Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

Abstract

Reviewed by: Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May Ashley Whitehead Luskey Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory. By Robert E. May. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xviii, 332. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4214-8.) Robert E. May seeks to dispel lingering misconceptions and misrepresentations of Christmastime under slavery. Such misrepresentations date back to the antebellum era itself and were fostered by white southerners and Confederate defenders, as well as by scholars such as U. B. Phillips, to justify the moral righteousness and legitimacy of the peculiar institution. May has deployed an impressive depth and breadth of research into the letters, diaries, and records of plantation owners, northern travel writers' observations of life in the South, newspaper accounts, literary and visual culture, and slave narratives and post-bellum interviews with the formerly enslaved, as well as modern-day plantation tourism literature, marketing campaigns, and historic site interpretation. In so doing, he complicates age-old narratives glorifying slave Christmases as blissful times of relaxation, dancing, freedom to travel and visit with family, affectionate gift-giving from benevolent masters, and indulgent feasting with owners and their families, entirely devoid of whippings or traffic in human flesh. Such inaccurate narratives, May argues, have for too long dominated and, indeed, distorted public memory about the realities and legacies of slavery in America. While May stresses that such unblemished holiday happiness was hardly commonplace for slaves, he does find some evidence of all of these Christmastime practices within slaveholding communities. He notes that great variance existed in how white and black southerners from different families and regions, and over different periods of time, celebrated this much-anticipated season. May reminds readers that, even in instances when slaves were granted two weeks off at Christmastime to visit family, were included in their masters' eggnog toasts, or received ample gifts of clothing, food, or holiday treats from [End Page 911] their white owners, such practices were usually crafted performances or calculated indulgences by masters and mistresses that were meant to placate their human chattel and reaffirm slaves' submissiveness and loyalty to white authority. May's findings buttress Eugene D. Genovese's argument that it was this uniquely reciprocal system of paternalism that undergirded the peculiar institution. However, like Genovese (as well as scholars such as Kenneth M. Stampp, Walter Johnson, and Edward E. Baptist), May also stresses that the violence, whippings, vigilante patrols, and buying and selling of people that also were omnipresent aspects of slavery ceased to take a holiday, even during the Christmas season. Indeed, May notes that slaveholders deemed such practices essential, as they lived in constant fear of slave revolts and rebellions every Christmas when, they dreaded, slaves might use their extra time off (and additional rations of alcohol) to "make the night hideous" for their owners. Yet May ultimately departs from Baptist and others who stress the wholly oppressive nature of the peculiar institution. May is at his best when unpacking the complex power dynamics involved in rituals such as the game of "Christmas Gif" and the "John Canoe" dance in which slaves exercised agency in making demands of their owners in return for their submissiveness or by acting in rebellion against total cultural assimilation by asserting pride in their native African culture through traditional song and dance. These practices, combined with the pressure that they often placed on masters to afford slaves certain indulgences at Christmastime, again confirm the former arguments of Genovese and Johnson regarding the remarkable agency of enslaved individuals. Despite these strengths, the structure of May's work may confuse readers. Several chapters propose to debunk the mythologized components of slave Christmases only to conclude that such components were not wholly mythologized and played an important—though admittedly varied—role in slaves' Christmas celebrations. In a few instances, May somewhat overstates his case about the centrality of Christmas rituals to the upholding of the peculiar institution, such as when he implies that a decrease in masters' ability to perpetuate paternalistic rituals at Christmastime throughout the Civil War had a notable impact on slaves' decisions to self-emancipate and on the downfall of the Confederacy itself. Moreover, by...