SOURCE: “The Slave Ship Dance,” in Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, edited by Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 33-46.

[In the following essay, Fabre discusses the dances performed on board slave ships headed for the New World as they are variously represented in accounts from ships' logs, observers travelling on the ships, and the captives themselves. She then explores the forced dances' dual relation to the realities of the Middle Passage and to an African heritage.]

We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets.

Olaudah Equiano (1789)

Dance is for the African “the fullest expression of art.”

Lee Warren, The Dance of Africa (1972)

The central importance of dance in West and Central Africa has been often emphasized by historians, anthropologists, and Africans themselves. A communal activity, dance was also a crucial element in ceremonial life and created special bondings among all celebrants, thus united by certain beliefs and practices. In the cults honoring the gods or the ancestors, dance was a way of mediating between the godly and the human, the living and the dead. Deities were praised, called upon through a dance designed to invoke special features, proprieties, or abilities. Dance was thus used to solicit intercession, to thwart wrath or punishment that human action might have incurred, to flatter, or to appease. Dancers not only communicated with the spirits but also impersonated them through specific body movements, rhythms, or masks and became possessed themselves.

From a more worldly perspective, festive dancing could represent a feat, a battle, a victory, a particular domestic event; dramatize a crisis or a confrontation; or become a vehicle for comment, satire, or parody.¹ As a much valued art form, it required skills one learned. Dancers were honored, and officials were supposed to be good dancers; any deficiencies could threaten their status, whereas competence enhanced their aura. The characteristics of the dances could vary greatly from one society to the other—each boasting the best dancers and unique styles,² yet dance received in each the same consideration and was used for similar functions. Ceremonial or celebratory, dramatic or theatrical, parodic or satiric, it was pervasive everywhere.

In this chapter, I examine the first recorded dance on the way to the New World, when African captives were encouraged or forced to dance and sometimes “whipped into cheerfulness.” It is highly symbolic and ironic that these performances should occur under the eye and whip of the slavers and their crew and on the deck of the slave ship. I shall therefore examine these dances' dual relation to the realities of the Middle Passage and to an African heritage. I question whether the slave ship dance constituted a definite assault on the captives' cultures and a dramatic break with former beliefs and practices, or whether it was a step toward the creation of a new culture in which still vivid memories of African dance could help bring shape and meaning to the experience of enslavement.

The slave ship dance had a wide range of witnesses and was often briefly mentioned in accounts and reports published on the slave trade. One of the first mentions occurs in the log of the English slave ship Hannibal in 1664: “Africans linked together were made to jump and dance for an hour or two. If they go about it reluctantly or do not move with agility, they are flogged.”³ The practice seems to have been widespread and was kept long after the abolition of the trade. The last record dates from 1860 when a slave ship, Wildfire, with 150 Africans from the River Congo, was taken in tow by an American ship in sight of Cuba and brought to Key West, Florida.⁴

Documents on the dance come essentially from three sources: slavers and captains who allude to them in logs or journals; observers who traveled on the ships as surgeons, guests, or visitors; the captives themselves, who endured the Middle Passage and mentioned their experience in their memoirs or autobiographies. From all these fragmented and scattered descriptions, one may grasp the scope of these dances, their significance and functions for the parties involved, and their underlying meanings for the “performers” themselves. Accounts by the slavers and captains present the dances as necessary, healthy forms of exercise; they emphasize the lightheartedness of the dancers inclined to “amuse themselves with dancing” and proclaim the captain's intentions to take good care of the captives and promote their happiness. Thus, James Barbot, owner of the Albion that voyaged the coast of Guinea near the Calabar River in the late seventeenth century, insists in his account on the good care the slaves received during the passage and describes the dancing as a happy pastime “full of jollity and good humor that afforded an abundance of recreation.”⁵ Practiced as a regular activity necessary for the health of the cargoes (we are told slaves “jumped into their irons for exercise”), dancing had a healing effect on slaves' suicidal melancholy. There was a common belief that if “not kept amused” and in motion slaves would die: these pleasant exercises were keeping the slavers' stock “in good condition” and “enhancing [their] prospects of making a profitable journey.” Keeping the slaves in good shape was a major concern in the general economy of the trade at a time when losses in human lives through disease, epidemics, or suicide were high and caused much alarm. Captains had to commit themselves to carry the captives safe, whole, and fit for sale. When in the 1780s the slave trade came under attack and closer scrutiny, captains were requested to answer inquiries concerning the load, space, and provisions allotted on their ships, and laws were passed in 1788 to enforce stricter regulations, stipulating the load of each cargo. When called before Parliament, captains protested against the bill, declared it superfluous, and often referred to the dances as evidence of their goodwill and of the pleasant atmosphere that reigned on their vessels.

