Abstract
For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited. One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing. These arts gave slaves a chance to relieve stress and establish a culture through the creation of musical instruments, songs, and dances. All of these contained hints at the true nature of slaves’ feelings towards the system that oppressed them, feelings that they had to frequently repress. However, despite slaves’ efforts to make this culture entirely their own, masters tried to find ways to use it to their advantage instead of to the slaves’ benefit. The resulting covert power struggle sometimes ended in favor of the masters, taking the form of regulations on slaves’ dances, requirement of the performance of songs and dances for the masters’ entertainment, and even abuse of slaves by using their own arts. Ultimately, however, slaves emerged victorious because of the hidden messages in their songs and dances. Though this method of coping could not erase all the masters did, it was at least one glimmer of hope.
Highlights
Nineteenth-century chattel slavery was designed to dehu- what made music “strictly southern,”8 as Fredermanize those who were enslaved
For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited
One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing
Summary
For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited. One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing These arts gave slaves a chance to relieve stress and establish a culture through the creation of musical instruments, songs, and dances. The variety of times slaves would use music and dance shows just how important these two pieces of culture were to slaves since they seemed to try to work them into their lives whenever they could. William Wells masters did try to appropriate slave songs and Brown wrote in his narrative that his job was to make dances for their own uses, slaves still ended up with the slaves look happy by “[setting some] to dancing, some to upper hand, especially through their music, as seen in the jumping, some to singing, and some to playing cards [....] case of the slaves sold south in Brown’s narrative. O, gracious Lord! when shall it be, sang songs that contained messages that masters ei-
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