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From Jonkonnu and Son de los diablos to Congo Square and Son Jarocho: Global Histories of the Jawbone/Quijada as a Black Musical Instrument
In his left hand, Pompey held a jawbone by its chin, on an empty spot between the animal's front incisors and back molars. In his right hand, the 26-year-old Black mule-wagon driver held a “highly polished piece of rib,” ready to strike the jaw. In the evening twilight of June 3, 1845, on the south bank of Nebraska's Platte River, the men of the U.S. Army's First Dragoons gathered together, eager for his musical “exhibition.” And just before darkness fell, Pompey began a solo concert on the jawbone. A Dragoon officer recalled: As the music proceeded he began gradually to fire up, and soon his whole body, head, arms, legs, and feet were moving in the most perfect time. He chanted the air and beat, pounded, and scraped the accompaniment. Sometimes he would simply play inside the two walls of his instrument as upon a triangle—but in an instant he would change his style and execute a chromatic passage upon the loose teeth—using the molars for flats and the incisors for sharps, and getting the full tones any where he could find them. . . . Sometimes he would accelerando all the way through, and at the same time introduce a crash here and there by striking the palm of his hand forcibly against one side of the jaw, which would set every tooth into a most thrilling and exquisite tremulo.Pompey's concert included “an original overture to Samson,” “Lucy Neal,” and an instrumental “fantasia.” But while his White audience heard a Black mule driver clacking out a biblical song and a minstrel tune, Pompey was also singing about the pain of slavery and the joy of liberation. Indeed, for a Black musician like Pompey, and for Black people around the Americas, the jawbone was the sound of opportunity, and the sound of freedom.1This article tells a new global history of a Black musical instrument and the cultures that gathered around it. It asks: Can we write the history of the jawbone like we have written histories of the banjo and the gumbé drum, seeing it as African and American, even global in its history and influence; seeing it as a site for understanding Black artistic and religious and political practice yesterday and today?2The article collects key text, oral, and visual references to the jawbone/quijada3 as a foundation for future research, pace Eileen Southern and Dena J. Epstein.4 It also maps the jawbone's global movements, building on scholarship by Marcela Cornejo Díaz and Andrea Berenice Vargas García.5 Among Afro diasporic instruments in the Americas, the jawbone/quijada was unusual in how thoroughly and quickly it spread across imperial boundaries around the Atlantic–Caribbean–Pacific. Where many diasporic instruments in the Americas were popular in specific places or regions—the güira in the Dominican Republic, the reco-reco in Brazil—the jawbone was popular across both Spanish and British empires, not to mention Danish, French, and U.S. spaces. In this way, the jawbone was a dye tracer, revealing how Black culture circulated around the Americas; and a beacon, signaling where Afro diasporic culture coalesced. Put differently: where we find the jawbone, we also find Black cultures of religion, work, play, family—from the ring shout to the banjo to masked celebrations to patting juba. And when we follow the jawbone, we see these cultures connect.Of course, the jawbone was a musical instrument, an object that created and carried musical knowledge. Black musicians played and audiences listened to the jawbone because it allowed them to hear rhythms and melodies they wanted to hear—because those sounds were familiar from past experiences, and because they were welcome additions to lives made in the diaspora. In this article, we therefore hear evidence of the jawbone's sound, sensing how it startled listeners out of the everyday and into a Black timespace of celebration, devotion, and community forged through music.6To understand the jawbone as a creator of soundscapes and tracer of culture, a boundary-crossing object and an instrument that opened Black timespaces, this article traces the jawbone's deep history back to 1770s Jamaica and Peru (and before) and tracks the jawbone's broad influence forward around the Caribbean and the Pacific, as the jawbone reverberated in enslaved, maroon, and free Black communities, in Afro Indigenous and Afro Latinx communities, from St. Thomas to Colombia, from Florida to Kentucky, from Cuba to Mexico. The jawbone clattered when Black people celebrated Jonkonnu and clacked when they danced the Son de los diablos. It rattled in Congo Square and beat time at Christmas jubilees and corn shuckings. It became a signifier of Blackness, for worse (in nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy) and for better (in twentieth-century revivals of Afro Latinx music, dance, and culture). And the jawbone still rings out today.The jawbone is startling, for it is literally the lower jawbone of a donkey, mule, horse, or cow. It is uncanny to see an instrument that is so clearly a body part, a feeling that only deepens when we hear and see how it is played. The player holds the jawbone near the front lip at the “V,” grasping it so they are face-to-face with the jaw; or so it hangs down parallel to their body, chin at the top. In their other hand, they hold a wooden stick or a bone, or maybe a metal nail or key.To sound the jawbone, players use the stick to rap a rhythm on the jawbone—TAK TAK; they use the stick to scrape the animal's molars or rub the jaws like a rasp—BRRRRAH; they shake the jawbone like a rattle, its loose teeth buzzing—CHACA CHAC; or they slap the “cheekbone” with an open palm or pound it with a closed fist, a sound that inspired one of the jawbone's onomatopoeic names, the carachacha. The “tremulo” is so stunning that in the late 1960s, musicians demanded a durable, artificial jawbone; you can hear the vibraslap in the opening bars of Jimi Hendrix's “All Along the Watchtower”—CHAAAAA. As Pompey's “full tones” suggested, the jawbone can be softer or louder, relaxed or insistent, higher or lower in pitch, depending on how you strike it.7Where did the jawbone come from? While we have clues, for now we do not have a definitive answer. We can consider three possible origins: African, Indigenous, and the Black Americas. A first hypothesis: at its origin, was the jawbone African? I am cautious about a strong version of this hypothesis because I have yet to see evidence of a direct African analogue for the percussive jawbone idiophone—nothing like the variety of West African plucked spike lutes that connect with the banjo of the Americas.8 Still, it is easy to find shaken, struck, and scraped African instruments that make sounds like a jawbone: the rattle of pebbles against a gourd, the buzzing shells of an mbira, the toothy tak of a notched stick and a scraper, even the clack of human jawbones against a drum. No exact analogues, but many instruments that allow us to envision how the jawbone helped diasporic Africans summon African music and timespaces in the Americas—which also encourage us to continue to investigate the jawbone's connections across the Atlantic.9Maybe, before the jawbone became a Black instrument across the Americas, it was Indigenous? There is evidence for this second hypothesis: Indigenous musicians played jawbones starting in the sixteenth century in New Spain, across what is today north/central Mexico. In 1574, Franciscan scholar Juan Baptista de Lagunas published a P'urhépecha-Spanish dictionary based on his work in Michoacán. He defined the P'urhépecha word quirihpaqua as “a musical instrument made of a jawbone, which they play or make noise with, when they perform the dance of the Chichimecas.”10 Later, in 1737, Franciscan Joseph Arlegui described seeing “los indios” dance in Zacatecas as “an old man sings in a deep voice to the sad sound of a hollow trunk”—a teponaztli or similar drum?