Tuesday, July 4, 2006
Jumping the broom
Performance will re-enact slave-wedding traditions
By Larry Muhammad
lmuhammad@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
For years, African-American couples have incorporated slave-wedding traditions like jumping a broom into their nuptials.
But on Sunday, visitors to Locust Grove Historic Site can see a re-enactment of the real thing with authenticating detail -- a barefoot bride wearing wildflowers in her hair being married by a circuit preacher who arrives on a mule.
"The wedding takes place in the yard of the plantation house, with the white folks sitting on the porch in period costumes," said Dolores White, who wrote the show based on the wedding of her great-great-grandparents, Dolly Ann Penn and Isaac Boots.
"It's a celebration," she said, "and some of the slave women in full skirts sort of dance a jig, swishing their skirts around. And the band plays instruments that would have been used by slaves -- buckets, spoons, washboards, that type thing."
The event is free and open to the public. Donations will benefit Genesis Arts Kentucky Inc., a nonprofit arts group that White runs for low-income children in transitional families in the Shawnee neighborhood.
A former teacher for Jefferson County Public Schools, the 77-year-old White created the wedding re-enactment based on stories passed down through generations in her family.
She's traced her ancestry to her great-great-great-grandmother Cary Penn, who was born in a slave holding pen in Wales in 1794. Her mother, who died giving birth, was taken off the slave ship because of her pregnancy. Penn was wet-nursed by another slave, eventually arrived in America and was sold to Joseph Clark of Franklin County.
White believes that Penn's daughter, Dolly, worked as a slave at Locust Grove, where she met her future husband, Boots. White's sister, Rebecca Thomas, who died last November, found a record of the wedding from May 18, 1866, in Franklin County.
White has dedicated the re-enactment to her late sister.
Aileen Novick, Locust Grove's program director, said there's no record of Dolly Penn having been there, but added, "By 1820, there was a large slave community here, and this re-enactment gives people a glimpse into part of what the lives of the slaves might have been like."
Southern courts of the day didn't recognize slave marriages. Bondsmen had no legal standing to enter into contracts, and their families were routinely torn apart by masters who arbitrarily put one or another member of the household on the auction block.
Many slaves were forced to live with whatever mates the master chose, usually hoping to breed certain physical characteristics into the offspring. And a slave marrying a freedman was frowned on, if not considered a threat.
Nonetheless, the vast majority of slaves apparently honored their vows. An 1865 study of married Mississippi freedmen over 40 years old found that only 9 percent had a previous marriage terminated.
After emancipation, many former slaves legally married the same spouse they had under bondage.
The survey was quoted in "Weddings on Contested Grounds: Slave Marriage in the Antebellum South" by Will Thomas, a 1999 examination of slave weddings published in The Historian, a journal of scholarly research.
And that research documents what White's show depicts -- that there were elaborate slave weddings held with the master's permission and, sometimes, willing assistance.
"Weddings on Contested Grounds" quotes from a South Carolina planter's journal entry, about a slave wedding on his property: "They had out, with wife's permission of course, very foolishly, my crockery, tables, chairs, candlesticks & I suppose everything else they wanted."
A majority of slaveholders allowed their bondsmen to marry, the study found, often because it helped stabilize the plantation and reinforced the values of Christianity.
Weddings could be held in slave quarters, conducted by an elder, or in the plantation house with the master reading from the Bible and pronouncing the couple man and wife. Occasionally, a master arranged for a church and an ordained white minister.
Usually, the ceremonies were recorded in the plantation ledger, and followed by a celebration -- dancing and a reception at the plantation house with a banquet table.
One slave narrative quoted in the study read in part, "After marriage de white folks give me a 'ception an' honey, talkin' about a table -- it was stretched clean 'cross de dining room. We had everything to eat you could call for."
White has heard such stories of her ancestors since she was a child.
"My great-grandmother, Jenny Boots, when I was little she had this quilt," she said. "And she'd say, 'This is Dolly's apron. These are Peepaw's pants.' There was somebody else's shirt. Everybody had a piece, and I used to fantasize as a child, lying under that quilt, thinking that I knew these people."
Most of White's family comes from Frankfort, where Dolly Ann and Isaac settled and built a home on Fowler Street. She remembers playing in the crawl space under its high front porch.
Her mother, Rose Tyler, moved to Michigan, where she would regale visiting relatives with generations of family history.
"When family came to visit, the first thing Mom would do was pull out all of these pictures, and each picture had a story," White said.
Growing up, White said that Cary and Dolly Ann seemed as real to her as if they were alive, a feeling that later inspired her to have a fictional re-enactment of Dolly's wedding.
"I just wanted to share," she said. "I would get kind of excited, get goose bumps on the back of my neck thinking about some of these women. To know that you had a relative that was born in 1794, that was on a slave ship, that was something. You live with pictures and stories of people all your life, you feel like you know them. I feel like I have a bond."
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/.../1010/FEATURES
Linear Mode
