The Making of African America (21 page)

The deterioration of the political rights of black people made escape from economic subordination ever more difficult. In the heady years of Radical Reconstruction, black farmers and laborers might challenge their landlord's year-end calculations, hoping that an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau or a locally elected sheriff or judge—who might well be a former slave—would lend a sympathetic ear. If the case went to court, they might find black jurors equally supportive. But the collapse of Reconstruction, the dissolution of the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Supreme Court's nullification of the Civil Rights Act left black workers almost defenseless before their enemies. Landlords and planters, seizing their advantage, enacted a host of legal subterfuges to disfranchise black men. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses—backed by the omnipresent threat of violence—forced black people out of the South's polity. Sympathetic Freedmen's Bureau agents, sheriffs, and judges could no longer be found, and the testimony of black plaintiffs in court—if allowed—carried little weight before juries from which black men had been excluded. Tenants or sharecroppers who dared to challenge the planter's or merchant's bookkeeping—even the grossest frauds—found themselves with no authority to which they might appeal with a reasonable hope of success. Since many of the questionable calculations were based upon oral agreements or agreements written in a form inaccessible to barely literate or illiterate black tenants and sharecroppers, disagreements came down to who said what. In such circumstances, challenging the word of a white landlord could be nothing short of a death sentence.

Paralleling and complementing the loss of political rights was the imposition of legislation designed to immobilize black workers, geographically as well as occupationally. Many of these new laws echoed the Black Codes enacted during Johnsonian Reconstruction. Vagrancy laws—which, when not literally racially specific, were enforced in racially specific ways—required black workers to be employed by a certain date, usually in early January, when they had to contract for the year. Those who failed to do so could be arrested, jailed, and—if unable to pay their fines—hired out. From there they could be rented back to the same planter—or someone just like him—whom they had tried to escape. Convict labor accounted for an increasingly large portion of the Southern labor force and loomed equally large in the experience of African American workers. At the end of the nineteenth century, according to one estimate, convict leasing ensnared more than one-third of black agricultural workers in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi at one time or another.
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As the imposition of the legal apparatus of white supremacy nailed African Americans to the base of the social order, constraints on their mobility grew. Rather than loosen the ties of black people to the land, the postwar settlement laced them tighter. Between 1880 and 1910, the number of black sharecroppers increased from 429,000 to 673,000. By the end of the nineteenth century, some 75 percent of black Southerners worked in such relations. For some, the chains of debt came to resemble the chains of slavery, as landowners and merchants assumed a sense of proprietorship over their workers—who they sometimes deemed “their people”—which was much akin to masters' sense of proprietorship over their slaves. In the early twentieth century, when black people would at last begin moving north, would-be migrants discovered their path blocked by their landlords, often backed by the force of law. If my tenant “goes away,” declared one landlord, “I just go and get him.”
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Even those who escaped the cycle of debt, ironically, also found themselves tied to the land. Hard work, shrewd bargaining, and perhaps a measure of luck permitted some black agriculturalists to remain free agents. These ambitious men negotiated year after year for some new and better tenure arrangement—more productive land, a larger share of the crop, or a lower interest rate—which would enable them to move from the ranks of sharecroppers to that of share tenants or perhaps even renters, with hopes of eventually becoming landowners. But ascending the agricultural ladder also constrained their physical mobility. The key to negotiating a better tenure arrangement rested upon having a reputation as a hard worker who asked few questions, made few demands, and at year's end produced a bumper crop. According to one observer of Southern agricultural relations, “Being acceptable here is no empty phrase. It means that he and his family are industrious and his credit is good. It means that he is considered safe by local white people—he knows ‘his place' and stays in it.”
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Even the most obsequious black farmers rarely gained the much-sought prize, but those who secured it did so within the tight confines of neighborhoods where reputations—formed in direct face-to-face relations over decades and sometimes over generations—had been established. Of all commodities, reputations were the least portable. If tenancy and sharecropping kept black farmers on the move looking for better terms, it also assured that they would not move far. Most did not leave their county of residence, and many remained in the same locale. For most black people, the vectors of movement were neither long nor linear but lateral: short movements as black sharecroppers searched out a better deal. Rather the constant motion was a kind of march in place, a churning that changed everything and nothing.
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Landed black agriculturalists, whose numbers increased in the late nineteenth century, escaped the snare of sharecropping and tenancy—certainly more so than day laborers. The growth in the number of black landowners added to the stability to black life. In Alabama in 1870, less than one black farmer in one hundred owned the land he worked. The number of propertied black agriculturalists increased steadily in the years that followed, so that almost one in seven owned land. Similar developments could be found throughout the plantation South, so that almost one-fifth of black farmers owned land by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Often this land—edging on swamps and the sandy hills—was of such poor quality that it could not provide the independent livelihood black Southerners desired. It did, however, provide a home and a good deal more than symbolic security. Land purchased at the enormous cost of the labor of entire families had special meaning. Black landowners were reluctant to leave the land that it took a generation or more to accumulate.
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Many black Southerners found—with no little irony—that their ties to the land had rooted them in the land. Ultimately, their strongest connections to place were not chains of debt or even threats of physical violence but bonds of familiarity and, for many, affection. The growing constraints on black life at century's end persuaded them not to flee but to hunker down. As whites limited the economic opportunities of black people, disfranchised black men, and denied black men and women access to a formal education, black people turned more and more to their own world. Exclusion and segregation quickened the development of a universe of separate churches, schools, associations, and sometimes whole towns. There seemed little choice, as the majority of white people—Northern as well as Southern—embraced white supremacy, with white jurists announcing the doctrine of separate but equal and white intellectuals elaborating theories of racial superiority. While black people bridled at the imputations of inferiority that accompanied exclusion from the larger public sphere and protested the constraints it placed upon them, they took pride in their distinctive institutions. Black churches, schools, fraternal orders, and benevolent and political associations provided a buffer from the dismal poverty and shelter from the increasingly vicious racial depredations and savage racial violence. Black towns demonstrated that black people could govern themselves, a point affirmed by black churches, schools, and associations as well. The advantages of avoiding commerce with white Southerners and their gratuitous insults encouraged black Southerners to keep to themselves. Increasingly, black life turned inward and black men and women established a place where they could act with authority, intelligence, and independence, where the presumption of black incompetence had no weight, where their successes could be rewarded, and—perhaps most importantly—where the authority of black people was recognized.