—that musicians “hit with drumsticks or with a jawbone from a horse.”11 And in his journal about life in Nuevo Santander, José Hermenegildo Sánchez García wrote about seeing Indigenous celebrations, one in 1776. He recalled an “old indio” man who played “two sticks with two edges, one of them with teeth, or otherwise uses the jawbones from a horse” to accompany singing and circle-dancing, suggesting rasps and jawbones were substitutes.12 Considering these examples, along with contemporaneous Indigenous rattles and rasps—such as the omichicahuaztli, a rasp made from a human or animal bone scored with notches—we see how the quirihpaqua/jawbone could fit in Indigenous musical cultures.13 But important questions remain: did the Indigenous quirihpaqua/jawbone inspire Black musicians to pick up the quijada/jawbone? Alternatively, were Indigenous musicians inspired by Black musical practices when they added this novel instrument to their repertoires?14 Or did Black and Indigenous jawbone cultures arise independently around the Americas? Such questions deepen when we ask how the early Indigenous quirihpaqua/jawbone was played. In the 1737 example, the jawbone was used like a drumstick, unlike later jawbones, while the 1574 passage does not explain how the quirihpaqua was played. Was there a convergence in playing technique as jawbone cultures intersected? Further research is needed on the Indigenous quirihpaqua/jawbone.Finally, a third hypothesis: maybe the jawbone/quijada arose as a Black instrument of the Americas—aligned with African practices, influencing and influenced by Indigenous practices, but originating in Black American creative practices? There is evidence for this hypothesis, too. An early record of the Black musical jawbone described it as a string instrument: when White Danish planter Johan Lorentz Carstens lived on St. Thomas (1725–40), he reported that enslaved Black musicians played the asen-kiefter, or “the jawbones of donkeys, strung with horse hairs. These are draped with several silk ribbons, yellow, red and blue in color.” Carstens noted the asen-kiefter at a wedding of two enslaved people and also on New Year's Day, as enslaved Black workers were “obliged” to parade, playing flutes, tutu (conch) horns, and stringed instruments such as the asen-kiefter.15 Was this string jawbone one branch of a larger family tree of Black American jawbone instruments—maybe a branch that was pruned once the Black percussive jawbone began to flourish?Building off this third hypothesis, perhaps we can think about the Americas as a timespace of Black jawbone experimentation and creativity, as the introduction of large European animals to the Americas enabled Black musicians to pick up a jawbone and make new and familiar sounds for navigating American worlds. This kind of adaptation through transformation, of creating “something from nothing,” was an important strategy for African Americans, Ernest D. Brown has suggested, for “through these conversions, African people create means to realize culturally determined sound ideals,” with a “resourcefulness” that enabled Black diasporans to “preserv[e] important means of cultural expression.”16 Such adaptations and inventions quickly became so important to Black diasporans that they carried these cultural forms as they moved. For example, in 1766, a European ship sailed from Havana, Cuba, to Veracruz, Mexico, transporting not only sailors but “El Chuchumbé”—a “scandalous and obscene” son that was attributed immediately to the Black population in the Mexican port. Whether it was the “belly to belly” dancing it encouraged or lyrics that lampooned local priests, “El Chuchumbé” was understood as dangerous Black music, and the Church quickly prohibited it.17Likewise, we know that by the 1770s, the jawbone/quijada was seen as a distinctively Black instrument, which had become embedded in Black diasporic cultures from Jamaica to Peru. By this time, if not before, the jawbone was taking root around the Americas as an opportunistic instrument for Black enslaved, maroon, and free musicians. It was crafted from the neglected remains of dead farm animals by agriculturalist-musicians who had few material resources and many limits on ownership. And it made a variety of percussive sounds at a time when Black drumming was often outlawed, generating a distinctive Black sonic culture. In the next section, we will therefore follow the quijada/jawbone to see how it created this new Black diasporic musical culture, first in Peru, then in Jamaica.From its earliest mention in Peru, the quijada was coded as Black. In a discussion comparing Indigenous to Black culture in Peru, printed in Lima in 1775, Spanish official Alonso Carrió de la Vandera (Concolorcorvo) wrote about the culture of “negros bozales”—an insulting label for Black Peruvians who were not Catholicized and often had been born in Africa, distinguishing them from Indigenous people or Catholicized Black ladinos. While Indigenous musicians played gently and smoothly, he wrote, Bozales’ entertainments are the most barbaric and vulgar one can imagine. Their song is a howl. Its unpleasant sound can be deduced by just looking at their instruments. The jaw of an ass, defleshed, with its teeth loose, are [sic] the cords of its principal instrument, which they scratch with a ram's bone, antler or another hard stick, with which they make fastidious and unpleasant alto and soprano noises, which causes people to cover their ears and the ass, which are [sic] the most stupid and least easily frightened animals, to run.18Even as Carrió de la Vandera noted the jawbone's “alto and soprano” tonality, he still perceived savagery in its form and sound—a savagery he also imposed on the people who played and listened to its music. Similarly, in the 1791 Mercurio Peruano, José Rossi y Rubí described the music of Peru's “Negros Bozales” as “extremely disagreeable,” with drums, flutes, rasps, and marimbas combining with “the dried jawbone of a horse or of an ass” struck to make a “musical sound.” Rossi y Rubí believed their performances proved “the negroes are as far inferior to the Indians as the latter are to the Spaniards.”19 Through their comments, both expressed a racist hierarchy that was typical for White observers of the jawbone.Such negative perceptions may suggest how the quijada found a place in Catholic festivals as an instrument of the devil.20 Between 1782 and 1785, anonymous artists painted a remarkable series of watercolors of daily life in Peru that were collected in the Trujillo Codex. The codex includes dozens of images of Peruvian celebration, among them “Danza de los diabólicos” (Figure 2). In the middle of the page, costumed performers act out a battle between good and evil: the Archangel Michael fights the Great Devil, who is surrounded by six retainers. While the lead devil and three minor devils crack whips, the page is topped by three diabolical musicians playing guitar, quijada, and cajita, an Afro Peruvian instrument. The quijada player holds the jawbone by the chin in his left hand, ready to strike it with a stick held in his right. He smiles and dances, kicking up his left foot. The quijada helped make the drama of Lucifer's fall not only instructive but liberatory, for when marginalized Peruvians, including Black Peruvians, performed in these processions, they seized a literal place in the colonial order, playing, singing, and dancing in ways that often were restricted for Black performers outside sacred celebrations.Francisco “Pancho” Fierro, a limeño artist raced as “mulatto,” captured the excitement of such celebrations.21 A prodigious painter of Lima's street life in Republican Peru between the 1820s and 1870s, Fierro often depicted the quijada as part of Son de los diablos, a dance and musical performance that likely emerged from the colonial Danza de los diabólicos. Several Fierro paintings were set during the Catholic processions of Corpus Christi and Quasimodo in the 1820s and 1830s, despite religious and political restrictions on Black dancing and music. “Danza de diablos el día de Cuasimodo,” for example, depicts a masked devil supported by cajita and quijada.22 Other Fierro paintings from the 1820s and 1830s show processions that were even more boisterous: in “Sigue el son de los diablos (1830)” (Figure 3), Fierro's Grand Devil springs down the street, sword in hand, backed by a cajita player and two quijada players. Some Fierro paintings also show how these processions were received. In “El son de los diablos,” the Grand Devil is supported by harp, guitar, and, behind the cajita, a quijada; an adult and a child look on, enjoying the performance, as the leaps and smiles, and the festive colors and gargantuan masks, remind us that