Hidden in view: African spiritual spaces in North American landscapes. (Research).

Ruppel, Timothy ; Neuwirth, Jessica ; Leone, Mark P. 等

The most significant shift in the study of American slavery and free African Americans in the last 15-20 years has been the movement away from the view of enslaved and free Africans and African Americans as passive victims who were stripped of their culture, and who subsequently derived their identity solely from the white world. Focusing on slavery as a totalising and dehumanising institution, this assimilationist interpretation shapes the view that 'most ante-bellum slaves showed a desire to forget their African past and to embrace as much of the white civilisation as they could' (Stampp 1956:363). Over the last few decades, this approach has been replaced with an emphasis on cultural forms of resistance, the creolisation process, and the presence of African continuities. Within the last year, archaeologists working in New York City have uncovered the latest in a series of discoveries that indicate the strength of African cultural beliefs under slavery, and throughout North America. Arthur Bankoff, Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, led a small team of archaeologists who excavated within a slave dwelling attached to the main house owned by the Lott family of New York (Staples 2001). The house in its present configuration dates to the early nineteenth century and was home to twelve slaves until the end of the 1810s. Beneath the floor boards in a cramped garret that housed the Lott family's slaves, five corncobs were found arranged in a cross or star pattern. Other associated objects recovered included a cloth pouch tied with hemp, an animal pelvis bone, and an oyster shell. Twenty years ago such finds would have been dismissed as the idiosyncratic work of one person, or as domestic debris. However, in the context of new scholarship on African and African American cultural continuity, this discovery in New York City can now be seen as the paraphernalia of Hoodoo, the North American variant of Vudon, derived from West and West Central Africa. These artefacts, both in placement within the room and in content, have much in common with objects used by different African groups in religious practices geared toward the invocation and use of the spirit world. The continued recognition and documentation of such finds has fed the growing study of African cultures in diaspora.

United States historical archaeology touched these issues for the first time in the late 1960s, but achieved recognition in the 1980s with work on slave plantations and urban environments. The first contribution was that slaves had an archaeology. It still remains for the field to come to terms with the impact of its findings on the notion of culture, and perhaps more centrally, its impact on African Americans. The emergence of the idea of African America is new in this context and invokes the creation of new African and European identities in the African diaspora, including within the United States.

Recent studies have examined areas like naming practices, religious attitudes, language, and archaeological patterns in order to examine the presence of Africanisms in the Americas (Holloway 1991; Mullen 1994; Morgan 1998; Gomez 1998; Singleton 1999). Although these scholars have differed in the conclusions about the extent of assimilation or resistance, their intent has been to dislodge the thesis of the absolute power of the master and to insist, to various degrees, upon 'the preservation of African values in slavery' (Stuckey 1987:15). As a result of this shift in interpretation, we now see that Africans and African Americans did not derive their identity solely from masters, nor did they heedlessly internalise the values of the dominant culture. Instead, they refashioned social practices within spaces to accommodate two cultures, African and European, in one environment, including its landscape. Here we write about landscapes because archaeologists can know them. In American landscapes, initially derived from Europe as scholarship has shown for so long, we describe how Africans and African Americans built their own, itself unique to the North America diaspora. Lott Farm's internal landscape in New York City, a set of altars to gods, can be built inside or outside, and it is an example of materials built all over the eastern half of the United States, not only in the South. It is a landscape because it links heaven and earth in one place that can be made anywhere.

This paper seeks to move beyond the polarities of the African retentions debate (Holloway 1991: ix-xiii), by using a method that combines historical archaeology, folklore, and cultural theory to explore a particular aspect of African American life during slavery and beyond: gardens and yard spaces. Gardens and yard spaces do not exist only outside although much of our data come from outside. Because we write about things that help with control over spirits, we often refer to materials found inside, as in Lott Farm; thus, landscapes in this context permeate any created environment. These spaces will be explored for what they demonstrate about cultural creation, creolisation, and African heritage in the United States. The method is designed to take advantage of both material and documentary evidence of African American culture, while using each as a way to expand on knowledge provided by the other.

Issues with the archaeological record

Historical Archaeology has long claimed that the democratising effect of studying objects, rather than documents, positions the field to explore those whose voices have been repressed in traditional histories, those that rarely leave a documentary trail. Yet, archaeological work on plantations, and southern culture have only recently begun to move beyond the exploration of material culture as an indicator of assimilation or socio-economic status (see Otto 1980; and Orser 1988 for a take on plantations and slavery). Jean Howson has attempted to bring recent historiography to bear on historical archaeology as a warning against a simplified rendering of southern and slave society, while Leland Ferguson has effectively merged archaeology and history to explore the active role that the enslaved took in building the houses, fields, and drainage systems of South Carolina, as well as the continued presence of African influenced beliefs in African American life (Howson 1990; Ferguson 1992).

