A Different Legend of Sleepy Hollow

For most of us the name Sleepy Hollow brings forth images from Washington Irving’s 1819 legend of the hapless schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, who is chased one night by a terrifying headless horseman and mysteriously disappears, never to be heard from again. But there is another picture of the Dutch enclave Irving lovingly paints, one of a bucolic place where life moves slowly and tradition holds sway: “I mention this peaceful spot with all possible laud,” writes Irving early in the story, “for it is in such little retired Dutch valleys, found here and there embosomed in the great State of New-York, that population, manners, and customs, remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved.”


Situated on the east bank of the Hudson River about 25 miles north of New York City, today’s Sleepy Hollow has preserved, in the tradition of Irving’s embosomed hamlets, what might be the oldest African-American holiday, a festival called Pinkster. Popular in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, the holiday disappeared around 1850. It was revived in 1978, and every May since the Historic Hudson Valley Association has hosted a day-long celebration at Phillipsburg Manor in Sleepy Hollow, recreating the fun and games of the original holiday, brought here by the Dutch more than three centuries ago.

When the Dutch West India Company established New Amsterdam in the American colonies in 1624, it also brought with it slaves. As the settlers spread north throughout the Hudson River Valley, expanding the boundaries of the colony of New Netherland, the demand for labor to work the large bouweries, or farms, sparked the over two-hundred year history of slavery in what would become New York.

Slavery in the Hudson River Valley operated on a more modest scale than in the South. Most landowners had only one to five slaves (although a few had as many as 40). As a result, there were no large communities of Africans; blacks were mostly integrated into the white households, living in their master’s basements, attics, and rooms off the kitchens. Although their lives were not subject to the daily terrors of the Southern plantation system, Africans in the North still found life, for the most part, oppressive and grim. They were enslaved, recreation was rare, and except for the few other blacks in the household, they rarely met with other Africans—that sort of thing could be punished. Ever vigilant of problems among the slaves, whites passed laws to discourage them from gathering. For instance, in Ulster County, meetings of three or more blacks at “unseasonable hours” could result in whippings for them, and fines of a Spanish doubloon for theirs masters, according to a 1695 law.

But there was one exception. Celebrated seven weeks after Easter during May or early June, Pinksteren, Dutch for Pentecost, or Pinkster, as it eventually was called, was brought over by the Dutch in the early seventeenth century and was popular in the Netherlandish strongholds of the Hudson Valley, Long Island, and Northern New Jersey. The Christian holiday marking the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ’s disciples (and still celebrated by the Dutch in the Netherlands today), took place in the spring, during a time associated with renewal. It was also a time for slaves, who were given a week’s break, to gather and relieve the isolation of country life. While the Dutch observed the holiday by attending church services, visiting neighbors, and egg-dyeing, Africans traveled, sometimes miles away, to visit loved ones and family members, and connect with their community. Trips to New York City (by 1664 the English had peacefully taken New Amsterdam and renamed it), were not uncommon, and some slaves took the opportunity to run away. The chance to celebrate with friends and family was a powerful attraction. In 1827, the newly free Sojourner Truth, who would later become a leading abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, actually thought about returning to the Ulster County farm where she had been a slave (and putting herself in danger of being recaptured), just to attend the festivities there.

By the late-eighteenth century Pinkster in the Hudson River Valley and elsewhere had become more African than Dutch. Cornelius Littlepage, a character in James Fenimore Cooper’s 1845 novel Satanstoe, observes the festival in a passage likely drawn from Cooper’s own observations of the festival:

“The features that distinguish a Pinkster frolic from the usual scenes at fairs, and other merry-makings, however, were of African origin. It is true, there are not now, nor were there then, many blacks among us of African birth; but the traditions and usages of their original country were so far preserved as to produce a marked difference between this festival, and one of European origin. Among other things, some were making music, by beating on skins drawn over the ends of hollow logs, while others were dancing to it, in a manner to show that they felt infinite delight. This, in particular, was said to be a usage of their African progenitors.”

According to Albert James Williams-Myers, a professor of black studies at the State University of New York in New Paltz, and the author of Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African American Presence in the Hudson River Valley to the Twentieth Century, “For the Africans adapting the Pinkster holiday was a way of preserving their own traditions, the song, the dance, the dress, the drums. Those newly from Africa became the teachers of those blacks born here.”

