Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Negro dialect,” meanwhile, was another expression of the need for secrecy. Just as the Jews of Europe developed Yiddish, or Judeo-German, and the Jews of Spain developed Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, as a way to keep their Christian enemies from knowing too much about their business, the slaves developed a language, full of allusions, innuendos and puns, that the white master could almost, but not quite, understand. Also, the slaves communicated with one another through music, and many harmless-sounding spirituals were actually skillfully coded messages being passed up and down Slave Row. “Steal away, steal away to Jesus, steal away, steal away home.… I ain’t got long to stay here,” meant that there would be an escape attempt that night. Other songs evoked battle and destruction: “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, And the walls came tumblin’ down.” And others were direct challenges to the slavemaster: “Tell old Pharaoh, let my people go!”

  The social hierarchy of Slave Row was much more complicated than simply a matter of house servants versus field hands. Age conferred status, among other things, and older people were addressed as “Uncle” and “Auntie” not because they were relatives but because these were terms of repect. Slave artisans were also a privileged class. Each plantation was in effect a feudal city-state and needed, in addition to laborers, skilled carpenters, cabinet and furniture makers, cobblers, tailors, stonemasons, blacksmiths, painters, plasterers, silversmiths, and ironmongers. Many of these slaves had brought the secrets of their crafts with them from Africa, and the beautiful grill-work of New Orleans is a particularly striking example of slave craftsmanship. These people composed an aristocracy of talent. Then, in each Slave Row community, there was another aristocracy based on the slave’s relationship with his master. If a slave woman, for example, talked back to her mistress and got away with it, she was highly regarded. If a man stood up straight to his master, without bowing, and looked him straight in the eye (against the law in Louisiana), and was not punished for his uppityness, he became a plantation hero. An even greater hero was the slave who had made a brave attempt to escape, even though he might eventually have been caught and brought back to the plantation. The slaves who had made the most successful thefts from the masters, or who had carried off the most convincing deceptions, were also afforded special status, as were those who had become adept at seasoning their masters’ food with urine, arsenic, ground glass, and “spiders beaten up in buttermilk.”

  The plantation also needed policemen, and often the most important man on the estate was the driver. The driver was the slave appointed by the slavemaster and charged with the responsibility of supervising the work of the slaves in the fields by day and patrolling the slave quarters by night. “The head driver,” according to James H. Hammond, a South Carolina slavemaster, “is the most important Negro on the plantation, and is not required to work like the other hands. He is to be treated with more respect than any other Negro by master and overseer.… He is to be required to maintain proper discipline at all times; to see that no Negro idles or does bad work in the field, and to punish it [sic] with discretion.… He is a confidential servant, and may be a guard against any excesses or omissions of the overseer.” He was, in other words, to be a combination major-domo and political liaison between the master and the other slaves, with a role rather similar to that of the straw boss of Jim Crow days.

  The driver was also, quite often, the most feared and hated man in Slave Row—particularly if he abused his power and committed his own excesses or omissions. There was the case of a driver named Ely on a Mississippi plantation, who drove his slaves so hard and ruthlessly that they ambushed him and murdered him. But other drivers were genuinely admired, and even loved for doing what they could to soften the impact of slavery. Also in Mississippi, a driver named Solomon Northup conspired with his fellow slaves to outwit his master by faking whippings and other punishments, and successfully manipulated his master into giving his slaves shorter working hours and better quarters. Eventually, Northup managed to escape to the North.

  In other words, an ability to deal with the white man—whether through deceit, clever bargaining, or other chicanery—was a thing much admired along Slave Row. The institution of slavery has been succinctly described as “a perpetual state of war,” and, as in any war, anything was fair in this one. At the bottom of the slaves’ pecking order were the humble and subservient who bent to their tasks unquestioningly. For these slaves, there was little but scorn.

  The driver might be “the most important Negro on the plantation,” but he was not necessarily the most important person in the slave community. Inevitably, that distinction fell to a more charismatic type, a spiritual leader with “powers” that verged upon the oracular. One slavemaster complained that it was a “notorious fact” that “on almost every large plantation of Negroes, there is one among them who holds a kind of magical sway over the minds and opinions of the rest.… The influence of such a Negro, often a preacher, on a quarter is incalculable.” On one plantation, the leading high priest was called “Old Abram,” and was said to be “deeply versed in such philosophy as is taught in the cabin of the slave.” On another, in Mississippi, an ancient woman named Juba, who wore charms about her neck, was revered by her followers for the fact that she had had many visions and conversations with the devil. A Louisiana planter noted that Big Lucy had become the mystic leader of his slave community and “corrupts every young Negro in her power.”