Yet, despite their interests in recovering the suppressed voice of African Americans, historical archaeologists have rarely relied upon documents of slave life, particularly in the oral narratives of former slaves. The omission of oral history in the study of African American archaeology was particularly evident in a recent collection of essays, 'I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life' despite the claim that the volume is 'a study of the historical and cultural processes that made the African experience unique in the Americas' (Singleton 1999: 17). With the exception of Leland Ferguson (1999), none of the authors in Singleton's volume uses the oral testimony of former slaves to provide support for their analyses of plantation life or archaeological artefacts.

This lack of integration of the documentary and artefactual record is common in the field of historical archaeology. While many historical archaeologists consider their subject matter to be the period in history with a consistent and usable documentary record, the integration of the documentary record is rarely an important part of the interpretation of archaeological collections. This problem has been recognised and addressed by some. Margaret Purser, working in Nevada's Paradise Valley, demonstrated ways to use documents and oral history to explore trash disposal patterns. Even though Purser's article was published as part of Barbara Little's Text Aided Archaeology (1992), a volume designed to encourage the use of a range of documentary sources, her call to action has largely gone unheeded.

Indeed, historical archaeologists have long argued that archaeology has relevance in a period of time with good documentary record because there are sites and social groups about which little is written. Historical archaeology has often been cited as a corrective for a documentary record skewed toward the elite, and an oral history record too dependent on the interaction between interviewer and subject. But their reliance on artefacts as the sole source of information about the past often provides little idea of how objects were used, and few conclusions about cultural practices. Without the exploration of practice, archaeologists have difficulties engaging ideas of resistance, active cultural creation, and creolisation within the material record.

More than 2 300 oral narratives of former American slaves, collected by the Federal Writers' Project during the late 1930s, are a primary source of information about cultural practices and how specific objects were used during the antebellum period. However, these oral narratives have significant limitations and must be used with caution. These limitations are well known, and they can be briefly summarised. First, the majority of informants were in their seventies, eighties and even nineties when they were interviewed. Their memories, therefore, might be suspect due to old age. Secondly, many of the informants were children during the antebellum period. As such, they can be seen as too young to recall in detail and too apt to view their experiences through the haze of childhood reflection. Third, many of the informants were interviewed by the sons, daughters or relations of their former enslavers. As a result, they may have been tempted to qualify their responses and to observe the etiquette of Jim Crow segregation. Finally, and most damaging, many interviewers and editors sought to maintain the paternalistic image of the old South. Thus, material was deleted at the editing stage, and the informants' responses were shaped to emphasise the benevolence of the slave owners. Taken together, these limitations pose significant obstacles.

Despite these problems, historians and others have begun to use these narratives with increasing frequency to construct a revised view of American slavery. In order to overcome the biases and distortions, they have used other written sources, such as planters' journals, letters, newspapers, additional interviews with former slaves, and autobiographies. The intent has been to preserve the voice of the formerly enslaved as a counterweight to the significant textual record left by the slave owners.

Yet, the use of these textual sources has created further limitation due to the existence of disciplinary boundaries. While historical archaeologists have made significant contributions to our understanding of American slavery, their work has remained outside the purview of many historians and practitioners of cultural studies. These archaeologists have uncovered artefacts that add to our knowledge of African-derived practices and the creolisation process. As we noted earlier, these contributions have also remained within disciplinary enclaves. Some of the limitations of the oral narratives can be overcome by the use of archaeological sources, since artefacts open up areas of investigation not fully revealed in the oral narratives. In a similar fashion, the oral narratives provide a thickly described context for artefacts. Used together, archaeological and textual sources broaden our understanding of a historical period under increasing scrutiny.

In our exploration of African American landscapes, and seeking to overcome some disciplinary limitations, we combine archaeological findings at the Brice House in Annapolis, Maryland with cultural theory focused on modes of domination and resistance, and the oral testimony of former slaves about the uses of yards and gardens. We intend to show how enslaved individuals refashioned the spatial limitations given within slavery in order to preserve spiritual and family values and thus establish New World identities. We find a world filled with spirits and gods. Landscapes throughout the African diaspora were encoded with meaning--with knowledge of family and life strategies--and were encoded with signs, or hidden transcripts, that recognised the mystical nature of the world, the immanence of the other world in this one, and the tie to creolised African traditions of spirituality.

