medicine man who had cast a spell on Delia. If all others in this slave community knew of the spell, it is very likely that the victim also knew. The combination of knowledge that a root doctor was working magic against her and the belief in the power of such magic may have caused her literally to lie down and die. Such appears to be the case in voodoo death as described by anthropologist W.B. Cannon. Folk belief in sympathetic magic did not disappear overnight after the end of legal slavery. In an account set down in 1892, Ellen Call Long noted that “negro witchcraft” was thriving in Leon County during the early 1870s. The occasion for her observation was the tragic death of five black children between the ages of four and six. Thus it was that near the end of the first decade of freedom to the negro, I saw one of the most remarkable exhibitions of superstition ever be held by intelligence—the more so, that what I shall related occurred in what was considered the purlieu of the most cultured and educated of the middle Florida country. During and after Reconstruction, black ministers contended with the power of both Divine Providence and folk beliefs. When in 1880 the horse of a black drayman died after the fellow had “cussed out” his preacher, the minister interpreted the man’s misfortune as “a visitation of Divine Providence for his cussedness.” Equally powerful was belief in the abilities of special individuals to cast spells on people who had wronged them. A man in Tallahassee, assisted by an elderly woman, astounded onlookers by appearing to vomit nails, moss, and other debris. “His friends believe strongly in the reality of it all,” noted a Floridian, “and insist that he had had “a spell” put upon him by a woman to whom he was engaged but whom he jilted and who now protests that she intends to pay him off for his base desertion.” Most blacks living in Florida during the last half of the 19th century had been born neither in Africa nor in the Caribbean but in six southeastern states: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. In 1890, 122,170 individuals, making up 76.3% of Florida’s total black population, were native Floridians. Only 5.7% (7411) of all Florida born blacks lived outside the state of their birth in 1890, whereas between 11.1% and 25.9% of the blacks born in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, in Virginia did so. Between 1880 and 1890 Florida experienced a net gain of 30,528 black inhabitants through interstate migration. During the same decade Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, and Virginia experienced net losses in the black population. Put another way, a hefty 23.7% of the blacks living in Florida and 1890 had been born in other states, compared with percentages of 1.7 and South Carolina 2.8 in North Carolina 2.9 in Virginia, 6.6 in Georgia, and 10.0 in Alabama. If distinctive cultural patterns bearing traceable African origins are found in postbellum Florida, they cannot be explained simply by the presence of large numbers of African born individuals in the state’s black population. Other explanations must be found for the persistence of such culturally distinctive and widely acknowledged African influenced elements of culture as basket-making styles, grave markers, mortuary customs, and shouting (spirit possession) in African American religious rituals in the latter half of the 19th century. These Africanisms had become Americanisms and persisted in Florida and elsewhere in the Deep South as integral parts of an interconnected circum-Caribbean Creole culture that had been forged in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina during the previous century and had alternately influenced and been influenced by the customs and lifeways of southern whites and Indians. Although native Africans still alive during the 1870s and 1880s lacked any significant influence because of their miniscule numbers and proportions, indirect and even direct African influence was possible. Some of Florida’s older American born black adults, such the Reverend Eli Boyd, remembered deceased African born parents and grandparents. A self-designated “Geechee” interviewed in Miami during the 1930s, Boyd recalled, “My grandfather was brought directly from Africa to Port Royal, South Carolina.” The possibility of a vivid memories of African born parents and grandparents was underscored strikingly in a conversation I had with Richard McKinney, son of a black Baptist minister who figures prominently in the history of Life Oak’s African Baptist church. The McKinney family oral tradition posits links of kinship stretching from Jacob, an Ashanti African born around 1820, to the present. And while the proportion of Florida’s black population born in Africa had diminished to statistical insignificance by 1870, personal memories of African family ancestors have not disappeared even as late as the 1930s, when Shack Thomas, born a slave in Florida in 1834, recalled that his father had come from the Congo: “Pappy was a African. I knows dat. He come from Congo, over in Africa, and I heard him say a big storm drove de ship