Contextualizing everyday artifacts in the Diaspora

Ywone Edwards “Trash” Revisited• Considering poverty in light of

the multivalency of trash• Yard Dressings

– appropriating objects deemed trash by slave-owners and re-fixing their meanings

– improvisation and coding– taking control over object

meanings – esp., control over the

distinction between wilderness and culture

Ywone Edwards “Trash” Revisited• Quarters were often small and

poorly built: – rough enclosures of logs, stick

and mud chimneys, homemade tables and chairs,

– rags, old shoes, coon skins, chicken feathers, and colored cloth to fill gaps between logs gave disorderly appearance,

– reflect African American expediency and improvisation.

– Opportunity to produce a coded message in bold colors (esp. red/white)

Ywone Edwards “Trash” Revisited• Quarter yardscape appeared

dirty and untidy in opposition to planter’s formal order. – Taken to represent inferiority

• However, yards were spaces for work on their own behalf: – craftwork, kitchen work,

gardens (including medicinal “weeds”), animal pens, hunting (curing carcasses, skins, bones, and hunting tools on display), pest control (dung, ash), protection (oyster shell yards) spiritual protection (newspaper as wallpaper, confusing spirits).

“Trash” the result of self-affirmation

Ywone Edwards “Trash” Revisited

• Creating wilderness/spaces for spiritual presence

• “Clutter of slave dwellings commemorated loved ones who had been sold or had died” (Edwards 1998:264). – Metonyms for lost

companions through the display of their objects.

• Clutter as an intentional effort to create wilderness, a space uninviting to masters.

Ywone Edwards “Trash” Revisited

• Symbolize “thwarted aspirations” or social death. – “Perhaps when yards were paved with oyster

shells, they were reminders of the transparency and the whiteness of the watery world of the dead, thus serving as reflections of the potential inhabiters of these yard” (Edwards 1998: 265).

• Cemeteries thought of as wilderness, located in forests or, in Africa, in abandoned villages

Ywone Edwards “Trash” Revisited

• To live as dead people, – a death that brought them closer to their lost

loved-ones, and likely frightened whites. • DuBois:

– black music “is the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wandering and hidden ways” (in Edwards 1998: 265).

Re-use of glass at Oakley Plantation (Wilkie)

• Enslaved household

• Freeman and Scott families, post-bellum household servants– Freemens’ was “cooks

house”

• Scotts were tenants

Re-use of glass at Oakley Plantation (Wilkie)

• Total of 35 glass tools recovered from the three households, majority from late 19th century Freemen household (22)

• Distribute into two tools types: – scraping tools with edge

angle greater than 35° – cutting tools with edge

angle less than 35°

Cutting tools

Scraping tools were re-touched along edge and chosen from longitudinal body fragment

Cutting tools not re-touched, chosen from latitudinal bottle bases

Re-use of glass at Oakley Plantation (Wilkie)

• No glass tools at Scott house combined with presence of razor blades suggest function

• Tools used for shaving and for smoothing handles

• John Hubert, descendent of Scott family, recalled that making glass tools was a special skill

• Safety razors under cut the cost of straight blades after 1908 in Sears Catalog.

• Also reduced the demand for skilled glass tool making

• Initial analysis of the distribution of glass tools suggests an association with African Americans, especially in late 19th century

• Tentative association with women, who made have passed skill to daughters

Ham Hocks on your cornflakes(Warner)

• African American Maynard and Burgess families in Annapolis, MD 1843-1980s

• 19th century fish scale concentration adjacent to the rear door: ie., cleaning fish on site

Ham Hocks on your cornflakes(Warner)

• Full analysis of animal bones by Mark Warner shows two key findings:– Preference for pork– and shallow-water fish

• Pork consumption eclipsed by beef in late 19th century among whites but not blacks

• Pork was most frequent meat provided to slaves

• Lt 19C commercial fish was predominantly deep water species, esp. cod

• Indicates that fish at Maynard-Burgess was locally caught, perhaps by the family or purchased from local fishermen/hucksters