sometimes the villain is more entrancing than the hero.23In Lima's narrow streets, the rhythms of quijadas and cajitas must have echoed off the walls, pacing the devils’ steps with polyrhythms. Fierro's “La danse des diables de Guayaquil” (Figure 4) shows an elaborate procession led by a Grand Devil, who looms as minor devils fight playfully. They are followed by performers on harp, two playing quijada, and one playing cajita at the rear. The watercolor's owner, Léonce Angrand, was French vice-consul in Peru and an artist himself; his inscribed caption for the painting not only highlighted the “Negro” and “mulatto” performers but also suggested they may have traveled from Guyaquil, Ecuador, to perform in Lima, charting a current of the Black Pacific. In Fierro's paintings, the quijada thus opened Black and Indigenous space within a European-derived Catholic ceremony with colonial roots. Although guitar and harp could be coded as White European instruments, the nose flute was coded as Indigenous, while the cajita and quijada marked Afro Peruvian space on processional streets.24We also see how the quijada transformed space within Lima's San Lázaro cofradía hall, a social site for Afro Peruvians where the quijada sounded to honor cofradía royalty. In the early 1800s, the quijada honored Rosa, “Queen of the Mandingos,” an enslaved woman who presided in jewels, feathers, and artificial flowers, bearing a silver scepter. Looking back from 1825, White British traveler W. B. Stevenson recalled: On her arrival, and at her departure . . . [cofradía members] would sing to their music, which consisted of a large drum, formed of a piece of hollow wood, one end being covered with the skin of a kid, put on while fresh, and braced by placing it near some lighted charcoal; and a string of catgut, fastened to a bow, which was struck with a small cane; to these they added a rattle, made of the jaw-bone of an ass or a mule, having the teeth loose, so that by striking it with one hand they would rattle in their sockets. For a full chorus, they sometimes hold a short bone in their hand, and draw it briskly backward and forward over the teeth. . . . 25Within Afro Peruvian spaces where enslaved people created brief opportunities for order, creativity, beauty, and history, the quijada helped to define spaces of freedom.In Peru, the quijada became integral to Afro Peruvian celebrations in Catholic contexts. In Jamaica, the jawbone was instead attached to the Jonkonnu (John Canoe, Junkanoo) festival—again, an opportunity for liberation within a context of colonial control. Like the quijada in Peru, the Jamaican jawbone made its first recorded appearance around the 1770s. William Beckford, a White British resident of Jamaica from 1774 to 1786, described the scene “When the negroes assemble at Christmas, or upon any extraordinary occasion.” Beckford wrote: They are extremely fond of music and dancing; they have good ears, and preserve the most perfect tune and time. . . . Their musical instruments, if such they may be called, consist of a bonjour . . . a kind of Spanish guitar; a cotter, upon which they beat with sticks; a gomba, which they strike with their hands; a drum; a box filled with pebbles, which they shake with their wrists; and to close the account, the jaw-bone of an animal, from which is produced a harsh and disagreeable sound; and it may easily be imagined, when these all together join in chorus, and are accompanied by a number of voices, what kind of music must assail, and fill the ear.26Like the banjo and gumbé, the jawbone here can be seen as an instrument of the Americas—inspired by African predecessors and shaped by African practices and memories, but created in the diaspora out of local materials, ideas, and relationships. And, again like the banjo and the gumbé, the jawbone was suited for the sonic expectations of an African diaspora—a percussion-focused, polyrhythmic, microtonal music that resonated for the enslaved people who worshipped and celebrated to it.27Several early jawbone references show its strong connection with the Christmas/New Year celebrations of Jonkonnu. An anonymous (presumably White) resident of Jamaica, who seems to have been drafting a book on Jamaica between about 1770 and 1776, eventually published those writings in 1797 in The Columbian Magazine, offering details on costume design, song lyrics, and tunes. Throughout, the writer seemed contemptuous of the celebrations yet also fascinated. The account of the Christmas holidays in Kingston was typical, describing how “the negroes” spent “two or three days in rambling and drinking” as they enjoyed watching or joining the Set Girls and Jonkonnu: The confusion occasioned by the rattling of chains and slings from the wharves, the mock-driving of hoops by the coopers, winding the postmens horns, beating militia and negroe drums, the sound of the pipe and tabor, negroe flutes, gombas and jaw-bones, scraping on the violin, and singing of men women and children, with other incidental noises, make Kingston at this time a very disagreeable residence.28But if this aural takeover made White observers feel displaced from their colonial “residence,” Black celebrants took this moment to claim space in Kingston residences and streets. While in Peru, a Spanish colonial space, Black celebrations often connected to Catholic processions and holy days, in Jamaica, a British colonial space, Jonkonnu was creole, or integrative, or syncretic, combining African religious and secular practices with new diasporic practices that built an African/American culture. That space for creation and performance invited the jawbone in as both a marker of the time, during Black holiday celebrations, and as an instrument Black celebrants wanted to use, which could help revelers claim interstitial timespaces of opportunity outside work. Thus, freedom made the jawbone, but the jawbone also made the space free.29In 1837, Jamaica-born Jewish artist Isaac Mendes Belisario published a detailed view of the jawbone in action in paired illustrations of “Jaw-Bone, or House John-Canoe” and “Band of the Jaw-Bone John-Canoe” (Figure 5). The first “House” image depicts the flamboyant “chief actor” of the Jonkonnu procession, while the second “Band” image shows three men and a boy playing what Belisario heard as “stunning and harsh grating sounds.” (Accompanying, but unpictured: “A rather discordant chorus of female voices.”)30In the center of “Band,” a man plays a “gumbay” drum; to his left, a younger man plays a bass drum, looking to the older man for cues. And to the right is the jawbone player, wearing a snappy salmon-striped shirt and suspenders, with a neat, brimmed hat. Where Peruvian players held the jawbone vertically, the Jamaican player holds the jawbone across his body, teeth pointed down. Belisario wrote: The instrument from which the “John-Canoe” in the foregoing print derives his title (a novel mode of conferring distinction) is simply the lower jaw of a horse, on the teeth of which, a piece of wood is passed quickly up and down, occassioning a rattling noise†—this would not prove an inappropriate prelude, to the entrance of a gibbering spectre in some theatrical representation. . . .