somewhere on de Ca’lina coast. I ‘member he mighty ‘spectful to Massa and missy, but he proud, too, and walk straighter’n anybody I ever seen. He had scars on de right side he head and cheek what he say am tribe marks, but what de means I don’t know.” From these and other African ancestors, no longer alive when the census takers made their rounds in 1870, some older country born black Floridians like in Mrs. Lucreaty Clark of Lamont (Jefferson County) may have learned certain basket weaving techniques handed down from several generations, as did George Brown in South Carolina. Although South Carolina’s African American basket weaving tradition, which Peter Wood said “undoubtedly represents an early fusion of negro and Indian skills,” is widely known and highly visible to tourists along the roadsides of the low country, less attention has been focused on the traditions of basket weaving still practiced by some African American craftspeople in Florida today. In describing the white oak baskets made by Lucreaty Clark, James Dickerson wrote: “with her fingertips is carried the memory of an ancient African craft fast disappearing from the face of the Florida Panhandle. African slaves, once brought to the Panhandle to work on plantations, made baskets to hold cotton picked from the fields.” The tendency once was to assume that in those instances when Africans did not bring African made artifacts with them in the slave ships, there was no possibility of reproducing the ancestral material culture. That conception of how diffusion, even of material culture, works is entirely too physicalistic. The specific materials from which the artifacts are made is one thing; the form and design concepts are another matter altogether. The artifact might be most appropriately viewed as the analogue of a phenotype and the ideal traditional form as the genotype. What we see is not necessarily what the craftsworker has in his or her head. It is, rather, the end product of an interaction among the craftsperson’s image of the cultural tradition or ideal; the materials available to work with; and the craftsperson’s skill, practice, and ability to shape the materials in conformity with the ideal image. The ideal image is carried not in the hands or on the backs of the African bondsman, but in their heads. The reappearance of artifacts conforming reasonably well with African cultural ideas for pot, basket, chair, or door is therefore a mental feat before it becomes a physical reality. One archaeologist called the idea of proper form, which exists in the mind of a craftsperson who is fashioning an artifact, “the mental template,” an apt phrase. Spirit Possession and Ritual Ecstatic Dance A high degree of emotionalism has often been considered characteristic of black religious life. The frequency, long duration, and emotional nature of black church services in Florida had drawn comment from a number of observers. The image of black religionists as boldly demonstrative in their worship was so widespread that finding a group of black worshipers during Reconstruction that was “not noisy” was cause for comment. While traveling in Florida in 1870 G.W. Nickels visited St. Augustine and Jacksonville, where he witnessed “shocking mummeries, which belonged to the fetich worship of savage Central Africa and not of Christian America.” If we substitute “traditional African religion” for the ethnocentrically loaded “fetich worship” and bracket the obviously biased adjective savage, an important kernel of historical truth may remain in this jaundiced account. What did Nichols mean by Central Africa in geographical terms? Was he making a distinction between West Africa and Central Africa or was this simply his verbal shorthand for “primitive Africa” in general? In 1871 the Jacksonville Courier reported the complaint of local whites about duration of demonstrative services in a revival that continued several weeks. The same year Miss E.B. Eveleth, an American missionary society instructor at Gainesville, wrote that “many of those old churchgoers, still cling to their heathenish habits, such as shouting and thinking the more noise and motion they have the better Christians they are.” Eveleth and a colleague attended a service at which a woman jumped up in the middle of a sermon, clapped her hands, screamed, danced up to the pulpit, and whirled around like a top before throwing herself back into her seat. She was followed by another woman with similar motions. In an 1879 article entitled “Begin Worship Earlier,” the Tallahassee Weekly Floridian reported that white citizens residing in the “neighborhood of the colored people’s churches” had complained about “the singing and exhorting at a late hour.” Ever helpful, the Floridian suggested that “the colored people begin their services earlier and preach short sermons.” In 1873 Jonathan Gibbs, a Dartmouth-educated Presbyterian minister who became Florida’s first black secretary of state, was apologetic about the ecstatic religious behavior of blacks. They “still preach and pray, sing and shout all night long,” said Gibbs, “in defiance of health, sound sense, or other