From the Earth: Spirituality, Medicine Vessels, and Consecrated Bowls as Responses to Slavery in the South Carolina Lowcountry

ABSTRACT

People enslaved on the rice plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry struggled to create community and to protect the health and well-being of themselves and their families. Archaeological comparison of different forms of hand-built, low-fired pottery from the Carolina Lowcountry with practices in West and Central Africa suggests captive workers were using the pottery as necessary receptacles for preparing herbal medicines and for making charms similar to those of the Bakongo in Central Africa. African ethnographic evidence indicates that pottery is linked to conceptions of gender and power, and these ideas were likely incorporated in the ethnogenesis of the Gullah people of Carolina. Historical records and archaeological research suggest the central part of the Cooper River may have been a figurative crossroads for the enslaved people of the region. Archaeological and ethnohistorical research of enslaved people of the Carolina Lowcountry is only beginning.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonoware pottery
• Bakongo
• Gullah
• trans-Atlantic slavery
• medicine vessels
• Carolina Lowcountry
• gender
• power

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate Kenneth Kelly for inviting Leland Ferguson to participate in the 2013 “Studying Carolina, Africa, Rice, and Slavery Symposium” that initiated this study. We sincerely appreciate the willingness of Edda Fields-Black and Aline Allston Ferguson to read and comment on early drafts of the manuscript. Andrew Agha, Nicole Isenbarger, and Cyrus MacFoy read the manuscript and kindly provided valuable material from their research; Lisa Randle shared an important observation on the content. As he has for more than twenty years, Christopher DeCorse was always ready and competent to answer questions about West Africa. Christopher Fennell, Peter Schmidt, Peter Wood, Joe Joseph, and an anonymous scholar provided extensive and valuable peer review suggestions for two iterations of this study. We appreciate and have carefully considered all of their suggestions. Nicholas Younginger generously helped with illustrations, and through the years many others have contributed in a variety of ways to our knowledge of South Carolina and West and Central Africa. Of course, these kind people bear no responsibility for any errors readers may have found in the work; those belong solely to the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes about contributors

Leland Ferguson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina.

Kelly Goldberg was a Postdoctoral Fellow while making the majority of her contributions to this article, and is currently an Honors College Instructor, Department of Anthropology, University of South Carolina.

Notes

1 Historian Peter Wood (June 25, 2019, personal communication) writes, “Many historians now commonly use the term ‘slave labor camp’ as a more suitable substitute for the word plantation [as] a more honest description.” While we agree with Wood, we have chosen to retain plantation because of its common usage in archaeology for large-scale farms in the Carolina Lowcountry.

2 Henry Ravenel (1814–1887) was a planter, botanist, and scientist as well as the son of the owner of Pooshee Plantation. The site of Pooshee is today under man-made Lake Moultrie. For discussions of “cymbee pools” see Adams (2007), R. M. Brown (2012, 4–12), Fennell (2007b, 79), and Thompson (1998, 61).

3 Thompson (1983, 132, 135) writes that “Nowhere is Kongo-Angola influence on the New World more pronounced, more profound, than in black traditional cemeteries throughout the South of the United States,” and nowhere is the custom of Kongo-style seashell decoration of graves “more beautifully practiced than in the Carolina low country.” Stuckey (1987, 11) contends that “the circle ritual imported … from the Congo region contributed disproportionately to the centrality of the circle in [North American] slavery.” Expanding and complicating an understanding of the religious foundation of the Lowcountry, Creel (1988) writes convincingly that nineteenth-century Christianity in the Lowcountry had deep roots in both the West African region of Sierra Leone and Liberia, and the West Central African region of the Bakongo. Bakongo spirituality appears to have had a significant effect in spiritual development in other centers of New World slavery as well (e.g., Fennell 2013; Symanski 2006, 2012).

4 Sizes of colonoware vessels have been tabulated by Ferguson (1992, 138–143) and Espenshade (1998). Colonoware distribution beyond the Lowcountry has been reported by Baker (1972), Groover (1994), and Steen (2002). The authors suggest that future work could elucidate whether differential statistical patterning of colonoware vessel presence across rice and cotton plantations exists.

5 Ferguson (1990) considers traditional and contemporary Catawba Indian pottery a type of colonoware; in this case, European traits such as flat bottoms, tripod legs, painted decoration, and certain European-style body and rim treatments appear as early as circa 1800 and continue with variations to the present. For examples of archaeological type descriptions, comparative analyses, and studies of vessel form and use, see Anthony (1986); Crane (1993); Espenshade (1998); Ferguson (1990, 1991, 1992); Isenbarger (2006); Joseph (2004); and Wheaton, Friedlander, and Garrow (1983).

6 For interpretations of colonoware (formerly known as Colono-Indian ware), see Fairbanks (1984); Ferguson (1980); Hume (1962); and Posnansky (1999). For consideration of colonoware as evidence of acculturation and creolization, see Deetz (1996, 213–214); Ferguson (1992, xli–xlii); Hume (1962); Lees and Kimery-Lees (1979); and Wheaton and Garrow (1985).

7 Henry Laurens (1724–1792) was a South Carolina slaveholder and trader, rice planter, merchant, and Revolution-era politician. He was a partner in Austin and Laurens, the largest human-trafficking company in North America. Laurens served as Charleston business agent for the British-owned Bunce Island slave factory in Sierra Leone on the coast of West Africa.

