The Jumbies' Playing Ground: Old World Influences on Afro-Creole Masquerades in the Eastern Caribbean

THE JUMBIES’ PLAYING GROUND

FOLKLORE STUDIES IN A MULTICULTURAL WORLD

Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World

The Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World series is a collaborative venture of the University of Illinois Press, the University Press of Mississippi, the University of Wisconsin Press, and the American Folklore Society, made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The series emphasizes the interdisciplinary and international nature of current folklore scholarship, documenting connections between communities and their cultural production. Series volumes highlights aspects of folklore studies such as world folk cultures, folk art and music, foodways, dance, African American and ethnic studies, gender and queer studies, and popular culture.

Squeeze This!

A Cultural History of the Accordion in American

Marion Jacobson

(University of Illinois Press)

The Jumbies’ Playing Ground

Old World Influences on Afro-Creole Masquerades in the Eastern Caribbean

Robert Wyndham Nicholls

(University Press of Mississippi)

THE JUMBIES’ PLAYING GROUND

Old World Influences on Afro-Creole Masquerades in the Eastern Caribbean

ROBERT WYNDHAM NICHOLLS

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Publication of this book is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

First printing 2012

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nicholls, Robert (Robert Wyndham)

The jumbies’ playing ground : old world influence on Afro-Creole masquerades in the Eastern Caribbean / Robert Wyndham Nicholls.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-611-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-612-5 (ebook) 1. Moko Jumbies—Caribbean Area. 2. Stilt-walkers—Caribbean Area. 3. Carnival—Caribbean Area. 4. Caribbean Area—Social life and customs. I. Title.

GV1099.N54 2012

394.2509729—dc23

2012014809

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Edwin Christopher Cawte, whose research inspired me

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD: Clash of Cultures

John Wallace Nunley

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. Masquerade Derivation, Costumes, and Behavior

2. Aesthetics of Masquerading

3. Masquerading in the Eastern Caribbean

4. Specific Masquerade Types

5. Masquerade Prototypes in West Africa

6. Masquerade Prototypes in Western Europe

7. Old World–New World Comparisons

CONCLUSION

APPENDIXES

1. Informants in the Virgin Islands

2. Diaspora in Reverse

3. St. Croix Gombay Confrontation of 1852 and the Decline of Bamboula

4. The Moko and Carriacou Nation Dances

NOTES

REFERENCES

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

1.1. Mocko Jumbie, St. Croix, ca. 1900

1.2. Kumpo, Ziguinchor, Casamance, Senegal, 1994

1.3. Halloween disguise with mask, Uist, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, ca. 1930s

1.4. Straw Bear and handler, Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, England, 1909

1.5. Kankurang and guardian as woman, Ziguinchor, Casamance, Senegal, 2004

2.1. Bull, Frederiksted, St. Croix, ca. 1900–1910

2.2. Mocko Jumbie, St. Croix, ca. 1910

3.1. Masked king, Christiansted, St. Croix, ca. 1914

3.2. Plait Pole troupe, St. Croix, ca. 1900–1910

4.1. Mocko Jumbie dancer William Richardson, St. Thomas, ca. 1963

4.2. Straw Bear, Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, England, 1988

4.3. Hobbyhorse head, Newfoundland, Canada, ca. 1940

4.4. Valco horse, Tammela, Finland, 1928

4.5. Crookham Mummers, Hampshire, England, 1992

4.6. Carnival clowns, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, ca. 1963

5.1. Kankurang, Ziguinchor, Casamance, Senegal, 1991

5.2. Jola funeral bier, Ziguinchor, Basse Casamance, Senegal, ca. 1950

6.1. Skeklars, Fetlar, Shetland, Scotland, ca. 1900

6.2. Halloween disguise, Uist, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, ca. 1930s

6.3. Tapanipukki goat, Tammela, Finland, 1928

6.4. Tetbury Bull, Gloucestershire, England, 1975

6.5. Waterley Bottom Mummers, Gloucestershire, England, December 24, 1972

6.6. Marshfield Paper Boys, Gloucestershire, England, December 26, 1986

6.7. Julbock and Julget (Christmas goats), Vemdalen, Harjedalen, Sweden, 1919

6.8. Hobbyhorse dance from Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare (1839)

6.9. Janneys, Newfoundland, Canada, ca. 1995

7.1. Wedding mummers, Stardalen, Jølster, Norway, ca. 1900–1950

7.2. Death’s head masquerades, St. Thomas, ca. 1963

7.3. Masquerades, Christiansted, St. Croix, ca. 1900

8.1. Julegetta (Christmas goat) mask, Fredrikstad, Norway, ca. 1920

PLATES

Plate 1. Straw masquerade, Austria, 1989

Plate 2. Bull mask, Austria, 1989

Plate 3. St. Nicholas and Knecht Rupprecht, Austria, 1989

Plate 4. Mannequin with straw mask and skirt, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Ireland, June 2003

