White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, Spiritual Cake and Religious Faith In the 1700's

Historical Truth

In 1821, when a shipwreck destroyed the American whaling vessel Essex, the survivors resorted to cannibalism. The first four crewmembers eaten were Black. A decade later, in 1831, when slavers captured and killed Nat Turner, the leader of the famed Virginia slave rebellion, Turner’s executioners delivered his body to doctors for dissection. Then, according to William Sidney Drewry, a Virginia-born history professor, the physicians flayed the Black man’s corpse and used his skin to make a coin purse. Afterward, they boiled the remaining flesh to make grease. “The famous remedy of the doctors of ante-bellum days—castor oil—was long dreaded for fear it was ‘old Nat’s’ grease,” Drewry noted in his 1900 book The Southampton Insurrection, “and it is doubtful if the prejudice has entirely died out among the old darkies.”

Slavers, if they broke our will, bragged that we were “seasoned”(how ironic since many modern Black Americans complain Caucasians have difficulty seasoning food)—like all good food should be—so enslaved ancestors might fetch a higher price at auction. At times, however, they literally seasoned us as a form of torture. Moses Grandy, a North Carolina slave forced to work on the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, testified in his 1843 narrative that we were “flogged and pickled” for failing to finish our ordained daily tasks. Pork or beef brine was poured on our “bleeding backs to increase the pain.”

Historically black Women were the architects of Southern style home cooking and soul food. They informed the cooking of the mountain folk of the Appalachians as the first settlers there and during slavery remembering the staples of Africa, they imaginatively concocted and skillfully cooked flavorful recipes that would feed a house full of people. They had "the magic of cooking…" said Newark native chef Thérèse Nelson, founder of Black Culinary History, which she describes as "a place for reverent examination of our culinary past while supporting the work that will build our culinary future."

Nelson informs us these women were focusing on what they were given, we should keep in mind "how they were able to negotiate their skillsets" to live. Skillsets like foraging, butchery and knowing what herbs were medicinal ,nutritious, and healthy to consume. They were in fact the first nutritionist using Native American skills and those of Africans in the Americas

Chef Thérèse Nelson is the founder of blackculinaryhistory.com as "a place for reverent examination of our culinary past while supporting the work that will build our culinary future."

"Normally the men would do the actual slaughtering, but it would be Black women who would do the breaking down and the butchering," Nelson said. The higher cuts would be sent to market. Thus we have chitlins, Pigs feet, pork hot link sausage, hog maws,

"If you were a Black person, your payment would have been the offal [lower cuts of meat] because there was no marketplace for it.

Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs that were created by enslaved Africans in the Southern United States from a variety of traditional African spiritualities, Christianity and elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. The creation of Filet Gumbo came from this knowledge of a combination of native American cooking that included smoked and jerk meats like venison and the use of file’ powder, an herbal powder from the dried and ground leaves of the sassafras tree (Sassafras albidum), is used as a thickener in soups Africans combined this with bourbon, black walnut powder and brown sugar the antioxidant properties of black walnut hulls and antibacterial compounds in their outer shells, made them useful for naturally treating parasitic and bacterial infections.

Okra, also called gumbo, helps in the cleansing of the system. The mucilage in it helps flush out the toxins. Almost half of kidney disease is caused due to diabetes, modern researchers have proven that okra can help prevent diabetes. This means that it is a preventative food against kidney disease. They also were the population that brought the knowledge of growing rice and many ways of cooking it. Many of these women were also practitioners of Hoodoo and called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure man or conjure woman, root doctors, Hoodoo doctors, and in the bayou country swampers. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include conjure or rootwork. As a syncretic spiritual system, it also incorporates Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims and Spiritualism.

Most Hoodoo traditions draw from the beliefs of the Bakongo (Congo) people of Central Africa and West African Yoruba traditions as well. Over the first century of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 53% of all kidnapped Africans (over 1000,000 people) came from Central African countries that existed within modern day Cameroon, Congo, Angola, Central African Republic and Gabon. By the end of the colonial period, enslaved Africans were taken from Angola (40 percent), Senegambia (19.5 percent), the Windward Coast (16.3 percent), and the Gold Coast (13.3 percent), as well as the Bight of Benin and Bight of Biafra in smaller percentages. Following the Great Migration of African-Americans, Hoodoo traditions spread throughout the United States. Many slaves believed death in Africa was preferable to the unspeakable horror that awaited across the Atlantic.

Because the European did not see the African as human he was especially cruel in his torture and abuse devolving even to cannibalism in many cases he even wrote a cookbook for those who wanted to sample black flesh in a different way than the usual rape and dismemberment that became commonplace in the American antebellum south. But cannibalism of black bodies was not new to the slave trade. Slaves from what was called Senegambia were very valuable to the slaver these enslaved people of the Lowcountry were often from the Upper Guinea, a part of the African coast stretching from present-day Senegal to Liberia. During the colonial period, these regions were known as Senegambia, the Windward Coast, and Sierra Leone. Enslavers in the south commonly preferred enslaved people from these regions of Africa, who were known for their expert skill in rice cultivation.A skill like ironwork that the average Europeans knew nothing or very little about. At least 40% of enslaved people forced from Africa to the colonies entered through South Carolina.

It was during the height of this trade that the Portuguese schooner Arrogante was captured in November 1837 by HMS Snake, off the coast of Cuba. At the time, the Arrogante had more than 330 Africans on board ready for sale to the highest bidder; they had been shipped from the Upper Guinea coast. Once the vessel arrived in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the British authorities apprenticed those who had survived. Shortly after landing, however, the Arrogante’s sailors were accused of slaughtering an African, cooking his flesh, and forcing the rest of those enslaved on board to eat it. Furthermore, they were also accused of cooking and eating themselves the heart and liver of the same man. The Arrogante had struggled not to be captured by the fast-sailing British cruiser but surrendered after the HMS Snake was forced to fire several shots at it and in spite of the heavy rains and winds that made the chase all the more difficult. Upon boarding the ship, Captain Milne reported that its decks were crammed with enslaved Africans kept in atrocious conditions. In a private letter to his brother, Milne referred to the enslaved humans on board as “actual skeletons with death on their faces.” Milne, a seasoned officer who had encountered slave vessels before, confessed to be shocked by the sight of “dead and dying children lying about the deck all calling for food and water & pointing to their mouths.”No doubt they would have been used as food if the ship had been allowed to continue its journey.

The violence affected upon this group of enslaved Africans had been exceptional and the extent of their evil became even clearer upon their arrival in Jamaica. There, John Roby, the collector of customs at Montego Bay, was just as perplexed as Captain Milne had been before him about the horrible state of disease and emaciation that had occurred among them in less than 40 days explaining that the thighs of many adults were not thicker than his own wrist. Even more alarming, however, was the revelation that many of the enslaved made soon afterward. A considerable number of mostly children and adolescents, said repeatedly that and to different people, that multiple acts of cannibalism was just one of the horrors they had faced They recounted rape, torture, and beatings, sadistic murders, and the specifics of the cannibalism, all supported by physical evidence pointing to the vile criminality of the ship’s sailors. Bloody stories filled page after page of depositions.

In the case of the African on board the Arrogante that had been murdered for food, the sailors had cooked pieces of his body and served them with rice to the rest of the Africans. Those who refused to eat received beatings, rapes, and other various violent punishments.

The Senior Magistrate at Hanover, Alexander Campbell, and Special Justice of Peace, Hall Pringle, were convinced that the young Africans were telling the truth and denouncing an event that had indeed taken place. Evelyn, perhaps the most outspoken of them all, went as far as stating in public that “the long and patient hearing of the evidence, and the careful observing for many days of the tone and bearing of the many witnesses who were brought before the commission, suddenly, without concert, from various places, and about nine months subsequent to the alleged perpetration of the crime,” were conclusive evidence that the horrors described by the Africans were not the result of their vivid imagination, as had been suggested.