To amplify our case we cite political anthropologist James C. Scott who argues that oppressed groups challenge the dominant order by constructing and utilising what he terms a 'hidden transcript,' an interlocking series of veiled cultural practices designed to dispute and disrupt the absolute power of the 'official' and 'public' transcript. Scott draws attention to prosaic, everyday forms of resistance that remain largely invisible to the dominant culture because their meanings are not understood by those in power. Reticence, thus, becomes 'a tactical choice born of prudent awareness of the balance of power' (Scott 1990: 183). Social space has a paradoxical relationship to this ongoing struggle: it is visible, but it can also be inscribed with superimposed meanings that may not be apparent to the dominant culture because they are coded.

Admittedly, the gardens of the enslaved were highly visible and not hidden at all. But their interpretation and utility differed. For slaveowners, the gardens were a visible form of social control or a display of benevolence. For the enslaved, however, they were encoded with resonant meanings that disputed notions of dependence, subservience, and inferiority. Though visible and public, the garden could conceal a hidden transcript, one that spoke of desires to preserve cultural and religious values, to maintain family stability, and to achieve freedom. As Michael Mullin writes, 'resistance may be understood as a refusal to abandon one's values and traditions as well as--at another, more familiar level--singular acts ranging from quiet sabotage to organising and fighting back' (Mullen 1994: 2). The gardens, therefore, contested the public transcript of social death and natal alienation with a diasporic transcript in the same manner as the spirituals, folklore, and quilts of enslaved Africans and African Americans (Patterson 1982; Levine 1978: 3-80; Roberts 1990: 17-64; Tobin & Dobard 2000; Fry 2002). Their meaning was, in other words, hidden in plain view.

In addition, while these gardens were visible and could not have existed without the slave master's permission, their products frequently entered a subterranean economy involving riverboat trading, peddlers, poor whites, and barter. These transactions were not authorised by slaveowners, and they effectively escaped their vigilance. Yet, we argue, more than the production and distribution of goods was involved in this nexus. The public transcript of slave owners' ideology proclaimed that enslaved Africans and African Americans were bereft of deep emotional feelings, incapable of individual initiative, and unable to survive without paternalistic care. As a direct result, families were frequently separated, the whip became a staple of plantation discipline, and the absolute dependence of the slave became a primary goal of slave owners. The cultural practices, both spiritual and economic, that we describe in this paper contested these strategies. The struggle to maintain a family is one part of this refusal to abandon values and traditions. The desire for meaningful labour, the restoration of dignity, and the refusal to be subservient are equally crucial parts.

Our research into the archaeology of the Chesapeake and the world of enslaved people as codified in the oral narratives of former slaves suggests that African American landscapes encoded messages about freedom, resistance and family, messages that were derived from multiple African, as well as European, sources. African Americans coded landscapes, including interior landscapes of Hoodoo and exterior landscapes of produce gardens. Members of 'Archaeology in Annapolis' have found the marking of ritual spaces within the Brice house as representing practices that brought African sensibilities alive, and carried them forward under changing conditions. In the act of practising rituals which might combine BaKongo nkisi, Yoruba divining, and Orisha worship, African America was created. The everyday artefacts found in houses in Annapolis demonstrate how powerful messages of African and African American spirits at work can be hidden in plain sight in pins, nails, and buttons, whose meaning involved family, ancestors and community.

Yet, these landscapes and gardens also served a more prosaic function: they produced cash crops or side money. Despite the vigilance of the masters, an unregulated internal economy developed, one which allowed those who were enslaved to make crucial decisions about the allocation of time and resources used for family and community. These gardens and spaces fostered and maintained cultural values and family strategies which abetted survival, and the emergence of a distinctive New World identity.

African American signatures: the Brice House in Annapolis, Maryland

An African American interior landscape, designed as a crossroads, existed within the Brice House in Annapolis, a small port town on the Chesapeake Bay. Brice House is a five-part Georgian mansion with the carriage house located in the west wing, and a laundry, kitchen and slave quarter above, located in the east wing (Figure 1a). The house was built in 1760s, remained a private residence through the late 1800s, and served as rental property until the 1960s. James Harmon (2000) led members of Archaeology in Annapolis in recovering extensive materials deliberately placed beneath individual bricks in a floor, and buried next to doorways, and also buried under both hearths in the east wing (Figure 1b). Approximately three feet in front of the south side of a doorway between the kitchen and laundry (1), a small intact perfume bottle, filled with soil and a single seed was discovered beneath the dry-laid herringbone patterned floor. Immediately surrounding the bottle was a concentration of artefacts including seashells, buttons, over a dozen matchsticks, and large amounts of faunal and floral materials. All the match sticks had been lit and quickly extinguished. All around the bottle and associated artefacts was a dense concentration of hundreds of objects in a rough circular shape, extending to both sides of the doorway. Artefacts recovered included Union Civil War era brass military buttons and a boss from a cartridge case with an eagle with outstretched wings, over fifty glass buttons and beads, scraps of red fabric including one relatively large piece of red cotton, pins and pin fragments, peach pits and other seeds, a medium sized root mass, two polished black stones, and three coins dating from 1870-1900. To the west of the doorway, where the concentration of artefacts met an east/west dividing wall, another set of intentionally placed artefacts was found including a pen knife with an inlaid brass shield, a large black round glass bead, two buttons, two rings, one large rib bone, and several oyster and clam shells.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