Plate 5. Robert Collins’s painting of Waterley Bottom Mummers, Kingscote, Gloucestershire, England, 2010

Plate 6. The ox skull Broad of the Waterley Bottom Mummers, Francis Kyle Gallery, London, May 10, 2011

Plate 7. Onyunwunyu masquerade, Benue, Nigeria, 1978

Plate 8. Kankurang pair, Banjul, Gambia, December 26, 1970

Plate 9. Frafra hunter/warrior, northeastern Ghana, ca. 1973

Plate 10. Horned Makalo dancers, Banjul, Gambia, December 26, 1970

Plate 11. Ejumba mask, Niomoun, Casamance, Senegal, 1965

Plate 12. Mandinka Red Spear mask, Gambia, 1967

Plate 13. Ejumba mask, Casamance, Senegal, 1886

Plate 14. Igbo Okoroshi Ojo mask, Mgbala Agwa, Nigeria, ca. 1948

Plate 15. Mmanwu masquerade, Njima Club, Arondizuogu, Arochukwu, Abia, Nigeria, January 1988

Plate 16. Mgbedike masquerade, Akokwa, Imo, Nigeria, January 14, 1988

Plate 17. Back of the Mgbedike masquerade, Akokwa, Imo, Nigeria, January 14, 1988

Plate 18. Horned mask, Umodim village, Umuowa, Imo, Nigeria, March 12, 1988

Plate 19. Okokonko masquerade, Umuowa, Imo, Nigeria, March 12, 1988

Plate 20. Igede Ebuwo stilt masquerade, Uwokwu, Nigeria, 1981

Plate 21. Dan stilt dancers, Ivory Coast, 1982

Plate 22. Stilt dancer (possibly Gue Gblin masquerade), Ivory Coast, ca. 1970

Plate 23. Masquerade of the Urhobo people, northwestern Niger River Delta, Nigeria, 1976

Plate 24. Kakabotofo Fancy Dress pair, Fante, Elmina, Ghana, 1974

Plate 25. Fancy Dress or Kakabotofo with bitonal face, Fante, Elmina, Ghana, 1973

Plate 26. Clydie Murrain, John Hughes Village, Antigua, December 1994

Plate 27. Raffia masquerade, Frederiksted, St. Croix, ca. 1980

Plate 28. Pitchy Patchy, Frederiksted, St. Croix, July 3, 1995

Plate 29. Elaine Urgent performs a spoof of Alex Faucett, Frederiksted, St. Croix, July 3, 1995

Plate 30. Donkey mas’, Frederiksted, St. Croix, 1997

Plate 31. Magnus the Mocko Jumbie, St. Thomas, ca. 1950

Plate 32. Fiesta de Santiago de Apóstol, Loiza Aldea, Puerto Rico, July 1977

Plate 33. John Bulls, St. Johns, Antigua, 1994

Plate 34. John Bull, Antigua, Christmas 1999

Plate 35. Jam Bull with drummers, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, 2001

Plate 36. George Pope Farrell as Jam Bull, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 28, 2001

Plate 37. Glenn Trini Pierre as Jam Bull, accompanied by whip man Austin Burnett, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 28, 2001

Plate 38. Mocko Jumbie, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, ca. 2002

Plate 39. Mystical Mocko Jumbies, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 26, 1997

Plate 40. Mocko Jumbie dancer Gerard Luz James II and Pitchy Patchy masquerade worn by Amy Gill, Frederiksted, St. Croix, July 3, 1995

Plate 41. Moko Jumbi ’n’ Fren Dem stilt dancer, St. Thomas, 1996

Plate 42. Sensay, Dominica, ca. 1998

Plate 43. Sensay, South City, Dominica, 2010

Plate 44. Sensays, South City, Dominica, 2010

Plate 45. Sensay of Waseen Dominica Association, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, 2009

Plate 46. Horned Sensay of Waseen Dominica Association, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, 2009

Plate 47. Vitus Mas’ Sensay, Antigua, Christmas 1999

Plate 48. Carnival clowns, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, ca. 1963

Plate 49. Vitus Mas’ clown, Antigua, Christmas 1999

Plate 50. Heraldic clown, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 26, 1997

Plate 51. Tropical Masqueraders clown twins, St. Thomas, April 25, 1997

Plate 52. Carnival clown, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 26, 1997

