by Ira Berlin
After the war, former slaves’ attachment to place manifested itself in a desire for land, the legendary forty acres. The quest for land had many meanings, but few former slaves coveted mere real estate. While they appreciated the independence that land ownership might bring, land ownership was as much a matter of social identity—and the multiple personal relations that entails—as of political economy, for the land they wanted also spoke to deep emotional investments. Often it was the land they had long resided and worked. Sometimes, as a group of former slaves declared, it was “land they had laid their father’s bones upon.” As one Union officer observed in 1862, “Never was there a people ... more attached to familiar places than they.”20
The former slaves’ “love of locality” or what yet another federal agent called their “local attachments” resonated in the twentieth century. Reflecting on her youth in Knoxville, Tennessee, poet Nikki Giovanni insisted that it was “a place where no matter what, I belong.” Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who as a young woman integrated the University of Georgia, wrote fondly of her Southern home in a memoir she appropriately named In My Place. Amid her biographical account of the ugly confrontations with the segregationist educators and epithet-wielding fellow students, Hunter-Gault lovingly recalled the “evocative sights, sounds, and smells of my small-town childhood, the almost overpowering sweet smell of honeysuckle and banana shrub seducing buzzing bumblebees and yellow jackets; the screeching cries of crickets emanating from every shrub and bush; clouds of black starlings producing shadows wherever they flew over the dusty red-clay haze. This was the part of the South that I loved, that made me happy to be a Southerner, that left me unaffected by the seamier side....” “I do believe,” echoed Maya Angelou, putting a point on Hunter-Gault’s confession, “once a Southerner, always a Southerner.”21
But if some loved the Southern countryside, others developed equally powerful connections to the gritty cities of the North. Jacob Lawrence, whose work captured the very essence of the twentieth-century abandonment of the South, recalled, “I lived in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem. My life was in the Harlem community.”22
The allegiances dueled, as yet other refugees from the former slave states held firm to the belief that the South was their place. It was a sensibility articulated by thousands of African Americans who fled north and then, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, returned to the place of their nativity. “Black people are Southerners,” emphasized journalist Fred Powledge. “They are of and by and from and for the South ... and have repeatedly demonstrated ... their love for and faith in the region.”23 Some suggested that the connection of black people to the South was even an essential element in their nature, going so far as to deny the possibility of transplantation. “The Negro has never been a wanderer,” asserted an officer of the Colored Organization of New Jersey on the eve of the exodus from the South. “Fixed ties have ever held for him attractions that have outshone opportunities that lie elsewhere.”24
In the 1970s, when the third great migration that carried some six million black people from the South to the North had run its course and a counterflow to the South from the North began, economists and sociologists affirmed that migrants and their children and grandchildren remained “strongly tied to historic homeplaces.” Many of these ties were those of memories that represented “the intense value put on place and landownership, a value,” as noted in a close study of one particular returned migrant, “widely-shared among her generation.” Even migrants who had been born in the North felt the pull. They were not returning to their childhood roots, but to roots nurtured through the lives of others augmented by extended family visits, reunions, and family obligations. Still others tied “their homeplace” to their marital connections or simply to the force of belief.25
Of course the South was not a single place any more than black Southerners were a single people. The South that Maya Angelou remembered differed from that of Fred Powledge, and Powledge from that of Nikki Giovanni. Their Souths were products of particular geographies and chronologies. What Angelou and others have called “the South”—as in “once a Southerner, always a Southerner”—was reified, frozen in time and in imagination as somehow “the” authentic South. The contending, opposing cultures that continually made and remade Southern society were reduced to a catchall.26 Much the same would be done for Africa.
While some understood connections to place in essentialist terms, for others place had much more prosaic meanings, for it drew upon routines repeated so often that they proceeded without explanation, responsibilities taken without request, and favors exchanged without question. But as a wellspring of solidarity, place also defined the grounds of suspicion; while it embraced some, it excluded others. In drawing the boundaries of community, place defined kinship in the largest sense, creating—for example—a reverence for ancestors never known, whose remains stained ground that had never been seen and whose specters remained a presence long after breath had left their bodies. Over the centuries, African Americans have held reunions that drew thousands, and the constructed genealogies reached back across the Atlantic.27 Upon exiting his native Mississippi, Richard Wright voiced the sentiment of many other migrants, declaring he could “never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South.”28
Place had such a powerful pull that its magnetic force drew in those who had never actually experienced it. Piri Thomas, man of dark-skin and Puerto Rican and Cuban descent growing up in Spanish Harlem felt compelled to visit the South as a way to explore and understand the meaning of his own blackness. A Southern-born friend encouraged him to do so, saying, “It’s damn hard leaving the South and harder still goin’ back to it. But now that it’s come down to it, I’d like to see what’s shakin’ home.” What drew Piri Thomas to the South likewise annually sends perhaps thousands of African Americans back to Africa, a journey that sometimes confirms a connection to Africa, but at other times leads to profound disillusionment. 29
Of course no one really ever lived only in Africa or only in the South, just as they never lived only in the North or in Chicago. Rather black Southerners were more the product of neighborhoods, well-defined geographic spaces that were bound together by family ties, work patterns, and political alliances, as well as by the peculiarities of the natural and built environments. In such places, men and women knew one another and knew one another’s kin and near kin, their religious affiliations, their political ties, and even their dogs. Intimacy made for belonging.30
Yet the migrants’ embrace of place was also uneasy, tentative, and often probationary, for there was that other place—sometimes half remembered, sometimes totally unknown, and sometimes constructed from the whole cloth—that also commanded allegiance. That distant place was the land of fathers and mothers, grandparents, and ancestry from time immemorial; it was a land of celebrated giants, of men and women of legendary strength and penetrating wit, whose wealth was uncounted, whose deeds were great and whose character was unimpeachable.31 There, life had been lived to its fullest, free of the weight of subordination and the sting of condescension. Immigrants and often their children thus looked backward as well as forward, formulating their identities and drawing strength from who they once were (or thought they were) as well as who they would become.