When taken as a whole, these archaeological materials formed an oval over three yards in diameter that extended within the south room/laundry and into the north room/kitchen. The north room, which was the kitchen, had been disturbed to a great extent by twentieth century construction, but pieces of dolls were found beneath the north hearth, thus marking, conceptually, a northern arm of the central oval deposit (2). A cache of feathers was found beneath the south-hearth (3). If viewed from above, the two hearths at the ends of the north and south rooms marked the ends of a north/south axis. The doorway that separated the two rooms marked the east/west axis and served as a crossroads of this interior space. An outside doorway that marks the end of the east axis was also marked with a pierced coin. A stairway that was on the west side of the wing had been removed long ago leaving ground too disturbed to excavate. It marked the west opening. The whole stratified deposit dated from the 1860s through the early 1900s.

The Brice house artefacts appear to represent the physical remains of African American spiritual practices that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, commonly known as Hoodoo. Hoodoo, like other diasporic African spiritual beliefs such as Vodun or Santeria, combined African ethnic beliefs with elements of Christianity and Islam. In the late nineteenth century, Hoodoo spread across the United States wherever African Americans moved after emancipation. In this process, African based spiritual practices from across the South merged into a fairly cohesive practice. Early to mid-twentieth century descriptions of African American Hoodoo are similar across the South, and refer consistently to the use of dolls and human figures, pins, and bottles placed beneath steps as forms of healing, safeguarding, and bewitching (Herron & Bacon 1895; Steiner 1901; Hurston 1931; Jackson 1967; Puckett 1969; Raboteau 1978: 275-288).

We suggest that this room in the Brice House, with its markings of discrete clusters of meaningful yet everyday objects, is very similar in nature to other African-influenced ritual places that created sacred, protected and magic space. The tracing of images on the ground has a long history within BaKongo tradition. The material in the Brice house like that of Lott Farm and in Brazoria, Texas, marks out an interior space in just such a manner--creating an interior landscape with spiritual significance. African American 'yard art', and rooms or closets that are used as altars within Santeria and Vodun, share with the Brice House east wing the deliberate intent to manifest a relationship with the spirit world.

Robert Farris Thompson and anthropologist Grey Gundaker (Thompson 1983; Gundakar 1993) suggest that African American yard art, so commonly seen in the deep South, rose directly out of this tradition of marking space and creating ritual landscapes which found the mysterious and spiritual in everyday objects (Thompson 1983). Yard art has its roots most visibly in traditions of West Central Africa and West Africa, but other regions contributed as well. This is ethnographic work and its informants describe and create yards decorated with white stones, pinwheels, bottles hung in trees, broken pottery and iron pipes to evoke symbols of the dead (the colour white), and create vehicles (bottles with holes) which will drive away or keep close various spirits, depending on the intent of the spirit. Reflective objects (like hub caps or mirrors) can be considered 'flash,' and attract spirits so they can be useful or contained. Round objects (from tires to ceramic dishes) encourage the smooth journey of the human soul in life and death--symbolism echoed in the pierced coin worn around the neck or in the cosmogram. The colour red (that of communication) and the colour blue (for protection) is often found in flowers, or painted objects within carefully landscaped yards.

Another archaeological example of the placement of Hoodoo materials in an apparently ritually charged space can be seen at the Fanthorp Inn site, found in Texas. Workmen dismantling an interior fireplace, at the north side of the house, uncovered a small cloth bundle containing four rectangular paper packets, each containing a white powder tentatively identified as either white clay or chalk. Also found within the bundle was a small amount of faunal material. This material, placed between chimney stones, appears to date to the 1850's and is similar to both the Brice House and Levi Jordan plantation caches. Such markings appear to have been ritually placed in adherence with Hoodoo practices.

