Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  As the Atlanta Six appealed their case, Angelo Herndon became the next victim caught in the web of Georgia’s insurrection statute. On June 30, 1932, he led a march of over one thousand Black and white workers to city hall that forced the city to add $6,000 to local relief aid. Twelve days later Herndon was arrested while picking up his mail, and police searched his room without a warrant. They discovered a small cache of leaflets, pamphlets, Communist newspapers, and books by George Padmore and Bishop William Montgomery Brown.

  Initially charged simply for being a Communist, on July 22 Herndon was indicted for violating the insurrection statute. The ILD retained two local Black lawyers, John H. Geer and Benjamin Davis, Jr., the latter a scion of a prominent Black Republican family who would go on to become a national leader in the Communist Party.

  The rabidly anti-Communist prosecutor, John Hudson, sought the death penalty for Herndon for possessing the material. But Davis and Geer showed that the material in Herndon’s possession was readily available in the public library. And Davis turned the tables by insisting that “lynching is insurrection” and that the systematic exclusion of Black people from the jury pool was a violation of Herndon’s rights, rendering any indictment against him invalid.

  On January 18, 1933, an all-white jury found Herndon guilty but spared him execution by sentencing him to eighteen to twenty years on the chain gang. After securing his release on bail in October 1934, the ILD sent Herndon on a national tour to talk about his case in the larger struggle against class oppression, racial injustice, and fascism. “Today, when the world is in danger of being pushed into another blood-bath,” he warned in one of his stump speeches, “when Negroes are being shot down and lynched wholesale, when every sort of outrage is taking place against the masses of people—today is the time to act.”

  The tour ended after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal, sending him back to prison in October 1935. His legal team then turned to the insurrection statute itself and succeeded in convincing a Fulton County Superior Court judge that the law was unconstitutional. Herndon was released again on bond three months after he returned to prison. Predictably, the Georgia supreme court rejected the lower court’s ruling, setting the stage for a second appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1937 in a 5–4 decision finally struck down Georgia’s insurrection statute, vacating Herndon’s conviction for good.

  But in 1935, as Herndon crisscrossed the country fighting for his life, the Nazis consolidated power in Germany, Japan occupied Manchuria, Britain and France tightened their grip on the colonies, and Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Black radicals heeded Herndon’s plea “to act,” mobilizing in defense of Ethiopia, resisting lynch law in the South, organizing a global anticolonial movement, and defending Republican Spain from the fascists.

  Angelo’s brother, Milton Herndon, died fighting Franco’s troops in the Spanish Civil War. He told his men why he was there: “Yesterday, Ethiopia. Today, Spain. Tomorrow, maybe America. Fascism won’t stop anywhere—until we stop it.” His words still ring true.

  1934–1939

  ZORA NEALE HURSTON

  Bernice L. McFadden

  When I was a child, using the words ain’t, huh, and hey would reap an icy gaze from an elder or, worse, a pinch or slap, followed by the correction:

  Bernice, the word is:

  Isn’t. Yes. Hello.

  Historically, so-called Bad English or improper grammar was attributed to poor and uneducated people. It was considered lazy English, created by “lazy” Blacks, those Africans who were enslaved in America and worked from can’t see to can’t see, bonded people who were quite literally worked to death.

  My siblings and I were educated in private schools and spent summers in Barbados. We children were neither poor nor uneducated, so that sort of language was unacceptable in my household. We were expected to speak proper English if we aspired to be accepted and respected in the white world.

  I grew up in a family that was Southern on my maternal side and Caribbean on my paternal side. These relatives had migrated and immigrated to New York, stubbornly clinging to the customs of their birth homes. So I was raised in a family full of interesting and complex dialects, all of which I adopted.

  Truth is, Standard American English has never felt comfortable on my tongue. It is as unnatural to me as swimming fully clothed in the ocean. Today, even in middle age, I still speak in a dialect that I lovingly refer to as Yankee Bajan.

  I discovered Zora Neale Hurston in the summer of 1987. I was twenty-one years old and an aspiring writer unsure of what or whom I wanted to write about.

  When I opened Their Eyes Were Watching God, I was immediately struck by Hurston’s use of dialect, and a door in my mind creaked loudly ajar.

  In 1934 Hurston published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. It was well received by readers and critics alike. Hurston was celebrated for her use of Negro dialect. “Jonah’s Gourd Vine can be called without fear of exaggeration the most vital and original novel about the American Negro that has yet been written by a member of the Negro race,” wrote Margaret Wallace in The New York Times. “Miss Hurston, who is a graduate of Barnard College and student of anthropology, has made the study of Negro folklore her special province. This may very well account for the brilliantly authentic flavor of her novel and for her excellent rendition of Negro dialect.”

