A Bandage of Love : African Voices in African American Art and Life

WHEN THE FIRST enslaved Africans were brought to North America in the seventeenth century, they were stripped of their possessions.

Throughout the generations slaveowners tried to erase all traces of African culture.

Although many scholars believed that European American influences succeeded in suppressing traces of Africa, historian Betty M.

Kuyk argues that these scholars were wrong. In A Bandage of Love she draws on art, oral tradition, interviews, and written history to illustrate how newly arrived Africans and successive generations of African Americans retained their beliefs, customs, and attitudes and how, despite the traumas of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and continuing racism, these cultural traits survived.

Kuyk looks to a diverse body of evidence - from religious practices to song lyrics, from fraternal rituals to visual arts - to reveal rich African cultural continuities in contemporary African American life. Examining the work of African American folk artists - painters Sam Doyle and Bill Traylor and sculptor Ralph Griffin - along with oral history, music, folklore, and historical documents, she explores how African Americans retained values in religious and family structures and ideas about organizing communities.

She demonstrates how the mixture of African backgrounds developed into new African American traditions.

By listening to stories and songs, studying artistic expressions, and searching for rare written records, Kuyk uncovers and celebrates the echoes of African voices in African American life today.