“To Jump the Broomstick”

Library of Congress

In this Harper’s Weekly illustration from 1866, a chaplain with the Freedmen’s Bureau officiates the wedding of a black Union soldier and his bride. Before the Civil War, when southern state laws prohibited enslaved people from marrying, many black couples resorted to the informal marriage ritual of “jumping over the broomstick.”

TO JUMP THE BROOMSTICK | idiom {common} | To live as man and wife without the legal tie. This allusion is to a quasi marriage ceremony performed by both parties jumping over a broomstick.¹

While these days it is associated with the African-American community, to jump the broomstick probably originated as a wedding custom in the British Isles among Celts, Romani, rural Welshmen, and English laborers. In Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, historian Tyler D. Perry explores its trans-Atlantic origins. In the 6th century B.C.E., Greek philosopher Pythagoras urged his followers “not [to] step over a broom.”² Centuries later in early European folklore, the broomstick—a common household object—became linked to numerous superstitions, including protection from evil spirits and witchcraft. While the original text no longer exists, Quiz’em’s Chronicles, published in 1598, reportedly contained the following account: “ye Bride and ye Bridegroom, not handily finding a Parson, and being in grievous haste to be wed; they did take a broom-stick, and they did jump from one side of ye Broome-stick over to ye other side thereof; and having do done, they did think them lawfully Man and Wife.”³

Possibly rooted in the medieval era, by the 18th century rituals called “besom weddings” were commonly documented among rural communities in the British Isles. Placing a slanted birch besom (broom) across the doorway of the couple’s cabin, the groom “jumped over it first into the house, and afterwards the young woman in the same way.” Being carefully observed by a witness or village elder, the marriage was invalid if the broom had been removed or either party touched the broom while crossing. Otherwise, the community considered the marriage, and the children born from it, fully legitimate. The bride could request an annulment within a year if the marriage proved unsatisfactory. In that case, either the woman or the couple, again before witnesses, stepped backward over the broomstick. Although a common custom across Europe’s rural communities, the higher-ups rejected besom weddings in favor of church-sanctioned marriages.⁴

The custom persisted into the 19th century among rural and isolated frontier communities in both Europe and the United States. In migrant Romani communities, young men and women wed by jumping over the broomstick, with food, music, and dancing to follow the ceremony.⁵ In 1829, a couple in Alabama wed by cutting “a tremendous caper over a long hickory pole, probably in imitation of the old English custom of jumping over the broomstick.”⁶ While derided by outsiders, the custom was especially popular in Appalachia—so much so that it was occasionally called a “Kentucky affair.”⁷ “The ritual’s influence in white American folklore suggests that broomstick marriages were not simply ‘slave marriages,’ but became a custom largely identified with marginalized and isolated populations of various ethnic and regional identities,” Perry writes.⁸

From the mid-19th century onward, variation of the phrase frequently appeared in both American and British dictionaries, novels, and publications. B.W. Green’s The Word-book of Virginia Folk Speech, which recorded “the English of every-day life and not of dictionaries,” defined “Broomstick-marriage” as “Two people living together as man and wife without legal marriage are said to have been married by jumping over the broomstick.”⁹ Charles Dickens even alluded to the custom in his 1860 novel, Great Expectations: “They both led tramping lives, and this woman in Gerrard Street here had been married very young, over the broomstick (as we say), to a tramping man, and was a perfect fury in point of jealousy.”¹⁰ In most cases, publications by authors of higher status delegitimized the practice, portraying couples as uneducated and the marriages as a sham.

In the American South, state laws prohibited enslaved people from marrying. According to their enslavers, “The slave is a chattel, and chattels do not marry. The slave is not ranked among sentient beings, but among things; and things are not married.”¹¹ But enslaved people fully recognized the importance of family, marriage, community, and love—rituals and emotions common to their African ancestors. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project produced Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives—in which formerly enslaved people shared memories of their time in bondage. These interviews contain frequent references to informal marriage practices. “Say I wanted this woman for my wife. We would just put down the broom and step over it and we would be married. That is all there was to it before emancipation. Didn’t have no matrimony read nor nothing. You were married when you stepped over the broom handle. That was your wife,” recalled one man.¹²  Wedding practices—and enslaved peoples’ views on matrimony—varied from plantation to plantation. Sometimes the bride and groom, attired in castoff clothing from their enslavers, jumped the broom before both white and black witnesses. In most cases, the couple selected their marriage partner and the ceremony was performed amid their black community.