Plate 53. Montserrat masqueraders, St. John’s, Antigua, 1994

Plate 54. Vitus Mas’ Highlanders, Antigua, Christmas 1999

Plate 55. Carriacou Shakespeare Mas’ player Albert Donkey Duncan, Top Hill, Carriacou, March 29, 2007

Plate 56. Kittitian wire-screen mask with peacock feathers, ca. 1996

Plate 57. Montserrat masquerade mask, Plymouth, Montserrat, 1995

Plate 58. Mystical Mocko Jumbie mask, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 26, 1997

Plate 59. Aboriginal Mocko Jumbie masquerade, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 26, 1997

Plate 60. Mocko Jumbie performer Alvin Alli Paul, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 26, 1997

Plate 61. Naomi Baylarian of Moko Jumbi ’n’ Fren Dem, St. Thomas, 1996

Plate 62. Moko Jumbi ’n’ Fren Dem cloth mask with noodle design made by Naomi Baylarian, 1996

Plate 63. Tropical Masqueraders member donning her costume, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, April 26, 1997

Plate 64. Jester troupe member, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, ca. 2002

Plate 65. Promenader, Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, ca. 2002

FOREWORD

Clash of Cultures

JOHN WALLACE NUNLEY

The Jumbies’ Playing Ground documents an extraordinary social history of humans, one that developed as a result of a meeting of Amerindian societies of the New World and the experiments in social living created by players and actors from the Old World. While the social life of New World peoples was greatly disturbed by this meeting—and that is a related story—another important merging has been taking place in the new country to this day: between Old World European and African peoples.

The meeting of Old World European and African peoples was largely responsible for the creation of a new economic engine that served as the foundation for the birth of global capitalism. That engine provided the means by which European entrepreneurs leveraged their economic systems, moving from the mercantile format to that of full-blown capitalism.

This engine was the plantation system to which Robert Nicholls has dedicated his scholarly life. His focus is the Leeward Islands of the West Indies—Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts–Nevis, Anguilla, Montserrat, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, among many others. In keeping with the saying Man cannot live by bread alone, the islands have seen the development of a Creole cultural foundation centering on music, lyrics, dance, festival dress, and food and denoting cultural exchange, competition, and innovation among Old World civilizations. These wandering players helped to create a meeting place redolent with meaning as well as social and individual identities. This new cultural crucible, expressed in masking and performance and literally born of blood, sweat, and tears, cradled the new social experiment and its economic alter ego. Today, the playing grounds thrive, fueled by global tourism.

I, too, share a robust appreciation and enthusiasm for this historical and contemporary cultural phenomenon. Caught up in the heat of 1984’s Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, I had my first meeting with mas’ leader Steven Derrick, who had launched a band, Clash of Cultures. The name concisely sums up the modus operandi that has given shape to this publication. I had entered the playing grounds of Trinidad Carnival. With the heat of the steel band, soca music, and festival foods from all over the world, Derrick explored the mas’, its music, and the remaining panoply of the performing arts. Not incidentally, in the process of contemporary Creolization, Derrick has played a major role in bringing mas’ to St. Thomas, where Nicholls has conducted impressive research.

A few years later, I was following a Peter Minshall band, Moco Jombies, named for a masquerade character central to Nicholls’s thesis. As the band made its final lap from the Queens Park Savannah stadium, the soca road march Wet Me Down played on. A dear friend of mine was wining (dancing) in a seething hip rotation, as was the whole city. We were cooling off from feeling hot, hot, hot from the day as well as from the long-ago hardships of work, displacement, and settlement faced by our Old World ancestors. We were being cooled and healed by the playing ground. An old friend, Raoul Patin, explained, I did not play mas’ last time, and for the rest of that year my health faded. This year, 1987, the Jumbies and the spirits restored Patin for yet another annual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

But how did this all begin? Migration!

THE AFRICAN MIGRATION

Given the depth of the institution of African slavery, which began along domestic and Saharan routes in ancient times, the first European explorers, the Portuguese, easily expanded the system for the Atlantic trade. The forced migrations of African captives to the coast and across the Atlantic to the plantation estates profoundly shaped human experience and the formation of the playing grounds. African peoples were enslaved by the millions, finding their bodies turned literally into engines of production. The kidnapped included captives of warfare, debtors or their kin through pawning, those accused of crimes, and anyone unlucky enough to cross a slaver’s path. Human beings were shackled, tied together, and marched or packed into canoes for transportation to the coast. Occasionally, some individuals were sold or bought at local markets along the way, thus splitting families and mixing ethnicities. Herded like animals toward the coast, captives felt a great sense of compression, which was exacerbated by the nearby dangers posed by leopards, snakes, crocodiles, hippopotamuses, and human predators. The victims of the slave trade found themselves in very tight spots indeed. Slaves rested in makeshift cages or huts called barracoons at night, resuming the journey the next day until they reached the mercantile factories on the coast. There, slaves were stored just inches from one another in underground bunkers with little light—more compression.