† To loosen the teeth, the Jaw is hung in the smoke for several days.31The jawbone player is in the background, yet his instrument is so striking that its name attaches to performer Jaw-Bone John-Canoe.32The jawbone also gave its name to a song genre and its related drumming style: Jamaica's maroon communities still sing “Jawbone” songs. On the 1992 album Drums of Defiance: Maroon Music from the Earliest Free Black Communities of Jamaica, compiler Kenneth Bilby included several Jawbone songs from Moore Town, where a Kramanti musical culture continues. Bilby described Jawbone songs as “primarily for recreational dancing rather than for invoking spirits.” Yet Colonel C. L. G. Harris also notes that Trelawny Maroons sang a “Jawbone Song” in 1795, while at war with the British, “on the initial uncertainty regarding the fate of our brothers and sisters of Trelawny,” suggesting how even apparently secular “jawbone” songs fostered deep spiritual connections.33We see the jawbone helping to build this sort of people-to-people connection in an account by White Briton Henry De la Beche, who visited his plantation in the parish of Clarendon, Jamaica, on New Year's Eve, 1823. “In the evening we had a grand gala,” he wrote in his journal; at the “great house,” the people he enslavedThe “gala” continued on New Year's Day, 1824, as “Joncanoe was performed in grand style for me in the morning,” De la Beche noted, led by a white-masked “Bufo” wearing a pasteboard-and-glass house on his head, “performing all kinds of antics while some women and men danced around him to the music of the drum, jaw bone and two or three other singular musical machines.”34De la Beche's journal also describes how the Jamaican jawbone gathered community around diasporic religion. In May 1824, after an enslaved worker died, De la Beche witnessed a funeral that included “dancing and singing” until midnight, when De la Beche “stopped all this merriment” because it was so noisy he couldn't sleep. As De la Beche understood it, while enslaved Christians included the fiddle at their funerals, other enslaved people chose not to convert to Christianity in part because they wanted to keep “all the African accompaniments of tom toms and jaw bone burials.” This apparently Africanist ceremony reminds us that while the jawbone sometimes played on holidays like Jonkonnu, it also helped create diasporic timespaces where enslaved people marked the transitions of death.35Just as “El Chuchumbé” spread from Cuba to Mexico in the blink of an eye, the quijada/jawbone spread around the Black Caribbean and Pacific. In 1810, White Briton William Walton recalled how during his time in Hispaniola, “the lower order of the Spanish people of colour”—by which he meant people with African and/or Indigenous ancestry—sang and danced to the music of “a furrowed calabash, scraped quickly with a thin bone,” the calabash rattle, the drum, the banjo, and “the teeth fixed in the jaw-bone of a horse, scraped with rapid motion.” In his estimation, the dancing and music “appear to be derived from the African Congos and Indian Din mixed,” and he noted that these performances were the “usual ceremony on the death of a relation.”36In Republican Colombia, the jawbone appeared at a circle dance of remembrance. As White French doctor François Désiré Roulin traveled the Magdalena River in 1823, he stopped to watch Baile del Angelito, a religious ceremony marking the death of a child that remains part of Afro Colombian and broader Latin American practice today. In Roulin's watercolor painting, “Bords de la Magdelaine: Le bal du petit ange,” a young child lies in state, dressed in a gown and crowned with a flower garland; the child's anguished mother sits next to the body, while others pray and dance, celebrating the sinless child's ascension (Figure 6). A few feet away, two men dance deftly in a circle of six women, who squat beside three musicians playing a cylindrical drum, a long flute, and a jawbone. Compared to other images we have seen, this player holds the quijada in reverse like a fiddle, resting along the player's forearm and chest, “chin” out. The circle of women and a dancing man clap, adding embodied rhythms to the Indigenous-heritage flute and African-heritage drum. The group seems to include people with Indigenous, Black, or Indigenous and Black heritage, again suggesting how Black jawbone culture also was Indigenous from early on, if not from its beginnings.37We also see the jawbone in Cuba on January 6, 1844, at a celebration of Día de Reyes (Three Kings Day) in Havana. A newspaper correspondent from Cleveland describedIn Cuba, Día de Reyes was celebrated as an African holiday—for “the negroes in Cuba have no greater joy at any other time of the year,” Spanish commentator Aurelio Pérez Zamora wrote in 1866.39 The celebration was tied closely to African heritage and tradition, not only through revelry by cabildos (mutual aid social groups) but in the spiritual core of the celebration. Daniel E. Walker argues that White observers of the celebration witnessed the spectacle but failed to perceive its spiritual significance—in this case seeing a “negro opera company,” rather than how rhythm and dance connected celebrants to their ancestors, and Cuba to Africa. Moreover, elements found in Día de Reyes but also found around the Americas—masked performers including diablitos, the ring dance, the use of percussive instruments like the jawbone—are perhaps best seen as “parts of a larger public performance tradition carried out by people of African descent in the Americas throughout the slave period,” Walker argues. Indeed, we can look for ways that objects like the jawbone acted as nodes for diasporan culture, which formed when Black Americans carried embodied ideas, practices, memories, and ancestors around the Black Atlantic–Caribbean–Pacific, dancing to the jawbone.40The story was similar on Día de San Juan, St. John's Day (June 24), another Catholic holiday when the jawbone sounded. In Acapulco in 1876, a tourist and freemason from the United States was surprised to see Mexicans celebrating a holiday he cherished. He witnessed masked and costumed women and menIn celebrations like this, the quijada sounded along the Black Pacific in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—especially during holidays in the Costa Chica and its environs, where Afro Mexican communities had deep, centuries-old roots.42Eventually the jawbone appeared in the United States. We can wonder if it came with Black people who were moving or were moved from the Caribbean, for as Jonkonnu spread across the United States, the jawbone went with it; likewise, the jawbone often helped make the Afro Caribbean musics that filled Congo Square in New Orleans.43 Yet when it came to the United States, the jawbone also played in spaces where music was not always sanctioned, at the edges of slavery's workday: on a Saturday evening or during corn shucking, when enslaved people could sometimes perform the songs they wanted.44 The jawbone was the perfect instrument for these timespaces of opportunity, in which enslaved people could seize a little time and control, because the jawbone was itself an instrument of opportunity.In the United States, the jawbone featured prominently in Jonkonnu celebrations, especially in North Carolina.45 When Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) looked back on her enslavement in Edenton before her 1835 escape, she recalled a childhood Jonkonnu celebration on Christmas morning: Two athletic men, in calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows’ tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box. A dozen beat on this, while others strike triangles and jawbones, to which bands of dancers keep time.Where White observers of the jawbone emphasized the “ear-splitting din” of Jonkonnu, as George Higby Throop did in his fictionalized depiction of an 1849 Christmas morning “frolic” in North Carolina, Jacobs instead described a child's anticipation, and acknowledged the work and creativity Jonkonnu “companies” invested to make the day special.46In Louisiana, the jawbone likewise moved into opportunistic timespaces on Christmas and New Year's Day.47 At an afternoon Christmas celebration in 1841, the White newspaper editor of the Plaquemine Planters’ Gazette, Christopher M. Haile, heard a performance by an enslaved manPerhaps this jawbone player was “Creole” coachman Jean Becnel, one of fifty-four people enslaved by the Becnel family at Evergreen Plantation near Plaquemine in 1835.49The “skilful musician” held his instrument from the chin, hanging down, as it was held in images from Peru. The sound was enveloping, played with the entire body, “music all over,” “every inch of him” moving. We perceive “Becknell” connecting his body and instrument to the dancers’ bodies, too—cocking his head to the side before tapping and then raking the jawbone, unrestrained, spirited, sharing his energy with the dancers at the height of their exertions.50When we follow the jawbone in the United States, we also see evidence of Black musicians, including enslaved musicians, playing jawbone on ordinary occasions, outside holidays. For the jawbone also was played when enslaved people had more control over their time and space—Saturday evenings, Sunday afternoons, and the mixed moments of rest and leisure taken when enslaved people worked on tasks where entertainment was permitted or encouraged, such as corn shucking. Rebecca J. Griffin calls these “authorised social spaces,” times of relative “social freedom” when enslaved people