"Death is more busy in this Place": Mortuary Ritual in the British Plantation Colonies, 1640-1780

Nicholas Beasley

Contempt for each other’s funeral rites was an essential feature of Africans’ and Europeans’ ways of living together during the colonial period. Though they shared some basic practices when facing death, many followers of these two ways of death were intent on preserving their differences and understanding the shortcomings of the opposing group’s practice. White Christians maintained hierarchical mortuary practices, like the use of varied palls, that provided continuity with the practices of their ancestors in Europe, allowed for the performance of social privilege, and proclaimed their racial privilege to the wider community. For many Africans and their descendants, the maintenance of African ways of death and the rejection of European rites were central to resisting the dehumanizing program of slavery and to the creation of new identities. Whites deployed both rhetorical and physical power in efforts to deni-grate and control the mortuary practice of Afro-Americans, including those who adopted the faith and ways of Christians. Death was busy in the plantation world, and the humans struggling to make lives there sought meaning in it, ironically making their rituals of death one of the liveliest forums for creating the new societies of early America.

[WP #0604]