This environment gave rise to Creolization. Some of the slaves worked at the factories as cooks, translators, and domestic servants. Africans were exposed to elements of European expressive culture, including music, dance, plays, and holiday celebrations. At the same time, many white men who worked for the African companies took black wives or concubines. Furthermore, in the support villages near the factories, Europeans and Africans expressed their own pleasures and cultural pastimes, sharing and creating new variations of expressive culture.

THE EUROPEAN JOURNEY

As slaves waited in Africa to be sold, the great European seaports—Liverpool, Lisbon, Nantes, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Copenhagen—outfitted vessels and abducted or otherwise recruited sailors for the voyage to Africa. Every ship included sailors who played musical instruments—violins, harmonicas, brass, flutes, melodeons, drums, and whistles. Such entertainments helped to pass the time when the ships were stuck in the doldrums. Passing the Tropic of Cancer was occasion for celebrations in honor of sailors crossing the line for the first time. Masked old-timers escorted these initiates to the front deck of the ship and hazed them on a plank placed over a barrel filled with water.

The crew on a vessel anchored in the estuary of the Sierra Leone River enacted Hamlet in 1607, the same year that the play became all the rage in London. Anchorage beyond the breakers could last five months or more, depending on how long it took to fill the hold with slaves. Given a lengthy stay, entertainment for sea captains and their crews occurred at factories such as Bunce Island, in Sierra Leone. Some of the factory housing was well appointed, including fireplaces. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, traders and administrators played golf on a two-hole course, assisted by black caddies dressed in Glasgow-made kilts. Festivals on Christmas and Boxing Day brought similar reminders of home, sweet home.

CROSSING THE ATLANTIC

At the factories, oiled slaves were lined up for inspection and sale. Those purchased were packed onto canoes for transport over the breakers to the ships, where the slaves were deposited in double-level holds, three to four feet high with no space between chattel. At night, spooning was the only way for a slave to stretch out—again, compression.

Fever, dysentery, and respiratory disease and madness cut into slavers’ profits. To increase morale, slaves were issued rations of tobacco and rum. Captives were often brought on deck to exercise to the sound of drums and melodeons while a man cracked a whip at or near the slaves’ feet, forcing them to jump. Memory embedded in such horrifying calisthenics may well have shaped the Creole dances of the West Indies, where high-step choreographies, accompanied by whip action, are widespread. Those Africans who survived the journey usually spent a week onboard ship in New World harbors, being fattened, oiled, and readied for sale in yet another compressed space.

PLANTATION LIFE AND DECOMPRESSION

As inhuman and incomprehensible as the business of slavery was, in the Age of Enlightenment, life was just as hard on the estates. People died quickly, the work was brutal. However, decompression also offered a little hope and a means of making a life in the new country. A drawing by Richard Bridgens, The End of the Day (1820), depicts a Trinidadian slave gang decompressing after a hard day’s work cutting sugarcane. Men and women dance with high steps, while others play a drum made from a rum barrel, a metal triangle fashioned from a stirrup, a metal pot, gourd rattles, a pitchfork, and a horseshoe, likely the replacement for the African double gong (agoogoo), which today still establishes the basic tempo of African and the African diaspora music ensembles. The master of the estate and his entourage undoubtedly could hear this celebration at the Big House up the hill. Likewise, field slaves could hear their masters’ festivities on calendar holidays and would get reports about Fancy Dress balls and disguise charades from domestic slaves. A hybrid was in the making.

More decompression became available on Sundays, when slaves grew vegetables and traded foodstuffs, cloth, firewood, and luxuries at the weekly market. According to noted folklorist Roger Abrahams, markets were and are dangerous to authority, since they can give birth to ideas about freedom and other troubling concepts. As time moved forward and the engines of global trade, including slaves, carried the work, African Creoles survived by calling on the embedded memory of African days and stories of those days told by elders, transforming those older cultural expressions so that they functioned within a wider, more global expressive culture dominated by European capitalism. New life under very harsh conditions in a new country emerged on the playing grounds. The late Jamaican dancer, choreographer, and philosopher Rex Nettleford once pointed out to me that those Creole entertainments were the foundation for the designs for social living that gave birth to West Indian civilization.