Where ritual space was marked out through placement of objects or ritual action, as in BaKongo tradition, a practitioner should secure the four corners of the space with objects, incantations or actions. Within these secured rooms, objects were set up, sometimes hidden (if local authorities were unfriendly to creolised religions like the Regla de Mayombe) or in the open, if such worship was acceptable. These sacred rooms, sometimes separate dwellings, were spare, with few furnishings other than the charms or nkisi (medicines of the gods) carefully placed in vessels, on the earth, and enclosed. Descriptions of the munanso or enclosures for nkisi in the Cuban creolised tradition, share much in common with descriptions of the find at the Levi-Jordan plantation in Brazoria, Texas, and suggest that the common objects of everyday life can be used to make altars or sacred spaces of any place (Thompson 1983: 64). Once the crossroads between this world and the spirit world was established through various media of communication (whether through the objects found in yards or enclosed rooms), practitioners became a part of an African-based religious world.

The study of the Brice house cache not only suggests that archaeologists have the universe of cultural practices to use as context for finds, but also that archaeologists should take care when exploring ethnicity in the archaeological record. Traditionally, archaeologists have assumed that if artefacts of recognisably 'other' origin (like African derived baskets or pottery) are found on a site, then the inhabitants may be seen to be retaining elements of ethnic beliefs. This argument has been extended to assume that once objects of European origin are found on the site then assimilation must have occurred. In the case of the Brice house, all the objects recovered were of recognisable European or American origin, many mass-produced for the general populace. However, it is in their uses that these objects also represent the continuity of African traditions. The origins, decoration, and form of the Brice house objects proved to be important only in so far as these attributes referenced a world of Hoodoo meanings.

'Crossroads thinking'

While the Brice House material appears to be generally an example of the practice of Hoodoo, the material very specifically appears to be a manifestation of the ritual marking of the ground with the sign of the crossroads or the embodiment of the cosmos. The symbolism of the cosmogram or the crossroads appears throughout the African diaspora, and represents a powerful idea found among people primarily from West Central Africa (and in other forms in West Africa) that came to have new life and meaning in the Americas. The crossroads is the meeting place of heaven and earth, the living with the dead, the beginning and end of life, and a place of magic where life's problems can obtain supernatural solutions. The physical look of a crossroads embodies an X whose arms are ringed by an oval or circle. One line of the X is the horizontal axis that divides the world of humans, here on earth, from the world of spirits, the world above and below. The vertical line of the X represents the life line running between the living and the dead. The circle or oval that runs around the ends of the arms represents the path the human soul voyages from birth to full maturity, to decline, to life as a spirit in the underworld where one is still powerful enough to influence life on earth (Ferguson 1999: 117-20; Thompson 1983; Thompson 1991: 152-157). There are many important aspects to the crossroads, but for our purpose here, the salient one is that it can occur, and be found, almost anywhere. Crossroads represent a spiritual location that occurs in many landscapes, and inside houses.

All the world, every space, every crossroads can be significant, and inscribed with hidden transcripts because the world of the dead, the other world, is always immanent in this one. Crossroads thinking is where two ways come together, where this world meets the next, where the dead meet the living, where the living can go to communicate with the dead. Its origin is West Central African, BaKongo, and was later mixed with understandings of Christian saints, with Yoruba divination practices, along with other ethnic beliefs that came with enslaved people to North America.

Crossroads thinking is directly related to a representation of a threshold between this world and the next. Crossroads thus finds expression in the use of graveyards in Voodoo and Hoodoo because the crossroad is where the dead and the living meet, and where the living go to seek the help of the dead. The symbol of the cosmogram can also be worn on a necklace, inscribed on the bottom of a ceramic vessel, as archaeologist Leland Ferguson found in South Carolina, or be traced on the ground with metal chains within an enclosed room as archaeologists found in Brazoria, Texas (Ferguson 1999; Brown & Cooper 1990). The action of drawing on the ground with sand or chalk also creates a crossroads between this world and the world of spirits, and as such is a place to meet with the spirits as supplicants. As Robert Farris Thompson explains, 'the circle signified 'certainty,' while the cross within the circle stood for all the powers activated or concentrated upon this point' (Thompson 1991: 155). Sterling Stuckey found this same sense of circling and inscription in the practice of the ring shout, a counterclockwise dance ceremony 'directed to the ancestors and gods' (Stuckey 1987: 12).

Such crossroads thinking became embedded in spatial practices and represents the hidden transcript in everyday landscapes. Indeed, all the artefacts employed in Hoodoo can be read through the hidden transcript of religious and magical rules of the practice. These practices were in turn grounded in cosmology. Out of a cosmological view grew ways of building yards, using crossroads, recognising that the world was filled with 'altars' to the gods. Such beliefs nurtured and preserved a sense of identity and familial continuity. By teaching these practices and beliefs, African America was constantly created and recreated, and disparate ethnic groups became black Americans.

