2.9 Creating African American Culture

African American creative expression mixed influences from African ancestors, from other enslaved people and from local European and Indigenous cultures.

Quilt-making became a way to tell stories and preserve memory, using African-inspired patterns and colors. The required cream and red appliquéd quilt from about 1850 is one example. Potters added African styles to their work. David Drake, an enslaved potter in Edgefield, South Carolina, carved short poems and dates into the clay of many of his large storage jars, even though South Carolina law banned teaching enslaved people to read and write. The required source is one of his jars, from 1858. His poems touch on love, family, faith and slavery.

People recreated West African instruments from local materials: gourd rattles, drums, and the banjo, which grew from West African stringed instruments.

Many Africans already spoke more than one language, and traders were used to building a lingua franca, a shared language for people with different native tongues. In America, enslaved people developed creole languages, such as Gullah, which blends West African languages with English.

Spirituals (also called sorrow songs and jubilee songs) were religious songs enslaved people created. They took Christian hymns and biblical stories and added African musical elements: call and response, clapping, improvisation and syncopation (stressing the offbeats). This created a new American musical genre and laid the foundation for gospel and the blues.

Spirituals had several jobs at once. They expressed hardship and hope, resisted the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and showed creativity. They could also pass along strategic information, such as warnings, plans to run away and ways to escape.

Many spirituals had double meanings. Songs about Moses, the Promised Land or crossing the river Jordan told of biblical deliverance, but they could also signal escape on the Underground Railroad (2.20).

This spiritual is credited to Wallace Willis, an enslaved man in the Choctaw Nation who was forced west to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) during removal. On the surface, the words are about going to Jesus. They could also mean slipping away to a secret religious meeting or escaping north. The required performance by the gospel singers Shirley Caesar and Michelle Williams (2001) shows how this music lives on.

Large numbers of Senegambians and West Central Africans were brought to Louisiana, and their music shaped what became the American blues. The course points to one musical link: the blues shares its musical system with the fodet, a form from the Senegambia region. The ring shout, a worship dance performed in a circle with clapping and singing, still survives among the Gullah Geechee people of the Sea Islands and coastal Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas.