“It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas,” wrote Frederick Douglass in one of his narratives revisiting his life as an enslaved man.1
Douglass reminds readers that even the most inhuman slave owner in the United States allowed bondspeople to not work between Christmas and the New Year’s Day except for feeding and taking care of the livestock.
For enslaved people, the holidays were an opportunity to rest, eat, drink, and socialize. Even more important, these festivities were also a great occasion to run away. Douglass understood, perhaps more than anyone, how paternalism operated in slave societies. Slave owners abused and punished enslaved people all year long. But they represented themselves as knowing what was in the best interests of bondspeople. Therefore, according to Douglass, “a slave who would work during the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them.”2The reason for this assumption was simple. Access to leisure, food, and drink were, as Douglass put it, “effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”3 The great abolitionist was certainly right in noting how these measures could soften insurgent behaviors among enslaved men and women who worked from dawn to dusk under strict surveillance. This chapter shows that holidays and other festivals were not only spaces of accommodation; they also offered opportunities for resistance. In the next pages, I explore how enslaved people created both formal and informal associations through existing religious institutions that allowed them to appropriate spiritual practices and develop festivals, processions, dances, martial arts, and musical traditions to help survive the horrors of bondage, especially in Brazil but also in other parts of Latin America, the West Indies, and the United States. I especially emphasize the fact that many of these activities carried with them crucial cultural and religious components brought by Africans from their homelands, while also incorporating features from European and Native American societies. In several cases, dialogues between Christianity, Islam, and other African religions were embedded in these cultural events. Despite the nuances across time and regions in the Americas, many bondspeople used cultural and religious practices as resistance tools to build a world of their own. These cultural and religious manifestations emerged during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, but as we will see, many have survived into the present and are tools of cultural assertion and resistance still used by Black populations who continue to experience and fight against racism on a daily basis.