• Fish was dominant self-provided food among enslaved

Ham Hocks on your cornflakes(Warner)

Pork as cultural identity

• Pork more frequent in African American than in White cookbook recipes

• Pork most mentioned meat in blues lyrics:

Subverting the racist marketplace

• Locally caught fish allowed African Americans to get food without having to purchase it from white shopkeepers who were known for cheating black customers

• Middle-class Maynards and Burgesses may also have been supporting less fortunate members of their community

I don't want no hogheadsDon't eat no chittlins Don't want no spareribsDon't eat no backbone Mama, got a hamboneI wonder can I get it boiled 'Cause these Chicago women Are about to let my hambone spoil.

Chesapeake Tobacco Pipes (Emerson)

Chesapeake Tobacco pipes• Pipes made of local clays with incised and filled

designs, most common in 17th-century sites• Method of manufacture (molding) is English • Designs are African:

– Faceted bowls appear African (Mali)– White clay inlay is also African– Kwardata (transition from youth to manhood), – Double bell, – Quadraped motifs look like antelope more than deer

• Mid-17th century date: – mirrors first increase in numbers of Africans in

Chesapeake

Chesapeake Tobacco pipes

Chesapeake Tobacco pipesWhat do African designs mean?• Only in Chesapeake: not in other colonies like colonoware • Decline as colonoware starts to comes in • Rise and fall of Africanisms tied to larger cultural and historical fabric

• Increase in colonoware coincides with the intensification of slavery during 18C/Georgianization

• Colonoware reflects larger communities of slaves on modern plantations

• and the need by those slaves to supply themselves with basic necessities

• Slaves more isolated from the white community

•Pre-Georgian most slaves lived among other servants and were better provisioned by their owners.

•Slaves were less isolated

•Records of slaves working in their free-time: tending gardens and making handicrafts which they sold with the goal of one day purchasing their own freedom.

•likely that the pipes were objects made for sale

Pipes in the Atlantic Slave Trade(Handler)

• Tobacco and pipes were brought to Africa for slave purchase

• Tobacco also provided to slaves on board vessels

• “Slave pipes”: short stemmed pipes recorded on cargo lists

• Captive Africans were familiar with smoking pipes and tobacco

Senegalese Marabout holding the long stem of an elbow pipe,

1780s.

Pipes in the Atlantic Slave Trade(Handler)

• It is possible then that some stole pipes aboard ship and brought them with into the Diaspora

• And that there was in fact a market for pipes that offered a way to invoke African memories (supports Emerson) The woman is smoking a

white clay “slave pipe”, Surinam, 1770s.

African-Caribbean Pottery on St. Eustatius (Heath)

African-Caribbean Pottery on St. Eustatius(Heath)

• 1300 sherds of locally made pottery collected from ruined synagogue foundation pit dating post 1795

• Heath argues for creolization with the pots serving the effort to make a distinct and new African-Caribbean culture: new vessel forms

• Pots made by coiling and hand modeling, based on ethnographic record, most likely made by women

African-Caribbean Pottery on St. Eustatius(Heath)• Majority were pots:

– hollow, globular vessels with rounded bases and everted rims

– Largely burned exterior bases indicating use in cooking

• Or bowls:– Hollow vessels with straight

or inverted rims and round bases

– Not burned, likely used for storage or food prep or eating

African-Caribbean Pottery on St. Eustatius(Heath)

• Pepper-pot meals– One pot meals, made from any and all available

foods, easy prep

African-Caribbean Pottery on St. Eustatius(Heath)

• Other documented uses of earthenware pots– Water storage/cooling: Monkey Jars– Drums: outlawed b/c of their use in communication,

used earthen pots as substitute– Obeah witchcraft

• Spirit conjuring

Ceramics and the Market (Heath, Hauser)

• The Orangestad market was the focus of St. Eustatius society, black and white– “One end of the town to the other was a continuous mart”

