Quote:
Originally posted by SoTrue1920
There's other research that suggests that jumping the broom was initiated not as a 'genial' way of acknowledging the coupling of a male and female slave, but was created as a means of mocking the bonds that the couple had created. Seeing as how African Americans couldn't legally marry, "jumping the broom" didn't really mean anything at all -- it was just a "nice" thing for a "nice" slaveowner to do for his property. It wasn't legally binding. It wasn't even emotionally binding, because if a slavemaster decided to separate a couple he very well could, and there was precious little an enslaved couple could do to stop it.
That was the main reason I decided not to have a 'jumping the broom' ceremony during my wedding last year. A wedding is a time of deep, lasting, spiritual and emotional bonding for a couple; why would I want to introduce a tradition that makes a mockery of the love I share with my husband?
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I have to disagree with your statement that there was no emotionally binding in marriages of slaves. There are many documented cases of separated husbands/wives searching for years for their spouses after the civil war. They were definately "emotionally bound." I did some additional research on the jumping of the broom tradition before I got married. Harriett Cole's book also mentioned the Ebo traditon of giving a couple a broom when they got married as a symbol of them setting up house hold. She and other scholars have speculated that the jumping of the broom was an adaptation of this ceremony. My husband and I chose to jump the broom as a part of our wedding because we wanted to pay tribute to our ansestors, known and unknown, who honored and upheld their marital vows through all types of obstacles--including slavery and forced separations.
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