Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

Citation preview

Seems Like Murder Here

ADAM GUSSOW

Seems Like Murder Here SOUTHERN VIOLENCE AND THE BLUES TRADITION

the university of chicago press • chicago and london

Adam Gussow is an assistant professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. For twelve years he was the harmonica-playing half of Satan and Adam, a Harlem-based duo that toured internationally and recorded three albums on the Flying Fish label. Gussow’s first book, Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (1998), won the Keeping the Blues Alive award in literature from the Blues Foundation in Memphis. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2002 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2002 Printed in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 0-226-31097-3 (cloth) ISBN: 0-226-31098-1 (paper) CIP data to come  

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American

National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For my mother, Joan Dye Gussow

CONTENTS

preface ix introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

1

“I’m Tore Down” lynching and the birth of a blues tr adition

17

“Make My Getaway” southern violence and blues entrepreneurship in w. c. h andy’s father of the blues 66

Dis(Re)memberment Blues narr atives of abjection and redress

120

“Shoot Myself a Cop” m amie smith’s “cr azy blues” as social text

159

Guns, Knives, and Buckets of Blood the predicament of blues culture 195

“The Blade Already Crying in My Flesh” zora neale hurston’s blues narratives 233

epilogue 273 acknowledgments 281 notes 285 bibliogr aphy 313 index 327

PREFACE

This book began to take shape with the first paper I wrote as an English graduate student at Princeton in the fall of 1994, a report on Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (1920) for a Harlem Renaissance seminar. At that point I was still an active member of Satan and Adam, an interracial blues duo based in Harlem, which consisted of Sterling “Mister Satan” Magee on electric guitar, vocals, and percussion—a one-man-band setup—and me on amplified harmonica. I was excited to be back in school after ten years away but not at all sure how I was going to combine full-time graduate study with my then-flourishing career as a touring blues performer, a career I owed, in no small way, to the market for “race records” that Smith’s unexpected hit had helped establish decades earlier. Arnold Rampersad, who was directing the seminar and knew of my other life, encouraged me to write about blues—and about lynching, which had recently seized my imagination after I’d come across a description, in Giles Oakley’s blues history The Devil’s Music, of a horrendous event in Doddsville, Mississippi in 1904. “Be provocative,” Arnold urged me. “I think lynching needs to be talked about.” Nothing in my career as a blues musician had prepared me for the turn my intellectual life was about to take. Since violence of any sort had played a negligible role in the musicking I’d been engaged in, I’d tended to think of “the blues” as a discourse of romantic despair and euphoria, the putative theme of “Every Day I Have the Blues”: nobody loves me, nobody seems to care; worries and troubles, you know I’ve had my share. When I thought about the origins of the blues, I had only a generalized sense of the worries and troubles that had prevailed in turn-ofthe-century Mississippi, a catalogue of familiar oppressions without much specific gravity: sharecropping, poverty, boll weevils, racist whites, and the like. Mostly I thought of the blues as a living force: the thrilling, trance-inducing, body-engaging flux laid down by Mister Satan on the stretch of sidewalk we occupied on 125th Street next to the Studio Museum in Harlem. The blues were an arena in which an older black guy and a younger white guy could circle, grapple, struggle, reach all the way down, signify on each other’s playing and singing, talk back to a black audience that was fond of talking back to us. They were a place in which black and white could come together, vibrantly and joyously, and heal each other, melding into something new. The blues, as I’d known them, weren’t about violence or death, or so I thought. Mister Satan was fond of bragging that there’d never been a fight at one of our gigs; I’d never seen a gun or knife in my half-dozen years as a part-time Harlem street

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musician, and I’d certainly never seen such weapons in the various indoor venues we’d played across America and Europe, which included a windowless “social club” on the corner of 123rd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. The contemporary blues world, beery and loud and dominated by white coterie fans of black music, is a pretty friendly—some might say sanitized—place. Budweiser sponsors a number of events. The closest I’d come to death, as a blues musician, was the frequent jokes Mister Satan made about people he’d known who’d died—jokes that until that point had struck me as without much deeper resonance. One of his favorites was the line, “I had so many wives die on me, I was thinking of opening a funeral parlor.” I’d heard stories about his first wife, the one down in Mississippi he’d nursed to her death from cancer before he’d had a breakdown, drunk himself almost to death, and been reborn into his current identity. I knew nothing about the other wives. Much later I would read Kalamu ya Salaam’s What Is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self, and realize that Mister Satan had been giving me a lesson in blues humor. “[W]e laugh loud and heartily,” Salaam writes, “when every rational expectation suggests we should be crying in despair. [T]he combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the brutal facts of life is the basis for the humor of blues people.” Violence and near-death had touched me in only one other bluesrelated context at that point. The year before hooking up with Mister Satan, right after I’d put my graduate education on hold and pledged my life to blues harmonica (I was twenty-seven and flirting with a breakdown of my own), I’d run into a thirty-three-year-old black harp player who was to become my mentor and good friend. Nat Riddles, Bronxborn, was as college educated as I was—Long Island University and Pratt—and he, like me, had been bitten by the street-music bug. In the summer of 1985 I tailed him to the various sidewalk locations he was fond of working down in the Village with his little combo. He taught me everything he knew about Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Walter Horton; occasionally, at his insistence, I sat in. One evening I watched him ply a modest crowd in Astor Place with a Sonny Boy standard. The original song featured the lines, “I sent my baby a brand new twenty-dollar bill / If that don’t bring her back, I’m darn sure my shotgun will.” Nat had updated it to play on people’s anxieties about young black men at a time when crack cocaine and drive-by shootings were just beginning to draw media attention: “If that don’t bring her back,” he cried, “I’m darn sure my Uzi will.” He followed the line with an instrumental break: machine-gunned staccato chords, accompanied by a cocked forefinger veering around the circle. Rat-tat-tat, you’re dead, to his largely white audience. They cheered loudly, tipped heavily. In Blues, Ideology, and Afro-

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American Literature, Houston A. Baker refers to this as the black blues protagonist’s ability to “negotiate the economics of slavery” and purchase his own freedom. I would make this connection much later. When Nat was shot in the chest that fall, just around the corner from an East Village blues club named Dan Lynch where we’d both spent many late nights, I was shocked—just as shocked as Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie is when her beloved Tea Cake returns home from a jook all sliced up, crowing about how he’d cut his antagonist “every which way but loose.” Nat was my soul deepener, my spiritual liberator; like Janie, I didn’t want to think about his being mixed up with the kind of “trashy” people— drug dealers, in Nat’s case—who would hurt each other as a way of conveying strong feelings. After Nat fled town, I heard rumors that he’d been shot because he was slapping around his girlfriend, Irene, on the corner where the dealers were trying to do business. They’d been trying to protect her, people said. I dismissed the rumors, or tried to. Nat and I had never exchanged a harsh word; our relationship, like the one I would establish a year later with Mister Satan and Harlem, was a charmed thing, an interracial idyll. He was the most supportive teacher any player could have wanted. But there was this nagging violence problem. Sometimes he’d tell me stories, his eyes gleaming with pain but also with exultation, about the guys he’d been forced to “take down” with his tae kwan do moves when they flagrantly disrespected him. One victim was our fellow harmonica player and Dan Lynch regular, Bill Dicey; another was a cab driver. White guys. Black guys too, on occasion. I’d never heard him talk about hitting women, though. Which is why I refused to believe the rumor about Irene. I’ve written at length about Nat and Mister Satan elsewhere; my intention is not to retell that story here, but to ground this study in my own lived encounter with blues music, necessarily partial as that encounter has been. If I took one idea with me into graduate school, it was that the contemporary blues scene, flowering in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, is a force for racial understanding and reconciliation. There were paradoxes, exceptions, and retrograde dynamics, of course: the residue of blackface minstrelsy among white blues musicians was palpable, and something I had objected to in print. Corporate sponsorship and so-called commodified juke joints like the House of Blues chain made uneasy bedfellows with down-home music. Still, some measure of racial healing was being wrought. At best, long-standing evils—the myths, confusions, and paranoias engendered by the color line—were being conjured with, bathed in mutual respect, and raucously put to rout. I intended, when I entered graduate school, to deepen my understanding of the cross-racial creative bonds that I’d lived, and to write

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about them. What interrupted this plan was the seminar report on lynch mobs and “Crazy Blues.” Since Professor Rampersad had encouraged me to speak about lynching, I opened it by reading out loud the newspaper account of the Doddsville lynching of 1904 — one of the most gruesome acts of racial violence ever perpetrated in the Jim Crow South. I was trembling as I read, and stumbling blindly—not sure how many students in the room, if any, had knowledge of such spectacles; unsure about my own right, as an individual now situationally coded as a “white man,” to inflict such potentially traumatizing representations on others, including people of color; aware that my bodily reaction was a function of my desire to violate and extinguish my own innocence about America’s deadly racial antagonisms, and the innocence of all in the room. It was as though the ghosts of the Doddsville lynchers, white men who had chopped off the fingers of a black Mississippi couple before boring into their bodies with augers, had floated into the room and were hovering over me: poisoning the atmosphere, threatening to engulf us all. I had spoken of unspeakable things that would better have remained unspoken; I’d engaged in a second-order lynching merely by describing the horrible event to my classmates. Or so it felt to me at the time. Later it would become clearer to me that wrestling publicly with lynching narratives was conjuring with a kind of spiritual poison, and that such conjurations, however necessary, were a voyage into haunted land. It would also become clear that the blues music I’d been making with Mister Satan on the streets of Harlem, the interracial musical creativity and comradeship that we’d lived publicly, was the antidote. When I played a recording of “Crazy Blues” in class after my lynching recitative, in fact, the sense of relief, of applied spiritual salve, was palpable. As Mamie Smith belted out her complaint, my classmates began to breathe easier; the room felt looser, if not exactly loose. One of the animating claims of this study—that black southerners evolved blues song as a way of speaking back to, and maintaining psychic health in the face of, an ongoing threat of lynching—has its origins in this early seminar experience and in my life as a performing musician. This is, admittedly, a suspect way in which to ground an intellectual endeavor. American racial dealings are rife with fantasy and projection; it was certainly possible, as I brooded at the time, that I stood guilty of both. Perhaps I was just a naive white scholar scandalized by things that shouldn’t have surprised me, enlarging my own needless anxiety into a fantasy of racial beleaguerment that I then projected back in time onto a black population that hadn’t been nearly so distraught as I’d been about the brutish and nasty way white folk had treated them, and certainly hadn’t used blues music as a way of conjuring with what I was already fond of calling lynching’s “inflicted traumas.”

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I began to run into resistance almost immediately, as it happens, from blues aficionados. When I devoted one of my quarterly columns in Blues Access magazine to the subject of blues and lynching, readers accused me of flagrant projection. The blues were about lots of things, they protested—broken hearts, bad luck, going to Kansas City, hungering for love—but lynching wasn’t one of them. I hadn’t cited a single example of a blues musician actually complaining about lynching, not to mention singing a song that could be plausibly called such a complaint. Where was my evidence? This study is, among other things, a long-delayed answer to those early skeptics. Their skepticism, although motivated by an understandable desire not to have their interracial blues idyll disturbed by an irruption of undigestible racial bad news, was not unwarranted. My evidence was flimsy; I’d been graced with an insight but had yet to do the research. As I began to investigate, however, sifting the archive of recorded and transcribed blues for every conceivable reference to violence, what I unearthed wasn’t merely evidence of a long and previously invisible shadow cast by lynching on the blues lyric tradition, and equally compelling evidence for black retributive violence in the face of such white racist violence, but a far more overt and politically problematic theme: black folk threatening and enacting revenge against other black folk, “cutting and shooting” and taking unmistakable pleasure—as much pleasure as white lynch mobs—in that vengeance. When I thought back on my own experience as a blues performer, I was startled to realize that both Nat Riddles and Mister Satan were implicated in such intraracial violence. Although much of Nat’s fictive and real vengeance was directed at whites—the Uzi lyrics he’d sung at Astor place, the beatings he’d administered to Bill Dicey and others—his tales of Bruce Lee–style aggression sometimes featured black victims. Mister Satan, by contrast, was an impeccably peace-loving man in his personal dealings; I’d once seen him firmly push a drunken fellow musician to the sidewalk rather than hit him. I’d never seen him lift a finger against Miss Macie, his current wife. But the lyrics he sang! One of the first songs we’d ever recorded was the Ma Rainey classic, “See See Rider Blues”; there was a fierce glee in Mister Satan’s snarl as he sang “I’m gonna get a shotgun, long as I am tall / After I shoot my baby, I’m gonna run and saw the barrel off.” Strange as it seems, I’d never paid much attention to the words he sang during the eight years we’d worked together; my job, as I saw it, was simply to respond to the intense feelings he projected, answering the call of the vocal melody with equally feelingful harp fills. Now I was forced to take a second listen, shedding one more layer of lingering innocence about the violence at work in the music I loved, and my own participation in it.

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I, like Mister Satan, am a peace-loving man. This was not a pleasant book to write, although it was fascinating and compelling. It took me away—at many points, far away—from the open-hearted joy and optimism about America’s multiracial future that I have been blessed to experience as a blues performer and friend of countless blues performers: black, white, Asian, Native American. Writing it has given me a profound respect for scholars of slavery, genocide, and other fields of research where unrelieved bad news is what one dwells with for years on end. There is good news here, to be sure, but such rays of hope emerge only intermittently from a field of action that had been severely narrowed by the violences that upheld Jim Crow and pervaded southern lives, black and white, in the early decades of the twentieth century. The best news is to be found, really, in the brave new world blues has made in recent decades—a world in which B. B. King, broken-hearted by a lynching he witnessed during his Mississippi childhood, has gone on to become an internationally known ambassador for his world-conquering art. It is my hope that this book leads you, as it has led me, back to the music, which is where the healing is.

Introduction

All blues are a lusty lyrical realism charged with taut sensibility. (Was this hope that sprang always phoenix-like from the ashes of frustration something that the Negro absorbed from the oppressive yet optimistic American environment in which he lived and had his being?) —Richard Wright, introduction to Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning

One of the most representative stanzas in the blues lyric tradition flirts with suicide before veering toward life. A version of the stanza surfaces in the inaugural African American blues recording, Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (1920), but it is best known as a verse of “Trouble in Mind,” Richard M. Jones’s composition made famous by Bertha “Chippie” Hill in 1926 and quoted in variant form by Langston Hughes: Goin’ down to de railroad, Lay ma head on de track. I’m goin’ to de railroad, Lay ma head on de track— But if I see de train a-comin’ I’m gonna jerk it back! 1

“Trouble in Mind,” which William Barlow has called “the anthem of the classic blues genre,” 2 has roots in pre-blues black song: a spiritual entitled “I’m a-Trouble in De Mind,” published in Slave Songs of the United States (1867).3 The averted-suicide verse, however, does not appear in the spiritual. That verse is a blues innovation, something new in black song: at once tragic and comic, entertaining the idea of grisly death before renouncing it with jaunty vernacular decisiveness (the head is “jerk[ed] back” in the Hughes version, “snatch[ed] back” in Mamie Smith’s). The stanza is animated, as Hughes notes, by “the kind of humor that laughs to keep from crying.” If “Trouble in Mind” is representative because it foregrounds a familiar blues paradox, then it is significant for another reason that makes it especially relevant to the present study: the quoted stanza engages a submerged history of racial violence. It was common in post-Reconstruction Georgia, according to Donald L. Grant, for lynch mobs to “try to disguise 1

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INTRODUCTION

[their] work to make it appear that the [black] victim had died from other causes. One way was to place the body on a railroad track and let it be mangled by a train.” 4 In 1892, according to W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Isaac Flowers, a black man in Wayne County, Georgia . . . refused to retract his praise for a notorious black “desperado” whose flaunting of racial norms had provoked a mass lynching several years earlier. Flowers’s refusal to denounce the black outlaw so infuriated his white audience that they later murdered him and placed his body on the railroad tracks, where passing trains ran over and mangled it.5

“Trouble in Mind” is blues song’s subtle way of contesting the narrative of black abjection imposed by the white South. Explicitly renouncing suicide, the verse quoted above unmasks the “disguise” wrought by Georgia lynch mobs for the murderous fraud it was. It reclaims Isaac Flowers’s mangled body from the railroad tracks by reframing his fate so as to grant the blues singer a slim margin of agency: the question becomes not “Will the mob dismember me, with the train’s help, or allow my kin to bury me?” but “Will I dismember myself, with the train’s help, or choose to live?” Choosing life, as the singer of “Trouble in Mind” did simply by singing the song and enacting the symbolic resurrection, meant that one had avoided the “failure of nerve” it was the purpose of blues music to prevent, according to Albert Murray. “Much is forever being made,” writes Murray in 1976, of the deleterious effects of slavery on the generations of black Americans that followed. But for some curious reason, nothing at all is ever made of the possibility that the legacy left by the enslaved ancestors of bluesoriented contemporary U.S. Negroes includes a disposition to confront the most unpromising circumstances and make the most of what little there is to go on, regardless of the odds.

Choosing life when death threatens is for Murray “the most fundamental of all existential imperatives,” and the essence of the blues ethos: “reaffirmation and continuity in the face of adversity.” 6 The early 1890s were troubled times indeed for black folk in the South: three consecutive years of flooding along the Mississippi, a worldwide depression with devastating local effects, the blossoming of racial hysteria focused on the specter of the so-called black beast rapist, and, most notably for this study, an unprecedented increase in lynching, which had suddenly been reinvented by white folk as a spectator sport. Southern newspapers, according to E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay, “reported almost weekly incidents of mobs hanging, shooting, burning, or drowning hapless victims.” 7 The purpose of such disciplinary

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violence was, as the term suggests, to terrorize black southerners, particularly men, into submitting to an emergent system of racial segregation and remaining a captive and exploited source of agricultural labor. As the testimony of Mance Lipscomb, Willie Dixon, and numerous other blues musicians makes clear, lynching did achieve its intended purpose to a certain extent, frightening many black male southerners and silencing them in the presence of whites, even as it infuriated them and spurred them to express their grievances in various covert musical ways. “You couldn’t do nothing about these things,” insisted Dixon, a Mississippi native, speaking of lynching in later years. “The black man had to be a complete coward.” 8 Dixon’s harsh assertion, true as it may have been in certain respects, was belied not only by his successful flight north to Chicago—a nervy gambit that saw him arrested as a preteen on his first attempt and consigned to a prison farm—but by a thread of violent black resistance that runs intermittently but determinedly through the history of the post-Reconstruction South. In 1893, as white-on-black lynchings reached their all-time peak, a rural Alabama turpentine worker and juke-joint habitué named Morris Slater shot a white policeman who demanded his pistol, then escaped on a freight train and avoided capture for several years. Slater, whose exploits were soon memorialized in a ballad called “Railroad Bill,” was a prime example of what might be called “badman” resistance, a form of black retributive violence that was another significant phenomenon of the 1890s and one I explore in chapter 4. He was the sort of notorious black desperado that Isaac Flowers and many other black southerners admired, and that white southerners tried vigorously and unsuccessfully to extinguish. This study begins in the South of the 1890s because blues music, too, began to emerge as a folk form during that decade, coalescing out of a welter of extant black musics—field hollers, work songs, ragtime ditties, folk ballads, and spirituals—but extending them all in the direction of pained, restless, sometimes euphoric subjectivity. The black male blues singer, vocalizing the shared experience of his cohort, is the subject of his own song: his fears, his hopes, his sexual hungers and romantic losses, his financial setbacks, his aching body, the town he hungers to escape from, the town he dreams of fleeing to. Blueswomen, considerably more mobile than the women they sang to and for but equally inclined to live out their pressured freedom as a search for fulfilling sexual love, sang of empty beds, vanished lovers, haunted houses, “bone orchards,” and fantasies of revenge against a cold and heartless world. One of my purposes is to theorize this simultaneous emergence of men’s and women’s blues, reading it as a social response to the grievous spiritual pressures exerted on working-class black southerners by the sudden eruption of

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lynching-as-spectacle. A central claim of this study is that such violence helped to form what I call a “blues subject,” who then found ways, more or less covert, of singing back to that ever-hovering threat. Although blues scholars have long claimed that blues singers remained selfprotectively mute on the issue of white mob violence, lynching makes its presence felt in various ways throughout the blues tradition: not just as veiled references in blues lyrics and as jokes recounted by blues musicians, but also, with remarkable directness, in a series of blues autobiographies published over the past fifteen years. Lynching has recently emerged, in fact, as a significant theme within the larger field of blues literature. Writers such as Clarence Major, Arthur Flowers, Sterling Plumpp, Alice Walker, and August Wilson have struggled to come to terms with the lingering traumas engendered by a distinctive and deadly white folkway, and with the recuperative role played by blues music, a cultural form that enabled black people to salve their wounded spirits and assert their embattled individuality. “Like the spirituals,” writes James Cone, “the blues affirm the somebodiness of black people, and they preserve the worth of black humanity through ritual and drama.” 9 In largest outlines, this study seeks to understand the ways in which black blues people, beginning in the 1890s, affirmed their “somebodiness” through a series of negotiations with three intersecting violences that helped shape southern (and later, northern urban) blues culture. I have already invoked the terms “disciplinary violence” and “retributive violence” as a way of marking, respectively, the white-on-black vigilantism and police repression designed to terrorize, silence, and restrict the mobility of southern black folk, and the scattered but continuing black-on-white reprisals through which southern black folk forcefully resisted that terror. “In the most morally simplified cases,” notes Jerry H. Bryant in Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the Afro-American Novel, “white violence against blacks produces a victim, black violence against whites a hero.” 10 Disciplinary violence and retributive violence, I argue, inflect blues song and blues literature in crucially important ways, subtending both the overt victimhood of the blues singer (“Seems like everybody . . . in this world is down on me”) and his or her fantasies of heroic retribution (“Give me gunpowder, give me dynamite / Yes I’d wreck the city, wanna blow it up tonight”). The juke joints in which blues culture thrived, and the blues textual tradition as a whole, are traversed far more overtly, however, by a third and more problematic sort of violence: what I call “intimate violence,” the gun-and-blade-borne damage black folk inflict on each other. Such violence, I argue, cannot simply be dismissed as a deadly distraction from the recuperative rituals of the jook, although blues musicians did indeed view it as an unpleasant workplace hazard. Rather, intimate violence—

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both real “cutting and shooting” and symbolic mayhem threatened and celebrated in song and story—was an essential, if sometimes destructive, way in which black southern blues people articulated their somebodiness, insisted on their indelible individuality. The intimate violence of blues culture could be rage-filled, a desperate striking out at a black victim when what one really wanted to strike back at was a white world that had defined one as nameless and worthless. But intimate violence could also be sexy, enlivening, a crucial prop in the struggle to make one’s mark within a black social milieu. Blues orature and blues literature converge on this point. “Who is this?” exclaims Canewell, a blues harmonica player in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars (1996), as he arrives to escort his friends Louise and Esther to a local Pittsburgh jook: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me see if I got my knife. I go down to the Blue Goose with you all and I know I’m gonna have to cut three or four people. Good as you all look. Louise, you look like Queen Esther, and Vera look like the Queen of Sheba.” 11 The blues do indeed “preserve the worth of black humanity through ritual and drama,” as Cone claims, but intimate violence— Canewell’s playful, flirtatious boast here—is sometimes the pleasure-bearing currency through which that drama is enacted. If sexuality, along with travel, as Angela Davis has argued, “was one of the most tangible domains in which [black] emancipation was acted upon and through which its meanings were expressed,” and if blues song arises in part as a way of articulating through the sexual an emergent sense of black selfhood, then the intimate violence of blues culture was a third crucial way in which post-Emancipation black selfhood was elaborated.12 The final verse of Ma Rainey’s “See See Rider Blues” (1925) limns the blues subject by fusing sexual jealousy and a fantasy of intimate violence with a hunger to leave town on the next fast train: I’m gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I am tall, Lord, Lord, Lord Gonna kill my man and catch the Cannonball If he don’t have me, he won’t have no gal at all.13

We may find it hard to imagine just how novel this sort of song was in its day. Evoking the solitary, lovelorn, and vengeful black subject, it stands in striking contrast to both black spirituals—with their collective subject pursuing a freedom coded as otherworldly—and black work songs, satiric ditties, and other pre-blues seculars. “Historically and theologically,” Cone notes, “the blues express conditions associated with the ‘burden of freedom.’” 14 Rainey’s song, although it ministered to a community’s needs, understood those needs as each individual’s private struggle with freedom’s burden. The freedom to inflict bodily harm on other blacks and the possibility of being maimed or murdered in return

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was part of that burden—all the more so, as Michael Bellesiles has argued, as cheap handguns became widely available after the Civil War and black freedpersons began to participate in an emergent American gun culture, not to mention the South’s enduring culture of honor and vengeance. The deeper issue here, one which links the intimate violence of blues culture with the disciplinary violences of Jim Crow, is the way in which the transformation of slave into freedperson had radically altered the cultural meaning—more specifically, the monetary worth— of black bodies. “The lynching industry,” observed Newman White, “was revolutionized by the Emancipation Proclamation, which wiped out the cash value of a Negro.” 15 Cruel as slavery was, the status of the slave as the slaveowner’s capital placed real limits on the vengefulness that both poor whites and fellow slaves might exercise toward that slave without fear of retribution. Emancipation obliterated those limits and severely frayed the residual paternalist sympathies of the former slaveowners. “However these [white] men may have regarded the negro slave,” wrote Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune after a visit to Mississippi in 1866, “they hated the negro freeman. However kind they may have been to negro property, they were virulently vindictive against a property that had escaped from their control.” 16 The black jook, which emerged during the post-Reconstruction period as a relatively autonomous cultural location within which black individuality could assert itself, was populated by habitués who were struggling daily, outside the jook’s doors, against the control that sharecropping economies and the threat of lynching had reasserted over them. Freedom, as it existed within the jook, was the freedom to choose one’s sexual partners as described by Davis, but it was also, I argue, a wide-ranging expressive freedom: the freedom to sing, dance, curse, boast, flirt, drink, cultivate large grievances, and—not least—fight with and kill other black folk without undue fear of the white law, which considered black life cheap and black labor power easily replaceable. “If you killed a black,” insisted Honeyboy Edwards, a Mississippi Delta bluesman, speaking of the Saturday night brawls that regularly emptied the jooks, “generally wouldn’t nothing much happen to you.” 17 White lynchers could make exactly the same claim. The black blues subjects discussed in this study are united by two things: their lived sense of being enmeshed in the disciplinary, retributive, and intimate violences I’ve just outlined, violences particularly characteristic of the Jim Crow South; and their participation in a blues culture that, although marked by these violences, offered blues subjects a badly needed expressive outlet, a way of conjuring with and redressing the spiritual wounds that such violence had engendered in them. One might argue, of course, for a black jazz subject constituted along similar

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lines. Certainly the black and creole New Orleanians who invented jazz, and the black southern migrants who later danced—and fought violently—to the sounds of jazz in Harlem cabarets, cannot wholly be distinguished from the blues people who are this study’s focus. The sound of “classic” blues, after all, was the sound of a black female blues singer such as Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith backed up by a small band of black male jazzmen. Although the sociology of country bluesmen such as Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Blake places them slightly lower on the class spectrum than the dance-band-trained, sightreading jazzmen described by W. C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton, early blues culture and early jazz culture inhabit a fraternal continuum rather than mutually exclusive realms. New Orleans jazzmen were as subject to the threat of lynching as Mississippi or Texas bluesmen, although the threat in the jazzmen’s case may have been more theoretical than real; lynchings tended to occur in the more rural and isolated communities associated with cotton sharecropping and turpentine production—terrain in which blues music thrived, not jazz. Police repression, like lynching, is a form of disciplinary violence, and here the city and the North were as fertile terrain as the country and the South for blues and jazz subjects alike. We might remember the indignant claim of Langston Hughes’s Jesse B. Simple that bop, a Harlem-bred jazz innovation, comes [f ]rom the police beating Negroes’ heads. . . . Every time a cop hits a Negro with his billy club, that old club says, “BOP! BOP! . . . BE-BOP! . . . MOP! . . . BOP!” That Negro hollers, “Ooool-ya-kooo! Ou-o-o!” Old Cop just keeps on, “MOP! MOP! . . . BE-BOP! . . . MOP!” That’s where Be-Bop came from, beaten right out of some Negro’s head into them horns and saxophones and piano keys that plays it.18

Intimate violence, too, is common to both blues culture and jazz culture, leading to definitional grey areas when one attempts to distinguish blues subjects from jazz subjects. Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1993), for example, opens with a paradigmatic display of blues-cutting and blues-shooting: Joe Trace, a southern migrant in Harlem running from “want and violence,” has fallen for eighteen-year-old Dorcas “with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy [after she left him for another man that] he shot her just to keep the feeling going.” 19 Joe’s jealous wife Violet, in turn, goes to the murdered girl’s funeral and “cut[s] her dead face.” 20 These actions and the rest of the novel are accompanied by a soundtrack that bespeaks the blueswomen-and-jazzmen sociology of “classic” blues and is referred to simply as “the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shameless or apart and wild.” 21 Are Joe and Violet

8

INTRODUCTION

blues subjects or jazz subjects? They, like the eponymous hero of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” are situated at the bloody crossroads where the aching cry of blues subjectivity meets the improvised call-andresponse of the jazz collective. When I speak in this study about “blues texts,” I do so as a way of casting my analytic nets as widely as possible—bringing blues autobiographies into conversation with blues novels, for example, and blues literature into conversation with lyrics transcribed from recorded performances. I do this even at the risk of being challenged, on analytic grounds, for having combined apples with oranges. Certainly there are important reasons to distinguish an autobiography such as David Honeyboy Edwards’s The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (1997) from Walter Mosley’s RL’s Dream (1995), both of which feature Mississippi-born black protagonists who were musical associates of blues legend Robert Johnson. Edwards’s autobiography is the oral reminiscences of a historical figure who was present during the prewar flowering of Mississippi blues culture, reminiscences recorded, edited, and organized by two white cowriters; Mosley’s novel is the story of a fictional bluesman that Mosley, a contemporary African American writer, has invented in line with his received understandings—rather than with a practitioner’s firsthand knowledge— of Edwards’s culture. If both texts, nonfictional and fictional, depict blade-borne violence as a mode of self-assertion in a black blues context, we would be wise to keep in mind that Edwards’s text testifies to the historical truth of such violence, where Mosley’s merely seconds Edwards’s testimony and adds the luster of myth. Yet since blues-knives appear not just in Mosley’s novel, but in a remarkable array of other African American novels, stories, poems, and plays, it seems equally valid to assert, as I do in this study, that such knives constitute an essential thematic within the blues literary tradition—a thematic which, if used judiciously, can also be combined with autobiographical testimony to deepen our sense of both the motivations that provoke such violence and the psychological costs it exacts from those who inhabit blues culture’s roughest precincts. My other foundational analytic gesture— considering blues literature and blues orature as an expressive continuum—requires a somewhat different justification. It should go without saying that blues, as a cultural form, begins as music, the so-called folk-blues, and not as works of blues literature. Langston Hughes’s epochal poem “The Weary Blues” (1925), transforms the three-line AAB stanza of sung blues into an interpolated six-line stanza that would become the template for Hughes’s future blues poems, but the AAB stanza itself had been circulating within black folk culture for at least two decades before Hughes thought to displace it toward the printed page. Yet the apparent distinction between blues

INTRODUCTION

9

orature and blues literature is not nearly so clear-cut as it might seem. The blues lyric tradition, after all, is also, and fairly early in its development, a written tradition—which is to say, a tradition of composed and published lyrics such as W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914) and “The Hesitating Blues” (1915). It was the extraordinary popularity of Handy’s early blues compositions, in fact, which helped make the AAB stanza— rather than, say, the AAA stanza, an alternate form—into the blues reference standard, one that black folk musicians in turn quickly adopted. Texas-born bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson (b. 1897) may have explored a range of emergent blues stanzaic forms when he was learning his craft as a street performer in Dallas’s “Deep Ellum” neighborhood, but virtually all the blues sides he recorded between 1927 and his death in 1929 follow Handy’s AAB, twelve-bar template. If the blues literary tradition is enlarged to include sheet music compositions such as Handy’s, in other words, we may argue with some justification that blues literature has been a reciprocal influence on blues orature, rather than merely a delayed, second-order outgrowth from the “authentic” folk form. Just as blues recordings on closer inspection sometimes betray their writtenness, so blues literature, like other forms of African American literature, often functions as a kind of talking book, which is to say that the vernacular language and AAB stanzaic form of sung blues materialize whenever African American writers attempt to represent blues musicians, blues performance spaces, paradox-laced blues feelings (“laughing just to keep from crying”), and blues-consuming communities. Sometimes, as in poems by Hughes, Melvin B. Tolson, and Ishmael Reed, the AAB stanza is evident; in other places it structures prose rhythms in a veiled but still legible way. Blues singer Ursa Corregidora’s epiphany in the final pages of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) about the skin-breaking fellatio that her enslaved great-grandmother must have used to “mark” her master, for example, draws its power from the AAB form that undergirds it: “In a split second,” thinks Ursa, “I knew what it was, in a split second of hate and love I knew what it was, and I think he might have known too.” 22 Rearranged as a blues stanza, the underlying structure leaps off the page, replete with the “worrying” repetition-withintensification of the A-line: In a split second I knew what it was, in a split second of hate and love I knew what it was, and I think he might have known too.

Corregidora, along with Jones’s Eva’s Man (1976), reminds us of another unsettling truth explored in this study, which is that the intimate vio-

10

INTRODUCTION

lence (and somewhat rarer retributive violence) of blues culture not infrequently has a sexual dimension. Sexual jealousy sometimes leads blues people to decapitate, eviscerate, and castrate each other, or fantasize such revenge against white oppressors; it also leads blues people to represent their own sexuality with strikingly violent, sometimes phallic metaphors, as in Lillian Glinn’s “Packing House” (1928) and Lurie Bell’s “I’ll Be Your .44” (1982). “You know a woman need a man,” insists Hedley in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars (1997). “I don’t need none that bad,” retorts Louise, with jaunty bitterness. “I got me a thirty-two caliber pistol up there. That be all the man I need.” 23 This study is premised, in sum, on a conception of blues textuality that understands blues literature and blues orature to be an expressive continuum rather than a self-evident binary. It is also premised on a frank acknowledgment of its own incompleteness. The three broad modes of violence that I investigate, no matter how much of the blues cultural and textual tradition they traverse, are merely one set of analytical lenses through which the enormously complex phenomenon of blues expressiveness may be viewed. Preferring to focus on more localized dynamics associated with post-Reconstruction southern history, I’ve said relatively little here about blues music’s deeper rhythmic, melodic, and to a certain extent attitudinal sources in the slave spirituals. Nor have I made more than passing mention of another and more distant influence, the African penchant for ambiguity and indirection that survives in the spirituals as coded yearnings for freedom and may have conditioned, for example, the refusal of black blues musicians to address lynching without the veil of metaphor. Finally, I’ve said nothing about a small but important subset of blues songs on the subject of hangmen, which many might consider the most obvious way in which bluesmen conjured with the terrors of the lynching South. Such blues, ranging from “Black Ophelia’s Shouting Jailhouse Blues” (1898) to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Hangman’s Blues” (1928)—which includes the verse, “Mean ole hangman is waitin’ to tighten up that noose, / Lord, I’m so scared I’m trembling in my shoes”—may certainly have been a way in which the terrors of lynching were addressed.24 So too, in all likelihood, was a ballad entitled “The Hangman’s Tree,” an American adaptation of the traditional English ballad “The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” which folklorist Dorothy Scarborough describes in 1925, with breezy fatuity, as having been “scattered over [the state of Florida] by the singing of the care-free vagrant Negroes who go from place to place in search of work, or are sent about on construction gangs, and so forth.” Local black folk, according to Scarborough, “act out this song at an entertainment in the Negro schoolhouse”:

INTRODUCTION

11

The condemned—here a man instead of a woman (a curious change to take place in the case of a ballad whose title is The Maid Freed from the Gallows)—was all ready for hanging, with a real rope fastened around his neck. The hangman held the other end of the rope in his hand, ready to jerk the victim to his fate. The victim, a large black man, appealed for mercy, begged for a few minutes’ reprieve, on the ground that he saw his father coming; but the father sternly repudiated him in gesture and song. His mother was equally obdurate, and likewise the brother and sister. The stage was fairly crowded with cold-hearted relatives—for Negroes in their singing love to reach out to all remote branches of relationship. At last the man begged for one more minute, for he saw his “True Love” coming. True Love came in, a yellow woman dressed in white, with a box of money, and dramatically won his release.25

As entertainments go, this ritual hardly seems carefree. Such hangman’s blues and ballads were, I suspect, not simply a way of occupying and asserting control over the lynching ritual, but a way of supplying it with what it lacked: a human face, however cruel; a set of petitionable actors who, however hard-hearted, might in fact be swayed by the victim’s plea for mercy. The true terror of lynching for black southerners, after all, was the faceless, merciless, apocalyptic vengefulness of the massed white mob. This was something new in southern law enforcement, and in black memory. Just as sexuality and gun-and-blade-borne intimate violence were arenas in which post-Emancipation black individuality could be explored, so too the sudden eruption of spectacle lynching across the southern landscape after 1890 forced emergent black blues subjects to feel their solitary selfhood as a sudden, vertiginous sense of incipient victimization: the possibility that one might not simply be killed by whites, but tortured at length in full public view, as Henry Smith was tortured in Paris, Texas in 1893 by an implacable white crowd of ten thousand. In chapter 1, I explore this “jinx all around my bed” from a variety of perspectives, tracing the outlines of lynching’s inflicted terror in both the blues lyric and blues autobiographical tradition. Bessie Smith’s “Blue Spirit Blues” (1930) and Little Brother Montgomery’s “The First Time I Met You” (1936) offer paradigms for coded “lynching blues” that predate Billie Holiday’s recording of the far more graphic café society protest song “Strange Fruit” (1939). Although a justified fear of white reprisal inhibited early blues singers from addressing lynching directly, recent blues autobiography has become a way for long-repressed truths to be told and long-standing traumas addressed with the help of compassionate white interlocutors, a phenomenon I call “confessing the

12

INTRODUCTION

blues.” In an extended look at B. B. King, I explore the way in which a blues subject who has been both wounded and formed by what I call the “primal lynching scene” may image in his lyrics a “primal healing scene,” a heavenly sexual embrace that soothes and remakes him. Sammy Price, a Texas boogie-woogie pianist born a generation earlier than King, was traumatized as a boy, he reports, by a version of W. C. Handy’s “Hesitating Blues” sung by a wandering bluesman in which a recent lynching was surreptitiously inscribed and protested; I trace the renegade version to an infamous racial spectacle and discuss its possible meanings, including the threat it held out of violent black reprisal. In chapter 2, I investigate the connections between southern violence and blues’ emergence during the 1890s from a slightly different perspective, focusing not on the folk-bluesmen who evolved early blues song but on Handy himself, a trained professional musician who overheard, transcribed, compositionally remade, and profited from the nascent form. Handy’s seminal autobiography, Father of the Blues (1941), has long been the victim of critical neglect, which I remedy by offering an extended reading of Handy’s formative professional years. In particular, I explore the ways in which Handy’s southern tours with Mahara’s Minstrels between 1897 and 1903 exposed him to racial violence and Jim Crow indignities that united him and his peers in a fraternity of blues feeling with their working-class equivalents, the songsters and “wandering musicianeers.” Relocating to the Mississippi Delta just as a lynching epidemic was sweeping through, the bandleading Handy quickly found himself in the employ of James Vardaman, celebrated racist demagogue and thengubernatorial candidate—a résumé item Handy both masks and reveals in his autobiography, and one that further educates him in an emerging dialectic of blues feeling and blues catharsis. Later, in Memphis, Handy finds a way of converting his own near-lynching as a minstrel into the central trope-of-flight animating “St. Louis Blues,” a composition that helped transform blues from a regional black folk music into an internationally celebrated pop commodity. In chapter 3, I move outward from the blues lyric tradition and its foundational autobiography into the blues literary tradition as a whole, exploring a range of novels and poems that dramatize the encounter of the blues subject with the legacy of spectacle lynching. Roberta Rubenstein’s theory of cultural mourning, which she applies to the works of Toni Morrison, offers a useful way of understanding the struggle undertaken by recent African American writers to re-member the dismembered body bequeathed on survivors by a not-yet-fully-mourned history of lynching. I take additional theoretical cues here from Cathy Caruth, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Saidiya Hartman, who provide useful

INTRODUCTION

13

working definitions of trauma, abjection, and redress. If the abject is what beckons, haunts, and threatens to engulf and unmake the subject, then black blues subjects in the Jim Crow South were forced to make peace with, or be wholly undone by, the mutilated, charred, “souvenired” carcass into which spectacle lynching threatened to transform them. Their psychological response to this existential challenge, I argue, took two primary forms, embrace and possession, both of which blues literature explores in depth. (Rejection, a stoic refusal to acknowledge terror, is a third strategy, one I discuss in chapter 4.) Authors discussed in this chapter include Arthur Flowers, Clarence Major, Sterling Plumpp, B. B. King, Alice Walker, Bebe Moore Campbell, Walter Mosley, August Wilson, Chester Himes, George Schuyler, and Larry Neal. Chapter 4 focuses on retributive violence—black folk striking back at white lynchers and their symbolic equivalents—as imaged in Mamie Smith’s recording of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” (1920). A two-anda-half minute song that sold seventy-five thousand copies within a month of its release and ushered in the race records boom, Smith’s recording is, like Father of the Blues, an oft-invoked cultural text to which scant critical attention has been paid. I try to correct this oversight by framing “Crazy Blues” within a series of overlapping social contexts, paying particular attention to a couplet about cop killing that helps account for the song’s runaway popularity. That “Crazy Blues” was the first African American blues recording makes it important. But that it should fantasize gunborne reprisal against white power makes it a particularly significant document: an expression, I try to show, of accumulated black frustration in the post-Reconstruction years, but also an overlooked precursor of the socially restive gangsta rappers of the late 1980s. In the final section of chapter 4, I offer a new theory of what I call “abandonment blues,” by which I mean blues songs in which female singers bemoan the loss or absence of their men. Where Angela Y. Davis reads such songs as social inscriptions of both joyous black male wanderlust (a refusal to be corralled by any one romance) and the demands of agricultural labor (which required many black men to travel long distances in search of work), I read them under the sign of white violence: the “disappeared” black man of black women’s blues was, among other things, blues song’s way of mourning the men killed by white lynchers and race rioters, or arrested on vagrancy charges, prison-farmed, convict-leased, thrown in jail. Using Kathleen Brogan’s theory of cultural haunting, I read both “Crazy Blues” and Bessie Smith’s “Haunted House Blues” (1928) as abandonment blues of this sort. The fantasy of badwoman vengeance offered by “Crazy Blues” addresses abandonment with homicidal rage; I contextualize Mamie’s yearnings with relevant moments from other blues texts, including Violet Mills’s “Mad

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INTRODUCTION

Mama Blues” (1924), Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Drinking Man Blues” (1940), and Ann Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). The first four chapters of this study are concerned almost entirely with interracial violence as it registers in the blues textual tradition: white disciplinary violence against black folk, black resistance and reprisal against white folk. In the last two chapters I address a different kind of violence, one traditionally associated with blues music and blues culture: the knives, razors, “chibs,” ice picks, and guns that have taken the lives (and graced the hands) of a number of blues musicians, that show up in virtually every blues biography and autobiography, and that flash forth in an extraordinary profusion in blues lyrics themselves: “Johnson Machine Gun,” “Good Chib Blues,” “32-20 Blues,” “Got Cut All to Pieces,” “Cold-Blooded Murder,” “Pistol Slapper Blues,” “Ice-Pick Blues.” The South, black and white, is a uniquely violent region; as white Mississippian Margaret Jones Bolsterli has noted, “[t]he general run of violence that Americans accept is so much worse in the South, in fact, that I am afraid to drive on rural roads in Arkansas and Mississippi, when I would not give fear a second thought on such roads in Wisconsin or New Hampshire.” 26 Black southern blues people are no less southern than black, and blues culture, as I show, is the locus of a peculiarly violent vitality, one that has its origins in the post-Reconstruction southern frontier. Blues weapons, I argue in chapter 5, were instruments of self-making rather than random mayhem. Like the celebrated white desperadoes of the California silver rush depicted by Mark Twain in Roughing It, southern blues people marked each other’s flesh and earned both names and reputations (forms of cultural capital) by doing so. Bluesmen who sported scars, such as Muddy Waters, were the subject of pleasurable gossip, and Muddy himself sang blues songs about a woman he knew who “might shoot you . . . [and] might cut you too.” 27 My claims here build on but also substantially critique the views of Robin D. G. Kelley and Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, both of whom have written about jook life from a celebrationist perspective that tends to downplay or ignore the jook’s deadly shadow. The blues musicians themselves—Memphis Minnie, Johnny Shines, Mance Lipscomb, Honeyboy Edwards, and others— have much to say on the subject; I rely heavily on their recollections. If blues weapons were real enough to those who handled them (and suffered their sting), they entered the world of representations via blues song and flowed outward into blues literature, where they manifest themselves as phallic signifiers, instruments for writing-on-the-body, and transformations of musical or rhythmic violences. John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” (1962) and Little Walter’s “Boom Boom, Out Goes

INTRODUCTION

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the Light” (1955) are good examples of this third mode of metaphorical displacement. In chapter 6, I apply the theory of intimate blues violence elaborated in chapter 5 to a fresh reading of Zora Neale Hurston and two of her most engaging and problematic protagonists, Big Sweet and Tea Cake, both of whom are exemplars of juke-joint aggression. As a self-described tomboy who was “always hurting” other girls and roughhousing with neighborhood boys, Hurston was fascinated as an adult investigator by the jook culture she discovered in Polk County, Florida, in which intimidating backwoods blueswomen brandished knives, bragged of their murderousness, and feared no man, white or black. Hurston’s jookimmersion experience, I argue, betrays noticeable class anxiety; her avid but uneasy investigations draw her unknowingly into the jook’s passional economy, rousing jealousies in several women until one finally chases her out of the jook, knife in hand. I read Hurston’s violent exile from Florida blues culture as a fall into self-knowledge, a needed enlightenment that gifts her with crucial truths about the inner life of her folk subjects. No Hurston character has provoked more disparate reactions, it would seem, than Tea Cake. Extending recent work by Missy Dehn Kubitschek and Maria V. Johnson on the significance of violence in, and the blues influences on, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), I read the novel as the story of Janie Crawford’s violent blues apprenticeship, the way she descends into a blues milieu that is discernibly lower on the class spectrum than her all-black hometown of Eatonville, extending her emotional range and finding her voice with Tea Cake’s help. Their Eyes revolves not only around the issue of “racial health,” as Alice Walker has suggested, but around Tea Cake’s sickness and profound diminishment, his reduction at the novel’s end to a caricature of the bluesman as jealous, possessive, pistol-wielding agent of vengeance. Killing him with the rifle he has taught her how to shoot, Janie represents Hurston’s vision of a kinder-and-gentler blues culture, shorn of murderous irrationality but retaining the “singing and sobbing” lyricism with which the novel concludes. This study offers a vision, finally, of the predicament of blues culture, which is to say the violent vitality that animates the songs, their makers and audiences, and the blues textual tradition as a whole. Working-class black life in the Jim Crow South was a deadly affair, hemmed in by white law and lynch law, white racial and sexual hysteria, white-managed economies of expropriated black labor, white folkways that demanded silence and submission. Blues was a mode of resistance: a way of bearing coded and overt witness to terror, easing troubled minds, making a

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INTRODUCTION

living outside the sharecropper’s exploited condition, clearing a space for pleasure, fantasizing revenge—a way of bringing oneself and one’s community back to life by getting loud, fierce, and down. Such violent expressiveness, a desperately needed antidote to the stifling, silencing oppressiveness of Jim Crow, carried some of the poison along with it—some of the South’s regional predilection for hands-on vengeance, for settling personal disputes outside the law. When Charley Patton sang “Every day seems like murder here,” he was singing about the early modern South he knew. The murderers were certainly white: during Patton’s teenage years in Sunflower, Mississippi, at least nine blacks were lynched. But the murderers were also black: in two separate stabbings, jealous members of his jook audience almost ended his life. The southern violence I explore was a biracial affair; the predicament of blues culture was to be situated squarely in that violence, with no place to hide. The blues textual tradition confronts such violence forthrightly, unsentimentally, often searingly, without ever abandoning hope—a useful guide to the critic who would enter and survey such troubled territory.