Jumbies, horses, bulls, cows, donkeys, bears, clowns, straw men, mummers, kings and queens, Indians, men of words, and men as women, were and are the characters that compose the playing ground, recalling the social and cultural history of the Indies while pointing to the futures of so many island nations. In this volume, Robert Nicholls tells this rich and complex story.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I want to recognize all the interviewees and informants who contributed their memories and invaluable insights to this project. I am grateful to the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, for providing a supportive environment and to the UVI’s Ralph M. Paiewonsky Library for its services. The input of the Society of Virgin Island Historians, especially Betsy Rezende; the Estate Whim Plantation Museum, especially Carol Wakefield; and the Enid M. Baa Library, especially Annice Canton, is duly noted, as are the contributions of Myron Jackson and Ruth Moolenaar of the VI Heritage Institute. The work of some individuals stands out: Mary Jane Soule conducted interviews during the late 1970s and early 1980s, creating an important collection of Virgin Islands’ oral history. Historian George Tyson made available Danish-era literature and many of the nineteenth-century newspaper reports that appear in the monograph. UVI historian Arnold Highfield was also generous with information and provided access to obscure European texts. Special gratitude goes to Kenneth Bilby and Ivor Miller, Rockefeller Fellows for the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College, and to Rockefeller Fellow Dominique Cyrille of Martinique and to Douglas Chambers. I was fortunate to interact with numerous culturally attuned individuals in the Caribbean. From Montserrat, author Eddie Donoghue and scholar/masquerader Donna Henry of the Montserrat National Trust were paramount, as was Sheron Burns. In Barbados, Betty Carillo Shannon, librarian at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, provided literature sources, and of Barbadians, fellow UVI faculty members Dion Phillips and Trevor Parris gave input, as did Nancy Jacobs, UWI, Cave Hill Campus. I refer to the publications of fellow faculty and St. Kitts natives Vincent Cooper and Simon Jones Hendrickson, while Nevisian educator Simeon Roper provided firsthand accounts of masquerades in Nevis, as did Alice and Daniel Elliott. In the Bahamas, information about Junkanoo was provided by Nicolette Bethel, Jackson Burnside, Arlene Nash Fergusson, Roosevelt Finlayson, and Krista Thompson. Regarding Antigua, Michelle Henry, curator at the Antigua National Museum, and Keva Margetson of the Vitus Mas’ group keep the tradition alive. UVI’s Lornetta Prince has witnessed many John Bull performances and helped facilitate the Antiguan research. Others to whom I owe a debt of gratitude include bull performer Clovelle Philip and senior culture-bearers Romic Williams and Austin James. Author/playwright Edgar Lake provided a range of information on masquerades in Antigua. George Pope Farrell provided an important backdrop to his career as a Jam Bull performer, while other information came from whip man Austin Burnett and Jam Bull performer Glenn Pierre. The input of Antiguan scholar and masquerade dancer Anthony Richards was judicious. Jamaicans Sydney March and Velma Pollard provided input, as did American ethnomusicologist Doris Green. Lennox Honychurch, curator of the Dominica Museum, is a living archive, while Kneath Warrington provided Sensay photos. Regarding Trinidad, my former colleague at UVI, calypso monarch Hollis Chalkdust Liverpool, contributed, as did John Cupid of the Carnival Institute, Pearl Eintou Springer of the National Heritage Library, Hazel Franco of UWI, and Pamela Franco of Tulane University. Thanks also go to Joan F. McMurray, Joan Fayer, and Dannabang Kuwabong of the University of Puerto Rico and Diana Baird N’Diaye and Olivia Cadaval of the Center for Folklife Programs, Washington, D.C. African scholars included Senegambian Mbye Cham; Malian Bokari Guindo; Nigerians Babatunde Lawal, Ode Ogede, and Olabayo Olaniyi; Ghanaians Nii Ahené, Ofori Ansah, Kofi Boeteng, John Collins, and Soulay Ousman; and Cameroonian Dominic Ntube as well as Kadiatou Konte, chanteuse from Guinea. British informants included Gloucestershire wassailers and folklorists Gwilym Davies, Geoff Haines, and Stephen Rowley and historical researcher Richard Chidlaw. Other help came from photographer/archivist Brian Shuel and scholar/authors E. Richard Cawte, Caroline Oates, Ian Russell, and other members of the Folklore Society. Paul Smith of the Memorial University of Newfoundland is a pillar of strength in that Atlantic Rim outpost, and the University of Iceland’s Terry Gunnell made major contributions in the area of Nordic mumming and helped me acquire photos from that region. Notable scholarly input was provided by Eli Bentor, Herbert Cole, Peter Mark, and John Nunley as well as by other members of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, including Martha Anderson, Judith Bettelheim, David Binkley, Jean Borgatti, Donald Hill, Sidney Kasfir, Frederick Lamp, Conchita Ndege, Keith Nicklin, Simon Ottenberg, Allen Roberts, Polly Nooter Roberts, and Robert Farris Thompson as well as by Danish scholar Gerhard Seibert. Assistance came from National Museum of African Art personnel Veronika Jenke, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Janet Stanley, and Amy Staples. Virgin Islands scholars included Charles Turnbull, historian and former governor of the VI; Ruth Beagles; Dmitri Copeman; Glen Kwabena Davis; Gene Emanuel; Denise Georges; Elaine Warren Jacobs; Annie Smith; Gilbert Sprauve; and Maurice Thomas. Other VI contributors included authors Gerry Brunn, Ruth Moolenaar, and Richard Schrader. Finally I thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–sponsored initiative, Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World, for making this book possible.