considerations supposed to influence a reasonable being.” One seeming example of how some black worshipers shouted in defiance of health was described by James Weldon Johnson. A woman known as Aunt Venie, out of respect for her age, was “the champion of all ring shouts” at St. Paul’s church in Jacksonville, Johnson recalled: We were a little bit afraid of Aunt Venie, too, for she was said to have fits. (In a former age she would have been classed among those “possessed with devils.”) When there was a “ring shout” the weird music and the sound of thudding feet set the silence of the night vibrating and throbbing with a vague terror. Many a time I woke suddenly and lay a long while strangely troubled by the sounds, the like of which my great Grandmother Sarah had heard as a child. The shouters, formed an earring, men and women alternating, their bodies close together, moved the round and round on shuffling feet that never left the floor. With the heel of the right foot they pounded out the fundamental beat of the dance and with their hands clapped out the varying rhythmical accents of the chant; for the music was, in fact, an African chant and the shout an African dance, whole pagan rite translated and adapted to Christian worship. Round and round the ring would go. One, two, three, four, five hours, the very monotony of sound and motion inducing an ecstatic frenzy. Aunt Venie, it seems, never, even after the hardest day of washing and ironing, missed a “ring shout.” Johnson’s speculation that the sounds of the ring shout resembled the sounds his great grandmother had heard in childhood is noteworthy because his maternal great-grandmother, Sarah, was born and raised in Africa. She was on board a slave ship headed for Brazil when the ship was captured by a British man-of-war and taken to Nassau. It is fairly well known that African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne opposed the ring shout and tried to eliminate all forms of religious dance. One shocking spectacle that Payne observed at St. Paul’s A.M.E. church in Jacksonville (where Aunt Venie shouted) left such an impression upon him that he recorded his frustrations in his personal journal in 1892. His frustrations were intensified by the realization that even the parishioners of a Wilberforce-educated pastor (who should know better) danced at an A.M.E. “love feast.” Another eyewitness account may serve as a definitive example of this persistent, ritually induced and culturally patterned behavior known as shouting. Charles Edwards, a white traveler, observed the event on a freezing January day some time in early 1880s at an unspecified black church in Jacksonville. The building was filled with 300 to 400 adults who initiated a “bread-and-water forgiveness festival” with the singing of this verse, repeated again and again: While Heaven’s in my view, My journey I’ll pursue; I never will turn back, While Heaven’s in my view. Then the spirit possession began: One woman—she was almost a girl—cried herself into what might have been a fit. But if a fit, it was of a kind well known to the other women, her neighbors, for two of these stood up by her side, and taking, each of them, an arm of her, they guided or supported her through all her contortions, with faces showing their amusement rather than concern. Even when she wrenched herself away from them, and threw herself backward, so that her head and the upper part of her body hung over into the next few, they pulled her back and tightened their hold, while a third lady tried to put order into the dress and hair of the girl—and not one of the three was so absorbed by her task that she would devote her eyes and ears to it exclusively. The foregoing descriptions have in common the detection of religious hysteria or possession-like behavior, popularly known as “shouting,” “getting happy,” or “getting a spirit.” Observed in certain black churches, it has been variously attributed to an innate primitive emotionalism, residues of African culture, or just the simple emotionalism of the unwashed and uneducated masses. In 1930 Herskovits raised the question of the relation of “religious hysteria” among peoples of African origin in the United States, Haiti, the Guiana’s, and the West Indies to similar African phenomenon. But, as Herskovits pointed out, few answers were forthcoming in 1930 because little systemic study of the religious practices of blacks in the United States have been conducted from the point of view of the ethnologist. Certainly not all black churchgoers exhibit the same degree or type of demonstrativeness in religious ceremonies. The amount of heat and emotional ecstasy generated seems to be closely related to social position. “It is of no little significance,” wrote Luis Lomax, “that these mulatto Negroes of the ‘genteel tradition’ were Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Congregationalists while the black masses were members of the ‘common’ church’s, such as the Baptist and Methodist congregations.” The difference between the “genteel tradition” and the “common” tradition was to be found in the nature of the services. Those