Hidden transcripts: African-American yards and gardens

Just as African cosmological views found no need to separate the inside from the outside, there was no necessary separation of the spiritual and the practical. Gardens and yards that made physical a BaKongo cosmogram, and brought a crossroads to life, also served family and traditional ends. Gardens produced cash, currency, bartered goods and savings for freedom. Gardens also produced a paradox of slave life that African Americans understood. Enslaved people growing and selling their own produce, acquiring goods through this labour, created the paradox of property (a slave) owning property, the paradox of a person, who was considered to be a capital investment, investing their own time to build capital. This activity became a lesson in humanity--that people who were enslaved were not objects, but humans who struggled in life to build families, wealth, and safety.

While landscapes nurtured a sense of identity that was not dependent upon the values and opinions of the dominant culture, they also produced cash that increased the stability of the family, as well as of African traditions of community (Hudson 1997). Family stability, in turn, allowed for the preservation and passing on of African cultural and religious practices, such as the centrality of the cosmogram and ancestors. Given the importance and prevalence of slave gardens in the low-country, and also in the deep South and Chesapeake region, it is important to ask: What was produced in these gardens? What times were either allocated or designated for work on the gardens? More importantly, what items were bought with the money generated by slave gardens? Besides these questions, our research also uncovered two largely unexplored areas: (1) the attitudes of the enslaved towards this kind of additional work; and (2) the attempt by some fathers to provide support for their families. Over 2 300 interviews with former slaves, collected by Federal Works Progress Administration during the late 1930s and published as The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography in 41 volumes (Rawick 1972-9), have helped to provide answers to these questions.

A careful reading of the oral narratives discloses abundant references to the presence of slave gardens, income generated from extra labour, and decisions made about purchases. Many recent studies have explored this flourishing internal economy that operated both with consent and outside the surveillance of the masters (Morgan 1982; McDonald 1993; Wood 1995; Hudson 1997). Although laws were passed to regulate the 'clandestine trading' among slaves, free blacks, and whites, it became virtually impossible to regulate since the internal economy was a vital component of slave culture (Schweninger 1992: 104-05). Many slaveowners found that gardens could be used as a positive incentive to connect the morale of the enslaved to the interests of the plantation. Other owners permitted gardens in order to reduce their food allocation costs. Certainly, gardens can be seen as furthering the interests of slaveowners and creating continued dependence. On the other hand, gardens could allow slaves 'to eke out a modicum of independence from the masters and the white world' (Hudson 1997: 31). But more was involved than sustenance or autonomy. Like the landscapes which were marked by the African crossroads, these gardens were also inscribed with a hidden transcript that spoke of pleasures, choices, and desires not dependent upon the benevolence of the master's or owner's notions of innate inferiority and perpetual dependence. The redefining of identity in a New World context became visible in the descriptions provided by former slaves about production, time use, and consumption.

What was grown in these gardens? Predominately cotton and corn. Some informants mentioned tobacco, potatoes and peanuts. Others said the gardens were used for chickens, turkeys and hogs. Laura Thornton, a former slave in Alabama, recalled that 'Slaves had money in slave time.' By working 'extra time,' her father produced a bale of cotton every year in his garden. In addition, he grew corn to feed the horse that he had purchased (Rawick 1972: Vol. 10, Pt. 6: 328). Lila Rutherford said that the slave community on the plantation of Ivey Suben in Newburry County, South Carolina raised corn and vegetables on their patches (ibid. Vol. 3, Pt. 2: 58). The family of Ferebe Roberts was allotted four acres for their patch, since land was distributed according to the size of the family. The Roberts family raised 500 pounds of lint cotton and sold it in Warrenton (ibid. Vol. 13, Pt. 3: 214).

While gardens produced many crops, slaves had to find or steal the time to work them. Although some mention Saturday, most identified night as the time available. Henry Gibbs remembered Saturday afternoons as the time for working patches; Charlotte Beverly identified 'moonlight' as the available time for raising cotton (Rawick 1977: Vol. 8, 823; ibid. Vol. 1, 40). Born on a plantation in Marion County, South Carolina, Hector Smith clearly understood the difference between time owned by the master, Randall Davis, and time claimed by the enslaved for their own purposes: 'Oh, dey work dey garden by de moonshine en fore light good in de mornin cause dey had to turn dey hand to dey Massa work when daylight come here' (Rawick 1972: Vol. 13, Pt. 4: 101). According to Ishrael Massie, a former Virginia slave who was 88 when he was interviewed in 1937, finding time to work the garden involved both personal initiative and the master's expectations: 'ef dey didn't have anything fer ya to do ya could do dis work fer yoself at nightime ef ya wuz a smart fellow' (Perdue 1976: 210). Massie's father raised tobacco at night to buy clothes for his family.