CHAPTER ONE

“I’m Tore Down” Lynching and the Birth of a Blues Tradition

NEGRO BURNED ALIVE IN GEORGIA; SECOND NEGRO THEN HANGED Newman, Ga., [23 April 1899]—Sam Holt, the murderer of [his white employer] Alfred Cranford and the ravisher of the latter’s wife, was burned at the stake, near Newman, Ga., this afternoon, in the presence of 2000 people. . . . Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the negro was deprived of his ears, fingers, and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on, but stood the ordeal of fire with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as “souvenirs.” The negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain the ghastly relics direct paid their more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bones went for 25 cents, and a bit of the liver crisply cooked sold for 10 cents. —Springfield, Mass. Weekly Republican Well I’m tore down, almost level with the ground Well I’m tore down, almost level with the ground Well I feel like this when my . . . baby can’t be found. —Freddie King, “Tore Down” [T]rauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. — Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

“STRANGE FRUIT” AND THE MISSING BLUES LEGACY

Lynching is commonly viewed by blues scholars as merely one egregious link in a chain of violent disciplines inflicted by white southerners on black southerners during the post-Reconstruction period (1890 – 1920) when blues music was first emerging as a recognizable cultural form. The other disciplines, intended to produce docile black male laboring bodies, remain notorious to this day: capricious and draconian vagrancy laws, peonage laws that reconstituted slavery in the form of debt-servitude, a convict lease system in which shackled men were worked to death for profit, prison farms in which murderous beatings 17

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CHAPTER ONE

were the norm. “We was hemmed up,” insists Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb (b. 1895) in his autobiography, describing a general condition, characteristic of the Jim Crow era, which might be called disciplinary encirclement.1 “They kill ya if they think ya outa line,” complained blues mandolinist Yank Rachell (b. 1910) in later years, remembering the white Tennesseans of his youth.2 Lynching—particularly in its “spectacle” form, with hanging supplemented by torture, burning, and mutilation— was arguably the most brutal southern discipline: by destroying an exemplary black male body, and by publicizing this destruction, the white South hoped to produce sufficient terror in black male subjects to guarantee the continued functioning of an oppressive social and economic system.3 (Lynching was a decidedly gendered phenomenon, in the South and elsewhere: of the 3,513 blacks lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1927, according to Trudier Harris, only 76, or 2 percent, were women.) 4 “White people may or may not be very conscious of this threatening atmosphere in which Negroes live,” wrote John Dollard in 1937 after an extended stay in Mississippi, but Negroes are extremely conscious of it and it is one of the major facts in the life of any Negro in Southerntown. I once asked a middle-class Negro how he felt about coming back down South. He said it was like walking into a lion’s den; the lions are chained; but if they should become enraged, it is doubtful whether the chains would hold them; hence it is better to walk very carefully. . . . Every Negro in the South knows that he is under a kind of sentence of death; he does not know when his turn will come, it may never come, but it may also be at any time. This fear tends to intimidate the Negro man.5

Brutal, public, terrifying; a collective white threat that intimidated black male southerners into “walk[ing] very carefully.” Lynching was all these things. Yet lynching was also, according to blues scholars, a taboo subject in its own time, all but unaddressed by black blues singers— singers who were more than willing to speak back, overtly and covertly, to the other violent disciplines hemming them in.6 Unspecified “hard times” and “bad luck” are bewailed, after all, in countless blues recordings (such as Bessie Smith’s “Poor Man Blues” [1928]) that contest economic inequality; chain gangs, high sheriffs, big cruel bossmen, and mean old railroad engineers are apostrophized in ways that can clearly be construed as racial protest. “I’m tired of being Jim Crowed, gonna leave this Jim Crow town,” proclaims Alabama bluesman Cow Cow Davenport in “Jim Crow Blues” (1929), and to his sectional plaint might be added dozens of other titles, among them Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Jail House Blues” (1949), Kokomo Arnold’s “Chain Gang Blues” (1935),

“I’M TORE DOWN”

19

Texas Alexander’s “Section Gang Blues” (1927), Bukka White’s “Parchman Farm Blues” (1940), Victoria Spivey’s “Bloodhound Blues” (1929), Blue Boy’s “Dyin’ in the Electric Chair” (1929).7 So where in this lyric outpouring, we might ask, are the white lynch mobs and the scores of charred, dismembered black corpses they left dangling across the Jim Crow South over a period of more than fifty years? What of the rage and powerlessness, the sickening fear, such events engendered in black witnesses? Those blues songs, curiously— or perhaps understandably— seem never to have been sung. “If it ever occurred to [Charley] Patton or his associates to address themselves to subjects such as lynchings,” insist biographers Steven Calt and Gayle Wardlow of the Delta blues’ first recording star, “these thoughts were automatically suppressed. ‘No sir, they wouldn’t bring them up,’ said the former jukehouse owner, Elizabeth Moore. ‘I ain’t jokin’! They was scared: they wasn’t gonna bring it up.’” 8 The strongest argument against any significant connection between the repressive practice of white-on-black lynching and the expressive practice of blues has always been, it is claimed, the virtual absence from recorded blues song of any mention of either lynching or the terror it was intended to produce. “Left unarticulated,” Jon Michael Spencer insists, at least in recorded blues, was the utter dread of conviction in the court of “Judge Lynch,” the unjust “justice” system administered by white vigilantes with the popular consent of their white communities. The most frequent verdict given by “Judge Lynch” was, as his name implied, lynching, the “white death” [invoked by Richard Wright], that which Billie Holiday sang about in her poignant “Strange Fruit.” 9

Holiday’s 1939 recording is often taken to be a kind of first emergence, the moment when blues song and bold, indelible representations of the lynched, burned black body were decisively conjoined, bursting forth into spectacular public audibility.10 That “Strange Fruit,” authored by white songwriter Lewis Allan (Abel Meeropol), was a landmark in both popular and protest music is indisputable, but it was art-song balladry, not blues song: it lacks both the formal structural elements of blues (the AAB stanza or equivalent repetitions) and the witnessing first-person “I” that is the blues lyric’s distinguishing characteristic. “Strange Fruit” gets us nowhere in this particular exploration, and the deafening silence remains: lynching is a nonissue within blues song, according to the prevailing scholarly view. It is dwarfed in importance by themes such as poverty, wanderlust, loneliness, gambling, heavy drinking, romantic feuding, and the multiple imperatives of what Albert Murray has termed “the old downhome Saturday Night Function,” 11 which is to say the sort of

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all-night-long party at which black folk, according to Robin D. G. Kelley, have always reclaimed themselves and their pleasures from the depredations of white racism.12 “For its own audience,” claim Calt and Wardlow, “Mississippi blues functioned purely as party and dance music.” 13 “You don’t get next to someone playing ‘Strange Fruit,’” scoffed Murray, who thought that Holiday’s song—and, by extension, others on the topic—held little attraction for black folk in need of release. “Who the hell wants to go hear something that reminds them of a lynching?” 14 Many people do, it turns out, now that lynching has faded into historical memory. As the audience for Mississippi blues has noticeably whitened since the early 1960s, contemporary black creative artists have shed whatever vestiges of fear may have inhibited Charley Patton and other early blues performers from addressing the subject overtly. In Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk, a tap-dance-driven history of African American music that premiered on Broadway in 1995, choreographers George Wolfe and Savion Glover make an explicit claim for the birth of the blues out of turn-of-the-century violence in a song entitled “The Lynching Blues”: strung up and left to die by a gang of whites, a black man’s dangling feet tap spastically against the stage, the spatter of accents slowly coalescing into a shuffle beat. Such a claim, while generating considerable theatrical energy, offers nothing in the way of historical evidence; it should be taken as merely a hint about a possible linkage between a mode of racialized terror and a black folk music that first attained mass popularity with W. C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” (1912). An even more provocative hint—indeed, a bold insistence that blues repetitions can rescue unsung lynching victims from obscurity—is found in the grooves of White African, a 2001 release by Denver bluesman Otis Taylor (b. Chicago 1948).15 Set to the brooding, droning, Delta-tinged tones of Taylor’s guitar, “Saint Martha’s Blues” laments a turn-of-thecentury lynching in the bluesman’s own family: [spoken intro] My great grandfather, back in Lake Provence, Louisiana He was lynched. Not only was he lynched, they took his body, and they tore it apart, and they went to his wife, Martha Jones. And told her where she could find her husband. Poor, poor Martha Poor Martha . . . poor Martha Jones She got to go downtown Oooh she got to go, she got to go and find him, her husband.

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They came to the door They took him, they took him away and hung him! They hung him from, they hung him from the highest tree They tore . . . they tore his poor body . . . they tore his poor body apart Oh they tore . . . they tore his poor body apart Poor poor Martha. Poor Saint Martha Jones Poor, poor . . . poor Martha She got to go. She got to go and find She got to go and find him She got to got to got to go and find her husband. She walking all over town She walking, she walking, she walking all over town She dragging . . . allllllll She dragging that thing behind her She got to go She got to go and find her husband Poor Martha Poor Saint Martha. [whispered] She got to go She got to go She got to . . . she got to . . . she got to . . . she got to . . . she got to She got to go and find him She got to . . . she got to go.

In “My Soul’s in Louisiana,” Taylor sings not as the surviving greatgrandson mourning a violent familial legacy, but as the victim of a vigilante murder that marks him as less than worthless; he offers a blues in the voice of a dead man whose restless spirit demands release: Well my soul’s in Louisiana Well my body lies in Tennessee I didn’t kill . . . kill no brakeman I didn’t kill no engineer Well a white man pointed his finger And then said what they always said They didn’t bother . . . bother to hang me They just shot me on the spot. Well my soul’s in Louisiana Well my body lies in Tennessee

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They didn’t bother . . . bother to hang me They just shot me . . . BAM! on the spot. Ooooooaaaah . . . ooooohhhh. Ooooooaaaah . . . ooooohhhh.

“The blues,” James Cone insists, “are an expression of fortitude in the face of a broken existence. They emphasize the will to be, despite nonbeing as symbolized in racism and hate.” 16 Lynching—the dismemberment-hanging evoked in “Saint Martha’s Blues,” the casual extralegal assassination of “My Soul’s in Louisiana”—was the ne plus ultra of southern racism and hate: at once threatened penalty, whispered horror story, and suffered or witnessed fact, it was and still is the most potent symbol of nonbeing for African American subjects and those who, like Taylor, mourn their broken existences. If contemporary blues song is an arena in which long-deferred mourning for lynching victims and their kin may be openly enacted, then it seems useful to investigate the ways in which black southern blues singers of an earlier age may have conjured lyrically with the terror, restlessness, and grief that their daily reckoning with lynching both engendered in them and prohibited them from expressing overtly. In this chapter I intend to explore the linkage between southern lynching and blues song, and to advance—albeit with a provisionality that befits its speculative nature—what I hope will be taken as a radical claim. Far from being a nontopic, lynching is inscribed in the blues lyric tradition in a variety of ways: as anxieties about encirclement, torture, and dismemberment; as a blues nightmare about Hell’s “dragons”; as direct address to an oppressive phantasmic presence (“Mr. Blues, “ “Good morning, blues”) that stops at the black subject’s front door, chases him from tree to tree, and does him many sorts of harm; as songs of romantic loss and gain that transcode and redress histories of racial violence; and as a lyric transformation of the black subject from figurative lynching victim to figurative lynching propagator. (The gangsta rap group Da Lench Mob is a latter-day example of this “badman” mode.) Only a few of these lyric inscriptions, such as Otis Taylor’s, are both intentional and overt; others, including Big Bill Broonzy’s “Conversation with the Blues” and a version of “Hesitating Blues” reported by Sammy Price, are intentional but veiled, speaking clearly to blacks while avoiding offense to whites. Most of what might be called “lynching blues” inscriptions, however, are semi-obscure and remain arguable: unconscious transformations rather than intentional codings of lynching tropes and scenarios, they express the pressured, nightmare-strewn subjectivities that it was the intention of white southern terror to produce. Far from a helpless capitulation to that terror, they were a startlingly creative response to it,

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one that offered, in Cone’s words, a “liberating catharsis” by “afford[ing] black people a certain distance from their immediate trouble and allow[ing] them to see and feel it artistically.” 17 Lynching, I propose, casts such a broad shadow across the blues lyric tradition because it was one of the prime social catalysts— even, debatably, the prime social catalyst—for the emergence of blues song out of a welter of pre-blues black musics.18 It was not merely a covert theme of certain blues songs, in other words, but the ontological ground out of which blues expressiveness arose: an overhanging threat of nonbeing, at once highly personal and utterly phantasmic, in the face of which black southerners articulated a restless, grasping, sometimes surreal form of lyric first-person address. My intention is to provoke further research and discussion, and to tease out the implications of an apparent coincidence: that the narrative histories of spectacle lynching and early blues song are essentially coextensive. Both are “born” as recognizable cultural phenomena in the 1890s, and are particularly associated with Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas; both spread quickly across the rest of the South over the next two decades; both achieve their popularity with the help of modern media (lynchings and blues recordings were advertised in newspapers and on the radio). If black crowds “came from far and wide,” in Sterling Brown’s phrase, to see Ma Rainey and her self-styled “Assassinators of the Blues,” 19 then special discounted excursion trains sometimes gathered white lynching audiences from equally far-flung districts—a five- or six-state area, on occasion. Lynching postcards and the charred bones of lynching victims were consumed as avidly by southern whites in the early decades of the century as blues sheet music and blues recordings were by southern blacks. Are these parallels merely epiphenomenal, or is black subjectivity here engaged in a public struggle with what would annihilate it? Might we even say that a “blues subject” emerged out of a forced daily confrontation with that possibility of annihilation, and spoke back to that threat in song? JINX ALL AROUND MY BED

One familiar and enduring mode of blues lyricism is a discourse of romantic abandonment or “lonesomeness” figured, paradoxically, as encirclement, rough handling, and murderous taken-apartness. Subtending such romantic abandonment is a second kind of aloneness, by-product of the bluesman’s wandering life: the absence of a powerful white patron to stave off the trouble that could accrue to so-called “strange niggers” unknown to local whites. “If you didn’t have a white captain to back you in the old days,” Louis Armstrong insisted in 1954, “—to put his hand on your shoulder—you was just a damn sad nigger. . . . Oh, danger was dancing all around you back then!” 20 Alone and

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beleaguered, the bluesman engaging this particular discourse cries out in the voice of the soon-to-be— or recently claimed—victim of an allpoints mauling: Well I got up this morning, jinx all around, jinx all around, ’round my bed I say I got up this morning, with the jinx all ’round my bed Know I thought about you and it like to kill me dead. —Son House, “The Jinx Blues” (1942) Blues grabbed me at midnight and didn’t turn me loose ’til day Blues grabbed me at midnight, didn’t turn me loose ’til day, I didn’t have no mama to drive these blues away. —Blind Willie McTell, “Mama, ’Tain’t long ’fo’ Day” (1927) Well I’m tore down, almost level with the ground Well I’m tore down, almost level with the ground Well I feel like this when my . . . baby can’t be found. —Freddie King, “Tore Down” (1961) Yeah now, blues, why don’t you give poor Bill a break? Yeah now, blues, why don’t you give poor Bill a break? Now why don’t you try to help me live instead of tryin’ to break my neck. —Big Bill Broonzy, “Conversation with the Blues” (1941)

The stanzas by House, McTell, and King each evoke, in their repeated first line, a state of psychological disrepair precipitated by lost or absent love that is at the same time a symbolic representation of the black subject’s physical emplacement in an imagined primal lynching scene: surrounded by a nightmarish “jinx” (a lynch mob is very bad luck), grabbed at midnight (the nightriders have arrived), torn to pieces (by coal-oilstoked fire and souvenir hunters). Each stanza turns, in its third line, toward the romantic embrace that would provide solace were it available, but that, in its absence, precipitates fears in the black subject that configure themselves as the helpless abjection of the lynching victim. Broonzy’s stanza shares with the others an image drawn from the grammar of lynching—“break my neck”—but it differs in being a direct petition to what oppresses the singer, a phantasm he calls “blues.” It also differs from the earlier examples in the note of bitter humor it entertains, a play on the word “break.” The word “blues” is a way of signifying, for the consideration of a black audience, not just oppressive whiteness, but white hands, hands that would prefer to grab, tear apart, and break the necks of black people. “Conversation with the Blues,” uncharacteristically bold for a blues song, was issued two years after “Strange Fruit”; while its directness may have been prompted by Broonzy’s contact with the same progressive

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northern whites who helped make Holiday’s song a hit, it was clearly also motivated by Broonzy’s long-standing grievance against southern vigilantism. “[W]hen anybody asks me if I’m from Mississippi,” he later confessed in his memoir Big Bill Blues (1955), “I’ll say yes but I’m mad and don’t like to talk about it, because I was born poor, had to work and do what the white man told me to do, a lot of my people were mobbed, lynched and beaten.” 21 In a 1948 conversation with folklorist Alan Lomax, released in 1991 as Blues in the Mississippi Night, Broonzy was brutally specific about the way lynching had scarred his family: I had an uncle like that [who spoke up for his rights] and they hung him. They hung him down there because they say he was crazy and might ruin the other Negroes. See, that is why they hung him, because he was a man that if he worked, he wanted pay. . . . So, the white man went to town and got a gang and come out there after him that night, and he shot all four, five of them until they finally caught him. . . . Fifty or sixty of them come out there and got him and killed him.22

A jinx all around his bed, grabbed at midnight, tore down level with the ground: Broonzy’s uncle is alone and encircled, claimed by the blues— another name, in this case, for death-dealing white power. But what if all early blues song proceeded, to a greater or lesser extent, from the black southerner’s palpable sense of vulnerability, of existential dread, of unwantedness, in a landscape increasingly darkened after 1890 by the strung-up, sometimes mutilated and smoldering carcasses of one’s kin? Clarence Williams, a jazz pianist and songwriter who penned many down-home blues and novelty songs for Bessie Smith, attributed his creativity in at least one case to a mood brought on by disciplinary encirclement, a sense of imminent victimization at the hands of white men: Why, I’d never have written blues if I had been white. You don’t study to write the blues, you feel them. It’s the mood you’re in—sometimes it’s a rainy day . . . just like the time I lay for hours in a swamp in Louisiana. Spanish moss dripping everywhere. . . . White men were looking for me with guns—I wasn’t scared, just sorry I didn’t have a gun. I began to hum a tune—a little sighing kinda tune—you know like this . . . “Jes as blue as a tree—an old willow tree—nobody ’round here, jes nobody but me.” 23

In this case, strikingly, the blues singer-songwriter erases the white mob (“White men . . . looking for me with guns” in the narrative becomes “nobody ’round here” in the song) while aestheticizing—with the help of rhyme, repetition, and simile—the lonesome (if not precisely fearful) mood that its threatening presence has induced in him. If, as Mississippi jook proprietor Elizabeth Moore insisted, Charley Patton and other

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blues singers were scared to address the topic of lynching in their songs, then Williams’s description of his own creative process may help us understand the way in which such internalized proscriptions spurred blues creativity. The songwriter avoids representing the mob itself in so many words, sketching instead the subject position of its prospective victim; stark, striking, sometimes fanciful figures convey the sense of being alone, surrounded by malevolence, and in need of (black) companionship. One of Williams’s hits for Bessie Smith, “Mama’s Got the Blues” (1923), evokes this sort of blues subject in its opening stanzas: Some people say that the worried blues ain’t bad Some people say the worried blues ain’t bad But it’s the worst old feeling that I’ve ever had. Woke up this morning with a jinx around my bed I woke up this morning with a jinx around my bed I didn’t have no daddy to hold my achin’ head.24

What sort of blues song would a woman sing if she had been haunted all night by a sickening fear that her absent man had fallen into malevolent white hands, a scenario not uncommon in the Jim Crow South? The heart-rending mutilations wrought by the phantasmic lynching scene were what Toni Morrison has taught us to call “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken”: unspeakable and unspoken, above all, in the blues lyric tradition, at least in so many words.25 Yet even though these two quoted stanzas are not about lynching, the blues condition they evoke—an intensely “worried” subject, alone and surrounded and in bodily pain—is identical with the lynching victim’s condition, as though the blues singer’s sympathetic imagination has drawn her helplessly into psychospiritual alignment with her absent and fictively tortured man. Once the primal lynching scene had “spoken” itself as this characteristic blues trope of simultaneous aloneness-and-surroundedness, the trope itself was the thing, not the fears of lynching that may have provoked it. One certainly need not claim that all blues singers who invoked it were conscious of its origins, or were themselves overcome by fears of lynching; sometimes, pace Freud, a jinx around one’s bed is simply a love affair gone bad. But the compulsion that the trope exerted on both blues singers and blues audiences, the rapidity with which it became central to an emergent blues lyricism, suggests— or so I would claim—that it may surreptitiously have voiced the collective nightmare that black folk had otherwise repressed for the sake of psychological survival. Black men in the Jim Crow South were markedly more vulnerable to mob violence than black women; but women, too, felt the ineludable nearness of “white death” every time they mourned an absent lover.

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“They woke me up before day with trouble on my mind,” cries Bessie Smith in her self-authored “In the House Blues,” besieged by troubling phantasms as she awaits her man in vain: They woke me up before day with trouble on my mind Wringin’ my hands and screamin’, walkin’ the floor hollerin’ and cryin’. Catch ’em, don’t let them blues in here Catch ’em, don’t let them blues in here They shakes me in my bed, can’t set down in my chair. Oh, the blues has got me on the go Oh, they’ve got me on the go They runs around my house, in and out of my front door.26

Loneliness and restlessness in themselves are hardly startling emotions to find voiced in American folk song, but the peculiarly concrete and animate form they take here is new, and a second exemplary instance of emergent blues lyricism. These blues aren’t simply a troubled feeling: they’re a material as well as spiritual disturbance in the vibrational field of black identity, willful violators of every single psychic boundary the isolate black subject seeks to erect. What Smith’s imagination has done, I suggest, is find an uncannily apt metaphor for the haunting wrought on black southerners forced to dwell in the presence of white disciplinary surveillance, virulent Negrophobia, and gothic transformations of black flesh into proliferating mobile souvenirs. “The blues” in this sense are a way of symbolizing what unconsciously oppresses the black blues subject—the ever-pressuring white gaze, periodic eruptions of ritualized mob violence, the blackened knuckles and pickled fingers strewn across the lynching South—but they’re also a way of expressing the feeling produced in the subject by that encircling, soul-deadening network of oppressions: Early this morning, the blues came walking in my room, Early this morning, the blues came walking in my room, I said, “Blues, please tell me what you are doing here so soon?” —Ida Cox, “Rambling Blues” (1925) And the blues fell mama’s child tore me all upside down Blues fell mama’s child and it tore me all upside down Travel on, poor Bob just cain’t turn you ’round. —Robert Johnson, “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” (1937)

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I got to keep movinnnn’, I got to keep movinnnn’, Blues fallin’ down like hail And the day keeps on worryin’ me, There’s a hellhound on my trail. —Robert Johnson, “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937)

Even as lynching began to fade from the landscape as an active threat, black southerners continued to suffer a kind blue haunting, one they exorcised—in song, in print—with the help of images both visceral and surreal. “The very first blue man I remember,” writes Houston A. Baker in 2001, describing the hellhound that unsettled his Louisville, Kentucky boyhood in the 1950s, was not Elmore James or Big Bill Broonzy but a vividly reported monster who was said to live somewhere in the vicinity of Louisville’s Chicasaw Park. . . . The Blue Man was grotesque, of uncertain origin, and his story was chilling. He was stealthy, yet ferocious, fanged and vicious in pursuit of young black men. . . . He endured, tumesced, became ever more horrific in the storied assaults he launched on black flesh. [As] I now realize, the Blue Man was a pure product of black Southern boyhood rumor, a sinister function in a continuous narrative that was always enhancing itself. The narrative was a grab bag containing snatches of colorful adult conversation, grim details of an Illinois black teenager mutilated and killed in Money, Miss., flashes from the Negro newspaper (the Louisville Defender) about police beatings and tavern brawls in black communities. There was enough tense, vaguely understood fear and anxiety in the air we breathed and enveloping territories we negotiated to provide tons and tons of narrative stuff to enlarge the Blue Man’s existence.27

As a spate of blues autobiographies published over the past decade makes clear, we are only just now beginning to hear the full story of lynching’s inflicted traumas from those who came of age in what Texas songster Mance Lipscomb has called “the time of De Pressure.” 28 Such works direct our attention not merely at the lynched black body—as the locus of conflicting emotions including identification, terror, grief, numbness, and disgust—but to the body’s utter dissolution, its “toredownness,” under the sign of white violence. “They shot im in mincemeat pie,” Lipscomb remembers of a black victim who had dared raise his hand against a white man in Navasota, Texas in 1906: “Blam-zum blam-zum blam-zum blam-zum!” All over the jail. I don’t know how miny times they shot im, but they shot im enough times ta have sister holes in im all over. . . . Man didn have a face! Body near about like mush. . . . Boys I could tell y’all sumpm that make yo flesh crawl about the life I lived. And I’m still here, playin on this old gittah. (144)

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Torture and dismemberment are pressing concerns of blues performers and blues song for reasons that trace directly back to the popular racial spectacle lynching suddenly became in the early 1890s, a kind of spectacle that had no real precedent in black memory.29 Attention to the various guises in which both torture and dismemberment figuratively reassert themselves in the blues textual tradition can help us detect the continuing presence of lynching’s long shadow at moments when the familiar trope of the dangling black body is nowhere to be found. Both the lynch-mobbed subject and the blues-singing subject are united, for example, by a drastic reduction to the pained expressive body on the verge of public collapse; they share that “element of pure self ” identified by Abbe Niles as the blues’ distinguishing characteristic, situated in a context of overtly cathartic audience involvement.30 The 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, described by Ida B. Wells-Barnett in A Red Record (1895) and cited by Grace Elizabeth Hale as the inaugural example of lynching-as-mass-spectacle, makes clear the level of white collective investment in the tortured black subject’s swan-song: The [lynchers] then gathered about the Negro as he lay fastened to the torture platform and thrust hot irons into his quivering flesh. It was horrible—the man dying by slow torture in the midst of smoke from his own burning flesh. Every groan from the fiend, every contortion of his body was cheered by the thickly packed crowd of 10,000 persons. The mass of beings 600 yards in diameter, the scaffold being the center. After burning the feet and legs, the hot irons—plenty of fresh ones being at hand—were rolled up and down Smith’s stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat.31

Blues song was, among other things, black popular music’s way of reconstituting the pleasure of racialized torture as a kind of ritual healing, redistributing it away from the sadistic white lynch mob and toward the “suffering” black blues subject and his community of black auditors. Where the Smith lynching and similar spectacles reduce the black subject to a groaning, abject, isolated, torturable black body—a ghastly festival of aching body parts—the blues singer in one characteristic guise proposes him- or herself as an abject, isolated, tortured but articulate sufferer, the voice of a black body’s aching parts refusing to be scattered and silenced: I got the blues so bad, it hurts my feet to walk, I got the blues so bad, it hurts my feet to walk, It has settled on my brain, and it hurts my tongue to talk. —Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Lonesome House Blues” (1927) 32

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Got the blues so bad, I can hardly sleep at night, Got the blues so bad, I can hardly sleep at night, Tried to eat my meal, my teeth refused to bite. — Ora Brown, “Jinx Blues” (1927) 33

The black subjectivities limned by these stanzas participate in an epistemology that had been profoundly shaped by lynching-as-spectacle: not the dreadful events themselves—which black folk witnessed only rarely—but the accompanying advertisements, newspaper stories, photographs, postcards, souvenirs (blackened fingers traded like baseball cards, pickled knuckles displayed in butcher shops), and ceaselessly recirculated horror stories that together produced a sense of overhanging peril.34 These stanzas are simultaneously a capitulation to that epistemology (the black subject’s willing reduction to an abject body) and a rejection of it (a refusal to be silenced, despite aching tongue and malfunctioning teeth). “[L]ynching figures its victims as the culturally abject,” observes Robyn Wiegman, “—monstrosities of excess whose limp and hanging bodies function as the specular assurance that the racial threat has not simply been averted, but rendered incapable of return.” 35 These blues stanzas do indeed figure their victims as culturally abject, but in the very act of voicing that abjection they resist white terror by enacting a troublesome return—like a lynched body that floats again and again, unbidden, into the dreams of the lyncher. “He is encircled with a rope law which is destructive to civilization, a curse to Christianity and barbarous in its appliances,” protested one black editorial writer in 1897, speaking of black subjection to white lynch law. “The rope is his guide and the lynchers his teachers and directors. In some places he is not allowed to complain, no matter what his treatment.” 36 Blues song was lyricized complaint as countervailing representation, a way of contesting both violence-enforced silence and the compliant Sambo-grin that black men were expected to present in public. It was also, and not incidentally, a way of bringing pleasure to black southern audiences; it offered a kind of healing that could only come from engaging and transforming the collective nightmare that dared not speak its name elsewhere in the region’s popular culture. If the shadow cast by spectacle lynching on the blues lyric tradition seems faint in the examples just cited, then at other moments it is hard to miss. Bessie Smith’s “Blue Spirit Blues” (1930), composed by Spencer Williams, reads like a hallucinated gloss on Henry Smith’s ordeal; its invocation of hellish tortures draws, like Son House’s “Jinx Blues” and Freddie King’s “Tore Down,” on the familiar paradox of the blues subject as both isolated and surrounded, a spectacle of vocalized abjection:

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Had a dream last night that I was dead Had a dream last night that I was dead Evil spirits all around my bed. The Devil came and grabbed my hand The Devil came and grabbed my hand Took me way down to that red hot land. Mean blue spirits stuck they forks in me Mean blue spirits stuck they forks in me Made me moan and groan in misery. Fairies and dragons spittin’ out blue flames Fairies and dragons spittin’ out blue flames Showin’ their teeth, for they was glad I came. Demons with their eyelids drippin’ blood Demons with their eyelids drippin’ blood Draggin’ sinners through that brimstone flood. “This is hell,” I cried, cried with all my might “This is hell,” I cried, cried with all my might Oh, my soul, I can’t bear the sight. Started runnin’ ’cause it is my cup Started runnin’ ’cause it is my cup Run so fast ’til someone woke me up.37

In “Feast of Blood: ‘Race,’ Religion, and Human Sacrifice in the Postbellum South,” Orlando Patterson argues that a significant number of southern lynchings were, in fact, “sacrificial murders, possessing all the ritual, communal, and, in many cases, religious characteristics of classic human sacrifice.” 38 “Blue Spirit Blues” is the sacrificial victim’s visionary reply, the canny redeployment of familiar religious imagery as a way of venting a social anxiety. “In freedom as in slavery,” notes Lawrence Levine, “the Devil . . . often looked suspiciously like a surrogate for the white man” 39 ; although the Devil sometimes materializes in blues culture as a trickster-accomplice and figure of useable power—Peetie Wheatstraw as “the Devil’s Son-in-Law,” Robert Johnson singing “Me and the Devil Blues”—the “red hot land” into which this particular Devil and his “mean blue spirits” convey the blues singer looks uncannily like a lynching-bee, from the polymorphous tortures they inflict (“stuck they forks in me,” “spittin’ out blue flames”) to the leering grins that suggest those beaming out from so many lynching photographs (“Showin’ their teeth, for they was glad I came”). “Dragons” signify the

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Klan (which had been reincarnated in 1915) and its baroque hierarchies, and “fairies” may be an oblique reference to the white women whose putative purity was being defended by the lynching ritual. “[T]he blues,” observes Gerhard Kubik in words that usefully gloss Smith’s song, “sometimes transmits images of almost paranoiac magnitude. There may be an obsession that will not go away. You try to run away from an unpleasant idea, an obstructive, ghastly image, but it constantly reemerges from your own unconscious, putting you under its spell.” 40 No noose is to be found in “Blue Spirit Blues”; yet here, arguably, is a kind of lynching blues, a dream-vision or “spell” that engages with the particulars of a familiar ritual and offers both singer and audience a welcome imaginative release—thank God it was only a bad dream!—from the “obstructive, ghastly image” of abjection that an emergent white folkway had inflicted on the black South. Mississippi, which led the country in white-on-black lynchings between 1890 and 1920, has long signified in black imaginations the sort of hellish apocalypse given fanciful shape in “Blue Spirit Blues” and evoked more starkly in “Hellhound on My Trail.” When barrelhouse blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery asked the mother of New Orleans jazzman Danny Barker whether he might take young Barker with him to Mississippi for two weeks’ worth of gigs in the 1920s, Barker remembered his mother’s disbelieving yell. “Just the mention of the word Mississippi amongst a group of New Orleans people,” mused Barker in 1986, would cause complete silence and attention. The word was so very powerful that it carried the impact of catastrophies, destruction, death, hell, earthquakes, cyclones, murder, hanging, lynching, all sorts of slaughter. It was the earnest and general feeling that any Negro who left New Orleans and journeyed across the state border and entered the hell-hole called the state of Mississippi for any reason other than to attend the funeral of a very close relative—mother, father, sister, brother, wife, or husband— was well on the way to losing his mentality, or had already lost it.41

In a celebrated passage from Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright describes “days lived under the threat of violence in 1920s Mississippi,” struggling to evoke the deadly, ghostly phantasm that he termed “the white death.” The tensions induced by this phantasm are, in fact, a kind of Ur-blues, the pedal-tone of black southern life during the Jim Crow years: Tensions would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused. It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted. I had never in my life

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been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.42

In his long poem “Between the World and Me,” published in Partisan Review in 1935, Wright had imagined himself into the sort of primal lynching scene that, as he reveals here, had insidiously conditioned his youthful behavior. “[O]ne morning while in the woods,” the poet stumbles on the “sooty details” of a recent spectacle lynching, including “torn tree limbs,” “a scorched coil of greasy hemp,” and “a stony skull”; these details draw him helplessly into a fictive lynching, leading him to envision “a thousand faces swirl[ing] around me, clamoring that my life be burned.” Beaten, tarred and feathered, then soaked with gasoline and ignited, the poet/victim makes us intimate witnesses to his moment of extremity: “And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling in my limbs / Panting, begging, I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot sides of death.” 43 Wright (b. 1908) and the Louisiana-born Montgomery (b. 1906) were contemporaries; in a blues entitled “The First Time I Met You” (1936), recorded a year after Wright’s poem was published, Montgomery offers a lyric portrait of the blues subject-in-formation as helpless victim of an ineludable terror that Wright would have recognized: 1

5

The first time I met the blues, mama they came walking through the wood The first time I met the blues, mama they came walking through the wood They stopped at my house, first, mama and done me all the harm they could. Now my blues got at me lord, and run me from tree to tree Now my blues got at me lord, and run me from tree to tree You should have heard me begging Mr. Blues, don’t murder me. Good morning, blues what are you doing here so soon? Good morning, blues what are you doing here so soon? You be’s with me every morning lord, and every night and noon.

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The blues came down the alley mama, and stopped right at my door

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The blues came down the alley and stopped right at my door They give me more hard luck and trouble than I ever had before.44

In Black Boy and “Between the World and Me,” Wright glosses the deadly, anxiety-inducing world Montgomery evokes here; the signal difference between Wright and Montgomery is Wright’s willingness, as one who had escaped the scene of subjection, to name white terror explicitly. This Montgomery cannot afford to do, for fear of reprisal. His song instead is a desperate ode to “Mr. Blues,” whom he begs not to murder him. “Mr.” is, it need hardly be pointed out, the ritual honorific every black man and woman in the Jim Crow South was required to extend to every white man on pain of death; not to do so was an actionable insult. Montgomery’s song thus codes the singer’s subjection as racial, and expressive: the black subject pleading for his life with the symbolic representative of White Power—as Wright’s woods-walking poet, imagining his own lynching, ends by “[p]anting and begging.” The singer begins his song (lines 1–3) by speaking of the blues (“they”) rather than to Mr. Blues; begins, as it were, by invoking a mob-like collective before appealing directly to a murderous overseer. At other points the singer will speak of “my blues” (lines 4 –5) and address the blues themselves with “Good morning, blues” (lines 7– 8). The shifting guises in which the blues present themselves to him, and the variously direct and indirect addresses he musters, suggest a subject struggling to name, and bring under control, a mode of white terror that functions precisely by breaking down the black subject’s ability to make such categorical distinctions. Does death come in the form of a white mob, or one white man with a grievance, or both? Is terror pressing closely on the subject’s psyche (“stopped at my house”), or lurking at a remove (“down the alley”), or both? And what sort of death will these shape-shifting blues inflict? “They . . . done me all the harm they could,” Montgomery complains, anticipating Mance Lipscomb’s guarded observation, in a discussion of white violence against black folk, that “you kin kill a dog mow ways than hangin im.” 45 Any listener conversant with the various tortures that accompanied lynching—which is to say the great majority of Montgomery’s black audience—would have heard this line as an invitation to imagine such a fate. The next verse consolidates this provisional meaning: “my blues,” Montgomery tells us, “got at me . . . and run me from tree to tree.” A forest that might ordinarily parse as a set of possible hiding places confronts the terrified blues subject with an array of identical lynching-trees, interchangeable scenes of looming subjection. The singer’s direct address to the audience, “You should have heard me beg-

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ging . . . “ (line 6), acknowledges his subjection—indeed, publicizes it— in an attempt to countermand the terrible isolation of the about-to-belynched subject by conjuring up an ideally receptive audience for the subject’s self-witnessed moment of extremity. The “you” of the imagined black collective supplants the “they” of the murderous white blues-mob led by, and symbolized by, Mr. Blues. Any given blues song is not necessarily always a direct report of the bluesman’s lived experience; as Barry Pearson notes, a performer may just as soon lyricize, and claim, a disaster that has happened to somebody he knows.46 In Little Brother Montgomery’s case, “The First Time I Met You” does indeed seem to correspond with what is known of its author’s self-protective racial paranoia. “Little Brother,” according to Danny Barker, was a master at travelling through the South. I noticed that he never stopped at any place that was owned or operated by white folks. When he wanted to stop for food or drink he would ask some coloured person where there was a coloured place. He drove slowly and carefully when passing through a community. He watched the road like a hawk, but when we hit the outskirts he’d sigh and relax.47

What “The First Time I Met You” offers us, finally, is a paradigm of blues song: an anxious, beleaguered first-person speaker addressing a variously configured and oppressive presence (“the blues,” “my blues,” “Mr. Blues,” and “blues,” in this song; bossman, lover, bad luck, and the like in countless others), all of which variants are secondary cathexes that enter blues song by way of the subject’s struggle to address his or her primary cathexis, atmospheric white disciplinary violence, the “sentence of death” invoked by Dollard and represented at its most extreme by spectacle lynching. “We was raised under that ether,” insisted Lipscomb, struggling to name the phantasmic threat that oppressed him as a black boy trying to survive Jim Crow protocols in turn-of-the-century east Texas: Other words, its so miny people here done so bad to me, and done kilt my people and robbed me. And I was scared ta go down the street, without gittin off the street. If I meet a white fella, he’s down the street an he had his nice clothes on, I had ta give im the street. An dont touch up against a white lady. Do, you gonna git kilt, Nigra. . . . This town here is rotten with that! An I lived through that.48

In the blues lyric spectrum, the beseeching cry of “Mr. Blues, don’t murder me” leads, when the immediate pressure of white terror has subsided, to the restless ache of “Good morning, blues” and “Blues how do you do”; these latter apostrophes, in turn, provoke the desperate but playful

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seductions of “Hey baby, won’t you take a walk with me” and the mournful accusation “You don’t love me.” What the bluesman seeks, above all is a lover’s embrace that will stave off the overhanging threat of toredownness in a claustral social field “rotten” with Negrophobic aggression; what he fears is the lover’s abandonment that will leave him defenseless, once again, in the face of such a threat. What he mourns, most profoundly, is his thoroughgoing unwantedness. Blues lyricism finds salvation in mourned unwantedness. It transforms the suffocating burden of “ether”—white racial hatred and incipient mob violence—into the pretext for blues apostrophe: the blues street singer is “moaning and groaning,” “screaming and crying,” and taking up space on the same small-town sidewalk down which the white woman’s promenading figure threatens apocalypse; he is directly addressing all who will listen, reforming the phantasmic lynch mob as a nickel-tossing crowd, white and black, happy to stand vicariously accused (“Oh baby, you done me wrong”) of romantic perfidy. There are clear African antecedents for this idea that in castigating or pleading with his abandoning lover, the bluesman might in fact be purging himself of forbidden aggression against deadly white power. Learthen Dorsey describes the Ashanti custom of bo akutia in which “an ingenious vituperation by proxy is engaged in”: A person accompanies a friend to the home of the chief or some other official who has offended him but of whom he is afraid. In the presence of this person, the aggrieved individual pretends to have an altercation with his friend, whom he verbally assails and abuses freely. Once he has relieved himself of his pent-up emotions in the hearing of the person against whom they are really intended, the brief ritual ends with no overt acknowledgment by any parties involved of what has actually taken place.49

In African American blues culture, the white “boss” rather than the black tribal chieftain was sometimes the focus of indirect blues protest, with the mule as intermediary. “I’ve known guys,” Big Bill Broonzy told Alan Lomax, that wanted to cuss out the boss and was afraid to go up to his face and tell him what he wanted to tell him, and I’ve heard them sing those things—sing words, you know, back to the boss—say things to the mule, make like the mule stepped on his foot—say, “Get off my foot, goddamn it!” and he meant he was talking to the boss. “You son-of-a-bitch,” he say, “stay off my foot!” and such things as that.50

My claim is that such complaints to boss, lover, and even mule, in the uniquely apostrophic, subjective, and colloquial mold into which early

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blues song cast them—“I ain’t gonna be your lowdown dog no more”— would not have achieved lyric form had not the existential challenge posed by a new kind of disciplinary violence, lynching-as-spectacle, forced a new kind of black subject to emerge in the 1890s. What sort of subject was this? Male and female both, since the threat posed to black men by lynching, vagrancy laws, and the like registered on black women—who were directly victimized only rarely by these disciplinary snares, although they did suffer sexual violence at the hands of white male employers—as an ongoing sense of possible and actual loss. A self-focused one, above all; lyric witness to the drama of the lone, restless, imperiled black American wanderer and the lonely, restless, imperiled stayer-at-home. “The blues,” as Lawrence Levine notes, “was the most highly personalized, indeed, the first almost completely personalized music that Afro-Americans developed.” What sets blues song apart from ragtime and medicine show ditties, badman ballads, work songs, and other post-Reconstruction black secular song forms is an intense focus on the singer’s own emotion-laden experience, often grounded in bodily distress: I’m tore down; I’m broken-hearted; I got stones in my passway; cold chills run over me; I got ramblin’ on my mind; I sat in the electrocutin’ room, my arms folded up and crying. “The blues grabbed both my legs this mornin’ . . . ,” cries Tommy McClennan in “Blues Trip Me This Morning” (1942), “they tripped me, t’rowed me down.” In blues song, virtually without exception, the singer is the subject. “Of the thousands of blues recorded between 1920 –1941,” Stephen Calt offers, “there are probably fewer than half a dozen that are not sung from the first person.” Levine finds a parallel between the self-focus of early blues song and the concurrent embrace by black intellectuals and the black middle class of Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of self-reliance, but suggests no mechanism— other than an implied trickle-down—by which those in the so-called desperate class who actually created blues might have absorbed Washingtonian individualism.51 In fact, as Ayers, Litwack, and others have noted, a significant number of black men at the dawn of the Jim Crow era were withdrawing from the mainstream, rejecting the Washingtonian work ethic even as America rejected them; their individualism was fueled, if anything, by a desire to contest their social erasure (as “boys” and “worthless Negroes”) and a furious resentment bred by white vigilantism that tripped them, as it were, and threw them down. An 1889 article in the black Fisk Herald, according to Ayers, argued that the rising tide of mass violence against blacks by whites could be traced to the “younger whites who are even more hostile and bitter than the older ones” and to “the younger Negroes [who] are ignorant of

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the so-called instinctive fear of their fathers [and are] prone to brood in bitterness and suppressed rage over their wrongs, [and] are more sensitive to injustice and quick to resent.” 52

1889 was just before lynchings suddenly surged in popularity among southern whites and took on the trappings of mass spectacle, recreating in “the younger Negroes” a latter-day version of their fathers’ “instinctive fear.” It was this explosive combination of bitterness and terror, furious revolt and violent subjection, that helped bring early blues song into being. Economic dislocation played a role, too, helping to create a class of freefloating African American laborers who were particularly vulnerable to white mob violence. “Up to fifteen years ago, tramps of any sort were unknown,” an article in the Nation observed in 1893, as a worldwide depression settled in. “Now, whites go by, at some seasons, daily, and gangs of colored wandering beggars have also begun. Usually such negroes are willing to work on odd jobs only. It is probable that these vagrant bands furnish the wretched victims for the horrible lynchings described in so much detail in the local papers.” 53 Early blues musicians were a loosely knit artisanate within this class—at once subject to the lynchings, vagrancy laws, prison farms, and chain gangs that scourged it and at least partially independent of the economic pressures that molded it. Little Brother Montgomery’s brand of blues piano, for example, took shape in the barrelhouses, rough-and-ready jooks that sprang up in turpentine, lumber, and sawmill towns and camps in rural Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the late nineteenth century. Profitable circuits developed along freshly laid train routes; piano players developed followings and evolved signature styles, “risking life and limb,” notes Mike Rowe, in the process.54 The young black male laborers— especially turpentine workers—who formed the primary audience for such music were thought by both races, according to Roberta Senechal de la Roche, to be “especially unique and ‘backward’ in attitude and customs,” which is to say that their self-contained black subculture preserved a restive, rebellious frontier vitality that directly contravened Washingtonian accommodationism and submission. “Although little systematic data on the occupations of blacks lynched yet exist,” De la Roche adds, “it is suggestive that those regions in the South where the timber industry flourished—such as northern Florida, southern and western Georgia, east Texas, and central and southern Mississippi—had relatively high lynching rates.” These regions also, and not coincidentally, produced more than their share of early blues singers.55

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CHANGING THE JOKE, SLIPPING THE YOKE: LYNCHING AND BLUES HUMOR

Even as they engage with history by dramatizing a recognizable form of black beleaguerment, songs such as “Blue Spirit Blues” and “The First Time I Met You” convert pain into aesthetic pleasure with the help of blues repetitions. “Repetition of . . . distressing experience as a game,” according to Freud, is one way the subject may actively master, and derive pleasure from, an otherwise overpowering threat to the ego’s integrity.56 Jokes, too, sometimes draw on “distressing experience” to produce pleasure—Wylie E. Coyote’s repeated flattenings in the “Roadrunner” cartoons are a visual joke, in this sense—and the AAB verses of “Blue Spirit Blues” and “The First Time I Met You,” like those of McTell, King, and Broonzy, bear an uncanny formal resemblance to the standard tripartite joke: unfortunate or humiliating incident, same incident repeated with minor intensification (supplied in performance by a change to the subdominant chord), then punchline (highlighted by a change to the dominant chord). Joking was, as it happens, an important way in which blues musicians extracted pleasure-in-repetition from the “sentence of death” under which lynching had placed them. Asked in 1965 by a white blues researcher to “tell us a bit about South Carolina,” the home state he’d fled for New York, the Rev. Gary Davis dryly replied that “in South Carolina they hung coloured people when they felt like it. In Georgia they staked them.” 57 Lacking a punchline, but a grim jest nonetheless. To be staked is to be burned, and perforce dismembered: a fate worse than mere hanging, and productive of extreme anxieties that black blues subjects struggled to contain and transform. William Ferris relates another example of blues joking, a signifying exchange in the late 1960s between two Mississippi juke joint musicians that bears almost vaudevillian accents: Pine Top: I’m gonna leave here, boy. Jasper Love: Yeah, let’s go down to Vicksburg. I was down a little bit below here, coming towards Louisiana, and I looked up the road and I see a stick I thought was across the road, but it was a black snake. Pine Top: Black snake? Jasper Love: Yeah, and I run up there and I went to kill the snake, and you know what the snake did? He throwed up both hands and told me don’t hurt him ’cause he was trying to git outta Mississippi too. Pine Top: (laughs) I hear you.58

“[R]ather than an escape from reality,” argues Kalamu ya Salaam in a discussion of black blues humor,

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when we fantasize, it is based on a brutally honest recognition of reality, a reality albeit clothed in a metaphorical grace . . . thus, we laugh loud and heartily when every rational expectation suggests we should be crying in despair. The combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the brutal facts of life is the basis for the humor of blues people, which is real black humor.59

Jasper Love’s brutal humor takes on a peculiar urgency when one remembers that white lynching fever in the South, driven by fear of the socalled black beast rapist, had long tended to play itself out in gruesome acts of ritual castration, and that “black snake” was a familiar blues trope for the willful, imperiled black phallus. Where Love’s black snake is a restless member fleeing the theater of its own impending destruction, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” (1927) evokes a restless member seeking loving racial refuge. Jefferson’s plea derives its poignancy from the fact that imputed black male desire for white female flesh (“the usual crime”) was the most frequently invoked pretext for lynching: Mmmmmm mmm black snake crawling in my room Mmmmmm mmm black snake crawling in my room And some pretty mama better come and get this black snake soon.60

If the white lynch mob was able to extract cathartic pleasure from the isolated black male subject by torturing, castrating, burning, and dismembering him, then the figural shadow cast by these violences shows up in the blues tradition not just as the blues subject’s anxieties about his (or her) own tore-downness or incipient victimization, but as the willingness to inflict lynch-mob-like abjection on other blacks, and extract pleasure in the process.61 Blues textuality offers several examples of this expressive mode, which might best be understood as the blues subject’s willed transformation into a fearless, swaggering “badman” figure. On the opening page of Clarence Major’s Dirty Bird Blues (1996), Georgiaborn bluesman Manfred Banks becomes enraged when he discovers that his estranged wife is sleeping with a local minister. “My baby saying Daddy to another man,” he fumes. “[I’m gonna] use that nigger to mop up a greasy floor, make that nigger think a mob of Georgia crackers lynching his ass, work my mojo on that nigger, pistol-whip that nigger till he bleed green pee.” 62 In J. J. Phillips’s Mojo Hand (1966), North Carolina blues guitarist Blacksnake Brown (modeled on Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins) tells his apprentice, Eunice Prideaux, about southern violence, and expresses impatience at the tardiness of his partner, X.L.:

