KRISTINA R. GADDY
  • Books
    • Well of Souls
    • Flowers in the Gutter
  • Writing
  • Open Stacks Blog
  • About
    • Support My Writing
  • Contact

Come in, the stacks are open.

Pinkster, the King of Kongo, and New York

10/19/2022

0 Comments

 
     “Wait, is his name Charles or is the name of the king King Charles?” someone asked me after reading a draft of Well of Souls. In Albany, New York, the most well-remembered King of the African American Pinkster celebration was Charles, but Albany wasn’t the only place that had Pinkster celebrations and Charles wasn’t the only king.
​     In Antiquities of Long Island from 1874, Gabriel Furman writes that although at first Pinkster, “the day of Pentecost,” was celebrated by Black and white New Yorkers, it “eventually became entirely left to the former,” and was never as popular on Long Island as it was in Albany. On the hill where “the Capitol now strands,” booths were set up and Black people came from near and far to celebrate. The dance as he remembers it was called the “Toto dance,” which was danced to “a hollow log, with a skin of parchment stretched over one end, the other being left open, on which they beat with a stick, making a rough, discordant sound,” a drum Furman calls the “banjo drum.” [1]
Picture
A later 19th century image of King Charles on horseback from Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
     “The head man in all these dances and processions was an old Guinea negro, aged eighty-five years, whom they called King Charlie,” continues Furman. James Eights had heard that Charles had been “brought from Angola” as a child. If you’ve read Well of Souls, you know that King Charles’s red coat and title as King connect him to traditions from the Kongo/ Angola region of Africa. Charles was said to be owned by “one of the most ancient and respectable merchant princes of the olden time, then residing on the opposite bank of the Hudson.” [2] This man was probably Volkert P. Douw, a mayor of Albany and New York state senator. [3] 
​     Interestingly, Douw also owned Dinah, one of the enslaved people accused of starting a fire in Albany and mentioned in the “Pinkster Ode” as being buried on Pinkster Hill, where the festivities took place. [4] Charles is reported to have died in 1824, but by then, the Pinkster celebrations had already been outlawed and declining in Albany.
     Many of the accounts of Pinkster (including fictionalized accounts in novels like James Fenimore Cooper’s Satanstoe) show up not only long after the festivity was no longer a regular occurence, but after the end of slavery in New York.
     In addition to describing Pinkster in Albany, Furman writes that Pinkster was celebrated on Long Island, too, and that even in 1874 “especially on the west end of this island, it is still much of a holiday.”
 
​     On the other side of the island in Brooklyn, “men, women and children, sometimes as many as two hundred” came to the market to celebrate Pinkster.  “They danced for eels around the market; they sang; "tooted" on fish horn; played practical jokes on one another,” wrote Henry Reed Stiles in 1869. People also got drunk and arrested for disorderly conduct, apparently, but Stiles reports that they were let off with a fine since Pinkster only happened once a year. [5]
Picture
Dancing for Eels 1820 Catharine Market. Read more at the Creolization of American Culture website by clicking the image.
     Across the river in Manhattan, Pinkster in the late 1790s was a “universal observance” and “boys and negroes might be seen all day standing in the market place, laughing, joking, and cracking eggs. In the afternoon, the grown up apprentices and servant girls, used to dance on the green in Bayard's farm in the Bowery,” according to an 1846 reminiscence. [6] In 1838, The New-York Mirror reported that two of the Pinkster celebrants were Billy the fiddler, who stood “four feet nothing in his stocking feet, and [was] deeply versed in the mysteries of catgutt” and Pot-pie Palmer “a light-hearted, shirtless vagabond, who, during the prevalence of the yellow-fever, trundled the dead to their graves, singing ‘Yankee-doodle,’ and ‘Hail, Columbia!’” [7] During the excavation of the African Burial Ground in New York, one man was found wearing a red military coat, which has led people to speculate that he was a Pinkster King.
Picture
Detail from Samuel Jennings's "Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences" where a Black man wears a red coat. / Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Picture
The Kownu in the banyaprei wears a red jacket with epaulets in this diorama by Gerrit Schouten / Rijksmuseum.
     And while we suspect that other Pinkster celebrations had their own kings, King Charles is the only king found in historical sources. (I default to the idea that there are very few contemporaneous sources that discuss Pinkster, which was often because white people with the means to document Black customs didn’t care enough to do so. And the later sources, which impart a sense of nostalgia for pre-slavery times, all seem to draw on each other.) However, in an 1894 article about Pinkster by historian Alice Morse Earle, she notes that around the same time as Pinkster (May or early June), Black residents throughout New England held an “Election Day” where a “Black Governor” was elected. In Windsor, Connecticut, the master of ceremonies in 1820 was a man named “General Ti,” enslaved to “Calt. Ellsworth.” [8]
     Like Calenda/ Kalinda dances elsewhere, similar traditions of celebrations and electing a king or master of ceremonies may have had different names but essentially served the same purpose: to carry religious and spiritual traditions forward in new ways, adapted to and integrated with the culture of white European Americans in power.
Read more about Pinkster and African American history in New York:
  • Dewulf, Jeroen. The Pinkster King and the King of the Kongo: The Forgotten History of America's Dutch-Owned Slaves. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017.
  • Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: the Influence of African American Art in History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Williams-Myers, A.J. Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley to the Early Twentieth Century. Africa World Press: Trenton, 1994.
Notes
[1] Gabriel Furman, Antiquities of Long Island, 235-239.
​[2] Furman, Antiquities, 323-327.
​[3] 
Dewulf, The Pinkster King, 60.
[4] Dewulf, "Rediscovering Pinkster," 17.
[5] Henry Stiles Reed. A History of the City of Brooklyn, Volume 2. 1869 39-40.
[6] 
John F Watson. Annals and occurrences of New York city and state , in the olden time : being a collection of memoirs, anecdotes, and incidents concerning the city, county, and inhabitants, from the days of the founders. Philadelphia : H.F. Anners, 1846, 178. 
[7] 
The New - York Mirror: a Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts 1823...Apr 14, 1838; 15, 42; American Periodicals Series Online pg. 330
[8] Alice Morse Earle. “Pinkster Day. “ Outlook (1893-1924); Apr 28, 1894; 49, 17; American Periodicals Series Online pg. 743-744.
This is part of Banya Obbligato, a series of blog posts relating to my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History. While integrally related to Well of Souls, these posts are editorially and financially separate from the book (i.e., I’m researching, writing, and editing them myself and no one is paying me for it). So, if you want to financially support the blog or my writing and research you can do so here. ​
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Come in, the stacks are open. 

