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Title: "The Sabbath among slaves"
Description: Engraving depicts the author's experience of the Sabbath among slaves. As Bibb explained, having no moral or religious instruction, slaves generally "resort to the woods in large numbers on that day to gamble, fight, get drunk, and break the Sabbath." This behavior, Bibb noted, was encouraged by the slaveholders, who viewed the slaves' activities as a form of entertainment, and who liked to watch them fight, "dance, 'pat juber,' sing, and play the banjo." To this end, the slaves were often provided with whiskey. Accordingly, the illustration shows a slaveholder pouring a libation into a slave's glass. In the background left, a group of white men and women observe the Sabbath festivities., Illustration in Henry Bibb's Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: an American Slave (New York: Published by the author, 5 Spruce Street, 1849), p 23., Fels Afro-Americana Image Project, Scenes of Slave Life.
Creator: Strong, Thomas W., engraver
Date: [1849]
Location: Library Company of Philadelphia | Books & Other Texts | Rare Am 1849 Bibb 65732.D p 23, https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A2778

Title: The broomstick wedding
Description: Illustration is included in Chapter XIV, "I am the Innocent Cause of a Fight -- Religious Services among the Slaves in 'Ole Virginny.'" It shows a "broomstick wedding" that the author recalls having seen. Standing to the left, the betrothed slaves Pompey and Susan hold hands as they wait to jump over the broomstick, which is held by two slaves who are bent at the waist. Uncle Aaron, an elderly slave know as a preacher and a conjuror, presides over the ceremony. According to the author's description, the bride and groom wore the cast-off clothes of their mistress and master: she in a half-worn, ill fitting, maroon-colored merino gown, and he in checked trousers, a white vest and a brown linen duster that was several sizes too big. Numerous wedding guests fill the cabin., Illustration in Mary Ashton Rice Livermore's The Story of my Life, or, The Sunshine and Shadow of Seventy Years (Hartford: A.D. Worthington & Co., 1897), p. 257., Caption underneath the image reads: "'Look squar' at de broomstick! All ready now! one-two-three-jump!'", Fels Afro-Americana Image Project, Scenes from Slave Life.
Date: [1897]
Location: Library Company of Philadelphia | Books & Other Texts | Rare Am 1897 Liv 29518.O p 257, https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A2839

Title: A Negro funeral
Description: Engraving accompanies T. Addison Richard's narrative, "The Rice Lands of the South," which, among other topics, describes slave life on southern rice plantations. It shows a slave funeral, set in a heavily wooded grove, in which numerous mourners take part. A preacher with raised, out-streched arms leads the service; mourners kneel, pray, and weep. Engraving corresponds with the following passage: "The state of excitement and exaltation to which their [i.e, the plantation slaves'] impressionable natures are so easily wrought, especially in religious matters, is manifest in their singing even more strangely than in their preaching and praying. These performances though, are, with all their grotesqueness and absurdity, often very effective and beautiful. Not seldom has it been our pleasure to listen to impromptu music, wondrously sweet and wild and weird, which, well counterfeited on the lyric stage, would bring fame and fortune. Perhaps the most remarkable of these exhibtions are those which are wont to occur on occasions of funeral solemnities, celebrated, as they generally are, in the deep night-darkness of some dense old wood, made doubly dismal by the ghostly light of the pine torches and the phantom-like figures of the scarcely visible mourners." (p. 735), Illustration in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 19, no. 114 (November 1859), p. 731., Fels Afro-Americana Image Project, Scenes from Slave Life.
Date: [November 1859]
Location: Library Company of Philadelphia | Books & Other Texts | Rare Per H 9 62992.O v 19 n 114 November 1859 p 731, https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/Islandora%3A2876

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