Self—individual and collective—was constantly being constructed between movement and place. Black people—as opposed to Angolans, Igbos, and Mandes—discovered their common Africanness had become a race on the western shore of the Atlantic. In much the same manner, African Americans hustled from the seaboard to the interior came to recognize their Virginian or South Carolinian origins in Mississippi, so black Georgians and Mississippians became Southerners in the cities of the North and ancestral places like Barbados and Jamaica, Ghana and Kenya came alive in twenty-first-century America. While the ligaments by which black people constructe
d their identity had been snapped in the process by which Africans became African Americans, the connections testify to the constant remaking of what had been and what would be. The old or the new might fail to be recognizable in these hybrids, as neither the rearview mirror of history nor the telescope of the future could capture the realities of the new mixtures.
The Contrapuntal Narrative
Over the course of four centuries, the great migrations and the intervening periods of stability have created a culture in which physical movement has been both resisted and embraced and in which identification with place has been alternately espoused and disowned. If those on the move yearned for the stability of place, those chained to place—often literally so—wanted only to move. The great migrations or passages—from Africa to the New World (the Middle Passage); from the seaboard to the interior, or black belt (a second “Middle Passage”); from the rural South to the urban North (a third passage); and the global diaspora to American cities (a fourth passage)—provide critical markers in the formation and re-formation of the African American people.32 Each initiated a reconstruction of black life on new ground, creating new measures of cultural authenticity and new standards of cultural integrity. To be sure, the old ways were incorporated into the new, blending what once was with what would be, and creating an illusion of a seamless, unchanging cultural concord that reached back to antiquity. But not even the most powerful continuities could suppress the arrival of the new, as manifested in the most deeply held beliefs or the most transient fads. Thus, at various times, to be black meant to wear one’s hair in an eel skin queue, to conk the kinks straight, to bush au naturel, to plait into tight braids, or to shave the pate clean.33
The neck-snapping discontinuities between change and stasis have drawn black people to their past and invested that past with enormous weight, even as they wrestled again with an ever-changing present. At times, such connections with the past have created nostalgic longing for the old country, the old homestead, or the old neighborhood by men and women who—by force or choice—had been uprooted. These themes—the necessity to make life anew and the yearnings for a barely remembered or wholly imagined past—remain the great constants of African American life, echoed in literature, politics, and certainly music. Antebellum colonizationists, post-Reconstruction Exodusters, early twentieth-century Garveyites, and late-twentieth-century street vendors, generation upon generation, articulated a desire to recall, revisit, and sometimes return to the ancestral homelands and reclaim an African, then a seaboard, and even a Southern zion. Such projections suggest why African Americans constructed new histories from the ur-narrative of King Buzzard, the egalitarian guarantee of the Declaration of Independence, the biblical promise of exodus, or the Afrocentric roots of civilization.34
Yet the force of change—the serial migrations and repeated cultural reconstructions—made it impossible to recoup the past fully, despite the powerful propensity to freeze identity at a single moment, sometimes defined by ancestry, ideology, or even body image. In truth, the old societies could never be fully reconstructed as they had been, as they were remembered, or even as they were imagined. Indeed, the great passages themselves transformed the old societies. They were felt as much by those left in the seaboard South after their children were sold away as those who remained in the black belt after their neighbors had gone north. The transatlantic slave trade remade black life on the west coast of Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; the internal slave trade again remade the settled seaboard South in the nineteenth century; and the movement to the urban North remade the rural South in the mid-twentieth century; and yet again the global diaspora has transformed blackness in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. No matter how strong the identification with the “old country,” the world that migrants had left was no more. Immigrants—whether forced or free—might some day return to the old country, but they could not go home.
But if the Old World could not be transferred to the New, it was never entirely forgotten. In making and remaking themselves—first as Africans, then as African Americans—over the course of some four hundred years, black people never turned their backs on the past. Rather, in successive iterations, they incorporated the past into their new selves, not in heroically remembering, but in drawing upon their experience often with a great sense of purpose.
The boundaries between movement and place and the resulting tension grew over time as immigrants faced the necessity of divesting themselves of portions of the past. While transnational languages—pidgins and creole tongues—might temporarily knit the past and the future together, the disjuncture was inevitable, if not for the immigrants themselves then certainly for their progeny.
The cultures of movement and place penetrated one another, in part because change, no matter how revolutionary, was never complete. Old patterns always coexisted and overlapped with new ones. More importantly, the vectors of change did not always point in one direction. Movement did not give birth to place or vice versa any more than the past necessarily summoned the present or than the present automatically fulfills the past. Often languages, religions, cuisine, or music created amid the flux of movement was transported back to the migrants’ place of origins as well as forward to their place of arrival.35
There have been many bridges between movement and place, linking the sense of what was lost to what was gained: rites of passage, aesthetics of form and color, styles of cooking and dressing, folktales and proverbs, even intonation of voice. None, however, was more manifest than music. Music, as Lawrence Levine has written, “appears to be one of the most conservative of cultural traits.” The portability of music and its seeming indestructibility maintained rhythmic patterns—and occasionally melodies and lyrics—even when migrants were stripped naked and denied their every material possession. In connecting shared experience with communal values, music, as Amiri Baraka has observed, has served as one barometer of the African American experience. The transformation of African American music mirrored that of black peoples, as the great passages set them in motion and the new arrivals rooted them in place. Nowhere is the contrapuntal narrative more evident.36
But music was not simply a window into African American life; it was a means by which black people understood their circumstances and articulated their deepest beliefs and most powerful yearnings. It provided a way to speak the unspeakable, both to themselves and those who dared to listen. Explaining the return of black Northerners to the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest parts of the South, contemporary social scientists emphasize the magnetic draw of the “powerful and stark form of blues ... some of the finest remnants of African American sacred music.”37
Music also transmuted shared experience into communal solidarity. This was particularly true of the call-and-response that was a unifying element in eighteenth-century shouts, nineteenth-century spirituals, and twentieth-century jazz, as well as other musical genres. Echoing the theme sounded by the leaders, others then elaborated on it—assenting or dissenting to the message and then expanding and modifying it in various ways—thus taking ownership of the message. The voices of captive Africans were still echoed two centuries later in the churches of the Mississippi Delta. “The preacher,” remembered Bluesman B. B. King, “says one thing and the congregation says it back, back forth, back forth, until we’re rocking together in a rhythm that won’t stop. His voice is low and rough and his guitar high and sweet; they seem to sing to each other, conversing in some heavenly language.”38
While the call-and-response pattern remains an omnipresent hall-mark of African American music, there are some others such as particular melodies, cadences, and strategic repetitions. Embellishments that emerged from field hollers, spirituals, the blues, jazz, and rap created grooves which then swung to join musician and audience as one. Each was driven forward by a never-ending process of improvisation that reflected—and marked—the remaking of African American life.
Music was present from the begi
nning, as slave-ship captains reported the collective voices emanating from below deck. The repetitive choruses, the interplay between leader and congregants, and the improvisational character provided the first evidence of one of the essential elements of what would be the African American repertoire. These features and others—polyrhythmic, tonal, and timbral flexibility, to name a few—became prominent in African American music and remain so in the present day. But if some central forms have remained the same, black musicians constantly reworked the melodic and harmonic ideas with different tempos and rhythmic impulses that reflected both movement and place.39
Thomas Jefferson, like many observers since, recognized the special place of music in the lives of black people, even if he—again, like so many after—attributed it to some congenital trait. The continuities of African American music and the lack of accurate description has made it easy to essentialize the sounds that observers like Jefferson attributed to the music of black people. Put another way, those continuities have made it difficult, as Shane White and Graham White noted, “to restore the ‘pastness’ of past sounds.” The history of African American music is often frozen in place, celebrated as a marker of identity for a people whose identity was constantly disparaged. In the process, however, such celebrations often ignore cross-cultural construction first among Africans and then among African Americans, Native Americans, and Europeans in the creation of an ever-changing black musical tradition. Examining how movement and place transformed the evolution of shouts and hollers into spirituals, spirituals into gospel, and country blues into rhythm and blues both historicizes African American music and maintains its ubiquity in the black American experience without presuming these genres had distinctive lineages.40
African American music, with its extraordinary variety and multiplicity of forms, rarely follows the “normal” course of any chronology of black life, a chronology whose specific markers remain mired in conjecture and endless debate.41 Black musicians, enslaved and free, functioning as “griots”—African storytellers—told many tales. The power of invention and reinvention of the black musical tradition overwhelms any attempt to link particular genres to particular moments. Subordination, moreover, discouraged black musicians from speaking directly, so their music was often coded, filled with ironic references, multiple meanings, and veiled imagery. Nonetheless, music speaks profoundly to the transformative dynamic that has constantly remade the experience of black peoples. No history of either movement or place in African and African American life can be fully understood without careful attention to the sounds that accompanied it. Nothing better revealed the larger transformations of African American life—be they cultural, economic, or political—than music.