by John Derek Norvell (1997)

Pinkster is one of the oldest African-American celebrations in Anglo-America and is certainly the oldest in the New York area. Dating to the early Dutch colonial period in New Netherlands (now New York and New Jersey), this celebration predates the earliest St. Patrick's Day festivals in America by one hundred years. The holiday's name is derived from the Dutch term for Pentecost, "pinkster/dagh," although it is closer in form to "pfingsten tag" of the neighboring German Lutheran religions. Along with Christmas and Easter, Pinkster remained as major religious celebrations within the newly established Calvanistic Dutch Reformed Church in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The African festival began with eleven Angolans who were brought to New Amsterdam in 1626 during the Dutch Angolan Congolese Wars. These Angolans brought with them a Bantu Ki Kongo derivation of the festival which incorporated elements of African Roman Catholicism. After their arrival in New Amsterdam, an African king was elected for each year of the festival, and certain dances (part religious, part secular) were performed on the Commons (now City Hall Park) and on Pinkster Hill in Albany (near the State Capital Building) in close proximity to the burial grounds of their loved ones. These circular dances were the forerunner of the "ring shouts" that gradually spawned the musical creation of the well-known "spirituals."

Pinkster became so thoroughly African by the eighteenth century that James Fenimore Cooper called the holiday the "Saturnalia" of North American Blacks in his story, Satanstoe, which used the festival as a background. The weeklong festivities included the erection of booths, the selling of wares, and much merrymaking in which social distinctions between slave and free were temporarily forgotten. Even poetry, the Pinkster Ode, was written for the occasion. The celebrations were witnessed by many famous Americans including George Washington when New York was the first capital of the new nation. Sadly, state and city fathers outlawed these boisterous festivals in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Historian Sterling Stuckey believes the last celebration tool place in the 1840's.

Striking religious features of the festival included the ring dance near burial grounds. This counter-clockwise dance represented the spiritual cosmos of the Congolese Bantu world. This cosmology was represented by a cross within a circle and was a symbol of God, Nzambi. The horizontal cross beam or kalunga line separated the mortal world above from the sea of the underworld below. At midnight (the high noon of the realm of the dead), their deceased ancestors rose with the emerging sun in the east to take the concerns of the living to God at high noon in the heavens. Thus, the counter-clockwise dance mirrored the four cardinal points of the sun. The crossroads of this symbolic cosmogram, drawn in the sand or by a fork in the road, also expressed an oath or invocation to God (or an intercessory ancestor). Later, it became the symbol of Christ who triumphed over death, firstborn of the realm of the dead, and who with the intercessory saints took up prayers and souls to the Almighty like the rising eastern sun.

In New Amsterdam, the original eleven Angolans, their descendants, and the many others brought here joined the Bowerie (Bowery) chapel in 1640, yet retained and supplemented these beliefs, even when the British took control of the colony in 1664. From the time of slavery, these customs would form the basis of African-American religious tradition, music, and liturgy in independent churches like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, mainline faiths, and in what was known as the "invisible Black church." The election of a king over all the Africans in New York suggests a collective "African consciousness" modeled on the Biblical narrative where a universal church was formed out of the many cultures when the apostles spoke in tongues with one accord. The dances near the burial ground also express a communion with the ancestors, saints of the church triumphant in union with the living congregation of the church militant.

This year's Pinkster celebration is special in that there is a commemoration of the burial grounds of those of the church triumphant. Today, the New York Historical Society is remembering the former site and adjoining burial grounds of both the Yorkville African Methodist Episcopal Mother Zion Church and All Angels Episcopal Church Mission of St. Michael's Church. These burial grounds contained the remains of the African American members of Seneca Village - the antebellum community that was dispersed to make way for Central Park. Pink azaleas, official flower of Pinkster, will be placed at these burial grounds in Central Park, the cemetery on Pinkster Hill in Albany, the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan (site of the first Pinkster celebration), and other hallowed grounds known and unknown all over the city, state, and Hudson Valley region. Hopefully, Pinkster will once again become a statewide celebration, as it was in the past.

John Derek Norvell is a member of the Congregation of St. Saviour and the Cathedral Choir

Published in A Holistic Approach to Innovative African American Music [Limited Edition]. Co-directors: Dr. James Turner and Dr. Karlton E. Hester. African Studies and Research Center and "Jazz" Studies at Cornell University. Ithaca, NY 1997.