    Away from prying eyes, damaging light, and pilfering hands, the most special collections are kept in closed stacks.  You need an appointment to view the objects, letters, and books that open a door to the past. 

    Here, pieces of material culture are examined in the light. The stacks are open. ​Read the stories behind objects and ephemera found in private collections, archives, and museums. 

    Archives

    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    August 2019
    July 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013

    Categories

    All
    16th Century
    17th Century
    18th Century
    19th Century
    20th Century
    21st Century
    African American History
    African History
    Alcohol
    Alcohol History
    America
    Animal
    Appalachian
    Art
    Bad Science
    Baltimore
    Banjo
    Banjo Collector's Gathering
    Banjo History
    Banya Obbligato
    Banya Prei
    Books
    Canada
    Cancer
    Cat
    Celebrations
    Chesapeake Bay
    Chicago
    Christmas
    Circus History
    Civil War
    Clown
    Cold War
    Colonial History
    Communism
    Conjoined Twins
    Cook Books
    Crab
    Creole-bania
    Culinary History
    Devil
    Drumming
    Dutch History
    Easter
    England
    Eugenics
    Exhibits
    Fiddle
    Film
    Food
    Food History
    France
    "Freak Show" History
    German American
    German History
    Goucher College
    Halloween
    Hockey
    Hollywood
    Hospital
    Human Development
    James Ford Bell Library
    Jewish History
    Lincoln
    Lost Baltimore
    Lost History
    Lying In
    Lying-In
    Magazine Covers
    Map
    Maritime History
    Maroons
    Maryland
    Maternity
    Medical History
    Medical Procedures
    Medicine
    Metropolitan Museum
    Midwifery
    Minstrelsy
    Monsters
    Museum
    Music
    Native American History
    New Jersey
    New Orleans
    Newspapers
    New York City
    Obstetrics
    Ozy
    Patent
    Photography
    Plain Weave
    Political History
    Politics
    President
    Print
    Psychology
    Public Transportation
    Science
    Sheet Music
    Skansen
    Skeleton
    South American History
    Sports
    Stedman
    Streetcar
    Suffragettes
    Suriname
    Sweden
    Swedish History
    Theater
    The Knick
    Third Reich
    Traditional Music
    Traditions
    Transportation History
    Tri-racial Isolate
    Typeface
    Typography
    U.S.
    USA
    U.S. History
    Valentine
    Vegetarian
    Vegetarianism
    Victorian
    Violin
    Virginia
    Vodou
    Weaving
    West Africa
    West Virginia
    Winti
    Wisconsin
    Witch
    Witches
    Women
    Women's History
    World History
    World War II

    Picture

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Books
    • Well of Souls
    • Flowers in the Gutter
  • Writing
  • Open Stacks Blog
  • About
    • Support My Writing
  • Contact