His wooden spoon has a pointing and purposeful inial: a small, naturalistic hand deftly carved into its tip.94 hree curved ingers are held in check by the bent thumb as the index inger points in the opposite direction from the spoon’s bowl. It makes a decisive gesture, similar to the letter “D” in American Sign Language. he hand is concave and appears taut. he igure in the wood creates a lined, realistic surface for the palm. It appears to be a hand according to Western conventions of representation. It does not simply suggest a hand but copies one, with realistic joints and creases. he carved hand is attached to an elongated wrist that morphs into a curved handle and links to the ovoid bowl of the spoon. he skilled carver used the grain of the wood to emphasize the hand’s connection to a lean forearm. he carved wrist is resolved into the handle through a simple incision. Its color, a rich reddish brown, could be that of flesh. he spoon is about twelve inches long, and the entire carved hand could it inside of the large semicircular spoon bowl at the opposite end.
His object does not easily fall within any of George Browne Goode’s six categories. In Tangible hings, it is an unplaced object.
Formally, the carving seems equally divided between function and representation: a serviceable spoon bowl on one end and a carved, pointing appendage at the other. hese two aspects make it easy to consider it as an anthropological and art-historical object, one with a clear cultural context and function, as well as an aesthetic. It could as easily be housed in the Fogg Art Museum as it is in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. A Western user, thinking of its potential culinary use, would hold this spoon at the slight crook in the handle, where the human form becomes a utensil. he wooden index finger would point above and behind the user, in the opposite direction from the spoon’s bowl.
He precise anthropological context of the spoon is unclear. It was collected in sub-Saharan West Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. Its tribal affiliation and maker remain unknown, and it does not seem to have a clear iconographic link to an existing cultural group. he naturalistic carved hand may have more in common with Western art than with African forms of representation and could suggest a hybrid style. It may be a variation on the ceremonial spoon form, perhaps reflecting a combination of colonial Portuguese and West African traditions. hough it appears to be scaled for domestic use, the carefully carved hand may have had a spiritual function. Ceremonial spoons are objects that convey title, respect, and power in a range of African communities. Such spoons were part of the accruements of office for high-status women, and were
75. Collected in sub-Saharan West Africa in 1857, this wooden spoon has a handle that morphs into a carving of a human hand with a pointing finger. It is hard to categorize, appearing more ceremonial than functional. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
76. he human hand carved on the spoon has elements more in common with Western than African art; perhaps it is an intercultural object. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Used in ceremonies or in displays outside of homes rather than for cooking. he object may be related to a specific individual or title, giving it a social identity.95 his potential anthropological context was not carried with this object to the United States, where it was cataloged simply as a “spoon.” It remained a curio in private hands until it was donated to Harvard three decades after it was collected.
In Tangible hings, the spoon is an unplaced object precisely because it is equally uncomfortable as art and anthropology. As history, the spoon points to an even deeper discomfort, as a trace of the transatlantic slave trade.
He spoon was acquired on the southwest coast of Luanda, the present-day capital of the nation of Angola, in 1857. Mary Willis Sparhawk donated the spoon along with more than sixty other objects to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1883. Her son, Clement Willis Sparhawk, was a medical student at Harvard at the time and graduated the following year. he objects she donated were from both Africa (the Congo) and South America (Brazil). Her husband, John Bertram Sparhawk, had collected them on his travels. He had been a Massachusetts merchant and traveler, with substantial interests in the Brazilian rubber industry, and had owned a plantation on Fernando Po, now Bioko, an island off the coast of Cameroon that is part of Equatorial Guinea.96 He was not just a trader and a merchant but also a farmer, who required substantial labor to produce rubber, coffee, rice, and cocoa for U. S. markets. In the 1850s, Sparhawk had sailed on ships owned by his wealthy uncle and namesake John Bertram, making trips across the Atlantic to Angola and Para, Brazil. Objects like this spoon and the other artifacts recorded in the logs of the Peabody Museum document his travels.
He pointing hand on this spoon was not the only human form crossing the Atlantic in the 1850s. U. S. participation in the African slave trade had been illegal since 1807. In the 1850s, when Sparhawk was traveling, U. S. nationals were certainly not supposed to be involved in the Brazilian slave trade, though some southern slaveholders and northern merchants ignored this prohibition. Ships flying the U. S. flag illicitly carried slaves from West Africa to Brazil in the years before the American Civil War. Sparhawk’s connections to both Brazil and Angola suggest that he may have had a deeper connection to this trade.97 Even without direct involvement in the sale of individuals into slavery, some of the people who worked for Sparhawk in Para, Brazil, where slavery was legal into the 1880s, were likely enslaved, as were the workers who supported his endeavors in Angola.98 In 1864, Sparhawk and his son Bertram (born to his irst wife in Brazil) applied for a joint passport, and by the following year, they were running a nearly 1,500-acre plantation in Fernando Po in this case, one they had committed to operating with free labor.99 he venture went horribly wrong and the two Sparhawks were basically marooned until their family sent funds to rescue them. he elder Sparhawk died one month after he returned to Massachusetts in 1872.100
A decade after his death, his wife donated his collections to Harvard, whose accession log described the lot as “[a]n interesting collection ofweap-ons, feather garments, gourd dishes, and other native work of the Amazon Indians; and of the grass-cloth garments, basketwork, carvings on wood and ivory, trumpets made of elephant tusks, and numerous other objects of native workmanship from Southern Africa.”101 he large donation linked Brazil and Africa in the Peabody Museum’s records. he places recorded in the museum’s ledger book followed the same path as the enslaved Africans forcibly moved to the Amazon to work the rubber and coffee plantations, which were often funded by American capital and designed to serve the needs of U. S. consumers. Did Mary Willis Sparhawk realize the larger story her donation recorded? In the years her husband and stepson were in Fernando Po, her father Clement Willis served as an alderman in Boston and proposed the creation of a monument to those who died “putting down the Southern Rebellion.” he Army and Navy Monument was installed on the Boston Common in 1877. Today Mary Willis Sparhawk’s museum donation may suggest as much about Massachusetts’s role in slavery as does her father’s towering plinth.102
His carved spoon with its pointing inger may have shared a vessel with enslaved Africans, and later with the goods being sent to Massachusetts that their hands helped to create. As an unplaced thing, does it suggest a specific ceremonial function? Could a careful anthropologist link it to the identity of a respected female tribal leader? Perhaps an art historian could explain how a talented artist imbued a carved stick with as much energy as God’s crooked finger on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Or does it serve as a placeholder for a shameful, often forgotten chapter in American history? Maybe it is all of these things and a material metaphor: a piece of a human body employed for another’s purpose, taken from one context to another, and after more than a century in a museum case, still pointing to a sinister history.
S. A. C.
World History
