Black Kings and Queens

Despite the central role of Catholicism in disseminating the devotion to Black saints and creating brotherhoods, the election and processions featuring Black kings were not always associated with the presence of Catholicism.

Take the example of New England, where from the middle of the eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century, Africans and their descendants elected their kings or “governors.”³⁹ As in Latin America, bondspeople commemorated these coronations with processions that included music and dance. During the Dutch rule in what was then New Amsterdam (in today’s Manhattan), enslaved Africans and their descendants started commemorating Pinkster, a Pentecost holiday celebrated seven weeks after Easter Sunday.

Throughout Pinkster festivities, which lasted a few days, enslaved people also crowned their kings and paraded the streets. As late as in the nineteenth century, enslaved people and white people took the streets of cities such as Albany and Kingston in New York.⁴⁰ Albeit in a different context than that of colonial North America and the northern United States, enslaved people in Latin America also commemorated the Brazilian Pentecost holiday by participating in the Catholic feast of Divino EspĂ­rito Santo (Divine Holy Ghost). Although the festival was not led by a Black brotherhood and did not honor a Black saint, enslaved people appropriated the commemoration by participating in its parades, dancing, drumming, and collecting alms.⁴¹

In Brazil and the rest of Latin America, the coronation of kings of Congo was associated with the activities of the brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary, whose members were usually connected to West Central Africa.

In a travelogue published in the early nineteenth century, British planter and traveler Henry Koster (who spent most of his short life in Brazil) reported the election of the king and queen of Congo during the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary in the church of Amparo in Olinda, which was at the time the capital of the then-captaincy of Pernambuco in northeast Brazil. He described the members of the court entering the church wearing “cotton dresses of colours and of white, with flags flying and drums beating,” whereas the king, the queen, and the secretary of state each “wore upon their heads a crown, which was partly covered with gilt paper, and painted in various colours.” Also according to Koster, the “king was dressed in an old fashioned suit of divers tints, green, red, and yellow; coat, waistcoat, and breeches” and holding a wooden scepter; the queen “was in a blue silk gown, also of ancient make”; and the secretary “had to boast of as many colours as his master” even though apparently portions of his costume were “borrowed from a different quarter, for some parts were too tight and others too wide for him.”⁴² As enslaved people and freedpeople appropriated these festivals, they incorporated, blended, and re-created Christian and African traditions such as songs and dances, and material culture items such as musical instruments and clothing.

Although Black kings and queens along with their courts paraded the streets of various Latin American regions several times during the year, their presence was usually visible when enslaved men, women, and children took to the streets to celebrate folia de reis (folly of kings), a festival held between Christmas and the Epiphany (January 6), commemorating the visit of the three Magi to Jesus after his birth.

All over Brazil, these popular festivals became alternative sites of power for both the enslaved and freed populations. These kings and their courts took to the streets to collect donations for the organization of the various festivals of the Catholic Church honoring patron saints. Dressed in full regalia, the king and the members of the court were followed by parades, in which white, Native, and mixed-race individuals also participated. Although tolerated by the public authorities, as noted by French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret, this kind of public Black commemoration of “their homeland” was prohibited in 1808, when the Portuguese royal court moved to Rio de Janeiro, because of the noise and disturbance it caused, therefore confirming the subversive potential of Black festivals.⁴⁵

Historians and anthropologists have attempted to explain the election of Black kings and the rise of Black festivals and other Black cultural manifestations in the Americas in a number of ways.

A second line of interpretation contends that these manifestations are not African survivals but rather result from cultural mixture. Defined as creolization, this approach explains Black cultures in the Americas as an amalgamation of various African, European, and Indigenous traditions in response to the dehumanization imposed by slavery.⁴⁷

A third framework to understand Black populations and their cultures in the Americas focuses on the forced migration of enslaved people from West Africa and West Central Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Defined as an Atlantic model, this approach has been challenged because of its excessive focus on Europe and the Americas that not only pays little attention to Africa but also excludes the Indian Ocean connections and places an excessive emphasis on the United States.⁴⁸

Finally, a fourth model, which is the one adopted in this book, draws from the idea of the existence of a worldwide African diaspora. This framework does not emphasize that Africa is part of a distant past but rather highlights that globally dispersed African populations share a common identity and a connection with the homeland. However, even in the context of the Atlantic world, these connections are not fixed. As put by historian Joseph E. Harris, they assume “the character of a dynamic, continuous, and complex phenomenon stretching across time, geography, class, and gender.”⁴⁹

In the context of these debates, some Brazilian historians argued that Black Brazilian Catholicism was different from what they refer to as a generic “African” Catholicism. Marina de Mello e Souza, for example, underscored that Black festivals reflected European power while maintaining connections with their African origins and creating their own institutions.

