Right: "At an Alabama Corn Shuckin'," cakewalk by E. E. Huston, 1902.

2 Abrahams, Roger; Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South, Pantheon Books, New York, 1992; p. 30.

Slave dances were generally held around the end of the harvest season, and there seem to have been two events about which slaves were permitted "celebration": Christmas, and the so-called "corn-shucking." The first celebration was of a fixed date, the second, changeable, and sometimes held more than once a year, depending on the individual "culture" of the plantation; the harvested corn would be gathered and piled extraordinarily high ("as high as a house" in many descriptions) and the plantation's slaves as well as slaves from the surrounding area plantations would gather to shuck the corn. Sometimes the shucking would last long into the night, and on other plantations it would be over by dawn, the remainder of the evening spent dancing. 2