  In New Orleans in the 1800s lived the legendary Marie Laveau, a tall, handsome “free woman of color” who was also a kind of voodoo priestess, credited with all sorts of extraordinary powers. At her command, blood would appear through a crack in an empty china teacup. She could, it was said, make men impotent at will, and her spells could make a woman barren. In the mulatto and black community, Marie Laveau was much feared and respected, and her influence in the white society of New Orleans was also awesome. By trade, Marie Laveau was a hairdresser, and she tended the ladies’ coiffures in all the city’s finest houses. Nineteenth-century women confided their secrets to their hairdressers as readily as women do today, and as a result Marie Laveau knew all the gossip, the scandal, the intimate details of marriages, liaisons, and love affairs. She used her knowledge well, trading tidbit for juicy tidbit among her clientele, and for years she ruled New Orleans, both black and white, and was considered one of the city’s most powerful forces. Once, when General Lafayette came to New Orleans, a great ball was given in his honor. He failed to appear. It was because, so the rumor went, he was busy relishing the exotic pleasures of Marie Laveau. Marie Laveau had fifteen children, including one daughter to whom she imparted the secrets of her sorcery, and who took over for her in her image. The only portrait of Marie Laveau that is known to have existed was destroyed when the painting was stabbed through the eyes.

  From the earliest days of slavery, the black priest was a pivotal plantation figure—the comforter of the sorrowing and bereaved, the interpreter of the supernatural, the guide to the here and the hereafter. From these men and women grew the Negro church, the fabled “invisible church of slavery,” which rapidly became the first, and most powerful, black social institution in America. At first, it was by no means a Christian church, but an adaptation of African rites generally termed Obi Worship or Voodooism, over which had been spread a veneer of Christian ritual taught by the Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal missionaries. Since slaves were not permitted to hold meetings on the plantation, and could not conduct religious services without a white witness present, the invisible church went underground. The worshippers slipped away, at night, to the fields or swamps to praise God in “hush-harbors.” Their God, furthermore, was not the white man’s God, nor was their devil the white man’s devil. The devil, for example, was not the terror that he was in the European church, but a wily trickster, respected for his guile, who frequently competed with God and won. Intertwined with this was a belief in a world of spirits who could be manipulated, persuaded and inveigled to serve the living in various usefu
l ways, and a belief in “hants,” charms and taboos.

  In a book called From Slave Cabin to Pulpit, Peter Randolph described a “hush-harbor”:

  They have an understanding among themselves as to the time and place of getting together. This is often done by the first one arriving breaking boughs from the trees and bending them in the direction of the selected spot. Arrangements are then made for conducting the exercises. They first ask each other how they feel, the state of their minds, etc. The male members then select a certain space, in separate groups, for their division of the meeting. Preaching in order, by the brethren; then praying and singing all around until they generally feel quite happy. The speaker usually commences by calling himself unworthy, and talks very slowly, until, feeling the spirit, he grows excited, and in a short time, there fall to the ground twenty or thirty men and women under its influence.

  The “invisible” church and its leaders and prophets became such a powerful force in the lives of American blacks that, when the slaves were freed in 1863, black Americans launched into frenzied church-organizing and church-building. The spiritual leaders of the plantations, almost none of whom had any formal religious training, had already been people of great influence. Now they found themselves in positions of considerable power. By 1876, the black South was linked by a network of churches of every denomination and persuasion. Because the churches were usually the largest buildings in the area, they were, at first, the only major buildings owned by blacks. They were social and spiritual centers. They were also centers of political, and substantial economic, activity. Money poured into the coffers of black churches as it did into the treasuries of the fraternal orders, and it has been estimated that, between 1870 and 1910, some $250,000,000 passed down the aisles of black churches in collection plates. Obviously some early black “preachers,” who were merely self-taught orators and spellbinders who claimed a direct line to the Almighty, were less scrupulous than others, and used their positions for personal aggrandizement. Itinerant preachers, serving communities that had no regular church or pastor, also made money traveling about the country speaking for honorariums. And, in larger towns, as black religious institutions leapt from suppressed invisibility to jubilant visibility, it became an article of faith that the black preacher must have the handsomest horse and buggy (and, later, automobile) in town. He must have the finest house, the finest clothes, and the best-dressed wife. It was an honor for the women of the congregation to work for the preacher and his family as his cook, housekeeper, or laundress. Out of the black churches came the black colleges, and it was essential that the preacher’s children be given a higher education. And so, in most Southern towns, it was possible for the black preacher and his family to become, if not the richest, at least the best fed and best cared-for people in the community. Many of today’s black elite are descended from these early clergymen. And, as black preachers prospered, many of them bought or built their own churches, and rented them back to their congregations, thus providing themselves with a tidy source of income. This is currently the case with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., of Atlanta, who owns his Ebenezer Baptist Church. The rent his congregation pays him has made Dr. King well-to-do.

  The preacher, whatever his denomination, dealt with the fundamental problems of life—economic adversity, illness, death, and the question of the hereafter. And so, central to the theology of the post-Civil War black churches were their mutual aid and benevolent societies, which were life insurance and burial insurance companies in embryo. Practically every church of any size in the country had at least one benevolent society attached to it, and some had several. In general, these societies operated by assessing church members from 25 to 37 cents a month and, in turn, paying out sickness benefits of between $1.50 and $3.00 a week, and death benefits of between $10 and $20. The excess capital of these societies—which was often considerable—was banked or invested in real estate. These societies not only provided service, aid, and counseling; they also loaned money, at interest, in times of crisis and were therefore like miniature banks. At the same time, like the quasireligious fraternal orders, they offered business and money-management training to preachers and lay members of their congregations. They offered concrete proof of what individuals could do by pooling their resources. It was no coincidence that W. R. Pettiford, organizer and first president of the Alabama Penny Savings Bank, was pastor of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Nor was it a coincidence that, in more recent times, the late Elijah Muhammad, spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam, managed to create an economic empire of over $90,000,000 which includes 4,200 acres of farm land, a great deal of choice Chicago real estate, a weekly newspaper, and a nationwide chain of supermarkets, barbershops, restaurants and clothing stores.