Opponents to the trade sent petitions for its abolition and tried to gather evidence that would question the captains' proclamations of innocence. Thus, in a publication that became famous, Thomas Clarkson collected testimonies from less biased witnesses.⁶ Their observations offer a very different picture of the dance scene. The captives are described as “compelled to dance by the cat” or jump to the lash—this “jumping” termed “dancing.”⁷ A surgeon, Thomas Trotter, who traveled on the Brookes in 1783, sees the dance as a joyless ceremony that he called “dancing the slave.” “Crew members paraded on deck with whip and cat o' nine tails.”⁸ Captives danced in shackles (except women and children) and on crowded decks. Dancing by the cat was perceived as a violent and painful exercise: “the parts … on which their shackles are fastened are often excoriated.”⁹ Physically damaging, the dances were also often humiliating. Captives left the hold for another kind of confinement: hampered by their shackles, the once free and expert dancers of Africa became the butt of mockery. Observers thus often emphasized surveillance and coercion and noted that slavers, who rarely mentioned the use of whips, ignored the complaints of the dancers.

The strict control or even violence were exerted to prevent any carry-over of indigenous practices. Fear was great indeed that the enslaved would use these exercises to develop some kind of secret coding and prepare a mutiny: the ships' guns were sometimes aimed at the dancers to intimidate them, and constant watch was secured. Whip and gun were used to set the limits and avoid transgression. “Dancing the slave” was part of a deliberate scheme to ensure subordination by destroying former practices, to curb any attempt at recovering freedom of movement, action, or thought.

Slave ship dances were also used to entertain captains, their crews, and their guests. These amusements were slightly more formal; musicians were requested (and the great number of advertisements asking for musicians attest to the importance of such shows). If no professional musician were available, a sailor would play the fiddle or bagpipe, or a captive would be designated to play a European instrument or to improvise on a broken drum or banjo. He could also use whatever was available: utensils, ship equipment, or kettles. The captives often brought with them instruments that they were sometimes allowed to play.¹⁰ Meant to enliven the journey, some dances could turn into “wild, lewd parties” in a parody of primitive naked rejoicing.¹¹ After the trade was abolished, illegal slavers were careful not to attract attention of patrol ships or pirates. Yet in spite of the high risk, they were unwilling to relinquish a practice that was a source of profit and amusement. Dances continued but were carefully planned, either at night—a device that slaves would later use once ashore to escape surveillance—or by summoning only a portion of the captives at a time.

Rewards or liquor were also offered to the best performers. This practice can be seen either as a way of acknowledging and encouraging skill or as a means of buying talent and disarming resistance. This system introduced a hierarchical order and encouraged competitiveness among dancers. The rewards the best dancers received designated them as an elite, leaders who could perhaps be used to control others, who could organize or curb revolt. One needs to determine whether the best performers selected by the “rulers” were the same the captives tacitly chose and managed to impose. Performing skills were quickly singled out and endowed some slaves with a form of power that had to be promptly rechanneled.

All these strategies devised by whites prefigure many of the methods used in the “management” of plantations—ranging from intimidation to reward and privileges. Dancing the slave may seem to have been confined to the slave ship journey, but it endured under many other forms. Slaves may not have had to dance under the lash, yet the whip was always present physically or symbolically, conceived as the best instrument to punish insubordination or to “fix and season” independent-minded Africans. Significantly, lash and fiddle were used in coffles in the same manner as they had been on the ships, this time to urge chained “niggers” to march on and accept this other passage to another unknown destination, sale, and uncertain fate.¹²

On the other hand, slave ship “entertainments” prefigure these performances when slaves' musical and dancing skills would be appreciated, and used. Captains and plantation owners took the same pride in showing how talented the captives were, and these plantation dances did not escape the attention of those who organized the first traveling minstrel shows in the 1830s.

