John Canoe

One of several names used to describe a ritual, possibly African in origin, once common in coastal North Carolina and still practiced in the British West Indies, particularly Jamaica. (Other names include "John Koonah" and "John Kooner.") In The Battle for Christmas (Vintage Books, 1997), historian Stephen Nissenbaum describes the ritual as it was performed in nineteenth-century North Carolina:

Essentially, it involved a band of black men - generally young - who dressed themselves in ornate and often bizarre costumes. Each band was led by a man who was variously dressed in animal horns, elaborate rags, female disguise, whiteface (and wearing a gentleman's wig!), or simply his "Sunday-go-to-meeting-suit." Accompanied by music, the band marched along the roads from plantation to plantation, town to town, accosting whites along the way and sometimes even entering their houses. In the process the men performed elaborate and (to white observers) grotesque dances that were probably of African origin. And in return for this performance they always demanded money (the leader generally carried "a small bowl or tin cup" for this purpose), though whiskey was an acceptable substitute. (285)

Nissenbaum likens John Canoe to the wassailing tradition of medieval England, seeing in both a ritualized inversion of the normal social order that provides, simultaneously, a temporary suspension of and powerful reaffirmation of that order. (Wassailing, Nissenbaum notes, enacts this inversion along the axis of class, whereas John Canoe enacts it along the axis of race.) Both John Canoe and wassailing bear strong resemblance to the social inversion rituals that marked the Roman celebration of Saturnalia.

John Canoe is also the name of a track recorded by the LeBeha drummers of Belize, who perform traditional Garifuna music.