Jim Crow's Counterculture

by R. A. Lawson

  And this master had two manifestations in plantation agriculture—both ex-ploitive of blacks—the paternalist and the punisher. In a 1968 interview Bukka White recounted his annual encounter with the paternalist master. “When the end of the year come [the owner] would tell you, ‘You did nice. You like to come out of debt. If you’d taken that other little cut across the ditch like I told you, you would’ve cleared some money. But you didn’t do that and you owe me three hundred dollars. Now, how much money do you want to borrow for Christmas?’ So John would say, ‘Three hundred.’ And the man would give him the amount of money he was supposed to give him in the first place.”44 This kind of swindling reflected the economic relationship of manager and worker that had developed in the northern economy of “wage slavery” and was a post-Emancipation phenomenon in white-black economic relationships in the South. But the punisher master relied on a means of exploitation that was far more rooted in southern economic history: coercion. Will Stark recalled the annual frenzy of the cotton harvest:

  They had to work—or fight! When they come after a man to work, he had to go. For instance . . . [if] any of these people out of town wanted some hands to chop the cotton or plow, it make no difference who he was, he must go. They would go into colored people’s houses and git the children out and make them go out and pick cotton . . . Of course the boss didn’t do all this, the officers here in town would take um and when they got out on the plantation they had to work—or fight . . . [What happened to those that fought?] They just whipped um up. Some of um I heard they whipped to death . . . One bossman out here about Tutwiler . . . made a man work and chained his wife in bed at night to make sure they wouldn’t run away.45

  The ability to dictate the terms of employment (to use the phrase loosely) sprang from the long-lasting patriarchal custom of white male ownership of land and those who occupied it. “I also saw how the plantation was a world unto itself,” wrote B. B. King in his autobiography:

  The owners would tell their hands—the black folk who worked the land—that not even the law could touch them if they did their work and stayed on the plantation. Plantation bosses were absolute rulers of their own kingdoms. Sheriffs didn’t like to violate their boundaries, even if it meant giving up a criminal. It gave you a double-feeling—you felt protected, but you also felt small, as if you couldn’t fend in the world for yourself. I could feel the old link to slavery; I knew the sharecropper system was a thousand times more fair-minded, after all, we were free citizens—but I also knew that, in some ways, sharecropping continued the slavery mentality.

  Notice that King started off this segment using the word “hands” to describe the black residents of New South plantations, providing further, if perhaps subconscious, evidence to support his final point about the resiliency of the language and consciousness of slavery well after Reconstruction.46

  Although blacks in the Old Southwest had enjoyed fewer new opportunities than freedmen in the eastern seaboard states of the former Confederacy, the end of Reconstruction marked the close of a brief period of limited possibilities. “The Negro [in Mississippi] could do things during the first twenty-five years of his freedom that he could not do during the second quarter of a century.”47 As blacks worked their way into southern public and economic space, they found that they still were regarded as inferior by their white neighbors, employers, and landlords, who sought to maintain what economic historian Gavin Wright labeled a “colonial economic relationship” with black labor.48 Aboard steamboats, in public parks, and on trains, blacks increasingly were relegated to separate social space after the Redeemer movement of the 1870s, well before “a rising tide of extreme racism swept across” the Mississippi Delta and neighboring areas in the 1890s.49

  The buttressing of institutionalized segregation with the disfranchisement of black voters showed the strength of white-supremacist politicians in the 1890s. The old paternalists of the South compromised with emergent, demagogic lead ers such as Theodore Bilbo and James K. Vardaman in Mississippi, deflecting the cross-racial threat posed by populism. Much of that racism could be attributed to a younger generation of white southerners who lacked proximity to their black neighbors. “In a way I’m fond of the Negro,” a white Mississippian observed in 1918, “but the bond between us is not as close as it was between my father and his slaves. On the other hand, my children have grown up without black playmates and without a ‘black mammy.’ The attitude of my children is less sympathetic toward the Negro than my own.” With each generation, and particularly after the 1890s, Jim Crow seemed to extend the cultural distance separating white and black, thereby forcing open a particular niche of public space within which southern blacks developed their own cultural institutions.50