Thus, even before the ships' arrival into the New World, performance was an important stake, essential in many cultural events but also determinant in white and black relations, with its web of ambivalent feelings: hatred and attraction, contempt or praise, condescension or respect. It created secret bonds and interdependence. Performance was at the same time a well-planned necessary event, a duty and an artistic accomplishment that could be rewarded.

If dancing the slave involved many strategies and much scheming on the part of the slavers, one may surmise that the captives responded with equally elaborate devices to develop—secretly but purposefully—a form of dancing that could escape control and manipulation.

The slaves' point of view is rarely mentioned in the accounts and was no concern to slavers except when they suspected plotting and mutiny; the grief, indignation, or resignation, the aspirations or strivings the dance might have expressed, were ignored or denied. Only a few perceptive observers—mostly, as we saw, the surgeons—were attentive to the moods of the performers. Occasionally a document hints at this hidden dimension of experience, such as this short poem, “The Sorrow of Yomba” (1790):

At the savage Captain's beck,
Now like brutes they make us prance:
Smack the Cat about the Deck,
and in scorn they bid us dance.(13)

Fear seems to have prevailed. Testimonies of African slaves to the Select Committee of the House of Lords¹⁴ or early narratives—like that of Olaudah Equiano, who, as an Ibo boy of eleven, boarded a slave ship in 1756—underscore the terror and horror. If slaves near the coast were familiar with the trade, those who came from the interior had no notion of their captors' intentions. After the trauma of capture, the long march on land or water to the sea, they boarded the ships in unspeakable terror. Many preferred suicide to the brutalities they would endure at the hands of voracious traders. Their “imagination ran wild” as Equiano says; rumors, reinforced by sailors or interpreters who sought to exploit the captives' fear, spread from Senegambia to Angola that the slavers, whose appetite for human cargo had become prodigious, were insatiable cannibals (in a strange reversal of the stereotype ascribed to Africans). Equiano tells us that when he saw “a multitude of black people of every description chained together” near a “large furnace of copper boiling,” “every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow,” he was convinced they were about to be eaten; and many Africans thought that the captives who never returned had been eaten or murdered.¹⁵ Another slave, Augustino, recalls that when the younger ones were allowed to come on deck, several jumped overboard in fear they might be fattened to be eaten.¹⁶ The white man's cannibalism explained his hunger for slaves and hence the trade. It was not uncommon among Africans to express such suspicions toward the neighboring peoples they distrusted. It is therefore not surprising that they ascribed the same features to white traders, who were stranger to them, and saw themselves as the new sacrificial victims. Furthermore, many slaves who were familiar with canoes on rivers, but had never seen a ship, imagined that it was some object of worship or magic brought to their shores by the white man for a general slaughter. The fear and horror persisted and led not only to acts of despair but also to murderous revolt. Fright remained, says Equiano, until they reached the West Indies and bitter cries could be heard through the nights. Historians tell us that the Amistad rebellion off the Cuban coast in 1839 occurred because the captain's slave informed the captives that they were about to be eaten. “Desperate, they rose in revolt, murdering most of the crew, saving only a few to navigate the ship back to Africa”¹⁷

Thus, one can understand how the idea and image of death informed the slave ship dance and brought with it a whole train of associations. For the captives who identified with the roaming and restless spirits of the dead, beliefs about death and the journey to the other world could help them negotiate this unfamiliar voyage to unknown shores. Death was less feared than enslavement. And if it meant the only possible reunion with those who had been left behind—ancestors, friends, and kin—and with the home country, this “journey back” could be ceremonially performed or physically accomplished. The dance was the symbolic enactment of a whole system of beliefs, reinforcing worship rites and calling forth the gods, or the dead, or supernatural forces that could perhaps counteract white schemes. Or it could be the prelude to action: the collective meeting with death or revolt against the slavers. Death should be self-willed and not inflicted by others. And it was not merely an escape, a relief from hardships; it was seen as the only path to resistance that could wreck the slavers' project and challenge their power.