could “appropriate the meaning and significance of these events in order to fit their own demands and needs.”51 Even these opportunistic performances carried a message, but that message was understood differently by Black participants and White observers. White observers believed that the joy they saw in a night's performance proved that slavery's harms were exaggerated. Black participants instead saw these moments as deeply important yet all too short; a temporary opportunity for freedom and community whose feelings, ideas, and memories carried into the rest of the week.The jawbone thus found a place on Sundays in Congo Square, New Orleans—a liminal timespace for Black Americans where for almost fifty years, until 1856, municipal laws permitted Black celebrants to drum and dance on the Sabbath.52 Observers like William Wells Brown noted how their celebrations connected to Africanist spiritual and cultural practice. “About three o'clock the negroes began to gather,” he remembered in 1880, “each nation taking their places in different parts of the square. The Minahs would not dance near the Congos, nor the Mandringas near the Gangas. Presently the music would strike up, and . . . each set had its own orchestra”: a gourd banjo, common before the mid-nineteenth century; “several drums made of a gum stump dug out, with a sheepskin head”; “and two jaw-bones of a horse, which when shaken would rattle the loose teeth, keeping time with the drums,” rousing people to dance.53In 1843, a presumably White correspondent for the Daily Picayune described Congo Square festivities in a way that highlights connections with diasporic African/American practices: The orchestra was full, and, judging from the satisfaction which it gave, very effective. The leader strummed a long-necked banjo, the head of which was ornamented with a bunch of sooty parti-colored ribbands; another of the musicians beat the jaw bones of an ass with a rusty key; a third had the end of a butter firkin, covered with a tightly drawn sheep skin—a kind of a la petit tambour, on which he kept time with his digits, and a fourth beat most vehemently on an old headless cask that lay on its side, ballasted with iron nails.This music was accompanied by singing and dancing.54 Looking at Congo Square, scholar Jeroen Dewulf connects the jawbone back to the Kingdom of Kongo through the sangamento mock war dance and its use of drums, marimbas, ivory horns, and the cassuto, a scraped instrument Dewulf likens to the jawbone. Other scholars use the jawbone to trace the histories of Louisiana musics forward, suggesting the jawbone was “antecedent” to the jazz and zydeco washboard or frottoir. But the jawbone was not a simple substitute for triangle or scraper, rattle or rasp—it was an instrument of the Americas that spoke in its own distinctive sonic voices.55Black jawbone musicians carved out “authorised social spaces” in Florida Territory as well, witnessed by White French scientist Francis de La Porte, Comte de Castelnau, in late 1837 and early 1838. He wrote about his visit to Tallahassee in an 1842 book and an 1843 essay. In his essay, he described how enslaved Black people spent their “rest days”: Draw near to a plantation, and the noisy outbursts of laughter that you will hear there will make you forget the overseer who goes about provided with his huge whip; then come the rest days, and all the miseries of the week are forgotten in the wildest dances and the most ridiculous capers; the orchestra is provided with a sort of mandolin made of a gourd [a banjo?], and a horse's jaw bone, the teeth of which are scraped with a hollow stick.56His book included an engraving of a scene of revelry in downtown Tallahassee (Figure 7), and in the text he set the scene. For “negro slaves,” he wrote, theirIn the bottom left, two men sit on a log, each playing a horse jawbone. One steadies a jawbone on his knee while the other lifts his jawbone and waves his stick with a flourish. Next to them, four men stand in a circle, patting juba, as Eileen Southern and Josephine Wright have noted. Together, they seized a song and dance of joy from an ordinary day, liberating a timespace for themselves by making music with their bodies and scraping a horse's teeth with a stick, even as others labored, steps away.58Here, we also connect the jawbone to “patting juba” as an act of self-creation. The jawbone, like bones and triangle, is an idiophone, creating its sound through vibrations from the instrument itself, rather than being mediated through a string or reed or mouthpiece. As we think about how Black performers beat rhythms from toe-taps and juba-pats, we can also think about how they made sounds of the self, human rhythms. In fact, as we read the lyrics of a remembered “jawbone song”—“De jawbone walk,/And de jawbone talk,/And de jawbone eat/Wid a knife and fork”59—we wonder, as Roger D. Abrahams did: how did the words “juba” and “jawbone” and “hambone” move around? How was the jawbone instrument connected to songs of “jawbone” and “juba,” dances of “walking jawbone” and “juba dance,” embodied performances of “patting juba” and “hambone”?60In the United States, the jawbone also was played at corn shuckings. When formerly enslaved people were interviewed by members of the U.S. government's Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, many remembered corn shuckings fondly, due to differences between usual work patterns and the work patterns of shucking—in part because corn could be shucked in “slack” times, especially during winter. Some shuckings featured singing, music, contests, and dancing that created community while also pacing the work. And after shucking, enslaved people sometimes enjoyed a planter-supplied “feast and frolic” that capped off their work and segued into Christmas. Thus, scholars like Abrahams have argued that the performance culture of shucking was distinctively “Afro-American,” indeed a “[form] of active resistance,” creating “alternative perspectives toward time, work, and status.”61J. R. Matlock was born in 1839 into slavery on a large cotton plantation near Winchester, Tennessee. After his escape from slavery during the Civil War, he joined a series of musical troupes performing first in North America and then in Australia and New Zealand, where Matlock relocated for the rest of his life. In an 1877 interview, Matlock remembered hearing the jawbone after a day of corn shucking: In the evenings after the work, there are grand “to-do's.” There is the fiddler and other instrumentalists who keep the game alive. The principal instruments are the mule's jawbones, combs (with paper wrapped round them), banjos, the strings of which are made of strong horse-hair, while cheese-boxes do for the frame-work. At the conclusion of the “shucking,” we have a grand jubilee that lasts for 48 hours, during which time we are, to a certain extent, our own masters, and on most plantations are supplied with more food and drink than we can dispose of.62Matlock also said the jawbone was part of less organized celebrations—“Saturday evenings, after the work is done,” when enslaved people would “assemble in crowds round the out-door fires, and here they hold a weekly concert, if the overseer don't interfere. Two or three of them have fiddles, others have tin cans, clappers and banjos, while the jawbone music is a very strong element at these entertainments.” To the bemused journalist, Matlock described the jawbone as “just a mule's jaw, with the teeth very loose and rattling, so that when you shake it, it makes first-class music.” He added that “jubilee songs and plantation walk-rounds” might also take place on Saturdays—“if we are not prevented.”63Matlock explained corn shucking as a sanctioned time when enslaved people were “our own masters,” in contrast to Saturday celebrations that took place “if the overseer don't interfere.” On an 1840s-50s cotton plantation that was ploughed by mules, the jawbone was an instrument of opportunity, like tin cans, combs, clappers, and cheese-box banjos. Finally, professional entertainer Matlock saw the jawbone as a musical instrument, not harsh or disagreeable but a “principal instrument” providing a “strong element” to concerts. When the jawbone was part of one's culture, experience, and musical imagination, it sounded “first-class.”Others connected the jawbone with corn shucking. Wash Wilson, 94 years old and formerly