THE JUMBIES’ PLAYING GROUND

INTRODUCTION

Similarities between disguised performance traditions in the West Indies and those in West Africa and Western Europe warrant investigation. The Jumbies’ Playing Ground explores cross-cultural knowledge transfer relating to transatlantic art influences. This interdisciplinary study examines how Afro-Creole masquerades evolved and looks for possible precursors in the regions from which Caribbean populations were drawn. More specifically, it examines the elements of Old World masquerades adopted in the Lesser Antilles in terms of appearance, roles, and behavior. In so doing, this research provides a detailed exploration of the origins of New World cultural practices as well as cultural transfers between European and African descendants starting with Caribbean colonialism. Other studies in this area usually have been only side issues in debates focusing on another topic, have focused on a single group, or have otherwise been limited in scope. By taking a broader perspective, The Jumbies’ Playing Ground brings new depth to the study of the international dimensions of cultural interchange. It transcends established academic boundaries and interacts with other areas while adding to village-based studies on the arts of island-cluster communities and how they have intersected with broader currents of global interchange.

This book examines the making of Afro-Creole masquerades, which are an important part of mas’ (masquerade) within the vernacular mode of Caribbean music and dance. This book focuses on masquerades of the Eastern Caribbean—Barbados and the Leeward Islands of the Northern Lesser Antilles—and only on early prototypes containing residues of Old World beginnings. It is not intended as a compendium of Leeward Islands’ masquerades but rather highlights certain practices that date back to the beginning of the plantation economy. The Old World section concentrates on the masquerades of Upper Guinea, especially the Mande diaspora, though the Igbo and other West African groups are also discussed. In Western Europe, the focus is on Britain (especially the West Country), Ireland, the Nordic regions, and Scandinavia. The Leeward Islands include Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts–Nevis, Anguilla, Montserrat, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI),¹ but the study also examines Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada, and Carriacou in the Windward Islands as well as Barbados. Jamaica appears because as a significant part of the former British West Indies (BWI), it has more in common with the Lesser Antilles than it does with its neighbors in the Greater Antilles, Cuba and Hispaniola. As part of the cultural network of the Atlantic Rim region, North Carolina and Newfoundland also appear in this account.²

The traditions explored in this book overlap with but are essentially different from those of the Latin Carnaval that spread to the New World during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when Spain, Portugal, and France began colonizing parts of the Americas. For example, the dance in the Leeward Islands known as Plait Pole (Maypole) bears a marked similarity to the Danza de las Cinta (Ribbon Dance) performed by the masked dancers of San Juan Totolac in Mexico (Mauldin 2004, 162), but such parallels are not pursued here. New World carnivals are explored in other worthy books (see, e.g., Kinser 1990; Mauldin 2004), as are expositions of Bakhtinian notions of liminality and inversion (Bakhtin 1984; Turner 1969, 1974). In Montserrat, the enslaved’s adoption of St. Patrick’s miter as a headdress for their principal masquerade is seen as a rite of reversal. The Leeward Islands’ inversion of social norms during Christmas mas’ is shared with Mardi Gras and carnivals held in Trinidad, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil but differs in that the carnivals, connected as they are to Catholicism, represent pre-Lenten revelry for which participants typically atone in the fasting and sobriety of Lent. With the exception of hangovers and empty pockets, there was no period of atonement following Leeward Islands festivities.

