Boogie Man (13 page)

They were his folk. According to the online thesaurus thoughtfully provided by Microsoft as part of my word-processing software, ‘folk’ is not only synonymous
with ‘clan’, ‘kith’ and ‘family’, but also with ‘house’, ‘kindred’, ‘lineage’ and ‘race’. The Concise Oxford
Dictionary goes a little further: its primary definition of ‘folk’ cites ‘a people’ and ‘a nation’.

Listen to the blues, and it will tell you its own story. It will tell you who it is, what it is, and how it came to be: who made it, and why. The details of the precise
circumstances of how this music came to exist are present in its every nuance, just as DNA, the basic source code of life itself, is present in each and every molecule of each and every organic
entity.

It is the story of millions of people – men, women and children – who are forcibly abducted from their native lands. As an integral part of this process, they are
separated not only from their families and friends, but from anybody else who speaks the particular language of their tribe and region. They are crammed like cargo into rotting, leaky ships headed
for a variety of destinations; chained in the dark for weeks fed on scraps, sluiced with unclean water, left to wallow in their own excrement. Invariably, over half of the captives imprisoned in
each vessel die of disease, malnutrition and maltreatment during each long journey to their new homes. Many of them are forced to lie chained to the decaying dead for days on end. Periodically the
sick, the dead and the dying are simply pitched overboard to take their chances with the sharks. Once docked in the particular one of these new ‘homes’ with which we are specifically
concerned here, they are not only sold into servitude, but subjected to a process designed to strip them systematically of everything they own and everything they are, leaving them with nothing
other than their capacity for physical labour and their ability to reproduce. Denied the use of their own languages, they are taught only enough of their captors’ language to enable them to
comprehend and obey simple commands. As with their languages, their own spiritual beliefs are withheld from them. They are taught only as much of their captors’ religion as is judged
necessary to convince them to accept their new status: somewhere just below the lowest rung of humanity.

Their new masters were often, in their own terms, highly religious and deeply spiritual men. As such, they would have encountered severely distressing ethical and moral dilemmas if they were
required to enslave those whom they considered to be their fellow humans and spiritual equals. On the other hand, in order to found the new society – indeed, the New World – which they
believed was theirs by divine right and manifest destiny, they desperately needed the labour which slavery would provide. So, in order to salve their consciences, they
justify
this ‘peculiar institution’ with a cunning and sophisticated variety of arguments. Since there are minor physiological differences between captors and slaves – the enslaved
peoples have darker skin, more crisply textured hair, thicker lips and broader noses – it is suggested that they are not actually human beings, but some sort of humanoid animal, or great ape,
entitled to no better treatment than any other beast of the field or jungle. Others regard this view as overly cynical. They prefer to believe that these unfortunate creatures are indeed humans;
albeit of some degenerate variety, so dreadfully backward and savage that enslavement – of their minds as well as their bodies – provides the best possible way to wean them from their
primitive ways, and lead them by the hand into the civilized world. To achieve this laudable end requires nothing less than the enforced induction of a kind of collective amnesia. They are Adam and
Eve reborn, the juices of the forbidden fruit still dripping from their chops. Its seductive flavour must be cleansed from their palates; its tainted knowledge erased from their minds. The masters
have a similar attitude to the native peoples of the land which they have colonized; the majority of these are exterminated, the remainder herded onto reservations often far from their home
territories, and their lands confiscated to serve the needs of those better qualified to inhabit and cultivate them.

Naturally, the slaves pay a price for the unsolicited gift of the civilizing process. They are denied their languages, and the right to language; denied their beliefs, and the right to those
beliefs; denied family, and the right to family; denied culture, and the right to culture; denied their history, and the right to that history; denied expression, and the right to expression;
denied mobility, and the right to mobility; denied pride in themselves or their traditions, and the right to that pride. To their bodies they do indeed retain limited rights, available to them
whenever exercise of those rights does not conflict with the needs of their masters. They are encouraged to reproduce, but not
to form permanent attachments to mates or
children, since one or more family members might, at any time, be sold or traded away. They are taught that their physical differences are proof that they are intrinsically evil, as is their belief
that the power that drives the universe is manifested among many different gods and spirits. Their own ancestral deities, they are repeatedly told, are in fact demons in the service of the Great
Adversary and fit only to be destroyed by the One True God: that of the masters. Furthermore, they learn that this single (albeit tripartite) Supreme Being, despite His love for them, is punishing
them for their unbelief in Him, and that He will continue to do so until they have earned His approval by passively accepting and enduring their fate. They are taught that their masters are good
and that they are evil; that their masters are intelligent and that they are stupid; that their masters are beautiful and that they are ugly. Most crucially, they learn that their masters have won,
and that they have lost.

The slaves survive as captive peoples always survive under circumstances where escape is virtually impossible, and where the only possible consequence of insurrection would inevitably be to
provoke the extinction which only compliance, or the illusion of compliance, can keep at bay. Their first act of survival is the creation of a space within which they can share some small degree of
intellectual and emotional privacy. Within this space, they develop methods of using any and every resource at their command to make some sense of their condition; and of preserving their humanity
against what eventually turns out to be centuries of captivity or near-captivity. In other words, they set out – each separate grouping in their own way, in isolation or near-isolation from
their peers both near and far, working with whatever they have – to transform a group of victims snatched at random from a variety of peoples, each with its own language and customs, into a
People; one People with a common means of expression, a common awareness of their condition, and a set of common goals.

