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Joy Is An Act of Resistance:

Sing. Laugh. Dance… in spite of every adversity. Joy is an act of resistance. It is the proof of irrepressible freedom that cannot be redlined, contained by a color line, or coded blue by a flatline. We are resilient. We endure. And it is our joy that has sustained us. A light heart and hearty laughter have always been our best medicine against the chronic stresses of being Black in America.

Our joy is an offering to our ancestors in that most primal of prayers and thanksgiving – the dance. We move our feet in gratitude and faith, for the distance we have come and for the certainty that we will get there, one day. An African aphorism says, “After the heartbeat, the drum,” with both heartbeat and drum pumping life into our limbs in celebration of the freedom that one day will be. Joy is sympathetic magic, conjuring all good things hoped for into the present tense. It is a demonstration and a declaration – to ourselves and all others – that we are still here, still human, and very much alive despite the centuries of brutish treatment and attempts to turn us into brutes that would respond in kind.

This is the joy our shared experience – the joy of spring expressed in Pinkster, Pentecost, and the Feast of the Weeks when the spirit of life reborn descends like a dove on the heads and hearts of those who have passed over and have been passed over and have wandered in the wilderness but always found joy in community and their shared journey and survival. Today they are the descendants of Simon Congo, Paul D’Angola, and Jacob Barsimson who bequeathed that joy to traditions that endure in the Hudson Valley – to jubilee Sunday service, to bacchanal Saturday nights, to Pinkster parades and any excuse to dance wherever two or three are gathered together. Black laughter is often loud, defiant, and in your face. It’s the sound of joy at having crossed over Jordan, the Ohio River, and the Mason Dixon to freedom. It’s the everyday joy of having cheated death one more time.

The allure of Pinkster in 1827 was such that Isabella Baumfree, better known to most as Sojourner Truth, even “looked back into Egypt,” the Swartekill area of Ulster where she had been enslaved, with a conflicted longing for the joy of that celebration. Pinkster was its own kind of freedom. Baumfree, who was so much more complex than the myths that have been constructed about her, grabbed hold of freedom in whatever form she could find it. Depicted by abolitionist writers as old and asexual, she was in fact tall, agile, and a competitive, provocative dancer, fond of liquor and tobacco and use to the kind of sexual license reserved for men – two husbands, lovers, and an intimate, exploitive relationship with her enslaver that she turned to her advantage. Pinkster extended the opportunity for this kind of freedom and release. Sojourner Truth, like the abolitionists who wrote about her, understood that revelations about her private life would have undermined her moral authority as a reformer in the puritanical climate of her time. But she was as much a product of Pinkster as of the movement for the abolition of slavery.