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“The South ain’t no good. You know where Jacqueline come from, over to Monroe [Louisiana], they got lots of them night riders. It ain’t no black man safe there. You could get yourself kill and wouldn’t nobody even know of your death. Man, when that old X.L. coming?” “I don’t know.” “Shit, you ain’t ’posed to know. Look like I’m got to join them night riders myself to get a little action out of these slow-assed niggers what call themselves my friends.” 63

In “A to Z Blues,” a 1924 recording, Billy Higgins engages in playful repartee with Josephine “Josie” Miles that suddenly veers into an extended description of the tortures he has in store for her, tortures so horrifyingly baroque as to be laughable—which is clearly the point: J: What you gonna do, boy? B: I’m gonna cut your nappy head four diff ’rent ways Long, short, deep and wide When I get through usin’ my black-handled razor You know you’re gonna take a ride. J: If you can catch me! B: I’m gonna cut ABCD In the top of your head That’s gonna be treatin’ you nice And you ain’t gonna be dead I’m gonna cut EFG Right across your face HIJK That’s where runnin’ takes place I’m gonna cut LMN ’Cross both of your arms You gonna sell shoestrings and pencils Your whole life long I’m gonna OPQ That means trouble to you I’m gonna grab you too and turn you Ev’ry way but loose I’m gonna cut RST Just to hear you cry That’s the last time tears Are gonna run from both of your eyes I’m gonna cut UVW On the bottom of your feet And that’s the last time you’ll walk down Thirty-fifth Street

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I’m gonna mark you ’cross your bosom With XYZ When I get through with alphabet You’ll stop messin’ with me.64

Deliberate exaggeration is one of the defining qualities Salaam ascribes to what he calls “the blues aesthetic,” and exaggeration here works to multiple purposes.65 “A to Z Blues” burlesques the black badman mythos (not to mention black uplift-through-literacy), but it also allows Higgins to occupy, frolic within, and at least partially demystify the white lynch mob’s terrifying license, inflicting (in fantasy) the mob’s tortures on a helpless black body. The song makes trash-talking play out of deadly terror. There is a kind of liberating gallows humor in the bluesman’s flirting with the lyncher’s subject position, but there is also an aggressive posturing in the three examples I’ve just cited that owes less to race than to place and class. Black male southerners, like the white male southerners who lynched them, were shaped by their region’s fondness for violence, their investment in a concept of personal honor upheld through handson reprisal. If the blues textual tradition is shadowed by images of both lynch-mob-engendered abjection and badman aggression, that is attributable in part to the social position occupied by early blues musicians: both putative source and potential object of white racial hysteria, they were honorary members of the wandering-vagrant class of so-called worthless Negroes that blanketed the post-Reconstruction South and helped spur the lynching fever of the 1890s. “Lacking steady employment,” declaimed a “Southern lawyer” in 1900, “and frequently too lazy to work even when employment is possible, these idle, vicious persons roam over the country, a prey to every brutal propensity.” 66 While most blues musicians preferred to be “idle” where exploitative sharecropping economies were concerned, the charge of viciousness cannot entirely be dismissed as white racist projection. Guns and knives were common accoutrements of the blues life, as requisite to juke joint performers as guitars or harmonicas. Leadbelly narrowly escaped lynching at the hands of a Louisiana mob in 1930 after assaulting a “splendid white citizen” with a pocketknife.67 Skip James (b. 1902) is said to have concluded one abortive venture into Mississippi juke joint proprietorship in 1929 by clearing out the club with a shotgun after a gunfight had broken out. “If anything, his reenactment spoke of his dissatisfaction with not having killed everyone in sight; his resentful tone of voice left no doubt that his revenge was incomplete and that he had never adequately gotten even with his enemies.” 68 James’s lyric output reflects this fondness for extreme violence; one of his earliest recordings, “22-20 Blues” (1931), threatens a

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gun-inflicted dismemberment that recalls the Texas lynching described by Mance Lipscomb (“[the white mob] shot im enough times ta have sister holes in im all over”): If I send for my baby, and she don’t come If I send for my baby, and she don’t come All the doctors in Wisconsin, sure won’t help her none. And if she gets unruly, and gets so she won’t “do” And if she gets unruly, and gets so she won’t “do” I’ll take my 22-20, I’ll cut her half in two.69

Where Skip James is brooding, Bo Carter is playful; but Carter, too, works an expressive register that is shadowed by a southern history of lynch-mob-inflicted torture. The first passage below is an account in the Vicksburg Evening Post of a 1904 double lynching in Doddsville, Mississippi; the second, Carter’s “All Around Man” (1936), is the work of a Mississippi bluesman who was eleven when the Doddsville lynching took place: Luther Holbert and his wife, negroes . . . were tied to trees and while the funeral pyres were being prepared, they were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket. Some of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore into the flesh of the man and woman. It was applied to their arms, legs and body, then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.70 Now I ain’t no butcher, no butcher’s son, I can do your cuttin’ until the butcher-man comes, ’Cause I’m an all around man, oh I’m an all around man, I mean I’m an all around man, I can do most anything that comes to hand. Now I ain’t no plumber, no plumber’s son, I can do your screwin’ till the plumber-man comes, ’Cause I’m an all around man [etc.] Now I ain’t no miller, no miller’s son, I can do your grindin’ till the miller-man comes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now I ain’t no auger-man, no auger-man’s son, I can bore your hole till the auger-man comes.71

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Like James’s “22-20 Blues,” both of these texts were intended by their creators to pleasure southern audiences: a vengeful, voyeuristic white reading audience in the case of the lynching account, a beleaguered black race-records audience (and a white audience for “party records”) in the case of Carter’s song. Both texts find that pleasure in what might be called the polymorphously torturable black body: butchered, violently plumbed, ground to bits, bored out. Pleasure is taken not simply by those who consume each text, but also by the actors who inhabit it, and here the contrast grows revealing. The sadistic, souvenir-claiming pleasure taken by the lynchers in the lynching account is reconstituted in Carter’s song as a playful gift of pleasure (“your grinding,” “your screwing”) to the woman he is addressing. Blues song reconfigures torture as an all-points sexual healing proffered by a virtuosic lover. Here, unexpectedly, is the “lusty lyrical realism charged with taut sensibility” that Richard Wright invokes as the blues’ gift to American culture.72 It is impossible to think of any other American song form in the 1930s that works this peculiarly rich vein of expressive material. The tautness in Carter’s Mississippi-born case comes, I am claiming, from the ghosts of spectacle lynching: unspeakable, unspoken, but felt as a shaping presence. As a cultural text, “All Around Man” is overdetermined; it draws on various sources, above all an African American signifying tradition of sexual innuendo that had already, by 1936, been appropriated by the interracial pop market for “blue blues” such as “You’ve Got the Right Key but the Wrong Keyhole,” “Press My Button (Ring My Bell),” and several hundred variations on “Wild about That Thing.” Bo Carter himself recorded at least 118 titles, many of which mined the same playful mix of sex and aggression as “All Around Man,” including “Pin in Your Cushion” (1931), “Ram Rod Daddy” (1931), “My Pencil Won’t Write No More” (1931), “Mashing That Thing” (1935), “Please Warm My Weiner” (1935), and “Don’t Mash My Digger So Deep” (1936).73 Now my baby’s got the meat, and I got the knife I’m gonna do her cuttin’, this bound to solve my life And I’m tellin’ you baby, I sure ain’t gonna deny, let me put my banana in your fruit basket, then I’ll be satisfied. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I met a hot mama, I wanted to love her so bad, I lost all the lead in my pencil I had Now, the lead’s all gone, oh the lead’s all gone, oh the lead’s all gone, the pencil won’t write no more. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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[W]hen I get to use my digger, I use it like I should, the women all cryin’ your old digger, ya know, it digs and feels so good.74

Old myths about black sexual potency (the stud slave, the black beast rapist) are being conjured with in such songs; new combinations of pleasure and pain are being ventured under the sign of play. The bluesman as figurative lyncher who can “do it” to his woman a dozen different ways is shadowed always, however, by a far less playful scene of subjection in which the black phallus plays an equally central symbolic role. “A HELL OF A THING TO SEE”: CONFESSING THE BLUES, TRANSCODING THE BLUES

Lynching in the post-Reconstruction South was terror enforced through both spectacles and representations, a matter not merely of lynched black bodies produced by white mobs—3,220 between 1880 and 1930, nearly one a week—but of widely circulated newspaper accounts of such atrocities. More than 150 separate in-state lynchings were reported by Mississippi newspapers alone between 1900 and 1909; almost all of the victims were black men accused of crimes against whites, usually murder or attempted murder, with rape or attempted rape a distant second.75 “The custom of burning human beings,” protested Booker T. Washington in a 1904 letter to the editor, has become so common as scarcely to excite interest or attract unusual attention. . . . These burnings without a trial are in the deepest sense unjust to my race; but it is not this injustice alone which stirs my heart. These barbarous scenes followed, as they are, by publication of the shocking details are more disgraceful and degrading to the people who inflict the punishment than those who receive it.76

Common as lynchings-with-burning were in 1904, accounts of them certainly excited interest when published, precipitating fury and despair in correspondents to black newspapers such as the Indianapolis Freeman, even as they provided white readers with a “shocking” thrill. Although such lynching narratives may, as Washington claims, have been degrading to the lynchers, they nevertheless served a fetish function for whites who consumed them, repeatedly staging a second-order ritual of containment in which the “Negro criminal” was apprehended, transformed through torture into the grotesque fiend he was “known” to be, then annihilated, his charred fragments distributed as another kind of fetish by the eager mob. Such narratives were also clearly, as Tolnay and Beck claim, “a weapon for the further psychological torment of the entire African-

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American community,” illiterate as well as literate, since written accounts were retold orally and widely disseminated as chilling warnings about the limits of acceptable black behavior.77 Early blues musicians hardly needed the added insult of newspaper accounts to buttress what experience had already taught them; a remarkable number had either witnessed lynchings firsthand— often as children— or seen lynched bodies later, after they’d been dragged through town or strung up for display. This was as true for the so-called classic blues singers on the southern vaudeville circuit, many of them women, as it was for their almost exclusively male peers on the juke joint circuit. In 1922, Alberta Hunter was on southern tour when “the body of a young black boy, lynched because he supposedly talked back to a white man, was thrown into the lobby of a theatre where she was to appear.” 78 Guitarist and singer Esther Mae Scott (b. 1893), who worked and toured with Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong, briskly corrected interviewer Theresa Danley in 1976 when asked about a turnof-the-century lynching in Mississippi: TD: Did you ever witness or hear tales of the lynching? EMS: No, I didn’t hear any tales or witness any tales of the lynching. I saw charred bodies up against trees in Vicksburg on Clay Street. They were burned beyond recognition, and they said the body was a body of Jesse Dawt’s brother, a colored man that attempted rape on a white girl. TD: That was in the city . . . EMS: Vicksburg, Mississippi. TD: About how old were you when you saw that? EMS: I was seven or eight years old. We dare not talk about it, we dare not to say anything, it was just there.79

Scott’s prickly insistence on her status as eyewitness to the aftermath of a spectacle lynching is the rebelliousness of a principled truthteller. Yet there were truths, her statement suggests, that could not be uttered at the time without risking her own conversion into a charred body or the equivalent. The blues subject is suspended between conflicting imperatives: the need to bear witness to such outrages, the prohibitive danger of bearing witness to them. Heroic nonchalance—minimizing the claims of both imperatives—was one attitude blues subjects sometimes adopted. “That wadn nothin but ta see a fella git kilt,” insisted Mance Lipscomb after describing a lynching-by-horse-dragging he had witnessed as a boy (“Body near about like mush”), his aplomb later vanishing with an admission that as an older man he’d cried when a boyhood friend, tried summarily for the sin of dating a white girl, had been hung by a white mob:

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They hung im right there at the jailhouse. They wouldn’t let nobody in ta see im except those that fed im, from when they drug im in til they hung im. Wouldn even let his mama see im. I rode up there ta see im, tried to catch a glimpse of im through one a them barred-up windas. But I never could see im. That was long about—I’d say nineteen twenty-six. . . . I cried when they hung im. I’d a done inythang fur him. He was my best friend. But back then, there wadn a thang I could do fur him. Ever time I go through Anderson, I thank a him.80

Here the need to bear witness is frustrated—and traumatizing emotion produced—by the impossibility of bearing witness, a product of the same iniquitous power relations that elsewhere manifest themselves as charred black bodies and the like. Blues autobiographies and interviews often become a surrogate stage in which the blues subject is finally able to speak the long-unspeakable traumas engendered by such spectacles; to “confess the blues” rather than repress a soul-deep ache, shrug it off, or transubstantiate it into coded musical protest. Big Joe Duskin (b. 1921), a Cincinnati boogie-woogie piano player, told interviewer Steven Tracy about the tears he’d shed after witnessing the lynching of his cousin, Handy Fuller, as a boy in Birmingham, Alabama (Fuller’s offense was breaking into a local store owned by a white man, taking some groceries to feed his hungry family, and leaving a signed note saying he’d pay when he could): Now, Steve, I remember back during the days, back during the Klan when they was movin. I didn’t understand it, but I knew what they did and all that by hearing the old people what they talked about. And they told us any time we go in the presence of whites or whatever say “Yassur” and “No sir.” [W]e was brought up in that manner. . . . Well, the Klu Klux Klan come and got [Handy] out of the house that night, Steve. And when they did, I’m looking at em. I saw they hoods but I couldn’t understand, I thought they was ghosts, and the way I’m crying and all that, and one of em kicked me right back in the hind parts there. I ain’t never had nothin hurt me so bad in my life when this guy kicked me like that. Well, I crawled right out of the way and got into bed and I seen em when they put this rope around his neck. They says, “We gonna hang you. You’ll never break in another store around here. Specially a white man’s store.” So they took him out, Steve, and I crawled out the back and went around through the tall weeds and I brushed em away where I could see it. And I seen em when they put him on this mule, they had his hands tied behind him. They put this big rope on his neck and said “Hit that horse on his ass as hard as you can so he can drop right from him and break that black bastard’s neck.” . . . Okay, when the horse, they hit the horse real hard with

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a whip, he runned out, my uncle— cousin—fell, and when he fell I heard his neck snap like that, see. They said “Leave the bastard stay there and let somebody come get him.” They said “now, let’s do better n this. Get that mule and tie him back and drag his ass right back in front of his people and drop his black ass and leave him stay there.” So that’s what they did . . . so finally I come cryin and come round the back way and told my Aunt Judy, I said “They brought cousin Handy’s body and they laid it out in the drive.” And she went out and she grabbed him up, Steve, because they didn’t know it, they just dragged the boy there in the road. And she was huggin and crying and said “Awh, Lord, my son!” Oh, and she was just so pitiful about it and we all cried and all of that, so they buried him and that was that.81

Duskin’s confession, like Esther Mae Scott’s, evokes the young blues subject-in-formation as silenced witness to an act of terrorizing white violence—violence that in this case falls, glancingly but painfully, on the witness himself. By verbalizing their intention to do “better n this” before tying Handy’s body to a mule and letting it be dragged “back in front of his people,” the lynchers make it clear that a disciplining spectacle—a graphic warning to the entire black community—is what they are after, rather than simple retribution. What is striking, for all this, is Duskin’s eagerness as an old man to unburden himself of this remembered primal scene in the presence of a compassionate white witness (“Steve”) who is also, as it happens, a fellow blues musician. “Intersubjective witnessing,” a term used by Cassie Premo Steele in her study of trauma and recovery in the poetry of Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Andalzua, is an apt description of the process Duskin and Tracy are engaged in. If trauma, as Steele defines it, “marks the painful aftereffects of a violent history in the body and the mind of the survivor”—such as Duskin’s claim that “I ain’t never had nothin hurt me so bad in my life”—then recovery from trauma, according to Freud, is a three-stage process of remembering, reconstructing, and working through the traumatic event with the help of a compassionate listener. “To witness,” writes Steele, “one needs a listener who will hear the story of the event. Until the repetitions of the event are turned into memories and reconstructed in some way, the survivor is left to suffer in silence.” 82 Duskin’s insistence at the end of his narration that “they buried [the lynched man] and that was that” suggests that a kind of silencing was wrought on him as a boy in which his need to mourn— so evident here, as in Lipscomb’s confession—was stanched prematurely by both white callousness and the rough exigencies of black life. “Confessing the blues” may be a way of healing old wounds by unmaking the racial protocols of Jim Crow through a conscious act of intersubjective

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witnessing, allowing progressive northern whites to hear, acknowledge, and honor the suffering that violent white southerners had inflicted on their fellow black citizens years earlier. Something of this dynamic was clearly at work in the life of bluesinflected songster Josh White (b. 1914), who covered Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” from the relative safety of New York’s Cafe Society stage in the 1940s, purging himself before a sophisticated interracial audience of the anger he still felt after witnessing a lynching in his youth. A guitarist and singer, White had spent much of the 1920s as a so-called lead boy for John Henry Arnold and several other blind street singers in and around Greenville, South Carolina. Greenville during those years was under the sway of Cole Blease, two-time governor become U.S. senator, a Negrophobic politician who once referred to lynching as “the divine right of the Caucasian race to dispose of the offending blackamoor without benefit of jury.” 83 Just across the state line was Georgia, where black folk were staked rather than hung, in Rev. Gary Davis’s pithy formulation. “[White’s] most vivid and horrifying memory,” writes his biographer, Elijah Wald, “came from [his] first trip south with Arnold at age 12 and provided a story that he would tell over and over in later years.” 84 Like many itinerant black musicians, White and Arnold were in the habit of bivouacking at night in roadside fields; on this particular night, White remembered: I was awakened by a hand put over my mouth. It was like being smothered, but then I heard a voice in my ear. “Joshua, what is it? Don’t be afraid, this is Mr. Arnold.” Then he stopped holding my mouth. My ears became adjusted first and I heard sounds, and then my eyes got adjusted to what was around me and I saw where the noise was coming from. It might have been like across the street, there was a crowd of people stirring about and they had a bonfire. There were kids and adults. Drinking, a lot of drinking. Cider and white lightning. Then I saw this—there were two figures. They were stripped other than their shirts. Like on tiptoe. I don’t think I could see them dangling, but what I could see and what I can’t get out of my eyes: I saw kids, ten, twelve years old, girls and boys my age, mothers, fathers, aunts, adults. The kids had pokers and they’d get them red hot and jab them into the bodies’ testicles . . . it was a hell of a thing to see. I came close to screaming but Mr. Arnold could sense, as I was telling him what was happening, when I might scream and he would put his hand over my mouth. It wasn’t torture, it was just mutilation; they must have been dead. The people were laughing. . . . We were afraid to leave until they left. It was not quite dawn. They wouldn’t wait till it got light for anyone to see what was happening. They

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vanished. It was a few miles from Waycross, Georgia. We were going there, but we turned back in the direction from which we came.85

As a foremost interpreter of “Strange Fruit” during the 1940s and 1950s, White is perhaps the only blues performer who both witnessed a lynching and managed later to purge himself overtly in song of the feelings— or at least some of the feelings—it engendered. His autobiographical confession was part of the mourning and healing process, too, as was his outspokenness, rare among bluesmen, in progressive political circles up north. “For Josh,” writes Wald, “the double lynching was a key event in his life, and he would often cite it as a source of the powerful anger that fueled both his singing and his attacks on American racism.” 86 Not every bluesman who confesses the lynching blues to an interviewer has experienced or witnessed mob violence firsthand; but the simple fact of having come of age in the Jim Crow South sometimes gives the blues subject a murderous tale to tell. “Was I aware of them?” Chicago bluesman Otis Rush (b. 1934) responded incredulously when an interviewer for Living Blues asked in 1998 whether lynchings had registered on his youthful consciousness: I knew all the time what they’ll [the white folks will] do. I’m livin’ there, man! I’m livin’ in Philadelphia, Mississippi. . . . Hey, you don’t be careful, they still do that shit down there. Okay? And you don’t have to go so far South to run into one of these peoples. Right here in Chicago—you understand? You could go around a block, and you’ll run into one of them. What do you call it—Klu Klux Klan? They everywhere, man! Look at what they just did to this man in Texas— drag a man behind a pickup truck until he’s dead. That ain’t happened no ten years ago. That just recently happened. So you know I gotta be right because they still doin’ it. And who knows how many peoples is under the water or under the bushes and trees and leaves. We don’t know they’re there, but somebody know where they’re at. A lot of peoples is missing.87

Rush’s confession reveals the paranoia, both self-preserving and self-limiting, of a haunted, wounded soul. His boyhood sense of being encircled by white violence has lingered as his adult conviction that the Klan is “everywhere”— despite what watchdog groups such as Klanwatch insist is the organization’s greatly diminished membership. His old fears reanimated by the highly unusual but widely publicized dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas only a few months earlier, he has locked himself within the panopticon that southern lynch law at midcentury aimed to install, like Baker’s terrorizing “Blue Man,” in the skull of every Mississippi black boy. In his autobiography, I Am the Blues (1990), Chicago blues bassist and

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prolific blues songwriter Willie Dixon (b. 1915) describes his own boyhood in terms that echo Rush’s sour view, acknowledging black powerlessness in the face of lynching with a bluesman’s caustic frankness: When I was a kid, we were living on Jackson and Locust Street [in Vicksburg] and the Ku Kluxers marched by our house, dragging some black guy up to the school, tarrin’ and featherin’ and all that kind of stuff. You couldn’t do nothing about these things. The black man had to be a complete coward.88

Dixon ran away from home for the first time at the age of eleven; at thirteen, he was arrested for vagrancy while passing through Clarksdale on his way to Chicago and sentenced to thirty days out on the Harvey Allen County Farm. It was there that Dixon came face to face with white disciplinary violence at its most malevolent: They’d haul us out there to work and put us on a great big ditch dig. I had never seen a ditch that big and everybody jumped off the truck and was down there cutting weeds and singing. We were on top cutting and all of a sudden I hear somebody screaming: “Oh, Lawdy! Oh, Lawdy, captain, please stop doing it. Stop doing it.” That scared the hell out of me and my partner. I dropped the hoe I had and I run over there peepin’. Boy, they’ve got five guys on this one guy, one sitting on his head, one on each arm and each leg and this guy sitting up on the hill—they called him Captain Crush—has got a strap about eight inches wide. It’s leather, about five or six inches long, a handle on it about two feet long and holes in the end of this strap about as big as a quarter. They called it Black Annie. He’s up on a mule and every time he hits this guy, flesh and blood actually came off this cat. He only hit him two or three times after he got to hollering and the guys holding him down could turn him loose after three licks because it would damn near paralyze him. He was out and they were still beating him. We were standing there wide-eyed looking—you know how a bunch of kids is. I was only 13 years old then. “Hey, come here,” he called me. “Me?” “Yeah, you.” I go down there and this guy took that damn strap and hit me upside the head and I stayed deaf for almost four years. He knocked this big patch of skin off my face and I didn’t even know what the hell was up. He hollered at me and I was laying there like a damned worm. I couldn’t even get up.

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. . . This Captain Crush that was running the farm didn’t have no mercy—you talk about mean, ignorant, evil, stupid and crazy. He fouled up many a man’s life. There was a preacher down there and this was the first time I saw a man beat to death. To hear a man screamin’ and cryin’ and begging God and everybody else to have mercy, this is a helluva thing in a young person’s life. He never really gets over it, you know, because you’ll always see it until the day you die.89

Just as young Frederick Douglass is born as a slave subject when he witnesses the flogging of his Aunt Hester in a tableau that concludes the first chapter of his Narrative, so Dixon is born as a blues subject in the primal scene he narrates here: he’s both a traumatized witness to a legal lynching (to lynch originally meant to deliver thirty-nine blows to the back of a horse thief ) and a fellow sufferer, beaten temporarily deaf with the same strap. Dixon’s witnessing eye, like Esther Mae Scott’s and Mance Lipscomb’s, is drawn to the spectacle of the black body’s dissolution, its reduction to scattered helpless flesh. Like every other blues memoirist I’ve discussed, Dixon confesses these particular lynching blues long after he’s put time and space between him and the primal scene, yet the scene continues to haunt him. Southern-born bluesmen who migrated north were spurred at least in part, it seems clear, by a restless desire to escape what Amiri Baraka once called “the scene of the crime.” 90 In Blues Mandolin Man (2001), Yank Rachell (b. 1910) describes the 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams, an NAACP worker who had led a voter registration drive in Rachell’s hometown of Brownsville, Tennessee, in terms that leave no doubt about why Rachell and many of his fellow blacks subsequently decamped: A boy workin’ for a man run a laundry. He was the head worker, Albert, Albert Williams. We call him Big Williams. So one evening he got off work, went home, eat supper, put on his house shoes and housecoat. So, the boss man come down there. You know, if I workin’ for you, you won’t come down to the house. Boss man don’t come down to the house of the one workin’ for him. Ain’t normal. But the boss man go to Albert house and call him out. “Come here.” He come out. “Get in the car.” He got in the car with him. Four or five cars were parked behind the man with their lights out. He and his boss man— carry him on to the Big Hatchie River. The other cars trail ’em on down there, haul him up in the tree, cut his privates off, his fingers and toes off, put a weight on him, and throw him in the river. That’s when I left. Why they did that? Said it was the nigger tryin’ to get up some kind of a meetin’ or something, tryin’ to get up a little organization or something, you know. They didn’t like that. . . .

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Well, that lynchin’ bother me. After everyone else was leavin’, I left too, for a while. People went to Detroit, Chicago, New York. They still over there. I had to watch my ownself with the white people.91

Although lynchings were far more common below of the MasonDixon line than above, the Midwest could be a deadly and traumatizing place for black folk, too. Clarinetist Garvin Bushell (b. 1902), who recorded with classic blueswomen Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Lucille Hegamin, opens his 1988 autobiography with his earliest memory, at age two, of a lynch mob’s howl: “Springfield [Ohio] was . . . a prejudiced town. They lynched a Negro in 1904 and the mob came right by our house. We were upstairs, looking through the crack in the window, with all the lights out, naturally. I’ll always remember the howl of that mob as they dragged the body, and the torchlights coming right through Fair Street. It seems as though this Negro didn’t pay his rent, a white woman went to throw him out, and he smacked her. They dragged him down Clark Street, over onto Fair Street. I’ll never forget that.92

This unforgettable moment of aural and racial initiation returns as musical rebelliousness, Bushell’s adolescent rejection of the piano in favor of the “noisy music”—a transmuted howl— of the jazz clarinet.93 In his 1997 autobiography, guitarist David Honeyboy Edwards (b. 1915), a prime example of the blues stoic, describes a similar dragging episode recollected from his boyhood in the Mississippi Delta. A black tenant farmer named Quack refused to allow his pregnant wife to be worked by their bossman, then killed the bossman with an ax in self-defense after being shot and wounded by him: Those men tied Quack behind a old A-model Ford and drug him down from out in the country clean to Shaw, drug him with a big grass rope. He wasn’t nothing but beefsteak when they got into town. Old Dr. Field, the old white doctor, he said, “Well, this nigger’s eyes are shot out; he won’t see his way to hell.” See, he had killed that white man but that white man made him kill him! That was some bad times back when I was a boy.94

Even as his testimony cheerfully sidesteps the question of racial injustice, Edwards’s eyes bear redemptive witness to a scene of racial subjection whose eyeless—indeed, figureless—black victim is defined precisely as a kind of extinguished witness. Eyes were dangerous possessions in the Jim Crow South, as were musical talents: both implicated black male blues subjects in a racialized sexual economy where the difference between lynching witness and lynching victim was a matter, at best, of exquisite social tact. “They’d lynch you in a minute,” Skip James insisted

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to Stephen Calt in the mid-1960s, describing the dangers he’d encountered entertaining at white parties in Mississippi back in the 1920s. “The white girls at these parties wanna come and flirt around,” but the men “don’t like to see ’em in my face no way. ’Cause I’m a darkie. Negro. . . .” 95 Coming of age in the Delta a generation after James, B. B. King (b. 1926) came face to face with the primal lynching scene James merely hints at—a scene King narrates for the first time in his 1997 autobiography Blues All Around Me. “When I’ve been described on other people’s pages,” King complains in the book’s opening chapter, “I don’t recognize myself ”; dictated to his ghostwriter, David Ritz, Blues All Around Me reflects his desire, late in life, to “open up and leave a true account of who I am.” No other published interview or autobiography offers a more indelible image of a youthful blues subject in formation: There were . . . moments . . . of shock and pain that can’t be erased from my memory. A sunny Saturday afternoon and I’m walking to the part of Lexington[, Mississippi] with the stores and the main square. I’m running an errand for Mama King, feeling the summer heat along my skin, feeling halfway happy. At least there’s no school today. I’m delivering a big basket of rich folks’ clothes Mama King has washed and ironed. Suddenly I see there’s a commotion around the courthouse. Something’s happening that I don’t understand. People crowded around. People creating a buzz. Mainly white folk. I’m curious and want to get closer, but my instinct has me staying away. From the far side of the square, I see them carrying a black body, a man’s body, to the front of the courthouse. A half-dozen white guys are hoisting the body up on a rope hanging from a makeshift platform. Someone cheers. The black body is a dead body. The dead man is young, nineteen or twenty, and his mouth and his eyes are open, his face contorted. It’s horrible to look at, but I look anyway. I sneak looks. I hear someone say something about the dead man touching a white woman and how he got what he deserves. Deep inside, I’m hurt, sad, and mad. But I stay silent. What do I have to say and who’s gonna listen to me? This is another secret matter; my anger is a secret that stays away from the light of day because the square is bright with the smiles of white people passing by as they view the dead man on display. I feel disgust and disgrace and rage and every emotion that makes me cry without tears and scream without sound. I don’t make a sound.96

This passage contrasts starkly with David Honeyboy Edwards’s description of Quack’s lynching: Edwards’s almost jaunty stoicism in the face of remembered “bad times” has given way to King’s sickening fall from innocence, the ambushing of a young blues subject with unspeakable

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emotion. If the blues singer, in John W. Work Jr.’s formulation, “translate[s] every happening into his own intimate inconvenience,” then King’s confrontation with the lynched body of his fellow Mississippian gives birth to the blues artist as secret sharer, inward-turned witness of his own grief, rage, and fear.97 The silence enforced by white power in public space—the “square . . . bright with the smiles of white people”— together with the spectacle he witnesses on an improvised stage, threaten the artist-in-formation with a kind of stillbirth. In retrospect this moment becomes the springboard for a long and variegated career as disc jockey, blues singer, guitarist, and world ambassador for the blues, all of which are King’s way, like Garvin Bushell’s, of making the sound, in public, that he was incapable of making at the primal lynching scene. “I worked off my fears,” (54) he tells us; agricultural labor is eventually displaced by restless musical labor, as King achieves show-business renown for playing up to 350 dates a year on the road with his band. The tears he is forbidden to shed in Lexington return in 1969 in the healing theater of the Fillmore West auditorium, before an audience of white flower children: At the microphone, Bill Graham gave me a straight-to-the-point introduction. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “the Chairman of the Board, B. B. King.” By the time I strapped on Lucille, every single person in the place was standing up and cheering like crazy. For the first time in my career, I got a standing ovation before I played. Couldn’t help but cry. With tears streaming down, I thought to myself, These kids love me before I’ve hit a note. How can I repay them for this love? The answer came in my music. I played that night like I’ve never played before. Played “Rock Me Baby” and “Sweet Little Angel” and “You Upset Me Baby” and “How Blue Can You Get,” played all my stuff with all my heart while they stayed on their feet, screaming and stomping for nearly three hours. It was hard for me to believe that this was happening, that the communication between me and the flower children was so tight and right. But it was true, it was probably the best performance of my life.98

Blues performance is the medium through which King is able to reorchestrate the primal lynching scene as a moment of individual and collective redemption. The black child who stood heart-flooded, a mute witness to the lynched black body on a “makeshift platform” surrounded by white leers in a Mississippi town square, has transformed that scene by ascending the stage, displacing the dead man, and making himself the focus of specular attention: the benevolent black father melting into long-deferred tears, dissolving in the embrace of a new generation of young whites. The scandal that provided the pretext for the long-ago lynching—“the dead man touching a white woman”—has returned, sanctified and magnified—as black–white communication that is “so

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tight and right.” The question that haunts the young lynching witness— “What do I have to say and who’s gonna listen to me?”—has been answered, resoundingly. It is worth asking, in light of my earlier speculations, just what role the particular songs King performed “with all his heart” may have played in enabling his cathartic release. Their explicit protest content is nil, after all, and they betray no obvious encryptions of lynching anxiety typified by “The First Time I Met You,” a song covered by King’s contemporary, Buddy Guy. King’s songs seem instead to be straightforward declarations of sexual love, animated by striking metaphors: She’s 36 in the bust, 28 in the waist, 44 in the hips, she’s got real crazy legs You upset me baby . . . yes, you upset me baby Like being hit by a falling tree, woman what you do to me. —“You Upset Me Baby” (1952) 99 I got a sweet little angel, I love the way she spreads her wings I got a sweet little angel, I love the way she spreads her wings When she puts her arms around me, she brings me joy and everything. —“Sweet Little Angel” (1956) 100 Rock me baby, rock me all night long Rock me baby, rock me all night long I want you to rock me baby, like my back ain’t got no bone. —“Rock Me Baby” (1962) 101

While it would be fatuous to argue that “You Upset Me Baby” sketches a blues subject filled with a sexual passion so earthshaking that it symbolically uproots the dreaded lynching tree, it is not fatuous to suggest that the embodied pleasures King evokes here are grounded in his lived sense of their horrifying opposite. King himself is very clear about the source of his blues songs. “Where I lived,” he explained in an interview conducted not long before his Fillmore performance, a little place between Itta Bena and Indianola in Mississippi, the people are practically the same way today, they live practically the same way, and that is under the fear of the boss in a manner of speaking. Because so many Negroes down there have been killed many, many different ways if you said the wrong thing at the wrong time. . . . So when they use the word frustration, I don’t think that really tells the whole story because a guy get to feeling a lot of times he’s afraid, he’s actually afraid. . . . [I]f you live under that system for so long, then it don’t bother you openly, but mentally, way back in your mind it bugs you. . . . Later on you sometime will think about all of this and you wonder why, so that’s where your blues comes in, you really bluesy then, y’see, because you are hurt deep down, believe me,

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I’ve lived through it, I know. I’m still trying to say what the blues is to me. So I sing about it. The next thing, which is relatively minor compared to living like I have, is your woman. 102

King’s statement should give pause to any who might be tempted to dismiss claims about the linkage between lynching and blues lyricism as farfetched speculation or oversubtle misreadings. What makes King “really bluesy,” he insists here, is the way he has been “hurt deep down” by the fear and frustration of living in a Mississippi where “so many Negroes . . . have been killed many, many different ways if [they] said the wrong thing at the wrong time.” This deep-down hurt—an individual and racewide subjection to white violence—is his blues, King claims; it’s what he “sings about,” it’s what he’s “still trying to say” in his songs. Yet King’s recorded repertoire never overtly addresses either these deaths or the pain they have caused him; the one pain he consistently sings of is the immemorial blues theme of failed love: “The Thrill Is Gone,” “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” “Every Day I Have the Blues.” We can only conclude, I think, that the “relatively minor” theme of “your woman,” which King mines to such liberating effect at the Fillmore, is in fact a kind of screen behind which lurk the outsized hungers and unresolved griefs engendered in him by exposure to racist violence. Paul Gilroy’s theory of transcoding is useful here; it helps explain the discrepancy between King’s onstage lyric silence on the question of lynching and his offstage confessional insistence on bearing witness to it. “[T]he stories which dominate black popular culture,” Gilroy argues, “are usually love stories or more appropriately love and loss stories. That they assume this form is all the more striking because the new genre seems to express a cultural decision not to transmit details of the ordeal of slavery openly in story and song. Yet these narratives of love and loss systematically transcode other forms of yearning and mourning associated with histories of dispersal and exile and the remembrance of unspeakable terror.” 103 While King, Dixon, Rush, Rachel and other blues autobiographers and interviewees have, with the encouragement of white interlocutors, openly engaged in “the remembrance of unspeakable terror,” this openness is a recent development. In their earlier lives down south, the “love and loss stories” of blues song were the only cultural arena in which these men could safely confess the “yearning and mourning” bred by their daily subjection to lynch-law. Although the distant ordeal of slavery invoked by Gilroy may have supplied some of the “deep down” hurt that King was struggling to purge in his songs, the unprecedented murderousness of the lynching era—the “many, many different ways . . . Negroes down there have been killed”—was, as Rush’s warning about

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bodies hidden under “bushes and trees and leaves” makes clear, a far more immediate source of grief and anxiety for southern-born blues singers. “[T]he blues,” insisted Lonesome Jimmy Lee in the 1960s, invoking disciplinary practices typical of the Jim Crow period rather than slavery days, “is an expression of the so-called negro in America. Of his hard tribulations that he had. . . . See, this people they had so much torment, lynched, burned, tarred and feathered, and then they have sung sadder blues than we could ever imagine.” 104 The “loss” half of the love-and-loss dialectic articulated by blues song is a way of transcoding such tribulations and torments: the bluesman sings of romantic mistreatment as a way of signifying on and mourning the “sadder blues” of racial mistreatment. A song such as “The Thrill Is Gone” (1970) speaks of failed love, for example, in terms that resonate not merely with the immediate black past—the eruption of black rage in Watts, Newark, and Detroit; the murder of Martin Luther King—but with a larger history of white violence against hangable, stompable, shootable, bombable, disposable black bodies, a history that blues song alone has the power to fully mourn: “The thrill is gone . . . the thrill is gone away from me / You gonna be sorry someday . . . for the way you treated me.” 105 The “love” half of Gilroy’s dialectic, by contrast, celebrates the power of romance and sensuality to image heavenly embodiment and unmake white terror’s inflicted wounds. “Sweet Little Angel” and “Rock Me Baby” transcode a black collective yearning—and King’s own private yearning—for existential solace, a full body embrace that might symbolically overturn the seemingly unending scourge of white violence against black flesh. (The widely publicized lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi and subsequent display of his battered body at a Chicago funeral home took place, it should be remembered, in 1955, the year before “Sweet Little Angel” was released.) If King can’t help but identify with the lynched young black man of “contorted” face whom he encounters in Lexington, then in “Sweet Little Angel” he imagines the healing antithesis: gathered in by his lover’s angelic limbs (“spread . . . wings”), his own body becomes a site of heaven-sent pleasure rather than potentially hellish pain. “Rock Me Baby,” like “Sweet Little Angel,” images what we might call a primal healing scene: sexual fusion as an all-satisfying, womb-like embrace. “You Upset Me, Baby,” by contrast, yearns for a primal healing scene, but does so in a way that registers as physical assault. This song reworks King’s primal lynching scene: both the lynched male body in Lexington and the voluptuous female body here profoundly “upset” King, but he speaks back to the latter body— publicly confesses his blues—in a way that he was unable to address the lynching victim as a stricken, silenced young witness. Sexual yearning

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partakes of, and displaces, mourning; both emotions, as Gilroy suggests, are grounded in “the remembrance of unspeakable terror.” By performing these songs and the rest of his repertoire before an enthusiastic white audience at the Fillmore, King enacts a primal healing scene at the very moment he evokes it lyrically: the cheering white flower children become the “sweet little angel” who brings King joy, the “baby” by whom he is embraced and rocked all night long. Transcoding his blues, transporting his new white public, he unmakes the protocols of Jim Crow. “NO MORE COTTON IN ROBINSONVILLE”: AN EARLY TEXAS LYNCHING BLUES

Is there any evidence that blues singers in the Jim Crow South were not merely aware of lynching, felt the presence of it as a personal affront, and sang songs that unconsciously transcoded its inflicted traumas, but used blues song as a deliberate way of encoding their fear, grief, and anger? “The First Time I Met You” and “Conversation With the Blues” seem to fit the bill, but we have only circumstantial evidence regarding authorial intent and no evidence whatever about the songs’ reception by black audiences. What we do have, however, is one curious and suggestive example of early blues song that was intended by its creator as a coded but explicit protest against an infamous local lynching, and was readily understood as such by its black audience. It comes to us in the form of an innocuous four-line blues stanza, a regional variant on “Hesitating Blues” provided by boogie-woogie piano player Sammy Price. Price, who recorded “Machine Gun Blues” (1939) with guitarist Peetie Wheatstraw and “Death Letter Blues” (1961) with blueswoman Ida Cox, was born in 1908 in Honey Grove—“a small town in east Texas,” he tells us bluntly at the beginning of his 1990 autobiography What Do They Want?, where the slogan was written in big bold letters, “the blackest land and the whitest people.” This slogan was meant for white people, and at an early age I used to hear people say, “Nigger, do not let the sun go down on you here.” [N]igger was your only name, and you could be damn sure that if you did anything other than shut up, bow your head and take it, it was only a matter of hours before you were just another of who knows how many dead niggers.106

When he was four or five, Price moved with his family to Waco and quickly fell in love with music—the blues, in particular, a form whose sudden popularity he links with a wartime increase in civic tension and the felt need among black folk for musical unburdening:

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In 1916 music got into the streets where a black kid could get close to it. . . . But now it was war-time, and I guess people needed to hear and make more music in order to feel better. Carnivals started passing through town, and traveling minstrel shows; black people started listening to the blues . . . from [then] on until the summer of 1918 we just day-dreamed about music, always listening to the blues melodies we heard around us day and night. These songs used to come to us from some of the strangest places, and from the start I loved every one of them. Like religion, the blues was also a part of our people.107

Price was, from the standpoint of blues history, a member of the pivotal second generation: not one of the early blues-inflected songsters (Henry Thomas, Henry Sloan) or their disciples (Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton), or their literate middle-class confrere (W. C. Handy), but one of the first young black musicians to come of age when blues music was a cultural given, a widespread but still-blossoming vehicle of racial consciousness. That consciousness, as Price makes clear, was both celebratory and anxiety ridden, a hunger for secular salvation linked to a particular kind of war being made against black people: A guitar player came past our house one day, and instead of singing the original words of a blues we knew he made up a set of words to describe a lynching that had taken place in a small community called Robinsonville, near Waco. Every few days there used to be some kind of lynching or a killing which involved black folks. Blacks always used to come out with the short end of the stick, and the only hope for the losers was jail or death—take your choice. The words went something like this: I never have, and I never will, pick no more cotton in Robinsonville. Tell me how long will I have to wait, can I get you now or must I hesitate? . . . You can be sure that words of songs can have an effect on a person. The words of the Hesitation Blues made us realize, for the first time, the dangers for a black man of living in the South, so that all the years we lived in Dallas and other cities in the South our hearts were always filled with the hidden fear that we could very well be the subject for one of those blues songs.108

Thirty years earlier, in conversation with blues researcher Paul Oliver, Price recounted his fall from innocence even more starkly, in terms that clarify the song’s oppositional moment: When I was a boy I lived in Texas, and it was pretty rugged. I’ll never forget the first song I ever heard to remember. A man had been lynched

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near my home in a town called Robinson, Texas. And at that time we were living in Waco, Texas—my mother, brother and myself. And they made a parody of this song and the words were something like this: I never have, and I never will Pick no more cotton in Robinsonville, Tell me how long will I have to wait, Can I get you now or must I hesitate? I remember this particular lynching. Now what that meant by that song was that he would never pick any more cotton in Robinson—Robinsonville—because a man had been lynched there. And then shortly after that they lynched a man in Waco, Texas. I was in the public school you know, as a kid. And we had to run home and close the door and then they lynched this man and then they burned him and sewed up his ashes in a little cloth and sold these ashes to the people. So you see I’m quite conscious of the—you know—the social pattern in America.109

While Price’s memory falters on the question of how many lynchings took place, his two accounts dovetail on the crucial issue of his own response: the young black subject, a secondhand witness, was stricken with “hidden fear,” a fear that actually sent him into hiding. This fear, like B. B. King’s, was the private correlate of a public act: the spectacle lynching of a black man with whom Price could not help but feel an imperiling racial equivalence. Price’s fear, like King’s, creates him as a subject, structuring a psychic landscape grounded in his almost-unspeakable terror (masked by euphemisms such as “rugged”) of being reduced to clothbound ashes for sale. What distinguishes Price’s scene of subjection from King’s is the mediating role played by blues music. According to Price’s first account, a variant of “Hesitating Blues” sung by a wandering guitar player precipitated his fall from innocence into racial fear, substituting a coded warning for the far more direct warning supplied to King by the lynched black body in Lexington. Left obscure is the mechanism by which four apparently innocuous lines—a renunciation of field labor concatenated with a lover’s plaint— came to transmit such freighted racial meanings. Price’s second account supplies us with a reading, at least for the opening couplet: the blues guitarist, resentful at a black man’s lynching in Robinson, sings of revolt. He will withhold from the white world what white disciplinary violence has been put in place to compel—namely, his participation in cotton production: “I never have, and never will / Pick no more cotton in Robinsonville.” Here, if we believe Price’s interpretation, is an incontrovertible example of early blues song as coded protest against lynching—indeed,

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against a larger system of economic exploitation within which lynching functioned as deadly guarantor. Yet in the second couplet we find an incongruous leap from subversive renunciation to blues lament: Tell me how long will I have to wait, Can I get you now or must I hesitate?

These lines are a variant of W. C. Handy’s “Hesitating Blues” (1915), which followed on the heels of his groundbreaking “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St. Louis Blues” (1914), and which was based, according to Abbe Niles, on an original that “was played and sung to Handy by a wandering musician.” Handy’s composition contains the following couplet: Tell me how long will I have to wait Oh, won’t you tell me now, Why do you hesitate? 110

Before Handy published his version, the song seems to have circulated in southern vaudeville; in 1913, at the Dreamland Theater in Waco itself, according to Abbott and Seroff, “George and Nana Coleman were ‘featuring their own composition, “How Long Must I Wait.” ’” Newman White mentions the “Hesitation Waltz,” popular around 1914 as another possible precursor to Handy’s song: I got de hesitation stockings and de hesitation shoes. I believe to my soul I got de hesitation blues. Honey, how long will I have to wait? Kin I git you now or must I hesitate? 111

And White cites a variant from Alabama, dated 1915 –16, which incorporates an early version of what will later become Bo Carter’s “All Around Man”: I ain’t no miller, No miller’s son, But do your grinding Till the miller comes; Tell me how long will I have to wait, Or will I have to do a little hesitate.112

Neither Handy’s composition nor these two variants, however, creates meaning as Price’s version seems to, by yoking together labor unrest and romantic agony in a strikingly disjunctive dyad: I never have, and I never will Pick no more cotton in Robinsonville,

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Tell me how long will I have to wait, Can I get you now or must I hesitate?

By what process of association does Price’s blues singer move from coded protest against lynching to a suitor’s complaint about an equivocating beloved? The lynched body in question was reduced to ashes and sold in small packages; perhaps the wandering bluesman, forced to imagine the possibility of his own extinction and ghastly commodification, hungers for romantic escape. Gilroy’s theory of transcoding provides a gloss: considered as a narrative of love and loss, of “yearning and mourning associated with . . . the remembrance of unspeakable terror,” Price’s “Hesitating Blues” simply reverses the terms. The opening couplet mourns the loss of terror’s victim, guardedly but angrily; the second couplet yearns for a love that would undo terror’s chill. In both cases, a hybrid bit of black popular song apparently reflects a cultural decision to comment on a lynching without transmitting the details openly; without offering the slightest hint, in fact, that a lynching is what is being signified on. Yet the message was heard by its intended black audience— clearly enough that Price himself has no trouble supplying the traumatizing particulars from memory. Does Price offer us any reason to believe his unlikely reading of the wandering guitar player’s song? Why should we assume that the variant of “Hesitating Blues” he recalls is connected in any way with the lynching he describes? His memory does falter, as I noted, on the question of where the lynching or lynchings took place. Robinson? Robinson and then Waco? There is reason to think that both incidents may be one and the same: the infamous Jesse Washington lynching of 15 May 1916, subject of the “Waco Horror” investigation in the Crisis. A mentally impaired field hand, Washington allegedly raped and killed his employer’s wife in the kitchen of her home in Robinson, then returned to the fields to hoe cotton. He was arrested, tried a week later in Waco (“one of the quickest trials on record in this part of Texas,” noted the New York World ), found guilty by an all-white jury, seized by a courtroom mob and dragged to the square in front of City Hall. He was struck with shovels, bricks, and clubs; he was stabbed; his fingers, ears, and toes were cut off. A chain was finally tied around his neck and he was strung up over a huge dry-goods box heaped with flammable materials. “Screaming for mercy until the flames silenced him,” reported the World, Jesse Washington, a negro of eighteen years, was burned to death by a mob in the public square here to-day. Many women and children were among the 15,000 who witnessed the lynching. . . .

