The Battle for Christmas (49 page)

“Winter Holydays in the Southern States.”
This woodcut illustrated a pro-slavery story that appeared in the December 1854 issue of
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
. The accompanying text offered this description of the activities shown in the picture: “[T]he [white] ladies of the family interest themselves in the amusements and entertainments of the negroes, giving superintendence to the making of pastry, the adornment of the tables, and whatever else will add to the refinement of the festivity. On such occasions, the ‘stately mistress’ and her ‘aristocratic daughters’ may be seen assisting, by every act of kindness, and displaying in the most charming way the family feeling and patriarchal character of our Southern institutions; while the negroes, on their part, never feel that they are duly and affectionately remembered unless the white family, or most of its members, are present, to witness and participate in their enjoyments.”
(Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society)

It is difficult to say who is master
. Of course, it was not difficult at all. But what is interesting is that these words were published in an article on the “Management of Servants,” not a propaganda piece but a set of rules intended solely as “in-house” advice, so to speak, for the use of the writer’s fellow slaveholders. Believing that such occasions of ritual inversion actually took place is not by any means tantamount to succumbing to nostalgia or pro-slavery ideology. Neither does acknowledging that this was the case mean that the slave system was benign or even fundamentally paternalist. What it
does
mean is that many slaveholders wished to
believe
that it was paternalist and benign, and that they were willing to act out their wish on this one, symbolically charged occasion—an occasion that lasted for only a few days each year.

In other words, it was far easier to act out a ritual that produced a symbolic representation of a paternalist society than it was to produce the actual society. And acting out the ritual brought real returns, not just material advantages (in the form of a more pliant workforce) but psychological benefits. By permitting a season of misrule, and performing the requisite gestures of deference, slaveholders were able to affirm that they had fulfilled their personal obligations within a paternalist order. In turn, this permitted them to affirm the paternalist humaneness of the slave system itself, in the face of external attacks (and, sometimes, of their own inner doubts). All this was a big payoff, and at relatively small cost. Consider this extraordinary passage, from a private letter written by a Louisiana slaveholder in 1836:

Or this striking statement, presented to the 1824 North Carolina state legislature by Dr. James Norcom of Edenton, North Carolina:

I cite Dr. Norcoms statement for an additional reason: One of his
own
slaves was none other than the aforementioned Harriet Jacobs, whose autobiography would later describe the Christmas she spent hiding in the crawl space of an Edenton house. And it was from Norcom himself that Jacobs was hiding—
he
was the man who had tried to force her into sexual slavery. It is not pleasant to think that people like James Norcom were “sincere” in their paternalist commitment to the “freedom” that slaves enjoyed during the Christmas season. But accepting such a possibility sheds some light on how real slaveholders were able to accept the slave system.

Dr. James Norcom
. This resident of Edenton, N.C., plays two roles in our story: He was the impassioned defender of the right of slaves to perform the John Canoe ritual, and he was the owner of Harriet Jacobs, a woman he pursued relentlessly in an effort to force her to become his mistress.
(Courtesy, North Carolina Division of Archives and History)

And it also serves to illuminate the larger meaning of Christmas. For it is worth wondering whether this was not the same role that Christmas has played in other societies as well, nonslave societies from early-modern Europe to present-day America. A key reason for the enduring popularity of this holiday may well be that it has provided a profoundly ritualized means of helping people to come to terms with their own complicity in a larger system that they realize must breed injustice. That may be as true for a member of the seventeenth-century English landed gentry as it is for a Southern planter. Or, for that matter, for a modern plutocrat who makes generous Christmas donations to a deserving cause.

In most of the cross-race rituals I have just described, the slaves themselves appear to be little more than the passive objects of their owners’ largesse. But there is more to it than that. What is intended by the patrons is not always what is taken by the clients. And it should not be surprising that slaves attempted to play a more active role in those rituals, to turn symbolic privileges into real ones—to “appropriate” them, in modern parlance. Two distinguished scholars who have examined similar forms of popular revelry and carnival misrule in early-modern Europe—Natalie Zemon Davis and E. P. Thompson—have shown how European peasants and apprentices appropriated similar rituals, in a process that involved tacit “negotiations” carried on in the context of an unequal set of power relationships. There are indications that the very same thing happened on the slave plantation.

