Hence the development of the Jazz Age, which in its mainstream cultural embodiment was qualitatively different from the ragtime and jazz juke joints. But it retained enough aesthetic ferocity, in both music and fiction, to scare some and shake up many others. F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected some of the ferocious and fertile impulses of the juke joint in the linguistic creativity of his novels, where slang leapt to the foreground, and his characters were not trying to close out the body. In certain European canonical works, the body becomes irrelevant or merely instrumental, an appendage to the mind’s operations, merely instrumental. For instance, the body was good for producing wind for the brass instruments or for the muscle to stroke the string instruments in the classical orchestra. But the body itself was never as present in European classical music as it was in Negro hot spots, the indigenous dives of brown divas and majordomos—at least not when it was primarily interpreted by Europeans. I’m speaking here of musicians, with the singers who rose to prominence later, including folk like Caruso and Callas, being obvious exceptions. Basically, in European music, you saw the segregation of the body into measured utilities, where the hands were good but not the feet, where the lips were fine but not the eyes, and so on.
In jazz, the body was aesthetically desegregated, freed from the artificial constraints of taste, custom, and tradition. In jazz, the entire body was implicated and was truly integrated. The values of jazz include a profound vocal tonality, since the musical instruments were manipulated in varying degrees to sound like the voice. That’s why we love Lester Young’s and, later, John Coltrane’s, sound, because the very textures they evoke on the saxophone remind us of the human voice crying, sighing, laughing, speaking and shrieking, complaining, and expressing joy. Let’s move from the reeds to the brass. In a sense, the blues shouts and the field hollers get reexpressed, reemphasized, rearticulated in the longing, yearning, feral tones of the trumpet and the cornet. When you hear Louis Armstrong wailing on his trumpet and cornet, when you hear him cutting through the aesthetics of polite society with its measured, rigid, precise tonalities, lashing, as only Armstrong could, in a viciously insistent tone that suggested he was indeed “stomping the blues,” you hear the quality I’m talking about. It’s anger and joy, anxiety and peace in shuffling cadences that trade hope for despair as he’s trading twelves in King Oliver’s group and later his own.
And beyond jazz, in gospel music, for instance, when you hear the transcendent aesthetic possibilities that transmute suffering into ethical vision and religious passion, you’re hearing the full-bodied character of black music. Black music, and the contexts of black experience it introduced, were just too much for an often repressed mainstream society. And you don’t have to buy into stereotypes of the oppositional figures of the white savant and black savage, with the former a glutton for reason and the intellect, and the latter addicted to primal urges and nature, to get my point. The aesthetic priorities and intellectual musings of black artists (and for me, the two go hand in hand, especially when we’re talking about jazz) provided white youth a different and daring prism through which to view themselves. Remember, Du Bois had written in 1903, at least that’s when the essays in Souls of Black Folk were gathered, that it is a strange thing to see oneself, that is, the black self, through the lens of another world, a world that was in many ways a foreign, judging, hostile world. But what happens with jazz music and culture is that the prism is inverted, metaphorically speaking, so that now, in the 1920s, black culture provides the lens through which many whites begin to view and understand themselves. That was a monumental philosophical reversal achieved largely by aesthetic means.
What was it that was bringing black folks from the rural South to urban centers in the North?
Economic opportunity was one thing that drew black people from rural agrarian culture, where they were brutally segregated on post-Emancipation plantations in sharecropping arrangements. Sharecropping was little more than the evolved form of slavery. You see, after Emancipation, 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South until the early 1900s and the great black migration North, to Chicago and Detroit and other big cities, in search of greater economic opportunity. Even before the great black migration, blacks had been drawn to urban centers like New Orleans, which was steeped in racial history. Congo Square was there; it was the place where black slaves had been sold on the auction block. Congo Square prefigured the urban cultures that coalesced around New Orleans in the late 1800s and early 1900s because it was where all these Africans from every part of the world were brought, or literally bought, together. There’s nothing like the oppressive commercialization and commodification of black culture to forge the solidarity of blackness, even if it was a defensive, protective, reflexive move, and to create modern blackness in ways it didn’t exist in Africa before the coerced diaspora, the forced migration.
But this new thing, this tertium quid, this not-European, not-African-butsomehow-American racial reality that formed in Congo Square, was the forging of the black Atlantic, as Robert Farris Thompson, Peter Linebaugh, and much later Paul Gilroy, have described it in their work. In Congo Square, music was played outside the control of the dominant white society. Blacks reappropriated the space of domination as a source of liberating aesthetic self-expression. The drum was crucial to this process. It was the dominant symbol, the dominant metaphor, of the convergence of political meanings and aesthetic articulation. In Congo Square, the rhythm of black life, with its percussive tonalities, was literally drummed into existence. That’s why the drums were outlawed: they were the language of black emancipation. The drums allowed blacks to facilitate community, to communicate valuable political messages in a percussive tongue. It was a testament to the fertility and generativity of blackness, even for those Creoles who were passer blanc, passing for white, although it was routinely the case that they were marked in their bodies with the outlaw(ed) meanings of blackness by the dominant society.