who claimed to be of the “genteel” group considered their services to be of a “higher order,” which, according to Lomax, made their services “a good deal less exciting.” The association of the black masses with denominations having the more exciting brand of services led the Reverend Thomas Lomax, a black Georgia Baptist firebrand of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and grandfather of Louis, to crack: “If you see a Negro who is not a Baptist or a Methodist, some white man has been tampering with his religion.” Some writers viewed the ritual known as the ring shout, or simply the shout, as a phenomenon found only among the Gullah-speaking blacks of the sea islands off Georgia and South Carolina. It is true that some of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of shouts originate in that region. Laura Towne, for example, described the shout as a religious ceremony representing possibly a modification of “the negro’s regular dances; which may have had its origin in some native African dance.” Bernard Harris wrote that the Indian antebellum and Civil war era shout usually came after the praise meeting was over, and no one but church members were expected to join. The musicologist Eileen Southern considered a shout, held after the regularly scheduled service, to the “purely African in form and tradition,” arguing that “it simply represented the survival of African tradition in the New World.” If this argument is accepted, there can be little doubt that the religious musical dance and drama form called the shout exhibited a remarkable stability over time. The ring shout described by James Weldon Johnson probably happened in the 1870s or early 1880s. In antebellum times, when most of the furnishings of the praise houses in which the shouts occurred were movable, the physical form of a shout was rather literally a ring. Wooden chairs or benches that were not nailed to the floor of the cabins were easily moved to the side, leaving empty floor space in the center of the building. After the Civil War, the circular form of the shout probably persisted longest in churches with movable seats. With the appearance of heavy wooden pews, which were usually permanently riveted to the floor, the circular form of a shout had to be either modified or abandoned altogether. Spirit possession pushes us toward direct confrontation with what has been called the Frazier-Herskovits debate over the extent and impact of African cultural influences in various parts of the Western Hemisphere. Two kinds of altered states of consciousness are pertinent here – drug trance and possession trance, both of which are widespread. In a survey of altered states in 488 societies, Erika Bourguignon found possession trance to be prevalent in (but of course not limited to) continental Africa. Bourguignon and others influenced by Herskovits argued, “it is clear that possession trance in Haiti is historically related to what is essentially the same phenomenon in West Africa and in other West African derived societies in the Americas.” If so, there is every reason to expect the similar behavior as exhibited by western and central African derived black populations in the United States are historically related to those parts of Africa. Possession behaviors are learned in both formal and informal ways, along with beliefs and associated ritual action. In human communities that view possession as a peak religious experience, the behavior is widely interpreted as a communal event, an act that helps to cement a spiritual and social community. One universal aspect of spirit possession is the accompaniment of drum beats or drum-like rhythms. Although little systemic research has been conducted, Andrew Neher offered a tentative physiological explanation of the behavior found in ceremonies involving drums. “This behavior,” he wrote, “is often described as a trance in which the individual experiences unusual perceptions or hallucinations. In the extreme case, twitching of the body and generalized convulsion are reported.” Neher found support for the notion that “the behavior is the result primarily of the effects of rhythmic drumming on the central nervous system.” Drumbeats are made up of many frequencies that are transmitted along different nerve pathways in the brain. Since low-frequency receptors of the ear are more resistant to damage than high-frequency receptors, “it would be possible to transmit more energy to the brain with a drum than with a stimulus of a higher frequency.” In a second part of his study, Neher obtained responses to drumming that were similar to responses observed with wrote in a light stimulation of the brain. He argued that possession takes place when drum, or drum-like pulses are used deliberately in rituals to bring about a state of disassociation, or trance. Analyses of drum rhythms of the beer dance of the Lala of Northern Rhodesia, the Sogo dance of the Ewe of Ghana, the beer dance of and Nsenga of Central Africa, and of Vodoun, Ifo, and Juba dances in recorded Haitian music found that the agitated possession behavior occurred at frequencies between seven and nine