8 Marks were reported in Ferguson (1992) and (1999). The most varied collection of marked vessels is reported in Agha, Isenbarger, and Philips (2012); and Agha and Isenbarger (2011). Fennell (2007a) provides an in-depth survey and synthesis of BaKongo elements found in archaeological and ethnohistorical contexts in North America, Haiti, and Brazil.

9 Joseph (2007) has suggested “that intact colonowares found in South Carolina’s rivers may also or alternatively be a product of canoes capsizing while transporting colonowares for sale at Charleston’s markets” (see also Espenshade 2007).

10 Note, in describing the “cymbee pools,” Edmund Ruffin referred to his part “Indian” informant. Later, in the 1930s, ex-slave Albert Carolina said his grandmother was African and that his grandfather was an Indian. Carolina explained that his “grandparents had built a kiln of clay pots and baked them” (Ferguson 1992, 3). Modeled on Shakespeare’s Othello, the plot of William Gilmore Simms 1841 novel, The Loves of the Driver, involved the relationship of a black driver (labor foreman) with a Catawba woman.

11 For more information on West African rice growing technologies see Fields-Black (2008).

12 For more in-depth discussion see Fett (2017) and McMillin (2004).

13 The discovery of the submerged remains of the Clotilde provides a unique insight into the continuation of the slave trade during this poorly documented period (Hurston 2018).

14 For a rich and expanding repository of existing records, see Henry Lovejoy’s (N.d.) website “Liberated Africans.”

15 In many cases, liberated Africans, African Americans, and African Canadians were returned to settlements in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere in West Africa, regardless of the geographic or ethnic origins of themselves or their ancestors. In one such case (see Goldberg 2018) Mary Faber, the daughter of a family of liberated Black Nova Scotians was returned to Freetown, educated by local missionaries, and moved to coastal Guinea where she married an American slave trader and adopted an active leadership role in continuing the sale of enslaved Africans into the 1840s. Though perceived to be of local origins, Mary Faber’s story demonstrates the complexities in determining origins of Africans captured and sold during the later portions of the slave trade.

16 While archaeologists and historians have engaged in a variety of discussions concerning the complex nuances of cultural contact, the authors have chosen here to employ the model of material creolization discussed by Ferguson (1992, 2000).

17 For discussions of the linguistic roots of the name see Brown (2012), Creel (1988), Johnson (1930), Rosengarten, D. (1986), and Turner (1969).

18 The Archaeological Institute of America defines “type” as “a grouping of artifacts identified as distinct or created for comparison with other groups [of artifacts]. This grouping may or may not coincide with the actual types or groups designed by the original manufacturers” (http://www.archaeological.org/education/glossary#t). In the Big Market, one type of pottery was shell tempered, the other grit tempered.

19 Berns and Hudson (1986) and Wood (1998, 2008) have discussed gourds as essential elements of the material worlds of Northeastern Nigerians and enslaved African Americans, respectively.

20 The cover of a publication on herbal medicines from Ghana (Braffi 1974), also shows an earthenware pot resting on a cooking hearth.

21 Likely they also fashioned hearths by placing three lumps of clay to form a base for elevating cooking vessels over fire, as common in many parts of West and West Central Africa. As yet, no Lowcountry archaeologist has identified one of these features. Perhaps bricks were used instead.

22 See K. Brown (1994, 2004) for discussions of Bakongo spirituality and iron on a late nineteenth century Texas plantation which was the residence of recently arrived people from the Congo.

23 Rosengarten (1994, 148) writes, “Though coiled grass baskets were made throughout Africa, Low Country baskets are most closely related to those of Senegambia, the Congo, and Angola” (citing Twining 1978, 167; Vlach 1990 16).

24 Archaeologist Joe Joseph (2011, 134–155, 2016) suggests that the dikenga symbolism used by Lowcountry potters may have been used by African-American potters in the Edgefield District of the Carolina Upcountry.

25 In some documented instances in Brazilian contexts (see Sweet 2011 for the example of Domingos Alvarez), enslaved “healers” were purchased intentionally for their perceived abilities, and called upon to treat members of the white community through applications of herbs and practices of spiritual healing for ailments that local white doctors were unable to remedy. Although the authors have found no documentation to date, it may well be the case that similar practices were occurring among Lowcountry communities.

26 Espenshade (2008) hypothesizes that alternatively, the colonoware decline of the mid-nineteenth century could be explained as a form of resistance by enslaved and eventually newly emancipated African Americans, who negatively associated the ware with their enslavement. We find this to be a weak hypothesis, and agree with Espenshade that, “other explanations may ultimately prove more parsimonious.”

27 For discussions of the use of colonoware in foodways, see Ferguson (1992), Marcil (1993), Agha, Isenbarger, and Philips (2012), and Isenbarger (2006).

28 Estimation of the percentage of the site sampled is from Andrew Agha, personal communication, March 3, 2014. The excavated portions of the Dean Hall quarters do not include the initial settlement dating from 1725 to 1790; the location of that early settlement has not been identified.

29 Andrew Agha (personal communication, January 9, 2015) reported the stones as having been “pale in appearance, off-white to light-gray with occasional yellowish tint.”