by John Szwed
The performances at Harvard were the ones that mattered most to John, and on March 13 they appeared before the Poetry Society of Cambridge at Emerson Hall in the afternoon, and again at Leverett House in the evening for a lecture/concert sponsored by the dean. Professor Kittredge was the master of ceremonies, and Lead Belly, whatever his feelings, came through, reaching deep into his repertoire, banging the guitar strings until they rang like bells, and even dancing before an ecstatic, cheering crowd of six hundred. Kittredge whispered, “He is a demon, Lomax!”
The last night of the tour was March 20 at the Providence Art Club. With Harvard behind him, John refused to go on, and Alan took his place. When John told Lead Belly and his wife four days later that he was sending them back to Louisiana, they were pleased and excited. They said good-bye to their friends in Norwalk and the Lomaxes drove them to the train on March 26.
John and Lead Belly’s association had lasted only six months and eleven days, three months of which were spent recording in the field; two months in New York City and Wilton; and less than three weeks on tour. According to John’s accounts, they had together earned $1,550 ($24,000 in today’s dollars) on the tour, $800 of it from performances, a $250 advance from the book, $100 for the March of Time radio show, $150 for the March of Time film, and a $250 advance from the American Recording Company. (None of this included Lead Belly’s hat passing, which he kept for himself.) Everything earned after January 5 was split two ways, and after February 9, three ways, with a share for Alan. For the first three and a half months after John and Lead Belly began to work together John paid all of Lead Belly’s living expenses, but once they were in New York City, Lomax began deducting for cash advances, a new guitar, clothing, food, dentist bills, and the like. There were no living expenses charged the Ledbetters while they were in Wilton, since the two of them had worked as cook, driver, and housecleaners while they were there. As they were leaving he gave Martha $298.94 ($4,600 today), $150 of it split into three postdated checks and the rest in cash, because, he said, that way Lead Belly wouldn’t spend it all at once.
Once they were back in Shreveport, Lead Belly began to fret over the money. When he learned that he couldn’t cash all the checks immediately, he wrote Lomax about it in a way that John considered intimidating. Lomax then contacted Sheriff Tom Hughes (who was the subject of one of Lead Belly’s songs) in Shreveport and told him that he had been threatened, but offered to pay Huddie in cash if that seemed advisable. Lead Belly, meanwhile, had hired a lawyer who demanded his money, and Lomax gave it to him. Next, the lawyer brought up the matter of the recording for the American Recording Company and demanded an accounting. But since the records had sold so poorly, there were no royalties to be paid. Lead Belly then hired a second lawyer to look into his earnings on the March of Time film, get an accounting of earnings from the tour, and look into the book contract. Lomax had not been fully paid for the film himself, but he sent Lead Belly the rest of what he was owed for his part. This time Lead Belly thanked him, and proposed that they might now reunite to continue working together. He then hired yet another lawyer, and the letters his attorney wrote to Macmillan had the publishers so concerned about legal entanglements that they put the book on hold until the dispute could be cleared up. Lomax was pressured to settle and finally agreed to a $250 payment to Lead Belly in exchange for Macmillan retaining rights to the songs to protect them from further lawsuits, as well as the voiding of his and Lead Belly’s management contract.
Lead Belly wrote John two more times asking him to join him on the road, but John was adamant: their relationship was over. Alan was painfully caught up in their conflict, wanting desperately to find some way to stay close to Lead Belly. He made a quick decision that he would continue working with Lead Belly in whatever way he could, and Elizabeth Barnicle was one means by which he thought he might be able to do so. She welcomed Lead Belly’s break with John, and made her own plans for continuing his tours of colleges through her contacts at Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and other women’s colleges. He and Alan would be part of each other’s lives until Lead Belly’s death fourteen years later, and that relationship would remain yet another source of constant friction between Alan and his father.
CHAPTER 4
Travels with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle
With their income limited to what they could manage on the low-rent outskirts of academia, Alan and his father were forced to look for a larger audience than the groups of professors John Lomax had been entertaining at banquets and smokers. They had to develop a style of writing and performance that would reach the average person, the big publishers, and the press. John had his own style: a local colorist who spoke from personal experience, sometimes as a collector, sometimes as a native son. Alan was still trying to find a role for himself, and searching for his own voice, mainly in literature, and that was how he came across the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. He knew of her as an anthropologist who had studied at Columbia University and was making her way in New York City academic and literary circles as the only professionally trained black folklorist in town. Her education, her southern experience, and her race gave her license to challenge what others wrote about the lives and arts of ordinary black people. Hurston sought to reclaim African American folklore from the grotesqueries created by white writers and artists, whether they be slumming modernists seeking primitivist thrills or old-school minstrel men grasping at yesterday’s fantasies. But she was equally unafraid of taking on black intellectuals for their out-of-touch pontifications about their own people. Who else would dare mock W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous discussion of spirituals as “sorrow songs” in The Souls of Black Folk? To her, black religion was serious drama, performance worthy of comparison to opera. Just at the moment when the literati of the Harlem Renaissance were adapting high modernist ideas to African American purposes and Alain Locke was arguing that black culture should be “elevated” through refinement, extension, elaboration, and formalism to bring African American art in line with modernism, she was insisting that black folk culture was already high art. Like Yeats, Kafka, and other “minority” writers whose readers were largely part of the majority, she walked a difficult line. But she walked it with style, grace, and a self-conscious intelligence that astonished and sometimes dismayed her colleagues, black and white.