Still, there was something crucial about Congo Square to black identity. New Orleans provided a gumbo ya-ya of disparate black identities of African origins. People think when you say black, these identities are self-evident, but they’re not. They think the same for Africa, but when you say African, what are you really saying? Are you talking about East, West, North, or South African? Are you talking about Yoruba or Hausa? And in the African diaspora, things are no different. When you speak of African religion, for instance, are you talking about Candomble from an Afro-Brazilian experience, or are you speaking of Afro-Cuban Santeria, or perhaps a Haitian expression of Vodoun? The gumbo ya-ya of black identity evokes the African appreciation for the integrity of multiplicity, which is essentially what black urbanity is all about. The black urban experiment of the early part of the twentieth century, in its edifying moments, was about mass black exodus to cities that were ports of call for the migrations, mixtures, and mergers of all kinds of black identities, both within indigenous U.S. populations and from all over the Americas, from Caribbean cultures, and later from British cultures as well. The expansion of economic opportunity that drew blacks to big northern cities from all parts of the country, indeed the world, had a concomitant virtue: it not only eroded the vicious de jure segregation to which they had been subject in southern apartheid, but it multiplied the rambunctious collocation of ethnic, regional, religious, sexual, gendered, and class diversities within black identity.
Talk about the atmosphere of Chicago in 1919.
Chicago during that time was home to upwardly mobile blacks, relatively speaking, who had limited success in challenging the norms, the ethos, the very superior self-understanding that even average whites possessed. As a result, blacks suffered violence as reprisal for their “uppity behavior.” So the de jure segregation of the South was replaced by the de facto segregation of the North. A lot of the violence blacks suffered was not simply of the top-down sort—violence regulated and mediated through political structures in an ostensibly democratic society. The violence had largely
to do with the politics of resentment from white working-class folk who frowned on the even limited success of this burgeoning black working class. Tensions between the races were exacerbated when black scab workers were brought in to bust the unions, most of which barred black workers. In effect, the white power structure was playing musical chairs with nonunionized black workers and exploited white unionized workers, pitting the latter against the former. All this means that around 1919, the second great fire razed Chicago. The first fire happened in 1871, when Mrs. O’Leary’s legendary cow kicked the lantern that started the fire that nearly burned down Chicago.
The second fire was more redemptive, ignited when some blacks joined the working and middle classes, turning Chicago into one of the great centers of black culture in the modern West, similar to what would happen later in Los Angeles when the booming war industry drew blacks in record numbers during World War II. In Chicago, circa 1919, the stockyards were the huge attraction that helped spark Chicago’s great black migration. The stockyards and the sometimes apocryphal stories that transplanted black Southerners in Chicago sent back home that exaggerated their standard of living in the big city, as if they were, in the parlance of hip-hop, “living large.” Maybe in comparison to their old southern haunts they were living large, but they were hardly living in the lap of luxury up North; and there were virtues to the old southern geographies that formerly dominated black life. In the South, even if they were poor, they had open spaces in fields, but in the North, their enhanced economic status confined them in tenements that stretched upward several stories and choked the landscapes and skylines of ghettoes and slums.
The North had its own variety of Jim Crow, except that it was Jim Crow, Esquire, or James Crow III. Northern racism was more subtle but no less vicious. Twenty years after 1919, during the 1940s, Chicago exploded with black aesthetic creativity, with jazz, blues, gospel, and later its own variety of soul music, making it very difficult for white Americans—especially the recently arrived white ethnic immigrants, including Poles, Italians, Lithuanians, and Irish, who populated Chicago’s burgeoning lumpen proletariat—to accept even marginal black mainstream success. The battle was classic: recently migrated southern blacks and recently immigrated white European ethnics—in Michael Novak’s famous book title (at least during his radical phase) The Unmeltable Ethnics, something I’m sure he’d disavow now as a leading conservative and advocate of the melting pot. In short order, tensions mounted and eventually led to race rioting in Chicago.
Were the objections concentrated on the influx of people or was it reaction to what the people brought with them, the culture?
It was both. They were indivisible because the greatest thing the people brought was themselves and their itinerant, mobile cultural meanings. According to many conservative social scientists, the urban situation was messed up because black people reshaped industrial urbanity in the first half of the twentieth century in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, and so on. Blacks brought their culture with them, a culture pervaded by blues and jazz and gospel music and spiritual sensibilities. They brought a particular understanding of what their place was, both geographically and racially, but they had to adjust as well, because transitioning from agrarian, rural life to urbanity’s more regimented, geometric living (R. Buckminster Fuller gone ghetto, so to speak, in cloistered, crabbed cubicles, geodesic domes writ small) was very difficult. The geopolitics of industrial urban space didn’t necessarily bode well for some blacks who brought cultural habits and lifestyles more suited to the South. Many blacks brought the cultural norms of creative collectivity and communal sharing with them, which were healthy and productive; black Southerners helped each other out with the meager resources they had. They also brought the habit of having a lot of family members, relatives, and friends live in one room, in the shotgun shacks that were common in parts of the South, a habit that proved to be counterproductive in some instances. Thus cultural adaptability worked for and against blacks. You usually only hear the negative side in books that detail the effect of the black migration on family structure, cultural thriving, and social cohesion and stability. But you rarely hear of the vital social and cultural habits (such as adaptable familial structures and flexible gender roles, since black women have always worked outside the home) that allowed black urbanity to flourish.
