Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside

Brad Smith

H 577 Week 3 Precis

04 February 2009

Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community,

University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Charles Joyner’s thesis in Down by the Riverside, his tightly-focused study of slavery in All Saints Parish, Georgetown District, South Carolina, from 1670 to 1865, is stated most clearly in the concluding paragraph of his work:

[I]n hundreds of unremembered slave communities like All Saints Parish…these men and women and thousands more played important, if unsung, roles in a momentous process of culture change. For out of pride and compassion as well as anguish and injustice, out of African traditions as well as American circumstances, they created a new language, a new religion – indeed, a new culture – that not only allowed them to endure the collective tragedy of slavery, but to bequeath a noble and enduring heritage to generations to come.[1]

In his introduction, Joyner outlines three purposes in the work, including his primary purpose: “…to reconstruct life in one slave community (through) a sifting of every kind of available record.”[2] His secondary goal is to provide a social history of the enslaved people who lived on the Waccamaw River, what he calls “the emotional texture of slave life,”[3] along the lines pioneered by the Annales school. Finally, his third avowed purpose is to examine the evolution of the region’s “creole” Afro-American culture,[4] a synthesis of the cultures of the region’s various peoples. He examines a variety of cultural influences ranging from those associated with violently uprooted Africans (drawing on sources from West Africa and the Congo River basin) to those drawn from existing “creole” Caribbean communities to Anglo-American sources. In the introduction and a prologue Joyner sets the stage for the rest of the work, citing the central themes outlined above, and discusses his sources. These include documentary evidence ranging from nineteenth century correspondence, legal, and census records to modern historical works and oral histories, including the testimony of former slaves recorded by the Federal Writers Project (WPA) in the 1930s and oral history interviews centering on folk culture that he himself conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. As demonstrated in the 91 pages of endnotes, Joyner appears to have succeeded in sifting “every kind of available record,” although the lack of a bibliography in the 1985 edition makes tracking his references challenging.

Overall, the 240-page text is structured thematically, with chapters detailing:

1) the geology, climate, and overall economy of the Waccamaw River rice plantation region, which by the mid-eighteenth century generated the highest per capita income (for the plantation owners) in all thirteen colonies.(pages 9-40);

2) the chattel slavery “task system” of labor used on the plantations, the organization and practices specific to the Waccamaw region, and the demographics of the enslaved labor force (41-89);

3) The social and economic relationships of the Waccamaw’s people, both enslaved and free; the complex systems of racial and family ties, both internal and external, that existed within the larger divide between blacks and whites; and the organization of daily life, including matters as essential as food, clothing, and shelter (90-126);

4) The concept of “off time,” when those enslaved were done with their required daily tasks, and thus were able to choose how to spend the remainder of their working day; this was not primarily “leisure time,” as Joyner makes clear, (although it included holidays, religious worship, and what could be referred as family/community time), but rather the period of the work day – gardening, hunting, fishing, sometimes even work for hire – that slaves were able to dedicate to their own or their family’s subsistence (127-140);

5) Christianity on the Waccamaw, especially the synthesized “Afro-Christian” faith that resulted from the mix of the (primarily) West African religious traditions of the enslaved – including both monotheism (Islam) and polytheism, and those traditions celebrated both publicly and privately – with the Protestantism practiced by the whites of the region. Whites in All Saints Parish were Episcopalians or Methodists, and thus heirs to the Reformation and the Protestant Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; clergymen of both denominations were encouraged to evangelize among the enslaved, and, as Christian church leaders did throughout the slave states, provided theological support for the slave system. Joyner also points out that both whites and blacks were heirs to a rich, and culturally mixed, fusion of myth and superstition that had both European and African influences (141-171);

6) The folklore, both common and racially specific, that arose along the Waccamaw from the mix of African, Caribbean, and Anglo-American traditions, and the use of folklore for entertainment and, among enslaved Afro-Americans, as moral instruction, practical education, oral history, and as a survival mechanism for a people prevented from becoming literate as public policy, who had little or no ability to memorialize their own culture in any other way (172-195);

7) The Gullah language, a creole Afro-English that arose, according to Joyner, as something of a lingua franca among enslaved Africans who spoke multiple native languages. These people needed a language to speak to each other as much as with their Anglophone slave masters, and so Joyner suggests the earliest form of Gullah was a pidgin English, without native speakers, created from English vocabulary but with a structure derived from West African roots. This developed over time into a creole language, with native speakers, which was passed from one generation to another and was influenced by the various British English dialects used by the white population. In turn, a discernibly “lowcountry” American English dialect, influenced by and influencing Gullah in return, came into use among white South Carolinians (196-224);.

8) Resistance to slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and freedom. Joyner makes it clear that enslaved people on the Waccamaw did not passively accept their fate, but facing the realities of the geographic isolation of the Waccamaw River country and the risk of violent retribution , including to slaves’ families, it is unsurprising that the amount of overt resistance – insurrections or desertions – was limited. That being said, Joyner also details the obvious desire for freedom among the slaves, including those who took advantage of the presence of the US Navy on the river from 1862 onward to escape from slavery and sign on, as laborers or troops, to fight the Confederacy (225-240);

Joyner ends Down by the Riverside with a short (2-page) epilogue, which provides both a conclusion and the clear statement of his thesis referenced above. He uses the literary device of a present-day cruise on the river, past the abandoned rice fields now returning to nature, past the empty lots where slave cabins and masters’ mansions once stood, to make the case that history remains with us, shaping today’s realities even when overlooked, missed, or ignored:

[H]istory really happened here, to real men and women whose names we know, over whose graves we have stood in silent homage, and of whose burdens and achievements considerable evidence remains…we have discovered a real world of slave folklife: of courage and passion, valor and pity, violation and redemption, faith and fear, love and resentment.[5]

In a particularly Annales-influenced observation early in the work, Joyner notes that: “all history is local history, somewhere . . . no history, if properly understood, is of merely local significance.”[6]

Joyner, a white South Carolinian from All Saints Parish, earned PhDs in history from the University of South Carolina and folklore-folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently professor emeritus of history at Coastal Carolina University, having taught earlier in his career at the universities of California, Alabama, and Mississippi.[7] Down by the Riverside has been well-received by historians, with positive mentions in reviews in journals as diverse as Slavery & Abolition, Economic History, African History, and Southern History. The late George Rawick, editor of the massive 41-volume The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Greenwood Press, 1972-80), which includes complete transcriptions of the WPA interviews, referred to Joyner’s book as “the finest work ever written on American slavery.”[8] An interesting point of comparison with Joyner’s work would be the late John Blassingame’s earlier The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1979).

Given the limits inherent in any published work, Joyner succeeds in bringing to life a community far removed from his own time – a goal that any historian would be pleased to achieve. Overall, Down by the Riverside is a valuable work, both on its own and as a supplement to a large-scale survey of slavery in the United States.

[1] Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 242

[7] Coastal Carolina University History Department biography of Charles Joyner, accessed (02-01-09) at http:// www. coastal. Edu /history /facultyn.html

[8] James M. Clifton, review of An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-65, by Randolph B. Campbell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1989) in The Journal of Economic History Volume 50, Issue 2 (1990) 488-489.