The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America.

Buchanan, Thomas C.

The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. By Walter C. Rucker (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xii plus 288 pp. $49.95 cloth).

There is a recent and outstanding literature that analyses cultural connections between Africa and the Americas in the era of slavery. (1) This scholarship has been spurred on by the publication of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom (1999) which researchers have used to understand the flow of enslaved Africans to the New World with new precision. (2) Walter C. Rucker's excellent The River Flows On adds to this historiography by demonstrating that African culture was intertwined with slave resistance in North America. By surveying the main conspiracies and rebellions in Virginia, South Carolina, and New York from the colonial through the antebellum period, Rucker provides a reappraisal of slave resistance that will challenge the field to more fully embrace African cultural survivals.

At its best, Rucker's analysis persuasively highlights African cultural persistence during the most dramatic moments of slave resistance. In part one of the book, which covers the colonial period, his analysis of the 1712 New York rebellion (chapter 1) and the 1741 New York conspiracy (chapter 2) highlights the activities of Gold Coast Africans. In the 1712 revolt, for instance, slaves maintained Akan names, used conjure to ensure to the success of their plans, operated firearms first learned from trading networks along the Gold Coast, and relied on traditional loyalty oaths to bind participants. In colonial South Carolina (chapter 3), where slave trade data shows that west central Africans were concentrated, Rucker's analysis is less focused on specific revolts and more on routine forms of resistance. Here he probes white fears to show that African culture was continued through traditions such as night drumming, dancing, and poisoning. While part one does not always convey culturally specific cultural transfers to the degree Rucker maintains, he clearly demonstrates that African culture was at the root of much resistance.

The book gets more controversial in the antebellum period (part two). In chapter four, he challenges Douglas Egerton's interpretation that Gabriel Prosser led a working-class rebellion that joined urban artisans and slaves against planters and merchants. Rucker argues that the acculturated figure described by Egerton would have had little appeal in the Virginia countryside where recent arrivals were from the Bight of Biafra. Instead, he argues that Gabriel attracted slaves to the plot because of his skills as a blacksmith, a trade which many West Africans associated with warfare, death, and the spiritual world. In short, while Egerton's Gabriel reads the newspapers of Richmond and was inspired by the ideas of the Age of Revolution, Rucker's Gabriel has his identity rooted in West Africa.

Having marshalled evidence which he says "completely undermines Egerton's view of an interracial class revolt" he then partially sides with his nemesis in his reading of the Denmark Vesey revolt (chapter 5). His reading of the recent controversy over whether the Vesey conspiracy was real or not supports Egerton (and David Robertson and Edward Pearson) against the claims by Michael P. Johnson that the revolt existed only in the minds of Charleston's whites. Rucker argues that there was too much African culture present in the trial transcripts to have been solely created by white observers. A key point for Rucker is the story of a conjurer named Phillip who was apparently born with a "caul" over his face, a piece of skin that for many West Africans symbolized the birth of someone with exceptional foresight. The point for Rucker is that the specificity of such a story suggests that material in the trial records was beyond the invention of Charleston's white community and that therefore the plot must be true. This is problematic, however, because it implies that whites were ignorant of African culture, which Rucker's own evidence on the workings of the slave trade refutes. Rucker is probably right here--that some aspects of African culture were beyond the comprehension of whites--but he does not persuasively argue this point or suggest how it might authenticate the plot.

The final pages of the book have similar methodological weakness. The sixth chapter reinterprets Nat Turner from Christian visionary to an African-American who draws on his African heritage to inform his American identity. This rests on a few shards of evidence (such as an anonymous newspaper article which claimed he had fortune telling ability) and is more suggestive than definitive. The book's coda, which is a bit out of place in a book that mostly focuses on plots and revolts, challenges Lawrence Levine by asserting that that slave trickster tales were solely of African origin (and not synthesized from a variety of origins as Levine maintains) and that they were filled with African cultural forms that have not been acknowledged. But since Rucker does not have new empirical research, this reader was not persuaded by the reinterpretation.

Rucker's main arguments are convincing; there is little doubt that there has been a general tendency to underestimate the contributions of specific African cultural enclaves to key episodes of slave resistance. While he underestimates the degree to which this material is embedded in existing scholarship, foregrounding this material sheds new light on the events in question. At the same time, his belief that African culture persisted and was unchanged in all three places of study until after the end of the slave trade swims against the current orthodoxy of the field: that time and place matter very much when considering such matters. (3) His rejection of this conceptualization extends to comparative studies of the Atlantic World. He castigates Eugene Genovese's earlier work for espousing what he derisively labels "American exceptionalism." Here Rucker seems blind to the obvious ways that North America was different demographically and culturally, and to how this might effect African cultural survivals. A related problem is that Rucker uses demographic history too selectively. He makes good use of the newly available material on the demography of Africans, but then neglects readily available material on the whites these slaves lived alongside. Rucker leaves this material out because he does not believe that this broader culture had a role in shaping the slave community, but does not test this implicit claim.

In the end, what the reader gets here is a dichotomous world. For Rucker to become creolized is to become acculturated is to accommodate with the slave regime. In contrast, to be an Igbo or an African or an African-American (in the case of Turner) is defined by resistance. The 1741 Conspiracy would seem to clearly refute this paradigm. Rucker acknowledges the interracial elements of the plot, but then fails to consider how this might challenge his larger conceptualization of the relationship between culture and resistance. Later in the book there is simply no place in his conceptual scheme for Vesey or Gabriel to draw resources for their struggles from the white world. This book demonstrates the strengths and limitations of an Afro-centric perspective.

Thomas C. Buchanan

University of Adelaide

ENDNOTES

1. Herman L. Bennett. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640. (Bloomington, 2003); James H. Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, 2003); Michael A. Gomez. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2nd Ed. (Cambridge, UK, 1998).

2. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, eds. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, 1999).

3. Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America," The American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 1. (Feb., 1980), pp. 44-78.