  Perhaps Hurston’s well-worded and sophisticated prose, set in contrast to the dialogue, led Wallace to assume that Hurston’s education was what allowed her to expertly mimic the Southern Negro dialect. It probably never occurred to Wallace that this achievement was the result not of an education at a prominent academic institution but of Hurston’s bilinguality. After all, Zora had been born in Alabama and raised in Florida, in towns populated by Black people. The people and their ways of communicating weren’t foreign to her—she was writing about home.

  Black language, now known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), was born in the American South during slavery when bonded people, separated from their familial tribes, mixed with Africans who spoke different languages. In an effort to communicate with their fellow men and women—and their captors—they stitched together scraps of several languages, including that of their enslavers, and created the melodic and nuanced dialect that Hurston used in her work, a dialect that still survives today.

  In 1936 Hurston was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the folk religions of Jamaica and Haiti. While in Haiti, she wrote, in just seven weeks’ time, Their Eyes Were Watching God, a story that she said “had been dammed up in me.”

  Published in the fall of 1937, during the Great Depression, Their Eyes Were Watching God centers on Janie Crawford, who finds herself married to the controlling Jody, a man who does not allow her to speak or communicate with friends. In contrast, when she meets Tea Cake, he is happy to hear what she has to say, encouraging her to share her thoughts and engage with others. This new relationship forges a feeling of empowerment and joy within Janie.

  In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jody can be construed as a metaphor for white people eager to silence the thoughts and expressions of Black people.

  But Zora Neale Hurston would not be muted.

  The publication of Their Eyes Were Watching God was met with criticism. The harshest came from Richard Wright, who accused Hurston of writing into and not above the stereotypes and tropes that had plagued Black people from slavery into Jim Crow. It was his stance that if a Black person took up a pen to write, that pen should be used as a sword to wage war against the oppressive white racist regime. Anything less was a frivolous waste of ink and paper. “Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley,” Wright wrote.

  Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that’s as far as it goes.
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br />   Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the “white folks” laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.

  Their Eyes Were Watching God was taken out of print in 1938 and remained in obscurity for forty years, until writer Alice Walker brought it back into the national spotlight. It was reissued in 1973, and the classic remains in print to this day.

  Had Hurston bent to the will of her critics, she might have received her flowers while she was still alive. Ever the nonconformist, the willful Hurston, in her next book, yet again put the politics of race aside in favor of presenting Black people in all their glorious authenticity.

  By the time Hurston published Tell My Horse in 1938, she was struggling financially. Tell My Horse is a travelogue of sorts, outlining the customs, superstitions, folk traditions, and religions found in Haiti and Jamaica. Hurston defied genre assignment by mixing and melding anthropology, folklore, and personal experience. This infuriated her critics. “It is a pity, therefore, that her real talents produced a work so badly—even carelessly—performed! She pays practically no attention to grammar or sentence structure,” complained Reece Stuart, Jr.

  One of Hurston’s biographers, Robert Hemenway, describes Tell My Horse as “Hurston’s poorest book, chiefly because of its form.” Later that year Hurston reviewed Richard Wright’s novel Uncle Tom’s Children and had no qualms about repaying his unkindness, saying that Wright’s writing was “so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where they live.” Too much, too little, too late, Hurston’s star had fallen and was slowly burning away in the cold, looming shadow of Richard Wright.

  In 1939 Hurston returned to Florida and went to work for the Federal Writers’ Project. Working alongside folklorist Stetson Kennedy, she and others collected songs and folktales from the culturally rich communities that dotted the Sunshine State. Hurston respected and revered the many iterations of Black language found in America and abroad and charged herself to do her part in collecting and preserving it for future generations.

  For this, I am grateful God sent Zora Neale Hurston into the world. She has been a steady guide on this literary journey of mine. It is because of her refusal to participate in the contempt and erasure of Black dialect that I am able to proudly embrace and celebrate my bilinguality on and off the page.

  * * *

  —

  God don come, he send. —Barbadian saying

  COILED AND UNLEASHED

  Patricia Smith

  A whole people’s tumble into raw, untested century began

  with one man, penning his serpentine sojourn up from slavery—

  I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth,

  but…I must have been born somewhere and at some time.

  He began as another baby shoved directly into the wrong air.

  Eavesdropping on the whispered blue archives of a scarring

  passage—the passage that taught so well the gracelessness

  of chains—Booker T. slowly untangled the acrid truths of his

  own mother’s bondage. He knew how gingerly his people

  had to sidle toward that blaring northern star. And words,

  like feral soldiers, lined up for him, crafting that careful story—

  his stern and measured gospel, the only breath in his body.

  Screeching a story that feels like the only breath in his body,

  Du Bois upended Booker, angled for agitation, commanded

  there be nothing hushed and unhurried about our freedom.

