The Making of African America (6 page)

The cultures of movement and place penetrated one another, in part because change, no matter how revolutionary, was never complete. Old patterns always coexisted and overlapped with new ones. More importantly, the vectors of change did not always point in one direction. Movement did not give birth to place or vice versa any more than the past necessarily summoned the present or than the present automatically fulfills the past. Often languages, religions, cuisine, or music created amid the flux of movement was transported back to the migrants' place of origins as well as forward to their place of arrival.
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There have been many bridges between movement and place, linking the sense of what was lost to what was gained: rites of passage, aesthetics of form and color, styles of cooking and dressing, folktales and proverbs, even intonation of voice. None, however, was more manifest than music. Music, as Lawrence Levine has written, “appears to be one of the most conservative of cultural traits.” The portability of music and its seeming indestructibility maintained rhythmic patterns—and occasionally melodies and lyrics—even when migrants were stripped naked and denied their every material possession. In connecting shared experience with communal values, music, as Amiri Baraka has observed, has served as one barometer of the African American experience. The transformation of African American music mirrored that of black peoples, as the great passages set them in motion and the new arrivals rooted them in place. Nowhere is the contrapuntal narrative more evident.
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But music was not simply a window into African American life; it was a means by which black people understood their circumstances and articulated their deepest beliefs and most powerful yearnings. It provided a way to speak the unspeakable, both to themselves and those who dared to listen. Explaining the return of black Northerners to the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest parts of the South, contemporary social scientists emphasize the magnetic draw of the “powerful and stark form of blues ... some of the finest remnants of African American sacred music.”
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Music also transmuted shared experience into communal solidarity. This was particularly true of the call-and-response that was a unifying element in eighteenth-century shouts, nineteenth-century spirituals, and twentieth-century jazz, as well as other musical genres. Echoing the theme sounded by the leaders, others then elaborated on it—assenting or dissenting to the message and then expanding and modifying it in various ways—thus taking ownership of the message. The voices of captive Africans were still echoed two centuries later in the churches of the Mississippi Delta. “The preacher,” remembered Bluesman B. B. King, “says one thing and the congregation says it back, back forth, back forth, until we're rocking together in a rhythm that won't stop. His voice is low and rough and his guitar high and sweet; they seem to sing to each other, conversing in some heavenly language.”
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While the call-and-response pattern remains an omnipresent hall-mark of African American music, there are some others such as particular melodies, cadences, and strategic repetitions. Embellishments that emerged from field hollers, spirituals, the blues, jazz, and rap created grooves which then swung to join musician and audience as one. Each was driven forward by a never-ending process of improvisation that reflected—and marked—the remaking of African American life.

Music was present from the beginning, as slave-ship captains reported the collective voices emanating from below deck. The repetitive choruses, the interplay between leader and congregants, and the improvisational character provided the first evidence of one of the essential elements of what would be the African American repertoire. These features and others—polyrhythmic, tonal, and timbral flexibility, to name a few—became prominent in African American music and remain so in the present day. But if some central forms have remained the same, black musicians constantly reworked the melodic and harmonic ideas with different tempos and rhythmic impulses that reflected both movement and place.
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Thomas Jefferson, like many observers since, recognized the special place of music in the lives of black people, even if he—again, like so many after—attributed it to some congenital trait. The continuities of African American music and the lack of accurate description has made it easy to essentialize the sounds that observers like Jefferson attributed to the music of black people. Put another way, those continuities have made it difficult, as Shane White and Graham White noted, “to restore the ‘pastness' of past sounds.” The history of African American music is often frozen in place, celebrated as a marker of identity for a people whose identity was constantly disparaged. In the process, however, such celebrations often ignore cross-cultural construction first among Africans and then among African Americans, Native Americans, and Europeans in the creation of an ever-changing black musical tradition. Examining how movement and place transformed the evolution of shouts and hollers into spirituals, spirituals into gospel, and country blues into rhythm and blues both historicizes African American music and maintains its ubiquity in the black American experience without presuming these genres had distinctive lineages.
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African American music, with its extraordinary variety and multiplicity of forms, rarely follows the “normal” course of any chronology of black life, a chronology whose specific markers remain mired in conjecture and endless debate.
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Black musicians, enslaved and free, functioning as “griots”—African storytellers—told many tales. The power of invention and reinvention of the black musical tradition overwhelms any attempt to link particular genres to particular moments. Subordination, moreover, discouraged black musicians from speaking directly, so their music was often coded, filled with ironic references, multiple meanings, and veiled imagery. Nonetheless, music speaks profoundly to the transformative dynamic that has constantly remade the experience of black peoples. No history of either movement or place in African and African American life can be fully understood without careful attention to the sounds that accompanied it. Nothing better revealed the larger transformations of African American life—be they cultural, economic, or political—than music.

The interplay of movement and place is not unique to black Americans. Americans of all sorts also experienced its whiplash effects, for the history of the United States rests upon movement—first across the oceans and then across the continent—and then the embrace of place. In the hands of historians like Frederick Jackson Turner, the migratory experience became the definning characteristic of American life. His argument was so powerful that even his most determined critics could only emphasize movement, though generally of a different sort. Oscar Handlin, reflecting upon his own work as a historian of American immigration, famously declared, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
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Handlin's appreciation of migration as the master narrative of American history strangely was never extended to African Americans. For some, to concede as much was to incorporate them into American history as equal to others. Differences in the nature and timing of the arrival of Africans and Europeans (forced and free) served as a means of excluding people of African descent from the ideology that celebrated the United States as a global sanctuary from oppression and as fostering material improvement for all. Writing in 1920, historian Carl Russell Fish, a pioneer student of American immigration, denied black people a place in the history of the United States for just this reason. Their “enforced migration” precluded the possibilities of self-improvement that were at the heart of the American ethos. Lerone Bennett, writing some forty years later, agreed—although for different reasons. If the new American republic's foundational ideology saw the nation, in the words of its first president, as a refuge for “the oppressed and persecuted of all nations,” what place could there be for enslaved peoples of African descent?
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For others, the incorporation of African Americans into the master narrative denied the exceptional nature of the black experience: the long, violent nightmare of enslavement, segregation, disfranchisement, and poverty. “African Americans,” flatly declared one economist, “are the descendants of slaves, not immigrants.” “Unlike the Irish, Poles, Jews or Italians,” insisted a careful student of Chicago's ghetto, “Negroes banded together not to enjoy a common linguistic, cultural and religious tradition, but because a systematic pattern of discrimination left them no alternative.” Others have dismissed the possibility on principled ground, observing that the employment of the very word “immigrant” for enslaved Africans “strips the language of its symbolic meaning.”
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The debate concerning the special character of the African American versus the European American experiences has turned nasty at times. The comparison of migrations often became the occasion for invidious matches as to who suffered the greatest hardships, the most wrenching losses, or the most devastating separations. The differences among the “uprooted” counted for more than their shared experience. Perverse competitions as to relative damage meted out by restrictive covenants, redlining, or the barrage of vile epithets—dago, gook, greaser, hunky, kike, and nigger—demonstrate that shared experience breeds contempt as well as camaraderie.

Without question, the organized, systematic removals wrought by the slave trade were categorically different from migrations based on the belly or on fear—no matter whether the fear was generated by political persecution or by environmental disaster. Forced migrants did not make the choice between improving their circumstances in their homeland or someplace else, although they too were subject to the vagaries of the business cycle. The crimp and the labor contractor—like the slave trader—were in the business of labor recruitment. But no matter how rapacious and exploitive they viewed themselves and were viewed by others as different than slave traders, no matter how similar their objectives, methods, or even motives. Similarly, unlike indentured servants, debtors, or redemptioners, who might have conceived a term of servitude as a bargain that exchanged labor for the promise of a better life in the future, those who arrived in slave ships could hardly conjure any advantage derived from their passage.

What can be said for the differences between European free migrants and those black men and women caught in the slave trade also applies to the various movements of black men and women, for here too the distinction between choice and coercion is manifest. The men and women forcibly transported across the Atlantic or across the North American continent differed from those who chose to leave the South for the North in the twentieth century or come to the United States in the twenty-first, no matter how desperate their situation. Africans ensnared in the slave trade were not trying to improve their material circumstance, enrich their social lives, or escape from political oppression. As free men or women, even the most impoverished black sharecroppers fleeing the hellhounds of landlord debt and Klan violence had some choice of destinations and traveling companions. They could imagine a better life in a better place.
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Black men and women who evacuated the plantation South for the urban North in the first half of the twentieth century hardly left by choice, although there were many reasons for them to do so. The decision of planters and furnishing merchants, often with the direct assistance of the state, to protect their own profit at the expense of the well-being of black laborers made it impossible for many to remain in the rural South. The men and women who were expelled from the plantations that they, their parents, and perhaps their grandparents had worked on often migrated north with great reluctance. Some left only under threat of bodily harm. They fretted about leaving home, severing the network of kin in which they were enmeshed, and losing the familiar landscape that they knew and loved. They feared the unknown and were skeptical about the promise of freedom and opportunity among white Northerners. But they were also excited about the new possibilities. The joy that radiated from the railroad cars cannot be compared to the misery emanating from slave ships. While observers regularly compared the slave coffle to a funerary train, literally a march toward death, no one—not ever—described the trains and buses that carried black people northward in such a manner. The decisions that shaped the migrations of black men and women who left the South were largely their own, beginning with how and who and where and sometimes when. Traveling on their own or with family, they carried numerous possessions. Whatever pain accompanied the loss of the familiar and whatever anxieties attended the fear of the new, escape from the oppression which had dogged them generated an optimism unimagined by those caught in the slave trade. If the forced migration of both the international and internal trades represented social death, the movement north bespoke life and the possibilities that accompanied smashing the shackles of confinement.

The possibility of return, however distant, also distinguished the free from the forced immigrant. The former lived in a dense network of connections, real or fictive. The latter was isolated and alone in a world permanently truncated.
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Perhaps more important, free migrations—far more than forced migrations—generated reverse flows. A large portion of those who ventured across the Atlantic and the Pacific sampled life in the New World and turned on their heels and went home.
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While a handful of enslaved peoples crossed the Atlantic or later the North American continent several times, most did not. Black Southerners who migrated northward, however, commonly returned home, sometimes for short visits, sometimes for an extended stay, and sometimes permanently.