In the United States and the West Indies, as in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, bondspeople celebrated Christmas. In the United States, enslaved people described how Christmas was the only period during the entire year when they were allowed to take a break from work. Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, explained that whereas his owner allowed three days off, other slave owners gave their enslaved property between four and six days of rest during the holidays.

Northup also reported that every year one slave owner in central Louisiana’s Bayou Boeuf offered a Christmas supper to the enslaved people of neighboring plantations, an occasion that could attract as many as five hundred men, women, and children who came “on foot, in carts, on horseback, on mules, riding double and triple” to attend the open-air banquet. Northup noted, “Only the slave who has lived all the years on his scantly allowance of meal and bacon can appreciate such suppers” that included several kinds of meat, vegetables, bacon, cornmeal, and biscuits, as well as peaches, preserves, pies, and tarts.⁵⁵ Once the supper ended, bondspeople danced and sang. Northup, who would be the one playing violin during these gatherings, observed how “the African race is a music-loving one” and how his fellow “bondsmen whose organs of tune were strikingly developed... could thumb the banjo with dexterity.”⁵⁶ Music certainly allowed Northup to endure his twelve years living as a slave; as he writes, “Alas! had it not been for my beloved violin, I scarcely can conceive how I could have endured the long years of bondage.”⁵⁷ The ability to play violin not only allowed him to express himself, but it also occasionally relieved him from working longer hours and gave him access to extra rations of food, tobacco, and even shoes.

Abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, who like Douglass escaped bondage, similarly described how enslaved people enjoyed Christmas festivities in her narrative published about a decade after Northup’s account. She reported that “every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus. Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction.”⁵⁸ Jacobs is among the very few authors of slave narratives in the United States, if not the only, to mention Johnkannaus (also known as Jonkonu, Johnkonnu, John Conner, and John Canoe). In her own words, the festivity consisted of groups of enslaved people in which “two athletic men, in calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows’ tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns.”⁵⁹ These troupes, which might include up to one hundred enslaved men, started parading early in the morning. Singing and dancing, a dozen members of the group played drums made of boxes covered with sheepskin. Other revelers played triangles and jawbones (idiophone percussion instruments made from the jawbone of a horse, mule, or donkey) and went from door to door asking for contributions.

A similar Christmas masquerade named Jonkonnu was first documented in Jamaica in the late seventeenth century. More than one century later, artist Isaac Mendes Belisario described the performance by illustrating his description in a series of lithographs showing that enslaved revelers played the same musical instruments described by Harriet Jacobs in her narrative (figure 14.4). Scholars have linked Johnkonnu festivals to West African secret societies in the Bight of Biafra by also underscoring how these masquerades changed across the Atlantic Ocean and during the long period of the Atlantic slave trade.⁶⁰

Figure 14.4. Isaac Mendes Belisario (1795–1849), Sketches of character: In illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the island of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: Published by the artist, at his residence, no. 21 King-Street..., 1837[–38]). Courtesy of Yale British Art Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.

Because nearly 750,000 men, women, and children from Igboland were sent into slavery in the Americas, especially from 1750 to 1830, one historian more specifically associated the rise of Jonkonnu with the presence of Igbo-speaking peoples in North America and the West Indies. Following this interpretation, the term jonkonu would be related to njokku (ifejioku), the cult of the Yam spirit and the secret male society Okonko (also related to yams). Therefore, white settlers and slave owners called the performance John Konu because the male performers, who prepared their Christmas presentations throughout the year, shouted the word njokku during the parades.⁶¹ But no matter how these parades were connected to specific ethnic groups and regions and how they changed over time, enslaved people who performed Jonkonnu used it to reclaim their personhood in a society in which slaveholders daily attempted to deny their humanity. As we will see later, in other parts of the Americas, enslaved people participated in several other festivals and processions that incorporated costumes, masks, musical instruments, songs, and dance similar to Jonkonnu, and despite being transformed over time, they are still today largely celebrated by Black populations in the Americas.

During the era of slavery, bondspeople in the United States took advantage of the fact that slave owners and overseers were often distracted during the holidays by planning their escapes to coincide with the festivities. John Andrew Jackson, for example, was owned by a Quaker family of planters in South Carolina. After being separated from his wife and his child, he decided to run away during the three-day Christmas holiday of 1846. His escape was successful. After reaching Charleston, he was able to flee to the North and eventually reached New Brunswick in Canada.⁶² Like Jackson, Harriet Tubman also successfully escaped from the plantation where she was enslaved in Maryland in 1849, later returning to rescue her three brothers Ben, Henry, and Robert from slavery on Christmas Day of 1854. These cases remind us that congregating and reveling were also opportunities to resist slavery across the Americas, not just seek momentary reprieve from its tragic realities.