Beliefs associated with death, and the attitudes they engendered, accompanied the slaves through their journey and their New World odyssey—just as they later shaped their burial and death rituals. The African heritage was thus very much present on the slave ship—a heritage consisting of a set of beliefs and practices but also of a body of knowledge that could serve as tools to help them out of their present predicament.

Significantly, the dance was informed by certain frames of mind and occasionally signaled appropriate moments for action. The torpor of some of its movements featured death itself; the twists and contortions of body and limb figured the anxiety and the pain; the sudden clapping of hands and stomping of feet, the jumping and leaping, contrasting with the swaying of bodies and slow shuffle, evoked the possibility of escape or of greater freedom. The dance thus stages the various moods and moments of the slave ship experience—the temptation to surrender and despair, the suffering and humiliations, the awakening of energies, the call for daring or insurgent acts. Improvised, and yet purposeful, the dance is both an experiment with, and a rehearsal of, all possible forms of “escapes.” All moods, emotions, and ideas are made physically present through the body in carefully orchestrated gestures that, as they express and try to make sense of the plight, suggest certain basic African rhythms; the body, that was so central to the lived and felt Middle Passage experience, is entrusted with the task of representation and figuration, just as it also must perform the actual acts the dance may induce.

Also important were the sound and vocal structure of the dance—the humming and whispering that burst into outcries of pain or jubilant shouting, the way emotions broke into moaning and singing, the language of voice and song and the tunes brought from Africa, the use of African tongues often mentioned by witnesses and of “talking drums” whenever they were allowed as well as all the substitutes found to replace them, and the devices sought to deaden the sound and disguise its meaning. The possibility of recreating familiar tunes with whatever was available enabled the captives to keep their musical tradition alive, its beats and rhythms, the subtle combination of vocal and instrumental effects.

Codes of silence were also developed. Silence was another answer to the humiliations suffered, alternating with moments of extreme vocal expression and shrieks of grief. The silence of “sealed lips” (that is evoked in a Yoruba sculpture) accompanied the silence of the drum—often described as “an instrument of significant silence” all the more powerful when it was suppressed¹⁸—and it became a critique of the cruelty and violence inflicted. Silence was also a bond cementing solidarity between captives who would not betray one another. This tacit pact agreed upon on the slave ship endured; it became a crucial code of behavior, severely punished when it was broken.

In the slave ship dance, the basic principles of many performances to come were set: the blending and interplay of dance, song, and music; the call-and-response pattern between dance and music, between voice and instrument, body and song, and mostly between leader-caller and the assembly of dancers (later called celebrants or worshippers when the “performance” would be conceived more as a ceremony); the gift for improvisation; the combination of spiritual and practical purposes; the implicit reference to the spirit world; the emphasis on communication, on the sharing of information and meaning as well as on the necessity to disguise any signal or message; the techniques of deceit to avoid surveillance, to conceal one's mood or designs. These skills and devices, found among all generations of captives, were passed on and improved upon by slaves through several decades.

Codes of kinship and loyalties were also asserted in which slaves acknowledged their common origin, thus reacting against the brutal exigencies of the trade, the cruel separations already experienced on the coast and in the pens, the deliberate destruction of their culture. African identity had to be proclaimed when it was most threatened. It became a mooring that could ensure survival, a thing to remember, a structure around which to create strong bonds in anticipation of other partings and bereavements.

Shipmates and countrymen took silent vows either to find a way back home—a constant preoccupation for early Africans—or to cultivate ties to sustain new communities. Later, after their arrival in the New World, these shipmates' groupings would assume a more official existence, be organized into “societies” that held multiple functions; inaugurated by a formal ceremony, they invented their own rituals, among which oaths of allegiance and mutual assistance figured prominently, and had their feasts, pageants, and marches.¹⁹ In these ceremonial events celebrating the endurance and survival from the soul-destroying slave ship experience, the Middle Passage was symbolically evoked in its three moments: violent displacement, rebirth, and reunion, the memory kept and reactivated in order to cement the new communities.

