• DOI:10.1086/JAAHV91N2P127
• Corpus ID: 141344081

"Dere Were No Place in Heaven for Him, an' He Were Not Desired in Hell": Igbo Cultural Beliefs in African American Folk Expressions

@article{Hildebrand2006DereWN,
  title={"Dere Were No Place in Heaven for Him, an' He Were Not Desired in Hell": Igbo Cultural Beliefs in African American Folk Expressions},
  author={Jennifer Hildebrand},
  journal={The Journal of African American History},
  year={2006},
  volume={91},
  pages={127 - 152}
}

• J. Hildebrand
• Published 22 March 2006
• History
• The Journal of African American History

The Spirits and human beings are in constant exchanges, but the [outsider] does not know. (1) Very few historians have explored the survival of ethnic identities and beliefs among enslaved Africans in North America and their descendants. W. E. B. Du Bois made a subtle reference to this form of cultural persistence in the United States when he wrote in 1903 that the black church was not, at first, "by any means Christian nor definitely organized; rather it was an adaptation and mingling of heathen rites among the members of each plantation." (2) I embrace the idea that there was not a single African identity, but a "mingling of heathen rites"--a significant carryover of ethnic identities that had been fundamental in the lives of Africans captured and forcibly brought to the United States. My goal is to better understand the ethnic components that ultimately blended together in the African American community, and to emphasize that not all markers of ethnic identity needed to be jettisoned to make such a blending possible. This essay will address the ethnic background of Igbos enslaved in the United States, demonstrating that Igbo culture left a lasting impact on the folklore or wisdom of the enslaved and their descendants, well into the 20th century. (3) The evidence for such an argument has long been available in the form of folktales collected by E. C. L. Adams. These folktales, especially "The King Buzzard," "The Yellow Crane," "Transmigration," and "Ole Man Rouse," would have had multiple levels of meaning in America. To the enslaved Africans who heard them, these tales surely expressed the wrongs inherent in slavery. But to members of the Igbo ethnic group, these tales also promised that the system of justice handed down from their ancestors survived, that life lasted longer than the time spent in a single earthly body, and that the ancestors would not overlook the sins of the master class. That these tales were steeped in significance for Igbo-descended people and other Africans of various other ethnic backgrounds attest to the fact that "syncretism" took place in the United States. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits employed the term to refer to change that occurred over time as two (or more) different cultures blended those elements unique to each. In Herskovits's parlance, syncretism involved an exchange between African and Euro-American cultures; his goal was to emphasize the long neglected and often denied African contributions to the various cultures in the Americas. (4) Indeed, syncretism must have taken place on at least two levels. Before African and European cultures could blend together, a somewhat unified African American culture had to be shaped out of various African ethnic components. Detailed examination of these four tales with Igbo ethnic components opens a window onto this process, allowing us to see how a tale might preserve specific ethnic beliefs at the same time that it held meaning for the wider African American community. The creation of a Pan-African identity in the United States, then, involved two levels of syncretism; and neither of those blendings required that ethnic components be discarded entirely from the mix. AFRICAN ETHNICITIES IN THE NEW WORLD Though U. B. Phillips in American Negro Slavery, published in 1918, mentioned the various ethnic backgrounds of Africans brought to the Americas, he did so in no useful way. (5) In the work of later historians, the references to ethnic identity or background virtually disappeared. While African ethnic influences in other parts of the Americas were (and are) confirmed routinely, most historians (though by no means all) have dismissed African ethnic identities in North America, sometimes through outright statements, and other times through omission. A few scholars in other disciplines provided exceptions to this general trend. In The Myth of the Negro Past, published in 1941, Herskovits described in this way one of the myths that he planned to challenge: "Since the Negroes were brought from all parts of the African continent, spoke diverse languages, represented greatly differing bodies of custom, and, as a matter of policy, were distributed in the New World so as to lose tribal identity, no least common denominator of understanding or behavior could have possibly been worked out by them. …