enslaved in Louisiana and Texas, told a WPA interviewer in the 1930s about “ring plays” after shuckings. “For music dey scratch on de skillet lids or beat bones or pick de banjo,” he recalled, and, when asked again, he added: “Dere wasn't no music instruments. Us take pieces a sheep's rib or cow's jaw or a piece iron, with a old kettle, or a hollow gourd and some horsehairs to make de drum.” Or they would find a buffalo horn to make a flute. Or “dey'd take a mule's jawbone and rattle de stick ’cross its teeth.”64 Likewise, Ophelia Settle Egypt interviewed a woman who had been enslaved near Memphis, who remembered that “at corn shuckings, they would sing, ‘Walk Jawbone, Come Jine the Re.’”65The song “Walk Jawbone,” which seems likely to have been a dance, too, was popular especially around Tennessee and Kentucky. This may suggest that the jawbone instrument also was popular in that area—or at least that Kentucky and Tennessee were mule-breeding states, which soon supplied the cotton economy's “mule boom” of the 1830s-40s.66 In the 1820s and 1830s, a variety of “jawbone” songs became a recorded part of the cultural imagination of White and Indigenous Kentucky and Tennessee readers in the form of political parody songs. “Jaw-Bone Music, Or Caucus Kitchen Dance” appeared in a Kentucky newspaper in 1825 (“First John Rowan comes out alone/And hopped to the tune of a jaw bone”).67 Similarly, in 1833, a Tennessee paper featured “New Jaw-bone,” celebrating Andrew Jackson's presidency.68 Most interesting was “The New Jaw Bone: Composed by a Choctaw of Col. P. P. Pitchlynns Party While Emigrating Last Winter to the West,” penned in 1832 or 1833. The song documents the hardships caused by the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which resulted in the Choctaw Removal from Mississippi to Indian Territory; scholar Frank Kelderman suggests it may have been written by Choctaw diplomat Peter Pitchlynn.69Why did the jawbone become part of political parody? One hypothesis: corn shucking was sometimes a carnivalesque event where “singing the master” was permitted, with Black singers composing or improvising lyrics that parodied “Old Master” and other White attendees. Perhaps Black “jawbone” songs first were wielded to parody Old Master's power, but later provided a familiar parodic form that could be redeployed for Indigenous and White purposes.70“Jawbone” songs took on another valence: from (at least) the 1820s, first parodists and then musicians and songwriters used the jawbone to signify “Blackness,” here meaning a racist image and imagining of supposed “Black” culture and comportment, constructed by White writers and performers. For example, in 1824, a St. Louis newspaper printed a “humor” column contrasting the dignity of a White July 4th celebration with a malaprop-ridden “Black” celebration. The mock toast was a common protominstrel parodic format in the 1810s-20s: in newspaper humor columns and racist broadsides, imagined White celebrants were credited with orderly and sensible toasts, while imagined Black celebrants toasted in fractured racist “dialect.” Thus, in the 1824 column, a standard White patriotic toast was paired with a “Black” example: “De Presidunt of des United States—he has done hoed his row, let him take a cheer in de tempul ob fame . . . ,” with each toast followed by a song (“3 cheers—Presidunts March.”). The sixth toast, for 1824 Democratic-Republican presidential nominee “Masser Crawfurd,” was followed by “6 cheers—Walk Jawbone.”71That “Walk Jawbone” could be dropped in as a casual, unexplained reference suggests the song probably had been familiar for some time; while its inclusion in a parody of “Black” dialect suggests that “Walk Jawbone” already was coded as Black through an association of the jawbone with Black performance. Racist “dialect” parodies like this deployed words associated with Blackness, such as “juba,” to construct a metonymy, in which embodied and culturally distinctive performance practices such as jawbone-playing or juba-dancing redounded on the person whose body was seen as especially suited to performing them. Words like “jawbone” thus evoked both the performing Black body and imagined “Blackness.”The protominstrel move to connect body and behavior through images and signifiers came to animate early performances of blackface minstrelsy, in which White minstrel performers claimed to be able to capture and “delineate” essentialized Blackness, in part because they said they had learned musical, lyrical, and terpsichorean techniques directly from Black performers. Thus, in the 1830s and 1840s, blackface minstrelsy deployed the jawbone to construct its racist, imagined “Blackness.” An 1855 article credited White minstrel George Christy with being “first” to bring the jawbone into blackface minstrelsy. Christy, whose “intimate knowledge of negro character . . . has since made his performances so acceptable,” adopted the instrument after seeing “a juvenile specimen of the African race” play jawbone in Kentucky.72 A separate text described the Christy technique: The Christy minstrels held the instrument at the point of the jaw by the left hand; the stick or beater was held in the right hand between the cheek bones, striking one cheek bone for a single beat and both for a double beat. There was also a varying pitch of the sound according to the point struck, the sharper sounds if struck near the teeth and the lower one if struck near the joint over which the jaw was hinged. Occasionally the beater was rubbed across the teeth like a notched stick rattle.73An 1860 engraving, based on an early photograph, pictured a White blackface minstrel holding the jawbone much like Christy did (Figure 8).74Yet in blackface minstrelsy, the idea of the jawbone proved more popular than the instrument. In his analysis of minstrel troupes performing from 1843 to 1847, Robert B. Winans found that only 3 of 29 included a jawbone. The most popular instruments comprised the classic minstrel ensemble of banjo (29), tambourine (29), bones (25), and violin (20), but even the triangle (11) was more popular than jawbone. Between the tambourine, bones, and triangle, perhaps most troupes believed they had the jawbone's sonic profile covered.75Still, because the jawbone helped code a song as “Black,” many song lyrics mentioned the instrument incidentally. “Oh, Lemuel!” described a cotton plantation frolic, which included enslaved musician Lemuel's prowess on the fiddle, banjo, drum, and jawbone.76 And the minstrel standard “Commence Ye Darkies All” was a common opening number that allowed performers to announce their intention to “play/For de white folks round de room” by sounding all the ensemble's instruments: “Touch light de banjo string,/An’ rattle de ole jaw-bone;/Oh, merrily sound de tamborine,/An’ make dat fiddle hum!”77Though a few songs centered the jawbone, notably “Walk Jawbone” and “De Ole Jawbone,” most seemed to draw on the “Walk Jawbone” dance as much or more than the instrument.78 The earliest published variant of “De Ole Jaw Bone” (1840) was likely written by White banjoist Joel Walker Sweeney: As I was cum from TennesseeMy hoss got mired up to his kneeI whipped him till I saw de bloodDen he hauled me out ob de mudWalk Jaw Bone wid your turkey tooNeber mind dat buger bu.79Sweeney's lyrics overlapped with or drew on lyrics for a “Walk jawbone” song attributed to Ben, an enslaved Black banjoist, which was recorded in an 1833 biography of Davy Crockett.80 A separate 1840s song, “Walk Jaw Bone,” with “Original Verses” by White minstrel Dan Emmett, told the story of an enslaved man who ran away. The jawbone appears only in the chorus: “Walk jaw bone, Jenny come along,/In come Sally wid de bootees on.”81Minstrelsy's most famous composer, Stephen Foster, wrote the jawbone into the chorus of his hit song “Angelina Baker” (1850), in which an enslaved man grieves after his beloved has been sold away: Angelina Baker! Angelina Baker's gone—She left me here to weep a tearAnd beat on de old jawbone.82The jawbone here evokes the trope of the sentimental and emotional slave, who rattles the jawbone in happiness and beats on it in sorrow (Figure 9).Along with emotion, violence was built into these racist stereotypes of the jawbone. In 1848, Black activists Martin R. Delany and Charles H. Langston planned to hold an antislavery meeting in Ohio. But Delany and Langston were