Into the White Mind

This chapter contextualizes the “broomstick wedding” in North America as a product of the social classifications that white Americans largely modelled from their British counterparts, though they simultaneously repositioned the discourse within the particular cultural framework of the antebellum United States. Specifically, it examines how slave owners understood the broomstick wedding and its relationship to slavery, determining that the elite patterns of matrimony existent in Britain were adopted by the southern aristocracy. Among American writers, social constructs of “race” and “otherness” were imbedded within elite discourses surrounding the broomstick ceremony that were once typically concentrated within class distinctions among British writers. On the other end, Northern abolitionists also opined on the broomstick wedding, framing it as a degrading custom forced upon the enslaved by those who enslaved them. Thus, the negative portrayals of those populations who “jumped the broom” came from various angles, highlighting how race and class were important components of differentiation. In the United States, then, “jumping the broom” becomes much more associated with constructs of “blackness,” as American writers and minstrel performers portrayed it as a custom connected to slavery and the traditions of enslaved people.