Slave clothing and African-American culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Past & Present, August, 1995 by Shane White, Graham White

But although it is likely that many slaves were aware of the import of their actions in the white world, they were also wearing such clothing in the context of another set of values. Just as the African elite happily appropriated items of European clothing, so eighteenth-century slaves on the American mainland may simply have added to their ensemble any garment that caught their fancy or that they managed to acquire. Among many blacks there appears to have been little if any sense that such an item should co-ordinate in style, colour or anything else with the rest of their garb; it was precisely this characteristic of wearing what appeared, to white eyes, to be odd combinations of clothing, of lumping together, say, an elegant jacket with a pair of trousers fashioned out of coarse, drab material, that whites found risible. Yet at the same time, whites were probably unable entirely to dismiss the suggestion that their own behaviour was being held up to gentle (albeit often very public) ridicule.

Consider, for example, the hats that some slaves fashioned for themselves. Erskyne, the runaway from the "Guiney Country" mentioned above as having clothes "really too good for any of his Colour", completed his ensemble with a handkerchief tied around his head and a hat on top of it. Will, a twenty-year-old runaway, and according to his owner a "great thief and lyar", wore a hat whose band was yellow and whose crown was "covered with the skin of a large bird".(29) Consider also the way in which slaves incorporated items of military garb into their dress.(30) In part, slaves may have worn these items of military apparel because they were all that was available during periods of shortages - many of the relevant descriptions date from the Revolutionary War - but it also seems likely that colour, cut and cloth made such garments desirable at any time. Dick, "a stout elderly Angola fellow" who ran away in December 1771, had on a coat and trousers made of blue negro cloth, but also wore, under the former, a soldier's jacket that was coloured red.(31)

This aspect of African-American culture probably attained its most heightened expression in the garb of the principal characters in Pinkster, Negro Election Day and General Training. These slave festivals, which occurred sporadically in the eighteenth century throughout New England, New York and New Jersey, usually lasted for one or two days in May or June, although Pinkster could occupy up to a week. The rituals varied considerably from place to place and over time, but typically an African American - usually called a king or governor - was in charge of proceedings and slaves from the surrounding area gathered to drink, eat, gamble, listen to music and dance. Generally, all slaves attending attired themselves in their best clothes but, inevitably, most attention was focused on the candidates for office and on the black kings and governors, who often borrowed items of clothing, and even swords and horses, from their owners in order to create a spectacular visual display. Cyrus Bruce, the slave of Governor John Langdon in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was well known for appearing at Election flamboyantly dressed, wearing a massive gold chain, cherry-coloured small-clothes, silk stockings, ruffles and silver shoe buckles. But few would have managed to cut a figure quite as striking as King Charles, who officiated over Pinkster in Albany, New York, in the 1790s and early 1800s. His ceremonial garb consisted of a British brigadier's broadcloth scarlet jacket covered in bright gold lace and reaching almost to his heels, fresh and new yellow buckskin small-clothes, blue stockings, highly burnished silver buckles on well-blackened shoes, and a three-cornered cocked hat also trimmed with gold lace. This slave's carefully constructed appearance was an act of cultural bricolage, the imaginative mediation of an African-born slave in a new, European-dominated environment.(32) But it was also merely an extravagant example - deliberately exaggerated for festival and, because of that, obvious even to us - of the way in which individual slaves throughout the American colonies managed to incorporate items of clothing into a "look" that whites found strange and occasionally even unsettling.