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It was all over one hour from the rendering of the jury’s death verdict. When the fire had burned itself out the charred body was put in a sack and was dragged behind an automobile to Robinson, where it was hanged to a telephone pole for the coloured populace to gaze upon.113

Robinson was seven miles from Waco, where young Sammy Price lived; the dragging aftermath of the Waco lynching may have led him to remember two lynchings when in fact only one had taken place. The details of Washington’s case—a black cotton picker in Robinson, a lynched body displayed publicly in “bagged” form—strongly suggest that he was the hidden subject of the blues verse Price supplies and interprets. The lines “I never have, and I never will,/pick no more cotton in Robinsonville” become, in this context, the singer’s veiled assertion of solidarity with the lynching victim.114 More than that: they become a form of counterpublicity, an empowering aural representation, spread in meme-like fashion by a wandering bluesman, that contests the moraledestroying lynched body “hanged to a telephone pole for the coloured populace to gaze on,” not to mention Washington’s own death screams. The apparently incongruous “hesitation” couplet may, of course, have had a more insurrectionary intent: “Can I get you now or must I hesitate?” may encode longing for revenge—impossible, suicidal revenge— against the lynchers themselves and the white society that enabled them: the war cry of a would-be “assassinator of the blues.” Perhaps the “you” that the singer hopes retributively to “get” is the white woman, or all white women, who are a principal source of the lynching fever that oppresses black southern men. Life at the mercy of what W. E. B. Du Bois once called “the lynching industry” certainly produced such longings, especially in the younger black generation. In 1914, according to Herbert Shapiro, after word of one particularly brutal Mississippi lynching reached the North, “black newspapers reported that young AfroAmericans were meeting secretly to organize vigilante groups that would put an end to lynching. Such vigilante groups did not materialize, but even the verbal interest in plans for countervigilantism signified a new militancy.” 115 Whether one believes that Price’s renegade version of “Hesitating Blues” was advocating reprisal against white lawlessness, it does seem to signify a new militancy on the cultural front: an insistence on speaking back to white violence, in a subtle but powerful way, from the perspective of the blues subject such violence had helped form. The era of spectacle lynching was more than twenty-five years old in 1916; Price’s generation, the second to come of age within its confines, found a kind of salvation in blues music. The terrors lynching engendered in Price and his contemporaries—“the hidden fear that we could very well be the subject for one of those blues songs”—were, if anything,

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exceeded by the terrors wrought on the previous generation, a bluesoriginating cohort that included Henry “Ragtime” Thomas (b. 1874) at one end and Charley Patton (b. 1891) at the other. There were 106 blacks lynched in ten southern states in 1892, more than any year before or since; 103 would be lynched by the end of the following year. The situation was so desperate, felt so desperate, that in 1893 Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of Georgia issued a call for a national black convention to discuss “the reign of mobs, lynchers, and fire-fiends, and midnight and mid-day assassins” terrorizing blacks across the South. “[I]t is known to all present,” he thundered in his opening remarks, “that not a week, and at times scarcely a day, has passed in the last three or four years but what some colored man has been hung, shot or burned by mobs of lynchers.” 116 The scourge continued as the decade progressed; whites, emboldened by black disenfranchisement and inflamed by racist demagoguery and sexual hysteria, transformed lynching from a method of frontier justice into casual assassination and sadistic mass entertainment. “We are Shot down for nothing,” wrote one black tenant farmer from Mississippi in an 1899 plea to the Justice Department. “We are killed by the white people in the State of Miss. just like we[’]re . . . some . . . pherocious beast.” 117 Nothing had quite prepared African Americans for the epidemic of racial violence that would sweep across the South after 1890. It was this wrenching, sickening fall through the false bottom of their low but established “place,” as much as anything, that pushed black folk musicians to bear witness to their unwantedness—with harsh laughter and boundless yearning for new horizons—in the fiercely personal art called blues. The same violence, crucially, engendered blues feelings (if not blues song) in a considerably more privileged class of black musicians, the touring minstrels. One former minstrel, William Christopher Handy, would reach across the class barrier, find emotional common ground with his “musicianeer” brethren, (re)write the folk-blues as a sheet music commodity, and change the course of American musical history.

CHAPTER TWO

“Make My Getaway” Southern Violence and Blues Entrepreneurship in W. C. Handy’s Father of the Blues

The old saying that music hath charms to soothe the savage beast worked fine for us. In our minds most of these people did everything the savages did except eat humans. We also found that they had the same weaknesses as savages. . . . We quickly discovered that their favorite tune was Dixie. — Tom Fletcher, a black minstrel, on playing all-white towns in the South, One Hundred Years of the Negro in Show Business The blues are, more definitely than any other Negro songs, the songs of a single singer. They express an individual reaction, usually one of depression, but often, as Mr. Niles has pointed out, one of humorous acceptance of the inevitable. . . . Unlike most Negro songs, they are known definitely by name—the names of states, towns, and countries being employed almost as extravagantly and irrelevantly as various feminine names were employed in the ante-bellum minstrel songs. —Newman White, American Negro Folk Songs I can sing the blues from the bottom of my heart I can sing the blues from the bottom of my heart All my profits gone ’fore I even got a start. —W. C. Handy, “Wall Street Blues”

ST. LOUIS BLUES

“The St. Louis Blues,” observed Langston Hughes in the summer of 1941, “is sung more than any other song on the air waves, is known in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, Paris and Berlin—in fact, is heard so often in Europe that a great many Europeans think it must be the American National Anthem. . . . [I]n a Tokio [sic] restaurant one night I heard a Louis Armstrong record of the St. Louis Blues played over and over for a crowd of Japanese diners there.” 1 If W. C. Handy’s universally celebrated 1914 composition—“the most influential American song ever written,” according to several pop music historians—was powerless to prevent Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, then Handy’s autobiography, published six months before the bombing to general acclaim, was soon put to use in the Allied war effort, a morale booster on the Western Front.2 “It may please you to know that the Council on Books in War Time,” Handy wrote composer William Grant Still in 1944, “has our permission to send 100,000 books of my autobiography Father of the Blues to the 66

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boys overseas without cost, and I received a letter from an Army Chaplain stating that this book has furnished many texts for his sermon.” 3 When Father of the Blues was published in 1941, Handy, according to his white literary associate Abbe Niles, was “the most famous and the most affectionately regarded American Negro”: the benign obverse, in a sense, of Richard Wright, whose Native Son, published the year before, was decidedly not the sort of propaganda the Council on Books in War Time wanted to place in the hands of an uneasily segregated U.S. military.4 If Wright’s Bigger Thomas was the avatar of African American rage and despair, Handy’s popular acclaim as “the Beethoven of Beale Street” (Newsweek’s phrase) was grounded in the story of a southern black boy who makes good, creatively and financially, in an America fully prepared to honor his musical gifts, if not always his rights as a citizen.5 Nor was this implicit comparison lost on Handy’s editorial collaborator, Arna Bontemps, who assumed that Father of the Blues would be vetted by its editors with an eye to mainstream sales. “Just read in a P[ublishers] W[eekly],” he wrote Langston Hughes several months after delivering the finished manuscript, summarizing 1940 in the book marts, that one of the sensations of the year was the sudden boom and abrupt decline of Native Son as a best seller. It concluded that the boom was due to novelty of such book being chosen by Book-of-the-Month and the fade out followed discovery on part of readers (who thought they were getting a murder thriller) that the book contained a “political argument”. . . . . . . The Handy book should go to press soon—vastly diluted since I last saw it, no doubt. I take no credit or blame for its final shape.6

Native Son, in other words, was a filial indictment; Father of the Blues, dictated by Handy on the eve of world war and ending with the words “God Bless America” (a nod to Irving Berlin’s 1939 anthem) was a paternal benediction, a Washingtonian refusal of “bitterness” in the service of uplift and national unity, the anti-Native Son. Or was it? While the political argument residing within the pages of Handy’s autobiography has long remained obscure, it is worth remembering that Handy initially entitled his life story Fight It Out. “Since the title ‘Fight It Out’ did not express a musical career,” he notes in the acknowledgments, “I have changed it to ‘Father of the Blues’” (xiii). The original title resonates nowhere more than in the opening chapter, where Handy sketches the lives of his two grandfathers, both of whom had struggled in different ways against the confines of slavery and southern violence. William Wise Handy, his paternal grandfather, had run away from his master in Princess Anne, Maryland, then “was overtaken and sold into Alabama where, still urged by the desire for freedom, he started

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an insurrection for escape, and was shot but not killed” (3). Later he acquired a liberal education—how Handy does not specify—and became “an honored and respected citizen of Florence” (3). Handy’s maternal grandfather, Christopher Brewer, remained a “trusted servant” after being freed by his master, John Wilson, later defending both Wilson’s person and property against white renegades. “At one time, near the close of the Civil War,” Handy writes, guerilla warfare was common in this locality. Three robbers were eventually hanged five miles out of Florence. These thieves had undertaken to rob John Wilson. They stripped him and tortured him to death by burning paper and searing his body to make him tell where his money was hidden. He refused. My Grandpa Brewer likewise knew. They shot him to make him tell. He also refused. But when his wounds had sufficiently healed he went to Nashville and brought his young master, Coonie Foster, back home and disclosed to him the hiding place of the money. (3 – 4)

“It is probably my inheritance from these two characters,” Handy concludes of his grandfathers, “that enabled me to submit to certain hard conditions long enough to fight my way out and yet be considered sufficiently ‘submissive’ by those who held the whip hand” (4). A central paradox of Father of the Blues lies here, in Handy’s strategic willingness as minstrel, songwriter, and bandleader to wear the mask of the “reliable,” the submissive and trustworthy Negro—his willingness, above all, to provide campaign music for white southern politicians, including Mississippi demagogue James Vardaman and Memphis boss E. H. Crump—while simultaneously engaging in overt and coded racial revolt against the “hard conditions” southern life imposed on him.7 As a member of Mahara’s Minstrels between 1896 and 1903, Handy packs a small arsenal (“a Winchester 44, a Smith and Wesson and a Colt revolver”), pulls a gun at least once against disrespectful white men in Texas, and lives to tell the tale (48). On another occasion in Tennessee he punches a white man in the face and barely escapes a lynch mob. Lynch mobs, actual and imagined, make their baleful presence felt repeatedly in the first half of Father of the Blues: in Shreveport, Memphis, Missouri, Mississippi. They hold the whip hand with a vengeance. Handy’s autobiography pivots on a chapter entitled “Trouble, Trouble, I’ve Had It All My Days,” in which his bitter disgust at the aftermath of a lynching—the severed head of a young black man, tossed into a crowd of Memphis blacks—precipitates his flight north to New York, an echo of the slave narrative’s freedom quest. Father of the Blues is, in its own way, as much of a “murder thriller” as Native Son. Its subject is not, however, the murder of a young white woman by a desperate young black man.

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Its subject is the murderous conditions—“the nightmare of those minstrel days,” as Handy calls them—that desperate young black men were forced to navigate in the turn-of-the-century South in order to realize their professional ambitions (51). If Handy is determined in Father of the Blues to script a myth of blues birth and capitalization—the composer as self-made man—then his text also summons up and dramatizes the unborn blues as a surplus emotion, a mixture of despair, revolt, and cathartic laughter begotten by racial violence in the 1890s and desperately seeking creative outlet. The black minstrels, to put it another way, led blues lives that their burlesque art could not adequately express; they were blues subjects in need of the release only blues song could provide. Handy, a member of this musically literate class of brass-and-string-band performers, encountered the “real” blues—which is to say, emergent folk blues—in the Mississippi Delta after a preparatory immersion experience in St. Louis. Handy’s life as a minstrel and later as a Mississippi bandleader (1903 –5) during a period of heightened antiblack reaction enabled him to write the blues by forcing him to feel the blues, participating in his own class-specific way in a larger current of black working-class feeling. The precise contours of this participation have never been adequately delineated, in part because Handy’s mythmaking betrays an unmistakable class bias—a mixture of condescension, racial husbandry, and Tin Pan Alley schmaltz—that obscures his own profound emotional investment. “[R]agtime, jazz and the blues,” he insisted in a 1950 interview, “reflect the honest, the pure and the genuine expression straight out of the souls of submerged people. I dug deep into their hearts and brought forth tones untouched by artificiality, melodies unspoiled by fluff.” 8 Houston A. Baker Jr. has dismissed Handy’s autobiography as “a simplistic detailing of a progress, describing, as it were, the elevation of a ‘primitive’ folk ditty to the status of ‘art’ in America,” but Handy’s detailing of his entrepreneurial ascent is shadowed always by his uneasiness at the continuing threat posed by white violence, a threat that he both evokes and resists and that renders Father of the Blues anything but a simplistic uplift narrative.9 Handy’s autobiography is a foundational blues text not just because it elaborates a myth of origins revolving around a pair of well-known first encounters between Handy and the “primitive music” (his term) that he would subsequently transmute into profitable pop-blues, but because it represents the world of pre-blues black entertainment in the state of crisis that preceded and accompanied that process. Blues song, for Handy, supplied an answer to the paradox proposed to the turn-of-the-century black southern imagination by the coexistence of seemingly unlimited geographical mobility and entrepreneurial

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freedom on the one hand and increasingly virulent white racist violence on the other. Minstrelsy often graced its young black male troupers with material benefits inconceivable to their slave-born parents—not just fancy new costumes and private Pullman coaches, but eye-catching jewelry. “Note from Mahara’s Minstrels,” read an 1897 item in the Indianapolis Freeman, a popular black newspaper, “—A great many of the boys took advantage of the market price on diamonds and now there are quite a number to be seen glittering among the boys.” 10 Yet such riches accrued only to those who traveled through a South where black material success—the accumulation of farmland, horse-and-buggy rigs, and the like—was bitterly resented by poor whites, lynching was endemic, and unknown young black men were the preferred victims. “Colored minstrels were considered an amusing night entertainment,” remembered Handy’s contemporary, Tom Fletcher, “in towns where there was no colored population,” but so-called strange niggers were anathema after dark.11 Dixie-style entertainment could take many forms, including elaborated sadism; minstrel life was a nightly high-wire act in the face of potential white savagery. “Usually they had signs prominently displayed which read ‘Nigger, Read and Run,’” Fletcher added: And sometimes there would be added “and if you can’t read, run anyhow.” . . . After the show [at] night all the colored people connected with the show would get together and parade down to the car. If there were no trains leaving that night we would hire an engine and get right out of town without delay.12

“More than once during my travels in the North and South,” Handy writes in the same vein, “I had passed through towns with signs saying, ‘Nigger don’t let the sun go down on you here’” (86). The opening line of “St. Louis Blues”—“I hate to see the evening sun go down”—may be read, in other words, as racial protest resonating within a narrative of lost love, a black man’s lament, recast in the voice of his lover, at white southern violence and the dislocations it imposes: I hate to see de eve’-nin’ sun go down Hate to see de eve’-nin’ sun go down ’Cause ma baby, he done lef ’ dis town. (143)

If, as Hughes insisted, “St. Louis Blues” was taken by some Europeans to be the American national anthem, it was an anthem that embraced rather than repressed the “shadow of a deep disappointment” evoked by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Although first performed by Handy and his band as a double-time march, the song was soon refashioned by Bessie Smith and others into a plaintive slow-drag with

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Handy’s hybrid major–minor melody unfurled into its full, stately gutbucket power. “Here were tunes,” wrote Abbe Niles of Handy’s blues compositions, “with a third dimension; under their sweetness was something bitter.” 13 Bitterness is not a quality we associate with Handy; the apparent lack of overt protest in Father of the Blues may well be one reason for its near total neglect by critics of African American autobiography, not to mention its adoption as an instrument of wartime propaganda. “He is no bitter protagonist for his race,” wrote Rebecca Chalmers Barton in Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography (1948), still the only extended discussion of Handy’s literary achievement. “He makes no direct battle for Negro rights against white wrongs.” 14 In a 1945 article in the Chicago Defender entitled “The Blues School of American Literature,” Earl Conrad ignored Handy’s autobiography entirely while praising recent “protest” works by Wright and Chester Himes. “Now, as a ‘bull market’ in Negro books looms . . . , the neurotic, frustrated, tragic—and very real—side of the Negro is being pictured.” 15 While Father of the Blues does, in fact, build to a climax in which its protagonist’s neurotic, frustrated, tragic side briefly gets the better of him—“my nerves—shattered!” he cries as blindness suddenly descends in the early 1920s (206)— Handy’s autobiography is also distinguished by its insistence on escaping from the sort of racial obsessions that Ralph Ellison was referring to when, in a review of Wright’s Black Boy (1945), he described the blues as “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain.” 16 Flight—from racial violence, but also from racial bitterness—is a key motif in Father of the Blues. Too much money stood to be made by a shrewd black businessman who could steer clear of both dangers, refusing to finger the jagged grain of his terrors, humiliations, and revenge fantasies. “Between playing for dances in magnificent plantation mansions from one end of the Delta country to the other,” Handy wrote of his Mississippi sojourn, “striking up the band for an occasional political candidate and conducting jam sessions in the New World [the black entertainment and prostitution district], I made more money in Clarksdale than I had ever earned. This was not strange. Everybody prospered in that Green Eden” (82 – 83). “Green Eden” is not, needless to say, how most African Americans would describe the Mississippi of the recently elected governor James Vardaman (who served 1903 –7), a demagogue who spoke approvingly of local mob rule and ceaselessly incited the racial resentment of poor whites. “If I were a sheriff and a Negro fiend fell into my hands,” the candidate had famously proclaimed, “I would run him out of the county. If I were governor and asked for troops to protect him I would send them.

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But if I were a private citizen I would lead the mob to string the brute up, and I haven’t much respect for a white man who wouldn’t.” 17 Yet Handy, who veils the precise nature of his participation in Vardaman’s gubernatorial campaign, is relentlessly buoyed by the intertwined dreams of artistic and financial success he shared with other African Americans of his generation; he observes his murderous surroundings with lucidity but refuses to be unmade by them. “He never shies away from looking at the scars he and his people bear,” Barton rightly observes, “but he approaches the future with an air of sweet reasonableness.” 18 Handy’s signal achievement is not merely to have survived and prospered under the hardest of conditions, but to have refigured American expressive geographies in the process, fusing the sweetness of unlimited entrepreneurial opportunity with the bitter but transcendable facts of racial violence into a bittersweet and unbeatable pop-blues amalgam. Handy made his getaway, in this doubled sense: he lived for most of his adult life off the profits of a song, “St. Louis Blues,” in which he’d coded, perhaps unconsciously, his own escape from a near-lynching in Tennessee. The incident in question took place in 1903, toward the end of Handy’s days as a bandleader with Mahara’s Minstrels, a touring black troupe. Frank Mahara, Handy’s Irish boss, treated his black employees well—since they happened also to be his investment capital—and protected them against the depredations of less congenial white men. “The music, the uniforms, the program and the talent,” Handy writes, even the food he bought and the Pullman car in which we traveled, had to be the best obtainable. He also saw to it that our Pullman had a hidden compartment under the floor . . . a compartment which we came to call the “bear-wallow” or the “get-away.” In this secret hold we carried reserves of food, not to mention a small arsenal. One night in a Tennessee town it contained me. (45)

The blues “sound” of black minstrel life is audible here, in the conjunction of Pullman car luxury with preparations for flight. This below-thefloorboards compartment or “get-away” fulfills the same symbolic function as the clay sinkhole into which Wright’s young black protagonist Big Boy crawls to escape the white lynch mob in “Big Boy Leaves Home” (1936), or the well-lit basement chamber into which the narrator of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) retreats: it is, in Houston A. Baker’s words, “the subterranean hole where the [African American] trickster has his ludic, deconstructive being.” 19 Handy’s survival requires him to play the trickster one night in Murfreesboro when he and the other minstrels are gathered in the Pullman car to “egg on” a boxing match between a pair of fellow performers:

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[F]rom out of nowhere, a white ticket agent with a coupling pin in his hand suddenly shoved his way through the crowd. He raised the heavy iron and aimed it at the head of one of the boxers. A gory tragedy was in the making and would have been accomplished had I not been standing where I could intercept the blow. I sprang forward, caught the man’s hand and wrested the iron backwards. I failed to disarm him, however, and a second later when he regained his balance, he turned on me. This time Will Garland [a musician] grabbed him from behind and pinned his arms to his sides. That was all I wanted. I savagely rubbed my fist in the helpless fellow’s mouth. “You just wait here till I come back,” I concluded melodramatically. Then I rushed away angrily. Of course I was bluffing. I had no intention of coming back, but I must have acted my part well. The railroad man assumed that I’d gone for a pistol, and when Will Garland released him, he broke and ran to the station and hid. Meanwhile, I crawled into the “get-away” and waited for times to get better. Some time later I heard the sheriff and his posse searching our car. Mahara was with them. He pretended to be angry enough to chew nails. I could hear his voice tremble with rage as he told the Murfreesboro sheriff and his men that I had better sense than to come on that car again after what I’d done. He left no doubt that he would make even shorter shrift of me than the sheriff intended, once he got his hands on me. This pleased the sheriff. He and his men gave up the search of the car and went out to scour the countryside. Many times I have had to use such native wit or suffer for the lack of it. (46 – 47, italics added)

Handy makes his getaway by performing it, an interracial burlesque that depends as much on Frank Mahara’s pretended fury (supplanting the white posse’s only to displace it entirely) as on Handy’s own verbalized threats against the white ticket agent. Handy’s tone in this passage, alternately cartoon-melodramatic and dryly Washingtonian, defies easy description; devoid both of palpable fear and lingering racial resentment, it may lead us to overlook the true gravity of his position as the propagator of an offense that could have resulted in his lynching. Handy’s tone proceeds from what might be called his “stance,” his orientation as autobiographer (in Jerome Bruner’s words) “toward the world, toward self, toward fate and the possible.” 20 That stance in Father of the Blues is of a forward-looking survivor determined to create expressive racial art in the face of white violence and to profit from that art by forging interracial alliances whenever possible. “Nothing made me glow so much,” he confesses elsewhere, “as seeing the softening effect of music on racial antagonisms,” and it is precisely this attitude that facilitates his ultimate mainstream success (116). When white violence threatens here, however,

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Handy-the-trickster retreats and regroups, crawling into the “get-away” and waiting for a more propitious moment in which to emerge. “A hibernation,” insists Ellison’s Invisible Man, “is a covert preparation for a more overt action.” 21 Handy’s long-term response to the Murfreesboro episode is a kind of creative hibernation; the overt action it covertly prepares for is his writing of “St. Louis Blues” in Memphis in 1914, eleven years after his near-lynching.22 Connecting both episodes, strikingly, is Handy’s withdrawal to a solitary chamber: retreating from his wife and children, he rents a room on Beale Street for one sleepless but productive night, the first time in his songwriting career he has done so. “I could feel the blues coming on, and I didn’t want to be distracted, so I packed my grip and made my getaway. . . . [T]he color and spell of Beale Street mingled outside, but I neither saw nor heard it that night. I had a song to write” (118). Handy’s Beale Street hotel room, the longdeferred fulfillment of the Pullman getaway compartment, is an exemplary instance of what Houston A. Baker has termed “the black (W)hole”: a privileged, protected, liberatory site of black creativity. “[I]n the script of Afro-America,” insists Baker, the hole is the domain of Wholeness, an achieved relationality of black community in which desire recollects experience and sends it forth as blues. To be Black and (W)hole is to escape incarcerating restraints of a white world (i.e., a black hole) and to engage the concentrated, underground singularity of experience that results in a blues desire’s expressive fullness.23

As desire recollects experience to begin the process of blues composition, what Handy calls “a flood of memories” fills his mind (119). “First,” he says, “there was the picture I had of myself, broke, unshaven, wanting even a decent meal, and standing before the lighted saloon in St. Louis without a shirt under my frayed coat” (119). Next is his memory of a heartbroken black woman he’d encountered during the youthful trip, stumbling down a poorly lit street muttering a proto-blues: “Ma man’s got a heart like a rock cast in de sea” (119). Musical elements, too, are a crucial part of the racial statement he wishes to make: “blue notes” to approximate the vocal inflections of blues singers, breaks between lines of verse to encourage instrumental improvisation. “Altogether,” Handy writes, “I aimed to use all that is characteristic of the Negro from Africa to Alabama” (121). The resulting blues song, as Baker suggests, is both “an achieved relationality of black community” and a more pointed engagement with the “concentrated underground singularity” of Handy’s own experience. “Underground” is the operative term here: at no point in his account of the song’s composition does Handy explicitly refer to his escape from white mob retribution in Murfreesboro. The

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only evidence is the escape-word itself, resurfacing as it does near the beginning of “St. Louis Blues”: Feelin’ tomorrow lak Ah feel today, Feel tomorrow lak Ah feel today, I’ll pack my trunk and make mah get-away. (143)

These lines are both a memorable evocation of the troubled African American mind in the age of Jim Crow and, I would suggest, an unconscious recapitulation of Handy’s brutally specific encounter with “hard conditions” in central Tennessee. Blues desire’s expressive fullness is achieved through a fusion of collective and individual concerns. This fusion takes place within a context of economic self-making in which the radically decapitalized (i.e., “worthless,” lynchable) black body of the postbellum South is preserved, enriched, reclaimed. Diamond rings and Pullman cars were one way Handy and his fellow black minstrels remade themselves; the shrewdest of accommodationist politics mixed with episodes of strategic resistance, including “St. Louis Blues,” was another. The point of the blues life, as Baker rightly observes, is to “successfully negotiate an obdurate ‘economics of slavery’ and achieve a resonant, improvisational, expressive dignity.” 24 Yet what bound Handy in fraternity with the country bluesmen whose “primitive music” inspired him was less an economics of slavery—against which his class-specific musical education enabled him to gain considerable leverage—than an economics of disciplinary violence, the random, ritualized terror that upheld Jim Crow. White lynchers were not known for their interest in making class distinctions when selecting victims from the available pool of unfamiliar black faces. A minstrel might pack his trunk and ride in Pullman luxury, where a country bluesman might hoist his guitar case and hop aboard a freight car; the lives and livelihoods of both depended on knowing where the getaway was, and how to sing it into being. TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS: HANDY AS BLUES AUTOBIOGRAPHER

If the blues, as Handy claims, “were conceived in aching hearts,” then Handy’s own role in the birthing process has remained obscure, both because of and despite the mythic contours of his autobiography (76). His image as a blues father figure was in place, as Abbott and Seroff have noted, long before Father of the Blues was published; when his Memphis Blues Band played Harlem during the summer of 1919, the Chicago Defender wrote that Handy “is well known over the world as the ‘Daddy of the Blues.’” 25 The extraordinary popularity of “St. Louis Blues” alone, the best-selling song in any medium by 1930, provoked commentators into mythomania. “More couples have danced to Mr. Handy’s tunes,” wrote Ralph Thompson in the New York Times,

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than to any minuet or tango ever written, and the most cherished of them all is already almost as unimpeachable a classic as Yankee Doodle or Turkey in the Straw. . . .The effect [of “St. Louis Blues”] was that of a tornado, a revolution and an epidemic combined. It swept out from Memphis across the country in all directions, and across the oceans to Berlin, Cape Town, Vladivostok and Shanghai.26

Mythmaking often provokes reaction by, or on behalf of, those it would displace from history. When New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton heard Handy described on a 1938 Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! radio broadcast as “the Father of Jazz” as well as blues, he was furious. “Mr. Handy cannot prove anything in music that he has created,” he fumed in an open letter to Downbeat magazine. “He has possibly taken advantage of some unprotected material that floats around. . . . [T]hese untruthful statements Mr. Handy has made, or caused you to make, will maybe cause him to be branded the most dastardly imposter in the history of music.” 27 Coming as it did when Handy was in the process of dictating what would become Father of the Blues, Morton’s accusations may well have provoked Handy to detail with apparent scrupulousness, as he does in a chapter entitled “Blue Diamonds in the Rough: Polished and Mounted,” the various bits of “unprotected material” he had collected and transmuted into profitable blue gems. Surely, too, it led him to foreground his own exploitation at the hands of a duplicitous white music publisher, who, after convincing him that “Memphis Blues” (1912) was not selling, purchased the copyright from him for fifty dollars and deprived him of twenty-eight years’ worth of subsequent royalties. One of the only places in Father of the Blues where Handy admits to what he calls “bitterness in my heart,” in fact, concerns this bungled deal. “While I was getting the praise, another man owned the copyright to Memphis Blues and was getting the money. . . . [H]owever,” he continues, with characteristic sweet reasonableness, “I determined to swallow that resentment like a true philosopher, set my head to new things, and see if I couldn’t do better next time. In fact, a bee was already buzzing in my bonnet” (116). “St. Louis Blues” was this bee. Yet even as Handy achieved a kind of apotheosis as a popular songwriter and “America’s most affectionately regarded Negro,” his career continued to be shadowed by two interrelated charges, both of which have exerted a lingering effect on his reputation: lack of originality (he neither lived nor wrote the real blues) and immoderate profit (real bluesmen don’t get rich). “Even to claim, or accept, the title of ‘Father of the Blues,’ as W. C. Handy has done, is as absurd as it is presumptuous,” wrote Rudi Blesh in his 1946 jazz history, ShiningTrumpets:

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Although a Negro, Handy is, and in sympathy always has been, rather remote from the racial wellsprings from which the blues and jazz emerged. He seems, from the time of his youth, to have been in the un-Negroid tradition that goes back to the Fisk Jubilee Singers or farther, a tradition that always has aimed to “disinfect” Afro-American music by Europeanizing it. . . . Fatherhood of the blues is out of the question; Handy’s sponsorship, although it helped to awaken interest in the blues, has retarded accurate knowledge of them and certainly was no influence in their development.28

In After the Ball, a history of American popular music, Ian Whitcomb dismissed Handy as the “Stenographer of the Blues,” an appellation linking his presumed lack of originality with musical literacy: real bluesmen don’t read and write music, Whitcomb implies, they create music, the authentic folk-blues that educated imposters like Handy then proceed to label “primitive music” before transcribing and profiting from it.29 Despite his admitted blunder with the “Memphis Blues” copyright, Handy’s cardinal sin seems to have been that he found a way of profiting from a musical form whose rural southern practitioners (and juke joint audiences) have traditionally been defined by their subjection to white economic exploitation, cotton sharecropping in particular. Handy took care of business; this alone made him a curiosity among blues practitioners, even to the favorably inclined. “Obstetrician of the Blues” the New York Times headlined its review of Father of the Blues, adding: “William Christopher Handy wrote several very good songs and one unkillable one, St. Louis Blues; but essentially he was less a musician than a good businessman whose business was music.” 30 Far from a sign of inauthenticity, however, Handy’s stubborn pursuit of profit within a blues context places him squarely in the African American tradition: blues music as an escape from the “blues” of poverty and sharecropping economics. “The performance that sings of abysmal poverty and deprivation,” notes Baker, reminding us of this paradox, “may be recompensed by sumptuous food and stimulating beverage at a country picnic, amorous favors from an attentive listener, enhanced AfroAmerican communality, Yankee dollars from representatives of record companies traveling the South in search of blues as commodifiable entertainment.” 31 Struggling to make his mark as a songwriter at a turn-ofthe-century moment when sound recording was in its infancy and sheet music was the dominant form, Handy was the precursor of these Yankee blues scouts. While there is no record of his ever having paid any of the “dusky bards” and “husky duskies” whose stray snatches of melody found their way into his blues compositions, his profitable incorporation

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of Mississippi blues into his brass-and-strings band’s repertoire registers in Father of the Blues as a liberating euphoria, an epiphany of self-making. “I have intimated that silver money had always been plentiful in the Delta; now at last we began to come in for our share of it” (79). This particular epiphany, an earned lyric getaway from economic subjection, was one that Mississippi bluesmen themselves knew well. “[Guitarist Big] Joe [Williams] changed my life and I was glad of it,” insisted David Honeyboy Edwards after returning home from his first out-of-state blues ramble in the early 1930s. “I didn’t want to be in that field from sun to sun, can to can’t, can see to can’t see. I was going to make it with the guitar. I could make more money playing than picking cotton.” 32 Making no money as a novice street singer with the hymns and spirituals he’d learned in church, B. B. King shifted to blues and watched the tips pour in. “That was my first lesson in marketing. I saw something about the relationship between money and music that I’m still seeing today. Real-life songs, where you feel the hurt and heat between man and woman, have cash value.” 33 Yet no amount of cash, as Father of the Blues makes clear, can wholly remove Handy from subjection to the violences and humiliations of Jim Crow—the origins of blues feelings generated by racial rather than romantic hurt and heat, and ones that reaffirm his fraternity with a wider community of blues performers. At exactly the moment “St. Louis Blues” is beginning to pay off in the form of stupendous royalties, Handy’s career as a Memphis bandleader requires yet another out-oftown trip, one marked by “headaches”: [H]ere I was again, trotting off to a six-dollar engagement in a particularly backward part of Arkansas after a week-end which had brought nearly six thousand dollars. It wouldn’t be easy to take all the little digs that one suffered in that sort of element. It would be hard to be tactful when commanded to play two extra hours or to do this or that monkey business for the delight of our audience, but even engagements like this had been welcome when the sock was empty, and perhaps it wasn’t right to scorn them now. I made up my mind to endure it cheerfully. Every dime added to what you had made the going easier and lessened the headaches. We lived through this engagement, and Wednesday morning I returned home to find another surprise waiting. The Emerson Company had sent a check for an additional thousand dollars. What I did with this check, together with the larger ones, can best be described as wish fulfillment. (135)

Handy’s stance of tactical submission in the service of capital-hungry self-making is in full display here. As before, his tone—“backward,” “little digs,” “tactful,” “monkey business,” “headaches”—serves to

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downplay both the ridicule and potential violence his bandleading requires him to endure at the hands of what appears to be a lower-class white audience (“that sort of element”), and the intensity of his own reactions. It’s hard to tell just how enervated he is by the insults he “suffer[s]”; they’re not really the focus of his attention. What counts is to live through the engagement and see one’s economic ambitions (and all possible ancillary wishes) fulfilled. What Handy seems to reject, in other words, is the form of blues subjectivity that Richard Wright embraces in Black Boy: the attitude identified by Ellison, in which one “keep[s] the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness.” Handy dances lightly across the jagged grain, rather than fingering it until he bleeds: the blues, in this case, become a kind of bourgeois stoicism, a self-discipline in the service of uplift, rather than a form of existential revolt. Existential revolt is, as I shall describe in a moment, also a mode Handy explores, but a passage such as this— characterized by emotional restraint verging on outright servility— does raise the disquieting question of what, exactly, Handy’s blues feelings are? Where is the rage at suffered indignity, the paralyzing fear at the “white death,” the lust and jealousy and overwhelming desire to flee, the familiar obsessional miasma that swirls furiously through the works of Wright, Himes, and others in the “Blues School of American Literature”? If the blues, as Handy insists, “were conceived in aching hearts,” where is Handy’s heartfelt ache? Does Father of the Blues deserve to be called a blues autobiography, for all its evident connection with the musical form? Why not a show-business memoir, or a “middle-class success story” of the sort invoked—and rejected as uninteresting—by Stephen Butterfield in Black Autobiography in America? 34 The only sustained attempt to define blues autobiography, as it happens, explicitly excludes Father of the Blues. In a 1975 essay entitled “To Be Black and Blue: The Blues Genre in Black American Autobiography,” Elizabeth Schultz categorizes Handy, instead, as a “testimonial autobiographer,” along with Matthew Henson, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and others, and in opposition to “blues autobiographers” such as Himes, Wright, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Ann Moody, Claude Brown, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, and J. Saunders Redding.35 What distinguishes blues autobiographies from testimonial autobiographies is, according to Schultz, neither the representation of blues musicians and textual incorporation of blues lyric forms (by which standard Hughes, Handy, and Hurston might well be grouped together), nor the evocation of the Jim Crow South at its most nakedly oppressive (by which standard Handy might arguably be grouped with Himes, Wright, Moody, and Angelou), but rather the imputed generic origin of each form, and a

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quality of heightened, searching consciousness that manifests itself, in the case of blues autobiography, as an open-endedness of plot. Testimonial autobiographies such as Handy’s, Schultz claims, derive from the written tradition of slave narratives; blues autobiographies, by contrast, derive from the oral slave histories, of the sort recorded by the WPA in the 1930s. From this initial and highly problematic distinction, Schultz deduces a series of categorical oppositions: testimonial autobiographers are concerned with “accuracy of historical fact,” “objectification and development of a specific conviction,” and an “experience of conversion and salvation”; blues autobiographers are concerned with “emotional accuracy of expression,” “the process of discovering meaning,” and an “open-ended” life history governed by “a continued willingness to embrace reality.” While Schultz’s schema may help clarify several distinctive features of Father of the Blues, it deconstructs itself on the question of generic origins: if testimonial autobiographies derive ultimately from written slave narratives such as Douglass’s, why place Handy in this category, since his autobiography was, like Malcolm X’s, spoken out loud to an amanuensis, very much in the fashion of slave oral histories? In light of the recent flowering of as-told-to autobiographies by Willie Dixon (1990), Mance Lipscomb (1993), B. B. King (1996), David Honeyboy Edwards (1997), and Henry Townsend (1999), not to mention Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues (1946) and Big Bill Broonzy’s Big Bill Blues (1955), the term “blues autobiography” seems increasingly untenable when used, as Schultz uses it, to describe a subset of African American autobiography that bears no discernible relationship with actual blues performance practices: apprenticeship to elders, the forging of a personal style, mastery of a repertoire, travel in pursuit of musical labors, the material conditions of those labors, the sources of musical creativity, and participation in moments of individual and collective musical catharsis.36 Father of the Blues is a foundational blues text in all these respects; it stands, arguably, at the beginning of the blues autobiographical tradition, concerned as it is with representing the turn-of-the-century moment in which blues music was emerging from a welter of black popular musics, and with its author’s crucial role in that process. Yet Schultz’s distinction between testimonial and blues autobiographies and her consignment of Father of the Blues to the former category is not entirely misguided. Her confusions are grounded in precisely what makes the political valence of Handy’s text so difficult to decode, which is to say his willingness to swallow his pride and submit to the white South for the sake of survival and long-term profit, while simultaneously “fighting it out,” engaging in selective tactical resistance—including, on at least two occasions, violent blows against white men. Submission

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demands a choking-off of feeling and consciousness, at least temporarily; profits accumulate to one who coolly calculates risks and rewards. Fighting it out, by contrast, is an expression of heightened feeling, a flowering of conscious rebellion. Father of the Blues is, I would suggest, a hybrid text: both testimonial autobiography and blues autobiography, according to Schultz’s definitions. As a testimonial autobiography, it is both a conversion narrative (Handy’s “discovery” and embrace of blues music) and the inspiring story of a freedom quest, the self-directed uplift of an Alabama black boy from the clutches of Jim Crow into apotheosis as the acknowledged “Father” of a treasured American song form. As a blues autobiography (in Schultz’s terms) it is simultaneously concerned with depicting the passional subtext of the testimonial autobiography: the jarring violences and humiliations suffered by Handy and other members of his younger black generation, the tears and rages that demanded, and finally found, creative outlet. At crucial points, in other words, Handy-as-narrator is less concerned with the testimonial autobiographer’s “accuracy of historical fact” than with the felt history of his blues-inaugurating generation, the blues autobiographer’s “emotional accuracy of expression.” Although Father of the Blues moves strongly in its final pages toward racial reconciliation and the paternal benediction “God Bless America,” it begins, significantly, with the tears of a southern black boy. THE NIGHTMARE OF THOSE MINSTREL DAYS

Father of the Blues is, among other things, Handy’s attempt to act as a central clearing house for tales of blues grief: a literary blues singer, he bears empathic witness to his generation’s confrontation with white southern violence even as he lives out his own particular variant of it. His life story begins with an emblematic howl of pain. “Where the Tennessee River, like a silver snake, winds her way through the red clay hills of Alabama,” he intones, sits high on these hills my home town, Florence. Here I came into the world, as my parents often told, “squalling for six months straight,” from the six-months’ colic. They used to place the date of some particular event as “so many years before, or so many years after surrender.” This of course referred to Lee’s surrender to Grant, which resulted in the emancipation of my race. I began exercising my vocal organs “eight years after surrender”; to be exact, November 16, 1873. (1)

As a child of the later Reconstruction, Handy attained young manhood in the 1890s, when the promise of emancipation—self-ownership and uplift—was being severely eroded by a relentless white campaign to disenfranchise, economically subjugate, and terrorize a captive black

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population. His colicky, squalling inability to digest the historical moment into which he has been born anticipates these post-Reconstruction disillusionments; it also enmeshes him symbolically in the terrors of Reconstruction itself, a secondhand legacy he plumbs with the help of a black minstrel he encounters during his Mahara’s days. “He gave me cold chills,” Handy confesses, invoking a familiar blues trope: His eyes were deep-set and filled with weird shadows. His name was William Malone, and he had been earning his salt by playing up and down the old Streckfus line between St. Paul and St. Louis. A kindly, selfeducated boy, I prevailed on him to join our show, and he and I became berthmates. Then it was that I discovered his unearthly affliction. Periodically during the night a strange, tortured sound would escape his lips. I cannot describe the sound. It was as if the woe of the entire world was suddenly rolled upon the lonely young man. Over and over again, as long as he slept, this moan was repeated. I was so disturbed I asked him if he were aware of it. He assured me that he was and gave me his own explanation. Back in Reconstruction days his father had been active in Mississippi politics. The Klan had set about to clip his wings. They hounded him with threats. They sent him notes signed with blood. Often hooded men sprang from the thickets and attempted to pounce upon him. The poor ex-slave tried hard to stand his ground, but the odds were great. As fear grew, he formed the habit of sleeping beneath his cabin floor. Alone in the tiny room above, his young wife cried herself to sleep. From one night to the next they lived in mortal anguish of what might happen to the man, the wife and the child that was waiting to be born. Eventually all three escaped safely to Washington, but the infant was marked for life. This, Malone explained, was the cause of the low moaning that I heard so often. He was the child of that harassed pair. (67– 68)

Malone’s nocturnal haunting, a blues-like inheritance from his father, is “the nightmare of those minstrel days” rendered literally. If Handy himself is able, when white violence threatens, to escape into the getaway compartment of Mahara’s Pullman and recompose himself, Malone’s father can do little more than cower in fear beneath the floorboards; his hideout, although it does finally facilitate his escape, reads like a ghastly parody of the liberating “black (W)hole” described by Baker. Malone, scarred in the womb by his mother’s bottomless grief (an echo of Handy’s infantile “squalling”), is frozen to the scene of traumatic repetition his dream-life has become—the transgenerational aftermath of Mississippi’s post-Emancipation collapse into Klan violence, but also a marker of contemporary racial woes. The “tortured sound” that escapes Malone’s lips and so disturbs Handy finds an immediate analogue in the polymorphous tortures wrought by southern lynch mobs on their groaning

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victims during the period, and the outraged letters of protest printed by black newspapers. “Negroes can be lynched every day,” cried one correspondent to the Indianapolis Freeman in 1893, and naught is done or said. Every paper brings news of a transit to eternity of some poor helpless Negro. America’s soil is drenched with his blood. Her graves are crowded with his body. Every gust of wind brings to our nostrils the odor of burning flesh. Without judge, jury or attorney we are hung, shot, burned, baked, fried, skinned and butchered.37

The haunted representative of a younger black generation forced to dwell in daily contemplation of such a fate, Malone has the blues without possessing an articulate way of expressing them, a spiritual condition that Trudier Harris has termed “no outlet for the blues.” 38 Malone’s moans are isolating, imprisoning; the abject moans of the lynching victim, as it were, rather than the cathartic moans of a blues singer like Ma Rainey. “[Ma] wouldn’t have to sing any words,” recalled poet Sterling Brown of Rainey in later years. “[S]he would moan, and the audience would moan with her. She had them in the palm of her hand.” 39 What distinguishes Rainey’s moan of 1920 from Malone’s of 1900 (or Henry Smith’s of 1893) is the emergence and development, during those decades, of a fully articulate blues culture within which a meaningful blues moan could be uttered. By “writing” the blues large as he did—snatching folk-blues melodies out of the air and transforming them into immensely popular sheet music compositions—Handy was as responsible as anyone for this cultural transformation. The complaint he helped birth was generational, the repressed collective cry of the black minstrel brethren whom he characterized in Father of the Blues as “a wistful but aspiring generation of dusky singers and musicians” (69). “Wistful” is a typical understatement by Handy, belied not just by William Malone’s moans, but by Handy’s own youthful grief, the memory of which is prompted by a later encounter with the racist campaign rhetoric of Mississippi politician James Vardaman: “As a schoolboy in Florence I had gone home, buried my head in a pillow and wept after listening to sentiments like these uttered from the courthouse steps by a politician of the same stripe” (81). As racist reaction deepened across the South during the 1890s, Handy’s boyhood despair found uncanny reflection in the world of touring black entertainment. In 1897, according to the Indianapolis Freeman, one hit on the circuit was “Harry Waters’ “Cry Baby” song . . . [a] lifelike imitation of a squalling youngster. He is with [a show called] ‘Darkest America.’” 40 The blues, in Ann Douglas’s apt formulation, “bore witness to a moment of immense and historic disillusion,” a disillusion as visible in the desperate inventiveness of black minstrels and vaudevillians of the 1890s as

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in the letters published in black newspapers in the aftermath of lynching’s depressingly common spectacles.41 “When I survey the Southern States of America,” wrote one correspondent to the Indianapolis Freeman from Pensacola, Florida in 1893, and view the surroundings of the Negro, comparing his advantages with his disadvantages, I ask myself the question, are not the Negroes in Hell? Hell is only a place of horror and punishment. How much more horror can hell have for its victims than the Southern States has for the Negroes? We are falsely accused, ridiculed, imprisoned for trifles, lynched on false accusations, and robbed of the rights of citizenship. This is hell in the first degree. . . . We must stand up for our rights, though we die. Have race pride, respect ourselves and make others respect us.42

Blues wistfulness grounded in a yearning for such civil respect sometimes found an outlet in black minstrelsy. “George Wilson, of Sam T. Jack’s Creoles,” read an 1897 item in the Indianapolis Freeman, “has written a topical song, entitled ‘What We Would do, if the Law would Allow Us,’ which he is singing with much success.” 43 So-called coon songs, even as they recycled demeaning minstrel images of chicken-stealing, watermelon-devouring plantation Negroes, were another way in which touring black performers in the later 1890s voiced their generational complaint. In songwriter Ben Harney’s “Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose” (1896), “[the] first ragtime song to become a major hit,” according to Philip Furia, “listeners were delighted not only by the syncopated rhythm but by the idiomatic plea of the caricatured black to ‘Mister Johnson’ (slang for the police)”: Oh, Mister Johnson, turn me loose! Don’t take me to the calaboose! 44

Harney (b. 1871), an arguably mulatto Kentuckian who passed for white throughout his songwriting career, seems to have adapted his material from African American originals first overheard on the street, as did Hart Wand, Leroy “Lasses” White, and several early white blues songwriters. Harney’s song was introduced to the Broadway stage by white “coon” shouter May Irwin in her 1896 show Courted into Court, along with Ernest Hogan’s soon-to-be hit “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” 45 Yet what might seem like a case of black social pain leavened with comedy for interracial profit by Harney and Irwin was soon reappropriated by African American performers, its problematic racial politics transformed into something like catharsis for black vaudeville audiences. “Mattie Phillips is sure to make a name for herself,” noted the Indianapolis Freeman of a youthful singer with Black Patti’s Troubadours in 1898. “She is a dashing octoroon from North Carolina, and her fancy steps in the first act,

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when she sings ‘Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose,’ set the audience wild. . . . She is a bright, level-headed young woman not out of her teens.” 46 “[A]ll the best talent of that generation came down the same drain,” insists Handy in Father of the Blues, a statement that reflects both the unifying effect of shared experience on a generation’s consciousness— above all, a yearning to be “turned loose” from the violences of Jim Crow—and the ill repute in which the boisterous black minstrels were held by what Handy acknowledged to be “a large section of upper-crust Negroes” (33). Handy participated in the flowering of this consciousness not just as a performer, songwriter, and bandleader, but also as a devoted reader and distributor of black newspapers who could not help but be aware of outrages young black men were being subjected to, and bitterly protesting, across the South. “As a sideline in Clarksdale, [Mississippi],” he relates, I did a kind of bootleg business in Northern Negro newspapers and magazines. Not only did I supply the colored folks of the town, but also got the trade of the farmers, the croppers and the hands from the outlying country. They would come to my house on their weekly visits to the city, give me the high sign, and I would slip them their copies of the Chicago Defender, the Indianapolis Freeman or the Voice of the Negro. This may sound like a tame enough enterprise to those whose memories are short, but oldsters of those parts will not have to be told that I was venturing into risky business. Negro newspapers were not plentiful in those days, and their circulation in cities like Clarksdale was looked upon with strong disfavor by certain of the local powers. But because I was favorably known to most of the white folks as the leader of the band that gave the weekly concerts on the main street, they never suspected me of such dark business as distributing Northern literature to Negroes of the community. (79 – 80)

Here the mask of the “reliable” permits Handy to play the role of revolutionary, member of a generational vanguard promulgating resistance and rebellion in the face of death. If Handy’s own language—“risky business,” “strong disfavor”—is something less than apocalyptic, the black voices that spoke out of the pages of the newspapers he read and distributed were exactly that. An aggrieved, impassioned, violently assertive “New Negro” was being born in the 1890s as the blues’ future father came of age. “As a young man of the race,” wrote one contemporary to the Indianapolis Freeman in the days following Henry Smith’s 1893 lynching, I do not feel or yield that deference to the so called superior race that did and still does some of my ancestors. I am one of the great army of black youth of this country who feels with the intuitive instinct of the oppressed,

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that a crisis is imminent. I feel that the youth of which I am one, is to be the savior of the Negro race. Each moment the plan of action becomes more unified. Two formulas are to be chosen: from one prayers for a peaceful solution, begging for a consideration of the Golden rule by all mankind, the other craves the application of force let it be a war of extermination if it must be, for it is better to die fighting for liberty, if death as a sacrifice means a probable rectifying of the ills done the living.47