  He preferred the uncompromising clench, the coil, the strident

  voice and stalwart stride. Make yourself do unpleasant things

  so as to gain the upper hand of your soul. He meant the soul

  of Black folk, and that soul’s upper hand was a fist—pierce

  and pummel at the sleek white wall, prelude to the unfeigned,

  unslaved voice. Restraint had no role or reason in revolution.

  Between the tenets of those two men, a race strived to untangle

  its convoluted root, urged its whole self forward, and hurtled

  toward the door America had fought so hard to keep closed.

  A thousand clamorous truths lurked behind that thick door.

  To coax them loose, pens scarred its surface, keyboards clicked

  and spat. In Chicago, which was destined to be ours, Black word

  became Black bellow, warning of the menace seething behind

  Jim Crow’s burgeoning growl. Word was soundtrack, it was

  solace, salvage, defender of the defenseless. The Black word

  would learn to hide in the deep pockets of Pullman porters,

  cooing the brethren north, it would slip on the silken shouts

  of Hughes, Brooks, and Ida B., sing to soldiers of boundaries

  that wailed their color. The Defender and Crisis harbored

  the merciless Black word, the us to us, the tongue of tenement,

  of chittlins and factory, spinning the fractured tale of that

  furious north star and where it had always meant to lead us.

  It led us to Madame CJ Walker, who slathered Black crowns

  with grease that clung and stank like flowers, oil that crackled

  under a toothed and rabid heat. She schooled us in that sweet

  torture until we shamed our own mirrors, until our whole nappy

  heads spat glow. And she raised fists of her own damned money,

  from us to us. Blue-black and hallelujah-crowned, Madame CJ

  Walker American-dreamed. The star led us to the sharecroppers’

  boy, who knew no star was the end of free, who drove his body up

  through ice and into a startling sky. Matthew Henson stepped into

  that sky and planted the flag of a country that was not yet his.

  Mahri-Pahluk, the Inuit called him. Matthew. The Kind One.

  That furious star kept leading us north, and north—five decades

  after Lincoln dragged ink across the only edict that mattered,

  a wary Jubilee spanned the year. Soon after—as if a lock had

  clicked open—frenzied migrants, wide-eyed and beguiled,

  surged into depots in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland

  Philly and Pittsburgh, clutching our strapped cloth cases, with

  tabasco leaking from the waxed paper seams of what was left

  of our lunches. Dizzied by a conjured glare, we streamed into

  tenements, placed mementos of our other selves on shadowbox

  shelves, declared ourselves blessed, and sent hallelujahs back

  down south, in carefully scripted letters that sloshed our new

  city’s cracked concrete with gold. You got to come see, Pearl,

  it’s better up here. Amos, there a job for every man who want one.

  And Amos worked to beat the willful red dust off his hat and he

  came, Pearl wrapped fried bread and peppered pork scraps

  for the journey and she came, Annie cried loud in front

  of her granddaddy’s slantways old house and she came, Otis beat

  down the little-boy fear in his belly and he came, Earl put one last

  flower on Mary’s grave and he came, Esther slow-folded all her

  country clothes and she came, Willie started bragging all around

  Mississippi ’bout some paycheck he didn’t have yet and he came,

  Eunice, Nona’s baby girl
, got her tangled hair pressed and plaited

  for the first time and she came, we came, hauling even the things

  we dreamed of owning, we came, loosing the noose, stepping

  gingerly into the gaping mouths of cities, we came, just stunned

  enough. We wrangled with wary merchants, waged war with

  vermin, dragged our feet through bloodied butcher shop sawdust.

  Some found jobs revolving around bland ritual—the putting in

  or taking out or hammering on or the pulling apart of things.

  We calmed the fussy clockwork of white babies, held them to

  the wrong breast. We scarred skillets for another family’s beans

  and meat. We dug with ain’t-a-thang-different-but-the-dirt, ’cause

  all that black gold is buried somewhere. We were told that

  all those vexing daily battles were ours, but real wars belonged to

  everyone. Once again, we lunged lockstep into questions that white

  American men had vowed to answer with their breath and bodies.

  It was called the first war in the world, but it wasn’t, it couldn’t have

  been, because we had forever been tending to wounds. When

  that war shuddered to its close, the very same America held out

  its skeletal arms and begged the brown soldiers back inside—

  inside where their names were still a street-spat venom. Inside,

  while their bodies still dripped from the thickest branches of trees,

  inside, where they were whispered to be not men, but fractions

  of men. They returned to their homes in South Carolina and Texas,

  in DC and Chicago, in Omaha and Arkansas, and the air had not

  changed there. So the summer turned red and exploded, blood

  splattering storefronts, a war inside a quavering peace. Snarling

  white men killed to feed their hatred of hue, killed 1000 of us

  to make America great again, to siphon all that dark trouble from