There were booths and food stands. Vendors dressed their stalls in greenery and “pinkster bloomies,” or azaleas, the official festival flower. Blacks sang, drummed, recited verse, told stories, and improvised dances, combining steps from their homeland with those from Europe. “It was New York’s contribution to the Carnival seasons, very much like the West Indian and Brazilian festivals at Christmas and Lent, only celebrated in the Spring,” said Williams-Myers in a 2004 interview I had with him. And, surprisingly, blacks and whites mingled. “Hundreds of whites were walking through the fields, amused spectators,” Cooper continues in Satanstoe. “Among these last were a great many children of the better class, who had come to look at the enjoyment of those who attended them, in their own ordinary amusements. Many a sable nurse did I see that day, chaperoning her young master, a young mistress, or both together, through the various groups; demanding of all, and receiving from all, the respect that one of these classes was accustomed to pay to the other.”

“You had a diversity of people,” said Williams-Myers. “Europeans, including the Dutch, French, English, Irish, Germans. Africans and Native Americans. It was very inclusive. It was common ground.”

It was also a time for blacks to slyly mock whites by aping European fashions and behavior (much like West Indian slaves of the time, who, during their New Year’s holiday called Junkanoo, gleefully ridiculed their owners), and recite speeches and stories filled with double meaning. A pamphlet printed in 1803 titled “The Pinkster Ode” yields a poem centered on a character named King Charles, that has decidedly abolitionist undertones:

“On wing’d Pegasus, laureat Pye
May raise king George above the sky’
And Gallic poets strain their art,
To swell the fame of Bonaparte;
These bards of gas can never raise
A song that’s fit for Charley’s praise.
To’ for a scepter he was born,
Tho’ from his tather’s kingdom torn,
And doom’d to be a slave; still he
Retains his native majesty.

O could I loud as thunder sing,
Thy fame should sound, great Charles, the king,
From Hudson’s stream to Niger’s wave,
And rouse the friend of every slave.

The highlight of the festival was the crowning of the Pinkster King, a chance to give honor to respected members of the black community. The “Pinkster Ode” though itself fanciful, did praise a real-life man named Charles, who from 1790 to 1810 presided over the festival in Albany, New York, where, it is said, it was celebrated the best. “He was alleged to have been born in the Congo and be of royal blood,” said Williams-Myers. “King Charles presided over the Pinkster Carnival most likely because of his African royalty. He was also a master drummer. He could make the drum talk. Not everybody had that skill.”

By 1811 the city of Albany passed laws designed to eventually eliminate the festival. The town father’s cited the rowdiness of the blacks. Other towns followed until the holiday dwindled into obsolescence sometime around 1850. Williams-Myers maintains that New York officials actually feared uprisings. “People did drink and celebrate, but the literature maintains they were not rowdy. But at the turn of the nineteenth century, many whites feared uprisings. There had been the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739; the Haitian Revolution in 1791, the Gabriel Prosser revolt of 1800 in Virginia. Much closer to home, there had been a slave conspiracy in Kingston, New York, in 1775, that was overheard and stopped. White people even became frightened of the crowds at Pinkster.”

In 1978 the Hudson River Valley Association revived the holiday at Phillipsburg Manor, and in 1985, Radire Sumler, then the preservations group's director of programs, spearheaded, with the help of Professor Williams-Myers, the introduction of African-American traditions that were such a vital part of the early Pinkster celebrations. Past festivals have included storytelling, a drumming workshop and performance, and African-influenced contra-dancing. “It’s actually a dance where the blacks made fun of the white dances, the stiff minuets,“ said Larry Earl, an associate director of the Historic Hudson Valley Association in an article for The New York Times. “It has hip movement and jumping, but was developed to put on their masters.”

“We always hear that Africans were stripped of everything when they came here, and in many ways they were. For the most part, they really only brought their skin color and their dispositions, but they also brought what they could carry in their heads, their traditions," said Williams-Meyers. When we look for African survivals, the focus is often the South, but the North is important. “The Pinkster holiday turned out to be a real revelation.”

Phillipsburg Manor, located in Sleepy Hollow, New York , continues the Pinkster tradition today. Owned by the Philips family, wealthy Dutch merchants, the 300-year old estate originally covered 50,000 acres, and was managed by 23 slaves year-round. A one-day event, the Pinkster Festival at Phillipsburg is a recreation of the original, combining traditional Dutch children’s games like ninepins, stilt-walking, egg-dyeing, and European style country dancing with African storytelling, drumming, dance, a grand parade, and the election of a Pinkster King. This year’s Pinkster Festival will be held on May 19. For more information call 914-631-8200 or visit hudsonvalley.org/pinkster