• Market offered freedoms for free and enslaved blacks– Laws passed suggest Africans were renting rooms and

shops in the town to be near the market– Other laws described a fear that slaves were smuggling

and/or stealing what they sold (canoe law)• Slaves’ provision-ground produce and handicrafts were

sold in market. • Heath concludes that earthenware pottery production

was driven by the market, and intensified after emancipation

Ceramics and the Market (Heath, Hauser)

• Mark Hauser: microscopic petrographic evidence from locally made ceramics in Jamaica

• Considers localization of the global capitalist system in the internal local logic based on the dynamics of provisioning in the plantation economy– Planters elected to let slaves to provision

themselves through gardens and handicrafts– Helped create openings in the system for “hawking

their wares”

Ceramics and the Market (Heath, Hauser)

• Sunday markets were common in American slaveholding areas

• Slave market exchange typically dominated by women who traded in cash, vs. barter or credit

• On Jamaica, a secondary market of itinerant traders, free and enslaved, moved goods around the Island

Ceramics and the Market (Heath, Hauser)

• Hauser analyzed ceramics from sites on Jamaica’s north and south shores for petrographic evidence to determine clay sources and manufacturing techniques

• Concentrated distributions suggest use of limited clay sources

• Variety of decorative techniques sharply reduced in 18th century

• indicates a centralized production system

Ceramics and the Market (Heath, Hauser)Ceramics and politics• Hauser’s evidence suggests that production of locally made

pots was by few makers working in a distinct region– That these pots are found on both sides of the island suggests itinerant

traders were main source of distribution– Itinerants traveling between plantations and cities would have also

provided news of interest to the enslaved communities

• Such exchange of information at the Sunday markets has been blamed for the 1831 Baptist War/Great Slave Revolt, which involved as many as 60,000 enslaved people.

• Hauser’s work suggest the political uses of the centralized earthenware trade in bringing about the end of slavery in Jamaica in 1838 through organizing tactics of itinerant traders.

Sampling Many Pots (Wilkie and Farnsworth)

• Considering enslaved Africans as not only sellers but also consumers in the market

• Clifton Plantation, Bahamas– William Wylly, owner, encouraged market

participation (provided boat)– Ceramic assemblage from slave quarters are quite

distinct from others in Bahamas• Focus is on European-made ceramics found at

driver’s house:– home of Jack and Sue Eve, their children Cato and

Maria, 1813-1821

Sampling Many Pots (Wilkie and Farnsworth)

• Clifton Plantation, New Providence, Bahamas

• Ceramics recovered from slave quarters represent great variety of decorations and types

• a pattern at odds with typical owner-supplied uniform sets

Hand-painted and factory turned wares found at Clifton Plantation slave quarters

Sampling Many Pots (Wilkie and Farnsworth)

• Assemblage dominated by tea wares and bowls

• Even saucers and tea cups do not match

• Suggests tea cups used for relishes to accompany pepper-pot stews, which were served in bowls

Sampling Many Pots (Wilkie and Farnsworth)

Color choices• Owner’s ceramics

dominated by blue monochrome vessels simply decorated (ie, shell-edge)

• Driver’s ceramics were majority polychrome dominated by browns and oranges

• Color palate matches cloth colors found in Africa and African Diaspora communities

Sampling Many Pots (Wilkie and Farnsworth)

Bakongo continuities• Banded ceramics• Chevron and dot designs (4

moments of the sun)• Hand painted bird symbols:

flight as symbol of spiritual revelation

• Cosmogram:

Sampling Many Pots (Wilkie and Farnsworth)

Tobacco pipes• Greater diversity in slave

quarters than owner’s• Beehive pipe from driver’s

house• Beehive suggests

association with ant/termite hill, which is considered special path to the underworld

• Bees, as flying insects, sim. to birds, symbol of spiritual revelation

Sampling Many Pots (Wilkie and Farnsworth)

• Decorative clothing items

• Great variety between houses

• Gold and brass buttons• Bone buttons• Beads• Bell