Courtship Contests and the Meaning of Conflict in the Folklore of Slaves

Brer Rabbit dancing and singing plum turned Miss Wolf's head.... Brer Rabbit he take the gal and go off home clipity, lipity. Poor old Brer Coon he take hisself off home, he so tired, he can scarcely hold hisself together. COURTSHIP, STEVEN STOWE POINTED OUT, HAS HAD A STRANGE career and dubious standing in the study of family history. (1) This is particularly true regarding the study of the enslaved family in the antebellum South. While several historians have maintained that was significant in creating family relations among slaves, few have offered evidence for this conclusion. Rarely has there been detailed consideration of how slaves understood their courtships--the ideals and values that structured these relationships, the competing and contradictory influences that shaped the courting experience, and the conflict that caused within the enslaved community. (2) Consequently, in the personal and emotional world of slaves, has been understood as a mere passage instead of its own social event. (3) Exploring the intimate lives of those who inhabited the past is difficult. Personal texts, such as letters and diaries--though they reveal much about the private worlds of particular individuals--are beset by methodological problems relating to subjectivity and interpretation. As Peter Stearns and Jan Lewis have written, What makes the study of emotions so stimulating and yet so maddening is the elusiveness of its subject, the knowledge that we can, in fact, never be entirely confident that our interpretations are correct. The shifting sands of human emotion and experience both bedevil and beguile us. (4) To certain extent, this is true of all sources employed by historians; it is, however, indisputable that when studying emotions historians must ask very different questions of their sources. For those interested in the emotional lives of the enslaved in the antebellum South, the task becomes even more problematic. (5) Few personal texts are available that truly reveal the intimate lives of the enslaved. Legally forbidden to learn to read and write, only minority of enslaved men and women were able to master the written word and thus give expression to their emotions through this particular form of discourse. The enslaved inhabited predominantly non-literate community, and historians must turn to oral representations of their culture in order to discover the emotional structures of their lives. Several scholars are engaged in this study and have recognized the folktale as primary illustration of the values and ideals of the enslaved. Lawrence W. Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977) places African American folk thought at the forefront of historical understandings of slave life. His work presents an in-depth understanding of the meaning of slave folklore and its moral messages. (6) One of the most significant aspects of Levine's work is his discussion of animal tricksters, who dominate several of the tales. Levine has discussed the ambiguities of the trickster tales and argued that, though the tales appear to invert the power relations of slavery, historians should be aware that the trickster character is ambivalent and complex. (7) Although Levine has pointed out that and marriage are central features of several of the tales, his analysis tends to overlook the significance of contests, which are embedded in number of the stories. Instead Levine has focused on assessing the function of folklore in the wider cultural world of the enslaved. Other scholars have made important connections between folklore and the processes of and marriage. John W. Blassingame, for example, has noted that one way for slaves to succeed in sex, courtship, and marriage was to be skilled in the so-called verbal arts. Therefore, courtship on the plantation was battle of wits played by resort to riddles, poetic boasting, toasts, and ridicule

Art · Biology · Courtship · Epistemology · Folklore · Literature · Meaning (existential · Sociology · Zoology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Philosophy

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