Hurston had just published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, in 1934 and now was completing Mules and Men, a volume of black American folklore and ethnography. Yet, as was often the case with her, she was short of money. Her reputation for flamboyance, infighting, and refusing to step off for anyone had killed her chances for the academic job she once hoped to have at Fisk University, and she was now caught up in an affair of the heart that was going bad fast.
When Alan read Zora Neale Hurston’s “Hoodoo in New Orleans,” her first-person account of participating in the Afro-Creole occult, he was swept up by her confidence and daring as ethnographer and writer. “Imagine,” he’d say, amazed at her description of initiation into a cult, “lying naked, face down on a rattlesnake skin for three days, through, and that hoodoo doctor starts painting a lightning bolt down your back!” What astonished him was the bravery with which she had gone beyond the rules of her anthropological training, becoming one of the folk, embracing their beliefs and dreams, then writing about it with elegance and high affect. She had gone too deep, though, and her identification with her subject kept her from ever telling all she knew. “The oaths of secrecy she swore and the terrifying physical and emotional ordeals she endured in these initiations left their mark on her,” Alan said, “and there were certain parts of her material which she never dared to reveal even in scientific publications.”
Hurston represented to Alan what was possible for an intellectual of a certain type, and pointed the way toward how he, too, might come to write in a deeply personal and expressive style and still be an ethnographer and folklorist true to his subject. Though she was educated in the kind of careful et
hnographic techniques and objective methods of anthropology that had the laboratory report and the scientific monograph as their models, to Alan “she was no reserved scientist but a raconteur, a singer and a dancer who could bring the culture of her people vividly to life. For she opened the way, with sure taste and a scientist’s love of fact into the whole world of Negro folk lore.”
In the months before they first met, he had been transcribing recordings of songs, tales, and oral history, listening in careful detail to the gentle and subtle nuances of southern speech. He had struggled with turning everyday talk into readable prose, realizing that writing in dialect could seem patronizing or, worse, could make speech seem downright silly. He recalled his first encounter with Hurston’s writing years later in a letter to her biographer, Robert Hemenway:
Lead Belly that all of us who really experienced American folk in those pristine days agreed upon was the extraordinary character of the language, the style, that came to us. The writing, the talk of that time, in middle class circles, was already beginning to be lifeless. Today it has hit a nadir of colorlessness. Moving among the working people with a notebook or a recording machine was to be bathed continuously in pungent, strong, growing language. My father’s chief pleasure in life were the poets of speech that he had heard. And he made all of his children aware of this and we have always taken great pleasure in it.... Therefore when I was introduced to Zora Hurston, who not only appreciated this prose, but who had learned how to turn it into spoken and written prose of her own that was the purest and finest aesthetic quality, I was entranced and dazzled and almost worshipful. I was engaged in my attempt to reach the same peak of excellence and later in my own books of oral history I hope I occasionally achieved it, but when I met Zora she already had mastered the editorial style necessary to transmit the whole plangent sound of black folks’ speech onto the page then confused by mistransliteration or the redundancies that no eye can accept.
Early in 1935, Alan boldly took the lead and wrote to ask if she was interested in working with his father and himself in Florida, and later that year she sent letters to both Alan and John suggesting that they meet, and asking, by the way, if she could also be introduced to “brother Lead Belly.”
In the meantime, Professor Barnicle had met and become friends with Hurston in Manhattan. Sometimes Zora went downtown to speak to Barnicle’s classes at New York University, or Barnicle joined her in Harlem and met friends of hers such as Alain Locke or the pianist and singer Porter Grainger, who recorded her songs and arranged music for several of her theater pieces. Earlier, Barnicle had proposed that she and Alan go to Kentucky on a collecting trip in the summer of 1935, but in the middle of May she came up with the idea that she, Hurston, and Alan go collecting together in the Southeast. The idea was that Alan could get money from his father’s grant, Barnicle would finance some of the trip to make recordings for her classes at NYU, and Hurston would use the project to complete the fellowship she had from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation. Hurston planned the trip and picked the areas in which they’d work. Barnicle suggested they also rent a motion picture camera in New York as well as a trailer to haul cots and cooking equipment behind her car, while Zora drove a second car.