In a sort of antithesis of the passage, some ceremonies, oriented in time and space toward Africa, symbolically staged the reunion with countrymen, the travel back to the motherland and home of the ancestors. This return is accomplished even more powerfully by spiritually potent Africans who could fly back to Africa, whose feats are reported or sung in that other ceremonial space, the storytelling session.

It is interesting to note that in the New World, many images antithetic to the slave ship journey were to emerge. Some were generated by the exegesis and reinterpretation of the biblical text inspired by the Evangelical movement. The cruel Middle Passage was opposed by the triumphant return similar to the crossing of the Red Sea by the children of Israel. The experience of conversion was pictured as a rebirth after a long journey through hell; the black church itself was conceived as a ship where “storm-tossed” people can assemble, worship, and “labor the spirit.”²⁰ Ironically, the dreaded ship becomes the instrument of salvation in a religious and a practical sense. In a totally different mood, insurrectionary New World slaves saw slave ships as potential instruments of their liberation: they would use whatever ship they could capture to prepare a revolt. The mere sight of a ship inspired them to action. Thus, at the time of the Montserrat insurrection of 1768 in the Leeward Islands, slaves took advantage of the presence of three Dutch vessels offshore to prepare a mass escape by seizing the ships and sailing off perhaps to Puerto Rico, and they improvised a “Fire on the Mountain” song for the occasion.²¹ In another inversion, slaves mastered their former fear of white cannibalism by inventing drinking toasts in calypso fashion at elaborate dancing feasts in Port-of-Spain and, playing on elements of the Catholic communion, made a song (often sung by market women): “The flesh of white people is our bread, their blood our wine.”²² One could find many other instances of inversion; one of the most intriguing is perhaps the famous Jonkonnu carnival in Jamaica and North Carolina that stilled the fright inspired by white traders by celebrating, in song, mask, and dance, a powerful African middleman and a major slaving place on the Guinea Coast.²³

The slave ship experience itself, encapsulated in the dance, became a site of memory that informed many performatory or ceremonial events. I would like to dwell on one such event that probably has the strongest connection with the Middle Passage dance. It offers in a different setting a reinterpretation of that scene and introduces a new dynamic of time and space that highlights its symbolic significance.

In Caribbean cultures the slave ship dance received a name that is both specific and generic, “limbo,” and became the prototype for other dances still practiced today. The limbo dance begins precisely on the slave ship, on the cramped deck where slaves were summoned, and is informed with this primal scene. Suddenly emerging from the ship's bowels, the figures of the shackled dancers of the limbo dance suggest a play with contrasts. The posture of the slaves in “limbo,” hampered by their chains, trying to set their bodies in motion first, evokes what Wilson Harris has called in an insightful essay, “the eclipse of the resources of sensibility.”²⁴ But the dance also asserts the possibility of movement: it sets body and limb in motion and arouses the senses. The disabled bodies are able to perform a dance that is potentially the dance of life, a dance that can imaginatively break the chains and defy traders or captains and their crew. Thus, dancers translated the blunt order to instil life in their numbed and prostrated bodies into a secret call to be born again; they assembled all their energies to transcend the agony and pain. The healthy exercise that the chains turn into a grotesque pantomime that reinforces images of inferiority becomes a ritual of rebirth. The dance to ensure that the cargo of living flesh will arrive safe on the other shore is channeled to other ends. Neither mind nor limb will be so easily manipulated and conquered, and the survival will serve other purposes.

In the limbo dance, the possibility of renascence is evoked through metamorphosis: the dancer moves under a bar that is gradually lowered “until a mere slit of space remains through which with spreadeagled wings he passes like a spider.”²⁵ In this symbolic reenactment of the slave ship dance, the leap to freedom is dramatized, visualized, and narrated. The spider image connects this choreography with another form of performance, storytelling, and with the animal trickster tales of West Indian and African folklore. Inadvertently and ironically, the rulers who order the dance provide an occasion for escape; the performer finds a way out of a desperate situation. This trickster's device announces and prefigures many other tricks and strategies, such as “stealing away,” that slaves would later use to find a more appropriate space for their gatherings, dances, frolics, or worship. Onlookers on the ship would pay no more attention to a spider sneaking out through a slit of space than they did to the slaves' real “performance”; the meaning of the dance eluded them.

