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Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May

2021; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jer.2021.0100

1553-0620

Tara Strauch,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviewed by: Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory by Robert E. May Tara Strauch (bio) Keywords Slavery, Christmas, Historical memory Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory. By Robert E. May. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 332. Cloth, $34.95.) Robert E. May’s comprehensive book, Yuletide in Dixie: Slavery, Christmas, and Southern Memory, examines Christmas in the antebellum South and the public memory of that holiday after the Civil War. While at first thought this might seem like a niche topic, May makes the argument that understanding how Christmas functioned in the slave South and how the holiday came to be remembered is crucial for understanding the system of slavery and its consequences. This book tracks the creation of an insidious ideology that deserves the attention of early American historians. For well over one hundred years, proslavery ideologues, southern memoirists, northern sympathizers, and other producers of culture created a sanitized, nostalgic, and familial vision of Christmas that encouraged Americans to think positively about slave owners and the system of slavery itself. Through a close reading of texts written by the literati of the [End Page 707] South, narratives of people who escaped enslavement, and the Works Progress Administration oral histories of formerly enslaved people, May shows us again and again how white southerners (and northerners) sanitized the story of slavery through tales of happy Christmas traditions. May’s work reads as a brutal but necessary reminder of the reality of enslaved lives. His dry and cutting tone and entertaining thrusts at elite southerners relieves some of the tension built up by reading this painfully thorough work. May has arranged the book chronologically and topically beginning with antebellum descriptions of how the holiday was celebrated in the South and moving through gift-giving, buying and selling enslaved people on Christmas, and slave resistance during the holiday season. The last two chapters and the epilogue focus on the Civil War and the creation of a public memory of happy Christmases in the ante-bellum south. As May explores throughout the first four chapters of the book, the holiday was a crucial part of plantation masters’ control over their human property. Christmas was used as a reward, kept from enslaved people as a punishment, and was designed on plantations to reinforce the centrality of the master to the plantation system. Christmas, May observes, was a commercialized holiday well before the Civil War; as he notes, “masters conveniently repressed the overlying deceptions of Christmas gifting because it was in their collective self-interest. All that mattered . . . was that most slaves seemed happy as they reveled over the holidays” (87). May addresses the Civil War in a short but forceful chapter examining how Christmas during the Civil War upended southern understandings of the holiday as “Civil War Christmases were fraught with discouragements for southern slaveowners” (183). Enslaved people, on the other hand, increasingly associated Christmas with freedom especially as the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. This led to “the symbiosis of Christmas with freedom” among African Americans (188). Finally, May shows how memorialists and novelists throughout the South created the image of the Old South Christmas during Reconstruction. The chapter entitled “Sanitizing the Past” drives home the point that southern writers were trying to remake the South through their writings and that these sources cannot be unthinkingly used to create an image of the pre-war South. In his epilogue, May hints at the importance of his work; he notes that “the real problem [with stories about Christmas] is that the cumulative effect of the retrospectives recovered in this book rendered slavery redeemable—or [End Page 708] more accurately, invisible” (258). In other words, there were likely happy moments for some enslaved people on some Christmases, but the narrative white southerners told themselves and others about Christmas in the antebellum period imagined that Christmas celebrations conformed to northern ideals by making slavery seem secondary to the enjoyment of the holiday. May’s work also highlights the role that popular culture played in creating the system of slavery and in promulgating historical memory. Scholarship about the early republic has and continues to be affected by the fact that “literate Americans...