  Perhaps blacks could manage their own churches and social clubs, or even refine themselves somewhat through education, some white southerners conceded, but by the 1890s in the Lower Mississippi Valley, most whites believed that the duty of citizenship was fit only for descendants of the Anglo-Saxon race. In the wake of populism, safeguarding southern white solidarity meant redrawing the contours of southern history and, once again, defining black and white racial difference. Maintaining a continuum from Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone” speech of 1861 to Governor George Wallace’s “segregation now, segregation forever!” dictum in his inaugural address in 1963, virulent Jim Crow segregationists such as Senator Vardaman encouraged a culture of white solidarity and inherent black inferiority. “I am just as much opposed to Booker Washington as a voter, with all his Anglo-Saxon reinforcements, as I am to the cocoanut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every morning. Neither is fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship.” Vardaman could be even more virulent, objectifying the Negro as “a lazy, lying, lustful animal.”51 Mississippi’s neighbors, Alabama and Louisiana, likewise held constitutional conventions aimed at restricting the franchise, and the reform-minded legislators devised elaborate and varied means—the “grandfather clause,” poll taxes, residency requirements—to keep all blacks and many poor whites out of the voting pool. Two years after the Supreme Court approved segregation in public spaces with the Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896), the high court returned a pro-disfranchisement decision in Williams v. Mississippi (1898). By upholding the constitutionality of Mississippi’s “understanding clause,” the Supreme Court legitimated the various voter restriction measures devised throughout the South, and Republican presidents from Taft to Hoover, having abandoned the “black and tan” platform, busied themselves with building a “lily-white” Republican Party in the South.52 After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, 96 percent of Mississippi’s adult black males were registered to vote. In 1892, under the new state constitution, that number fell to a mere 6 percent. Louisiana recorded as many as 130,000 registered black voters in 1896, but only 1,342 in 1904—a reduction of nearly 99 percent. Alabama’s voting blacks were likewise dropped from the rolls after a new constitution passed in 1901; afterward, only 2 percent of black men were registered in the birth-state of the Confederacy compared to 83 percent of their white male neighbors. Social and economic discrimination were as streams from the bedrock of political exclusion, wrote Leon Litwack: “When the white South acted on its racial creed, it sought to impress on black men and women their political and economic powerlessness and vulnerability—and, most critically, to diminish both their self esteem and their social aspirations.”53

  Nowhere was the ability to diminish black freedom and aspiration more on display than in the gruesome and ritualized acts of murder and desecration known as lynching. Long before these killings took place in secret, under cover of darkness, as with the Emmet Till case in 1955, lynch mobs descended on their victims in public, often witnessed by dozens, if not hundreds, of onlookers. And they did so with grave frequency. Scholars have estimated that during the zenith of racial violence in America—the 1890s—there were 1,689 African Americans murdered in lynchings
, and such incidents remained common over the next three decades. Other estimates show that residents of some counties in Mississippi could have witnessed an average of thirteen lynchings in their lifetimes, affirming the Magnolia State’s reputation as the “land of the tree, home of the grave.” B. B. King, like so many black Mississippi Deltans, experienced his cathartic, racial coming-of-age in witnessing a lynching in his youth, a sight that “broke the heart and wounded the spirit of every black man and woman who passed by.”54

  Billie Holiday purged some of this broken-heartedness and wounded spirit in her 1939 debut of “Strange Fruit” in New York City, but such open recognition of the nation’s acceptance of racial violence was not possible for blues musicians operating in the South. Instead, blues musician and writer Adam Gussow maintains that the various “abandonment” blues sung by black women (read by feminist historian Angela Davis to speak of the unwillingness of black men to settle down in relationships) were in fact symbolic representations of the disappearance of black men swallowed up by lynch mobs. It is worth noting that of the some 3,513 blacks documented as lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1927, only 76 were women, making males the victims 98 percent of the time.55 Still, black male musicians could make use of the hangman imagery, as in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Hangman Blues” (1928), wherein the “Mean ole hangman is waitin’ to tighten up that noose,” or Ledbetter’s popular rendition of the chilling prisoner song, “Gallis [Gallows] Pole”:

  Father did you bring me the silver?