harassed by a White “rabble,” which demanded that the meeting be adjourned, “by considering this a darkey burlesque!” Yelling, “darkey burlesque!,” the crowd chased Delany and Langston back to their hotel and gathered outside with “a brass drum, tamborine, clarionet, violin, jaw-bone of a horse, castanets, and a number of other instruments,” Delany wrote, “or whatever would tend to excite and rally a formidable mob.” (Eventually, the two activists departed safely.) The Black jawbone had been hideously transmuted: decontextualized by minstrels and appropriated for racist profit as a “Black” instrument, then reintroduced into the real world to attack Black political action, wielded as a signifier of “Blackness” that enabled a White lynch mob to stage its violence as a minstrel show.83While the jawbone could be re-engineered into a symbol of anti-Blackness, the fact remained: the jawbone never stopped being a Black instrument, for Black people never stopped playing the jawbone. Blues musician W. C. Handy remembered his childhood in Alabama in the 1870s-80s: though his churchgoing family rejected musical instruments as “the devil's playthings,” he wrote, Handy and other local kids still figured out how to play music. They made a broom handle into a bass, “sang through fine-tooth combs,” and “made rhythm by scraping a twenty penny nail across the teeth of the jawbone of a horse that had died in the woods near by.” Perhaps it was the horse's jawbone, or the way Handy heard music in nature—as when “the hooves of the galloping horses beat in syncopation”—that helped Handy compose some of the earliest published blues songs.84With the decline of minstrelsy in the early twentieth century, the jawbone was ready to be reinscribed again. Where minstrelsy had coopted the jawbone to create “Blackness” in the nineteenth century, the jawbone was reclaimed as a “vector” of global Blackness in the mid-twentieth century, to use Kenneth Bilby's concept.85 The jawbone's reclamation was connected to postwar decolonization movements and related efforts to build Black and African diasporic culture and pride, which encouraged new uses of the Black instrument. Yet this midcentury jawbone revival also intersected with national politics, and when a movement to pick up the jawbone aligned with political power, it was not always liberatory.Peru's story reveals these tensions, as described by Heidi Carolyn Feldman. Feldman notes an “Afro-Peruvian revival” starting in the 1930s and taking off in the 1950s. She argues that the revival aimed to recreate and recenter Black culture in Peru, albeit with a mix of motivations. The Pancho Fierro theatrical company was one vehicle for revitalization. When White Peruvian scholar José Durand created the company in 1956, he imagined presenting tableaux vivants of the Black limeño dances painted by artist Pancho Fierro. But once he recruited informants to fill gaps left by Fierro's static paintings, Durand decided he could combine memory and imagination to choreograph and score a full performance. Pancho Fierro Company performances reclaimed Black dances, instruments, and song genres such as the festejo, which they staged with a combination of Black performers and White performers in blackface. Feldman argues that this revival sometimes commoditized Black performances by playing to anti-Black stereotypes and, moreover, that the company's performances of stereotyped Blackness promoted nostalgia for White colonialism.86The quijada was at the center of the Company's revival, for “Son de los diablos” became the Company's signature performance. By the 1950s, “Diablos” was rarely performed, but in 1956 the Pancho Fierro Company changed that by staging a “Diablos” dance styled after Fierro's paintings, accompanied by quijada, cajita, and guitar. Audiences loved it so much that the troupe added “Ritmos de quijada” as an opener. Eight glowing, green phosphorescent quijadas hovered on a stage lit with black light, as the eight performers who held the instruments faded into black. “The effect was marvelous but the folkloric authenticity was marginal,” performer Nicomedes Santa Cruz wrote. The repopularized quijada thus became a symbol and vector of Afro Peruvian culture in Peru, carried forward into the 1960s by revivalists in Santa Cruz's Cumanana company, and into the 1970s by Afro Peruvian musicians such as Perú Negro.87In 1958, when U.S. jazz pianist Randy Weston wanted to record a “salute to music and, through music, to freedom and to Africa,” as his friend Langston Hughes described it, he composed a jazz suite, Uhuru Afrika (Freedom Africa). In November 1960, Weston and arranger Melba Liston gathered jazz luminaries such as U.S. trumpeter Clark Terry and drummer Max Roach, Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji, and Cuban conguero Cándido Camero. They joined performer Brock Peters and Tanganyikan/Tanzanian decolonization activist and scholar Tuntemeke Sanga to open the suite by calling for liberation. After a spoken declaration of “Uhuru! Freedom,” we hear a thumb piano, conga and bongo drums, shaken wrist-bells, and Weston playing a donkey's jawbone. Sanga then reads a Langston Hughes “freedom poem” written for the album, first in English, then in Kiswahili. Throughout the reading, the jawbone intensifies calls for freedom.88 As Robin D. G. Kelley has written, Weston and Liston's suite was “a manifesto, a declaration of independence for Africa and mutual interdependence between the continent and its descendants”—and the jawbone helped create that rhythmic, embodied link.89The jawbone also signaled Blackness and liberation in Brazil. In 1966, Brazilian singer and composer Geraldo Vandré was looking for a distinctive sound for his new song, “Disparada” (Stampede). Brazil's government had been overthrown two years before, and Vandré responded with a protest song disguised as a moda de viola, a rural cowboy folk song, which he hoped would create a new “national culture.” Its cowboy protagonist lamented a loss of control over his life: he felt like he was just a bull in the herd. But soon, change would come: from atop his horse, he would help lead a populist stampede. In October 1966, “Disparada” was entered into a televised national popular music contest. Vandré recruited Black singer Jair Rodrigues as lead; but to accompany the viola caipira and caxixi, Vandré wanted an atypical sound. Some remember that Vandré asked for an instrument that sounded like a rifle shot; others remember a whip crack. Either way, the solution was the queixada, a donkey jawbone. In a performance available online, Rodrigues starts slowly, remembering how things used to be. But then the tempo kicks up, powered by Rodrigues's new awareness and desire for change. To punctuate every line, a percussionist pounds the queixada—its PÁ, PÁ, PÁ! a sound of rebellion.90Musicians still play the jawbone across the Americas. But while today's jawbone is integral to Indigenous, Latinx, and Black cultures, often all at once, it still connects to places where Black communities took root across the Caribbean-Pacific. Thus, Colombia is not only the site of the 1820s Baile del angelito but also where today's musicians play quijada on the plains of Bogotá, in the Andes Mountains, and on Providencia—an island where quijada joins washtub bass in calypso and reggae music, and also an island where enslaved Black residents revolted against British enslavers in 1638.91 Likewise in Belize, Black musicians play jawbone in buru and brukdown music—a cultural and musical legacy of Black workers who were enslaved on mahogany plantations—while others play jawbone to celebrate Jankunú or Wanáragua.92 And just as in Colombia, when we look back into Garifuna history, we find the jawbone: in the city of Belize on Christmas night, 1893, “the moonlit streets resounded” with song, an observer noted, as “Karif” revelers “rattled the loose teeth in the jaw-bone of a donkey, rubbed a piece of tin over an old cassava grater, played home-made guitars, rattled bones and beat tam-tams.”93The story is similar in Mexico—not only in the Black Pacific communities of the Costa Chica, where Afro descendant and Ñuu Savi (Mixtec) musicians play the jawbone, but also in Veracruz, where the Afro diasporic musical tradition of Son Jarocho was born. Micaela Díaz-Sánchez and Alexandro D. Hernández argue that Son Jarocho has its roots in the early