Read The Battle for Christmas Online
Authors: Stephen Nissenbaum
Even now, with the Civil War lost and the black population legally free, the capital city of the Confederacy continued to link rituals of Christmas misrule with the maintenance of the antebellum racial hierarchy. A “contented and well regulated negro peasantry” was, after all, just what was needed to sustain a prosperous class of white planters. The cry of “Christmas gift!” would be music to their ears.
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On the other hand, Charles Ball, a freed black who had for many years been a slave in South Carolina, suggested in 1831 that masters had the upper hand, and that slaves had lost their traditional privileges as a result of the introduction of large-scale cotton production in the early nineteenth century. Ball observed that in South Carolina, Christmas “comes in the very midst of cotton picking. The richest and best part of the crop has been secured … but large quantities of cotton still remain in the field, and every pound that can be saved from the winds, or the plough of the next spring, is a gain of its value, to the owner of the estate. For these reasons, which are very powerful on the side of the master, there is [ca. 1830] but little Christmas on a large cotton plantation. In lieu of the week of holiday, which formerly prevailed even in Carolina, before cotton was cultivated as a crop, the master now gives the people a dinner of meat, on Christmas-day, and distributes among them their annual allowance of winter clothes….” Ball remembered exactly how and when the change had come about: “As Christmas of the year 1805 approached, we were all big with hope of obtaining three or four days, at least, if not a week of holliday [sic]; but when the day at length arrived, we were sorely disappointed, for on Christmas eve, when we had come from the field with out cotton, the overseer fell into a furious passion, and swore at us all for our laziness, and many other bad qualities. He then told us that he had intended to give us three days, if we had worked well, but that we had been so idle, and had left so much cotton yet to be picked in the field, that he found it impossible to give us more than one day; but that he would go to the house, and endeavor to procure a meat dinner for us, and a dram in the morning…. We went to work as usual the next morning, and continued our labor through the week, as if Christmas had been stricken from the calendar.” Charles Ball,
Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man
(Lewiston, Pa., 1836), 206–208.
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Francis Fedric, an escaped slave, claimed that his master actually forced his slaves to get drunk, and that he explicitly told them he did so in order to force them to internalize their enslavement: “About Christmas, my master would give four or five days’ holiday to his slaves; during which time, he supplied them plentifully with new whiskey, which kept them in a continual state of beastly intoxication. He often absolutely forced them to drink more, when they had told him they had had enough. He would call them together, and say, ‘Now, you slaves, don’t you see what bad use you have been making of your liberty? Don’t you think you had better have a master, to look after you, to make you work, and keep you from such a brutal state, which is a disgrace to you, and would ultimately be an injury to the community at large?’ Some of the slaves, in that whining, cringing manner, which is one of the baneful effects of slavery, would reply, ‘Yees, Massa; if we go on in dis way, no good at all.’ Thus, by an artfully-contrived plan, the slaves themselves are made to put the seal upon their own servitude.” (Francis Fedric,
Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America. By Francis Fedric, an Escaped Slave
(London, 1863), 28.
I
T WAS
the cry of “Christmas gift!” that awakened Booker T. Washington one night in 1880, that first winter in Tuskegee, Alabama. But the cry was not music to his ears. Washington and his wife first realized that the holiday season had arrived when, past midnight on Christmas Eve, local black children began “rapping at our doors, asking for ‘Chris’mus gifts! Chris’mus gifts!’” The visits continued almost without pause until dawn: “Between the hours of two o’clock and five o’clock in the morning I presume we must have had a half-hundred such calls.”
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Those calls were merely a foretaste of the holiday week to come—a week that, as Washington put it, “gave us an opportunity to get a farther insight into the real life of the people.” And Booker T. Washington did not like what he learned:
We found that for a whole week the coloured people in and around Tuskegee dropped work the day before Christmas, and that it was difficult to get any one to perform any service from the time they stopped work until after the New Year. Persons who at other times did not use strong drink thought it quite the proper thing to indulge in it freely during the Christmas week. There was a widespread hilarity, and a free use of guns, pistols, and gunpowder generally.
Then there were the frolics, held every night of Christmas week in one of the cabins that once had served as slave quarters on the local plantation.
Washington described the frolics as “a kind of rough dance, where there was likely to be a good deal of whiskey used, and where there might be some shooting or cutting with razors.” Perhaps redundantly, he added, “The sacredness of the season seemed to have been almost wholly lost sight of.”
In one cabin I noticed that all that the five children had to remind them of the coming of Christ was a single bunch of firecrackers, which they had divided among them…. In still another family I found nothing but a new jug of whiskey, which the husband and wife were making free use of, notwithstanding the fact that the husband was one of the local ministers…. In other homes some member of the family had bought a new pistol. In the majority of cases there was nothing to be seen in the cabin to remind one of the coming of the Saviour, except that the people had ceased work in the fields and were lounging about their homes.
The “lounging about” may have bothered Washington more than anything else. He even encountered an old local black preacher “who tried to convince me, from the experience Adam had in the Garden of Eden, that God had cursed all labor, and that, therefore, it was a sin for any man to work.” Washington recognized the irony of the situation: The old preacher was “supremely happy” during Christmas week, “because he was living, as he expressed it, through one week that was free from sin.”
Familiar material. Nor was Booker T. Washington the first African-American to criticize it. In slavery days, many black people, from pious Baptists and Methodists to secular radicals like Frederick Douglass, had decried the carnival aspects of the slave Christmas, arguing that it demeaned those who engaged in it.