If “[t]he miracle of [Handy’s] own career” generates hope for racial reconciliation and black social progress, as Barton has claimed, then Handy is equally concerned in Father of the Blues with depicting the furious undercurrents of minstrel life as he and this “great army of black youth” lived it.48 Nowhere is this more evident than in his account of the 1902 lynching of a fellow performer who refused to defer to the “so-called superior race”: Sudden, stark tragedy sometimes darkened our minstrel days. There was Louis Wright, for instance, who played a trombone in the boys’ band. Later, though still in short pants, he was elevated to my division. An unusually talented musician, this slim, sensitive boy resented insult with every fiber of his being. He would fight anyone any time and with any weapon within reach. In our company we understood his fierce pride; we knew how to treat him. Later, however, when the Georgia Minstrels lured him away from us, he didn’t fare so well. They were in a Missouri town and Louis, on the way to the theatre with his female companion, was snowballed by some white hoodlums. He retaliated swiftly, laying down a blast of curses. That night a mob came back-stage at the theatre. They had come to lynch Louis. In his alarm the sharp-tempered boy drew a gun and fired into the crowd. The mob scattered promptly, but they did not turn from their purpose. They reassembled in the railroad yards, near the special car of the minstrel company. This time their number was augmented by officers. When the minstrels arrived, the whole company was arrested and brutally flogged during the questioning that followed, but no squeal was forthcoming. In time, however, Louis Wright was recognized. The law gave him to the mob, and in almost less time than it takes to tell it they had done their work. He was lynched, his tongue cut out and his body shipped to his mother in Chicago in a pine box. (43)

Wright’s fate is a gruesome travesty of Baker’s “black (W)hole”: the African American artist brutally silenced, boxed in, obliterated. Yet Wright’s racial pride turns out to be Handy’s own. Instead of raging at Wright’s lynchers or mourning his dead friend, Handy conveys his reactions indi-

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rectly, answering the Wright episode in the next paragraph with another tale of black minstrel beleaguerment: One day in a Texas town I began to think that my turn was next. While playing a cornet solo in the public square during the noon concert, I suddenly turned around to discover a rifle pointed at my eye. I ignored the threat, playing as if nothing was happening. A few moments later, the drums rumbling as we began the march back to the theatre, a gang of cowboys appeared and began roping our walking gents with their lassos. A swarm of rowdy boys joined in the fun and threw rocks down the bell of the big bass horn. Then the kids turned on the drums. They pelted our drums so vigorously the noise sounded like the rat-a-tat-tat of a machinegun. I was furious and stoutly refused to play a note during the parade. We marched faster than usual, but we kept our ranks. Later, Mahara complimented me warmly for keeping the parade in formation and refusing to play. (43 – 44)

The snowballs that pelted Wright return as rocks clattering off Mahara’s drums. Handy’s pride is no less fierce than Wright’s, although it expresses itself not as outright violence against his white tormentors but as a furious refusal to entertain them, to play “their” Negro minstrel—a refusal they may not, in fact, have decoded as the insurrectionary gesture Handy intended. What a modest rebellion! Yet Handy’s infrapolitics play loud and clear to, of all people, his supportive white employer. That Handy would deliberately note Mahara’s approval of his wildcat strike is one more example of the paradox that is Father of the Blues, a text as concerned with preaching interracial cooperation—indeed, praising white paternalism—as it is with documenting racist white violence and prideful black resistance. White violence and black resistance, however, remain keynotes of Handy’s minstrel days. The interlocutor of Mahara’s Minstrels, for example, George L. Moxley, although “[w]hite in appearance,” was “by birth and at heart a Kentucky Negro,” according to Handy, and had risked his life repeatedly by “passing” with white minstrel groups. “W. A. Mahara was the only Minstrel Company I travelled with,” Moxley wrote Handy, “but I put on an Elks’ Minstrel once in Shreveport and one in Dayton, both ofays. They would have hung me in Shreveport had they known that I was colored, and the same is true in plenty of other places” (39). Sometimes, as here, valor among black minstrels consisted of exercising discretion and living to fight another day. “Orange was the Texas town we dreaded most,” confessed Handy, relating one such episode:

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Whenever it became known to the home town mob that our show was routed their way, they would sit up all night waiting for the train to pass. Their conception of wild, he-man fun was to riddle our car with bullets as it sped through their town. Our strategy was to extinguish the lights and lie quietly on the floor. Fortunately none of our company ever got killed during these assaults. (44)

“Our car” is the significant phrase here: what made black minstrelsy uniquely nightmarish in the 1890s was the continual subjection of black material success to the deadly whims of white envy and roguery. Like blueswoman Ma Rainey, who wore diamond tiaras and a necklace made of gold pieces, the minstrels transformed their bodies, not to mention their mobile accommodations, into spectacular emblems of black uplift—inspiring to black audiences, potentially infuriating to local whites. “Our special palace car, which has just left the shops of Barnie & Smith, at Dayton, is a thing of beauty,” wrote Fred W. Simpson, a trombonist with Oliver P. Scott’s Refined Negro Minstrels, to the Indianapolis Freeman in 1898, “and is being commented on by the admiring crowds as they gaze on it.” 49 Four months later he bragged, “Our new parade clothes came in Ottawa, Ill., and to say that the ‘gang’ created a furor when the parade went out is but putting it mild. We simply captured the natives. Our overcoats are a dark green, box back with two rows of pearl buttons, and the hats are pink silk with a green silk band.” 50 The black minstrels were projecting themselves across the South as a glorious, enviable spectacle during a decade when white racist reaction was concerned with restricting black freedom of movement through public space. Guns were the preeminent enforcer of Jim Crow’s freshly legislated hierarchies, even as private Pullman cars were an important way in which the black minstrels resisted both. “On Railroads in the South—Where Every White Man Carries a Revolver” read the headline of an investigative report in the New York Age dated March 29, 1890: From Nashville your correspondent took the L&N Railroad for New Orleans. . . . I thought of that infernal decision of the United States Supreme Court rendered March 2, 1890, claiming that a State had the right to compel railroads to run Jim Crow cars for colored people. . . . The Afro-American in the South is entirely controlled by the white man. He is subject to insults and outrages in every walk of life; if he appears as a man, truthfully speaking he is in one respect a complete slave— that is, he is a slave to the will of the white man. . . . At Evergreen, Ala., a colored man came aboard and went in the closet. The conductor did not pass through until the train left the next stopping

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place, Castleberry. He then looked in and discovered the man. The train was running very slowly, about 6 miles per hour. Instead of the conductor stopping the train and putting the man off, he first struck him in the face as hard as he could with his fist. Then he took a large handled broom used by the porter to sweep the smoker, and broke that over the man’s head. I am positive if that man had been white, the conductor would not have struck him, but would have stopped the train and put him off. This illustrates just how colored men and women are treated on railroads in the south. I could recite at least 25 instances of insults and outrages, that I have seen from Henderson, Ky. to San Antonio, Texas, and all committed upon the colored man and woman. But we must get every AfroAmerican in a position to protect himself before we can expect to compel others to respect him. Lee surrendered because Gen’l Grant had more bullets, guns, powder and more men to use than he. I observed from New Orleans to San Antonio that almost every white man has the ready revolver in his hip pocket.51

Increasingly agitated demands for black self-defense culminated, shortly after Handy joined Mahara’s in 1896, with an extraordinary editorial headline in the Indianapolis Freeman: “Get Guns! Negroes, Get Guns!” The words were those of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, whose thunderous declamations against lynching and calls for a black outmigration to Africa in recent years had made him a familiar figure to the paper’s readers. Its editorial writers expressed qualified support for Turner’s program: Get guns! Negroes, get guns! was the fire brand and tow expression that fell from the pen of the able and eloquent Bishop Turner, when in a mental frenzy over the wrongs heaped on his race in the last seven years, which wrongs reached their climacteric a few weeks ago when two colored men were murdered while the A.M.E conference was in session in Louisiana. We can not advise this very lawless mode of procedure, yet from the tenor of affairs some forcible methods of bringing to terms those who insult the manhood of the race by putting end to lives in these most disgraceful ways, should not be too tardy in obtaining.52

There can be little doubt that Handy and his fellow minstrels knew of Turner’s inflammatory exhortation; two weeks after its publication in the Indianapolis Freeman, a “Note from Mahara’s Minstrels” appeared in the paper claiming that “[t]hrough California we got The Freeman quite often which is always welcome in our company.” 53 More surprising, perhaps, is that Handy and the others should quickly have adopted Turner’s “forcible methods” as a way of defending their manhood, and their

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wives’ and lovers’ respectability, from insult. The episode, related in Father of the Blues, takes place shortly after Handy has escaped lynching in Tennessee by using the Pullman’s getaway compartment. Now, accompanied by his reluctant wife, he and his minstrel band are about to drum up business for the evening show in Tyler, Texas with their usual noontime parade when an “excited doctor” who has just examined one of their ailing bandmates runs into the town square, arms flailing: “Stop! Stop it!” he cried. “Stop this damn music.” I turned in alarm. The members of my band began to look foolish and unnecessary. Presently, turning to the assembled crowd, the doctor added, “Ladies and gentlemen, these niggers have got the smallpox. If they don’t get out of town—and that right quick—we’ll lynch them all.” The effect was electrical. Stunned for a moment, we quickly regained our wits well enough to fall into step with the rat-a-tat-tat of George Reeves’ snare drum and commence a double-quick to the car. In another jiffy an engine was hitched to our car and we were taken to a siding on the outskirts of town. County officers came a short while later to inform us that the appearance of one more case of smallpox among us would be the signal for them to burn the car and carry out the doctor’s lynching threat. (47– 48)

“[F]oolish and unnecessary” indeed: Father of the Blues is a case study of an art form, black minstrelsy, fragmenting under the pressures of history. A free-ranging black male presence, looming in the white southern imagination of the 1890s as a kind of deadly disease that could only be kept in check through lynching-with-burning—Vardaman would compare the “brutish negro’s lust” to “the virus in the fangs of the coiled serpent”—finds its exemplary objective correlative here in the form of smallpox.54 Where is the minstrel grin now, confronted as its supposed bearers are with the threat of extermination? The grin is replaced, in one of the more remarkable passages in Father of the Blues, with armed resistance and grim determination. “During our enforced idleness,” writes Handy of the quarantine period, something told me to brush up on my shooting. In addition to the arsenal in the bottom of the car [in the “get-away”], I had my own private collection of arms, a Winchester 44, a Smith and Wesson and a Colt revolver. The S.&W. had been bought especially for my wife, and during the lull I tried to teach her to shoot it. This proved to be a waste of time. She was too nervous to pull the trigger. At any rate, I built a fortress of cross-ties, and this became our protection by day as well as a bed by night. We decided immediately that there would be greater safety, considering the tenseness of the situation, in sleeping in the open than remaining

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in the car. This met no opposition, but it led to a greater problem. Guards were thrown around our concentration camp. By sundown some of us began to be disturbed about the lack of privacy. We requested the guards to allow our women to walk the tracks down to the nearby woods. This was denied. Will Garland got his fighting clothes on immediately. He was in the midst of a romance with Nettie Goff, our lady trombonist, and he was willing to pit his gallantry against any opposition. My blood boiled too. Will and I grimly raided the arsenal, took positions and calmly instructed the women to take their walk. We invited the guards to oppose us, if they dared. They didn’t. As a matter of fact, their attitude softened after that. Some of them actually became friendly. (48 – 49)

There is high drama here, surely, but also unexpected humor: at the very moment Handy and Garland are determinedly embodying Bishop Turner’s rallying cry, “Negroes, get guns!”, Handy is quick to point out that armed resistance, too, is a way of making white friends! Yet white friends were very much what “America’s most affectionately regarded Negro” was hoping to make with the publication of Father of the Blues. As the line “Guards were thrown around our concentration camp” may remind us, Americans black and white were, in 1941, on the verge of waging war against a dictator defined in large part by his racist, “un-American” persecution of the Jews—Jews who, like Irving Berlin with his recent hit “God Bless America,” dominated Tin Pan Alley and formed a significant part of Handy’s anticipated readership. By cushioning his description of armed black resistance within a prisoner-of-war scenario, by further qualifying it as a kind of sentimental gallantry, Handy rendered it more palatable for a (northern) white audience that might otherwise have shivered inwardly at the thought of infuriated black manhood asserting itself at gunpoint. “Handy makes neither much nor little of the racial question,” the New York Times reassured its readers in 1941, “but he does refer to it on occasion. And now and again he speaks directly to Jews as well as Negroes, with a lack of bitterness, a fearlessness and dignity which lights up both the sins and the hopes of democracy.” 55 Yet the fury remains, for all that; slipping off his mask of dispassionate folklorist, Handy gives in to rage: “My blood boiled too.” Boiling blood, infantile squalling, schoolboy tears, cold chills, and furious resentment: Father of the Blues enacts on the representative body of its narrator a kind of blues revolt, the passional crisis experienced by his fiercely assertive, upwardly mobile, yet grievously oppressed generation of young black southern men. Two large questions now come into view. First, can the rapid decline of black minstrelsy after the turn of the century be traced to this crisis, a painful and finally insupportable disjunction between the comic materials from which the minstrel show was

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assembled and the southern nightmare the black minstrels (and their black public) were forced to endure? Second, can the simultaneous emergence of blues, a subcultural music that filtered into black vaudeville around 1909 before exploding into mainstream popularity with “Memphis Blues” (1912), “St. Louis Blues” (1914), and Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” (1920), be attributed, at least in part, to the music’s provisional resolution of this disjunction: the supplanting of the minstrel grin, in the American popular imagination, by the bittersweet sadness, the wistfulness, but also the stoic pride, that underlay not just black minstrel life but most African American lives at the nadir? Didn’t blues music, in other words, ultimately help refigure the black image in the white mind, displacing it away from caricature (even as “coon” imagery resurfaced in early race-records advertisements) and toward an embattled grief more in accord with black self-perception? 56 Handy’s pronouncement about the blues being born “in aching hearts” may strike us today as trite, but its triteness is a function of the successful blues revolution Handy himself helped inaugurate. Just as Du Bois was able to establish, in The Souls of Black Folk, that black folk did in fact have souls, at a time when Charles Carroll (The Negro a Beast [1900]), Thomas Dixon (The Leopard’s Spots [1902]), and other racist expostulators on Negro “retrogression” were insisting otherwise, so Handy served as an effective propagandist for a widespread current of African American feeling—imprisoning despair backed with releasing euphoria—that the minstrel mask had previously hidden. The spirituals had worked some of this same territory, to be sure, but the spirituals, despite the best efforts of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and other touring choirs, had never achieved mass popularity of a magnitude enjoyed by Handy and his whistleable, hummable compositions; a more radical intervention was required. When folklorist Dorothy Scarborough visited Handy in the early 1920s, after “St. Louis Blues” and the subsequent race-record craze had considerably refigured American expressive geographies, Handy tried to clarify his revolution, unfinished though it was. “Handy said that the blues express the Negro’s twofold nature,” reported Scarborough, the grave and the gay, and reveal his ability to appear the opposite of what he is. “Most white people think that the Negro is always cheerful and lively,” he explained. “But he isn’t, though he may seem that way sometimes when he is most troubled. The Negro knows the blues as a state of mind, and that is why this music has that name.” 57

Wearing the mask of partisan folklorist here, as he does so often, Handy distances himself from “the Negro” whose blues he and the other black

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minstrels knew all too well: not economic blues, particularly, but the blues of a violent subjection that gave the lie to a “freedom” grounded in one’s putative right to travel when and where one wished. A kind of tensed wistfulness—what Jasen and Jones call “this dual package of pain and strength”—may have found its way into American popular song for the first time with the publication of “St. Louis Blues,” but the spirit of suppressed rebellion that underlay that bittersweet melancholy was always more than the music could openly express.58 “If Bessie Smith had killed some white people,” LeRoi Jones’s Clay explodes in Dutchman, “she wouldn’t have needed that music.” 59 If the last generation of black minstrels hadn’t been killed and almost killed by white southerners on a regular basis—and been driven to take up arms—they wouldn’t have needed that music either. The “nightmare of those minstrel days” begat, in Handy’s case, a dream of blues form. DELTA DEMAGOGUES AND “PRIMITIVE MUSIC”: HANDY’S MISSISSIPPI PROBLEM

Additional violent encounters with white racism were not, needless to say, something Handy actively courted after leaving Mahara’s in June of 1903.60 He was evaluating two competing job offers: one to direct a white municipal band in Michigan, the other to direct a black Knights of Pythias band in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He was six months shy of thirty, married, with two young daughters. Money was a consideration; the future author of “St. Louis Blues” and soon-to-be-ruler of a Memphis dance-band empire was nothing if not ambitious. But Handy was driven, too, by an inexplicable spiritual thirst that could only be quenched by the Delta, wracked by racial tumult as that frontier province was. “There was little comparison between the two [ job] propositions, as I saw it,” he confessed in Father of the Blues. “The Michigan thing was miles ahead, more money, more prestige, better opportunities for the future, better everything I thought. Yet, for no good reason that I could express, I turned my face southward and down the road that led inevitably to the blues” (72). Mississippi had not previously played any role in his imaginative life, Handy insists: “At no time did I even dream that the Mississippi delta would presently become my stomping grounds . . .” (72). His celebrated “discovery” and embrace of blues, which ultimately granted him more money and prestige than he could possibly have dreamed, was, in truth, anything but inevitable when he arrived in the Delta. What he would later call the “primitive music” (77) of southern black folk did not particularly interest him at that point. His model—unsurprising for someone who had just spent seven years putting a minstrel band through

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its marching paces—was John Philip Sousa. As Handy’s first Delta acquaintance, a black Clarksdale bank clerk and clarinet player named Stack Mangham, recalled, The band Handy came to teach was the second band [in town.] [T]he music played was nearly all marches and waltzes. After Handy came here, he began to teach us overtures and classical music. We would play for the societies like the Masons and the Sir Knights and Daughters, and for political campaigns, march around and go up there in town and play on some main corner for about a half hour. . . . I didn’t pay much attention to the blues and that music until Handy came here. He didn’t either at first. . . . When Handy came here, his ambition was to write marches. He brought a march with him that he had written that was [later] published as Hail to the Spirit of Freedom. He said then that he was going to be the March King—another John Philip Sousa. I think that was the only march he wrote. After he got interested in the blues, he never wrote another one.61

What happened in the course of Handy’s two-year residence in the Mississippi Delta to transform him from the would-be March King into the nascent Blues Father? The “Mississippi Mud” chapter of Father of the Blues, in which Handy describes his blues awakening, is the most frequently cited portion of his autobiography. Its primary attraction is two linked moments of first contact—with a slide guitarist in Tutwiler, with an instrumental trio in Cleveland—in which Handy plays folklorist and musical entrepreneur to what he construes as naive black folk subjects. These episodes are invariably identified by blues scholars as having occurred in 1903, although Handy never dates them in Father of the Blues. 62 His own scene-setting suggests they took place somewhat later, perhaps in 1904, after a period of uninterrupted in-state travel with his band had given him a working familiarity with Delta geography, not to mention contemporary Delta politics and folkways. The question of timing is important, since it is precisely Handy’s familiarity with Delta politics and folkways—in particular, the vicious Negrophobia propagated by gubernatorial candidate James Vardaman and the simultaneous eruption of lynching around Clarksdale—which may help explain his readiness to be converted to the blues gospel. In several crucial respects, Mississippi represents for Handy not an escape from the “nightmare of minstrelsy” but a continuation and intensification of that experience—a careerdriven move, as it were, out of the frying pan of racial violence and into the fire. Stack Mangham, signatory of the check that brings Handy to the Delta in the summer of 1903, is a key transitional figure, a threshold-

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guardian of the curious blues romance Handy is about to enter. Handy’s description of him is arresting: In Clarksdale a few days [after leaving Mahara’s] I entered the Planter’s Bank. A guard directed me to the cage of the assistant cashier and there I saw something I had never seen before in all my travels. A Negro stood at the window of that southern white bank handling foreign and domestic drafts. Still blinking and wondering whether or not I was awake, I approached the window. “I have no one to identify me,” I apologized, slipping the check [I’d been sent] through the cage. He gave me a suave smile. “My name is your endorsement,” he said quietly. “You will find it on the other side.” He was S. L. Mangham, assistant cashier. More important still, he was a clarinet player in the band I had come to direct. The local businessmen and bank officials called him Stack; they swore by him, coming and going. Whatever Stack promised, they said, he delivered. I found that he was held in equal favor by the band. Stack never left the platform when we played for dances. He never took a drink, and he never got excited. Nothing upset him. I cannot recall ever having seen his name or picture in a newspaper, yet Stack was a power in the town. He remained with the bank for thirty years and until it closed its doors. Mangham developed a peculiar type of paralysis and had to wear an iron truss to keep his head from turning around backwards, but now the truss is not necessary. (73)

Suave, powerful, trusted, unflusterable—Mangham is also caged and, it turns out, self-torturing, paralyzed by a mysterious bodily ailment that bespeaks the emotional price he has paid for his singular social role as the most financially successful “reliable” in a Mississippi Delta known far less for black uplift than for stringing black men up. “Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you,” Negro league pitcher Satchel Paige once quipped; Mangham’s paralysis reveals his repressed terror of an unnamed Something that he is powerless not to look back at, and that shows every sign of gaining on him. Black uplift of the sort Mangham embodies, as it happens, was being viciously attacked in Mississippi during this period, in a way that could only have given him nightmares. Theodore Roosevelt had infuriated poor Delta whites in 1901 by appointing Minnie M. Cox, a middle-class, college-educated black woman, as postmistress of Indianola, a town not far from Clarksdale. James Vardaman, who had begun a year-long campaign for the Mississippi governorship in 1902, lambasted the president as a “coon-flavored miscegenationist” bent on “filling the head of the nigger” with dangerous ideas. The “unmoral and debased negro,” Vardaman charged in August 1903, was unfit by temperament and lack of education to be anything more than a menial; he promised, as a way of

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ensuring this condition, to slash state funding for Negro schools if elected. His defeat, on the other hand, would be construed by Negroes as “an endorsement of Roosevelt’s criminal policy of social and political equality between the races”; as a result, he warned, “we would have to kill more negroes in the next twelve months in Mississippi, than we have had to kill in the last twenty years.” 63 The years surrounding Vardaman’s election—which is to say, the years of Handy’s stay in Clarksdale—were “among the bloodiest in Mississippi’s turbulent history,” according to David Oshinsky: As the campaign heated up, white terrorist groups came alive in areas where black farmers had experienced modest success. Calling themselves “whitecaps,” these nightriders beat and tortured Negroes, burned their barns, trampled their crops, and shot into their homes. According to conservative accounts, about a dozen blacks were murdered and hundreds more driven from their land.64

Lynching fever, too, had been stirred up by Vardaman’s rhetoric: between 1903 and 1905, at least seventeen blacks were lynched within a fifty-mile radius of Clarksdale—an area including the Delta towns of Tutwiler and Cleveland, where Handy would first encounter the blues.65 “Nothing upset him,” Handy insists of Stack Mangham, and yet Mangham’s own self-torturing body suggests otherwise, disclosing an anxiety grounded in the extreme fragility of his social position in Vardaman’s Mississippi. His involuntary head turning, a kind of hysterical symptom that can only be managed through the retraint of an iron truss, betrays the extent to which he has been unconsciously disciplined by a fear of being seen, and destroyed, by that which he cannot see, which is to say a phantasmic lynch mob. Lynching in the turn-of-the-century South, as Robyn Wiegman has argued, must be viewed in its performative, specular dimension, as a disciplinary activity that communalizes white power while territorializing the black body and its movement through social space. . . . Because the terror of the white lynch mob arises from both its function as a panoptic mode of surveillance and its materialization of violence in public displays of torture and castration, the black subject is disciplined in two powerful ways: by the threat of always being seen and by the specular scene.66

Laboring daily in his “cage” at the Planter’s Bank, Mangham is “always being seen,” and unconsciously disciplined, by a multitude of white eyes that together constitute a panoptic mode of surveillance. His symptom addresses this overwhelming visibility—a requirement of his job as “trusted” Negro money handler—while simultaneously addressing the

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lynch mob that is always already potentially pursuing him, preparing to make him the focus of a specular scene involving rope, coal oil, and a crowd of onlookers. Stack Mangham functions, it might be argued, as a model for one possible black response to the social paradox represented by the cashrich but deadly “Green Eden” that the turn-of-the-century Delta had become for those who knew how to navigate its peculiar social landscape. He is Handy’s Mississippi double: upwardly mobile, a dance band musician and man of moderate habits who refuses to allow his emotions to get the better of him. “[H]e never got excited,” Handy tells us. “Nothing upset him.” Mangham refuses, in fact, to have emotions, or at least to express them—a point on which he and the intermittently passionate Handy seem to diverge. If “the blues were conceived in aching hearts,” as Handy tells us elsewhere in the chapter, then Mangham—who, by his own admission, “didn’t pay much attention to the blues and that music until Handy came here”—represents an aesthetic dead end, a victim of his own repressions, even as he exhibits admirable suaveness and selfcontrol. But of course Handy himself didn’t pay much attention to the blues before coming to Clarksdale, as both he and Mangham agree. What shifted his perceptual focus, we might ask again, and opened him to inspiration? One spur was Handy’s repeated firsthand confrontation with Mississippi demagoguery in its purest form: James Kimble Vardaman, the socalled White Chief. Perhaps the most startling revelation of Father of the Blues, denied by Handy even as he makes it, is that his Clarksdale band provided a considerable portion of the soundtrack for Vardaman’s successful 1903 election effort. The case is circumstantial but compelling. “We were frequently hired,” Handy remembers of his Mississippi days, to furnish music for political rallies. This meant that we had to absorb a “passel” of oratory of the brand served by some Southern politicians just this side of the turn of the century. We appeared with one gubernatorial candidate who regularly treated his audiences to the following titbit [sic]: “Ladies and Gentlemen: “I come before you as a candidate for the governorship of the grand old state of Mississippi. And I pledge you my sacred word of honor that if you elect me your governor, I shall not spend one dollar for nigger education. “Now I want to tell you why I will not spend one dollar of the state’s money for nigger education; education unfits the nigger. Let me prove it to you conclusively. I am right.

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“When this great country of ours was torn by strife, and we followed the fortunes of the Confederacy, we left behind our mothers, our daughters, our sweethearts and our wives; and we left them behind with our niggers, and they guarded them like so many faithful watch-dogs. Now what kind of nigger did we leave them with? It was the uneducated nigger. “Suppose we again had to go to war, would you trust them with the nigger of today? (A chorus of no’s came in answer.) That’s why I wouldn’t spend one dollar for nigger education.” His voice quavered and mist came to his eyes as he extended one arm while resting the other dramatically over his heart. Then as the concluding words trailed off, we struck up Dixie. Outside we exchanged amazed glances among ourselves and laughed. He was not elected. (80 – 81)

Vardaman was, as it happens, elected governor in 1903 —“just this side of the turn of the century”—but can we be sure that this unnamed gubernatorial candidate described by Handy is, in fact, Vardaman? According to several historians, Vardaman’s 1903 Democratic primary campaign against Judge Frank Critz, Edmund Noel, and Andrew Fuller Fox revolved almost entirely around his repeated denunciations of Negro education, a position rejected by the other candidates. At a four-way debate in Winona, writes Eugene E. White, Vardaman launched into a tirade about the uselessness of Negro education. He taunted his audiences with the paradox of the state’s having “spent $150,000 to disenfranchise the negro,” by the Convention of 1890, and then “six million . . . to bring him back into politics” by educating him. . . . So alarmed were the Tupelo Negroes that a committee of the local colored Pastor’s Association printed a circular, which said in part: “A grave evil confronts the colored people of Mississippi, which they must try to meet in some way. A candidate for governor is about to be selected who would deprive us of every liberty and the blessed schools which are so fast bringing our people from the darkness to light.” 67

Newspaper reports of Vardaman’s appearances in July and August 1903, as his campaign came to a head, frequently mention a band, although not Handy’s by name. “At Water Valley,” reads a typical account, “a blaring band and a booming cannon heralded his arrival.” 68 Water Valley is roughly fifty miles from Clarksdale; Handy, new in town and just settling into his role as Delta bandleader, may well have heeded Vardaman’s call, later regretting (and denying) his participation in what turned out to be a winning campaign. Or Handy’s memory may simply have played tricks on him, confusing Vardaman’s successful 1903 gubernatorial candidacy with his failed 1907 senatorial bid. The Father of the Blues would hardly wish to be known, in any case, for having helped elect the

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man most responsible for giving black Mississippians the blues! Why, then, tell us of this politician at all, if to do so was to risk scandal? Handy’s concern, as he makes clear, is with his own emotional reactions to such hurtful demagoguery. His encounter with Vardaman reactivated painful and long-buried childhood feelings, but also served as an object lesson in the healing catharsis that covert expression (rather than stifling repression) of such feelings could provide: Each time we played for him, I was reminded of the first time I had listened to oratory of this sort. As a schoolboy in Florence I had gone home, buried my head in a pillow and wept after listening to sentiments like these uttered from the courthouse steps by a politician of the same stripe. Later I had wandered off alone in the woods across the road from the cabin in which I was born. There, point by point, I had undertaken to answer the man of ill will. Slowly, deliberately, I had torn his arguments to bits. At the top of my voice I had hurled the lie into his teeth. The woodland took up my shouts. The words of my defiance echoed and reechoed. That pleased me. I went home and slept well, a great burden removed. In Clarksdale the members of my band nudged one another with their elbows when we were safely out of the crowd. Then we all laughed—laughed. (81)

“The black masses laugh at the white man,” James Weldon Johnson once wrote, “with a deep laughter which should be the most ominous sound that reaches his ears.” 69 The laughter of Handy and his bandmates is both covert and ominous in its own way, the sign of liberated consciousness. If Mangham’s hysterical paralysis suggests the price of psychic repression, this free-flowing laughter suggests the value of creative expression. It is blues laughter: grounded in the humiliating oppressiveness of Jim Crow but refusing to remain there; outward-turned, other-mocking, cathartic. It throws off the minstrel grin, slips the yoke by changing the joke. Yet it is a laughter that has its deepest origins, as Handy reminds us, in tears and angry defiance: his own youthful response to viciously racist language that seems determined to deprive him of a future. Father of the Blues is, among other things, about the process by which Handy learns to acknowledge and express the whole complex of racially inflected blues feelings—humiliation, despair, cold chills, violent revolt, but also releasing laughter—that were his generation’s inheritance. Both acknowledgment and expression in this scene are conditioned, significantly, by repetition: “Each time we played for him,” Handy says of the Vardaman figure, “I was reminded . . . .” Handy’s furious woodland denunciations “echoed and reechoed.” “Then we all laughed—laughed.” If Mississippi is the scene of blues discovery for Handy, then his celebrated moments of first contact in Tutwiler and Cleveland might be

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described as dream-like encounters with troubling, haunting repetitions—musical repetitions, which compel Handy’s attention because they give uncanny aesthetic form to blues feelings already active in him, feelings that the politician’s demagoguery has recuperated and intensified. The propagators of these haunting repetitions are, in both cases, itinerant black musicians of a distinctly lower social class than Handy: a “lean, loose-jointed Negro” in Tutwiler, a “long-legged chocolate boy” and his trio in Cleveland (74, 76). As wandering freelancers who ply their trade in train stations and jooks, they would have been marked men in Vardaman’s Mississippi, targeted for harassment and arrest. In January 1904, shortly after Vardaman’s election as governor, the state legislature passed a vagrancy law that the governor urged police and prosecutors to enforce zealously. African Americans were not targeted by name, but the spirit of the law was clear, relying on code words for black criminality. “Let there begin a most vigorous campaign against the Vagrant,” Vardaman charged in a written directive, “—the vicious Idler and the Keeper of Dives of Infamy. Let the rendezvous of the Rapist, the Murderer, the Crap-Shooter, and the Blind Tiger, be closed!” 70 If Handy’s own performance venues—planter’s dances, merchant’s sales, boat excursions—were almost exclusively white, and thus exempt from such prosecutions, his firsthand contact with Vardaman’s racist rhetoric enabled him to share a certain community of feeling with these folk-blues musicians.71 Handy’s celebrated encounter with the Tutwiler guitarist presents itself, in any case, as a kind of cross-class awakening—as though one of what he would later call the “submerged people” 72 has suddenly voiced his own long-submerged feelings, feelings no longer wholly expressible in the musical language of John Philip Sousa: The band which I found in Clarksdale and the nine-man orchestra which grew out of it did yeoman duty in the Delta. We played for affairs of every description. I came to know by heart every foot of the Delta, even from Clarksdale to Lambert on the Dog and Yazoo City. I could call every flag stop, water tower and pig path on the Peavine with my eyes closed. It all became a familiar, monotonous round. Then one night at Tutwiler, as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start. A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.

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Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog. The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind. (73 –74)

The tune stays in Handy’s mind because it is already, in some sense, in his mind: it was put there by black minstrel William Malone, the Mahara’s berthmate whose “strange, tortured sound[s]” also woke Handy, and unforgettably (67). If Malone’s nocturnal moan sounded as though “the woe of the entire world was suddenly rolled upon the lonely young man,” then the face of this Tutwiler guitarist had on it “some of the sadness of the ages” (67). Malone’s moan, like the blues song Handy overhears here, was characterized by an arresting, uncanny repetitiveness: “Over and over again, as long as he slept, this moan was repeated. I was so disturbed . . .” (67). What distinguishes this Mississippi bluesman’s “weird” music from Malone’s moan, of course, is the fact that it is music. Malone, a blues subject before the letter, had no outlet for the blues except his traumatized inarticulate cry; this guitarist sings his blues as musical repetitions, the thrice-repeated line. Handy’s galvanized alertness in the presence of the Tutwiler bluesman is, in symbolic terms, a deferred awakening out of Malone’s nightmare—the lingering traumas engendered by Klan violence during Reconstruction—and into a dream of blues form. It is also Handy’s awakening from the immediate nightmare of Vardaman’s Mississippi: the pandemic lynching he describes in a later chapter entitled “Trouble, Trouble, I’ve Had It All My Days,” but also the racist demagoguery he has repeatedly been forced to endure. For this reason, too, the guitarist’s blues repetitions strike Handy as uncanny. They voice not just the “sadness of the ages” written on the bluesman’s face—a sadness inflected by lynch law and vagrancy laws—but the youthful grief Handy has been reengaging, and purging through blues laughter, each time he and his band accompany Vardaman on the campaign trail. Blues music offers Handy a way of breaking the cycle of pain by recycling that pain not as overt complaint, but as the fact of repetition itself, a haunting aural inscription of necessity with an immediate basis in the beleaguered black social unconscious he has come to share. The actual words sung by the guitarist are far less important to Handy, for this reason, than their insistent repetition. After asking the guitarist “what the words meant,” Handy receives a bemused reply and translates it for our benefit. “This fellow was going where the Southern [train] cross’ the Dog [train], and he didn’t care who knew it. He was simply singing about Moorhead as he waited. That was not unusual” (74). Indeed it was not. What was unusual—what struck Handy with the

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force of revelation—was the thrice-repeated vocal line backed by an “unforgettable” and “weird” knife-on-guitar-strings accompaniment. So-called knife-songs were, as it happened, Mississippi’s distinctive contribution to what would have been, in 1903 – 4, a blues culture in its infancy. The name is derived, according to Howard Odum, “from the act of running the back of the knife along the strings of the instrument, thus making it ‘sing’ and ‘talk’ with skill.” 73 These instrumental vocalizations serve to separate and comment on the singer’s repeated vocal lines, when not simply doubling those lines outright. The result is a call-and-response melodic tissue supported by polyrhythmic repetitions; an early slide guitarist such as Charley Patton, for example, snapped strings against the fretboard and slapped his guitar’s wooden face. Distantly grounded in African drum-talk, such music often strikes “educated” Western ears such as Handy’s as overly repetitive because they lack the cultural competency to decode rhythmic patterns of repetition-with-variation as articulate music.74 Handy, the would-be March King, is aware of his cultural limitations and provoked to address them almost immediately after his encounter with the Tutwiler guitarist: I had picked up a fair training in the music of the modern world and had assumed that the correct manner to compose was to develop simples into grandissimos and not to repeat them monotonously. As a director of many respectable, conventional bands, it was not easy for me to concede that a simple slow-drag and repeat could be rhythm itself. Neither was I ready to believe that this was just what the public wanted. But we live to learn. (76)

Again, Handy’s overt concern as a budding musical entrepreneur with “what the public wanted” shifts our attention away from his own considerable emotional investment in blues repetitions. What complicates the issue, of course, is that entrepreneurialism itself is a locus of his desire, offering as it does at least a partial escape from the severely narrowed “place,” enforced through violence, that Jim Crow would have him occupy. The possibility of remaking and uplifting himself by capitalizing on folk melodies is compelling to him. These two very different desires, unconscious and conscious—to hear his own and his generation’s racial beleaguerment voiced, to strike it big with a hit song— erupt into full view in Cleveland, Mississippi, dovetailing on this question of what to make of blues repetitions. His enlightenment comes one night when his band is playing a white society dance and someone passes up a note requesting, as he puts it, “some of ‘our native music’” (76). He tries to oblige with “an old-time Southern melody, a melody more sophisticated than native,”

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but his white audience is unresponsive (76). “A few moments later a second request came up. Would we object if a local colored band played a few dances?” (76) Handy is delighted to leave the stage, and staggered by what occurs: They were led by a long-legged chocolate boy and their band consisted of just three pieces, a battered guitar, a mandolin and a worn-out bass. The music they made was pretty well in keeping with their looks. They struck up one of those over-and-over strains that seem to have no very clear beginning and certainly no ending at all. The strumming attained a disturbing monotony, but on and on it went, a kind of stuff that has long been associated with cane rows and levee camps. Thump-thump-thump went their feet on the floor. Their eyes rolled. Their shoulders swayed. And through it all that little agonizing strain persisted. It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps “haunting” is a better word, but I commenced to wonder if anybody besides small town rounders and their running mates would go for it. The answer was not long in coming. A rain of silver dollars began to fall around the outlandish, stomping feet. The dancers went wild. Dollars, quarters, halves—the shower grew heavier and continued so long I strained my neck to get a better look. There before the boys lay more money than my nine musicians were being paid for the entire engagement. Then I saw the beauty of primitive music. They had the stuff the people wanted. It touched the spot. Their music wanted polishing, but it contained the essence. Folks would pay money for it. . . . That night a composer was born, an American composer. Those country black boys at Cleveland had taught me something that could not possibly have been gained from books. . . . My idea of what constitutes music was changed by the sight of that silver money cascading around the splay feet of a Mississippi string band. (76 –77)

The benevolent condescension Handy generally extends toward his black folk subjects swerves toward racist caricature here—rolling eyes, “outlandish, stomping feet,” “splay feet”—in a way that suggests something more than a simple class bias is at work. His caricature of these working-class black bodies as grotesque and out of control is connected, after all, with his irritable initial dismissal of the “primitive music” those bodies produce. “The music they made,” he sniffs, “was pretty well in keeping with their looks.” Not only does the music’s “disturbing monotony” issue from stomping and swaying black bodies, but it produces an answering response in hyper-rhythmic white bodies, the society dancers it has driven “wild.” What, then, of Handy’s body? With the exception of a “strained neck,” it hardly exists. It exists only as a palpable absence:

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the mandarin suppression of joyous animation. To behave as either the black trio or the white dancers do—to allow himself to be enlivened by repetitive rhythms—is to go primitive, as it were, to relinquish whatever class difference separates him from “those country black boys.” He anxiously reasserts that difference not just through caricature, but through his immediate declaration of entrepreneurial ambition: with the help of this music that “[f ]olks would pay money for,” he will become “an American composer”—something these splay-footed rustics, surely, will never achieve. Yet Handy’s body and soul are being called to by this music in a way that has less to do with his desire for social ascent and more to do with what remains submerged in him: the social unconscious he shares with the young black trio, rather than the class barrier he erects against them. His spot has been touched, not just “the people’s.” It is the repetitiveness of the trio’s music that engages him more than anything, a quality that both demands and defies description. “[T]hrough it all that little agonizing strain persisted,” he ventures. It is “one of those over-and-over strains.” It has “no very clear beginning and certainly no ending at all” and is characterized by “a disturbing monotony,” but, he insists, “It was not really annoying or unpleasant. Perhaps ‘haunting’ is a better word.” “Haunting” is the perfect word, in fact, and “agonizing” is a close second. Handy is indeed haunted by this music: its endless repetitions, even more than the thrice-repeated lines of the Tutwiler guitarist, call up the agonized spirit of William Malone, whose “moan was repeated . . . [o]ver and over again, as long as he slept.” No doubt, too, these repetitions call up memories of Handy’s wrenching recent series of engagements with Vardaman’s gubernatorial campaign. Blues form is a way of waking out of the nightmare of black history by reprising, as cathartic musical repetitions, the traumatic repetitions black history engenders. Nor, it should be added, is the “haunting” sound of early Mississippi blues merely Handy’s unconscious projection of his own unresolved psychic conflicts onto unremarkable folk material. There is every reason to think that the “agonizing strain” he describes may have been just that: the musical expression of a regionally inflected black social unconscious under grievous pressure. We have no way of knowing exactly when Handy’s Cleveland encounter took place, but we can say with assurance that between January 1903 and March 1904, eleven black men and one black woman were lynched by white mobs in Cleveland and its immediate vicinity.75 Vardaman’s Negrophobic campaign rhetoric had unleashed a lynching fever of such unprecedented ferocity that even the White Chief himself was dismayed, and tried to reassert control after assuming the Mississippi governorship in January 1904. In February, when informed of the lynching in Doddsville of Luther Holbert and his wife for

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the murder of a young white Cleveland planter, “Vardaman immediately contacted the local officials and urged them to restore order and to arrest those responsible for burning the alleged murderers.” 76 Holbert and his wife weren’t just burned: they were tortured and mutilated by a mob of white men, several of whom drilled a large corkscrew into their arms, legs and bodies. Three other “Unknown Negroes” were lynched in Doddsville on the same day. Six weeks later two more black men were lynched in Cleveland, fifteen miles from Doddsville. The scene of Handy’s blues revelation deserves to be called a killing field in progress, raked by the most gruesome sort of ritual violence against defenseless black folk. Such ritual violence precipitated, we know, a ritual aftermath, a part of the culture pattern described by Charles S. Johnson: keening wives and children recovering what was left of the victims’ bodies; fear, numbness, silence, and furious resentment among local blacks; continuing sporadic violence by emboldened local whites.77 Mississippi blues musicians, the conscience of the Delta (as David Evans once labeled Charley Patton), were particularly fond of making their guitars and harmonicas “talk,” and the talk they engaged in was drawn from the sonic environment that surrounded them: chugging trains, baying hounds, yelping foxes, and the like. Might not Handy’s early bluesmen, along with their instrumental vocalizations, also have functioned as an essential part of the culture pattern—imitating feminine cries of grief, cursing the lynchers with glossolalic knife flourishes, signifying on mob pursuits (and the agonies of “treed” victims) with so-called fox-chase songs? The agonizing, haunting sound of the Cleveland trio seems to disclose exactly what Handy’s description suggests: that both the sonic palette of early blues song and the repetitions that structured it were a way of speaking back to a deadly and recurrent ritual. A traditional blues line such as “Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days” transcodes that ritual as oppressive repetition: a lynch mob both repeatedly and perpetually on one’s trail. (Delta harmonica player George “Bullet” Williams once recorded a tune entitled “The Escaped Convict.”) 78 Chapter Twelve of Father of the Blues, entitled “Trouble, Trouble, I’ve Had It All My Days,” describes what Handy calls “outrages and grim hateful crimes,” including a violent white dance he played in the Delta. “When they finally let us go,” Handy writes, “we met one of the white men on the road. He had a rope around a Negro’s neck. In the next few hours three Negroes were murdered. They had to kill somebody” (180). Did this episode take place in Doddsville? Were these three victims the “Unknown Negroes” lynched in the vengeful aftermath of the Holbert double lynching? Certainly this seems possible, although additional research is required. That Handy himself escaped harm under such circumstances seems, in any

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case, a minor miracle. Nameless black vagrants may have been marginally preferred as lynching victims in Vardaman’s Mississippi, but mobs on the move were not particularly known for making class distinctions among available black men. The haunting sound of blues repetitions unites Handy and his folkblues counterparts under the sign of white terror; it also unites them, paradoxically, under the sign of profit. The “Green Eden” of the Delta bestows on both Handy and the “country black boys” he encounters in Cleveland a silver-dollar rain of surplus wealth whose existence is predicated on an exploited black agricultural workforce kept tractable through intimidation; Handy “began to come in for [his] share” of planters’ profits, he tells us, after orchestrating several blues songs and adding them to his band’s repertoire (79). Yet even as he exchanged the mantle of John Philip Sousa for something far more profitable and compelling, Handy’s attentions were beginning to drift. His dream of blues form held out the promise of a profit-driven getaway from the southern nightmare that had helped bring it into being. After two years with the Knights of Pythias in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Handy was beginning to look north once again, toward Memphis. BEALE STREET BREAKDOWN

Beale Street, the scene of Handy’s brief but epochal flowering as a blues songwriter, was also, it is often forgotten, a place he eventually fled in fear and disgust. It was the aftermath of a lynching in 1917, he tells us, that helped drive him away from Memphis, never again to reside there: a charred skull, the remains of “a pleasant, easy-going young fellow named Tom Smith” that a rural mob had brought back into town after the previous day’s festivities and “tossed . . . into a crowd of [Beale Street] Negroes to humiliate and intimidate them” (178). That this skull has come to rest in the square that would, a scant fourteen years later, be renamed for Handy himself, is an irony he notes in Father of the Blues. For once, with Smith’s murder, something like real bitterness enters Handy’s narrative voice—not an old man’s enduring bitterness, but an old man’s memories of his younger self ’s furious disillusionment, an exemplary instance of an autobiographical subject “confessing the blues”: Stunned, deeply resentful, I had walked slowly to the office. All the savor had gone out of life. For the moment only a sense of ashes in the mouth remained. All the brutal, savage acts I had seen wreaked against unfortunate human beings came back to torment me—particularly those in which the luckless one came near being myself. I thought of Grandpa Handy’s rebellion against the conditions of his servitude, and suddenly I knew that the old Nick was alive in me as he had

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been in my old grandparent and that there were limits to endurance. Some day I would be gone. They’d look for me on Beale Street, up and down the river, along the Yellow Dog and the Peavine, but I would not be there. (178)

If Handy’s narrated life has a quintessential “blues moment,” this is it. Seized by a welter of feelings—shock, resentment, despair, terror—that transform past and present into a web of unendurable oppressions, the blues subject is suddenly galvanized by a desire to flee, and to sing that desire. “Some day I would be gone,” Handy fumes with lyric exultance, immediately repeating-himself-with-a-difference in the blues’ defining rhetorical gesture: “They’d look for me . . . but I would not be there.” He assumes his rightful place in a tradition of willed blues exiles exemplified by Jazz Gillum’s “Key to the Highway”: I got the key to the highway I’m billed out, I’m bound to go I’m gonna leave here runnin’ because . . . walkin’s most too slow.

Father of the Blues is a book of many ironies. The sharpest of all emerges here, with the question of why Handy leaves Memphis—indeed, the South as a region, never to resettle there— on the heels of Tom Smith’s lynching in 1917. This particular act of violence, as his own words suggest, is merely the precipitating incident, one of many “brutal, savage acts” by whites against blacks that he has witnessed and survived. Handy’s real reason for invoking these acts, however, is unexpected: Tom Smith’s battered skull calls up overwhelming anxieties about the fate of his own managerial head in restive black hands. What he fears at least as much as white vigilantism is being murdered by his own band. The seven chapters detailing his rising Memphis fortunes build to a crisis in which the successful blues entrepreneur suddenly finds himself confronted by a mysterious “shadow” that has been pursuing him all along, an interracial epidemic of southern violence from which no amount of success as a blues composer and bandleader can exempt him. During the decade Handy resided there, Memphis was, by any standard, an unusually rough town, and not just because of the occasional wellpublicized lynching. With a population of 150,000, slightly more than half black, it had a reputation, justly or unjustly, as the murder capital of the United States. (Those Memphians who claimed the appellation was unjust insisted that while there was admittedly more killing in the vicinity of Memphis than in any other southern city, and while many of those victims were treated, and died, in Memphis hospitals, it was misleading and unfair to assign those murders for statistical purposes to the city itself.)