migration of “El Chuchumbé” from Cuba to Mexico, and flowered as an Afro Mexican form of “strategic resistance” in support of the early maroon/cimarron communities in Veracruz. They and others see the persistence of Afro diasporic culture in Son Jarocho as it is played today in Mexico and the United States: in its lyrics, which are flexible enough to allow timely and coded societal critiques; in its zapateado percussive dancing, which helped performers evade Church prohibitions on Black drumming; and in how Son Jarocho is performed as part of fandango, an event and practice in which participants co-create community, dance, song, and heritage. Finally, we add the rattle of the quijada, which joins instruments like the jarana and requinto in creating sounds of resistance and solidarity for Chican@ groups such as Quetzal and Las Cafeteras today.94What has made the jawbone an instrument of resistance and solidarity, of opportunity and liberation? Perhaps it is the way it draws the eye and ear and body, moving people to sing and play and dance. Yet like other Black instruments around the Caribbean–Pacific, the jawbone's spectacle could divert White listeners, distracting them from understanding messages shared by Black performers with Black audiences. To understand, let's return to Pompey's jawbone performance in 1845 Nebraska, chronicled by White Army officer James Henry Carleton. In his account, Carleton named the songs Pompey played: “an original overture to Samson,” the minstrel song “Lucy Neal,” and “a most difficult Fantasia on one colt's-tooth alone.” Let's take them in reverse order.The “Fantasia,” described parsimoniously by Carleton: a virtuosic performance, which reveals the musician's skill and suggests the range of music he coaxed from the jawbone. We can also wonder: did Pompey play European heritage music, as “Fantasia” suggests? Or diasporic/African heritage music, which could sound fantastic to Euro American ears?More expansively described was Pompey's performance of “Lucy Neal.” “Neal” was a hit minstrel song published in 1844, with several variants thereafter. Most had an enslaved Black man as narrator, singing about the lost love of his life, enslaved “yellow” woman Lucy Neal. Neal and the narrator fell in love while picking cotton but soon were separated when their enslaver sold the narrator away. Things only got worse: in a later stanza, Neal died while eating cornmeal.95“Lucy Neal” was part of a popular category of sentimental minstrel songs about families separated under slavery, which offered White audiences a chance to mingle contradictory feelings of amusement, superiority, and sympathy. Yet while we can imagine that a blackface performance by a White minstrel would set a baseline of ridicule, Pompey's performance imposed a different valence. As William J. Mahar noted, by emphasizing “the manifest injustice of forced separation,” some “Lucy Neal” variations expressed “a strong abolitionist sentiment.” Pompey likely was enslaved; so, when he selected the song and inhabited the narrator's role, it is no wonder that Carleton, even semijokingly, acknowledged that “words can never express the mournful pathos with which the jaw seemed to speak during the entire continuance of this popular piece.” This ambiguity was built into Pompey's performance: while for White soldiers, as Carleton wrote, “Neal” was an innocuous “popular piece” that “gratified” Pompey's audience, for Pompey and any other Black listeners, “Lucy Neal” instead inverted blackface minstrelsy—an antislavery song was voiced and performed, publicly and hauntingly, by an enslaved man.96Of course, antebellum Black performance often carried the subversiveness of double-meaning—the “coded text of protest,” as Saidiya V. Hartman puts it—whether Frederick Douglass's “jubilee beating” or Pompey's jawbone selections.97 If anything, Pompey's initial selection of “an original overture to Samson” was more of a protest than “Lucy Neal.” On the surface, “Samson” was an obvious joke for a jawbone player, as it was the biblical Samson who “came upon a fresh jawbone of an ass and he picked it up; and with it he killed a thousand men.”98 But in the nineteenth-century United States, “Samson” also was code for Black insurrection, “the ante-bellum equivalent of . . . ‘burn baby burn,’” scholar Sterling Stuckey wrote.99 Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper have traced a long history of the “Black Samson” who, like his namesake, had the electrifying potential to burst his bonds and take revenge on his captors. They note, for example, that Denmark Vesey was said to have framed his revolt as “deliverance from the hand of the Philistines.”100These images of liberation and revenge also made “Samson” a compelling subject for Black lyricists. In his 1915 Folk Song of the American Negro, John Wesley Work shared a “Negro slave” song with a verse about Samson.101 Likewise, in 1914, a White folklorist recorded a Black resident of the Sea Islands singing “an old plantation melody, Gawd's a-gwine t’ move all de troubles away,” which included verses about Samson's strength.102 More insistent was “Samson,” also called “If I Had My Way” and “Samson and Delilah,” which recounts Samson's life as a coded call for revolution. Blind Willie Johnson recorded an indelible version in 1927, while the Lomaxes collected versions by Sylvester “Deacon” Johnson and also Jesse Allison and Dock Reed in 1939, which included the following lyrics: They bound him with rope and, while walkin’ along,He looked on the ground and he saw an old jawbone;He moved his arms, the rope popped like threads,When he got through killin’, three thousand was dead.103On that evening in 1845, when an enslaved Black man pounded a massive jawbone, he soundedAt this moment in the song, later singers growled Samson's chorus: An’ if I had-n my wayI'd tear the buildin’ down.105Such words had power: when Blind Willie Johnson sang “If I Had My Way” outside the Custom House in New Orleans, the story goes, he was arrested “for trying to incite a riot.”106 But while we can't know what words Pompey sang, we can hear him pounding the jawbone during “Samson”: As the music proceeded he began gradually to fire up, and soon his whole body, head, arms, legs, and feet were moving in the most perfect time. He chanted the air and beat, pounded, and scraped the accompaniment. Sometimes he would simply play inside the two walls of his instrument as upon a triangle—but in an instant he would change his style and execute a chromatic passage upon the loose teeth. . . . 107Pompey played the earthquake of Samson tearing down an edifice of injustice; he amplified the actions of a chained man who shook the foundations of society's order; he transported 1845 listeners back to the moment when Samson picked up the jawbone and meted out deadly, divine justice against his captors. With every shake of the bleached white jawbone, bodies piled up: “With a donkey's jawbone, mound upon mound, With a donkey's jawbone, I struck down a thousand men,” Samson said.108When Pompey “beat, pounded, and scraped” the jawbone in Samson's name, he opened a transcendent timespace—connecting a mythical man's vengeance to an eschatological promise of liberation to an everyday moment played on a workaday instrument; that is, an instrument of the working day for a mule driver like Pompey. He opened this portal with “his whole body, head, arms, legs, and feet . . . moving in the most perfect time,” forging an embodied connection. He inhabited the potential of the Black Samson, carrying listeners to the moment when the building might come down.109Yet unlike Samson, Pompey did not stand alone, for the jawbone connected this Black Missourian to the rhythms of Africa and Peru and Jamaica, to the dancing of Congo Square and Jonkonnu and Son de los diablos, to the singing of the Set Girls and meetings before the Queen in the cofradía hall. The jawbone's rattle and clack connected a community through its sounds, which told dancers, accompanists, and everyone else that they could continue what came before.In his left hand, Pompey held a jawbone by its chin. And by seizing the time and space and opportunity to make something out of nothing, by bringing the sounds of a Black Atlantic–Caribbean–Pacific diaspora to a riverbank in Nebraska, Pompey made that jawbone speak of liberation, even if he could not live it fully that day.