Washington, too, understood that these practices were the lingering residue of slavery. But he managed to conclude the story he told on a happier note. In fact, Washington used his account of that first Christmas in Tuskegee to introduce a chapter devoted to the profound change he was able to produce in the character and habits of poor young black men who attended the famous college he established there. Washington went on to show the contrast between what he experienced in 1880 and the kind of Christmas celebration that he introduced to his students at Tuskegee. The transformation of Christmas was a paradigm of the larger changes he had set out to accomplish.
In the school we made a special effort to teach our students the meaning of Christmas, and to give them lessons in its proper observance. In this we have been successful to a degree that makes me feel safe in saying that the season now has a new meaning, not only through all that immediate region, but, in a measure, wherever our graduates have gone.
At the present time one of the most satisfactory features of the Christmas and Thanksgiving seasons at Tuskegee is the unselfish and beautiful way our graduates and students spend their time in ministering to the comfort and happiness of others, especially the unfortunate.
Booker T. Washington may have been exaggerating a little, but his success as an educator and administrator leaves little room to doubt the fundamental reality of his claim. A Tuskegee education meant both a change of behavior and an interior change of spirit, a reformation that Washington hoped would allow his students to integrate into mainstream American society. As Washington understood when he wrote his 1901 autobiography,
Up from Slavery
, Christmas provided an apt and powerful symbol of that very reformation.
And it provides us with an interesting reminder, a reminder that such a reform could and did originate within the African-American community itself. It is easy to think of the suppression of the carnival Christmas only as something that was imposed from outside. But this wasn’t the case. The suppression also came from within. Booker T. Washington’s students came to Tuskegee, in the depressing post-Reconstruction years that witnessed the emergence of Jim Crow, as members of a demeaned and betrayed group of Americans. They had little to risk, and a world to gain, by learning the skills and the values associated with respectable white society, including an appreciation of a “new meaning” for Christmas. In hindsight, there is something poignant about their efforts; we now know that even educated African-Americans were unable to achieve the respect and security that Booker T. Washington staked his career on providing, and to us what they lost in the process of reforming themselves may be more valuable than what they gained. But we should not doubt that for Washington and his students, learning a new meaning for Christmas seemed a form of empowerment. Suppression from outside was the most dramatic vehicle by which the old Christmas traditions came to an end. But it was not the only one.
John Canoe, too, eventually disappeared from the American mainland. It was still going strong in North Carolina as late as the 1880s, but by the turn of the twentieth century the old ritual had pretty much disappeared. Its ultimate suppression closely mirrors what we have just seen. According to interviews with elderly black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina, taken by a folklorist around 1940, the decline of the ritual was the result of new pressures both from whites and from within the black community.
What seems to have played the decisive role in suppressing the John Canoe bands was the emergence of a new political culture among the white people of Wilmington, a reformist culture that was unwilling to tolerate public drunkenness and the rowdy behavior that accompanied it. One black resident later recalled: “‘De policemen usta run the kooners because dey would get drunk and kick up a lot of fuss.’” Another’s analysis was more elaborate:
Kooner was ragin’ here ’bout 1882 but hit done died out ’bout 1900. De reason hit died out was dat different city mayors came in to hold office and dey stopped all dat. Each Christmas hit got less and less and finally the city officers stopped dem from marching down de main street.
A key event may have been a serious riot that occurred during the 1898 John Canoe parade. In any event, one woman reported simply that “‘de whites finally run all de kooners away.’”
But the folklorist who conducted these interviews also reported that John Canoe began to be opposed by black ministers who felt that the custom “tended to degrade the Negroes in the eyes of the white people of the community,” together with members of the emergent black middle class, who “began to look upon the exhibition as one that lowered their status in the eyes of the whites. They disliked to see ‘their folks making a fool of themselves.’” And apparently some of the John Canoers themselves began to feel the same way. One old unreconstructed Wilmington black man reported that the “kooner folk got dicty [i.e.,
snobbish, high-class]
. Then dey gave up ruffian’s ways. Dey got educated.” Booker T. Washington might have phrased it differently, but he would have been delighted with the result.
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All in all, then, the John Canoe ceremony fell victim to a combination of external suppression and internal reform. In its essentials, that was just what became of similar forms of Christmas revelry within white communities throughout Western culture. And it provides a model for exploring the transformation of Christmas in the white working-class culture of the nineteenth century as well.
Consider the Irish. In the 1840s Ireland constituted the major source of immigration to America, and that land was the major source of new membership in the American industrial working class. In those very years, as it happens, there was a major battle within the Irish community over the use of alcohol—even when it was used as part of the Christmas festivities.
Irish Christmas rituals in the early nineteenth century will be familiar to readers of this book, as they are reminiscent of both the English practices described in
Chapter 1
and the slave practices described in
Chapter 7
. Even when the Irish rituals were religious, they retained the rowdy old carnival note—alcohol, sex, and aggressive begging. Take the midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, for example. This event (it was held outdoors, illuminated by great bonfires) was usually preceded and followed by what a nineteenth-century Irish writer termed “jovial orgies,” perambulating groups who engaged in heavy drinking that often led to illicit sexual couplings.
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By the 1830s, the church itself had largely abolished the midnight Mass.
Other Irish Christmas rituals lacked even the veneer of religion. In one urban version of the English wassail, during the weeks before Christmas, several hours before daybreak each night, a group of serenaders would stop at the houses of all the prosperous residents, calling out the hour of the morning and declaring the state of the weather (this ritual was known as “Calling the Waits”). The serenaders waited until Christmas Day to go around to every door, collecting “the expected remuneration.” In one instance, in Kilkenny, the lead performer was accompanied each year by a dozen youths in blackface (a “retinue of young negroes,” as they were termed in the original account), who stopped at the house of “every respectable family in the city;” there they would drink a holiday toast and be given a half crown in return. (According to this account, the members of the group often became so drunk that they had to be carried back to their own houses.)
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