cycles per second. Polyrhythmic percussion techniques, such is the ones described for the Jacksonville ring shout by James Weldon Johnson, tend to heighten the intensity of the response. Death, Burial, and Funeral Rites Numerous ethnographic accounts underscore the assertion of Fortes and Dieterlen that in many traditional African systems, “death alone is not a sufficient condition for becoming an ancestor entitled to receive worship.” A proper burial, they said, is “the sine qua non for becoming an ancestor deserving of veneration.” While the precise number of African-born individuals who arrived illegally in Florida after 1821 is not known, we do know from specific descriptions of “salt water” Negros who arrived in antebellum Florida that they were not hit with cultural amnesia the moment they stepped off the slavers. Accounts of the arrival of cargos of Africans confiscated in mid passage on the seas and of their behavior upon landing in the United States clearly establish the carrying over of such cultural items as burial ceremonies. In May 1860, for example, the illegal slavers Wildfire and Williams were captured on the seas by two U.S. gunboats, the Mohawk and the Wyandotte, and taken to the port of Key West. Shortly after the arrival of the 300 Africans aboard these two ships one of the children died. Jefferson Brown described the burial ceremony: The interment took place some distance from the garrison, and the Africans were allowed to be present at the services, where they performed their native ceremony. Weird chants were sung, mingled with wails of grief and mournful moanings from a hundred throats until the coffin was lowered into the grave, when at once the chanting stopped and perfect silence reigned, and the Africans marched back to the barracoons without a sound. Some slaves in the lower south made a semantic distinction between “burying” and “preaching the funeral.” James Bolton, a former slave in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, said: “When folkses on our plantation died, Marster always let many of us as the wanted to go layoff work ‘til after the burying. Sometimes it were two or three months after the burying before the funeral sermon was preached.” Among the African societies that traditionally practiced “second burial” was the Igbo: Greater complications arose when many children of many family heads became Christians, and were forbidden by the teaching of the missionaries to perform the second burial of their fathers. The Igbo practice was to bury an elderly person soon after death, with preliminary ceremonies. Then after a year or less, sometimes more, the second burial would take place with a lot more elaborate ceremonies than the first. It was believed that this second burial was the one that helped a spirit of such departed elderly persons to rest comfortably with their ancestors in the land of ancestral bliss, from where they plead effectively with the gods for the well-being of their children on earth. In the traditional Igbo setting, the matter of the inheritors of the father’s property could not be properly settled until after the second burial. Being slaves, the community was not likely to have found this consideration significant. One real world element that reinforced the practice of second burial in its traditional Old World cultural setting was thus stripped away from the Igbos who were imported into the American colonies. A second consideration in a traditional context was the belief that without a proper second burial, the extended family would be harassed and victimized by the hovering restless spirit of the dead person. This notion probably lost little weight in the transition from Africa to North America, and there is considerable evidence among late antebellum slaves, as recounted in WPA narratives and published narratives in autobiographies, that belief in roaming, restless spirits was still something to contend with long after the majority of the slaves were American born. The distinction between burial and “second burial” or “preaching the funeral,” a concept in many African societies from which slaves were extracted, is important to an understanding of how Africans adapted to the restrictions on funeral attendance in the Old South. The deceased might be buried at night during the workweek (so as not to disrupt farm work), leaving days or even weeks or months to pass before the public funeral was performed. The funeral ritual, then, as distinguished from the physical act of burying the body, is a public phenomenon. Funeral rites in traditional African societies were often occasions for celebration, creating an intensely renewed sense of family and communal unit among the survivors. It was perhaps an analogous sense of celebration that, during the Reconstruction era, gave Ambrose Hart the mistaken impression the services among blacks were held more for recreation than for religion. Among the events reinforcing Hart’s impression was an incident that bears a striking resemblance to the Igbo “second burial.” Hart observed a group of Florida freed slaves gather to “repreach a funeral service for a