  Somehow, in the secret hush-harbors, the promise of freedom, including economic freedom to at least some blacks, had been held out:

  Oh, freedom; oh freedom;

  Oh, Lord, freedom over me,

  And before I’d be a slave

  I’d be buried in my grave

  An’ go home to my Lord and be free.

  And yet, as black churches developed, they too, like the fraternal orders and secret societies, became divided into disagreeing factions. In the South, the black population became quickly bisected into two large religious communities—the Methodists and the Baptists. The Methodists, with their hierarchal organization, have tended to attract the wealthier and better-educated blacks—both as clergymen and parishioners—and Methodist bishops, in their various episcopal districts, exert great power over the lives of their ministers, who receive their church appointments from the bishops. The black Baptist congregations have attracted more than twice as many members as the Methodists, and the Baptist Church is considered the church of the black masses. On the other hand, without an organization with a centralized authority and hierarchy, the thousands of independent Baptist congregations, each of which selects its own minister, have provided a fertile arena for ambitious men and women who wished to become religious leaders and thereby move upward from the lower to the middle class. In some cities, in the process, Baptists have become split along color and class lines, as certain congregations decided to dissociate themselves from the emotional fervor of some Baptist rituals. Chanting, speaking in tongues, throwing oneself prostrate on the floor of the church in transports of religious ecstasy—such activities were considered “primitive” and “uncivilized.”

  Also, as blacks have moved up the social and economic ladder in their communities, they have tended to desert both the Methodist and Baptist churches, and to affiliate themselves with churches that middle-class America has long considered “nicer”—the Congregational, the Presbyterian, or the Anglican Episcopal. “My grandparents were Methodists, but we’re Episcopalians” is a comment often heard among the elite, rather in the way that children and grandchildren of Orthodox Jews have tended to join the “more American” Reform congregations. At the same time, a number of upper-class black professional men—doctors, lawyers, dentists, and so on—have continued memberships in the Baptist or Methodist churches for business reasons. Their patients and clients are in these lower-class congregations. And it is common for upper-class black business and professional families to maintain two church memberships—one for social status and another for the financial advantage.

  There are also a certain number of black Jews, many of them living in New York’s Harlem to this day. Most of these are Orthodox, and observe the ancient Sephardic ritual that developed in medieval Spain and Portugal. This is because early Jewish plantation owners in the South were largely Sephardim who heeded the strictures of Deuteronomy 15. Deuteronomy implies that indentured servants or “bondsmen” in Jewish households should also be Jewish, and so Jewish slave-owners converted their slaves to Judaism. Deuteronomy also instructs that no slave should be kept for more than six years, and must be released in the seventh year—“And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let hi
m go away empty.” Many of these freed slaves kept their Jewish faith, and passed it along to their children and grandchildren. Black Sephardim are as fiercely proud of their ancient religion as white Sephardim, and consider themselves among the elite of Jewry. If their ancestors ever felt any spiritual kinship with the invisible church of slavery, the haughty Jewish blacks today have lost it altogether.

  Whenever one moves upward, step by step along the American stairway of social class, it seems that something must be left behind. The Howard or Talladega graduate who sends his son to Princeton has deprived him of the special experience of the all-black college, and the perfumed meetings of the ladies of the Links, steeped in Good Works, lack the intimacy of the sewing circle that gathered around Grandmother’s stove. When one climbs from Baptist prayer meetings to Episcopalian tea parties, the transforming magic of the hush-harbor in the midnight swamp has been lost forever.

  Also lost, to many upper-crust blacks today, are the Negro spirituals. One woman says, “My grandfather was an itinerant preacher, who preached mostly in Baptist churches in the South. He did very well financially, and managed to buy a thousand acres of farmland in southeast Texas. I remember, when I was a little girl, that everywhere I looked and as far as I could see, it was Grandpa’s land.” (She has recently sold her share of the Texas land, wisely retaining the mineral rights beneath.) She adds, “They say that Grandpa was a wonderful preacher, and had a beautiful singing voice. I never heard him preach, and I used to wonder what he sang. I was raised an Episcopalian, and we never heard a Negro spiritual in our church. I never heard a Negro spiritual in our house. I never even heard of a Negro spiritual until I was practically a grown woman. The other day, I heard Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway singing ‘Come, Ye Disconsolate,’ and I thought, ‘What a beautiful song!’ Someone told me it was a Negro spiritual, and I was amazed. I had absolutely no idea that black people ever sang songs like that!”