To slave ship masters and crews, what happened on the ship stayed on the ship. Like a 17th century Vegas the very illicit character of the slave trade after 1820 provided them with a perfect environment to express their deepest, sickest and most sadistic desires and needs, often to their own financial detriment. Rape, torture, pedophilia, sodomy, dismemberment, beatings, outright murder, and even mass killings were nothing rare in the illegal Atlantic. As a matter of fact, by the time the Arrogante was seized by HMS Snake in 1837, such crimes were so common that they barely merited a few lines in Colonial and Foreign Office letters and reports whenever they happened.

There is little doubt that by keeping these abuses away from public knowledge, slave ship captains and crews bestowed upon themselves a considerable degree of impunity. In fact one such sailor who had a well known addiction to raping prepubescent African girls before he returned to the colonies and his 14 year old future wife whom he would give a venereal disease, became a famous song writer and retired a Sunday School teacher.In 1772, in Olney England. At the age of 47, John Newton, began the writing of a hymn that would grow increasingly more popular over the next 349 years. In his song, “Amazing Grace,” Newton writes about a grace that is immense; he writes about amazing grace, one that saved him out of his wretchedness. John to learn the plantation business in Jamaica. Before leaving, the youth went to visit his mother’s relatives in Chatham, England, and, in one of the twists of circumstance that filled Newton’s life, met and fell in love with Mary Catlett, not quite 14. Mary reminded him of his mother.

So smitten was John that he prolonged the visit, gave Mary a venereal disease and missed his ship. Months later he was impressed into the British navy. In 1745, midshipman Newton set sail for the East Indies on the H.M.S. Harwich. The voyage was to last five years, but a storm hit and the Harwich had to anchor off Plymouth, England. Newton was put in charge of a boat going ashore, with instructions to see that none of the crew deserted. John himself deserted. He walked for two days before he was arrested by a military patrol and returned to the Harwich. There he was put into irons, stripped and flogged as a deserter, then transferred to a ship engaged in the slave trade. “From this time I was exceedingly vile,” he later confessed.

The female slaves on board were at the crew’s disposal John was known for liking them young probably because if he gave them a disease it wouldn’t be found out for awhile. John Newton, not quite 20 and now a militant atheist, indulged his sexual appetites often. Newton’s father had urged a ship-owning friend in Liverpool to ask all captains of his slave ships working along the African coast to search for John and to bring him home. In February 1747 the ship Greyhound put in at a port in Sierra Leone, and Newton—through a series of divine interventions, he would later say—was found.

The Greyhound was on a long trade cruise, returning to England via Brazil. Seeking something to do, Newton began reading The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, that included warnings of God’s judgment. Disturbed by the book’s message, he flung it aside. In the early-morning hours of the next day, the Greyhound was struck by a sea so heavy that part of her side was stove-in. “Pumping’s useless! Nothing can save this ship, or us!” a veteran sailor exclaimed. But Newton and others did pump from 5 a.m. until noon. “Don’t let this happen, the Lord have mercy upon us!” Newton cried out, startled by his own words.

The Greyhound did survive, “I began to know there is a God that hears and answers prayer . . . though I can see no reason why the Lord singled me out for mercy.” (For the rest of Newton’s life, he prayed and fasted on each anniversary of that fateful March morning.) Newton rushed to Chatham to see Mary, and after a voyage as first mate on a slave ship, John Newton, 24, married Mary Catlett, 20.

For the next four years, John captained slave ships and invested in slavery and became very wealthy. At first he had no scruples about slave trading, he wrestled with his conscience. Twice each Sunday he began conducting his white crew in prayers as the chained Africans lay closely packed, some of them dying, on the opposite side of the ship. During his next two voyages to Guinea, buying and selling blacks, he tried to act mercifully toward them and stopped raping slaves. Then in 1754, while Newton was sitting at home drinking tea with Mary, he suffered a minor stroke. He recovered, but it was clear that his days at sea were over so he stopped sailing and instead only invested money in slave ships.

A Growing Flock. Newton was appointed the official Liverpool tide surveyor in 1755. With time on his hands, he studied Latin, mathematics and the Scriptures. He also wrote hymns and began to preach occasionally as a lay evangelist. Increasingly he felt the call to enter the ministry. His wife was frequently ill during this time.

