The sacred sounds of freedom in the Americas included “the syncretic Afro-Brazilian religions of macumba and Umbanda, the black Catholic congado, and the quasisacred remnants of the otherwise secular batuque circle dance.” Eighteenth-century America served as a conjuring space for Black sacred sound. African religions—Abrahamic and indigenous—gave expression to the historical, cultural, and religious expressions of these communities. New world African communities deployed this sound in expressing the hopes, joys, dreams, histories, aspirations, and longings of a people with a history who were simultaneously an emerging people creating a new world. A dichotomous sacred and secular did not operate within this conjuring context. It was all one. Indeed, as the pioneering musicologist Eileen Southern notes, “The music is everywhere! Often, one needs only to stop and listen.”
Enslaved communities in North America were ethnically diverse. These continental and diasporic Africans forged a new world community with a new sound. The music in these communities not only captured the diverse traditions and cultures of Africans, it also developed in dynamic ways to reflect the contingencies of life in North America. Sacred sound transmitted histories, traditions, stories, myths, religions, and culture. “Song texts generally reflected personal or community concerns. The texts might speak of everyday affairs or of historical events; texts might inform listeners of current happenings or praise or ridicule persons, including even those listening to the song….But the most important texts belonged to the historical songs that recounted heroic deeds of the past and reminded the people of their traditions.”
The sheer diversity, complexity, and variety of musical forms and styles point to the depth and character of this soundscape in motion. Scholars have attempted to understand this music in a number of ways. Musicologist Guthrie Ramsey reminds us, “A most striking quality of early black music historiography ideology is how writers—particularly African American ones—negotiated the generally accepted ‘divide’ between Euro-based and Afro-based aesthetic perspectives.” Ramsey underscores the challenge of understanding eighteenth-century Black music: to develop an adequate knowledge of the music itself and translate it into an appropriate contemporary idiom. You run the risk of underdeveloping or overdetermining the immense African contributions shaping and forming the music when you make it conform to European-derived musicological registers. A further challenge is the need to hear the music absent the sound and play the music absent notes. You have to find another path to understanding.
Despite the diverse sources of Black sacred music in North America, spirituals were initially presented by Europeans in translation form, in the idioms of European notes and categories. But these translations were inadequate to the task of expressing the music’s rhythmic texture and robust sound. Dena Epstein writes, “Afro-American music included many elements not present in European music and for which no provision had been made in the notational system. For example, Lucy McKim Garrison wrote in 1862: ‘It is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat; and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on score, as the singing of birds or the tones of an Æolian harp.’ ” The worlds of continental and diasporic Africans could not be fully represented by the notational representation of latter-day ethnographers and musicologists.
So what is the sound of Black freedom? Perhaps it is best to begin by thinking reflexively about the probing question posited by W.E.B. Du Bois: “Do the sorrow songs sing true?”
1729–1734
AFRICAN IDENTITIES
Walter C. Rucker
Samba Bambara, forced to watch the torture and hanging of an unnamed woman compatriot, stood at the precipice between this world and the next. On December 10, 1731, he awaited his execution.
The leader of a slave plot in French New Orleans, Samba had a complicated past. A decade earlier he had served as an interpreter for the French Company of the Indies near Galam, a gold-producing state along West Africa’s Senegal River. Indirectly aiding and abetting the commerce in Black flesh, Samba reportedly led a 1722 revolt in Senegal that temporarily cost the French a trading post. When the fort was recaptured and Samba’s role was revealed, French authorities exiled him into Louisiana slavery.
Upon arrival in the French colony, he reassumed his role as an interpreter and used his linguistic skills to help his fellow Bambaras, when they had to appear in court, receive reduced sentences by translating testimony used against them in a favorable manner. His role as translator and his intimate knowledge of the French elevated Samba to the role of leader of the New Orleans Bambara. He leveraged his leadership role to conspire with other Bambaras to massacre all whites from Pointe Coupée to Balize, to free all Bambaras, and to force all Atlantic Africans who were not Bambara into servitude.
At this early moment in the long arc of African American history, concepts of a single Black race and of pan-African unity did not exist. Notions of Black people being one people had yet to be embraced fully by Africans and their American-born kin. Samba Bambara’s 1731 conspiracy was the product of a time when unifying labels like Black and African had yet to be internalized, had yet to reach their political potential.
In a period that saw the intensification of rivalries between the Spanish, French, and English crowns in North America, Atlantic Africans and American-born Creoles demonstrated their resilience in carving out freedom spaces in a hostile world. In November 1729, a number of enslaved women and men—many from the Bambara nation—joined a Natchez nation assault on a French outpost near present-day Natchez, Mississippi. They killed 237 French men, women, and children and burned Fort Rosalie to ash. Five years later, in June 1734, an enslaved woman named Marie-Joseph Angélique was accused of setting fire to the merchant quarter of Montreal to mask her attempted escape.
Surrounded by French and Spanish colonies on the North American mainland, the British colonies—numbering thirteen with the establishment of Georgia in 1733—faced the same realities and perils as their neighbors. Slavery and enslaved peoples were everywhere; thus, resistance was ubiquitous. By the 1730s, enslaved Africans and their descendants could be found in the Chesapeake colonies (Virginia and Maryland), the Lowcountry and Southern colonies (Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina), the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania), and the New England colonies (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire). Even though Georgia banned slavery in 1735, enslaved Africans were present in the colony at its inception in 1733. In addition to hosting resident maroons, Georgia was part of an African corridor between British Carolina and Spanish Florida through which enslaved people seeking refuge in St. Augustine, and later Fort Mose, would travel. Indeed, Georgia was founded to serve as a military buffer to deter enslaved women and men from reaching freedom in Spanish Florida.