by Mezz Mezzrow
I heard the jive language in its early stages, when I was hanging around the South Side in Chicago. It was the first furious babbling of a people who suddenly woke up to find that their death-sentence had been revoked, or at least postponed, and they were stunned and dazzled at first, hardly able to believe it. Then came the full exuberant waking up, the full realization that the bossman, at least the peckerwood kind with a bullwhip in his hand, was gone. The music got wilder and wilder. The excited rush of talk on street-corners, and in poolrooms and ginmills, swelled up to a torrent. That was the first real jive—the lingo of prisoners with a temporary reprieve. When I got to Harlem I found it had spread to the East, and really come of age. These Harlem kids had decided they wouldn’t be led back to jail nohow. They spieled a mile a minute, making that clear.
Jive, Dan Burley says, “is the same means of escape that brought into being the spirituals as sung by American slaves; the blues songs of protest that bubble in the breasts of black men and women believed by their fellow white countrymen to have been born to be menials, to be wards of a nation, even though they are tagged with a whimsical designation as belonging to the body politic. . . . Jive serves a definite need of the people the same as do the Knights of Pythias, the Elks, or the Sons and Daughters of I Do Arise, with their signs, passwords, handclasps, and so on.”
Sure. But I think you’ve got to keep hammering away at the fact that it is a protest, and not so inarticulate at that. That’s what makes it entirely unique, a different kind of language from the traditional Southern Negro’s, which didn’t challenge the white oppressor but only tried to escape from his eagle eye, and those of his watchdogs. Jive does knit together a kind of tight secret society—but it’s a society which resents and nourishes its resentment, and is readying to strike back. The hipsters’ fraternal order isn’t just an escape valve, a defense mechanism; it’s a kind of drilling academy too, preparing for future battles.
Jive isn’t just a reflection of a primitive state; not by a long shot. The Negro doesn’t add action metaphors to abstractions, put movement into static phrases, throw warmth into frozen logical categories, just because he can’t understand them any other way. That’s open to question. What is sure is that he’s got too much poetry and rhythmic feeling in him, still alive and kicking, to be expressed in the bookish accents of educated white speech. He’s got to pep up that bedraggled lingo to hold his interest and give vent to his emotions.
It’s sure true, as all the writers point out, that the heart of jive is action. That’s the most important fact about it. That’s why it’s peculiarly and uniquely a Northern Negro’s creation. The ground-down Southern Negroes didn’t develop an action language anywhere near as rich as this, although they had their own rich folk-poetry, because they couldn’t see any possibility of action. But these Northern kids I hung around with were so active they couldn’t sit still. Life below the Mason-Dixon line was sluggish, sleepwalking; up above 110th Street it was hyperthyroid. Life meant constant movement to these youngsters. They even called each other cats approvingly because they wanted to be as alert and keen-sighted as an alley-cat, that slinks through the dark streets and back lanes all night long, never closing its eyes, gunning everything and ready for all comers. . . . Their language could hardly keep up with their restless, roving activities. It was the poetic expression of an immobilized people who, at last, see the day coming when all the action in the world will be open to them, and all things will become possible.
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The young citified Northern Negroes I got to know, unlike a lot of the older colored folks down South, were plenty alert and attentive, keyed-up with the effort to see and hear everything all at once, because that’s how bottomdogs got to be unless they want to get lost in the shuffle. And, from where they were standing—blasted at by the radio, drowned in newsprint, suffocated by Hollywood epics—it looked to them like the top-of-the-pile white man is a bulging bundle of words. That T. S. Eliot described us all as hollow men, stuffed with straw. To the colored boys, we were all stuffed with pages from Webster’s Dictionary.
Back off a thousand miles and look for yourself—what’s the mark of the upper-crust American, the lawyer, the doctor, the financier, the politician? It’s his command of the King’s English, the way he spouts his high-powered jive so glib and smooth. Colored kids up North, dead-set on bettering themselves, dig the fact that the ofays with the most education have the highest standing, the most money and power—and the first thing that hits you about these high-riding guys is a smooth kind of gab, full of long skullbusting words and cliquish doubletalk.
Well, if talk shows your worth in this world the colored kids never made, then they sure aim to talk some too—not because they believe in it, but just to show they can do it. That’s the first step: to prove to others, and to themselves, that they’re in the running, have got what it takes. You can’t get by in the hard American scuffle just by shaking your weary old head and pulling your scraggly whiskers. You got to talk, man. If you’re Negro, and don’t want to stick in a spiritual gallion all your days, you got to talk twice as fast as anybody else. So these high-spirited hip kids I hung out with made up their own private tongue. Most of them didn’t even finish grammar school; they were operating just with their own native mother-wit. And in some ways it turned out richer and more human than the ofay’s. It was just as complicated and specialized, just as subtle and roundabout, as any lingo the whites ever thought of. And less artificial too, more down-to-earth, alive with a deep-felt poetic sense and a rich imagery born out of Nature, jammed with the profound wisdom of the streets.