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“Memphis,” clucked the Nashville Tennessean of its sister city’s intractable woes in 1917, is peculiarly situated, being on the border-lines of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. This fact is responsible in large measure for the great number of murders in that city. Persons from other States go to Memphis; if they fall into evil company and commit crimes, they feel they have a good opportunity to escape justice by fleeing, within a few minutes, across the line into another State. The river traffic there brings in a mixed population from all parts of the country, north and south. Memphis is holding crime to the minimum, considering the unusual conditions of the city.79

Cocaine addiction, imported primarily by black stevedores working the Mississippi north from New Orleans, had reached epidemic proportions among this “mixed population” by the early 1900s. The city had over five hundred saloons, most of which had back rooms used for gambling and prostitution, and the sex trade, according to James Dickerson, “was attracting ambitious young girls from all over the mid-South.” 80 If the murderers themselves formed an interracial fraternity, then violent black crime was a particularly urgent public concern, and not just to whites. Such crime, some blacks insisted, was provoked by popular music— the “coon songs” in particular, which added a new note of razor-toting belligerence to standard minstrel stereotypes of watermelon, chicken, and possum, and propelled that lyric aggression with irresistible ragtime beats.81 Although white Broadway actresses in blackface such as May Irwin, Stella Mayhew, and Marie Cahill had helped inaugurate the coon song fad back in 1896, the songs had over the following decade, and with the help of Sophie Tucker, become popular with precisely the demographic—assertive young southern black men—who may well have provided the original inspiration for those songs and their distorted racial renderings. Folklorists Charles Peabody and Howard Odum, in pioneering writings about early blues, both expressed dismay at this phenomenon, which violated the presumed purity of their folk-musical subjects. “Asked to sing for my wife while she was with us on a visit,” Peabody writes of the black laborers who assisted him on a 1901 archeological dig in the Mississippi Delta, “they suddenly found it too hot, and as a whole a request performance got no further than very poor ‘ragtime,’ ‘Goo-goo Eyes’ with any number of encores, and ‘Nigger Bully’ and others quite as original probably with Miss May Irwin as with them.” 82 “All manner of ‘ragtimes,’ ‘coon-songs,’ and the latest ‘hits’ replace the simpler negro melodies,” complained Odum in 1911. “Young negroes pride themselves

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on the number of such songs they can sing, at the same time that they resent a request to sing the older melodies.” 83 “Nigger Bully” was presumably a version of white songwriter Charles Trevathan’s “The Bully Song” (1895), a hit for Irwin, which contained lines such as “Razors ’gun a flyin’, niggers ’gun to squawk, / I lit upon that bully just like a sparrow hawk.” 84 Young southern blacks apparently found it possible to ignore the racist shadings of such songs while embracing the vivid (and whitesanctioned) representations of black aggressiveness they contained. Black elites, on the other hand, generally found coon songs odious, a distillation of all the social ills—violence, improvidence, boorishness—that their philosophy of uplift was attempting to combat. Such songs, according to this view, confirmed the worst white fears and prejudices about young black men, even as they spurred those same men to misbehave.85 As Memphis reeled during the early 1900s from daily murders and an epidemic of armed robbery, according to Dickerson, [a] black community leader, Professor Willie Councill, let it be known he had found the solution, and before an audience of twelve hundred at the Church Park auditorium, he summoned all the oratorical splendor at his command to denounce the influence of “coon songs.” “Make the young negroes turn from coon songs and go to the songs of our mothers and fathers,” the professor pleaded. “The coon songs . . . make sentiment against us.” 86

White Memphians certainly agreed with Professor Councill: something had to be done about violent young Negroes and the Beale Street dives they inhabited. Mississippi had its Governor Vardaman, vowing to close down the “rendezvous of the Rapist, the Murderer, the Crap-Shooter, and the Blind Tiger!”; Memphis now found its would-be scourge in E. H. Crump, the reform mayoral candidate in 1909. There were two other candidates, as it happened, each of whom had hired one of the best black bands in the city to beat the drum on his behalf. “The third candidate,” according to Handy, “running on a platform that condemned easy riders, barrel houses and even dance halls, was Mr. Crump. And for some ironic reason one of Mr. Crump’s committees hired our band” (98). The band Crump hired wasn’t Handy’s Clarksdale unit, but rather a second Knights of Pythias band based out of Thornton’s, a black Memphis barbershop. For the past several years Handy had been dividing his time between the two bands, commuting twice a week by train up from the Delta. As with Vardaman, so with Crump: Handy’s role as bandleader was to provide the soundtrack for a white politician whose motives with respect to his future black constituents were, to say the least,

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mixed. Where Handy-as-autobiographer veils his participation in Vardaman’s campaign, however, he makes his role in Crump’s campaign a centerpiece of Father of the Blues—indeed, a turning point in his rise as a blues songwriter and the music’s own emergence as an American popular song form. Handy’s duty, put bluntly, was to get out the black vote for Crump. Not just the black vote: the Beale Street vote, which is to say, the working- and vagrant-class black vote. “Beale Street was expected to cast a lot of votes,” he says, “and it was squarely up to us to get them” (98). Handy may well be exaggerating the importance of this lower-class demographic, most of whom had more absorbing interests to pursue than voting for mayor; the myth of blues origins he develops in Father of the Blues is sustained by contact with such folk at every turn. The black elite was going to vote for Crump in any case, because they approved of the reforms that he, like Booker T. Washington, was advocating. “[L]et all good citizens unite,” Washington had written in the Indianapolis sFreeman the previous year, in an effort to rid the communities, especially the large cities, of the idle, vicious and gambling element. And in this connection I would not be just and would not be frank unless I stated that the betters of the black race could use their influence, especially in the cities, to see that the idle element that lives by its wits without permanent or reliable occupation or place of abode is either reformed or gotten rid of in some manner. In most cases it is this element that furnishes the powder for these explosions.87

These “explosions,” according to Washington were miscellaneous acts of black criminality that had recently led to lynchings: murder, conspiracy to commit murder, the burning of a gin house. Handy’s quixotic and selfappointed task, in any case, was to write a campaign song that would capture the attentions of this “idle, vicious and gambling element” Washington referred to and convince them to vote for a white mayoral candidate who was publicly pledged to eliminate them. Handy may have been Crump’s lifeline to Beale Street, but Beale Street’s blues people would be the first to be “reformed” if Crump were elected. The barrel houses Crump wanted to do away with were, in fact, Memphis’s distinctive contribution to a blues culture in its infancy: multi-roomed urban jooks that, according to Calt and Wardlow, served as “all-purpose gambling den[s], dance hall[s], bar[s], brothel[s], and even boarding house[s],” and were the models for the Mississippi jooks and “blind tigers” Vardaman had decried.88 It was indeed ironic, as Handy pointed out, that Crump’s operatives had hired his band. Driven by a determination to outdo his two black musical competitors, Bynum’s (“with their flashy cornetist”) and Eckford’s (“with . . . the speed demon clarinetist”), Handy set to work:

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Hot-cha music was the stuff we needed, and it had to be mellow. Where was it to be found? Certainly not in any existing files. I closed my eyes and tried to dream it. Let me see now—yes, that’s it. I could hear what I wanted. It was a weird melody in much the same mood as the one that had been strummed on the guitar at Tutwiler. It did the business, too. Folks went wild about it. (98 –99)

Handy’s dream of blues form resurfaces once again: in this case, as the seemingly artless transformation of innocent folk materials (the “weird melody” heard at Tutwiler) into a product that “[does] the business” by summoning up the desired political emotion in folks who hear it performed. If Handy’s blues entrepreneurship here seems politically questionable— driving black people wild for the white boss, to the detriment of their own long-term self-interest—then Handy later justified his actions with a kind of playful cynicism. “Mr. Crump,” he said in an interview, “was running on a clean-up ticket. He was gonna drive out gambling, and drive out other things with which gambling was associated. And there were those among us who didn’t believe he was going to do what he said he was going to do.” 89 It is impossible to tell, from either the two fragmentary accounts Handy offers in Father of the Blues or restatements of the “Mr. Crump” myth he offers elsewhere, exactly who “those among us” were. Is Handy speaking of himself, or the members of his band, or the black public for whom he first debuted the song, or the white public who almost simultaneously “pricked up their ears,” or some combination of all four? What does seem clear is that the song, which soon became known throughout Memphis as “Mr. Crump,” began as a melodic composition, without lyrics, and was first performed that way one fall day in 1909. Handy’s initial account of this performance begins, misleadingly, with an image of himself as the songwriter at work; the lyrics he scrawls are revealed a moment later to be not his own original blues composition, but merely his “improved” version of a spontaneous folk creation: [I]n the fall of 1909 I often used to use [Pee Wee’s] cigar stand to write out copies of the following lyric for visiting bands: Mr. Crump won’t ’low no easy riders here Mr. Crump won’t ’low no easy riders here We don’t care what Mr. Crump don’t ’low We gon’ to bar’l-house anyhow— Mr. Crump can go and catch hisself some air! The city was in the middle of a three-cornered campaign to elect a mayor, and our band was beating the drum for Mr. E. H. Crump, who was running on a strict reform platform. I had composed a special

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campaign tune for this purpose. We had played it, with success. Meanwhile I had heard various comments from the crowds around us, and even from my own men, which seemed to express their own feelings about reform. Most of these comments had been sung, impromptu, to my music. My lyric was based upon some of these spontaneous comments, with my own development and additions. Luckily for us, Mr. Crump himself didn’t hear us singing these words. But we were hired to help put over his campaign, and since I knew that reform was about as palatable to Beale Street voters as castor oil, I was sure those reassuring words would do him more good than harm. (93)

“Those reassuring words” Handy refers to are, it seems clear, the rejection of Crump’s reform platform by the blues people (barrelhousers) Crump has targeted as both potential voters and future victims of his reforms.90 Handy’s own political loyalties, knotted in paradox here, are impossible to discern. As Crump’s retainer, he seems delighted that his “reassuring” campaign song will do his white patron “more good than harm,” even as Crump’s election is sure to harm those same deluded “Beale Street voters” with whom Handy might be expected to feel a political solidarity. Yet the song itself, for all that, is a surprisingly daring rejection of white political authority, with insult added. The lyrics to “Mr. Crump” would not, as Handy suggests, have made Mr. Crump himself happy— although they did, thanks to the bizarre logic at work, help elect him. “Mr. Crump” might be thought of as blues song’s aggressive response to the same oppressive social conditions that had produced topical minstrel songs such as “What We Would Do, if the Law Would Allow Us” (1897). As a spontaneous folk creation hurriedly “developed” by Handy, the song both reflected and spurred the protopolitical rebelliousness of its primary audience.91 That this core audience was black becomes clearer in Handy’s second account of the song’s public debut: Thoroughly rehearsed and intoxicated by the new melody, my musicians arrived at Main and Madison riding in a band wagon and got set to play the blues to the general public for the first time in America. . . . We were all seated in chairs. I flashed the sign and the boys gave. Feet commenced to pat. A moment later there was dancing on the sidewalks below. Hands went in the air, bodies swayed like the reeds on the banks of the Congo. Now and again one got happy and shouted, “Aw, do it, Mister Man.” In the office buildings about, the white folks pricked up their ears. Stenographers danced with their bosses. Everybody shouted for more. We heard them on all sides demanding that we play the song again. One bystander came directly in front of us and insisted on knowing the name of the tune. “That’s Mr. Crump,” [guitarist George] Higgins told them, missing a beat on his guitar. Then he sang the words again.

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And that was how it all began. From that day on our band was swamped with calls. (100)

Handy’s blues melody has helped precipitate a joyous uprising among its dancing, swaying audience of black folk, a blatant rejection of the white man’s would-be Law. Yet it has summoned this lyric rejection, again, in the ultimate service of installing that Law, which is to say electing Crump. White folks may prick up their ears—the traditional reaction to drumtalk in the quarters—but they don’t seem threatened. Far from it: they join their fellow black citizens in a moment of carnivalesque euphoria. Handy’s song has apparently brought home everybody’s vote for Crump. Is this episode, then, a classic example of what Marcuse calls “repressive desublimation,” a way of safely purging black rebelliousness in the service of increasing long-term state control? Or is it, instead, a moment of black cultural resistance in the face of that control? Handy’s song encourages, in any case, a general black restiveness in the face of white governmental encroachments, extant and proposed. “Bar’l-housing” stands, in the Beale Street symbolic, for disinhibited, free-flowing movement through and occupation of public space: the utopian inversion of Jim Crow’s deadly and deadening social rigidities. In later years, Handy traced his subsequent explosive rise as a blues entrepreneur to this magical day. “[W]e had to play it over and over and over,” he remembered of “Mr. Crump” in an interview: And Mr. Crump got elected, and Memphis grew so that if a band couldn’t play “Mr. Crump” they couldn’t get a job. Instead of finding ourselves loafing most of the time, I put 67 musicians to work, playing “Mr. Crump.” And then later I published this number, and I couldn’t use Mr. Crump’s name, as he’d become the boss of Tennessee politics. So I changed the name from “Mr. Crump” to “The Memphis Blues,” which was the first blues published.92

Handy’s rise proceeded on two fronts: the writing and publishing of nationally distributed blues compositions, but also, on a more local level, the growth of his Memphis dance band empire. Entrepreneurial success, however, comes at the cost of managerial headaches. “Aside from the publishing business and the business of composing new hits,” he writes, I continued to carry the staggering responsibility of keeping busy a dozen bands, employing over sixty people, playing for dances, touring on the road and through the sticks and giving concerts. The fortunes of our bands and particularly of the main unit rose with the success of the blues. . . . [T]he storm broke [at the Metropolitan Opera House in Atlanta in 1916] when we played the Memphis Blues and had to repeat it nine times.

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After that it was goodby to the printed program. We played only requests, and these called for blues, blues and more blues. Nothing but the blues. People seemed to be starving for blues. (126 –28)

Yet here another irony emerges. Even as Handy seems to have rationalized his delivery process and enlarged his productive capacity in an effort to meet the rapidly increasing public demand for his blues product, the irrationality subtending the music itself—the violence, rebelliousness, and aching hearts out of which it is conceived—has returned to haunt him. That haunting begins in 1914: two years before his Atlanta triumph, five years since the debut of “Mr. Crump.” “St. Louis Blues” has just been written and published. “Things began to happen immediately,” he writes, big things and little things, pleasant and unpleasant. Through them all, as I see it now, Time and Chance were conspiring to snatch me away from Memphis, away from the wistful glamour of a swiftly changing Beale Street. The increasing success of my songs, the ups and downs of business, and the dread shadows in the sun— each played a part. (123)

What are these “dread shadows”? Invoking them without warning, Handy says nothing more of them for fifty pages, when they recur twice in rapid succession: once on the heels of a near-mutiny by “the boys in the band,” once in reference to the lynching of Tom Smith. That he links them with the “ups and downs of business” is no coincidence: Handy is on the verge of being driven out of Memphis and the South by a series of violent encounters with all that he has tried to ignore for the sake of entrepreneurial success. One such willful blindness has been his continuing insistence on speaking for the so-called submerged people— “wanderers and others of their underprivileged but undaunted class from Missouri to the Gulf ”— even as, in his own daily life, he has come to resemble nobody so much as Boss Crump: the supreme commander of his blues metropolis, on the lookout for inefficiency, insubordination, and vice (99). “The draft thinned the rank of the old crowd at Pee Wee’s,” he laments: My own band was not exempted. Some of the best players were called to the colors. I hired the best musicians obtainable. These men didn’t have the spirit or pride of organization. While most of them played their instruments well enough, some lacked, for the most part, the character of the outfit they replaced. And with them the fortunes of the Handy band went from bad to worse. . . .

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Handling so many men and struggling to control the local entertainment field had been no fun. Sometimes I could have wished for an easier lot. My aim had been to gain a certain measure of security for my men, and doing that had given me satisfaction. But now I began to wonder just how much they appreciated my efforts. The revamped outfit was acting strangely, whispering behind their hands. . . . [I]t was already too late to do anything about it. I was too deeply involved in the web of my own enterprises. It would be necessary to wait till the whole business choked itself in the mesh. Such a time, I felt, was not far distant. (169 –70)

Handy’s complaint is that a wartime labor shortage has forced him to hire low-class musicians to play his blues, men without “spirit or pride of organization.” Another way of putting this is that he has been forced for the first time to hire blues musicians to play his blues—a rougher and less dependable class of men than he is used to, socialized at a somewhat greater proximity to the “idlers, vicious and gambling element” of Beale Street’s barrelhouses. These musicians aren’t country bluesmen like Charley Patton or the Tutwiler guitarist; they are, Handy’s characterization implies, able to read the sheet music he puts in front of them (they play, for his purposes, “well enough”), but it is also possible that they are poor sight-readers, schooled in an aural rather than visual musical subculture, and that this makes them more independent, harder for Handy to “organize” in the fashion he prefers.93 That he wanted his band musicians to be both musically literate and tractable—and that these two qualities were somehow related—is clear from the memories of Mississippi country bluesman Willie Moore, whom Handy informally adopted in Clarksdale as an eleven-year-old orphan, sending him to Tuskegee University to learn how to read music and play trombone. “If Handy got a man like Charlie Patton or me,” Moore explained, “or anyone, he’d send ’im to school.” 94 For the first time in Father of the Blues, a painful class breach has opened up between Handy and his fellow black bandsmen. His rise as a blues entrepreneur precipitates a kind of spiritual fall; suddenly he is bereft of the esprit de corps that has sustained him through a series of black musical collectives—from the Lauzetta Quartet of his youth through Mahara’s Minstrels and the Knights of Pythias orchestras in Clarksdale and Memphis. “At home,” he says, “my stock soared on a bull market, but even this boom failed to down the discontent that had sprung up among the men of the band” (174 –75). His business, as he fears, is about to “choke itself in the mesh,” an image that betrays his anxiety not just about the overextended “web of [his] own enterprises,” but about the larger and

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elusive tissue of southern violence in which his entrepreneurial ventures have always been situated. This violence flashes into view as he and his restive band play the Piedmont Exposition in Atlanta, a black event. “We . . . returned [to Atlanta],” he writes, to lead a gala parade of beautiful floats down streets bright with golden sunshine. The air was perfumed with roses. Spectators leaned out of windows. Others lined the streets. But a bad spirit still prevailed in the band. It smoldered during the early stages of the parade, and by the time we reached the residential section the devil broke loose and got out of control. Well, it had been a long time coming to a head, and I can’t say that it was a surprise, but it does seem odd that the cork had to pop during the parade. Yet that is exactly what happened. As we rode on a float two of my men fought on the way to the Exposition grounds. The band divided into factions, attempting to keep one from cutting or shooting the other. This rowdy spectacle put me in a most embarrassing position. I endured it by the hardest, but when we reached the Exposition, I called a policeman and kept him with the band throughout the remainder of the engagement. [S]uddenly I looked up and began to see shadows in the sun. (175 –77)

This “rowdy spectacle” is the passional shadow—the aching, expressive heart— of the blues music to which he has tried to lay claim. The devil may have broken loose, as he insists, but blues is, after all, the devil’s music. As the blues’ would-be father, Handy has devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the structural details of his chosen idiom: “the twelve-bar, three-line form of the first and last strains,” “the transitional flats and thirds and sevenths,” “the typical slurs of the Negro voice” (99). His role in musical history, he claims, “was to introduce this, the ‘blues’ form to the general public, as the medium for my own feelings and my own musical ideas” (99). Yet his focus on blues form and his readiness to capitalize on his apparent mastery of that form has led him, as the Piedmont Exposition makes clear, to steer clear of the music’s deepest emotional undercurrents. The dream of blues form had promised him an escape from the southern nightmare he knew well from his days as a black minstrel and Mississippi bandleader; this southern nightmare—thanks to his low-class band members, who sing their blues with knives and guns—now surges back into view, an inrush of repressed memory that begins with Tom Smith’s skull: Concerning one of these shadows I had written [my partner Harry] Pace a few months earlier. One morning, while passing the square on Beale Street that now bears my name, I noticed a crowd of Negroes gathered

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around a skull. The day before, that skull had belonged to a pleasant, easygoing young fellow named Tom Smith. Now it was severed from his body. The eyes had been burned out with red-hot irons. A rural mob, not satisfied with burning his body, had brought the skull back to town and tossed it into a crowd of Negroes to humiliate and intimidate them. Stunned, deeply resentful, I had walked slowly to the office. All the savor had gone out of life. . . . All the brutal, savage acts I had seen wreaked against unfortunate human beings came back to torment me—particularly those in which the luckless one came near being myself. . . . Now, . . . I could think of nothing but outrages and grim hateful crimes. (178 –79)

What Handy gazes on here is a kind of Gorgon’s head, an image of the southern nightmare at its most hideous. “No black American author has ever felt the need to invent a nightmare to make his point,” Roger Rosenblatt has written, and Handy’s invention in this case was minimal.95 “Tom Smith” was Ell Person, a Negro woodchopper arrested, accused without evidence, and finally lynched and burned outside Memphis in May of 1917 for the ax-murder of a sixteen-year-old white girl named Antoinette Rappal.96 Yet Handy’s purpose in summoning up Tom Smith’s charred skull is not the straightforward racial protest we might expect. The image of a “crowd of Negroes” gathered around that skull echoes, as it happens, the end of the book’s preceding chapter, in which Handy is gazing down at the members of his restive band, two of whom had threatened to cut and shoot each other the day before. “On the curbstone below,” he muses, “there was still no peace among the boys of the band” (177). What haunts Handy isn’t just the possibility of his own lynching, like Tom Smith’s, at the hands of a white mob, but the possibility that his mutinous black band may suddenly lash out, knives in hand, and sever his head from his body—which is to say, in symbolic terms, the band’s unwanted head (Handy) from the body they now collectively represent. The “Trouble, Trouble” chapter that follows takes the form of an extended flashback in which Handy, gazing at his band from the safety of his partner Harry Pace’s office, is trying to decide whether to continue his southern struggle or head north to New York. The neareruption of cutting and shooting among his musicians has conjured up “shadows,” which leads him to remember first Tom Smith’s lynching, then a series of “outrages and grim hateful crimes.” These outrages include several other lynchings, additional white assaults against blacks, and repeated episodes in which Mississippi whites, guns in hand, insist that Handy and his band perform for them. Yet most of these compelled performances serve as the soundtrack not for white-on-black

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violence— except incidentally—but for white-on-white violence. The white South, as Handy depicts it, is essentially one long and ludicrously brutal Shepherdson-Grangerford feud in which blacks are unwilling pawns. “We were playing for a dance at Batesville, Mississippi,” he writes, when a loafer stepped up and struck one of my men. I protested to my employer, but before he could intervene, the intruder struck me in the eye. A period of wild disorder followed. When this calmed down, we resumed the music, but the fellow waited outside for me. When the dance was over, he came upstairs with a bullwhip to be used on me. “Run!” someone shouted. Had I done so, I might have been shot. Instead, I made up my mind to die fighting. Meanwhile a crowd gathered, among them an upstanding man from Sardis named Maddox. I remember Mr. Maddox partly because of his bright red hair and partly because he was a godsend to me. He stepped up and low-rated the local boys for not protecting me after bringing me there to play for them. Then he turned on the fellow with the whip. “Hit me, if you dare,” he said. “I’ve done more to you than Handy has.” Then he knocked him down and beat him. Someone again told me to run. Somehow I didn’t feel like running. Instead, I stood and watched the battle. Maddox had administered as sound a beating to his opponent as you would want to see, but the fight did not stop there. It spread out, and I could see that it was shaping itself into a battle royal between the local boys and the Sardis crowd. Eventually guns were whipped out, the gangs scattered temporarily and the boys of my band took to cover. (180 – 81)

Here Handy offers us an image of black musicmaking obliterated by a white southern culture of vengeance. The local-boys-versus-Sardiscrowd feud, moreover, shows every sign of being mirrored by a Handyband-versus-Handy-band feud; the two feuds are obverse sides of a biracial southern culture of vengeance that has both its barrels trained on Handy’s head. “In Pace’s office,” he writes, emerging from his flashback, looking down on the quarreling members of my band, this grim, backwood humor seemed as full of peril as the anger of the mob that had cut off Tom Smith’s head and tossed it into the crowd of his Beale Street friends. Yes, the southern sun was full of shadows. I welcomed Pace’s suggestion. New York! A publishing business on Broadway! Certainly I’d do it. (184)

His restive band, swaggering Maddox, Tom Smith’s severed head: all three loom in Handy’s imagination as oppressive shadows, evidence of a

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civilization drowning in its own recirculating currents of violence, agents and tokens of his imminent southern fate. Handy had made a figurative escape three years earlier with “St. Louis Blues,” a lyric recapitulation of his flight from white southern violence in the “get-away” compartment of Mahara’s Pullman coach. Now another flight is demanded of him, a radical relocation rather than a temporary change of venue. He abandons his band that same afternoon—sending them back to Memphis by train while he stays behind in Atlanta and arranges for the trip to New York.97 Less than two-thirds of the way through Father of the Blues, we are at the close of Handy’s southern life. He would revisit Memphis a number of times in the coming years—to have a park dedicated in his name, to play the national anthem at a charity football game—but he would never again make the city his home. His northward move, echoing the slave-narrator’s flight to freedom, is driven by deep, earned blues feelings—resentment, outrage, torment, fear— even as it casts him into willed exile from the violent passions of the black bandsmen who helped regenerate those feelings in him. No love is lost between Handy and these men, at least on Handy’s side. “Since that time,” he says, “I have frequently had offers to lead bands of one kind or another, but the memory of these men has left me cold to all such proposals” (185), although he retained enough of an eye for profit that he continued to maintain a band in Memphis under his name. There is a kind of tragedy here, a loss of black musical community as the price of survival, which Handy’s subsequent embrace by Tin Pan Alley can never quite erase. Yet there is also, and simultaneously, a sharp sense of Handy’s sudden accession to the bluesman’s identity—as though only through willed exile from his violent southern home and abandonment of his overextended blues band empire could he finally sing his own blues, making his bittersweet getaway in a flurry of cathartic repetitions: Some day I would be gone They’d look for me on Beale Street, up and down the river, along the Yellow Dog and the Peavine, but I would not be there. (178)

CHAPTER THREE

Dis(Re)memberment Blues Narratives of Abjection and Redress

LOWRY ROASTED BY INCHES BEFORE WIFE AND CHILDREN. . . . Inch by inch the negro was fairly cooked to death. . . . As the flesh began to drop away from his legs and they were reduced to bones, once or twice he attempted to pick up hot coals and swallow them in order to hasten death. —Memphis Press Like a lynchee, Lord, flames reaching for my face Like a lynchee, Lord, flames reaching for my face My baby’s gone and there just ain’t no hiding place. —Sterling Plumpp, “Burning Up in the Wind” I don’t need the arm. But I do need to know what it could have been like to have had it. It’s a phantom I have to behold and be held by. . . . I will locate it so the severed part can remember the snatch, the slice of its disfigurement. — Toni Morrison, Jazz

TO DRIP ON GENERATIONS: CULTURAL MOURNING AND THE BLUES-LITERARY LEGACY OF LYNCHING

If call-and-response is a fundamental trope of African American culture, then virtually from the moment lynching became a pressing “Negro problem” in the early 1890s, the moans and cries of black lynching victims— or merely the silent calls of their mangled, dangling bodies— have been answered by a range of literary voices: outraged, dismayed, brooding (Handy is “stunned, deeply resentful”), but also cooly discerning and even darkly comic. George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), a rare example of lynching burlesque, exemplifies what Kalamu ya Salaam has called “the combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the brutal facts of life” that constitute blues humor.1 Near the end of his novel, with coruscating wit reminiscent of Twain and Mencken (both of whom had decried lynching),2 Schuyler deploys the familiar tropes of southern gothic to evoke the all-white hamlet of Happy Hill, Mississippi, only to redirect them murderously against two white Virginia aristocrats on the lam, Arthur Snobbcraft and Dr. Samuel Buggerie, who happen to wander into town disguised in blackface:

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The method by which Happy Hill discouraged blackamoors who sought the hospitality of the place was simple: the offending Ethiopian was either hung or shot and then broiled. Across from the general store and post office was a large iron post about five feet high. On it all blacks were burned. Down one side of it was a long line of nicks made with hammer and chisel. Each nick stood for a Negro dispatched. This post was one of the landmarks of the community and was pointed out to visitors with pardonable civic pride by local boosters. Sage old fellows frequently remarked between expectorations of tobacco juice that the only Negro problem in Happy Hill was the difficulty of getting hold of a sufficient number of the Sons or Daughters of Ham to lighten the dullness of the place. . . . The two [white] men, vociferously protesting, were stripped naked, held down by husky and willing farm hands and their ears and genitals cut off with jack knives amid the fiendish cries of men and women. When this crude surgery was completed, some wag sewed their ears to their backs and they were released and told to run. . . . They had only gone a few feet when, at a signal from the militant evangelist [Rev. McPhule], a halfdozen revolvers cracked and the two Virginians pitched forward into the dust amid the uproarious laughter of the congregation. The preliminaries ended, the two victims, not yet dead, were picked up, dragged to the stake and bound to it, back to back. Little boys and girls gaily gathered excelsior, scrap paper, twigs and small branches while their proud parents fetched logs, boxes, kerosene and the staves from a cider barrel. The fuel was piled up around the groaning men until only their heads were visible. When all was in readiness, the people fell back and the Rev. McPhule, as master of ceremonies, ignited the pyre. As the flames shot upward, the dazed men, roused by the flames, strained vainly against the chains that held them. Buggerie found his voice and let out yelp after yelp as flames licked at his fat flesh. The crowd whooped with glee and Rev. McPhule beamed with satisfaction. The flames rose higher and completely hid the victims from view. The fire crackled merrily and the intense heat drove the spectators back. The odor of cooking meat permeated the clear, country air and many a nostril was guiltily distended. The flames subsided to reveal a red-hot stake supporting two charred hulks.3

These scenes are unsettling for precisely the same reason that John Singleton’s Rosewood (1997), a cinematic retelling of the massacre of the black residents of Rosewood, Florida by the town’s white residents in 1923, is unsettling: because Schuyler and Singleton both depict their white lynchers as simultaneously monstrous and low comic, a horde of

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tobacco-juice-spitting yokels who make us chuckle even as we shudder. Black No More achieves much of its comic effect, of course, from the racial transposition of its lynching victims, the pleasure we take from watching a lynching ritual unknowingly cannibalize the very whiteness it is meant to defend. It is far harder to chuckle, as Singleton’s low-grossing movie demonstrated, when tobacco juice is being spit at the bound feet of soonto-be-lynched blacks, and when the “yelp after yelp” belong to black victims. I begin with Schuyler’s burlesque not because it is representative, but because it is so unrepresentative of the prevailing and deeply serious tenor of African American responses to lynching, a tenor exemplified by Billie Holiday’s stately and devastating rendition of “Strange Fruit” (1939). Such spectacles induce a blues so profound, these responses seem to say, that it can’t be hardened with laughter, only trivialized. Although black blues musicians, as I noted in chapter 1, occasionally told lynching jokes, the clear consensus that emerges from their published testimony—including Handy’s pioneering autobiography—is that lynching was grievously wounding to those forced to contemplate it as a potential fate. Blues musicians’ autobiographies are a small but important component of what might be called black lynching literature, a tradition that arguably begins with the journalistic muckraking of Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Southern Horrors (1893) and A Red Record (1895), poems such as “Lynching” (1907) by Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, and the collection of early black novels inventoried by J. Lee Greene in which the “ritualistic trappings, carnival-like atmosphere, and sadistic brutality of the lynching bee,” later travestied by George Schuyler, are first represented and critiqued: Walter H. Stowers’s and W. H. Anderson’s Appointed (1894), J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold (1896), Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) and The Hindered Hand (1905), and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912).4 This literary tradition, which evolves in the course of the century and draws renewed vitality from continuing agitation for antilynching legislation, has been explored in considerable detail by Trudier Harris, Sandra Gunning, Hazel Carby, and Judith L. Stephens.5 Missing from such explorations, however, is a discussion of the highly visible role lynching plays as a plot element and structuring trope in blues literature—not just the autobiographies of B. B. King, Mance Lipscomb, and others, but novels, poems, and plays by Alice Walker, August Wilson, Arthur Flowers, Clarence Major, Larry Neal, Kalamu ya Salaam, Walter Mosley, Sterling Plumpp, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Chester Himes.6 In some blues texts, lynching makes no more than a fleeting appearance—although even such passing mention may carry considerable

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symbolic or emotional weight. We may or may not remember, for example, that Celie’s “real” Pa in The Color Purple (1982), a well-to-do Georgia grocer, is lynched by jealous whites, and that Celie’s mother goes into labor as a result: The man [Celie’s father] had a wife whom he adored, and they had a little girl, barely two years old. She was also pregnant with another child. When the neighbors brought her husband’s body home, it had been mutilated and burnt. The sight of it nearly killed her, and her second baby, also a girl, was born at the same time. Although the widow’s body recovered, her mind was never the same.7

If Celie’s life-journey will eventually lead, with blues singer Shug Avery’s help, to sexual liberation, expressive mastery, and spiritual homecoming, her father’s spectacle lynching and her mother’s traumatized response is what prompts her birth as a blues subject: Celie is a true child of Jim Crow terror. So, too, is Levee, the Mississippi-born blues trumpeter in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984). At the end of the play’s first act, furiously lecturing his fellow musicians in a Chicago recording studio about why he isn’t “spooked up by the white man,” he describes how he interrupted his mother’s rape by “a gang of white men’s” in the family kitchen when he was eight years old by slashing at them with his father’s knife and being slashed in return. His father, after coming home and hearing the news, had grinned in the face of his wife’s attackers, relocated his family to another county, and then returned—with a rifle, presumably—to exact vengeance: “He got four of them before they got him. They tracked him down in the woods. Caught up with him and hung him and set him afire.” 8 The original Greek meaning of “trauma,” Cathy Caruth reminds us, is “‘wound,’ originally referring to an injury inflicted on a body”; Levee’s trauma is the “long ugly scar” he shows his bandmates while telling them the story, but it’s also the psychic wounds he has suffered as a result of the rape and lynching, and the attendant brittleness of ego that later leads him to murder his bandmate Toledo.9 Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992), which begins with a fictionalized version of the Emmett Till lynching, also takes place along the Mississippi–Chicago axis; the novel explores the troubled lives of its two main protagonists—Delotha Todd, the mother of the lynched black boy, and Lily Cox, the physically abused wife of one of the white lynchers—for parallels and divergences. When Delotha’s husband, Wydell, joins his wife in the hospital after she’s given birth to their newest son, he is suddenly filled with a dread that bespeaks the deepest blues: “Another boy, he thought. They kill the boys, the men. Hang them by their necks and then torch their lifeless bodies. Throw them on the chain

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gang for nine hundred years.” 10 As a fatherless young Mississippi boy and blues-guitarist-to-be, Atwater “Soupspoon” Wise, the protagonist of Walter Mosley’s RL’s Dream (1995), is befriended by Bannon, an eccentric local man who lectures him in African history, colonialist exploitation, and black pride. One day Soupspoon shows up at Bannon’s shack after his white neighbors have paid a visit. “By the time I got there the shack was burnt down an’ Bannon was dead. They had took him an’ piled stovewood on’im an’ then set him afire. His arms was just black bones reachin’ out away.” 11 Soupspoon, who goes on to become a traveling associate of blues legend Robert Johnson, names his guitar after his murdered friend. In collections such as Blues: The Story Always Untold (1989) and Blues Narratives (1999), Sterling Plumpp (b. 1940), a native Mississippian residing in Chicago, has worried the connection between lynching and blues with more subtlety and vividness than perhaps any other American poet. In “Muddy Waters” (1989), excerpted below, he celebrates his father’s spiritual resilience in a deadly time and place, a resilience enabled by blues music. “He / put a moving in my father,” writes Plumpp, speaking of Muddy, I saw it ripe as liver hung up on hog killing day. And they made the image they dreamed from it. I saw gods in their strides, feisty bold, desires tilted like derby hats. As they made space. . . . . . . As they pocketed the meaning in their genes and kept evil out side vows in their dance. Turned quietness to flames in loins. Shocked segregated fingers

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to clenched fists. As men paraded. They left shadows of lynchings and made images. Hung them above creation to drip on generations. He put a moving in my father.12

Lynching-as-spectacle is inscribed in Plumpp’s poem as “liver / hung / up / on hog / killing day” (Sam Hose’s cooked liver was cut into souvenirs, much to Du Bois’s horror), “flames in loins” (the castration-andburning ritual), “shadows of lynchings,” and (postcard-like) “images”; it is the source of continuing collective trauma that “drip[s] / on generations.” But blues music is also inscribed in the form of the spirited “moving” that Muddy Waters put in Plumpp’s father and other local men, a kind of daemonic energy and foundational self-respect (“feisty bold[ness]”). Blues-sponsored energy and self-respect in turn help those men generate personal style (“desires tilted like derby hats”), “space” for additional constructive response, “meaning,” and the psychological strength to “[keep] evil out.” In all these ways, blues music offers blues subjects—here, a Mississippi son and his black spiritual fathers—a means of engaging with, and transcending, the “drip” of abjection threatened by all those lynched bodies “[h]ung / . . . above creation.” “Burning Up in the Wind” (1989), also by Plumpp, offers a more pessimistic vision of the blues subject’s confrontation with the legacy of southern abjection; in this case, blues form (the AAB stanzas of sung blues) helps claim the poet as a figurative lynching victim rather than liberating him: Got a little story I like to tell when that sweet thing done left you when your nerve soother done gone and you talk about it, can’t help yourself I’m twisting, turning, lifted higher and higher I’m twisting, turning, lifted higher and higher Whoever said you need a plane to fly, sure is a liar Because I am tossed, turned, and all belted down Because I am tossed, turned, and all belted down When I look I am ninety miles above the ground

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My easy roller done gone and I got the begging sin My easy roller done gone and I got the begging sin All hot and sweating cause I’m burning up in the wind If you got a good thing, don’t ever live a lie If you got a good thing, don’t ever live a lie Cause you might end up hanging from a cross of fire Like a lynchee, Lord, flames reaching for my face Like a lynchee, Lord, flames reaching for my face My baby’s gone and there just ain’t no hiding place My easy roller done gone and I got the begging sin My easy roller done gone and I got the begging sin All hot and sweating cause I’m burning up in the wind 13

The lynchee’s agony is not merely a convenient trope for romantic despair here: it is a preexisting condition, a racewide image of abjection that the loss of a lover serves to reactivate. Dismemberment is figured not as “tore-downness” but as flying: the inconsolable poet, possessed by the ghosts of annihilation, has gone up in smoke. “Lynchee,” it should be noted, is not a word any self-preserving blues singer would have dared weave into his lines. As the penultimate stanza of Plumpp’s poem suggests, the figural shadow cast by spectacle lynching’s forty-year reign is somewhat more overt in blues literature than in blues song—a result, in part, of the self-censorship necessitated by blues performers’ relative temporal and geographical proximity to the primal lynching scene, but also, perhaps, an understandable desire on the part of blues autobiographers, novelists, and poets to compensate for that representational lacuna by making visible, whenever possible, the violated lynched body unsung by blues singers but forcefully present in their social and imaginative landscape. In this chapter I intend to examine in detail three novels, an autobiography, and a lyric poem that dramatize the encounter of the black male blues subject with the legacy of spectacle lynching. In any such exploration of African American texts it can be difficult, as Roberta Rubenstein reminds us, to identify the lingering traces of particular traumatic histories when so much bad news is clamoring for our consideration. “Ineradicably woven into the fabric of African-American experience,” Rubenstein writes in “Singing the Blues / Reclaiming Jazz: Toni Morrison and Cultural Mourning,” “is the cultural memory of injury and loss—lost lives, lost possibilities, lost parents and children, lost parts of the body, lost selves.” Rubenstein finds the imagery of dismemberment that occurs in Toni Morrison’s fiction to be

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a trope for the profound damages inflicted on African-Americans by the emotional dismemberments of slavery and its aftermath. Remembering—“re-membering” (Morrison’s own play on the word)—is a crucial compensatory process that might begin to ameliorate the pain of literal and figurative, individual and communal, severances that cumulatively persist as cultural mourning.14

Cultural mourning is indeed a useful concept, a way of understanding black aesthetic productions as the “working-through of individual and collective grief ” resulting from what Rubenstein calls the “involuntary separations, violations, and traumatic personal losses” incurred over the course of African American history. Yet we should be wary, I think, of overextending metaphors of dismemberment (such as “emotional dismemberment”) until they become little more than metaphors; to do so is to miss the unique demands placed on black subjects by the lynching era, an era in whose aftermath we in the early twenty-first century still dwell. The lynching-by-dragging of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas in 1998, an event that reinscribed the trope of the black body disintegrating in white hands, may have been an historical atavism, but the history it belongs to is very much alive in African American collective memory, as evidenced by Otis Rush’s agitated testimony in Living Blues magazine about bodies buried “under bushes and leaves and trees”; the post-traumatic stress reactions that such events precipitate derive far more directly from that history—its flesh wounds, its cries, its terrified silences—than from the distant slave past. If trauma, as Cathy Caruth has suggested, is always “the story of a wound that cries out,” 15 then the cultural mourning that transpires in the aftermath of the lynching era has indeed found powerful and distinctive voices in the blues literary tradition. Why this should be so— why fictional blues musicians, for example, should be charged with the task of literally and figuratively embracing lynched bodies—is elucidated by Saidiya Hartman’s recent theorizing of the way in which African American music and dance of the antebellum period acknowledged and healed the wounded black body produced by slavery. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) offers a particularly suggestive discussion of redress, the ministering of cultural practices to a spiritual lack engendered in black folk by forcible exile from Africa, grievous overwork, constant surveillance, and relentless subjection to violent discipline: The recognition of loss is a crucial element in redressing the breach introduced by slavery. This recognition entails a remembering of the pained body, not by way of a simulated wholeness but precisely through the

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recognition of the amputated body in its amputatedness, in the insistent recognition of the violated body as human flesh, in the cognition of its needs, and in the anticipation of its liberty. In other words, it is the ravished body that holds out the possibility of restitution, not the invocation of an illusory wholeness or the desired return to an originary plenitude. . . . [H]istory is illuminated not only by the recitation of the litany of horrors that characterized the “commercial deportation of Africans,” but also by performance practices that serve as a means of redressing the pained body and restaging the event of rupture or breach that engendered “the other side.” The (counter)investment in the body as a site of need, desire, and pleasure and the constancy of unmet needs, repressed desires, and the shortcomings of pleasure are articulated in the very endeavor to heal the flesh and redress the pained body.16

Hartman views the black subject as historically conditioned, the bearer of lingering spiritual wounds inflicted by the Middle Passage and slavery’s corrective violences (flogging and maiming), but also the purveyor of cultural practices suited to healing those wounds. Slave song and dance alleviated heartache by working through the “violated body,” engaging slave flesh in exhausting Saturday night “breakdowns” that mixed pleasure with pain to the purpose of unmaking or redressing a deeper pain. Like Rubenstein and Morrison, Hartman reads African American culture as a scene of mourning as well as subjection, a space in which “unmet needs” and “repressed desires” are felt, grieved, made visible and audible. Where she differs from Rubenstein and Morrison is in viewing such mourning as a contemporaneous project, coextensive in time with much of the violent subjection it seeks to redress, rather than a retrospective project concerned primarily with wounds engendered in the cultural past. The “amputated body” she invokes is both literal (the exhausted, violently disciplined slave body, sometimes deprived of a finger or hand) and metaphorical (a way of conceptualizing the psychological “rupture or breach” inflicted on slaves by their forced removal from an African homeland). Slave song and dance, according to Hartman, worked a healing on both fronts. What happens when we extend Hartman’s claims into the postReconstruction era? Can we enlarge her theory to encompass the arguably more grievous (and literal) amputations wrought on the black body by a history of spectacle lynching? The primal lynching scene is, after all, an unparalleled scene of subjection. Do blues subjects, like enslaved subjects, achieve a kind of redress by acknowledging the amputated body produced by such scenes, and by making that acknowledgment a part of their cultural practice? Can we enlarge the scope of Hartman’s theory

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still further, aligning it with Rubenstein’s theory of cultural mourning, and designate blues literature itself as a redressive cultural practice, one that works a healing on its audience decades after the primal lynching scene has disappeared from African American life as a potential lived encounter? We might conceive of the blues literary tradition that emerges in the aftermath of the lynching era as an assortment of blues subjects who struggle to “re-member” the dismembered black body that lynching has bequeathed to them. In Another Good Loving Blues by Arthur Flowers and Blues All Around Me by B. B. King, for example, the “amputated body in its amputatedness” is acknowledged, embraced, and recuperated— literally in the first case, symbolically in the second case—through intimate contact with the blues subject’s own body. In Dirty Bird Blues by Clarence Major and If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes, by contrast, the blues subject’s body becomes a battleground on which lynching’s traumatic legacy is unwillingly engaged without a healing transformation, as a kind of psychic possession that precipitates despair or flight or both. Plumpp’s “Burning Up in the Wind,” with its cry, “Like a lynchee, Lord, flames reaching for my face,” might serve as a touchstone for such an imaginative engagement. In Larry Neal’s “Riffin in the Chili House (In Memory of Bird),” the poem’s blues subject willingly surrenders himself to the flesh-marauding ghosts that possess him, finding in this apocalyptic embrace a source of visionary creativity and deep healing. The tradition begins, in short, as two distinct but overlapping modes of response elaborated by blues subjects to the existential challenge posed by lynching-as-abjection: embrace and possession. (A third significant mode, rejection—a kind of stoic refusal of all claims lynching makes on the subject—is what bluesman Luzanna Cholly exemplifies in Albert Murray’s novel Train Whistle Guitar (1974).17 I discuss this psychological orientation and the cultural importance of “badman” heroism in chapter 4.) What were black southerners to do, finally, with the charred dangling body, the leering white mob, the headless corpse, the blackened knuckles, the phantasmic fires, the choking, torturing, scattering annihilation that loomed daily, hourly, moment by moment? Racialized lynching challenges and often destabilizes those at whom it is aimed, raising profound philosophical questions about post-Reconstruction black subjectivity. “[C]orpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live,” observes Julia Kristeva: The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from

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which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.18

Kristeva uses the word “abject” as both adjective and noun, as both a quality of psychological threat and the potentially incarnate form of that threat. The corpse is abject in the adjectival sense because it threatens the subject with a destabilizing phantasm constituted by everything the subject represses or “thrust[s] aside” in order to emerge from chaos and the social field as a self-sufficient entity: death, sightlessness, lack of agency. But the corpse also embodies the abject; it is a specialized kind of object that has been pressed into service as a way of bodying the abject forth into the visual field so that it may do its haunting work. Lynching haunts black southern blues subjects by producing dead black bodies that make visible the abject as a racialized horror—a spectacle infinitely more destabilizing, in psychological terms, to black spectactors than to white spectators—precisely because it threatens to engulf black spectators, through the process of racial identification, within the founding repudiation (the “I’m-not-that”) that constitutes them as subjects. (This is true even when, as was almost always the case, blacks were secondhand spectators to lynchings, as the consumers of newspaper accounts, whispered gossip, and suggestive ghost stories.) Lynching haunts black southern blues subjects because they are helpless not to identify with the charred, mutilated, horror-producing black body it generates, and yet they are unmade as subjects—because claimed by the abject—the moment they feel such identification. Lynching confronts the blues subject, in other words, with a uniquely traumatizing variation on the “ordinary” dialectic of threatened witnessing subject and threatening abject described by Kristeva. The gardenvariety corpse is not the “utmost of abjection,” although it is a start. The utmost, from the blues subject’s perspective, lies further on down the road: the scattered, charred remains of what might once have been a corpse, produced by means of extended ritual torture before a large, enthusiastic crowd of white participants who would happily do the same to the blues subject, on any pretext, solely by virtue of his race. Permanently thrusting aside such a threat to psychic integrity “in order to live,” as Kristeva suggests, is something blues subjects find both necessary and extraordinarily difficult, since what is repressed eventually returns— or simply reoccurs—as one more southern outrage reported in the Chicago Defender or the New York Age. Yet still a way of living must be found.