In early June, Barnicle and Hurston set out driving south and met up with Alan in Brunswick on the coast of Georgia. They were a strange trio to be traveling anywhere, least of all the South. Alan, who had just turned twenty, was precocious enough, but still very young, and Hurston and Barnicle (black and white, both of them in their forties) were surely two of the freest spirits in America. Yet there was a logic to their relationship: Alan was in charge of the trip, as far as the Library of Congress was concerned, and he had two years of collecting and recording experience. Barnicle brought a knowledge of ballads and folk songs to the project, and would keep copious notes. Hurston’s role was to introduce the other two to black culture from the inside and guide them on how to work in the field. It was her region, her people, and she was the trained anthropologist and the experienced fieldworker, even if her approach to collecting was unorthodox. Instead of working with people alien to one’s own way of life and reveling in the raw sensitivity that culture shock was supposed to induce, Hurston chose to work with people she had known for a long time, or with whom she could identify, or could at least make feel as though they were old friends. Once, while traveling with Langston Hughes from New Orleans to New York, she had insisted on stopping to collect songs in towns all along the way. Hughes apparently became impatient with hearing the same songs from singer after singer, songs that he didn’t think were that good in the first place. “You can’t just sit down and ask people to sing songs for you,” she told him, “and expect them to be folk-songs and good ones and new ones.” She tried as much as possible to be both investigator and subject, participating in the singing, learning the songs as she listened, then singing along with the singers and writing it down later. Zora’s personalized approach to collecting was remarkably effective, even if other anthropologists dismissed her results as too subjective, too literary. Her manner in the field impressed Alan, and as the trip went on he too became more involved with the performers.
Zora thought that more could be accomplished if they stayed in black communities. They first located themselves near the eighteenth-century town of Frederica, on St. Simon’s Island, a few miles east of Brunswick. It was one of the Sea Islands, and though they were not islands in the strict sense of the word, they were nonetheless separated enough from the coast by inland streams and rivers to give them both a real and symbolic isolation from mainland American culture. The trio rented a shanty with three rooms, a kitchen, front and back porches, and an outhouse. Even when they discovered that the house was filled with bedbugs, they were not discouraged. They stayed up all night on the porch talking excitedly and looking at the stars, then spent the next morning trying to clean up.
Zora let it be known to the community that they wanted to hear singers and listen to tales, and the next evening they found the yard filled with curious folks. They set about recording everything they could: there were discussions and arguments in Gullah, the local creolized speech (which Alan noticed sounded similar to West Indian dialects of English he had heard), and an interview with a man of ninety-two who recalled slavery and Reconstruction times for them, making it the first recorded account of the life of an ex-slave. They recorded hymns, spirituals, and sacred ring shouts similar to the jurés Alan had encountered in French Louisiana; the “breakdowns” or “jook” songs played and sung for dancing in tiny country bars, along with the guitar players’ explanations of techniques of fingering and tuning; and folktales, children’s game songs, and ballads. Though Alan had collected “John Henry” before (it was the first song in American Ballads and Folk Songs), for the first time he began to understand the changing meanings and uses of the song, and saw it as music that reached out beyond race to something that was quintessentially American. Its words were so finely fitted to its melody that it could be spoken and still sound like music. It could serve as a ballad, a work song, or an epic; or, understood as a song with veiled references to Shango, the Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning, and his brother Ogun, the god of iron, it could be a song of African cultural persistence or a religious relic. Stories about powerful black men had an enduring fascination in America, and “John Henry” spin-offs like “Take This Hammer” could even serve as a song of organized labor. Alan later fitted new words to it:
And if he asks you what’s my Union,
It’s the C. I. O.,
It’s the C. I. O. [the Congress of Industrial Organizations]
Crossing into Florida in mid-June, the only southern state where the Lomaxes had never collected, they headed for Eatonville, where Hurston had grown up, an all-black town of 350 people near Maitland. Zora suggested that Alan and Barnicle darken their faces with walnut oil so they would not appear to be crossing all of the social lines of the South. When Alan objected that black people would easi
ly spot them as fakes, Zora replied that it was not blacks she was concerned with, but whites, and this simple disguise would be enough to keep them away. The white sheriff of Maitland was neither confused nor fooled, however, and arrested Alan for his part in their minstrel act, but Zora somehow “sweet-talked” (as Alan put it) the district attorney into letting them go.
But troubles with the law did not cease there. As Alan was coming out of a barbershop in a nearby town he was suddenly surrounded by police and put in the back of their Packard car. No one would tell him what he was being charged with, and the car was accompanied back to the station by motorcycle police. Yet once he was booked and placed in a cell, Alan said he actually felt relieved: “My Dostoievskyan weight of guilt was finally lightened. I felt good even though I still didn’t know what the charge was. There were no conflicts and no more worries. I’d been found out, and the judge would settle everything.” When he was taken to the district attorney’s office a few hours later, Zora, who had some local notoriety for her recently published book, was already there, pleading for his release. After Alan explained himself, the district attorney said, “I can’t tell you that you can’t live there, but I can’t be responsible for what will happen if you do. There was an organizer down here from the Workers Alliance a while ago, and as I remember, he was tied to a tree and whipped to death.” Hurston promised to take Lomax out of the county immediately. Later, Alan said, “A white man had for once been extricated from trouble in the South by a local Negro, instead of the other way around.” But it was not over: later, both Barnicle and Alan were stopped by the police after dropping Hurston off at some friends’ house on their way to Miami.