The Battle for Christmas (51 page)

And she stressed the elaborate preparations made by the participants:

I would love to see the texts of the songs that the John Canoe bands spent a month preparing. But we do have something that’s every bit as good, thanks to Harriet Jacobs. In her account of the John Canoe bands,
Jacobs notes that “[i]t is seldom that any white man or child refuses to give them a trifle.” But she adds that “[i]f he does [refuse], they regale his ears with the following song”—and here she records words to a song that ridicules the ungenerous individual by making him out to be a poor man (that is, poor rather than
stingy)
. The strategy is brilliant, as is its tactical execution (especially the sarcastic refrain
so dey say):

In fact, a twentieth-century folklorist has retrieved another such verse, and it is identical in its tactic of employing ridicule to shame the object of its attention:

Such tactics may even cast some light on an ostensibly very different begging song, one from the British wassail tradition. It is the familiar song that concludes with the lines: “If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do; / If you haven’t got a ha’penny, then God bless you!” In the context of the John Canoe songs, it is possible that this final “blessing” was intended to convey similar sarcasm—that it was, in effect, a curse.

Anthropologists have argued inconclusively about the origin of the John Canoe ritual. The general nature of the debate is whether John Canoe was an African ritual or an English (or American) one.
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1 would argue that it was both, and that what is striking is how many elements were shared by African and English traditions. One contemporary observer casually referred to the band as “mummers.” The John Canoe ritual may well have been African in origin, but it surely found its mark in antebellum America, where Christmas begging was still commonplace, and specifically in the South, where the wassail tradition itself was still being practiced by those roving bands of young white males who startled prosperous householders with nocturnal gunfire and entered their houses demanding food, drink, and money. At the very least, there was a convergence of African and European traditions, and the John Canoers understood that convergence and exploited it. Its origins and “exotic” content aside, what makes the John Canoe ritual so fascinating is the degree to which its structure and its content were almost wholly comprehensible to the white people who were its immediate objects.

Winslow Homer,
Dressing/or the Carnival
(1877)
. American artist Winslow Homer painted this oil canvas in southern Virginia at the very end of Reconstruction. An immensely respectful and dignified representation, it shows John Canoe being dressed by his wife and another woman as the children watch in fascination. Behind the group stands a picket fence—presumably there for the same purpose as the picket fence in the illustration, to divide black space from white space. (Homer made this painting in the summer—thus the leafing trees—but records suggest that it was a Christmas ritual that the black family was reenacting for the artist.)
(All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lazarus Fund, 1922
. [22.220])

Take, for example, the “ridicule song” that was recorded by Harriet Jacobs. In writing about this very song, one folklorist argues that “the parallel with African songs of derision is evident.”
⁶⁴
But so is the parallel with the wassail songs of English begging bands, or at least the part of those songs that contained a threat (“Down will come butler, bowl, and all”). To be sure, instead of the threat of physical damage characteristic of the wassail songs, the John Canoe songs resorted to
ridicule
. But it is easy to see why. The ridiculing strategy could be (as this folklorist implies) an expression of ongoing African traditions, but it could also indicate that the John Canoers knew that they were not in a position to threaten their
white patrons with physical harm. Ridicule was as far as they could go. In any event, it is easy to see how songs of ridicule would have been not merely understood but even brilliantly effective in white Southern society, where generosity was a sign of gentility (and the lack of it a sign of vulgarity). The overt message of such a song was not that its object was stingy but that he was poor. And such an announcement, even if it was meant sarcastically, amounted to a direct charge of low social status. In any case, the very
prospect
of being subjected to ridicule was an implicit threat, a threat that could have been just as effective as the threat to do damage. In that sense, the song of ridicule
was
a threat song. The song (like the entire John Canoe ritual) constituted behavior that must have marked the very limit of what was acceptable among slaves.

John Canoe marked the limits of what was permissible, but not of what was possible. On occasion slaves used Christmas to take control of their lives in ways that were far from symbolic. For example, the season offered them unique opportunities to escape slavery altogether by running away, taking advantage of the common Christmas privilege of traveling freely (and along roads that might now be crowded with unfamiliar black faces).
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Christmas also presented a tempting occasion for more aggressive forms of resistance. Sanctioned disorders could always overstep the bounds and edge into violence, riot, or even revolt. A striking number of actual or rumored slave revolts were planned for the Christmas season—nearly one-third the known total, according to one historian. Accounts of Christmas insurrections were especially rampant in 1856, when they were reported in almost every slave state.
⁶⁶

But the most serious rumors of planned insurrections at Christmas—rumors that amounted, in the end, to very little—came just
after
the slaves were finally emancipated, with the end of the Civil War, in December 1865. That is the point at which the memory of the traditional rituals of the Southern Christmas converged with a moment of serious political crisis in the lives of both black and white Southerners.

Some political history, then. If ever there was a time when the hopes of African-Americans were at fever pitch, it was in 1865. Those hopes had been raised by a set of executive orders and congressional acts, passed during the war itself, and for essentially military purposes. The Union army
of General William Tecumseh Sherman had marched irresistibly through Georgia late in 1864, finally taking Savannah in late December. (Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln a famous message offering him Savannah as a “Christmas present.”) Sherman’s march had created a refugee army of slaves, tens of thousands of newly liberated people who were now impoverished and homeless, and who turned for assistance to the Northern troops. To deal with this army of refugees, General Sherman issued, in January 1865, a proclamation that would have important consequences: Special Field Order No. 15. This proclamation set aside for the freedmen any lands (in the area of his recent march) that had been confiscated by the Union army or abandoned by their white owners. These lands, to be divided into forty-acre lots, included some of the best real estate in Georgia and South Carolina.

Two months later, in March, the United States Congress established a new federal agency, the Freedmen’s Bureau, designed to deal more systematically with the slaves’ difficult but imminent transition to freedom. The Freedmen’s Bureau adopted Sherman’s policy and extended it to the entire Confederacy. In late July, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued to his staff “Circular No. 13” (a circular was a memorandum intended to circulate to all agents of an organization). The circular contained a set of procedures that would divide abandoned or confiscated Southern plantations into forty-acre lots and distribute them to black families. Each of these families would receive a written certificate of possession. (The policy became associated with the catch phrase “forty acres and a mule.”)

But in the summer of 1865, with the war over, Lincoln dead, and Andrew Johnson in the White House, federal priorities in Washington underwent a significant change. President Johnson decided that the most important task facing the United States was not that of dealing with the freed slaves but rather that of reestablishing the loyalty of white Southerners. To accomplish this it was necessary to “restore” abandoned lands to their former owners. The President now instructed General Howard to reverse his policy and to withdraw Circular No. 13. The Freedmen’s Bureau was ordered to persuade the former slaves to abandon their hopes for land—and instead to sign labor contracts for the coming year with their former masters.

Both blacks and whites knew this was a crucial issue. Each side knew that the key to the future lay not just in legal freedom from slavery but also in the linked questions of land and labor. Whoever was able to own the
one would also be able to control the other. Without working on land that belonged to them (or that they could later purchase), the freedmen and their families would be at the mercy of their former owners. And both sides knew that plantation owners would never voluntarily sell their land to blacks. Without land reform, the freedmen could never control their own labor. They would be working under conditions that were almost identical to those imposed under slavery.

The situation was profoundly muddled during the fall of 1865. Most agents of the Freedmens Bureau—though not all—were then dutifully engaged in trying to extinguish the very hopes they had earlier helped to spread.
⁶⁷
In reality the cause of land reform was lost. But many freedmen could not bring themselves to believe that they were being betrayed by the very people who had just liberated them.

At this time of mixed and confusing messages, large numbers of Southern blacks came to pin their lingering hopes on the coming Christmas season. Word passed through the African-American community, often spread by Union soldiers, that when Christmas arrived the government would provide them with land and the other necessities of economic independence. An ex-slaveholder from Greensboro, Alabama, wrote to his daughter that the Union troops who were stationed near his plantation had assured his former slaves “that our lands were to be divided among them at Christmas,” and he added in frustration that they had already ceased doing any work: “Almost all are living along thoughtless of the future [and paying no attention to] what they will do after Christmas, when all will be turned adrift.”
⁶⁸

It should not be surprising that the freedmen chose to hold such high hopes for the Christmas season, since for African-Americans Christmas had long been associated with a symbolic inversion of the social hierarchy—with grand gestures of paternalist generosity by the white patrons who had always governed their lives.
⁶⁹
In 1865 those white patrons happened to be the government of the United States. To intensify black hopes still further, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (abolishing slavery) was due to take effect on December 18, one week to the day before Christmas.

By mid-November of 1865, Southern newspapers were publishing stories about these Christmas dreams. One story insisted that blacks throughout the South continued to believe “that about Christmas they were to have lands partitioned among them; and their imaginations have been heated with the expectation of becoming landholders, and living as
their old masters used to do without personal labor.” Another story (titled “The Negroes at Christmas Time”) reported that blacks throughout the South entertained expectations of “being furnished, about Christmas, by the Government, with the necessities of ‘housekeeping’… waiting in a life of ease and idleness, for the jubilee….” And a newspaper in Mississippi reported that “wildly credulous and wildly hopeful men are … awaiting the millennium of the 25th of December, who expect a big division of land and plunder on that day.”
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