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HANDLING THE DEADMEAT: SPECTACLE LYNCHING AND REDRESSIVE EMBRACE

By embrace I mean the blues subject’s successful struggle to achieve something like a love relation with the abject, his successful transformation of what should most oppress or haunt him—the lynched body of a fellow black man—into a source of spiritual and creative renewal. In Another Good Loving Blues (1993), novelist Arthur Flowers stages such a transformative embrace in his portrait of “silver tongued delta bluesman” Lucas Bodeen.19 Bodeen, a piano player from Sweetwater, Arkansas, is born in 1881, making him the contemporary of Clarence “Cripple” Lofton (b. 1887), Speckled Red (b. 1892), and others in the first generation of barrelhouse blues piano players. Bodeen’s artistic growth explicitly parallels the evolution of the nascent idiom. “Blues have gone through a lot of changes since he started,” the narrator informs us. “Bodeen remembered back when there wasn’t no such thing as the blues, or jazz. He was a young boy then, about 15, 16, new to Memphis, living off his wits and fascinated with the piano. They were playing ragtime back then” (57). The narrative is driven by Bodeen’s twin obsessions: to play what he repeatedly refers to as “a good blues” and to win the hand of a selfpossessed, wily, and recalcitrant conjure woman named Melvira Dupree. When his younger guitar-playing partner Jake dies unexpectedly as the two men are entertaining a juke joint crowd early in the novel, death enters the picture as an existential challenge Bodeen must master through his art, a key component of that good blues he hopes someday to play. “Up to now,” the narrator explains, “the blues had took every kind of hammer life ever threw at him and defeated em. Tribulations that crushed other folk and sent em crying to God wasn’t nothing but material for another blues for Luke Bodeen. But even the blues cant take on death and win. Or can they?” (40) What Bodeen yearns for, in the face of death, is creative transcendence, one of the five modes of symbolic immortality described by Robert Jay Lifton that meliorate the unavoidable “biological and psychic annihilation” suffered by the solitary, mortal subject at life’s end.20 Bodeen wants his art to survive him. “One day I’m gon do me a immortal blues Melvira. A blues that will still be here touching folk long after I’m dead and gone. A Luke Bodeen was here and he played a helluva blues blues [sic]. You can put that on my stone” (43). What remains unclear are the precise configurations of the death Bodeen must confront and transcend. He and Melvira, still uneasily wooing, are driving south into the Mississippi Delta on a quest to find Taproot, her ancestral home, when a “grizzled old blackman” in a wagon offers to show them the way:

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Still following the wagon, they crested a delta hill and came on a wide delta flatland dominated by a huge tree standing on the horizon. The tree stood starkly alone against the flat horizon, inexorably drawing the eye. As they drove toward it slowly, she slid her hand over and began stroking his biceps. A soothing thing. She knew her man. Bodeen was barely conscious of her stroking hand as the nature of the tree began to dawn on him. The car slowed down to a stop and the stillmoving wagon gained ground. Hanging from the tree was fresh delta fruit. A hanged man. A blackman, lynched and burned. Always stay your guard children. The stories I could tell. The tiny hairs on the back of Bodeen’s neck rose and an ancient primal growl rumbled low in his throat. He pulled out his hognose and scanned the empty horizons before climbing down, pistol ready, even eager. The old man had stopped and sat as impassively as a statute [sic] in the rain. Bodeen walked over to his wagon and looked at him belligerently. “Whats this old man?” The old man looked at him from eyes shadowed beneath the wide slouch hat. Melvira walked up and laid a calming hand on Bodeen’s forearm. “Which way to Taproot?” she asked. The old man pointed south at a winding road that went through an open picket fence. “You follow this road south, no matter what, take you straight to Taproot.” “Thank you,” said Dupree. The old man tipped his hat to her and geed his mule. He turned his wagon around and drove back the way they came. Luke Bodeen didn’t hardly notice; he was staring at the hanged man, disgusted with himself, the old man and life in the delta. Suddenly so very weary, he walked slowly through the sucking mud to the burnt thing, hanging from the old delta tree and swaying slightly in the delta wind and rain. The body was wet and soggy; it hadn’t burnt thoroughly and stank like the half-burnt meat that it was. The muddy ground around it was tracked up and littered with the remains of a delta picnic, broken parasols, wet crumpled paper, beercans and liquor bottles, folding seats. Looks like folk had had a pleasant Sunday morning. A little down-home delta fun. (188 – 89)

Bodeen’s legacy as a bluesman—the wounded land and burnt flesh he inherits—is the aftermath of a spectacle lynching. A kind of extinction has been wrought here, under the cover of “delta fun.” Bodeen’s initial reaction, animal fear (the “ancient primal growl”) mingled with a self-protective refusal to acknowledge what he sees, is glossed by Kristeva’s description of the abject as

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[a] massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which . . . now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.21

Bodeen’s weariness is a sign of the self-protective repression the blues subject must engage in, a defensive warding-off of the very real psychic threat posed by the abject. How can he possibly acknowledge his equivalence with this “half-burnt meat”? “The abject,” writes Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter, designates . . . precisely those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which— and by virtue of which—the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life.22

When applied to the social field of the Jim Crow South, the “dreaded identification” invoked by Butler refers to whiteness’ insistence on its absolute difference from blackness—an insistence enforced, among other ways, through the sort of “delta fun” Bodeen has stumbled onto, which makes difference visible by the reduction of a black man to a charred, smelly, inhuman carcass, pure dead meat for the delectation of picnickers. Black life, so transformed, isn’t merely “unlivable” and “uninhabitable,” but unliving and uninhabited; white subjectivity, however devoid of meaning in other respects, “circumscribes its own claim to autonomy and to life” by producing, deriving pleasure from, yet insisting on its utter apartness from, this “zone of uninhabitability.” A black blues subject such as Bodeen is challenged, too, by the specter of a “dreaded identification,” since to acknowledge his equivalence, or potential equivalence, with the “half-burnt meat” is to allow himself to be herded into the “unlivable” sector of the social field where only nonsubjects reside. His very psychic survival seems to demand that he reject any such equivalence. Yet not to identify with the body in a brotherly way, not to see it as a broken spirit-vessel rather than half-burnt nigger-meat, is to capitulate wholly to the epistemology of absolute difference that the spectacle was designed to enforce. One might say with Saidiya Hartman that Bodeen has been presented, in symbolic terms, with the “pained body” produced by the

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lynching era and must now choose whether to acknowledge or deny the claim of common humanity, and shared subjection, that it makes on him. Redressing the spiritual wounds inflicted by lynching requires, as Hartman suggests, a “recognition of the violated body as human flesh.” Human is the operative word here; the blues subject who would heal must fight a reflexive desire to turn away in revulsion. Only by meeting the present challenge and pushing onward toward the ancestral homeland of Taproot can Bodeen and Dupree, a latter-day Adam and Eve, achieve what Lifton calls “biological transcendence,” a mode of symbolic immortality that inheres in ancestral connections and the propagation of descendent generations. Bodeen’s first response to the primal lynching scene, however, is a violent reprisal that rebounds symbolically against those generations: “Damn em,” muttered Bodeen, “damn em all.” He looked at the pistol in his hand like he had forgotten he was carrying it. Then he emptied his hognose into the trunk of the tree, damning em with every shot. Melvira waited until the gun was empty, Bodeen still firing on empty chambers, before she gently took it from his hand. “Hurting the tree,” she said, “don’t help the man.” “Helped me.” His voice was supposed to be angry but sounded dead instead. (189 –90)

The lynching tree, instrument of subjection, is also a kind of family tree—a damaged but still essential offshoot of (or entrance to) Taproot, the sought-for vital source at which racial ancestry and nature’s fertility will come together. That Bodeen is “firing on empty chambers” suggests the uselessness of such an attack, the futility of attempting a regeneration through retaliatory violence. With all paths to transcendence blocked by the dangling corpse, the bluesman plunges into a hands-on confrontation with what most oppresses him: [Melvira] stuck the empty gun in the waistband of his pants and began trying to unloosen the wet chains that held the deadman still swaying from the branch. The heavy wet chain was more than she could handle, and Bodeen took over with a vengeance. Handling the deadmeat itself was a challenge that Lucas failed and he vomited all over the halfcooked thing before they finally got it unchained and loose of the tree. He was soaking wet from rain and tears by the time he dug a shallow grave in the soft muddy ground and covered it with rocks from the field. Then he was ready to go and waited impatiently in the car while Melvira said a short prayer over the makeshift grave.

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He drove silently past the tree and beyond, eyes strictly on the road, his conversation consisting of one-word replies. His people lived such a hard life. The rain clouded his vision and the bitterness clouded his soul. “Nothing you can do about it now, Lucas,” she said, fingering her roots and wondering what she herself would do. “No. At least I owe him a blues,” said Lucas Bodeen, “least we forget.” (190)

If, as Hartman suggests, it is the “ravished” black body produced by white violence that holds out the possibility of spiritual regeneration for those who survive, then Bodeen’s embrace of that body sets the scene, albeit provisionally, for rebirth through the medium of blues song. Rather than turning his back, fleeing and repressing, allowing the abject “halfcooked thing” to haunt him, the bluesman acknowledges it, literally and figuratively takes on its weight, witnesses the beginning of his own physical dissolution in vomit and tears, courts the psychic annihilation Kristeva insists he must suffer—and survives, barely. He goes deep into the spiritual hole. The corpse, in Kristeva’s words, is what he must “permanently thrust aside in order to live.” “These bodily fluids,” she writes, “this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border.” 23 Melvira accompanies Bodeen on this perilous border navigation. If Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” leaves “blood at the root” of the lynching tree, then Bodeen’s conjure woman “fingers her roots”—her hungered-for but imperiled transcendence through ancestry and nature— and wonders how to move forward. She carries the death encounter with her as trauma, the “repetitive seeing” described by Cathy Caruth as trauma’s distinguishing symptom.24 “At some point in the deepest part of the night Melvira rose, vaguely bothered. She reached out with her senses and found nothing wrong. Other than the rain still battering the roof, the barn was quiet. She saw the hanged man again, silhouetted against the evening sky” (191). After surviving a Mississippi River flood, the couple arrives at the tiny Delta town of Taproot. Bodeen, frustrated by his chronic inability to win Melvira’s hand, leaves her at the door of the cabin belonging to her estranged mother, Effie, who is on her deathbed; daughter and mother struggle to reconcile after years of mutual distrust. A mode of symbolic immortality that the lynching tree has cast into question—biological transcendence through the generations—is reclaimed and re-membered, as roots triumphant. “‘You are my ancestor,’ said Melvira Dupree in the solemn monotone of ritual, ‘and I have found you’” (208). On the

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morning after Effie’s death, Bodeen returns to the cabin, bringing with him the redress that he and Melvira have been seeking: Again a knock on the door, this time hesitant and unsure, life is far more timid than death. Melvira didn’t answer, and the door was slowly pushed open. Luke Bodeen of course, smiling with a rueful resignation. “What can I say girl,” he said sheepishly. “So I’m a fool for you, so what else is new.” Then he saw the body and the new lines of pain etched into her face. “Oh baby. Oh baby.” He gathered her into his arms. The dam loosened and, burrowing into his chest, she broke down in deep tormented sobs that finally released a lifetime of pain. (208 –9)

Melvira and Bodeen have become for each other versions of the “sweet little angel” (originally “sweet black angel”) invoked by B. B. King. Their mutually solacing embrace releases a lifetime of pain: not just romantic disappointments and wounds engendered by romance, but the humiliation and grief inflicted by white violence. This primal healing scene has been prepared for by the earlier primal lynching scene, Bodeen’s awkward, deadening, but finally necessary embrace of the “halfcooked thing” hanging from the tree. Only by risking their souls in that moment could Bodeen and Melvira earn the right to reclaim them here; only by recognizing “the amputated body in its amputatedness” could they redress the spiritual breach engendered by lynching and find wholeness. Like the second line of an AAB blues, the healing embrace is repeated, with deepening resonance: The music was back in her voice. She was singing at him again, her voice filled with sweet promise. Gloriana hallelujah. “Baby,” he said, his hungry arms opening. She moved into them like flowing water. And Lucas Bodeen is a complete man again. Baby I love you so. Never before has mortal man loved a woman like I love you. “I’m told Mississippi riverwater is good for growing things,” she murmured into his chest.” (210)

The blues Bodeen “owe[d]” the lynched man “least we forget” surfaces here, as the private soundtrack of a romantic euphoria that has its distant origins in Bodeen’s willingness to embrace a charred corpse. That willingness has blissfully reunited him with his woman-muse in a burst of lyric inspiration: So I’m a fool for you, so what else is new. Baby I love you so.

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DEAD BODIES COMING AFTER ME: B. B. KING’S REDRESSIVE EROTICS

If blues pianist Lucas Bodeen wins redress against lynching by embracing the ensouled body of his female lover in Another Good Loving Blues and singing the “good loving” blues song it provokes in him, then blues guitarist B. B. King offers in his autobiography an intriguing variation on embrace-as-redress: the ensouled, fetishized body of his femalegendered guitar, Lucille, with which he will very publicly conquer the world. The prelude to this ascent is a Mississippi childhood King remembers in Blues All Around Me as having been haunted by fears of dismemberment—the amputated body in its amputatedness—that linger to this day: Grandma might take me to a relative’s house where the old folk would talk late into the night while they put me in the next room to curl up on the bed and go to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t help but hear them tell spooky stories about headless bodies being carried off in open coffins. They were probably lying or exaggerating, but these tall tales painted such frightening pictures of ghostly death that when they turned off the kerosene lamps I found myself shivering with fear. They told the stories with such emotion and in such detail that, in the eyesight of my imagination, I saw dead bodies coming after me, dripping blood, breathing down my neck. The dark became a tomb. Today as an old man I still carry the fear of a little boy; I can’t sleep in the dark; a light must be burning in my bedroom.25

One might be tempted to dismiss King’s juvenile anxieties as essentially trivial—the product of a child’s overheated imagination, stoked by mischievous elders proffering a regional variation on Irving’s legend of the headless horseman—were the stories that traumatized him not so evidently grounded in the particulars of Mississippi history. In 1929, when King was four, the infamous lynching of Charley Shepherd took place— the most revolting public spectacle in the history of Mississippi, according to some. A convicted murderer and so-called trusty guard at Parchman Farm, Shepherd killed his sergeant, kidnapped the sergeant’s teenaged daughter, and fled into the surrounding woods. Five thousand men with bloodhounds tracked him across the Delta. After giving himself up, Shepherd was hogtied and driven from place to place like a carnival attraction. Then, relates David Oshinsky, he was taken to an open field where, according to one newspaper, “the enraged farmers and townspeople of the Delta went about their work of torturing” the convict for seven straight hours.

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Shepherd was placed on a funeral pyre doused with gasoline. He was beaten and stabbed, and his ears cut off for souvenirs. When the burning began, Shepherd’s nose and mouth were filled with dirt in order to prevent his inhaling gas fumes—and instant death. The crowd roared its approval as the charred legs and feet of the convict fell from the body into the fire.26

The next day, Shepherd’s smoking skull was found in a roadside ditch. King would not have known these details, of course, and yet in some sense he did know, inoculated as he was by stories of “ghostly death” into which the old folk seemed to have poured all of their own anxieties— “with such emotion and in such detail”—about life in the Delta.27 (Scooter, the Alabama-born hero of Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar (1974), has a similar recollection of being spooked by his elders: “that time playing house with Charlene Wingate when I was not only caught and not only spanked and chastised but also threatened with the booger man who would catch you and cut off your thing with his butcher knife.”) 28 At the age of eight or nine, of course, King would have his own traumatizing encounter with a lynched black body in the town square of neighboring Lexington, an experience discussed in chapter 1. King stumbles across the tail end of a ritual in progress rather than the ritual’s mute aftermath encountered by Luke Bodeen; the distance necessarily imposed on him by the presence of a white mob and his own youthful fear rules out any sort of direct approach to the dead black body. The sort of hands-on catharsis earned by Bodeen—his anguished embrace of the “halfcooked thing” followed by his healing embrace of Melvira—is unavailable to King. King achieves redress over time, however, with the help of blues music: not just by symbolically transforming the primal lynching scene into a primal healing scene during his 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, but by embracing and transforming the threat of dismemberment in two related ways. First, he rhetorically figures his own body as the site of a violent and intensely pleasurable ravishing by blues singers and instrumentalists, beginning with the records he hears on his Aunt Mima’s windup Victrola. “There was Bessie Smith and Mamie Smith and Ma Rainey, to be sure,” he remembers, “blues ladies who tore off the top of my head” (26). Describing his creative awakening as a young guitar player searching for models, he employs familiar tropes even while invoking the decapitation metaphor a second time: Ten-cent vendors widened my world by showing me a film clip of a white man playing the clarinet and, behind him, a black man playing the guitar. Standing glued to that tiny screen, my heart thumping inside my chest, my foot stomping the floor, my head nodding, and my ears tingling, I

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heard Benny Goodman play “King Porter Stomp” and “Sometimes I’m Happy” and “Let’s Dance.” On certain songs, the guitarist, Charlie Christian, soloed in a manner that blew off the top of my head. (69)

It may be stretching a point to claim that Charley Sheperd’s smoking skull haunts King’s description of overheated synapses; then again, it may not. Most young white American rock fans who describe themselves as “blown away” by the performances of certain guitar-wielding “gunslingers” are reaching for a suitably forceful figurative vocabulary, but they are also deploying clichés that betray their embeddedness in an American social field dominated, far more than any other industrialized country, by the presence of easily available firearms. If King’s figurative vocabulary is overdetermined—if it has perhaps been influenced, thanks to his extensive contact with white audiences and journalists, by a discourse of rock excess—then it seems also to resonate with the more localized, and considerably more brutal, social field he inhabited as a youth, one that engendered “the fear of a little boy” that he still carries “as an old man.” When King describes the music of his heroes, his tropes intermingle violence with pleasure in a striking way: blues performance as a metaphorical lynching that thrills its young victim. “My greatest musical debt is to [blues guitarist] T-Bone [Walker],” he confesses: He showed me the way. His sound cut me like a sword. . . . He’d cut off the notes and leave spaces between phrases that took my breath away. When he played, you felt his personality: edgy, cool, and a little dangerous. His guitar could cut you like a lethal weapon or stroke you like a sweet-talking love letter. . . . He was electric in more ways than one. Electricity coursed through my body when I heard the man play. His sound was branded in my head. (83 – 84)

Cut, asphyxiated, branded, but also stroked, sweet-talked, electrified: the tropes employed by King represent the blues subject as a site on which a peculiarly southern dialectic of torture and sexuality is played out. Just as the so-called black beast rapist of southern myth was assumed to have violently assaulted and even dismembered his helpless white female prey—the alleged pretext for the merciless tortures inflicted on Henry Smith, Charley Shepherd, and many others—so T-Bone Walker’s music has its way with the helpless young King here, figuratively taking him apart as it transmits an erotic charge. (Robert Johnson works the same vein when he threatens—and promises—his lover in “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” (1937) that “The stuff I got’ll bust your brains out, baby.”) 29 It is because the pleasures of Walker’s music manifest themselves to King as painful pleasures—because, according to Harman, “it is the ravished body that holds out the possibility of restitution”—that they offer young

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King the possibility of healing his own soul, which has been wounded by his encounter with spectacle lynching. Yet even while depicting his own body as the site of a figurative ravishing that offers him surreptitious redress against the “dead bodies coming after [him],” King transforms the threat of dismemberment conveyed in his primal encounter with lynching in a second way: by investing himself heavily in a kind of romantic fantasy, what Hartman would call a “simulated wholeness,” involving his guitar, Lucille. Electric guitars become a primary erotic fetish for King: pristine, sensuous, embraceable, feminine, cherished. They are virtuous bodies to be defended at all cost, antipodes of the shattered degraded bodies produced by lynching. Early in his life, King tells us, he was overcome with inexplicable longing when first confronted by a guitar belonging to Reverend Fair, the pastor of his church: Slipping into the very first pew, looking around to see which girls are sitting where, feeling happy and tingly up and down my skin, listening to Mama singing with the choir with a voice so sweet it makes me wanna cry, I can’t sit still. My eyes dart from here and there, only to land on the one object in the whole church that fascinates me most: Reverend’s guitar. It leans against his pulpit and, man, it’s beautiful. The body is hollow wood with a cord that plugs into the wall. Its rounded shape and lovely curves remind me of the body of a beautiful girl. I wanna run up and put my arms around the guitar, but I don’t dare. (17)

The visual and erotic fascination Fair’s guitar holds for young King— the fact that it all but demands to be looked at and embraced, in a context where King finds such action impossible—reveals its full meaning only when we read this scene in conjunction with the Lexington lynching scene that scars him as a youth. There, too, King finds himself transfixed by a visually compelling body emplaced in a significant social ritual (“I see them carrying a black body, a man’s body, to the front of the courthouse”); there, too, the body’s numinousness is partly a function of its erotic life (“I hear someone say something about the dead man touching a white woman and how he got what he deserves”). And there, too, King finds his desire to broadcast his feelings about the body in question inhibited by his felt inadequacy in the face of assumed social censure (“Deep inside, I’m hurt, sad, and mad. But I stay silent”). King’s imaginative life in Blues All Around Me takes the form of a bodily exchange: the bluesman hungering for, embracing, and publicly declaring his love for the pristine feminine body of Lucille and her surrogates as a way of displacing the abject masculine body of the lynching victim he is unable to embrace, not to mention the proliferating headless bodies in the ghost stories that still haunt him. “Music,” he says, hinting at this

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displacement, “took me away. . . . Ever since I laid eyes on Reverend Fair’s guitar, I wanted one for myself, just like a I wanted a girl to call my own” (43). He gets his first guitar when he is twelve, several years after the lynching: It was a cherry-red Stella, an acoustic model with a short neck and a good solid sound. . . . Never have I been so excited. Couldn’t keep my hands off her. If I was feeling lonely, I’d pick up the guitar; feel like talking, pick up the guitar; if something’s bugging me, just grab the guitar and play out the anger; happy, horny, mad, or sad, the guitar was right there, a righteous pacifier and comforting companion. It was an incredible luxury to have this instrument to stroke whenever the passion overcame me, and, believe me, the passion overcame me night and day. (43 – 44)

“The (counter)investment in the body as a site of need, desire, and pleasure,” Hartman notes of African American peformance practices, “[is] articulated in the very endeavor to heal the flesh and redress the pained body.” 30 What makes King’s counterinvestment in the body unique is the fact that the body in question—a body from which he takes what can only be erotic pleasure—belongs to his cherry-red Stella. Although we usually think of electric guitars as phallic props (particularly within the so-called cock rock subset of rock performance), there is certainly precedent for imagining the guitar as a kind of surrogate feminine body, a resonant cavity that thrills to the touch of knowing fingers. “In Italian,” as Alan Lomax notes, “an evening of lovemaking is termed a la chitarra.” 31 But King’s hungry passion, the consolation he takes in his guitar’s sensual presence, hints at a profound redressive need, an imagined wounded body healing itself by means of a performance practice in which lovemaking and playing the blues are deeply interfused. The very act of christening one of his later guitars “Lucille” takes place on an evening marked by King’s own bodily wounding. He’s playing a jook in Twist, Arkansas on a cold December night in 1949; a roomful of dancers circle around a garbage pail half-filled with lighted kerosene. “Well, I get to playing and the room gets to rocking, couples get to jitterbugging, snake-hipping, and trucking, and that kerosene is burning hot. I’m up there stoking their fire—the better my beat, the bigger my tips—singing some barn burning Pee Wee Crayton blues and having a ball” (132). Suddenly the kerosene pail is kicked over, the crowd is in a panic, and King finds himself bursting out of the jook in a crush of tumbling bodies. He’s left his guitar inside, he realizes: The flames get higher. I look at that fire and figure I’ve got about one second to decide. I go for it, dashing back inside. Someone tries to stop me,

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but I’m gone. Got to. Got to grab that guitar. Fire all around me. Heat unbearable. Burning like hell. Flames licking my feet, scorching my arms. I find the guitar, just as a beam crashes down in front of me. But I got the guitar. Grab it by the neck. Jump back over the beam just as a wall collapses, missing my ass and my guitar by a couple of inches. Can barely see the door for the all-roaring fire. Put my head down, cradling the guitar in my arms, and make a mad dash for the exit. The black night is a welcome sight. I’m burned on my legs, but the guitar is fine. (133)

Just as King tropes the blues guitar mastery of T-Bone Walker and Charlie Christian as a gloriously uplifting mutilation and asphyxiation, so his devoted passion for his guitar thrusts him into the subject position of a self-chosen lynching victim who is being devoured by flames, an almost–Charley Shepherd who barely escapes with the burned legs that were prelude to Shepherd’s extinction. Such a primal scene—the isolated black male blues subject as the terrified victim of his own lynching-by-fire—is, as I will discuss momentarily, the axis around which Clarence Major’s novel Dirty Bird Blues revolves; here the lynching parallel is merely implicit, adding resonance to an already dramatic episode: King’s guitar is the body saved from the flames. In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody describes the obverse of such a rescue effort—helplessness in the aftermath of a local family’s firebombing: We sat in the car for about an hour, silently looking at this debris and the ashes that covered the nine charcoal-burned bodies. A hundred or more also stood around—Negroes from the neighborhood in their pajamas, nightgowns, and housecoats and even a few whites, with their eyes fixed on that dreadful scene. I shall never forget the expressions on the faces of the Negroes. There was almost unanimous hopelessness in them.32

The continuing threat to black bodily integrity posed by white vigilante violence in the Mississippi of King’s childhood may help us understand King’s passionate investment in Lucille—the name he confers on his guitar when he learns that the fire is the result of a fight over a woman by that name. Lucille (a semi-hollow-body Gibson) is King’s peculiar transformation of the southern cult of white womanhood, the chivalrous idolatry of a man who views his guitar as a surrogate lover: I liked seeing my guitar as a lady. I liked seeing her as someone worth fighting or even dying for. . . . Truth is, from the time I put a wire string on a broom handle till today, I’ve turned to Lucille—and there have been seventeen different Lucilles—for comfort and relief. Just to pick her up and stroke her settles me down. . . . I put her on my lap and wait until some happy combination of notes falls from her mouth and makes me feel

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all warm inside. With the possible exception of real-life sex with a real-life woman, no one gives me peace of mind like Lucille. . . . . . . I get cold chills just thinking of hurting Lucille. Don’t even like anyone touching her when she’s sitting in her stand in my dressing room. The idea of smashing her to bits against a wall or an amplifier [the way Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townsend do] makes me sick. (134, 244)

King’s “cold chills” here are a familiar blues motif; in “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” (1937), Robert Johnson describes the blues as “a low-down shakin’ chill.” 33 King’s feelings for Lucille are the measure of his redressive need: not just the surrogate black body saved from the flames, she is the body shielded from all violence by her possessor’s resolute gentility. “Lucille” is multiple bodies, literally—the locus of a repetition compulsion, hinting at a lack in King, residue of youthful terrors (his “shivering with fear”), that the rituals of naming and aural selfpleasuring never quite resolve. FLAMES, LORD LORD: THE BLUES SUBJECT POSSESSED

If lynching inflicts soul murder on those potentially subject to it by destroying an exemplary black body, then embrace undoes soul murder by reclaiming that body with a resolute tenderness it extends toward other cherished bodies. Possession, by contrast, is a kind of failed relationality: the blues subject’s helpless collapse into, rather than embrace of, the abject. Haunted by the ghosts of past lynchings and the specter of disciplinary violence to come, the blues subject is finally reclaimed by his own worst fears, transformed into the tortured witness of his own imagined lynching. Such is the fate of Manfred Banks, protagonist of Clarence Major’s novel Dirty Bird Blues (1996). Banks, nicknamed “Man,” is Georgia-born, a blues-singing harmonica and sax player who quits postwar Chicago after four troubled years, fleeing his foundering marriage for what he hopes will be a fresh start in Omaha. Lynching is a shadowy presence through Major’s novel: a remembered boyhood threat, a hovering present-day possibility, but also a metaphor for Man’s subjective feelings of encirclement, powerlessness, and victimization in a public sphere governed by varieties of racist white men. When Man arrives in Omaha to make his fresh start, his sister Debbie greets him with cheerful boosterism that tails off in a chilling remembrance. “‘I ain’t saying some bad things ain’t happened [here],’” she admits: Back some years ago a mob broke into the courthouse and threatened to lynch the mayor if he didn’t hand over this puny little old colored boy they thought had raped some white gal. Told the mayor they would burn down the courthouse if he didn’t hand over the boy. . . . [Conversation

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intervenes.] Oh, I remember what I was saying. How they lynched that boy—William Brown—shot his body full of bullets then dragged it through the streets and burned it. Lynched him right over there on the corner of Eighteenth and Harney—about five or six blocks from there.34

“‘Maybe I came to the wrong place,’” Man says a moment later. “‘Lynchings and freezing weather don’t agree with me’” (70). Jim Crow attitudes towards the “usual crime” (real or imagined sexual contact between black men and white women, figured invariably as rape) still hold sway in Truman-era Omaha, as Man learns one night when a black man walks into a blues club called the Palace with an underage white girl on his arm. “Drusilla [the bartender] whispered to Man: ‘I don’t know who that boy is but he better be careful, he can get himself lynched around here’”(229). The job Man lands as a janitor at Lomax Steel soon after his arrival sours in the face of racist taunts he suffers from coworkers, provoking violent revenge fantasies. “At night in bed he thought about the trouble the jokers on the job were giving him. In his dreams he sometimes pulled a Bat Masterson on them, mowing them all down, sometimes whipping a Nat Turner on them. But big as he was he was strapped as though to a public torture rack. . . . brain-lynched” (108, 206). Such fantasies, and their deliberate stifling, reawaken memories of a Georgia boyhood where lynching was the great unspoken threat: Glad he hadn’t exploded and gone up against the peckerwood. Remembered his mama’s words: When you goes down the street, try to be nice and neat, watch yo step long the way, and be careful what you say. What she didn’t add, he knew was: You a black boy and the slightest wrong move can get you kilt. (110)

This sense of being hemmed in on all fronts—held down on the job and held up to public ridicule, both under the sign of disciplinary violence— generates an extraordinary restlessness in Man. Blues music is his safety valve: “Singing was his way of talking out this furious, crazy thing in him that made him glide, leap, holler and scream as if over treetops without even moving” (14). The “treetops” he “scream[s] . . . over” symbolize the way in which blues singing provides him with a creative release that lets him transcend his anxieties about becoming strange (lynched) fruit. Nor are his anxieties groundless. After winning a grudging promotion from his white supervisor, Eliot Selby, Man offers a ride to a white woman who flags him down one day after work. Eliot finds out and his grudge flares into merciless harassment. Man has made what his mother would call “the slightest wrong move.” His own mind takes lethal revenge in a pair of dream sequences, the armatures around which Major’s novel

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turns. In both cases, the blues subject is transformed—indeed, transforms himself—into the lynching-abject of black southern nightmare. The first dream follows a discussion Man has initiated with his blues partner, Solomon Thigpen, on the subject of death—a topic Solly glibly dismisses as pointless, even as Man, troubled, seems headed toward a night of reckoning. The dream is that reckoning: He’s easing the load up, holding the lever firmly and easing it back slowly, watching the load rise. A giant load, he’s careful not to let it start tossing and turning. When he has it up above head level he reaches for the drive-handle without even looking at it, knowing it so well, and pushes at it so that the crane starts inching along the tracks. And he keeps his eyes on the load, making sure it stays straight. Then suddenly there is a loud scream—EEEEEEEEEEEE! The cry of some male thing getting its balls cut off. And he looks around, back and forth, up and down the bay, trying to see what is going on. And in his panic he released the lever and looks straight down below the cab. On the ground, lying spread-eagle is Eliot. Half of his head is torn off where the edge of the stack of beams has torn into it. A gut-deep fear grips Man’s bowels and he thinks he might be pissing in his pants. He’s killed a man, a white man. Image of himself swinging at the end of a rope with the smell of kerosene all over his body and flames leaping up at his legs. Flames. Lord, Lord. And his eyes are turned up to the tops of the pines, and he sees clouds drifting by above him and he knows, God, he knows sure as shit, he’s going to die in a minute or two. And the rope touches his right cheek. He woke with a great sense of relief and dread. May not be alive but sho ain’t dead. Went to the river, all I caught was a shiver. Cain’t get across, cain’t get back loss, cause of that goddamned boss. (198 –99)

The “giant load” Man struggles to raise at the beginning of this passage is a psychic burden with social resonance: Man’s private stake in the uplift ideology propounded, among others, by Booker T. Washington. “Nearly sixteen millions of [black] hands will aid you in pulling the load upward,” Washington had warned the white South in his Atlanta Exposition Address (1895), “or they will pull against you the load downward.” If the race’s upward progress were blocked, Washington had continued, “we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.” 35 Man’s dream renders him the exemplar of a collective African American dilemma: he is blocked uplift transformed into a (literal) body of death. His movement downward in the dream is precipitated by a “loud scream . . . , [t]he cry of some male thing getting its balls cut off.” This image is both symbolic (a way of representing Man’s workplace emasculation) and proleptic (a harbinger of the primal lynching scene into which he will momentarily be cast). The psychic wound crying out is Man’s grievously blocked career ambitions—a nullification of his masculinity—but also his anxiety

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about the specific form of threatened violence with which that blockage is enforced. Man’s hunger to lash out combined with his repressed terror of lynching dovetail, as the dream continues, in a guilt-producing revenge fantasy that redoubles his anxiety. He murders his white boss, enacting vengeance through dismemberment—half a head for a pair of testicles—in a way that equalizes the two men while guaranteeing Man’s punishment at the hands of those enacting white “justice.” Pulled along by a dreamlogic that immures him within the primal lynching scene, Man has no sooner imagined his fate (“Image of himself swinging at the end of a rope”) than he is claimed by it (“with the smell of kerosene all over his body and flames leaping up at his legs”). The blues subject as lynching witness begets, by a process of condensation, the blues subject as abjectbody-in-formation. Major provides us here with what Flowers elides: the terrified internal monologue that precedes the creation of the “half-burnt meat” discovered by Luke Bodeen; the extended moment in which the subject of a spectacle lynching prepares, like Charley Shepherd, to give up the ghost. The blues subject’s possession by the abject is averted at the last possible moment as Man wakes into a provisional reprise. The euphoria of unexpected resurrection is shadowed by continuing fear, a paradox Man voices in a rhyming proto-blues: He woke with a great sense of relief and dread. May not be alive but sho ain’t dead. Went to the river, all I caught was a shiver. Cain’t get across, cain’t get back loss, cause of that goddamned boss.36

The dreams precipitated by traumatic neuroses, Freud reminds us, “have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.” 37 The “accident” from which Man wakes lies in the future rather than the past; it is the phantasmic doom looming over him, a fate that his boyhood in the Jim Crow South and scattered evidence in Omaha have led him to anticipate. His nightmare issues from what might be called pretraumatic traumatic shock syndrome: the dream itself supplies the deadly, traumatizing event that his environment, presided over by the ghosts of past lynchings, merely threatens to inflict. In such a world, Man’s lyric outburst suggests, blues repetitions may function as a crucial prop in the subject’s desperate struggle to fend off abjection. The “shiver” Man catches when he goes to the river might be read as the subject’s reflexive recoil in the face of the abject, which threatens to nullify all possible rebirths. Yet the very act of rhyming “shiver” with “river” is

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the blues singer’s way of wringing consoling pleasure from such a condition. Like the child-subject of Freud’s fort/da game, who compensates for the pain of his mother’s disappearance by playing hide-and-seek with a wooden spool on a string, Man makes a virtue of necessity, mastering loss by symbolically reproducing and controlling it. He staves off extreme anxiety by refashioning his beleaguerment as rhyming play, a kind of whistling in the post-nightmare dark: dread/dead, river/shiver, across/ loss/boss. Freud’s analysis of the fort/da game glosses Man’s fevered outburst. “At the outset [the boy] was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part.” 38 Yet never quite exorcised by Man’s desperate expressive play is the specter of his own lynching—a nightmare, literally, since it presents itself to him in the form of a repeated dream: his self-witnessed conversion into a corpse. Like the second line of an AAB blues, Man’s second nightmare is the first nightmare repeated, intensified, enlarged from a condition into a fate. Separating the two nightmares is a plot-turn: Man, frustrated at being assigned to dangerous scrap metal work for which he has received no training and sick of being verbally abused by his supervisor Eliot, strikes back one day—lands a “Joe Louis punch”—and is fired. Striking a white man, in the Georgia of Man’s youth, was an offense that could get you lynched; so too was fraternizing with a white woman, which sin Man is guilty of in Eliot’s eyes. “The guys say he [Eliot] was really pissed off,” a friend tells him after he’s been dismissed. “. . . That’s why he’s been riding your behind. . . . I heard him say many times that if the good Lord intended white people to mix with the coloreds he’d a made them all the same color” (215). The second nightmare picks up where the first left off: with the lynching rope touching Man’s flesh. I quote the lengthy passage in its entirety: He feels the hard new rope resting loosely around his damp neck. A mob of about a hundred jeering dog-faced white men are gathered around the base of a pile of scrap metal on which he stands. He smells fern. He smells apple pie. Dandelions are dangling from his shirt pockets. Closing his eyes, he sees a little birdhouse, and looking through the little hole, inside he sees a little old man sitting in a rocking chair. The old man is himself, a self that will never be. His hands are tied behind his back with a rope made of afterbirth. Overhead high in the dome, birds—golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, snail kites, and white ibises—are flying around in a frantic pattern. The rope is tied to the chain hook suspended from the crane rollers. No one, yet, is up in the cab. Mad dogs on chains are far in the back behind the mob barking. He is sweating and trembling in mortal fear. His terror is so acute he can’t speak. His voice is stuck in his throat. Out of the sides of his eyes he can now see somebody climbing the fire escape-like ladder to the cab. Man’s

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feet suddenly feel cold and he strains to look down. The pile of scrap metal has turned to a pile of scrap wood. He smells kerosene. One of the men, walking around the base with a tilted bucket, is dousing the pile of wood with the stuff. He knows he’s in the Lomax main bay but at the same time it seems like a hellish semi-open area steaming with smoke from a recent fire. Everything is charred black. One man spits a wad of garlic up at him and laughs, exposing a row of broken teeth. This is a jungle. Out beyond the men he can see black trees but they look like stacks of rebars and beams. Man opens his mouth, gasping for words and a nightingale flaps out and flies off above the heads of the men. Man’s throat is dry. The sole of his left foot itches. The kerosene has soaked into his bare feet. He feels it on his pants leg. He smells a fire torch burning. The men are still shouting and shaking their fists up at him. One man to his left throws a bucket of bird and mice droppings onto the pile. A mop and a broom are thrown on. A mop bucket lands near his feet. Far in the distance he can hear the banging of sheers [sic]. He turns his head, looking for crazy old Ralph, and sees the backside of somebody, possibly Eliot, feeding the body of a child into the machine. As he realizes it’s his daughter he notices a man below circling the woodpile sprinkling hay from a hayload that has been wheeled in from the yard. A skinny man with glassy red eyes and the face of a palomino climbs up to him, forces his mouth open by pushing at his jaws, and stuffs a bullfrog down his throat. He now feels the heat. Somebody is now in the crane car shouting down to the crowd. They cheer him on. “This’ll teach you!” they shout. He is standing on his own grave and he knows it. But he has stopped shaking. Terror has turned rotten, like loose shit, in his veins. It is as though he’s already dead. Caterpillars are crawling from his ears. Somebody throws a chamber pot of piss into his face. A chimney sweep swoops down and sits on his head. A small cradle with no bottom is tossed onto the woodpile. He smells smoke, hears the crane start. Gabriel’s horn is blowing. He’d drink silver water if he had some. His feet are so hot now he’s lost touch with them. The mob is screaming joy. This is it and he knows it. How unlucky can he be. The flames are gaining power, lapping up at his pants legs, cutting into his crotch. (293 –95)

Here is the blues subject in the throes of a doubled abjection, at once “already dead” (a corpse riddled with caterpillars) and about to be engulfed by flames at the hands of a screaming mob. This doubling seems to be Major’s way of representing the difference between ordinary death and extinction, by which I mean the sort of comprehensive annihilation described by Robert Jay Lifton in his studies of those who survived Hiroshima and the Holocaust. Extinction, according to Lifton, equates “the end of the self with the end of everything,” which is to say it deprives the human subject of faith in the five modes of symbolic immortality that make mortal life endurable.39 First among these consolations is biological immortality: “living on through—psychologically speaking, in— one’s sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, with imagery of an endless chain of biological attachment” (18). The process of abjection

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strips Man of such solace: not just his present-day self is being lynched, but the “little old man sitting in a rocking chair . . . a self that will never be”; a “small cradle with no bottom,” tossed onto the smoldering woodpile beneath his feet, marks the loss of his daughter, who has been fed into the disciplinary “machine” a moment earlier. The afterbirth that once nourished new life now binds Man’s hands, spiriting him toward the void. Religious or theological immortality, the second mode described by Lifton, has also been stripped away: Man’s nightmare has transformed his workplace into heaven’s obverse, “a hellish semi-open area steaming with smoke from a recent fire. Everything is charred black.” The third and fourth modes of symbolic immortality— creative (transcendence through the making of art) and natural (transcendence through identification with the natural world)—have been virtually obliterated. As a blues singer, Man has always counted on his voice to earn him creative immortality; his nightmare finds him gagged, asphyxiated, rendered mute. “His terror is so acute he can’t speak. His voice is stuck in his throat.” Nature begins by offering him a surrogate voice (“Man opens his mouth, gasping for words and a nightingale flaps out and flies off above the heads of the men”) and ends by abetting his silencing (the “skinny man” with “the face of a palomino” who “stuffs a bullfrog down his throat”). Man’s consciousness, on the verge of dissolving into the abject, narrows to the span of a single summary blues line: “How unlucky can he be.” Lifton’s fifth mode of symbolic immortality, experiential transcendence or ecstasy, also surfaces here, but is perversely transformed. The “sense of extraordinary psychic unity, and perceptual intensity, and of ineffable illumination” that accompanies this mode, according to Lifton, offers itself to Man not as a vision of wholeness beyond death, but of the subject’s agonized mute scattering into the abject’s comprehensive negation. Spectacle lynching transforms the splintering blues subject into an apocalypse of clamoring body parts. “His voice is stuck in his throat. . . . Man’s feet suddenly feel cold. . . . Man’s throat is dry. The sole of his left foot itches. The kerosene has soaked into his bare feet. He feels it on his pants leg. . . . Terror has turned rotten, like loose shit in his veins. . . . His feet are so hot now he’s lost touch with them. . . . The flames are gaining power, lapping up at his pants legs, cutting into his crotch.” Man’s nightmare ends where it began, in a sense, with retributive flames extinguishing an imputed illicit sexual desire that has always been no more than a fantasy projected onto Man by his “pissed off ” boss Eliot and white coworkers. In Dirty Bird Blues, Man’s repeated nightmares of possession bespeak the trauma engendered by his Jim Crow childhood and its reactivation

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by the threat of lynching in a latter-day Omaha, not to mention his anxieties about encirclement in a workplace policed by white men. Yet Major’s novel does not conclude with Man’s death or psychological collapse. Instead, Major’s blues subject, like Flowers’s, undoes the soul murder that has been inflicted on him by consciously embracing, rather than unconsciously being possessed by, a “veritable body of death.” Awakening out of possession begets a symbolic embrace or “hug,” Man’s longdeferred confrontation with what haunts him. “Last night,” he thinks after waking up from the second nightmare, something deep and ugly came out. Deep down inside, something, what is it. Got to be something strong enough to grind me down to sawdust. . . . Whatever it be got to face it, boy. If you scared of it look that fucker in the face and dare it to jump. Whatever shakes the soul, Mama useta say, fore the lighted day, in the black place, go up to that big bad fuckface and hug it. She didn’t say fuckface. But stand up, boy. Face it, little Freddy boy. . . . Hug the darkness even if it brings tears to your eyes. (297–98)

“[T]hat big bad fuckface” is Man’s way of naming the abject, which is to say Death in the particular historically conditioned form—the lynched, burned, dismembered black body—that has haunted southern-born blues subjects through most of the twentieth century, a specter at once ineffable and very real. “An indefinite, hazy fear is ever in the back of their minds,” Howard Snyder had noted of his workers in “Traits of My Plantation Negroes” (1921). “Often they do not seem to know what they are afraid of: it is an intangible, sinister something.” 40 Snyder’s black sharecroppers were, one suspects, somewhat more aware of what haunted them than he is. “For generations, as Edward Ayers notes, young black men [in the South] learned early in their lives that they could at any time be grabbed by a white mob—whether for murder, looking at a white woman the wrong way, or merely being “smart”—and dragged into the woods or a public street to be tortured, burned, mutilated. It was a poisoned atmosphere, one that permeated life far beyond those counties where a lynching had actually taken place, one that pervaded all the dealings each race had with each other.41

Man, too, was warned by his mother early in his life to “watch yo step” when he encountered whites in the street. As Ayers suggests, the blues subject’s anxiety about lynching is bound up with the Jim Crow South’s absolute proscription on social contact between black men and white women. A kind of white hysteria was at work during the period, as George Fredrickson and many others have observed, a flagrant projection of white guilt and sexual insecurity into the figure of the “black beast rapist,” whose exorcism—from the overheated brains of his white

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creators, at least— could only be achieved by way of the sort of spectacle lynching that almost claims Manfred Banks.42 FRAGILE AS OVERHEATED GLASS: DOUBLED ABJECTION, DOUBLED POSSESSION

Black male blues subjects, exposed to white racial and sexual hysteria, are at risk of being contaminated by both—at risk, that is, of being claimed by an abject constituted by both the lynched black body they might become and the black beast rapist they are suspected of harboring within. “Possession,” in this context, is a crisis of violence and sexual desire intermingled, the scandalous incineration of a blues subject by “fires” of interracial lust that are also the instruments of a phantasmic lynch mob’s vengeance for such lust. A moment of such doubled abjection and doubled possession can be found early in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) when Bob Jones, the novel’s protagonist, first confronts a voluptuous Texas blonde named Madge Perkins at the uneasily integrated wartime shipyard where he works in Los Angeles. Most of Jones’s fellow workers, white and black, are recent arrivals from the Deep South; the folkways, superstitions, and memories they’ve brought with them set the tone for their fevered workplace relations. “What Bob got his mind on this morning would get yo’ black ass hung where you come from,” one of Jones’s Southern-born fellow workers tells another.43 “This’ll get you lynched in Texas,” Madge jokes later in the novel as she undoes her bathrobe in front of Jones, flashing him forbidden fruit before trying to frame him for rape (147). Jones himself, although born and raised in Ohio, feels as oppressed as any black southerner by the racial hysteria swirling around him. “All that tight, crazy feeling of race,” he says of Los Angeles, “as thick in the street as gas fumes” (4). His rising anxiety reaches an early and explosive climax when he comes face to face with his Texas-born tormentor: We stood there for an instant, our eyes locked, before either of us moved; then she deliberately put on a frightened, wide-eyed look and backed away from me as if she was scared stiff, as if she was a naked virgin and I was King Kong. It wasn’t the first time she had done that. I’d run into her on board a half-dozen times during the past couple of weeks and each time she’d put on that scared-to-death act. I was used to white women doing all sorts of things to tease or annoy the coloured men so I hadn’t given it a second thought before. But now it sent a blinding fury through my brain. Blood rushed to my head like gales of rain and I felt my face burn white-hot. It came up in my eyes and burned at her; she caught it and kept staring at me with that wide-eyed phoney look. Something about her mouth touched it off, a

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quirk made the curves change as if she got a sexual thrill, and her mascaraed eyelashes fluttered. Lust shook me like an electric shock; it came up in my mouth, filling it with tongue, and drained my whole stomach down into my groin. And it poured out of my eyes in a sticky rush and spurted over her from head to foot. The frightened look went out of her eyes and she blushed right down her face and out of sight beneath the collar of her leather jacket, and I could imagine it going down over her over-ripe breasts and spreading out over her milk-white stomach. When she turned out of my stare I went sick to the stomach and felt like vomiting. (19)

That Jones’s seizure by lust precipitates his symbolic rape of his white female tormentor hardly needs pointing out; less obvious is the degree to which his torment draws on the discourse of spectacle lynching: an isolated black male subject transformed into a blinded, burning, shocked, tongue-choked, nauseous, quivering mess of body fluids and erupting eyeballs. The ghost of Henry Smith, torture-lynched in Paris, Texas in 1893 with branding irons for the alleged rape and murder of a white girl, seems to have reached out of the grave and reclaimed Jones, fifty years later. “After burning the feet and legs,” Ida B. Wells-Barnett had reported in A Red Record, “the hot irons—plenty of fresh ones being at hand—were rolled up and down Smith’s stomach, back, and arms. Then the eyes were burned out and irons were thrust down his throat.” 44 Smith, arguably the first victim of spectacle lynching, was also one of the first to be demonized as a black beast, a King Kong wreaking his savagery on helpless white womanhood. Fay Wray’s role was played by fouryear-old Myrtle Vance; a local clergyman, inflaming the populace in direct contravention of the facts, insisted that poor Myrtle had not merely been murdered by Smith, but had been raped and torn limb from limb. “First outraged with demoniacal cruelty,” he thundered, “[she was] then taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity.” 45 Jones’s crisis in If He Hollers Let Him Go is precipitated by Madge’s reimposition of this white southern nightmare of black male abjection, of King Kong “ferocity” unleashed against a helpless “naked virgin.” During the forty-odd years in which spectacle lynching prevailed, the white southern calculus demanded a doubled abjection of its victims: the accused black man must first be dehumanized, transformed by white imaginations into a sex-crazed “black beast” that represented the sum total of vileness against which the “southern way of life” defined itself; then he must be tortured unto death, reduced to half-burned meat and smoldering ashes. I read Jones’s crisis as the blues subject’s sudden, vertiginous

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reclamation by this doubled abject. “[F]rom its place of banishment,” Kristeva observes, “the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out.” 46 Here the banished specter of the black beast rapist, and the torture-lynching the beast deserves, is aggressively summoned up, “signed,” by Madge’s fearful gaze. Jones is helplessly possessed by both. His “discharge” is orgasmic release; his “convulsion[s]” (a “blinding fury,” a “face burn[ing] white-hot,” lust that shakes him “like an electric shock”) are painful retribution for the half-symbolic, half-real scandal he has engaged in, reckless eyeballing writ large. When the doubled abject has had its way with him, it spits him back out. The nausea he suddenly feels as he and Madge break eye contact is again glossed by Kristeva, who invokes the “spasms and vomiting” that warn the subject away from dung, corpses, and other imperiling manifestations of the abject.47 In Jones’s case, the warning comes too late. Since Jones, unlike Luke Bodeen, B. B. King, and Manfred Banks, is neither a blues singer nor southern-born, does he deserve to be called a blues subject? Blues subjects are defined not so much by their place of birth as by their felt subjection to and/or participation in the region’s characteristic violences, and by their relationship with blues music, which serves a crucial role in identity formation. Bob Jones is a blues subject in both these respects. Although a northerner, he is caught up in a second-order racial hysteria communicated directly to him by black and white emigrant southerners who occupy a psychic landscape shaped by Jim Crow violences. “I felt pressed, cornered, black, as small and weak and helpless as any Negro share-cropper facing a white mob in Georgia” (194), he says near the novel’s end. Too, his mingled mania and despair are accompanied at several points by a rhythm-and-blues soundtrack. Driving his coworkers back to the Atlas Shipyard the morning after being fired for an angry verbal exchange with Madge and chastised by his girlfriend Alice, he is undone by his own emotions, threatened by an explosive self-dismemberment. “I felt fragile as overheated glass,” he confesses. “[O]ne rough touch and I’d burst into a thousand pieces” (102). A moment later he switches on the car radio: One of Erskine Hawkins’ old platters, “I’m in a Lowdown Groove,” was playing. Alice and I had discovered it together shortly after we’d met at the Memo on the Avenue. I welled up inside, turned it off. But the words kept on in my mind. I got a hard, grinding nonchalance. To hell with everybody, I thought. To hell with the world; if there were any more little worlds, to hell with them too. (103 – 4)

Blues music functions here as a stay against psychic disintegration; it is the blues subject’s way of re-membering himself, transforming a

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potentially disabling surfeit of romantic feeling into a protective shell of stoicism that has affinities, as Albert Murray has suggested, with Hemingway’s creed of grace under pressure.48 A hardboiled cool-pose, Jones’s nonchalance (from the French nonchaloir or “to lack warmth”) is the obverse of the “white-hot” facial burn he suffers when Madge provokes him into overmastering lust. Situated in a context of interracial antagonism in which lynching has explicitly been invoked, his fragility also bespeaks the traumas of an era still very much alive in black collective memory, a time when so-called “Negro barbecues” were the South’s sport and shame. The “rough touch” that would cause Jones to “burst into a thousand pieces” is blues literature’s way of invoking, as deep utterance, the pained body produced by spectacle lynching, which is to say the ravished black body as multiple detachable parts. “Relic-hunters visited the scene,” wrote a reporter in the aftermath of one such lynching in 1899, “and carried away pieces of flesh and the negro’s teeth. Others got pieces of finger and toes and proudly exhibit the ghastly souvenirs tonight.” Fingers and ears of two Negroes lynched near Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, reported the Chicago Defender in 1923, “are on display in a large bottle filled with alcohol on the counter of the town’s only drug store. An inscription beside the bottle reads: ‘What’s left of the niggers that shot a white man.’” 49 A LOVE SUPREME: POSSESSION EMBRACED

“The blues,” insists poet, essayist, and Black Arts theoretician Larry Neal, “sings the joys and the pains of the world of flesh.” 50 One of the purposes of this study is to persuade readers to take a statement like Neal’s more literally than they may have been inclined to. The sudden efflorescence of spectacle lynching and its attendant “souveniring” in the social field of the Jim Crow South gave black folk a peculiarly hurtful sense of what “the world of flesh”—their flesh—might mean if bad luck glanced their way. The blues subject imagines these pains, is haunted by them, broods on them, yearns to transcend them. In blues literature, it is often the blues musician, as the community’s articulate spokesperson, who is charged with confronting, naming, and propitiating the ghosts of abjection—as Manfred Banks, for example, finally embraces the phantasmic “big bad fuckface” that has been driving him toward selfdestruction. The aesthetic orientation that leads certain African American writers to sing such blues heroism into being is what Arthur Flowers has termed “literary hoodoo”: an urgent desire to invoke a spirit world, often with the help of music (drum-talk and its textual transformations), as a healing antidote to the spiritual violence wrought on black folk through their violated flesh—indeed, through their relentless deformation in white hands to mere flesh, bones, “nigger toes.” Yet as Saidiya

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Hartman’s theory of redress suggests, the deep blues inscribed on black bodies cannot be sung and exorcised by simply abandoning the flesh for an “illusory wholeness” provided by spirit alone. Since the flesh–spirit binary is, in fact, a Western imposition, the wholeness sought by blues subjects can only be discovered by engaging flesh and spirit simultaneously, and fiercely. “We’re still wailing,” Louis Armstrong was reported to have answered when asked how he and his wife were getting along in their later years. Wailing—with its connotations of sexual delight, soul connection, the necessary pain of human embodiment, the added hauntings of black embodiment, and free-blowing expressive mastery—is a good word for the literary practice I’m describing. Larry Neal’s poem “Riffin in the Chili House” (1974), dedicated to Charlie Parker, is a poem that wails in all these senses. It images the blues subject as a black cultural redeemer, an architect of releasing euphoria: a jazz-blues sax player who dives into the wreck of African American history, is possessed by its flesh-mortifying ghosts, embraces them collectively as a beloved, and becomes nothing but spirit-transfigured flesh himself: 1

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Rim shot, the blue benny hug, the memories, the hug, chugging and riffin in the chili house. I run chords needing the space that only the horn provides; riffin Seventh Avenue blues, the Kansas City four/four, the women, striding, digging the cool murmur of morning a sledgehammer of meaning balled in sound slams against the back of my head. I churn mad I churn bright bopping colors I unwind: hoodoo hollering bebop ghosts blood guts screaming. I listen for the voice beyond the primary voice of the horn I spin cosmic tales I conjure and work juju with sound. I knotted deep inside the rocking hull of slaveship I the castrated darkness I whisper across seabones and lynched flowers; there are mysteries and ancestral movements here.