This book is based on certain assumptions. Masquerading is multivoiced, providing whole theater that combines other arts—music, dance, performance, and visual decoration. Art has the ability to provide glimpses of an underlying reality in the here and now as well as of the universal in a particular instance—universal human values, the collective unconscious, or folk perceptions of ancestors. Arguments for an Old World provenance of masquerade genres assume that these traditions have been resilient over time. Although European genres are quite well documented in the literature, there are fewer historical records about the sorts of West African masquerades of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to which enslaved Africans en route to the Caribbean might have been exposed. However, masquerades documented in the first half of the twentieth century are fair representations of long-established traditions, and some surviving African masking traditions are known to have remained little changed for hundreds of years: the horned Ejumba masquerades of the Jola (Diola) of Senegambia (Mark 1992); the Kankuran bush masquerades of the Mandinka (De Jong 2007); and the Zooba masquerade of the women’s Sande society in Liberia (Monts 1984). Charry (2000, 197–98) confirms such continuity in Upper Guinea: Accounts written by Europeans over the past several centuries describe dance events similar to those seen in villages nowadays. Furthermore, while many of the West African masquerades proposed here as exemplars remain operant in the twenty-first century, the same does not hold true to the same degree for Western European practices. Although a few stalwart performers preserve the tradition, this dearth is particularly poignant in England’s West Country, which was historically strong in wassailing. Accordingly, this research draws broadly from Western European regions to generate a field of likely prototypes, some still active, recognizing that similarities existed among peasant communities; indeed, a common masquerading ethos seems to have once encompassed most of Europe. What Margaret Fay Shaw witnessed in the Scottish Hebrides at Halloween in the early 1930s can be considered a cultural fossil, though at that time it was also common in Scandinavia and the Nordic Regions. According to Shaw (1955, 14), One little boy spent the day carefully removing the entire skin off the head of a sheep so he could slip it over his own head like a bag, with ears intact. Compare this practice to the paintings of Romans in Alexandria in 1344 wearing heads of a donkeys, monkeys, goats, and bulls (E. K. Chambers 1903/1967, 1:frontispiece) or to John Hadman’s 1433 King of Christmas parade in Norwich, England, where revelers, dressed as devils, chased the people, while others were wearing skin dresses, and counterfeiting bears, wolves, lions, and other animals (Coffin 1973, 134).

A comparison of Old World and Leeward Islands masquerading is necessarily a broad study containing lots of diverse information, but the weft has been systematically separated from the weave and information presented in a systematic and unambiguous manner. The rigorous use of tangible proof in historical research is critical, but it is important to remember that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. At a certain level of antiquity, the sociopolitical roles of masquerades in Western Europe seem comparable to West African traditions—similar enough in many aspects to provide a conterminous bedrock to this study.

The research examines the interaction between intercontinental and interisland diffusion. Customs from diverse societies migrated into the Caribbean, and more localized transmission occurred as well. Most of the Leeward Islands were once part of the former BWI, and this commonality provided shared British influences and allowed for cultural interchange among the islands. Such sharing extended to the Danish West Indies (DWI, now the USVI) because the Danes did not import their folk culture into the Caribbean in any substantial way. Although Danes administered the islands, most plantation managers and planters were English, Irish, or Scottish. Nevertheless, peasants in Denmark had a vibrant mumming culture, and although the Julebukk was outlawed in 1668, straw effigies continued. This familiarity might have encouraged straw dolls such as John Hog and endorsed the Straw Bear in the DWI. Raffia masquerades such as the Straw Bear are somewhat generic to the West Indies, West Africa, and Western Europe, but in the Eastern Caribbean, only two named the bear were uncovered—one in the Virgin Islands and one in Barbados. Are the two connected? Following emancipation in 1848, the Danish islands experienced an influx of laborers from the former BWI, including Barbados, Antigua, and St. Kitts–Nevis. Some became actively involved in social issues: For example, the activist Queen Mary of the 1878 Fireburn fame hailed from Antigua. Although masquerading occurred in the preemancipation Virgin Islands, the new arrivals doubtless boosted it. Marshall, the premier Mocko Jumbie in St. Croix during the early twentieth century, came from Barbados. This research examines whether the Virgin Islands’ bear originated in Barbados or was derived independently from a confluence of Danish and Irish customs.

Chapter 1 spells out the book’s ideas and themes and includes a discussion of masquerade derivation, costumes, and behavior. What is a Jumbie, what constitutes play, and what is the significance of the playing ground? Chapter 2 looks at masquerade group membership, performance calendar, and class composition as well as the logistics and economics of masquerading. Chapter 3 investigates aesthetics, including dressing up and dressing down; costume and mask types; and stilts, horns, and whips, followed by an examination of musical and percussion instruments and rhythm and song texts. Chapter 4 describes eighteen masquerade types in the Eastern Caribbean, while chapters 5 and 6 look at the Old World provenance of masquerade exemplars in West Africa and Western Europe, respectively. Chapter 7 compares Old and New World masquerades in both secular and spiritual realms and describes a Leeward Islands Saturnalia. Finally, the conclusion examines religious censure in a historical context in each of the three regions and considers the past, present, and future of masquerading in the Eastern Caribbean.

Chapter 1

MASQUERADE DERIVATION, COSTUMES, AND BEHAVIOR

I became interested in masquerade performances while getting my degree in art in London. A Yoruba artist, Taiwo Emmanuel Jegede of the Keskidee Arts Center in England, taught us that the artist’s duty is to feed society’s soul. I was intrigued by a masquerade’s quality of whole theater, combining the other arts.¹ I eventually researched the masquerade culture of the Igede people of Benue State, Nigeria. Although once used to ready warriors for war or to commemorate battle victories, Igede masquerades such as Onyantu, Aitah, Ogrinye, and Abakpa now appear primarily during funerals or during the New Yam Festival, which demarcates each agricultural year. I found that a masquerade’s performance is one of many voices within an event where an enhanced aesthetic is initiated by the conjunction of different art forms (Nicholls 1997, 64).²

During my research among the Igede, I found that ancestors were viewed as being of the dawn or the beginning and as conservative and concerned with the continuity of tradition. Yet because the dawn recurs each day, they are also connected with rebirth and renewal, creation and creativity. This viewpoint suggests not only that old things can be regenerated as new things but that old ancestral things such as masquerades can possess an immediacy that makes them appear as vital and new. In modern day soca and calypso parlance, the word wind (pronounced wine) refers to the pelvic rotations characteristic of many African-derived dances. Similarly, work (pronounced wuk) is currently used to refer to dance. It might be assumed that these are relatively modern terms, probably not more than thirty or forty years old. Yet more than two centuries ago, Moreton (1790, 14–15) documented a dance song in Jamaica that includes these terms:

Hipsaw! my deaa! You no shake like a-me!

You no wind like-me! Go, yondaa!

Hipsaw! my deaa! You no jig like a-me!

You no work like a-me! You no sweet him like a-me!

This lyric exposes the vintage of the customs that are researched here as well as the context that implies that they can appear fashionable and new despite their age. Authentic masquerades possess something of this quality, seeming fresh and novel on each encounter. Although Ronald Hutton (1997, 94) launched his academic career by calling the antiquity of the British animal disguises of the early nineteenth century into question, he concedes that the nature of the entertainment, if not the physical artifact, has remained consistent over the years and that the impression of antiquity cannot be denied. Furthermore, he points out,

E. C. Cawte shrewdly commented that the experience of being inside a hooden horse has an odd character of its own, involving a sense of slackening responsibility for what occurs as the role of playing the creature takes over. The present author, who has had that experience, must agree, and testify to the nervousness in the laughter of most spectators at the approach of something that is, and yet is not, a human being. . . . These customs do have a way of communicating something genuinely archaic, whatever their actual age. (94)

On arriving in the Virgin Islands (VI), I was pleased to discover that Caribbean masquerading did not simply consist of John Canoe in Jamaica but was part of the heritage of the Eastern Caribbean. Professor Ruth Beagles (pers. comm., July 10, 1995) told me that when she was growing up in Christiansted, St. Croix, she would hear the jing-jing-jing of the steel triangle in the Christmas celebration and run to the window of her two-story house to throw coins down to a small group of musicians and a masquerade, maybe Lucifer with horns, or Donkey Mas’ dancing to the tune Donkey want water, hold him down. I decided to explore Eastern Caribbean masquerading in more depth and thereby to discover its historical influence on today’s carnivals.³

Each Caribbean Island has a carnival, but they are held at different times of the year. Dominica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Trinidad keep their carnivals true to Catholic tradition as pre-Lenten bacchanals ending on Ash Wednesday, like the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Anguilla, Antigua, Grenada, and Tortola hold their carnivals at the beginning of August to commemorate emancipation in the former British West Indies (BWI); St. Kitts–Nevis, Montserrat, St. Croix, and the Bahamas hold their festivals at Christmas, perpetuating ancient turn-of-the-year traditions. (Nevis also features Culturama in August.) Still others hold their carnivals at distinctive times. In Barbados, the carnival is held in June or July and is a continuation of the old Crop Over Festival, which celebrates the sugarcane harvest. St. Martin holds its carnival on April 30, the birthday of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. St. Thomas also has its carnival at the end of April, simply to extend the tourist season.

The masquerades of the different islands are similar, though their festivals’ Creole names