This New Year’s Eve, many say they will skip the club and celebrate at home. The “sober curious” movement, COVID-19, seasonal depression, and refusal to pay exuberant cover charges are among the many reasons. For many others, it follows a long history of tradition.
In fact, for generations, Haitians and Black Americans have commemorated the New Year at home and other places of sanctuary, through a practice of prayer that is often followed by cooking sacred recipes. These traditions are deeply connected to shared histories of slavery and freedom.
Today, as we look back on 2024 and prepare for the year ahead, many of us stand to learn from the long traditions of Haitians and Black Americans for whom New Year’s practices honor the struggles and triumphs of being Black in the Americas. For centuries, Black communities have marked the holiday by reflecting on the past to prepare for the future.
Haitians have held a distinct New Year’s tradition for centuries. From 1697 to 1804, French colonialism and enslaved labor made Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) the most profitable colony in the Americas. The wealth from coffee and sugar attained by the white ruling class depended on the forced labor of 500,000 enslaved people. Roughly two-thirds of Saint-Domingue’s slaves were born in West Africa; they were known as Bossales. Black Creoles, who were born in Saint-Domingue, filled the ranks of both the enslaved and free people of color. By November 1803, the Bossales and Creoles rose up and defeated the French together, and their Creole emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence on Jan. 1, 1804.
Read More: The Vilification of Springfield’s Haitians Taps Into a Long and Troubling History
That day began a rich New Year’s tradition of drinking a traditional squash soup called soup joumou to mark Haiti’s victory over slavery and colonialism. Historian Bayyinah Bello attributes the origin of the soup tradition to Dessalines’ wife, Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur Dessalines. Félicité encouraged the entire country to finally savor the soup they had long been forbidden by their enslavers to enjoy. The soup also honored those they had lost—both during the war and over the many years of violent bondage. Over the next years, Félicité transformed soup joumou from a bowl of anti-Blackness and exclusion into a Haitian delicacy that was packed with new meaning: emancipation, decolonization, and Black sovereignty.
Félicité’s tradition also had roots in Haitian Vodou, one of country’s oldest faith traditions. Vodou even played a major role in the Haitian Revolution, as the West African lwa or spirit-force Ogou Feray is credited with motivating slaves in Saint-Domingue to seek their freedom.
In Vodou, preparing food for the poor masses has long since been a spiritual endeavor. The ritual of manje pòv (feeding the poor), calls on Vodou practitioners, to visit cemeteries, intercede for the poor (both the living and dead), and prepare a feast that usually includes soup joumou. This process blesses the host’s entire extended family, as only the destitute beggar who is without family has the power to protect them from separation or spiritual misfortune.
In preparing soup joumou on New Year’s Eve in 1803, Félicité established Jan. 1 as a national manje pòv that carries relevance every year. It is still honored and revered today. The history of slavery, as well as persistent meddling in Haiti’s sovereignty since 1804, have caused hunger to be a unifying experience for the nation’s Black masses. For well over two centuries, Haitians across the globe have kept alive Félicité’s tradition of preparing soup late into the night on Dec. 31 and serving whoever comes hungry the next day. Beginning the year with a manje pòv reminds Haitians to enter the new year seeking blessings from their fellow poor and believing the proverb “nou tout se moun,” which translates to: everyone is human.
And yet, while Félicité stirred principles of universal human rights into soup joumou in 1803, millions of Black folks in the United States were still in bondage and were preparing for the annual “hiring day,” which also took place on Jan. 1. On Hiring Day, enslavers in the U.S. tore families apart, trading individuals to form the strongest workforces for the upcoming year. Slave fugitive Harriet Jacobs detailed that these annual abductions and the destruction of Black families caused some to resist being sold to new enslavers. Their actions were met with lashings and imprisonment until they promised not to run away back to their families.
The meaning of New Year’s Day was further complicated when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all enslaved people in seceded states would be liberated at midnight on Jan. 1, 1863. Black folks illegally gathered in praise houses and forests on New Year’s Eve in 1862 to pray and watch the freedom they were promised roll in.
Yet, freedom for Black Americans did not immediately come in 1863. Slaves at Somerset Place in North Carolina were told they were emancipated but unless they moved out of their homes on the plantation, they were required to keep working the land without pay. When ex-slaves did move throughout the Albemarle Region they were often overworked and underpaid. This led some formerly enslaved people, such as a man named James Augustus, to return to the plantation. For Augustus and others, being paid to be exploited was not emancipation. They would choose to stay at Somerset as Black America wrestled with what emancipation would really mean, if enslaved people were to just become the working poor.
Read More: 10 New Year’s Traditions From Across the Globe
There was still much reason to pray after Jan. 1, 1863, and so tarrying in prayer on New Year’s Eve became an annual tradition. Watch Night services, as the New Year’s Eve tradition came to be called, continued to take place in the homes, praise houses, and forests where then-enslaved people held the first service in 1862. The dilemma in attaining true freedom led them to pray, sing, shout, and embody the Holy Spirit for hours leading up to midnight on the first. Watch Night served to mark enslaved people’s experience of family separation, emancipation, and a long freedom struggle.
Today, Black Christians still navigate the complex meaning of New Year’s Day—mired, as it was, with contradictory meanings of a violent past and the promise of the future—by continuing to gather for Watch Night services or “Holy Ghost Parties” on Dec. 31 each year. During these services, Black Americans praise God for their communal and individual liberation over the previous year. They also spiritually wrestle with fear of what the new year might bring them and others. In modern times, for many Black Americans, Watch Night services embody the anxiety of how the new year will separate families through mass incarceration, health disparities, and poverty while also holding the radical hope that social justice, prosperity, and God’s protection will be their future.
As with the strong tradition among Haitians, food is part of Black Americans’ New Year’s Day rituals, used to materialize the tug-of-war between feelings of freedom and fear on New Year’s Eve. Food becomes a conduit for Black Americans to literally and figuratively digest their harsh history while consuming their hopes and desires for the new year. On Jan. 1, Black folks commune over ancestral recipes of collard greens, cornbread, and Hoppin John to help manifest health and prosperity.
These New Year’s meals cannot be separated from their role in physically sustaining Black Americans’ ancestors during enslavement—but much like manje pòv, the recipes are believed to ward off the evils of poverty and family separation. Hoppin John, an Anglicized pronunciation of the French translation for black-eyed peas (pois pigeon), are said to represent monetary coins. Scott Alves Barton notes that black-eyed peas are also set out for Ogou in many African Traditional Religions due to the spirit-force’s revolutionary ability to open doorways or opportunities.
Haitian and Black American New Year’s Eve traditions across faith backgrounds call us to taste the harsh realities of the past and pray over the dangers that lay ahead. These Black prayer practices and sacred recipes acknowledge how each year brings in blessings and continues a long road toward freedom. With full bellies and prayerful hearts, they invite us to ring in the New Year full of justice and joy, celebration and grief, wealth and want, and life and death.
Rev. Nyya Toussaint is a scholar of social movements within Black faith traditions. His family is from Haiti’s Latibonit coast and North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound waterways.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