child that had been “buried, prayed for, and preached over two months ago.” It is conceivable that immediate interment of the corpse was necessitated by the limitations of embalming techniques at the time. Both blacks and whites in the antebellum period buried rather soon after death. If burial waited until the nearest Sunday, it would not preempt a scheduled day of work, and the maximum number of people in the neighborhood would be able to attend. But after slavery the patterns began to diverge between blacks and whites to the point where one Leon County resident in the 1970s perceived that “white people don’t have no respect for their dead… They bury them so quick.” With the advent of improved methods of embalming, the physical necessity of nearly immediate burial declined, but the possibility of delay was perhaps even a preference, among rural blacks. It is not unusual for more traditionally oriented and rural-based families to delay “preaching the funeral” for weeks, even now. Richard Wright recognized in the 1930s that there was a “a culture of the Negro which has been addressed to him and to him alone, a culture which has, for good or ill, helped to clarify his consciousness and create emotional attitudes which are conducive to action. This culture stemmed mainly from two sources: (1) the Negro church; and (2) the fluid folklore of the Negro people.” According to Wright: It was through the portals of a church that the American Negro first entered the shrine of Western culture. Living under slave conditions of life, the rest of his African heritage, the Negro found that his struggle for religion on the plantation between 1820-60 was nothing short of a struggle for human rights. It remained a relatively progressive struggle until religion began to ameliorate and assuage suffering and denial. Even today there are millions of Negroes whose only sense of a whole universe, who’s only relation to society and man, and whose only guide to personal dignity comes through the archaic morphology of Christian salvation. By focusing on blacks living within the confines of present-day Florida, this essay has depicted the entrance of African Americans “through the portals of a church” into what Wright called “the shrine of Western culture.” By this entry, they not only transformed themselves into African Americans without totally losing their African past but also helped transform and enrich Western culture itself. Notes 3. Anthropologists and folklorists often call this blending process syncretism. Two folklorists defined the term: “the merging of two or more concepts, belief, rituals, etc. so that apparent conflicts are rationalized away. Old beliefs and associated actions are not necessarily replaced or destroyed by new ones; they are, rather, reinterpreted and absorbed. Syncretism may be seen in elements of early pagan rites modified to survive in later Christian rituals. Symbolism in Christmas (trees, etc.) and Easter (egg, etc.) celebrations are examples.” 19. Larry Krueger and Robert Hall, “Fort Mose: a Black Fort in Spanish Florida,” The Griot. Spring 1987. 52. Shack Thomas interview, WPA slave narratives… Several African born slaves who ran away between 1820 and 1850 had tribal marks or scars. Maria, of empire African by births… Faced tattooed,” ran away from her owner, Henry and the grand Prix, and 1829, Pensacola Gazette, December 16 to 1829. In 1842 Abraham, who had “worked in the employ of a corporation in the city of Tallahassee for two years,” ran away meringue “mark over the eyes on the forehead, as Africans are frequently marked”; Florida son tall, October 14, 1842. 53. Edith Dabbs, Face of an Island, contains a photograph taken in 1909 of Alfred Graham, a former slave, who learned to weave baskets from his great uncle, who brought the trade of basketry from Africa. Graham later taught George Brown, who became an instructor in basketry at the Penn School on St. Helena Island. 57. Some writers have suggested that much of the emotionalism of southern evangelical religion derives from the contagious influence of blacks on revivalist frontier religion. At least one prominent black scholar, however, argued that, instead, the emotionalism of the early evangelical face of the whites influenced the nature of black religious worship. Harry Richardson wrote “but as the simplicity of the evangelical faith did much to determine the number of Negros who became Christian, the emotionalism of the early evangelical faith did much to determine the nature of Negro worship. The religion that the Negro classes first received was characterized by such a phenomenon as laughing, weeping, shouting, dancing, barking, jerking, frustration and speaking in tongues. These were regarded as evidence of a spirit at work in the heart of man, and they were also taken as evidence of the depth and sincerity of the conversion. It was inevitable, therefore, that early Negro worship should be filled with these emotional elements. Although there is some tendency to regard high emotionalism as a phenomenon peculiar to the Negro church, in reality it is a hangover from the days of frontier religion.”