This article constitutes the first step of a more extensive study about slave resistance within societies where slavery was a systematic practice, throughout the Americas. It focuses on the analysis of the festival of John Canoe in the nineteenth century Antebellum South, and explores the ambiguity of the feast as an arena that would explain the possibility of a surreptitious critic of the enslaved population. It also emphasizes, amongst others, the bodily transgressions of enslaved people within the celebration. The text seeks, in last, to argue in favor of a definition that slave resistance needs to be considered as a more inclusive phenomenon where hidden strategies of insubordination have their practice.