Aspects of Slavery and Freedom Seeking in North Carolina
Earth-Survival-Quarter Culture
Quarter Culture reveals the "Practical Language of the Slave".
It is critical to gain some fundamental understanding of slave culture, its contents, and its expression to gain a deeper understanding of how the enslaved people survived. Culture is a fostered worldview. Culture is about problem-probing, assessment, and problem-solving. Culture is civilization because it details how people need, have, and are organized to develop their potential to solve their problems and meet their psychological needs to live in reality. In short, culture is related to how a community solves its problems and builds around shared experience, history, values, sensibilities, instincts, and assumptions/understandings. Culture is also how communities give meaning to and express their routine and habits. Dance, food, dress, speech, song, rituals are all expressions of culture and are assigned meaning. For instance, it is highly likely that a cook-out among black folk, including family and friends-- if music is present for the festive, dancing to Maze's "Before I let you go," is highly expected to arouse spirits of both young and old among black folk. It is not that Maze's "Before I let you go" is the culture but the meaning that black folk has given to the song and included it in cherished movements as a way to express their love, joy of company, and life. So much so that multiple generations share the emotions and memories that have been imbued in the record.
Through culture, enslaved people were able to see their reality for what it was. An honest look at their existence, it would be assumed that they were a people of doom and gloom; however, their honest look did not rob them of their optimism or creative instincts. Although slavery was awful, dirty, and caused much suffering, the culture of the enslaved provided them with a mind to be resourceful. It helped them build lifestyles that created and responded to opportunities. The culture was a haven and gave enslaved people the mental and emotional resources to transcend their circumstances, have dignity. In many ways, slave culture defended the enslaved and acted as a buffer against internalizing white values and perspectives.
By and large, slave culture attempted to screen the more hostile ideas of Euro-America that [chimertized black folk] marked blackness as half-human, half-thing. These ideas of black existence and its assumed purpose were developed to foster to justify slavery and generate negative self-concepts within the black mind and create societal belief in black inferiority. If embraced, this could haunt and terrorize the soul of black folk and make the enslaved person less resistant to the visible and invisible chains of slavery.
The cultural forms and expressions of the enslaved differed from those of the slaveholding class, even though some cultural aspects were shared. The development and presentation of slave culture occurred within the mind of an individual enslaved person or group, where it was shared [formally or informally] with the group and, if accepted, became a way of doing things or thinking about a thing in the slave quarters. Slave culture established "norms, manners, and behavior, that which encouraged and promoted cooperation, mutual assistance, and black solidarity." Slave culture established a set of shared expectations, provided examples of positive self-concepts, and promoted their own slave values and ethics.
Culture contents comprise what scholars have called slave religion, and it is expressed through dance, folk tales, songs (spiritual and non-spiritual), and recreation.
These expressions not only manifested slave culture but more critically provided slaves with mental and emotional wellness, which explains that slave culture offered diversions and ways of expression that were outlets for dealing with bottled-up frustration, anger, sadness, grief, aggression, joy, shame, remorse, happiness, and laughter.
Allen Parker noted, "One of the diversions we had was coon hunting." Two or three men or young men went coon hunting together with coon dogs that were trained for the purpose of the hunt. Diversions such as coon hunting helped blacks to shed the frustrations of the workday and the condition of slavery while at the same time providing food for a family or one in need within the community.
Through culture, enslaved people generated a level of optimism "which makes sense of ultimate defeat not only unrealistic but impossible." Their culture helped them unlock the secrets of suffering that call for regeneration and restoring and make the goal and the demand of life, LIFE. Their culture helped them to deeply understand life "always included movement, process, inner activity, and some form of irritation. Their culture helped them to unlock the secrets of suffering, which to "reject annihilation and affirm a terrible right to live." Their culture which is nothing more than the summation of a people, their actions, goals, and ideas, helped them "reduce their exposure to violence," to live with the opportunity to have dignity according to their judgments. Their culture is a witness to the fact that these people remained creative and resilient in the worst of circumstances, which ultimately demonstrates their "majesty, beauty, and power."
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