Invisible or perceived only as bodies and commodities that were shipped away, the enslaved would turn this liability—their invisibility as human beings and as magnificent and crafted performers—into an asset and proclaim with vehemence of limb and voice their humanity and vitality, as well as their capacity to outwit and “put on massa.” They developed performatory skills to communicate in explicit or secret codes their grievances and strivings.

The slave ship dance was therefore not simply an atavistic spectacle or a meaningless, grotesque dance “under the whip” but a creative phenomenon of importance for the newly enslaved. Haunted by memories of Africa, beset by the slave trade whose laws and economic proscriptions violate their inner beings, the dancers perform an epic drama that announces the emergence of the New World Negro. Many elements in the slave ship setting supply figurative meaning. On one level, the dance expresses the predicament of the captives, caught in the prison of history, the vessel or the trade born of the inordinate ambition of the slavers. In an age of violence and despair, Africans experience the soul-destroying effect of the Middle Passage: their country irretrievably lost, the New World still unknown and forbidding. On another level, a craving for meaning enables them to deal with their dilemma symbolically; the “limbo imagination,” as Wilson Harris calls it, “points to new horizons”²⁶ and announces the necessity of a new drama. As the dance reenacts the tragedy of dismemberment and dislocation, it stages the possibility of transformation through recollection, reassembly and movement. This inarticulate, obscure desire to be born again infuses the performance with mental design, with a sense of time and space.

This dance born on the slave ship found its way into many other performances: in feasts where the limbo is performed, in carnivals where its ironic replica appears: the dancing on high stilts evoking elongated limbs and the ability to confer with superior creatures or the gods. Slaves were thus encouraged to deliberately seek occasions to assemble; devise counterperformances that would magnify all the movements, gestures, and voices confined or repressed on the ship; and express more freely their feelings and emotions. In the words lent to a slave, if “slaves' bodies were owned by the masters in their dances, slaves skip about as if their heels were their own.”²⁷

The slave ship scene also prefigures a form of gathering essential to all performances, creating new bonds and solidarity to be translated in the image of a circle or ring: the chaotic heaping of bodies would be reordered into a different pattern or architecture.

Exploring other essential forms of performance in worship, or what Raboteau has called “danced and sung religion,”²⁸ would be interesting. In praise and hymn singing, the worshippers performed songs that seem to resonate within the slave ship experience, with frequent references to the belly of the whale or “the fiery furnace” from which singers ask to be delivered, as in the song “O Lord give me the Eagle's Wing.”²⁹ Significantly, the ring shout appears as an ironic duplication of the steps of the slave ship dance, a further stylization of which the worshippers have reached fuller command: the slow movement of heel and toe, the double shuffle, the low sound, the sudden bursting of voice and motion.

Performance brought into play many recreative capacities, as a response to harsh realities—dislocations, dismemberment, violations. Born of many interactions, it also created new bridges connecting continents and expanding boundaries. On the slave ship the enslaved were exposed to discrete African cultures whose singularity was assessed, as well as to the culture of the traders. The captain forcing them to dance to the music of some European instrument became the unexpected agent of a form of acculturation. In this “gateway to the New World,” the process from destruction to creation, begun through a complex blending of legacies, transformed into new configurations.

In new settings after the Middle Passage, African Americans actively sought places and moments that would offer occasions to perform their new culture. Many artistic strategies of concealment were devised to avoid interference, censorship, or punishment and to resist “seasoning” and manipulation. They reaffirmed that, even if control were exerted, the imagination is free. Performance became a site for acts of resistance and liberation. The rehearsal of freedom took place at different levels: as a quest for space and movement, as freedom to summon gatherings, as freedom from bondage in fixed roles and representations, freedom to play with and transgress imposed forms and conventions. It spelled out a new grammar of social behavior. Thus imaginatively enacted, the ideal of freedom was made visible; its advent became more urgent.