And all the while, as I could guess from the oblique kind of humor in the language, from the comic nature of its symbols and images, there was a great bellylaugh hid away in it. The colored boys never stopped to bemoan their fate in this hip language of theirs; there’s no time for self-pity in this scuffle. Maybe they were schooling themselves in a kind of eloquence they wouldn’t aim for on their own; maybe they were playing the ofay game of making-with-the-words. But they were also mocking the game and the rule-makers too, and mocking the whole idea of eloquence, the idea that words are anything but hypes and camouflage. The hip cat plays the game with his tongue almost coming through his cheek.
Once and for all, these smart Northern kids meant to show that they’re not the ounce-brained tongue-tied stuttering Sambos of the blackface vaudeville routines, the Lazybones’ of the comic strips, the Old Mose’s of the Southern plantations. Historically, the hipster’s lingo reverses the whole Uncle Tom attitude of the beaten-down Southern Negro. Uncle Tom believes he’s good-for-nothing, shiftless, sub-human, just like the white bossman says he is. Uncle Tom scrapes and bows before his ofay “superiors,” kills off all his self-respect and manliness, agrees that he’s downtrodden because he doesn’t deserve any better. Well, the kids who grew up in Northern cities wouldn’t have any more of that kneebending and kowtowing. They sure meant to stand up on their hind legs and let the world know they’re as good as anybody else and won’t take anybody’s sass. They were smart, popping with talent, ready for any challenge. Some of them had creative abilities you could hardly match anywhere else. Once they tore off the soul-destroying strait-jacket of Uncle Tomism, those talents and creative energies just busted out all over. These kids weren’t schooled to use their gifts in any regular way. So their artistry and spirit romped out into their language. They began out-lingoing the ofay linguists, talking up a specialized breeze that would blow right over the white man’s head. It gave them more confidence in themselves.
Deny the Negro the culture of the land? O.K. He’ll brew his own culture—on the street corner. Lock him out from the seats of higher learning? He pays it no nevermind—he’ll dream up his own professional doubletalk, from the professions that are open to him, the professions of musician, entertainer, maid, butler, tap-dancer, handyman, reefer-pusher, gambler, counterman, porter, chauffeur, numbers racketeer, day laborer, pimp, stevedore. These boys I ran with
at The Corner, breathing half-comic prayers at the Tree of Hope, they were the new sophisticates of the race, the jivers, the sweettalkers, the jawblockers. They spouted at each other like soldiers sharpening their bayonets—what they were sharpening, in all this verbal horseplay, was their wits, the only weapons they had. Their sophistication didn’t come out of moldy books and dicty colleges. It came from opening their eyes wide and gunning the world hard. Soon as you stop bowing your head low and resting your timid, humble eyes on the ground, soon as you straighten your spine and look the world right in the eye, you dig plenty. . . . Their hipness, I could see, bubbled up out of the brute scramble and sweat of living. If it came out a little too raw and strong for your stomach, that’s because you been used to a more refined diet. You didn’t come of age on the welfare, snagging butts out of the gutter. You can afford the luxury of being a little delicate, friend.
You know who they were, all these fast-talking kids with their four-dimensional surrealist patter? I found out they were the cream of the race—the professionals of Harlem who never got within reaching distance of a white collar. They were the razor-witted doctors without M.D.’s, lawyers who never had a shingle to hang out, financiers without penny one in their pokes, political leaders without a party, diploma-less professors and scientists minus a laboratory. They held their office-hours and made their speeches on The Corner. There they wrote their prose poems, painted their word pictures. They were the genius of their people, always on their toes, never missing a trick, asking no favors and taking no guff, not looking for trouble but solid ready for it. Spawned in a social vacuum and hung up in mid-air, they were beginning to build their own culture. Their language was a declaration of independence.
I found some signifying clues to the hip lingo in the way it described traits and qualities the young Negro admires. The cat he looks up to is hip, like a guy who carries a bottle or a bankroll or, more likely, a gun on his hip—in other words, he sure is well-primed and can take care of himself in any situation; he’s solid, which is short for solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, and describes a man who isn’t going to be washed away so easy; he’s got his boots on and they’re laced up all the way, meaning that he’s torn himself away from the insane-asylum of the South, where the poor beaten Uncle Toms plod around in the gallion barefoot, and only the white boss-man wears boots; he’s righteous, in the Biblical sense of having justice on your side, and he’s ready, like a boxer poised to take on all comers, and he’s really in there, as a prizefighter wades into the thick of it instead of running away from his opponent; he really comes on, like a performer making his entrance on the stage, full of self-confidence and self-control, aware of his own talents and the ability to use them; or he really gets off, that is, is so capable of expressing himself fully that he gets the load of oppression off, the load that weighs down poor broken people who are miserable and can’t do anything about it, can’t even put it into words; and he’s groovy, the way musicians are groovy when they pool their talents instead of competing with each other, work together and all slip into the same groove, heading in the same direction, cooperating all the way; and finally, he’s a solid sender, he can send your spirit soaring and make you real happy, because no matter how heavy his burden is he still isn’t brought down, he keeps his sense of humor and his joy in life, and uses them to make you feel good too.