In addition to clothes, those who found or simply took the time to work in their gardens purchased a wide range of items. Although some just mentioned getting money for their cash crops, others identified specific purchases. These included: fiddles for the Saturday night frolic; town goods, such as clothes and pies, horses and saddles; marbles, candy, and toys for the children; coffee and tea for the household; chairs, beds, and bedsteads for the cabin; and, finally, Christmas presents. Sam Anderson, a former Mississippi slave, recalled a man named Dollie who used his Saturday nights to grow cotton. Eventually, Dollie saved $500 dollars and purchased his wife's freedom. Linda Thornton's father bought a horse with the work he did during 'extra time,' but he also bought whiskey. Prince Johnson's grandmother sold enough corn to buy not one, but two feather beds (Rawick 1977: Vol. 12, 5; Rawick 1972: Vol. 10, Pt. 6, 328; ibid. 1977: Vol. 8, 1168). These purchases identify desires to augment what was given by the master and, in some cases, achieve freedom. They also speak to the particular pleasures derived from coffee, sweet things, feather beds, and Saturday night dancing--a hidden transcript of desires and pleasures unregulated by the master.

According to Frederick Douglass, Maryland slaveowners used holidays as a safety valve to dissipate rebellious energies. Thus, they would encourage slaves to drink to excess and use leisure time for sports and amusements. While Douglass concedes that the majority of slaves engaged in these practices, he also notes that 'thinking and industrious' slaves employed their holiday time in making 'corn-brooms, mats, horse-collars, and baskets,' items which would generate cash (1986: 114). Douglass's comments go a long way towards making visible the hidden transcript energising the work and garden system. This hidden transcript reveals the identification and preservation of what folklorist John Roberts terms, 'behaviors appropriate and beneficial for protecting [African American] values and well-being under the conditions faced in slavery' (Roberts 1990).

Gardens as ritual space

We have used two sources of data to reconstruct landscapes used to maintain African identity in North America. Our archaeological work and citations from the oral narratives of former slaves show that the house and landscapes can hold a crossroads and that the key to understanding them is crossroads thinking. It is this symbolic form that we used to construct the African spiritual world. Second, the economic benefits from yard work were used to sustain family and community. The values thus sustained, both spiritually and socially, had roots among different African peoples. Although it is a secondary focus, we are also arguing that as different African ethnic groups became American, and as they used their cultures to deal with American life, African origins were adjusted and became African American.

We conclude our attempt to describe African American landscapes with the link between crossroads thinking and yards. We already think that people of African descent, who have only recently been accorded a place in written history, left evidence of African and African American traditions in the great plantation environments, and that, with thought and design, archaeologists can explore that possibility productively. Further, we have suggested that growing and selling goods for cash aided the survival of African family and community life. Now, we have to build the link between these yards or plots, and cosmology.

Gundakar (Gundaker 1988a; Gundaker 1993) has shown that gardens were not only places to find and manage spirits; they were also teaching tools that were carefully constructed for instructional purposes. Spirits lived there, came there, were discovered there and could be brought and fed there. This is true for much of the Caribbean, and for North America. For those with knowledge of the hidden transcript, there was instruction in the garden or landscape. Yard work was, and remains today in the American South, moral instruction. It was akin to a language for teaching how to improve and get on in life.

Richard Price explains that gardens and other worked environments like fields were inscribed with a 'grammar of ritual practices,' one which required constant discovery of spirits and then their domestication. Conjurors were required, but the invisible world of spirits could be known through divination, feeding, and other rituals. Further, through the use of particular liquids, leaves, and barks, spirits could be domesticated, i.e. moved from the woods, to the fields, to yams and finally into houses. This active discovery process involved paying attention to plants, smells, leaves, and plant properties, including roots (Price 1990; Price & Price 1999). Sweeping, common in North America, was a way to guide and manage the power of spirits connected to plants and living in yards. Sweeping went from house to gate and proved that the sweeper could defend him/herself. This larger, coherent, active, spirit-centred context for yards and gardens helps identify the African meanings in North American yards where we know that people habitually buried bundles.

In order to add to the link to gardens, our project (Leone & Fry 1999; Leone & Fry with assistance from Ruppel 2001) collected all references to magic or 'conjure' hands, tobys, mojos, charms and other behaviours associated with the spirit world in The American Slave (Rawick 1972-79). Initially, we organised our citations by the use of material items, such as bottles, pins or red flannel, in terms of their locations. As we proceeded, we collected a complete list of all items used in Hoodoo, how they were combined, what they were used for and where they were used.