  Father did you bring me the gold?

  What did you bring me dear father, to keep me from the gallows pole?

  What did ya? Yeah, What did ya?

  What did you bring me, to keep me from the gallows pole?

  In Ledbetter’s “Gallis Pole,” it is worth noting that the singer/narrator never escapes the noose, despite his kinfolk bringing ransom to save his body, and social psychologist John Dollard, in his 1937 study of race relations in Mississippi, offered this grim assessment of southern realities: “Every Negro in the South knows that he is under a kind of sentence of death; he does not know when his turn will come, it may never come, but it may also be at any time.”56

  By examining the accommodative and resistant functions of the southern blues tradition as it developed during the first five decades of Jim Crow life, historians can reestablish the significant connection between southern blacks’ aesthetic cultures and their collective political identities. The timing of blues music’s emergence coincided with the construction of the Jim Crow South at the turn of the last century. If blacks enjoyed widened civil and economic rights in the years following Emancipation, then the imposition of voting restrictions, social protocol, and economic oppression meant that African Americans, a generation or more removed from slavery, were forced into new identities under Jim Crow. Blues music makes fine evidence for the history of these new identities; blues were created to deal specifically with the new political and social status forced upon blacks through statutes and violence—that is to say, the culture of the New Negro in the South.57 As the popular culture of those at the bottom of the racial caste system, blues culture recorded a consciousness among southern blacks that was not necessarily represented in the written legacy of African American leadership—familiar sources that traditionally have captured historians’ attention.58

  Talking Back to Jim Crow

  In previous sections, we have seen how there was a balance between black musical conservatism—carrying on traditions—and the creative power of individual performers who sought innovation. Consider the following short examples, one a song fragment from a slave spiritual and the other a classic blues refrain. The first song fragment, popular in slave spirituals, gave the impression that there were no African Americans, only Africans in America. Despite their adoption of the masters’ Christian religion, slaves understood that they were accursed outcasts in a foreign land:

  This world is not my home.

  This world is not my home.

  This world’s a howling wilderness,

  This world is not my home.59

  The slaves had very little hope of escape and thus called for the “sweet chariot” to “carry them home” to a peaceful afterlife. But the second fragment, a central verse in Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” demonstrates that blues musicians, unlike their enslaved forebears, had someplace they could escape to:

  Feelin’ tomorrow lak Ah feel today,

  Feel tomorrow lak Ah feel today,

  I’ll pack my trunk and make ma gitaway.60

  Obviously, something had changed. That something had to do with the individualism born of the slaves’ Emancipation in the years following the Civil War. The collective consciousness of slavery—the “we” mentality—had been replaced by a more singular and individualistic consciousness—the “me” mentality. This situation was not unique; Americans in the late 1800s were living in a volatile society where the forces of individualism and communalism waged war like Zoroastrian deities. The Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause and the individualist spirit of the Wild West collided head on with the rise of labor unionism and the arrival of unprecedented numbers of new immigrant groups. The bomb blasts at Haymarket Square (1886), the Wounded Knee massacre (1890), the bloody Homestead Strike (1892), and the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist (1901)—to name just a few examples—are evidence that late nineteenth-century American society was far from settled when it came to questions of individual rights and group protections. But the bloody race riots (New Orleans and Memphis in 1866, New Orleans and Vicksburg in 1874) and the abandonment of Reconstruction in 1877 meant that Delta blacks’ political fates were sealed long before the Jim Crow disfranchisement statutes took effect and a second wave of racial violence swept through southern towns around the turn of the century. Without viable political parties or the opportunity to form a voting bloc or even unionize, black southerners had little chance to forge common political or economic identities.