The strategy bore both success and yet greater trials. As the number of black landowners increased, so also did other measures of success. One such measure was the expansion of black literacy, which grew from under 20 percent to over 60 percent during the last half of the nineteenth century. Yet success aroused fear and spurred the anger of white Southerners. Violence against black people grew, as measured by the increase in the grisly crime of lynching. Often white Southerners aimed their anger precisely at those who had succeeded in contradicting the stereotypes of African American incompetence. Such hideous violence pushed black men and women increasingly into their own world.
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No part of this separate universe was more important than the church. Usually a small, whitewashed building of modest dimensions located at some well-traveled crossroads and often presided over by an itinerant whose responsibilities extended to several congregations, the church remained—as it had been in slave times—the center of rural black life. Its minister's message rarely veered from a close reading of the gospel and, in his official pronouncements, almost always steered away from anything that could be deemed offensive to the white planters and merchants whose shadows loomed over the lives of his congregants. The weekly sermons presented a stern but loving God who would balance the scales of justice and offered hope not only for the next world but also for the here and now: as He had promised, faith had delivered His people from slavery and it would deliver them from the current injustices. Meanwhile, the weekly gatherings became the occasion for the believers—and not a few skeptics—to nourish their stomachs as well as their souls, bind themselves together as a community, recognize their frailties, gather their courage, and affirm their worth. The torrent of emotions renewed the faith of people who had little else but faith, reassuring them that they were God's children and that He had not forsaken them.
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As reflected in their most important institution, the dangers that everywhere surrounded black Southerners nurtured a deeply conservative bent in postemancipation black life. With the possibilities of falling outweighing those of rising, black men and women became increasingly defensive as they protected what little they had. To counter the endless intrusion of white people in their lives, they painstakingly preserved those aspects of their past that they had created at great cost during slavery and its immediate aftermath. Family, church, and community rooted them in the South. Within this realm, nothing revealed a greater sense of attachment to place than the music that emerged in the broad swath of the postwar plantation South that stretched from upcountry Georgia to Texas.

While the roots of gospel, ragtime, and jazz could be found in this musical renaissance, none more fully captured the black experience in the postbellum countryside than the blues. In its plaintive moans, wails, and cries along with its assertions of suffering and hardship, the blues evoked the pain of the continued constraints on black life. Although it often focused on the travail of individual men and women, in its larger dimensions it was a musical response to white supremacy. Like black churches, schools, and towns, the blues also represented an inward turn—a separate world in which whites could not enter. The blues employed traditional American instrumentation—the piano, guitar, and harmonica, along with washboards, spoons, and jugs—and it drew upon long-established African American rhythmic and tonal patterns. At times, it echoed the field shouts and spirituals. And like them, the blues exhibited extraordinary flexibility and range, calling for—indeed demanding—creativity. Although in time the three-line couplet followed by a one-line refrain—the AAB pattern—became the standard blues form, blues men and women prized improvisation and spontaneity, so that no two performances—even by the same singer—were alike.
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Blues singers would eventually gain national and even international reputations and would play for presidents and royalty in grand concert halls, but the blues had its origins in crossroad juke joints, front porches, back rooms, and prison cells where impoverished itinerants—generally men—sang a familiar story to other equally impoverished men and women. They sang of a people betrayed and beaten. Many of these betrayals were personal—cheating men and unfaithful women—but the weight of white domination was ever present. Crooked sheriffs jailed honest men and women, greedy planters cheated hardworking croppers, and rampaging mobs showed no mercy.
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“They arrest me for murder, and I ain't never harm a man,” sang blueman Furry Lewis.
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But whatever injustice stalked the South, blues men and women refused to concede their place. The South remained home, their home, as much a source of solace as a place of violence. So blues men sang of in “Clarksdale Moan.”

John Hurt struck a similar note in “Mississippi Road Trip” (1928).

Later, when black people evacuated the plantation, they made it clear the South itself would forever be theirs, as in Bill Broonzy's lines: