The religion of the Negroes on the plantation was then, as it is today, of a much more primitive sort. Furthermore, there were considerable differences in the cultural status of different regions of the South and these differences were reflected in the Negro churches. There was at that time, as there is today, a marked contrast between the Upland and the Sea Island Negroes. Back from the coast the plantations were smaller, the contact of the master and slave were more intimate. On the Sea Island, however, where the slaves were and still are more completely isolated than elsewhere in the South, the Negro population approached more closely to the cultural status of the native African. The Sea Islands were taken possession of in the first years of the war by the Federal forces and it was here that people from the North first came in contact with the plantation Negro of the lower South. They immediately became interested in the manners and customs of the Island Negroes, and from them we have the first accurate accounts of their folk-lore and sayings.
The Sea Island Negroes speak a distinct dialect and retain certain customs which are supposed to be of African origin. It is, however, in their religious practices that we have the nearest approach to anything positively African. This has undoubtedly the characteristics of primitive ritual. But this does not mean that it is African in origin. It seems to me more likely that it is to be interpreted as a very simple and natural expression of group emotion, which is just beginning to crystallize and assume a formal character. The general tone of these meetings is that of a religious revival in which we expect a free and uncontrolled expression of religious emotion, the difference being that in this case the expression of the excitement is beginning to assume a formal and ritualistic character.
In the voodoo practices, of which we have not any accurate records, the incantations that were pronounced by the priests, contain strange, magic words, scraps of ancient ritual, the meanings of which are forgotten. Lafcadio Hearne, who knew the Negro life of Louisiana and Martinique intimately and was keen on the subject of Negro folk-lore, has preserved for us this scrap from an old Negro folk song in which some of these magic words have been preserved. Writing to his friend Edward Krehbiel he says:
"Your friend is right, no doubt about the
'Tig, tig, malaborn
La Chelerna che tango
Redjoum!'
"I asked my black nurse what it meant. She only laughed and shook her head. 'Mais c'est voodoo, ca; je n'en sais rien!' 'Well,' said I, 'don't you know anything about Voodoo songs?' 'Yes,' she answered, 'I know Voodoo songs; but I can't tell you what they mean.' And she broke out into the wildest, weirdest ditty I ever heard. I tried to write down the words; but as I did not know what they meant I had to write by sound alone, spelling the words according to the French pronunciation."[9]
So far as I know there are, among the plantation hymns, no such remains of ancient ritual, mystical words whose meanings are unknown, no traces whatever of African tradition. If there is anything that is African about the Negroes' Christianity, it is not African tradition but the African temperament which has contributed it. I assume, therefore, that what we find in the most primitive form of Negro Christianity is not the revival of an older and more barbaric religion but the inception of a new and original form of Christianity.
An interesting fact in regard to the religious practices of the Negroes of the Sea Islands, which has not, so far as I know, been recorded in any of the descriptions of that people, is the existence among them of two distinct religious institutions; namely, the church and the "praise house." The praise house is the earlier institution and represents apparently a more primitive and more characteristically Negro or African type. In slavery days, the church was the white man's place of worship. Negroes were permitted to attend the services and there was usually a gallery reserved for their use. Churches, however, were relatively few and not all the slaves on the plantation could attend at any one time. Those who did attend were usually the house servants. On every large plantation, however, there was likely to be, and this was characteristic of the Sea Island plantations, a "praise house" where the slaves were permitted to worship in their own peculiar way. It was here that the "shout" took place. After the Civil War, churches were erected and regular congregations of the Negro denominations were formed. The Negro churches, however, never wholly displaced the praise houses on Port Royal and some of the other islands. It is a singular fact that today, among the Negroes of Port Royal, at any rate, no one is converted in church. It is only in the praise houses that Negroes get religion. It is only through the praise house that one enters the church. The whole process involves, as I have been informed, not merely an "experience," the precise nature of which is not clear, but also an examination by the elders to determine whether the experience is genuine, before candidates are admitted in good standing as members of the congregation.
On the whole the plantation Negro's religion was a faithful copy of the white man's. It was content rather than the form which suffered sea change in the process of transmission from the white man to the black. What this content was, what new inflection and color the Negro slave imparted to the religious forms which he borrowed from his master we may, perhaps, gather from a study of the plantation hymns. These folksongs represent, at any rate, the naive and spontaneous utterance of hopes and aspirations for which the Negro slave had no other adequate means of expression. The first and most interesting account we have of these Negro spirituals is that of Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his Army Life in a Black Regiment.[10] He collected them from the lips of his own black soldiers as they sang them about the campfire at night. He was almost the first to recognize that these rude plantation hymns represented a real literature, the only literature the American Negro has produced, until very recent times.
Col. Higginson has compared the Negro spirituals to the Scotch ballads and to the folk songs of other races. It is, however, not so much their similarities as their differences which are interesting and significant. Negro folk songs are ruder and more primitive. The verses, often but not always rhymed, are, as in the case of the example given below, composed almost entirely of single phrases, followed by a refrain, which is repeated again with slight modifications, ending, not infrequently, in an exclamation.
An' I couldn't hear nobody pray,
O Lord!
Couldn't hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself,
I couldn't hear nobody pray.In the valley,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
On my knees,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
With my burden,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
An' my Saviour,
Couldn't hear nobody pray.O Lord!
I couldn't hear nobody pray,
O Lord!
Couldn't hear nobody pray.
O—way down yonder
By myself,
I couldn't hear nobody pray.Chilly waters,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
In the Jordan,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
Crossing over,
Couldn't hear nobody pray,
Into Canaan,
Couldn't hear nobody pray.