  Instead, black southerners were forced to live with a lonely sort of democratic individualism, and early twentieth-century black musicians reflected this position in the first-person narrative that was the blues. Observing that almost all prewar blues songs were sung in the first person, making the singer the subject, Gussow calls this phenomenon the “witnessing first person ‘I,’ “ wherein the singer and subject are fused into one: “I am the blues—I’m the truth about the blues,” said Memphis-born bluesman Booker T. Laury. Likewise, musicologist James Bennighof in his analysis of Robert Johnson’s “Rambling on My Mind” concludes that Johnson and his blues contemporaries created music that was their own “because of the similarity of the lyrics to Johnson’s own circumstances.” Johnson’s lyrics in “Rambling on My Mind,” like “the lyrics of many of his other songs, and those of contemporaneous songs by other artists seems to suggest that these performances implied less distance between performer/composer and subject of the lyrics than would commonly be assumed in a European art song” in which the composer draws from someone else’s poetry for words to put to music.61

  The blues, then, were intensely personal, not only because of the contemporary political environment in which they were born but also on account of their derivation from southern field hollers, a West African carryover that worked in the South’s farms just as they had in the African kingdoms from which slaves had been taken in colonial times. Alan Lomax observed this phenomenon during his trips to penitentiary work farms.

  You could hear these personal songs—sometimes no more than a few notes long—coming from far away across the fields. These . . . were pitched high out of a wide-open throat, to be heard from far off. . . [A convict’s] signature song voiced his individual sorrows and feelings. By this means, he located himself in the vast fields of the penitentiary, where the rows were often a mile long and a gang of men looked like insects crawling over the green carpet of the crops. Listening to a holler, some con would say, “Lissen at ol Bu
ll bellerin over there—he must be fixin to run,” or “That’s old Tangle Eye yonder. He’s callin on his woman again.”62

  Unlike the slaves’ spirituals, which developed more communally from West African ring shouts, the field hollers were absorbed into early blues songs in which individualism almost always trumped communalism.63

  In the country blues, instruments gave the musician another “voice” to talk to, and the blues’s foundation in the call and response format ensured that the bluesman, no matter how lonely, could always converse. Harmonicas were particularly expressive in this way, but the guitar could be put to similar use. The famous slide technique of Delta guitarists particularly fulfilled this need. Before bottlenecks or steel pipes were used for this purpose, guitarists played “knife songs” by “running the back of a knife along the strings of the instrument, this making it ‘sing’ and ‘talk’ with skill,” as folklorist Howard Odum observed early on, in 1911. More recently, Gussow summarizes the conversational nature of the knife songs: “These instrumental vocalizations serve to separate and comment on the singer’s repeated vocal lines, when not simply doubling those lines outright. The result is a call-and-response melodic tissue supported by polyrhythmic repetitions; an early slide guitarist such as Charley Patton, for example, snapped strings against the fretboard and slapped his guitar’s wooden face.” Patton’s successor, Robert Johnson, perfected this technique with virtuosic skill. “His guitar seemed to talk,” traveling partner Johnny Shines recalled. It could “repeat and say words with him like no one else in the world could. I said he had a talking guitar and many a person agreed with me.”64 In a society in which black folks had been banned from literacy during the long duration of slavery—a condition perpetuated by poor funding for southern black schools—this kind of talking fit right in to a particularly African American flavor of epistemology, favoring what was spoken and heard over what was written and read. Average poor southerners—black and white—best understood and engaged their worlds through visceral experiences of feeling, seeing, and hearing. Patton’s guitar slapping and string snapping, like Johnson’s “talking” guitar, keenly reflected this notion.65