Jumping the broom
It is most widespread among African Americans and Black Canadians [citation needed], popularized during the 1970s by the novel and miniseries Roots, and originated in mid-19th-century antebellum slavery in the United States.
The expression may also derive from the custom of jumping over a besom ("broom" refers to the plant from which the household implement is made) associated with the Romanichal Travellers of the United Kingdom,[4] especially those in Wales.
[7] In 1789, the rumoured clandestine marriage between the Prince Regent and Maria Fitzherbert is cited in a satirical song in The Times: "Their way to consummation was by hopping o'er a broom, sir".
[8] Despite these allusions, research by legal historian Rebecca Probert of Warwick University has failed to find evidence of an actual contemporary practice of jumping over a broomstick as a sign of informal union.
He describes correlations between the ceremonies of enslaved African Americans and those of the rural British, saying that it is not coincidental that two groups separated by an ocean used similar matrimonial forms revolving around a broomstick.
[13] Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations (first published in serial form in All the Year Round from 1 December 1860 to August 1861), contains a reference in chapter 48 to a couple's marriage "over the broomstick."
[14] Although it has been assumed that "jumping (or, sometimes, 'walking') over the broom" always indicated an irregular or non-church union in England (as in the expressions "Married over the besom" and "living over the brush"),[15] examples of the phrase exist in the context of legal religious and civil weddings.
Sullivan III (1997) replied to Dundes that the custom originated among the Welsh people,[20] and was known as a priodas coes ysgub ("besom wedding").
Gwynn's dating of the custom to the 18th century rested on the assumption that it must have disappeared before the elderly interviewees were born, and on his misreading of the Llansantffraid Glyn Ceiriog parish baptismal register.
[25] Alan Dundes (1996) notes how "a custom which slaves were forced to observe by their white masters has been revived a century later by African Americans as a treasured tradition".
[27] Among southern Africans – who were largely not a part of the Atlantic slave trade – it represented a wife's commitment (or willingness) to clean the courtyard of her new home.
Parry writes that despite the racial animus which characterized the US South during the nineteenth century, poor white Southerners (many of whom were descendants of people who had irregular forms of matrimony in Britain) and enslaved African Americans had more cultural exchange than is commonly acknowledged.
[36] After its smaller-scale continuity in rural areas of the United States (in Black and white communities), the custom was revivied among African Americans after the publication of Alex Haley's Roots.
In Things We Said Today, an episode of Grey's Anatomy, Miranda Bailey and Ben Warren jump over a broom at the end of their wedding ceremony.
In Someone Saved My Life Tonight, another episode of Grey's Anatomy, Maggie Pierce and Winston Ndugu jump over a broom, finishing their wedding ceremony.