At the same time, though, the aesthetic cultures that black Southerners brought—and the joy, the frivolity, the edifying frenzy, the passionate investment in bodily expressions and syncopated rhythms and cultural significations that were important to sustaining their lives and nurturing their strong sense of self—was crucial to black survival. It also clashed with certain elements of the white mainstream, not the least of which was the perception by older whites that this black culture was ruining their children. When Louis Armstrong left New Orleans and headed to Chicago, one of his great fans was a high school–aged cat named Bix Beiderbecke. As a result, the great black migration, with its southern roots, influences the northern white populace, especially youth who are fumbling toward maturity while experiencing alienation from their parents’ world. A major way many white youth articulated their alienation, and affirmed their sanity, authenticity, and legitimacy, was by latching hold of the mores mediated through the artistic values of black culture as expressed in the imaginations and visions of its great artists. What happens is predictable: Bix becomes better known than his mentor in many artistic circles and gets the opportunity to make more money than Armstrong. Or think about Benny Goodman, who reaped huge aesthetic and financial benefit from his association with (read: appropriation) and downright ripping off of black musicians. But at least Goodman had enough sense to bring Fletcher Henderson along as his musical director, even though Goodman became famous in the first place because he had purchased twenty-four of Fletcher Henderson’s songs to make him the “King of Swing.” Damned, Duke, my sincere apologies!
So urban migration meant much more than black bodies occupying the menial workforce. It also meant the widening influence of black cultural sensibilities, even if, as was the case with Bix and Benny, they were appropriated and diluted. Black cultural influence caused great tension in the industrialized North because it meant that blackness was just so present. Its proximity was a problem. It was one thing for whites to minstrel blackness, to appropriate it for pecuniary and performative gain. Hence you had the Cotton Club in Harlem controlled by white mobsters, catering to a white clientele in the fabled bosom of blackness with a public face that was colored by its black entertainers. But it was another thing for Negroes to show up in the North looking to benefit from their own culture. Thus the aesthetic demands of Negro art caused a quake in racial and economic relations, shifting the plates along the fault lines of race that underlay the social geography.
But what was really trying for even white liberals was the actual, embodied presence of the blacks they had spoken for by proxy. When those black folk took the boat up the Mississippi to speak for themselves, it was mutiny on the white bounty! When other folk speak for you, no matter how informed or impassioned, it’s just not the same as you speaking for yourself. And part of the problem with black migration was the aesthetic encounters it forged in the public square, in the clubs and joints, and the churches and houses of worship that dotted the black urban landscape. The emotional sweep of black experience, which was largely abstract even for white sympathizers, became flesh and dwelt among the white world up North. That experience included the pain and pathos of black life; the utter despair and the defiant hopefulness of black existence; the anguished love that strode through the rhythms of black music; the sweat and strain and aspiration of black bodies in worship or erotic wooing or work or play; the murmurs, the shrieks, the barely suppressed guffaws, the edifying laughter, the comic sensibility that confronted the doom or tragedy or evil that blacks fought, elements that they refused to make their ultimate home, their ultimate reality. All of these moods and modes of blackness were
indivisible from the great black migration. While the cultural rituals that mediated the normative beliefs of the black cosmos were appealing to some whites, they were to many more a source of horror, of pity, of condescending tolerance, or of grave misunderstanding, more often outright hostility, but rarely fair engagement. Often black culture alienated whites who sought to keep blacks at arm’s length. White liberals didn’t mind fighting for black freedom, but they didn’t want blacks living next door. T.S. Eliot, the great modernist poet, said, “Between the ideal and the reality falls the shadow.” This is what Chicago was grappling with, the shadow, the dark rim of black urban existence as black bodies and beliefs challenged American notions of democracy, cityhood, and industrial civilization.
Speak to the black embrace, or not, of the migration.
Black people were greatly affected by the mainstream culture’s perceptions of their bodies, beliefs, value systems, and social visions: the baggage, metaphorically speaking, of migrating from South to North, as well as the virtues and vices that characterize black culture. Many black people accepted what white Americans believed about black culture: that it was barbaric and savage when it centered in jazz and blues, which meant that black culture at its best must move to embrace the transcendental traditions of spirituality that coursed through gospel music and evangelical, revivalist preaching. A huge problem occurred when Chicago-based musician Thomas Dorsey, the father of contemporary gospel music, introduced jazz and blues riffs in his music. Beyond the aesthetic dimensions of racial propriety, there were the social divisions of black society that were magnified in the great black migration. So the internal contradictions of black culture proved transportable as well. For instance, up North, blacks updated a habit they had practiced in places like New Orleans, known as the “paper bag” test—blacks who were darker than a plain paper bag were prevented by lighter blacks from participating in social clubs, civic organizations, or, informally, from marrying above their color-driven caste.
The Michael Eric Dyson Reader Page 61