Jumping line means movie#

In a Besom Wedding, a broom was placed aslant in a doorway for a couple to jump over.

One of these rituals, practiced widely in Wales, was a 'Besom Wedding,' a besom being a type of broom. They were married through non-church rituals. Some people - particularly Roma, commonly known as 'gypsies' - had marriages that weren't recognized by the church. It's featured in a scene in Haley's story. 'They didn't need the government telling them they had to get remarried.' Centuries later, black communities in America reclaimed the slavery-era tradition for their own.ĭundes credits Alex Haley's book and miniseries 'Roots' for the resurgence of the marriage ritual. 'There were even cases where former slaves refused to be married, because they felt their broomstick wedding conducted 30 years ago was sufficient,' Parry said. But in some cases, they'd rely on their broomstick weddings. Marriage was important for legal recognition. If a couple wanted to marry but a priest wasn't available, for example, they'd jump the broom and then wait for a clergy member to come into town a few weeks later to ratify the marriage.Īt the same time, former slaves had complicated relationships with legal marriage in America. But in some situations, it was still used. But at some point, 'slave communities recognized it as one way they could legitimately marry each other.'Īfter the American Civil War, former slaves 'embraced more orthodox forms of marriage,' according to Parry. 'They didn't entirely know the origins of it,' Parry told INSIDER.

It became a form of apologetics.'īy the 1830s and '40s, jumping the broom was a ritual that enslaved people understood as their own. 'They used this to prove to northern abolitionists that they were being very benevolent, nice, and kind to their slaves. 'When slaveowners married slaves, they would usually give certain slaves a very elaborate wedding,' Parry said. If anything, some slaveowners tended to give more showy weddings. But at the same time, most historians think slave masters didn't care all that much about slave marriages 'as long as they were bearing children,' Parry told INSIDER. Some slaveowners forced their slaves to do it as a form of mockery. Jumping the broom wasn't necessarily a tradition imposed on slaves by their masters, according to Tyler Parry, a historian of marriage rituals in the African diaspora. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/New York Public Library And sometimes they jumped over a single broom, and sometimes they each had their own broom.Īn 1899 illustration of a broomstick wedding. Sometimes the couple jumped at the same time and sometimes they jumped separately.

Sometimes the broom was laid on the ground and sometimes it was held in the air. There was some variance in the practice, according to the accounts that exist today.

Instead of an ordained minister legally conducting a wedding, there are accounts of slaveowners fetching a broom and having two slaves jump over it before they were considered married, according to Dundes. Slave marriages often weren't legally recognized, with tragic consequences - families could be separated at the whim of their owners. In the antebellum United States, 'jumping the broom' was one ceremony where slaves were forced to marry one another, according to the folklore scholar Alan Dundes. Slaves in America were married by jumping over a broom.

Jumping line means movie#

Two people jumping the broom during the premiere of the movie 'Jumping the Broom.'