Of the 239 citations to conjure in The American Slave, 75 per cent concern healing and curing, while 25 per cent involve fending off harm by inflicting it back on its origins. The latter, called fixing, was usually done outdoors, often in yards. All these spirit-driven operations were achieved through some expression of crossroads thinking. Charms, hands, mojos and bundles were combined to control spirits (Smith 1994: 4-42). In his study of the transformation of African American identity, Michael Gomez writes that the 'technique of burying a conjuration bag under the doorstep, in the front yard, or in some location over which the intended victim was sure to pass is a direct African retention' (Gomez 1998: 287). Protection and tricking, defensive and offensive conjure, are the twin poles of the crossroads thinking involved in spirit management, and it was done mostly throughout the yard and garden.

While most protective charms were worn on the body, some were placed by doors, steps and gates. Doors were intersections between outside and inside; they were thresholds or crossroads. One former slave recommended placing a conjure bag beneath the steps to make visitors friendly. Others recall sprinkling powdered brick or urine on the steps or back porch to prevent conjure. Over the door was a frequently mentioned location. Horseshoes, tin pans, red pepper pods, and even old shoes could be placed over the door, either to bring luck, prevent conjure, or control spirits. A number of informants described the practice of placing a stick near the master's door. Pounded down into the ground, the stick would prevent whippings or mistreatment by exerting control over the actions of the master.

In contrast to protective charms, most of the items mentioned in the practice of malign conjure were placed outdoors. As the victim walked over the hidden conjure, sickness, pain, or death would follow. Twenty-five per cent of those who identified potent locations for placing conjures designed to harm others mentioned 'under steps'. Conjures were 'buried in yards', 'front yards', 'under doorsteps', particularly front doorsteps, or just 'in the ground'. Some were placed 'under back steps', or in 'trees'. Others were placed in 'running water'. Flowing water included water running off a roof. Govan Littlejohn, a former South Carolina slave, recalled being conjured. His left foot began to swell up, and his pain continued until his mother found a conjure bag containing pins and feathers in the front yard by the doorsteps (Rawick 1972: Vol. 3, Pt. 3, 106-07). Hattie Matthews was told by her grandmother about the use of conjure bottles containing snake and frog powders during slavery times: 'Dey den dug a hole in de ground under de step an buried de bottle in de hole. When de person took a step ober dis spot dey wud habe pains in deir legs' (Rawick 1972: Vol. 11, Pt. 2, 251). Thus, outdoors, particularly yard space, was a place where one could call on the help of spirits, often for casting spells back upon the sender and therefore was a sacred spirit space.

Conclusion

The documented demographic clustering of enslaved people of African descent in plantation regions, the development of stable African American communities in regions such as the Chesapeake, and the renewal of beliefs through contact with people from Africa well into the early nineteenth century, suggest how African beliefs survived, spread, and grew throughout North America. The awareness of how the ethnic differences among Africans taken to the Americas fed the stream of African American life has grown among scholars. The result is a picture of survival, as well as creative change that welded together Africans from disparate ethnic backgrounds into African Americans.

Archaeological data and oral testimony have demonstrated the cultural influence of Africa in the landscapes of the African diaspora. Many landscapes, gardens, and yards built by African Americans were expressions of African heritage because they recreated and continued the African economic, social and cosmological worlds. Thus, yards and houses became the ground that was used to embody African family and community traditions and, when used to demonstrate the ways of the spirit world, actively brought West and West Central African worlds into use.

Received: March 30, 2002; edited: January 2003

Acknowledgements

Funding for archaeological work at Brice House was provided by the International Masonry Institute, generously supplemented by the Maryland Historical Trust. Historic Annapolis Foundation provided its archaeological laboratory and staff to support the excavation and analysis. Funding for research on the Slave Autobiographies was provided by Dr. Irwin Goldstein, Dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences; Dr. James Harris, Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, and Dr. Charles Wellford, Dean for the Graduate School at the University of Maryland, College Park. This paper was originally given at a symposium on 'African American Houses, Yards and Gardens' held at Dumbarton Oaks, October 12, 2000. We appreciate these sources of support; the interpretations are our responsibility.

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Timothy Ruppel (1), Jessica Neuwirth (2), Mark P. Leone (3) & Gladys-Marie Fry (4)

(1) Department of English, Howard University (Email: [email protected])

(2) Archaeology in Annapolis Project/Historic Deerfield

(3) Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland (*Email: [email protected])

(4) Department of English, University of Maryland