In some instances, the enslaved couple desired a formal wedding performed by an ordained minister or in a church. An 1855 issue of the North Carolina University Magazine described the various perspectives found among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Bob, the groom, “who was rather an ‘Old Fogy,’ and had all the superstitions natural to his race, did not wish to be married ‘by the books,’ as it was a certain forerunner of bad luck, but wished to imitate the example of his parents, by dispensing with all ceremony and be declared ‘man and wife’ simply by ‘jumping the broom-stick.’” Nancy, meanwhile, who had “spent some time in a city and had there seen marriage ceremonies performed with great pomp, was entirely too aristocratic for that trivial manner of entering into so serious a compact.” Bob acquiesced, and the couple wed in a formal church ceremony.¹³

Out of necessity, the community also recognized divorce. “To git unmarried, all you had to do was to jump backwards over the same broomstick,” recalled Betty Foreman Chessier, in her 1930s narrative.¹⁴ Not all couples had the privilege of formally ending their marriages. Lunsford Lane, an enslaved North Carolinian, recognized the limitations placed on his union. “In May, 1828, I was bound as fast in wedlock as a slave can be. God may at any time sunder that band in a freeman; either master may do the same at pleasure in a slave. The bond is not recognized in law,” he remarked.¹⁵ To absolve debts or settle estates, white enslavers forcibly separated black families at auction or in other sales. Husbands and wives often found themselves living hundreds of miles apart, with no chance of reunion. Either by choice or at the behest of their new enslaver, many enslaved people remarried by, once again, jumping the broom.

Following the Civil War, newly emancipated African Americans legalized their nuptials in civil and religious ceremonies. In the late 19th century, John Williams’ parents—Sam McInnis and Mandy McInnis—changed their last name and formalized their union. Enslaved couples “just had to ‘step over a broom.’” He recalled: “After the war, the colored folks had to get a license at the Courthouse to get married … and give their proper names when they bought their license. That’s when my father changed his name. He and my mama married like ‘white folks’ at Mississippi City, while they were working at Beauvoir,” the home of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis.”¹⁶ By choosing their own last name—one distinct from their former white enslavers’—Sam and Mandy Williams, and by extension their children, asserted their freedom and showcased their family status.

Created by an act of Congress in March 1865, the United States Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was responsible for “the supervision and management of all matters relating to the refugees and freedmen and lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War.” Among its many urgent tasks: facilitate and record the marriages of formerly enslaved men and women. Tens of thousands of African-American couples appeared before commissioners to obtain marriage certificates. The process varied considerably by state, some of them documenting husband and wife in addition to their children’s names.¹⁷ The Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, for instance, did not register marriage licenses but instead published an elaborate set of marriage rules, which applied to couples living in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.¹⁸

In order to receive military benefits or inheritance, couples had to prove the legality of their marriages. This hurdle prevented black families—many of whom never legalized their marriages after emancipation—from acquiring government and military benefits. The Bureau of Pensions, which was created to assist disabled Union veterans and their dependents, meticulously investigated the lives of black widows seeking aid. Any hint of impropriety—a child born outside of wedlock or an informal marriage—could disqualify an applicant.¹⁹ Courts, likewise, denied inheritance in the absence of official documentation. Given such contexts, an increasing number of black couples chose officially registered weddings, which legally protected the marriage and formally recognized the rights of the head of household. Over a half century before, Timothy Griffin and Lucy Woods had been “slaves on the same plantation in North Carolina … [and] entered into the connubial state by the old slave custom of jumping over a broomstick.” With 108-year-old Griffin on his deathbed, the couple wed before a minister in 1912.²⁰ By the late 19th century, broomstick marriages had all but vanished among the black community.

In 1977, Roots, an American television series based on the 1976 novel by Alex Haley, revived the custom. In it, the characters Kunta Kinte and Belle married by jumping over the broom. According to The New York Times, “The practice has since come to signify sweeping away the old and welcoming the new, the joining of two families and showing respect to ancestors.” Today, many black or African-American couples incorporate the tradition into their ceremonies. When interviewed by The New York Times in 2022, Julius Crowe Hampton described jumping the broom as “the most transcendental experience of my life. I felt as if I was lifted by the ancestors as we took this grand leap of faith witnessed by our friends, family and community.”

Tracy L. Barnett is currently a visiting assistant professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She recently earned her Ph.D. in American History from the University of Georgia. Firearms—their meaning to men and their availability in 19th-century America—are at the center of her academic scholarship.