Levine quotes Clifton Furness writing about a prayer meeting, in a way that appears at first to reify slave consciousness as ripe for subordination: “I was gripped with the feeling of a mass-intelligence,” Furness writes, “a self-conscious entity, gradually informing the crowd and taking possession of every mind there, including my own” (42). He (Levine) interprets this passage and others as
mak[ing] it clear that the spirituals both during and after slavery were the product of an improvisational communal consciousness. They were not, as some observers thought, totally new creations, but were forged out of many preexisting bits of old songs mixed together with snatches of new tunes and lyrics and fit into a fairly traditional but never wholly static metrical pattern. The were, to answer Higginson’s question, simultaneously the result of individual and mass creativity. (42).
The interpretation is needed, I think, to dispel another potential reading of Furness’s description. Before getting to the passage above that comes from Levine’s pen, I took Furness’s reading of the songs as an implication of a divide between the mass-intelligence and the individuals who formed that mass. It was as if they were caught up in it, but not really responsible for the creative act; as though they were a vehicle for some larger consciousness, but not conscious themselves. We could see this in the “self-conscious entity” that “informs” the crowd, meaning that the crowd becomes a formless void, waiting to be imbued with meaning by some transcendent power or idea(l). The difference for my initial reading of Furness and Levine’s, comes from an expectation on my part (to go back to Deloria) that the researcher will see the slaves as less intelligent or self-conscious when reading through a modernizing European model.
This expectation surfaced earlier in my reading as well, when Levine describes the, “spontaneity, this sense of almost instantaneous community which so impressed Higginson, [that] constitutes a central element in every account of slave singing” (40). Initially, I had been wondering why he decided to look at slave songs coming from only the religious or spiritual setting. In other words, if the spiritual setting established a kind of communal consciousness/entity, and Levine interpreted this as a synecdoche for slave life, I wanted to know if it was a sampling error, if the spontaneous communal creativity seen in the churches, was something mirrored by all instances of singing, or if his reading was hiding an ability for individual composition and creation. However, Levine goes onto address this question, which rests upon an assumed distinction between everyday life and heightened circumstances, such as church (or art, or, or, or). Levine seems to want us to see the songs arising from everyday life (of which spirituality is an integral part), instead of as an unconscious expression of lived reality (and therefore, if we follow the typical construction of slave insight as unconscious: less intelligent, less articulate, (almost) accidental). Levine sees the lines between the everyday and the transcendent as consciously blurred, or blurred in (slave) consciousness. This blurring highlights the important difference between slave and master social or cultural practices and understandings, in which the slaveholder relies upon a separation of the transcendent from the everyday in order to justify his or her terrorizing of others while still maintaining a sense of spiritual purity.
Levine spots this difference in the opposing conceptions of what it means to be a chosen people. Noting that it might be surprising to see slaves conceiving of themselves as a chosen people in their songs (which we do), he writes that
White Americans could be expected to sing of triumph and salvation, given their long-standing heritage of the idea of a chosen people which was reinforced in this era by the belief in inevitable progress and manifest destiny, the spread-eagle oratory, the bombastic folklore, and paradoxically, the deep insecurities concomitant with the tasks of taming a continent and developing an identity. (45)
The heightened sense of what it meant to be chosen enabled slaveholders (or the majority of white Americans, even in the North) to imaginatively transcend the mundane everyday through the imagined ideal of exceptionalism or ordained destiny. The slaves, on the other hand, lived through their everyday. The way we read the relationships between the words in the second part of this statement seems important. If the slave lives through, slogs through, only survives his or her everyday, it becomes a mundane terror, something from which to escape. However if we see the slave living through or within that mundane and terrifying reality as it was perceived by others (the slaveholders), then the relationship between the secular and sacred, the mundane and the transcendent becomes more complex. To go back to the problem of when the songs were sung, Levine affirms that “they were not sung solely or even primarily in churches or praise houses, but were used as rowing songs, field songs, work songs, and social songs” (48). “For the slaves, then,” he writes, “songs of God and the mythic heroes of their religion were not confined to any specific time or place, but were appropriate to almost every situation” (48). Therefore, the sacred intertwines with the profane, or everyday, and becomes a way of reading it. While for the slaveholders it was an escape from mundaneness, sacredness for the slaves was a means of finding meaning in the moments and meanings that slipped through, or perhaps more accurately, that coexisted with the awfulness of their bondage.
This treatment of the everyday life of the slave is not an attempt to romanticize his or her spirituality, which becomes again a dangerous way of primitivizing difference. Rather, it de-trivializes slave songs. The temptation to read the songs as primarily something performed in the church, and therefore separated from everyday life not only establishes a foundation to see slave songs as derivatives of European-based hymns (which Levine argues against early in the essay), but also pushes their message of salvation into an otherwordly realm of sacred belief and hope. As Levine puts it, understanding this blurring of the sacred and everyday means that we see “the manner in which the sacred world of the slaves was able to fuse the precedents of the past, the conditions of the present, and the promise of the future into one connected reality” (54). This connection of past, present and future into one concurrent reality seems an important idea, one that gains currency if we consider Levine’s suggestive title. “Slave Songs and Slave Consciousness” calls to mind not just the communal entity forged through the songs that the article analyzes, but also the Hegelian model of subjectivity (if I understand it properly) in which there is a master consciousness, recognized in the dominance of the slave by the master. Slave consciousness then becomes consciousness of the master, or rather, consciousness of the presence of the master, and the experience of terror in that presence. Levine characterizes the typical reading of slave songs as derivative as something that follows this logic. However, the “vitally creative elements of slave culture” remained, meaning that the system to enslaved the slave did not “so totally [penetrate] his personality structure as to infantilize him and reduce him to a kind of tabula rasa upon which the white man could write what he chose” (57). This vision of the slave as a blank slate means that his consciousness of self has either been erased, or, as in Hegel’s model, exists only as a derivative of the master’s consciousness. Hegel tells us that the slave gains self-consciousness through the realization that his work (as material manifestations of his presence in the world) is appropriated by the master. In other words, he gains self-recognition only through consciousness of alienation from himself. Levine’s reading of the slave songs challenges this concept, because in order for it to function properly, the slave must have no remaining vestiges of his originating culture or tradition through assimilation. Thus, the narrative that slave songs derived from Christian hymns, but not the other way around. Levine writes in opposition to this model that the slave could either be seen as “divested of old cultural patterns but not allowed to adopt those of their new homeland,” or “cling[ing] to as many as possible of the old ways of thinking and acting” (57). He argues that the slave songs represent the second of these options, which is positive in a sense, but I think we might see in his argument another. Early on, as alluded to above, he writes that the musical influence that created the slave narratives ran across the cultural divide in both directions, making it less a division than a point of mutual re-creation (37). While the songs did not change the political situation of the slaves, they did challenge the oppressive reality in other ways (58). I think we might see this challenge in the different model of slave consciousness that the songs represent, one that, like DeCerteu’s idea of la perruque, enables on a means of reading one’s surroundings differently from the structures or strategies that shape that reality. The songs as tactical interventions in the everyday life of slaves means, as Levine argues, that they open another field of communal meaning and relationship that the slaveholders either assumed was confined to Sundays or that they misrecognized entirely.
-- Andy DuMont
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