As the first New World performance, the slave ship dance established an interesting relation and dramatic tension between history and memory, between past and future. It asserted at the same time the will to remember and to reconstruct, however painfully, a chain of memories and simultaneously forget in order to invent a future, later acted out on casual and improvised stages. Most important, it created a fleeting relationship between gesture and vision, whether, as Herbert Blau writes, “you make the gesture to have the vision or you have the vision so that the gesture can be made.”³⁰ The slave ship performance was a creative and daring act that proclaimed, with the sovereignty of the body, the vibrant intensity of one's imagining power.

Notes

1. On African dance: Michel Huet, The Dance, Art and Ritual of Africa (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1979); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974); Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formation in African American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African [London: 1789], in Ama Bontemps, ed., Great Slave Narratives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 1-192.

2. Thus, Equiano claims that the dances in the kingdom of Benin had “a spirit and variety which [he] had scarcely seen elsewhere.” Bontemps, 7.

3. Quoted in The Art of Exclusion, the account was published in England in 1788.

4. The dance was meant “to keep the cargo alive long enough to reach the market.” Epstein, 14.

5. George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Westport, Conn.: Grayson & Grayson, 1933), 84-85.

6. An Abstract of the Evidence Delivered Before a Selected 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 (London: James Phillips & George Yard, 1791), 37. Clarkson also wrote a History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the African Slave Trade by the Parliament (London: John W. Parker, 1839). On the trade, see Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the Slave Trade to the United States of America (reprint: New York: Dover, 1971); Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes (New York: Viking, 1962); Edmund B. D'Auvergne, Human Livestock (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1933); E. Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: 1930-1935).

7. Clarkson, History, 304-305.

8. See George Howe, “The Last Slave Ship,” Scribner's Magazine, July 1890, 114, 123-24.

9. Ecroide Claxton, surgeon, who sailed on the slave ship, Young Hero, in 1788. In Clarkson, History, 304-305.

10. Some Africans were enticed on board the slave ships and offered rewards to perform tribal dances. When the dancing was over, they were taken below, and given intoxicating drinks. When they awoke, they were far out at sea. See Edward Thorpe, Black Dance (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1990), 10.

11. A surgeon on a Brazilian ship Georgia witnessed such a scene around 1827: members of the crew “stripped themselves and danced with black wenches … rum and lewdness reigned supreme,” in Dowe, 241.

12. When slaves were transported from Virginia to the better markets of the cotton territories, they marched, “their feet heavily loaded with irons,” to the sound of a fiddler who was supposed to enliven their spirit. Among the songs they sung was the famous “song of the coffle gang”: “We came to be stolen and sold to Georgia” (quoted in George W. Clark, Liberty Minstrel, 5th ed. [New York: published by author, 1846]).

13. Rare Book Collection, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

14. “Report of the Select Committee of the House Of Lords, Appointed to Consider the Best Means Which Great Britain Can Adopt for the Final Extinction of the African Slave Trade: Session 1849,” London, 1849.

15. In Bontemps, 47.

16. “Report of the Select Committee,” 1849, 163. For more detailed analysis of the belief in white cannibalism: W. D. Piersen, Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), chap. 1, 1-34; Michael Mullin, Africa in America. Slave Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736-1831 (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1992), 35.

17. Edwin P. Hoyt, The Amistad Affair (New York: 1970), 37.

18. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983), 327.

19. Mullin, 15, 32, 35.

20. Joseph M. Murphy, Working the Spirit. Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 172.

21. Mullin, 219.

22. Mullin, 223.

23. See Geneviève Fabre, “Festive Moments in Antebellum African American Culture,” in Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, eds., The Black Columbiad (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 42-53.

24. “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas” (first published in Georgetown: National History and Arts Council, 1970), revised in Explorations (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press, 1981), 20-42. Reprinted in: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. Andrew Bundy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 152-166

25. Harris, 159.

26. Harris, 159.

27. In an imaginary dialogue between a slave and his master, in Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen Planters of the East and West Indies by Philotheos Physiologus (London: A. Sowle, 1634), 146-148.

28. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

29. These songs found echoes in the jubilant or mournful hollers and tunes of firemen and regiment marchers observed in 1862 by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870), 23-24.

30. The Eye of Prey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 178.