The first tool which comes to hand is the masters’ language. This is rapidly reinvented and modified into something entirely new, spoken and understood by the People
but rendered impenetrable to the masters. From the captors’ tongue evolves a new one, deceptively similar to the old, but one in which the meanings of each word, each phrase, each sentence
are radically affected by microtonal shifts of pitch and infinitely subtle shades of intonation. The new language is restricted in vocabulary, by comparison with its predecessor, but it is
infinitely richer in nuance. First and foremost, it is a secret, private language that has emerged: words from The People’s various native languages – handed down, despite their
formally proscribed nature, from generation to generation – are incorporated into the new
lingua franca
. Their work songs and ‘field hollers’ become means of conversing
freely even in the presence of an overseer; the songs of the masters are subversively transformed to serve as the basis for new songs lampooning the masters, commenting on recent events, bemoaning
their fate, and praising the new heroes: the rebels and runaways who defy the masters. Those whom the masters call ‘bad’ are the most thoroughly respected and the most fulsomely
praised; in the new language, ‘bad’ becomes the highest accolade there is. Every member of the People grows up effectively bilingual, speaking one language in the inner world, another
in the outer: the single language which they were forced to share, both with each other and with the master race, becomes two. With each language comes a face: the face they show to their masters,
and the face they wear among themselves. The masters’ musical instruments, especially, are approached in new ways; they begin to make sounds never intended by their manufacturers, sounds
reminiscent of the by-now near-mythical homeland whence the slaves had been wrenched all those years before. The part of the process incorporating elements of music and dance is an integral one,
since the People came from cultures where music and dance were an integral aspect of everyday community life, and literally everybody sang,
danced and played some sort of
instrument. (Their musical traditions involved plucked stringed instruments, wind instruments and percussion; the latter pair also serving as means of communication. The People were therefore
forbidden access to the drum and the fife in case they were used to send wordless, but articulately phrased and pitched, messages which contained or transmitted any whiff of sedition.) To the more
devout amongst the masters, to whom all dance was anathema and for whom music was only acceptable if it was religious in nature, this was in itself evidence of innate primitivism, and all the more
reason to replace their indigenous music with the hymns and ballads which the masters, and their ancestors before them, had brought from their own homelands.

The second tool is the masters’ religion, which was supposed to justify their oppression. One particular text of this religion yields up a central metaphor which becomes the linchpin of a
powerful liberation theology: the tale of a captive People held in slavery in a foreign land until, eventually, they win their freedom and triumphantly return home. Almost as crucial as its content
is the manner in which this religion is adapted to the spiritual needs of the captives: where the masters’ worship is staid and complacent, in the hands of the captives the same worship
becomes visceral, becomes transcendental, becomes a rite of transformation, of possession, of joyous surrender to the spirit of the divine.

Time passes: the slave trade is finally banned, by which time the number of slaves has vastly increased. Because new arrivals are no longer forthcoming, the masters feel obliged to treat their
existing slaves marginally better; since there is no longer a theoretically infinite supply of them, they now represent an asset which must be conserved rather than wasted. For the first time, the
skills and knowledge of a slave are perceived as assets comparable in value to his or her strength and fertility. As a consequence, the masters find newer uses for their slaves. Some receive a
broader education than their peers and become
household servants, or even skilled personal assistants. Some of the enslaved women become sexual playthings for the male masters;
their offspring never acknowledged as members of the owning families, but nevertheless highly prized as more valuable slaves. A convention arises that the visible evidence of even one slave
ancestor among eight could outweigh any amount of the masters’ genetic inheritance in identifying someone as a slave. The proudest of the People take this to mean that their bloodline is
measurably and demonstrably more potent than that of their masters; the most thoroughly intimidated take it as a sign that the shame of their origins is utterly ineradicable.

Towards the end of their second century of captivity, there is a war among the masters. Though the freeing of the slaves is not the specific objective of the side who eventually prove
victorious, it is nevertheless part of their agenda, if only as a means of weakening the losers’ economic base. As such, it is successful. Unfortunately, what the People actually receive is a
nominal liberation only; a legalistic simulacrum of freedom which reproduces slavery in all but name. It keeps the bulk of the People in economic bondage to the former owners, hems in the
better-educated and more ambitious by blocking their progress with a comprehensive net of laws and codes, and denies them the legal and civil rights granted to any citizen who looks as though his
or her genetic inheritance from the stock of the masters is untainted by any visible ancestors from amongst the People. The People’s exclusion from the public life of the nation continues to
be justified on the grounds that they are intrinsically inferior beings who are nonetheless extremely dangerous. Those who had been forced to breed as if they were stud cattle are, as a
consequence, considered overly sexual; those who have faithfully and lovingly nursed their masters’ children are deemed profligate and cruel; those who had been routinely subjected to
corporal punishment nigh unto the point of death for the slightest infraction of an unfulfillable code are deemed uncontrollably violent. And what remains unarguably true is that their skin is
still a different colour. For the fruits of their liberation, they have genuine freedom of movement and association in very few places in deed. They are not entitled to vote,
and any attempt to apply for the right to do so is, informally but invariably, cause for spontaneous corporal punishment. Their word can be freely contradicted in a court of law by any member of
the master race. They may be physically attacked with impunity. They are subject to the full penalties of the law, whether or not they have committed an actual of fence, but not entitled to its
protection from a member of the master race.