Those are the qualities the young cats go for, the ones they’ve invented new phrases to describe. Fitted together, they form a portrait of Uncle Tom—in reverse, a negative print. They add up to something mighty impressive, a real man. As their new American lingo tells you, that’s what these hip kids mean to become. I could see how hard they worked at it. A heap of them made it.
What struck me as a wonderful thing was that they never lost their perspective—the language lets you know that too. The hipster stays conscious of the fraud of language. Where many ofays will hold forth pompously, like they had The Word, the Negro mimics them sarcastically. As a final subtle touch, his language is also a parody, a satire on the conventional ofay’s gift of gab and gibberish. A lot of it consists of flowery ofay phrases and puffed-up clichés that are purposely twisted around to show how corny and funky they are, like a man’s features are twisted in a caricature to show how simpy he is inside. I never once saw those kids get dead serious and all swole up with pompous airs. It inspired me to realize that these hip cats were half-conscious comic artists, playing with words. Their lingo was more than a secret code; it was jammed with a fine sense of the ridiculous that had behind it some solid social criticism.
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The feeling of brotherhood on The Corner never stopped astonishing me. Look: to most whites the ginmills of Harlem mean only one thing, the underworld. Well, there’s a world of difference between the ofay underworld and the colored underworld. You see, all of Harlem—the whole colored race, in a sense—is one great big underworld, because practically all of these people are shoved to the bottom of the pile and kept there on account of the one thing they have in common, the pigmentation of their skin. The oppression that rules all their lives has caused a kind of fraternity to spring up among many of them that you almost never get among the whites in any very broad group. At the bottom of the pile, with all the weight of white society crushing you, there isn’t much room for one group to back off and glare down their noses at another group. It happens, of course, like it does among all human beings, but not to anywhere near the same extent as among the whites, not with the same insane and frenzied competition, as though your whole life depended on outdoing your next-door neighbor. The housing situation down there at the bottom doesn’t favor much backing off. It’s much too crowded for such hincty antics. You’re all in the same boat together, and most of you realize it—all in the same underworld. Instead of backing off, which is impossible anyway, pretty soon you put your arm around your neighbor to be more comfortable, and the two of you begin looking out for each other. No room for shooting contests in that boat.
Marihuana took Harlem by storm, and before long several colored boys started to peddle it. First they wanted to sell it for me, but I explained to them that I couldn’t get enough of it to become a wholesaler, and besides I just wanted to spread it around in my own circle of friends, not make a real business out of it. So these boys, without any hard feelings, went off and made a connection with some Spanish guys down on Lenox Avenue, and began selling it on their own. They rolled it in a different sized paper, about half an inch longer than mine and much thinner, and they called their product a “panatella.”
Now get a load of their sales-talk. “This may not be as good as the mezz,” they’d tell their customers in front, “but it’s pretty close to it. Ain’t no more reefer after the mezz.” Try to imagine Al Capone’s mugs telling a saloonkeeper that their needled beer wasn’t as good as the Purple Gang’s because Louis the Wop had the best beer on the market! Why, white guys in the same situation would be shooting each other up all over the place, trying to move in on each other. There was never a breath of competition between us. We were all real good friends. To top it off, these very same cats, my “competitors,” would come around to see me on The Corner and buy my gauge for their own personal use! Nobody once got taken for a ride.
During this same period, bootlegging and the numbers racket flourished in Harlem, but the boys didn’t want no part of its leaders and trigger men. The way they handled the gangster situation amazed me. They admired guys who got by on their wits, without cutting the next fellow down, but muscle men, always acting loutish and clinching their arguments with machine guns, didn’t command any respect from them. Any simp can handle a machine gun; that’s not a brainy occupation. They always wanted to see the best man win, not the guy with the biggest arsenal.
One night I was standing at the bar in Big John’s when some of Dutch Schultz’s torpedoes came swaggering in, dressed like fashion plates and hats cocked every whichaway. Dutch was down in Connie’s Inn having himself a ball, and these mugs, abou
t five of them all told, had some time to kill. They ordered drinks for the house, and one of them ankled over to the juke box to play some records. As soon as the music started, one of the guys in our crowd yelled real loud, looking straight at this guy, “Man, that’s a killer!” He could have been talking about the music, but everybody in that room knew different. Right quick another cat spoke up real loud, saying, “That’s murder man, really murder,” and his eyes were signifying too. All these gunmen began to shift from foot to foot, fixing their ties and scratching their noses, faces red and Adam’s apples jumping. Before we knew it they had gulped their drinks and beat it out the door, saying good-bye to the bartender with their hats way down over their eyebrows and their eyes gunning the ground. That’s what Harlem thought of the white underworld.
Within the brotherhood there was some lively competition too, sure. The idea right smack in the middle of every cat’s mind all the time was this: he had to sharpen his wits every way he could, make himself smarter and keener, better able to handle himself, more hip. The hip language was one kind of verbal horseplay invented to do that. Lots of other games sprang up for the same reason: snagging, rhyming, the dirty dozens, cutting contests. On The Corner the idea of a kind of mutual needling held sway, each guy spurring the other guy on to think faster and be more nimble-witted.