The form taken by the slaves’ “appropriation” usually involved the dynamic of the gift exchange itself, the exchange of gifts for goodwill. There is a spectrum of ways in which such a ritual can be sealed—from the meekest expressions of thanks and goodwill upon the receipt of a gift
(“Sarvant, Master; merry Christmas to you, an all de fambly, sir!”)
to the most aggressive combination of demands and threats, in which goodwill
is contingent upon one’s demands being met
(“Come, butler, draw us a bowl of the best / … /But if you draw us a bowl of the small, / Then down will come butler, bowl, and all.”)
While slaves in the antebellum South were not in a position to operate at the most aggressive end of that spectrum, they were sometimes able to approach it.

In the most inoffensive form, slaves (house slaves, at least) might simply enter a room in the Big House on Christmas morning, wish the their masters family a “Merry Christmas,” and wait, becomingly, for their gift. As early as 1773, a Northerner temporarily employed in Virginia recorded such a practice (making it sound—and the parallel is surely no coincidence—much like a bellhop who has just shown some guests to their hotel room):

Slaves commonly made gestures that were more overtly aggressive, if still ostensibly friendly. Often this involved startling the master’s family by making noise in front of the Big House, generally at the crack of dawn. Typically, they did so by shouting “Merry Christmas!” The goodwill latent in that phrase could always be subverted by the manner in which it was expressed. Indeed, this seems to have been a ritually sanctioned way for slaves to get away with rousing white people from a night’s sleep. One white visitor reported in
Harpers Monthly:

But the commonest form of this ritual was the game of “Christmas gift!” This was essentially a variant of the wake-up call. A former slave described one version of the game: “The cock crowing for sunrise is scarcely over when the servants steal into the Big House on tiptoe so they can catch everybody there with a shouted ‘Christmas gift!’ before the kitchen fire is even started or the water put on to boil for the early morning coffee.” In response, each member of the white family who is thus “captured” must hand over a gift to the slave who has “caught” him or her. Susan Dabney Smedes describes the game with similar affection:

The recollections of a onetime Georgia field hand named James Bolton suggest that the custom was not always limited to house servants: “We runned up to the big house early Christmas morning and holler out, ‘Morning, Christmas Gift! Then they gave us plenty of Santy Claus, and we would go back to our cabins to have fun till New Year’s Day.”
⁴⁷

Unlike the practice of simply waiting for gifts to be distributed on Christmas Day, the game of “Christmas gift!” offered the slaves a symbolic moment in which they themselves actively turned the racial hierarchy upside down—an opportunity to step outside their servile roles, to shout at their owners and make a direct demand for gifts. Within the extraordinary limits imposed by the system of chattel slavery, this must have seemed a powerful, if brief, gesture of autonomy.
⁴⁸

What gives the ritual even more interest is its malleability. Within the black community, for example, it became something of a game between the generations rather than the races, with children using it to beg from their elders. And the game also moved from the black to the white community, from the slave quarters to the Big House, as white children imitated black children, waking their own parents on Christmas morning by shouting the words “Christmas gift!”

By the 1830s “Christmas gift!” had become a common intergenerational ritual between white children and grown-ups even outside the South. We have already encountered it in Philadelphia, in Mrs. G.’s story “The Christmas Tree” (see
Chapter 5
). In the South, Thomas Nelson Page
recalled it as a chief pleasure of Christmas in antebellum Virginia. Amanda Edmonds, who lived in Virginia, participated in the practice regularly over a ten-year period, and recorded it in her diary (we have met her before, in connection with getting drunk on Christmas morning). In her 1863 entry, for example, Edmonds wrote: “‘Christmas Gift’ rings louder this morning than for several years. I catch everyone and set the most complete and successful trap for my friend, Mr. Triplett; after his saying last night, he knew I could not catch him for he had a trap for me.”
⁴⁹

Amanda Edmonds was no child at this point; in 1863 she was 24 years old. But—and this is the key—she was still single, and for that reason she continued to occupy the role of a “young person.”
⁵⁰
For the sole determinant of who could appropriately go “begging” at Christmas seems to have been that of dependent status. (For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see
Chapter 3
.) “Christmas gift!” was, after all, a “domesticated” version of that rowdier, more public custom—which was itself a variant of the old wassail ritual—in which roving bands of youths startled householders at night with gunshots and shouted demands for food and drink. That may be why it proved to be so malleable.