In 1764 the new Rev. John Newton, 39, was appointed the curate of Olney, a little village on the bank of the River Ouse in Buckinghamshire. Newton loved his Olney parishioners. “Brothers and sisters” he called them. Many were poor, uneducated lacemakers. Not only did he wear his old sea coat on his rounds to the sick and needy, but he also told stories from the pulpit and to the children in Sunday school, of his seafaring life, his great sins and his own unworthiness to preach the Gospel.

Moreover, Newton dared to replace the conventional psalm-singing with the singing of hymns that were simple enough to be understood and felt by the plain people. When Newton published An Authentic Narrative in 1764, a graphic first-person record of his past debauchery and rescue, so many people flocked to his church that a new gallery had to be added.

After 15 years, Newton of Olney was reassigned to St. Mary Woolnoth, a distinguished church in London. Though his new position brought him great influence and social status, he never lost the image of himself broken and wretched on the coast of Africa, hating God and his own soul. His constant message, even to London’s elite, was that he himself was living proof that God could save the very worst.

In 1785, in yet another twist of faith, Newton crossed paths with a popular young political figure named William Wilberforce. Only 26 and already a member of Parliament, the wealthy and popular Wilberforce had recently experienced a religious awakening. Though his friends predicted a great political career, Wilberforce was convinced that his privileged life had no purpose. His wife Mary died in 1790 after a long illness.

Years before, Newton had been a friend and neighbor of Wilberforce’s aunt, and as a youngster William had come under Newton’s spell. Now “reborn,” Wilberforce sought out the 60-year-old Newton for spiritual counsel. Should he resign from Parliament and enter the ministry? No, advised Newton. God can make you “a blessing both as a Christian and statesman.”

Wilberforce, who was looking for a cause, found it in Newton’s sermons against slavery. This was an issue that no political party would dare touch, but no true Christian could evade. Newton joined the battle as best he could, probably worried about meeting his maker since his health was failing. He alone in the political arena spoke from personal experience, a trump card the opposing forces were unable to counter. He addressed the Privy Council (including Prime Minister William Pitt): “The slaves lie in two rows, one above the other, on each side of the ship, like books upon a shelf. The poor creatures are in irons, both hands and feet. . . . And every morning more instances than one are found of the living and the dead fastened together.”

In March 1807, Parliament passed Wilberforce’s bill abolishing the slave trade on British ships. That same year, on December 21, the Rev. John Newton, 82, spoke his last words: “I am a great sinner . . . and Christ is a great Savior.”

Newton was buried beneath his church of St. Mary Woolnoth, and a tablet was placed on the church wall.

Black people performed a kind of alchemy to survive: Through song and dance, we transformed our rage into rhythm, our sorrow into song. Where escape from bondage was not possible, the cakewalk gave us spiritual release.

Before we arrived from Africa, when we still were the Ashanti and the Dahomeans, an annual ritual gave us the freedom to mock our most revered leaders. In America, this tradition often expressed itself in a game of insults called the dozens. But where such direct confrontation with our oppressors was not viable, the cakewalk gave us a way to speak. In 1960, the actor Leigh Whipper related a story from his childhood nurse, who described the cakewalk like this:

Us slaves watched white folks’ parties . . . where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march, with the ladies and gentlemen going different ways and then meeting again, arm in arm, and marching down the center together. Then we’d do it, too, but we used to mock ’em, every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn’t dance any better.

The cake itself, bestowed upon the best dancer, was at first glance nothing to rhapsodize about. It was typically “a hoecake, baked in the hot coals of the hearth and wrapped in a cabbage leaf,” according to one 1892 account. But that hoecake, a mixture of water and cornmeal, literally cooked on the flat surface of a garden hoe, was a symbol of Black Americans’ ability to arise from the ashes, sweeter than ever.Seeing some glimmers of its real brilliance, whites in the United States and elsewhere moved to possess the dance for themselves. By 1902, white-owned theaters as far away as Paris were advertising the “true cake walk.”

Today, some of the essence of the art form can still be seen in the Soul Train line dance, the New Orleans second line, and, in particular, Hip Hop B-Boy B-Girl dance battles, Krump and vogue.