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25

30

35

40

I am the subject of someone’s magic; night sweats in the steady blow, horns haunt me the ram of fear tramples me; I probe, demon touched. I probe in fear guts in soul splattering space flesh explodes eyes roll heads roll meat screams shit! fuck it! shit! meat screams fuck it! HOLD ON I’M COMING!51

Neal’s poem begins on the bandstand of the Chili House, a Harlem after-hours club where, legend would have it, Charlie Parker played the inaugural bebop solo in December 1939. The “blue benny hug” (1), a benzedrine high, drives the jazzman’s initial improvisations, as does his drummer’s “[r]im shot” and obscure “memories.” These memories begin as casual impressions of city life (“the women, striding, digging the cool murmur / of morning”) but quickly dissolve into the collective ordeal of black history. The “sledgehammer of meaning / balled in sound” that “slams against the back of my head” is how the jazzman registers his drummer’s propulsive rhythmic accent; it may also be read as a metaphor for a particular historical rupture, and the jazzman’s sudden intuiting of that rupture: the moment when the West first lays its hands on the free African, blackjacks him, and spirits him toward New World captivity. Lines 13 –20, which begin with “I churn mad,” become, by this reading, a rendering of that suddenly unfree subject’s furious struggle; they’re also a rendering of the jazzman’s furious struggle to express that furious struggle from the vantage point of a mid-twentieth-century shaman who has been possessed by his ancestor’s unquiet ghost. The traumatic history that produced that ghost is clarified, several lines later, in images of the Middle Passage: “I knotted deep inside the rocking hull of slaveship / I the castrated darkness / I whisper across seabones and lynched flowers.” But traumatic history is also subsequently imaged, as the phrase “lynched flowers” hints, in tropes drawn directly from spectacle lynching, tropes which emblematize a later, post-Reconstruction moment in the vexed evolution of New World blackness: “guts in soul splattering space / flesh explodes / eyes roll / heads roll / meat screams.” What sets

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off this chain of images—the subject’s sudden possession by the lynching-abject—is described in lines 25 –30, in which the haunted subject, sensing an unacknowledged claim that a repressed traumatic history makes on him, deliberately seeks to excavate rather than avoid it— touching a “demon,” “prob[ing] in fear.” As the abject erupts into view (line 31), a spectacle of (black) bodily dissolution, the first-person “I” is extinguished. The subject has disappeared into the abject’s ravenous maw; what remains is the body’s constituent meat, in pain and wailing. A (dis)rememberment blues, in bebop time. Even as it dramatizes African American history as a tale of exiled, mortified flesh culminating in apocalypse, however, Neal’s poem works a healing spell by embracing—rather than merely being possessed by— the wail-inducing ghosts it encounters. The first-person “I” reappears in the poem’s final line when the jazzman wittily quotes the title of Sam & Dave’s 1966 soul hit, “Hold On, I’m Coming.” The primal lynching scene has now also become, and amazingly, a primal healing scene, an image of redressive sexual embrace. Wailing “HOLD ON I’M COMING!” through his horn, the jazzman is making fierce love to the collective terrors that he has allowed to speak through him. The screaming meat produced by spectacle lynching and countless other black fleshly mortifications has become his beloved, (re)collected into a fictive body and encouraged to “hold on.” A love supreme is imaged here, a kind of blues heroism—at once expressive and stoic, fierce and tender—that would redeem a people. As Neal’s poem suggests, a particular kind of blues heroism—the successful struggle of black male bluesmen to embrace the lynchingabject—has been an underlying theme of this chapter. Needless to say, blues literature also proposes women as heroic models: literal and metaphorical blues singers such as Celie, Shug Avery, Janie Starks, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith, women who fiercely resist racial and gender subordination, claim their sexual desire, call up the spirit, speak harsh truths, and live large lives with the liberating, sustaining help of blues music. If the ghosts of spectacle lynching that haunt blues literature are predominantly male—a result of the grossly unequal distribution of real-life victims—and if black male protagonists are called on more frequently and overtly to confront them, then a study is surely needed that would explore possible connections between the lingering traumas of spectacle lynching and the dismemberments suffered by, and inflicted by, literary blueswomen. I am thinking particularly of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976). While it may be stretching a point to call Ursa Corregidora and Eva Medina blues heroes, both protagonists clearly have sensibilities shaped by blues music (Ursa as a singer, Eva as

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an audience member), and both define themselves in relation to traumatizing dismemberments: Ursa’s loss of her womb after being hit by her boyfriend, Mutt; Eva’s castration-by-biting of her lover Davis. Are these dismemberments, including the near-castration-through-fellatio that Ursa threatens on Mutt, ways of symbolizing “the profound damages inflicted on African-Americans by the emotional dismemberments of slavery and its aftermath,” as Roberta Rubenstein argues; or can they be linked somewhat more closely with the literal dismemberments of the lynching era—the Mary Turner lynching of 1918, for example, in which the pregnant black victim’s uterus was ripped open by a lyncher’s knife, or the Claude Neal lynching of 1934, in which a lynching victim was forced to eat his own severed penis? 52 Perhaps, as I suggest in the following chapter, black female blues heroism in the face of lynching is manifested not as embrace of the abject (of the sort engaged in by Luke Bodeen), but as violent symbolic retribution against white society for all the “bad news” that the lynching era has dumped on the blues singer’s doorstep: the blues hero as badwoman avenger.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Shoot Myself a Cop” Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” as Social Text

One evening I heard a tale that rendered me sleepless for nights. It was of a Negro woman whose husband had been seized and killed by a mob. It was claimed that the woman vowed she would avenge her husband’s death and she took a shotgun, wrapped it in a sheet, and went humbly to the whites, pleading that she be allowed to take her husband’s body for burial. It seemed that she was granted permission to come to the side of her dead husband while the whites, silent and armed, looked on. The woman, so went the story, knelt and prayed, then proceeded to unwrap the sheet; and, before the white men realized what was happening, she had taken the gun from the sheet and had slain four of them, shooting at them from her knees. —Richard Wright, Black Boy I can’t sleep at night, I can’t eat a bite ’Cause the man I love, he don’t treat me right. —Mamie Smith, “Crazy Blues” blues ain’t culture they sounds of oppression against the white man’s shit/ game he’s run on us all these blues / yrs. blues is struggle strangulation of our people cuz we cudn’t off the white motha / fucka. . . . —Sonya Sanchez, “ liberation / poem”

NOT-SO-QUIET RIOT

The story of how black New York songwriter Perry Bradford convinced Fred Hager, a white executive at Okeh Records, to let Mamie Smith record Bradford’s composition “Crazy Blues” in 1920, thereby inaugurating a decade-long race-records boom, is an oft-told tale—a staple, in condensed form, of both blues histories and histories of the Harlem Renaissance.1 (A complete transcription of the recorded lyrics can be found 159

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at the end of this chapter.) Smith, the first black woman to record a secular song for commercial consumption, was also the first black superstar to be created by the medium: according to the shipping director at Okeh, seventy-five thousand copies of “Crazy Blues” were distributed to Harlem record shops alone within four weeks after the November release. Word quickly spread, helped in part by an informal distribution network of black Pullman-car porters who bought the records by the dozens, according to Bradford, at a dollar per copy and resold them in rural districts for two dollars, half a week’s pay for a black laborer.2 Within seven months, hundreds of thousands of copies of “Crazy Blues” had been sold nationally, perhaps even a million, the great majority of them to a black public delighted at the chance to consume, in endlessly replayable form, a commodified narrative of one black woman’s romantic abandonment. Breathless advertising in black periodicals clearly played a role in Smith’s success, fanning interest in her public appearances and capitalizing on passions already engendered in her record-buying fans. “Hear this World Famous Phonograph Star Sing ‘Crazy Blues’ and all her latest hits,” cried an ad in the Chicago Defender before her sold-out week of performances there in March 1921, “and then hear her popular Okeh records, the Greatest ‘Blues’ Records of the century.” 3 Abetting the power of advertising was Smith’s skill as a stage performer, noted by reviewers during the several extended tours she made in support of “Crazy Blues.” “Crowds which tax the capacity of the Avenue Theater are greeting Mamie Smith and her company at every performance,” wrote Tony Langston in the Defender: The famous “Blues” singer is a distinct hit and she is living up to her reputation in the most satisfactory manner. What it takes to put a “Blues” number over Mamie sure has got. She is full of animation and has a voice which seem [sic] to have been built for the purpose. She has a personality and a smile that is infectious and she is aided by a jazz band that is more than capable in every department.4

“[S]he made a complete success, equal to any star that has appeared in this city,” wrote another Defender reviewer several days later: Mamie Smith is a sensation in records and came back and made good on the stage. . . . Her last number, the “Crazy Blues,” justly called the “King of All Blues,” hit the audience in Baby Ruth order and took a real curtain call and would have done honor to any artist in the business. Miss Smith is one of the overnight successes, and made good and will enjoy packed houses wherever she appears.5

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The explosive success of “Crazy Blues,” in other words, was both unprecedented and overdetermined: a singular yet seemingly inevitable confluence of emergent technology, modern advertising, a gifted performer’s virtuosity, and a song that answered the long-deferred dreams of a race. The Chicago Defender had been demanding since 1916 that black female singers (classical rather than blues) be recorded; recent massive black migration from the South had swelled northern cities with an audience hungry for folk orality made modern.6 Now the first blues recording, and first blues recording star, had arrived to fill the void. An oft-told tale, with a curious twist: while blues historians have readily acknowledged Mamie Smith’s importance as a race-records pioneer, almost all have held a surprisingly low opinion of both Smith’s abilities as a blues singer and “Crazy Blues” itself as a blues composition. Smith, it is argued, wasn’t a “real” blues singer, a veteran of the southern tent show circuit, like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others who soon overtook her as recording stars. She was a vaudeville chanteuse from Cincinnati, a veteran of Harlem’s cabarets, with little connection to so-called folk-blues. The prevailing view of her surprise hit, voiced by Chris Albertson, is of “an uninteresting composition sung in a rather ordinary style.” Francis Davis is even more dismissive in The History of the Blues (1995): “Crazy Blues” . . .—largely on its reputation as the first commercially recorded blues by a black singer—was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 1994. . . . Yet heard today, it sounds like a period novelty, a vaudeville moan essentially no different from such white female singers as Marion Harris and Sophie Tucker. If anything, Smith lacks Harris’s rhythmic finesse and Tucker’s steamroller pizzazz. Despite its place in legend, it isn’t one of those songs that transcends its moment in the process of defining it ever after.7

Leaving aside for the moment the question of Smith’s skills as a blues singer, I believe that the consensus view of “Crazy Blues”—an uninteresting little period novelty—is profoundly mistaken. The song is, I hope to make clear, an insurrectionary social text, a document that transcends its moment by contributing to an evolving discourse of black revolutionary violence in the broadest sense—which is to say, black violence as a way of resisting white violence and unsettling a repressive social order. One would not know, from the dozens of retellings of the “Crazy Blues” story, including Perry Bradford’s own, that his composition as Smith sings it reaches an emotional crescendo in the final stanza with the following couplet:

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I’m gonna do like a Chinaman . . . go and get some hop Get myself a gun . . . and shoot myself a cop 8

In 1920 these were remarkable words for an African American singer to shout from the rooftops—so remarkable, perhaps, that Bradford deliberately excised the stanza that contained them from one of the two sheet music versions of “Crazy Blues” he subsequently published.9 As an event in the history of black popular music, they supply a partial genealogy for the emergence, decades later, of NWA (“Fuck Tha Police”), Ice-T (“Cop Killer,” “Squeeze the Trigger”), and other beer-and-blunts-stoked gangsta rappers of the late 1980s, not to mention Gil Scott Heron’s spoken-word version of Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” a celebration of New Orleans cop-killer Mark Essex.10 As an episode in the larger history of violent black revolt against white American policing, Smith’s deadly fantasy—a fantasy authored by Bradford, it must be remembered—anticipates cultural figures such as Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, both of whom stand convicted ( justly or unjustly) of having enacted it. African American novelists such as Julian Moreau (The Black Commandos, 1967) and John Edgar Wideman (The Lynchers, 1973) have proposed black male cop-killers as literary protagonists— coolly calculating rather than “crazy,” yet driven to extremity by a depth of frustration that “Crazy Blues” clearly limns.11 As a more localized episode in the history of black Harlem, Smith’s words about cop-killing prefigure a growing alienation between Harlem’s restive citizenry and its white occupying force, an alienation that would erupt in the riots of 1935, 1943, and 1964. “He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated,” wrote James Baldwin of the white Harlem policeman in 1960, “. . . and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it.” 12 Mamie Smith as the murderous vanguard, an early black revolutionary? To echo the title of Earl Anthony’s 1970 report on his life as a Black Panther, “Crazy Blues” begins as a narrative of romantic abandonment and transforms itself into one woman’s dream of picking up the gun.13 My principal concern here, however, is less with Smith’s inheritors than with her era: the way in which “Crazy Blues” resonates within a cluster of overlapping discursive contexts that helped constitute black subjects at the dawn of the New Negro Renaissance, both in Harlem and across America. One of these contexts was the black folk tradition of “badman” heroism: gun-wielding black male outlaws such as Railroad Bill and Stagolee, whose exploits often included the killing of sheriffs and other lawmen. A number of black urban centers in the North had swelled in the two decades preceding “Crazy Blues” with several waves

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of southern black migrants for whom such folk figures lived as mythic archetypes, sources of useable power, aids in identity formation. Recent history had provided these migrants with an indelible example of the badman hero in action. In 1900, a black New Orleans resident named Robert Charles, infuriated by news of the Sam Hose lynching in Atlanta and manhandled by a local policeman, had shot not one white cop but seven, four of whom died. Charles himself was ultimately shot to death and dragged through the streets by an enraged white mob. The so-called Robert Charles song commemorating his exploits was apparently quite popular among black New Orleanians, but whites were so violently antagonized by it that it was quickly suppressed.14 Perry Bradford performed in New Orleans and worked with local musicians in the years following Charles’s violent outburst; although no version of the Robert Charles song currently exists, there is reason, as I shall show, to view “Crazy Blues” as Bradford’s veiled reinscription of the song, his way of engaging and updating lingering folk memories. Overdetermined or not, the extraordinary success of “Crazy Blues” was at least partly a result of the complex symbolic rebellion it enacted, the truth it spoke to white power. When Mamie Smith sings of the pain of romantic abandonment, the black male lover whose absence she bemoans is associated not simply with faithlessness but with death, an inscription of his social fate in a white-policed public sphere where countless forms of “bad news”—lynching, race riots, vagrancy laws, back-alley murder—threaten to take him away for good: Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t got no time to lose I must find him today Now the doctor’s gonna do all . . . that he can But what you gonna need is a undertaker man I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues.

Although these lines may be read as Smith’s acknowledgment that she is murderously angry at her absent man, she seems at the same time to be filled with desperate longing for him, and worried about his fate, invoking the doctor and undertaker as a way of realistically confronting his possible demise. When she transforms that “crazy” agitation at song’s end into imagined revenge against the police—an all-purpose signifier for the Georgia lynch mobs, St. Louis rioters, and New York Irishmen implicated in his disappearance—her blues-flavored threat is addressing the memories, fears, and desires of a black urban public in formation. If

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Harlem during the jazz age was the setting for a great race welding, Smith’s commodified voice was the flux; not long after the song’s release, according to Jervis Anderson, it “was being played in almost every household of Harlem that owned a Victrola.” 15 “Crazy Blues” was a quiet riot— one that drew no white disapprobation—yet managed to second the new spirit of violent black resistance visible in Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere during the Red Summer of 1919 and voiced most notably in Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die.” “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,” McKay had written. “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” 16 Yet even McKay, for all his stridency, did not dare to suggest that black reprisal should take the form of cop-killing. That Smith’s was a female voice, even as the author of “Crazy Blues” was male, becomes crucial: sentiments that might have struck contemporary white listeners as insurrectionary if recorded by a black man could be dismissed as allowable hysteria coming from a black woman, not to mention a black woman modeling herself on a drug-addled Chinaman. Southern black women who protested vociferously against lynching were, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage has shown, granted a gender exemption from white reprisal; something of the same principle may have been at work in Smith’s case, since the historical record contains no trace of white southern reaction to the song, either adverse or favorable.17 Mingling romantic and political frustration, “Crazy Blues” reconfigures the badman tradition as a badwoman tradition, a lyric discourse of gun-, knife-, and dynamite-inflicted vengeance against black lovers and white oppressors elaborated by blues singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox, and by their southern-born literary inheritors: Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Moody, and Alice Walker. Doubly displaced from Bradford’s authorial hand, hidden in plain view, the last-second gesture of racial rebellion toward which “Crazy Blues” swerves had no precedent in black popular music. Certainly none of W. C. Handy’s pop-blues of the preceding decade dare to suggest that black romantic pain issue in such a politically charged act; “the mildmannered Handy,” suggest Jasen and Jones, “must have cringed the first time he heard [Bradford’s song].” 18 Any attempt to take the full measure of “Crazy Blues” as social text must begin with the palpable novelty of a cultural document that uttered—literally—a dangerous, liberating, and widespread public sentiment. A population of roughly a hundred thousand black Harlemites, young and old, southern- and northern-born, purchased tens of thousands of copies of Smith’s record at a dollar apiece within a month of its release, a riotous run on uptown distributors.19 What were these black consumers thinking when they heard poor Mamie fantasize, after losing her man, of shooting a cop?

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“CULLUD POLICEMANS” IN THE CITY OF REFUGE

To begin with, he would have been a white cop. Or a black cop with a demonstrated loyalty to the overwhelmingly white Harlem police force. King Solomon Gillis, the protagonist of Rudolph Fisher’s short story “The City of Refuge” and a recent migrant from North Carolina, may have swooned with delight at the sight of “cullud policemans” in Harlem, but black officers were still only a tiny minority in 1920, and by no means universally embraced by the race.20 The first black patrolman in Manhattan, Samuel J. Battle, was appointed to the force in 1911 and assigned to a midtown precinct; the black press reported that Battle was “subject to abusive language from both white and African American suspects who resented being arrested by him,” not to mention precincthouse hazing. By the time he was reassigned to Harlem in 1913, the hazing had stopped. The black press continued its support, demanding in 1914 that Battle and his one black fellow officer be supplemented by additional hires. There was a reason for this demand, as James Weldon Johnson made clear in a September 1918 column in the New York Age entitled “Law and Order in Harlem”: white police were beginning to lose control of Harlem’s increasingly restive black underclass. “Last week,” wrote Johnson, Police Captain Ward of the 38th Precinct requested a number of colored citizens to meet with him in conference and discuss the police situation in Harlem. At this conference Captain Ward stated that there were grave possibilities. He said there was a growing spirit of defiance of the police among certain classes of colored people, and that there was a disposition among these same classes to take colored prisoners away from the white police, no matter on what charges they were being arrested. The captain expressed the fear that if these tendencies were not rooted up serious trouble might at any time develop.21

“One of the remedies for the Harlem situation,” Johnson concluded, in a sentiment echoed by the black press in Chicago (1915) and Philadelphia (1919), “would be more colored policemen.” 22 Another bulwark against black mayhem and assassination, it soon turned out, was Samuel J. Battle himself. In 1919, the “serious trouble” Johnson had anticipated took place, as an enraged Harlem mob prepared to wreak vengeance on a white officer who had shot and killed an African American citizen. Battle intervened and saved the officer’s life, earning the confidence of the white brass downtown and eventual promotions to sergeant and lieutenant, the city’s first black policeman so honored.23 Here, in any case, was one index of the civic fury on which “Crazy Blues” was soon to draw: the thwarted mob murder of a white Harlem cop. But there were others,

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and they had much to do with the nature of policing in the southern states from which many of Harlem’s residents, like the fictional Carolinian King Solomon Gillis, had recently fled. LYNCH MOBS AND SOUTHERN POLICING

Harlem was the city of refuge in the eyes of black southerners, because it promised an escape from lynch law, vagrancy laws, peonage, convict lease, prison farms—the whole apparatus of Jim Crow justice designed to compel cheap black labor, uphold segregation, and indulge the violent psychopathology that undergirded southern whiteness. “Throughout the South,” Edward Ayers has observed of the post-Reconstruction period, “blacks felt themselves persecuted by the entire machinery of government, and the police stood as the most visible and galling element of that state.” 24 What Ayers terms “[t]he pattern of monoracial law enforcement in the South” had deep historical roots, originating several hundred years earlier with the paramilitary slave patrols, or “paterrollers,” of the colonial period. Staffed primarily by poor whites, the patrols were authorized “to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any African slave caught off the plantation without a pass, engaged in illegal activities, or running away.” 25 In the aftermath of Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection, newly organized police forces in southern cities such as Charleston, Louisville, Mobile, New Orleans, and Richmond were made directly responsible for regulating the slave population. Emancipation and Recontruction led to a significant but temporary shift away from monoracial law enforcement; by the 1870s, Republican administrations had appointed black police officers in Montgomery, Vicksburg, Jacksonville, Charleston, Chattanooga, Houston, and a number of other southern cities. The rise of demagogue-driven Radicalism after 1890 quickly ended this brief flirtation with social progress. By 1910, according to Marvin W. Dulaney, “African Americans had literally disappeared from southern police forces. . . . There was not a single black officer in the Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama”—an absolute exclusion that lasted until the 1940s.26 Even as black participation in southern police forces was being decimated, white southern police officers were expanding their traditional disciplinary function, erasing the boundary between law enforcement and lynch law enforcement. Just as many of the most egregious spectacle lynchings followed the murder of white police officers, so were white officers willing, far too often, to let lynch mobs have their way with jailed black suspects.27 “Do you think I’m going to risk my life protecting a nigger?” asked a southern sheriff, typifying, according to Arthur Raper, “a common attitude of peace officers” in the region.28 Such an attitude led

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directly, as W. J. Cash has suggested, to the phenomenon of southernsheriff-as-lyncher. “[F]ar from attempting to prevent lynchings,” Cash writes, “the police almost invariably connived at them and very often actively participated in them, sometimes serving as masters of ceremonies in the application of gasoline and torch or in adjusting the rope to the victim’s neck.” 29 Georgia led the nation in white-on-black lynchings between 1882 and 1923, and Georgia law officers, according to Herbert Shapiro, “did practically nothing to prevent lynchings or to punish lynchers.” 30 The result, in the eyes of black southerners, was a long-standing identification of white southern police with the forces of repressive order at best and death-dealing terror at worst. If “Crazy Blues” was, in its fantasy of cop-killing, a kind of quiet riot, then the anxiety it purged and the fury it channeled was one that Harlem’s recently arrived Floridian, Georgian, Virginian, and Carolinian migrants knew only too well. “[T]he majority of Negroes in the South,” insisted bluesman Josh White, remembering the time he’d been jailed and beaten as an eight-year-old transient in Jacksonville, Florida, “were afraid of anybody in a blue suit or a uniform or with brass buttons.” 31 Growing up in turn-of-thecentury Georgia, Albon Holsey and his friends always lived in “mortal fear” of the police, “for they were arch-tormentors and persecutors of Negroes. . . . I ran from policemen so often when I was a boy that even now [in 1929], though I am past forty, if one walks upon me unexpectedly my first impulse is to take to my heels.” 32 Perry Bradford, Holsey’s contemporary, moved to Atlanta with his family in 1899, at the age of six, and lived in a four-room shack next to the Frazier Street Jail. His mother, he remembers in his autobiography Born with the Blues, “used to rock me to sleep singing songs she had heard the prisoners singing through the bars of the jail.” 33 Bradford never explicitly references the sort of fear described by Holsey, but the future author of “Crazy Blues,” who played piano in the Decatur Street honky-tonks as a preteen, was certainly situated to absorb black working- and desperate-class attitudes toward southern policing. “ ’We have lived in Atlanta twenty-seven years,’ a local black newspaper observed during the period, ‘and we have heard the lash resounding from the cabins of the slaves . . . but we have never seen a meaner set of low down cut throats, scrapes, and murderers than the city of Atlanta has to protect the peace.’” 34 Such feelings were widespread among Bradford’s contemporaries, according to Litwack. “The subject of the police often dominated conversations among young blacks. The stories invariably revolved around chases, harassment, clubbings, illegal arrests, and coerced confessions.” 35 Virginia led the southern region as a source of black migrants to Harlem during

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the jazz age, and black Virginians, according to a black newspaper in Richmond, regarded the local police “with a distrust bordering on hatred,” a feeling reciprocated “with compound interest” by the police themselves.36 One source, in other words, of the “growing spirit of defiance of the police among certain classes of colored people” in Harlem—noted with dismay by James Weldon Johnson in 1918 and animating the public embrace of “Crazy Blues” two years later—was this preexisting current of black migrant feeling: a demand that the city of refuge be a refuge, not a reinscription of repressive southern discipline. Charles S. Johnson wrote in The New Negro: “For those [Harlemites] who fed their hopes and expectations on a new status which would afford an escape from unrighteous and oppressive limitations of the South, there is a sensitiveness about any reminder of the station from which they have been so recently emancipated—a hair-trigger resentment, a furious revolt against the years of training in the precise boundaries of their place.” 37 Between 1916 and 1919, hundreds of thousands of refugee black southerners had poured north into key industrial states—New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois—in pursuit of jobs that had recently been vacated by European nationals returning home to fight in World War I. This was the hope-driven “pull” half of a push–pull dynamic; the head of the Chicago Urban League had no doubts about what terrors were fueling the push. “Every time a lynching takes place in a community down South,” he observed, “you can depend on it that colored people will arrive in Chicago within two weeks.” 38 The hair-trigger resentment and furious revolt many of these refugees soon manifested in their new northern home was, in fact, a preexisting condition. As an unnamed black Mississippian tells Richard Wright in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” “Lawd, man! Ef it wuzn’t fer them polices n’ them ol’ lynch-mobs, there wouldn’t be nothin’ but uproar down here!” 39 The black urban public’s uproarious response to “Crazy Blues”—“The King of All Blues”—was a measure of the psychological liberation it offered from the “precise boundaries of place” enforced through southern terror. Yet the symbolic rebellion enacted in “Crazy Blues,” although it bespoke a tipping point in black public attitudes, was not entirely unprecedented on the cultural front. Mamie’s precursors in southern song and myth were the badmen. “CRAZY NIGGERS” AND THE BADMAN TRADITION

The badman hero, like blues song itself, began as an ethical response to the desperate challenge posed to southern black male subjects in the 1890s by spectacle lynching, Radical rhetoric (the “black beast rapist”), disenfranchisement, and a criminal justice system characterized, in Du

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Bois’s words, “by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination” toward black men.40 How to survive under such circumstances with a sense of self-worth and personal agency intact? If blues song was a way of coding racial beleaguerment as transcendental restlessness and romantic complaint, the badman was both restless and hard, in a way that thrilled his black public. Both were forms of individuation that staved off a perpetually threatened abjection: the reduction of he who would be a man to one more jailed or dead nigger. As psychological orientations, they partially overlapped; bluesmen sometimes partook of the badman mythos, like guitarist Luzanna Cholly in Albert Murray’s novel of blues life in 1920s Alabama, Train Whistle Guitar (1974). “[T]he idea of going to jail didn’t scare him at all,” insists Murray’s admiring young narrator, Scooter, “and the idea of getting lynch-mobbed didn’t faze him either. All I can remember him ever saying about that was: If they shoot at me they sure better not miss me they sure better get me that first time. Whitefolks used to say he was a crazy nigger.” 41 The blues badman evidences a very different orientation toward the lynching abject—the tortured, mutilated black body with which the white South would discipline him—than do B. B. King and the fictional blues subjects I discussed in chapter 3: rather then embrace or possession, the blues badman proclaims his outright rejection of white terror and the victims it has claimed. He, not the white mob, is the South’s avenging angel, or so he insists. Mourning his lynched black kin, much less imagining himself into their place, holds no interest for him. He would rather kill than mourn. The word “crazy,” in such contexts, has a precise meaning, one that the black consumers of “Crazy Blues” would surely have known: a “crazy nigger,” in the Jim Crow South, was an African American willing to use violence against whites in defense of his person, family, and dignity, and in the face of deadly white reprisal that supposedly made such self-defense suicidal. What sane person, after all, would commit suicide? “[W]e had a few Negroes down there [in Mississippi],” blues pianist Memphis Slim said to Big Bill Broonzy in a conversation recorded by Alan Lomax in 1946, that wasn’t afraid of white peoples and talk back to them. They called those people crazy. . . .” Big Bill: [C]razy people. . . . I wonder why did they called them crazy because they speak up for his rights. . . . Memphis: Yeah, they called them crazy. Big Bill: Well they do that you know. I had an uncle like that and they hung him. . . . They hung him down there because they say he was crazy and he might ruin the, the other Negroes.42

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“I didn’t take no stuff off of ’em, those white people,” claimed Yank Rachell of his Tennessee neighbors. “When they wadn’t right I would tell ’em they wadn’t right. Police or sheriff, I’d tell ’em all. They say I crazy. I wadn’t crazy.” 43 Blues bassist Willie Dixon’s father, A. D. Bell, was fond of guns. “Nobody messed with him—they were half-scared of him down there [in Mississippi]. . . . [H]e didn’t believe in nothing but his gun. He had shot several white people around there and everybody said he was crazy.” 44 The black badman engaged in a heightened, triumphant version of such “crazy” behavior; he was a mythic archetype grounded in historical reality and born out of a collective need for an heroic ideal. The badman’s revolt against self-interested white notions of “reasonable” black subservience succeeded, at least for a while, and succeeded brilliantly, disruptively, thrillingly. He picked up the gun—his defining gesture— and used it against white lawmen and the property they were charged with protecting. If Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, despairing at the unchecked ascendance of spectacle lynching in the 1890s, had cried “Get guns! Negroes, get guns!,” the badman was the individualist embodiment of this creed, a cultural icon with a palpable political valence, if not with a specific political agenda.45 Railroad Bill, a black folk hero based on the exploits of Morris Slater, is the best known of these gun-wielding badmen. In 1893, Slater holstered his pistol after a long week as a turpentine worker in rural Alabama and headed into town, where juke joints beckoned. Confronted by a white policeman who demanded that he surrender his firearm, Slater struggled with and then shot him, escaping on a freight train. For the next three years Slater eluded capture with a trickster’s dexterity—robbing a series of trains throughout southwest Alabama, selling purloined canned food to poor blacks who lived in shacks next to the tracks, frustrating the efforts of several local sheriffs who were elected on the promise that they would apprehend him. In an 1895 gun battle, Slater killed a second white lawman, Sheriff E. S. McMillan, who had devoted himself to the black outlaw’s capture. Finally, in 1896, Slater was ambushed and shot dead by two reward-seekers as he walked into a general store in Atmore, Alabama. Law officers carried his body from town to town for public viewing, according to John W. Roberts, “to demonstrate the power of the ‘law’ to others who might try to follow his example.” 46 Slater’s “badness,” as embroidered by the black folk imagination and transformed into the legend of Railroad Bill, wasn’t entirely directed against white law. Like most black badmen, Railroad Bill could be ruthless toward “innocent” whites and other blacks alike—a lyric violence, however, with its own capacity to inspire heroic identification on the part of his black (and, to some extent, white) public: 47

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Railroad Bill he was a mighty mean man He shot the midnight lantern out the brakeman’s hand I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill. Railroad Bill took my wife, Said if I didn’t like it, he would take my life, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill. Going up on a mountain, going out west, Thirty-eight special sticking out of my vest, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill Buy me a pistol just as long as my arm, Kill everybody ever done me harm, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill. I’ve got a thirty-eight special on a forty-five frame, How in the world can I miss him when I got dead aim, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill 48

The balladist “rides” Railroad Bill toward psychospiritual deliverance, celebrating and reenacting the badman’s expansive, rule-defying bad behaviors. One of these behaviors, the fantasy of gun acquisition and vengeance-driven mass murder (lines 10 –11), resurfaces in later blues songs such as Sunnyland Slim’s “Johnson Machine Gun” (1930s), Violet Mills’s “Mad Mama Blues” (1924), and Ida Cox’s “One Time Woman Blues” (1925); it also points toward the retributive fantasy Perry Bradford authored for Mamie Smith, in which “a” cop—any and every human embodiment of an oppressive order—will serve as a scapegoat for the thwarted lover’s wrath. Guns, absent from “This Thing Called Love” and other of his pre-1920 compositions, were a deliberate midcareer addition to Bradford’s songwriting lexicon, which had previously tended toward sentimental torch songs and rollicking dance tunes such as the “Bullfrog Hop” (1907).49 In both “Wicked Blues” (1922), a followup to “Crazy Blues,” and “Sinful Blues” (1924), a song he composed for Bessie Smith, Bradford recycles the long-gun trope from “Railroad Bill.” The three related compositions together limn what might be called the “badwoman blues narrative,” a hybrid genre in which the abandoned or mistreated woman, rather than dwelling in remorse, suddenly turns murderously hard (crazy, wicked, sinful) with the help of fantasized vengeance: Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t had no time to lose I must find him today

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I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues. . . . . . . . . . . Now I’ve got the wicked blues ’Cause my baby went away If I thought he loved me true I would have asked him to please stay I will buy a gun as long as my right arm Shoot at everybody done me any wrong Now babe I am all confused Cause I’ve got the Wicked Blues. . . . . . . . . . . . I got my opinion and my man won’t act right So I’m gonna get hard on him right from this very night Gonna get me a gun long as my right arm Shoot that man because he done me wrong Lord, now I’ve got them sinful blues.50

What distinguishes “Crazy Blues” from its two successors is its willingness to make manifest the racial discontent simmering below the surface of romantic disillusion. “Wicked Blues,” like “Railroad Bill,” threatens a mass murder (of “everybody done me any wrong”) that hints at racial discontent while allowing a more benign reading. “Sinful Blues” restricts the scope of vengeance still more narrowly, to the dimensions of the errant lover. “Crazy Blues,” by contrast, veers toward the underlying source of heartache, the visible embodiment of white repression: the white cop on the beat who, as James Baldwin would note four decades later, “moves through Harlem . . . like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country.” 51 Railroad Bill and the badman tradition are, I am claiming, the prime folk-cultural source of the cop-killing trope “Crazy Blues” deploys. Like most folk ballads, “Railroad Bill” appears in several printed versions; the version quoted earlier leaves out the following stanzas, in which the black badman encounters various white lawmen, and shoots them up: Standin’ on corner didn’t mean no harm, Policeman grab me by my arm, Wuz lookin’ fer Railroad Bill. Railroad Bill was mighty sport Shot all the buttons off high Sheriff coat Den holler, “Right on desperado Bill.”

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Railroad Bill, he went down Souf, Shot all de teef, out o’ de constable’s mouf Wa’n’t he bad, wa’n’t he bad, wa’n’t he bad.52

As the first stanza hints, the black audience’s emotional investment in Railroad Bill as badman hero was grounded in a shared racial subjection: the black folk speaker and the black outlaw are interchangeable in the eyes of white (in)justice. The badman’s heroism, seen through black folk eyes, is thus his “mighty sport”: his willingness to confront and vanquish white law with a virtuosic display of prowess. The political valence of this gesture is clear, and should help us read “Crazy Blues” as the protorevolutionary text it was for its black listeners. “The people,” Fanon reminds us in The Wretched of the Earth, make use of certain episodes in the life of the community in order to hold themselves ready and keep alive their revolutionary zeal. For example, the gangster who holds up the police set on to track him down for days, or who dies in single combat after having killed four or five policemen . . . these types light the way for the people, form the blueprints for action and become heroes. Obviously it’s a waste of breath to say that such-and-such a hero is a thief, a scoundrel, or a reprobate. If the act for which he is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonialist person or colonialist property, the demarcation line is definite and manifest. The process of identification is automatic.53

Most badmen did not direct their violence exclusively against “colonialist” representatives of white law, a fact that helps account, as Roberts has noted, for their frequently ambivalent portrayals in black folk song. Black badmen were often habitués of bars, saloons, jooks, and gambling dens, rubbing shoulders with other rough characters; badman lore “did not skirt the harsher realities of the consequences of participating in the lifestyle with which [these individuals] were associated.” 54 Jack Hardy, a novice gambler, loses at cards to a “Chinaman” and shoots him dead— an act bespeaking nativist aggression more than racial liberation. Stackolee may have been cheated out of his prized Stetson hat by professional gambler Billy Lyons, but the gusto with which he exacts intraracial vengeance is unsettling: Stackolee shot Billy four times in the head And left that fool on the floor damn near dead Stackolee decided he’d go up to Sister Lou’s. Said, Sister Lou! Sister Lou, guess what I done? I just shot and killed Billy, your big-head son. Sister Lou said, Stackolee, that can’t be true! You and Billy been friends for a year or two.

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Stackolee said, Woman, if you don’t believe what I said, Go count the bullet holes in that son-of-a-gun’s head.55

Yet here, too, as so often in the badman tradition, a subsequent stanza reveals the latent revolutionary content of the badman’s outsized aggression: white law has no power over him: She got on the phone, Sheriff, Sheriff, I want you to help poor me. I want you to catch that bad son-of-a-gun they call Stackolee. Sheriff said, My name might begin with an s and end with an f But if you want that bad Stackolee you got to get him yourself.

Aaron Harris, born in New Orleans between 1875 and 1880, was a famously ruthless badman fond of killing those who beat him at cards. Among his victims—twenty men and four or five women, including his own sister—were two white policemen whom he murdered “before witnesses,” according to Lawrence Levine. “He was a big man and a real bully,” remembered jazzman Johnny St. Cyr, “stood six feet, weight two hundred pounds and would draw a knife on a police officer.” His badness, given mythic dimension in a ballad reported by Jelly Roll Morton, was partially a function of his trickster’s ability to liberate himself from the imprisoning clutches of white (in)justice: Aaron Harris was a bad, bad man, Baddest man ever was in this land. Killed his sweet little sister and his brother-in-law, About a cup of coffee, he killed his sister and his brother-in-law. He got out of jail every time he would make his kill, He had a hoodoo woman, all he had to do was pay the bill.56

Two-Gun Charlie Pierce, a black Memphis desperado in the early 1920s, was another celebrated badman, part of the continuing narrative of black revolt against white policing that Bradford had shrewdly sampled into his universal pop hit. “In the spring of 1923,” write Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall in Beale Black and Blue, quoting the unpublished reminiscences of Sam Bledsoe, a police reporter for the Commercial Appeal, Two-Gun had shot a couple of policemen in a fight at the intersection of Trigg Street and Louisiana Avenue. He got his nickname on that occasion by using two weapons. He had several other brushes with officers and shot a couple more. Two-Gun was a hero to the blacks. There was a ditty about him, rendered to the tune of “Casey Jones.” Few dared sing it openly, but a

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drunken Negro in the jail one night defiantly yelled it until the jailer went back and silenced him with a blackjack. I remember one verse: Two-Gun Charlie is a mighty man. Mows down ’dem cops wherever he can. Got two pistols that sho’ am fine. Gives ’dem bastards a hot old time.57

Here is Fanon’s cop-killer as black community hero, his violence against “colonialist” enforcers later transformed by the people into a song that “keep[s] alive their revolutionary zeal.” That the community’s fear of white reprisal keeps the song an in-group affair helps us appreciate Bradford’s achievement with “Crazy Blues”: by morphing the bad nigger of white nightmare into a bad negress, an emotionally distraught woman with a “crazy” throwaway fantasy of shooting a cop, Bradford defused potential white anger while placing long-standing black antipathies in full pop-cultural view. Bradford seems, moreover, to have had a particular black badman in mind when he wrote “Crazy Blues”—a historical figure whose exploits, like Two-Gun’s, inspired a folk ditty so infuriating to whites that few blacks dared sing it openly. ROBERT CHARLES IN NEW ORLEANS

The Robert Charles affair hardly needed the embellishment of legend. The bare facts alone were shocking enough to white residents of New Orleans, even as they thrilled that city’s black community. A native of Copiah County, Mississippi—“bloody Copiah,” a black New Orleans newspaper called it— Charles had come to the Crescent City in the early 1890s, like many other young black men and women, in an effort to escape racial violence and make a better life for himself. Literate, ambitious, and politically engaged, frustrated at every turn by Jim Crow restrictions, Charles soon found himself radicalized by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner’s strident writings for the African Emigration Society. He began to distribute the society’s newsletter, showing every sign of becoming what Joel Williamson has called “the first fully selfconscious black militant in the United States.” 58 When Charles read of Sam Hose’s lynching, burning, and dismemberment in Newman, Georgia in 1899, he went into a rage. He was “beside himself with fury,” one of his acquaintances said later. He told another acquaintance, a black levee worker, that “it was the duty of every negro to buy a rifle and keep it ready against the time they might be called upon to act in unison.” 59 On July 23, 1900, while waiting with a friend outside the home of a woman he knew, Charles was harassed by three policemen, one of whom grabbed and began to beat him. Charles drew a pistol, he and the white

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cop shot each other, and Charles escaped to his apartment. When the remaining officers, including a precinct captain, tracked him down, he shot and killed one with his Winchester rifle, drove the other two into panicked hiding, and fled. Word of his brazenness roared through town, prompting whites to riot. Scores of innocent black people were beaten and a dozen were killed over the next four days. The police manhunt finally caught up with Charles. Cornered in his hiding place, the woodframe apartment building of a friend, surrounded by an armed and infuriated New Orleans mob of a thousand, Charles managed to shoot twenty-seven whites, killing seven, before being forced to flee from the burning structure. The mob stomped and shot him to death, his face flattened by the crowd’s boots. He was buried secretly a few days later, under military guard, in an unmarked grave. He had killed four white policemen, all told, and seriously wounded three others. During the manhunt and after his death, white newspapers referred to Charles as a “monster,” “an unreasoning brute,” “bad nigger,” “woman beater,” “dangerous agitator,” “worthless crapshooting negro,” “ruthless black butcher,” and “bloodthirsty champion of African supremacy.” 60 “His feat,” according to Leon Litwack, “almost immediately assumed legendary proportions” among New Orleans blacks, and the legend expressed itself in song.61 New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton described both to Alan Lomax: [I]f you shoot one officer like Robert Charles had, it’s no more than right that another one should take his place, but the way that newsboy was killing them off it looked like the department might run out of officers. Every time he raised his rifle and got a policeman in the sights, there’d be another one dead. It was never learned how many police were killed. Some said thirty-two. Some said eighteen. [L]ike many other bad men, he had a song originated on him. This song was squished very easily by the department, and not only by the department but by anyone else who heard it, due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder. So that song never did get very far. I once knew the Robert Charles song, but I found out it was best for me to forget it and that I did in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side.62

“Poorer blacks,” according to William Ivy Hair, “were reportedly regretful only that he had not taken more policemen with him when he died. Among lower class blacks he became an immediate folk hero and ‘the Robert Charles song,’ praising his exploits, would occasionally be played at all-black gatherings for years to come.” 63 There are several provocative, if admittedly speculative, connections between the so-called Robert Charles song—no published or recorded version of which exists—and “Crazy Blues,” not least of which is the

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overwhelming popularity of Perry Bradford’s national hit among New Orleanians themselves. “That record really turned around the recording industry,” remembered jazzman Danny Barker of the Crescent City response. “Every family had a phonograph in their house, specifically behind Mamie Smith’s first record.” 64 Did black New Orleanians embrace Bradford’s song so ardently because it drew on folk memories of Charles, their own most notorious cop-killer? While Bradford never mentions Charles in Born with the Blues, he would have had many occasions to hear the illicit ballad at the sort of all-black gatherings mentioned by Hair. In the fall of 1907, when Bradford was fourteen, Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels played in Atlanta and Bradford left town with them, spending most of that season as a company member. In 1908, he and the troupe had what Jasen and Jones terms “a wild, week-long booking in New Orleans” during Mardi Gras.65 Such experiences are one possible route of lyric cross-fertilization; another dates from 1913, when Bradford began a close, if occasionally competitive relationship with Morton himself. Morton, who referred to Bradford in letters as “Dear Friend Mule,” crossed paths with the young songwriter in a Chicago hotel room and did his best, according to Bradford, to pull rank: “Charlie, bring that lamb into the front room to the piano so I can slaughter him.” Jelly howled with laughter. We went into the front room to the piano and Jelly played what afterward became widely known as the “Jelly Roll Blues.” I asked him to play some more but he refused. I greeted him with “Man, that’s a good blues, very intricate, but move over and let the ‘real Blues King’ smack you down.” I played and sang a whole gang of blues; among them was “I’m Alabama Bound,” the song I changed the title to “Don’t Leave Me Here,” and then I played “Cannon Ball Blues.” After that early morning blues session, Jelly and I became fast friends.66

Did Morton, on some other occasion, try to one-up Bradford by dusting off the “forgotten” ballad of New Orleans’s legendary cop-killer? Did Bradford, who makes clear here his willingness to “compose” new songs by changing the titles of extant songs, draw on memories of the ballad when composing “Crazy Blues”? Lending credence to such speculations are two other details of the Robert Charles affair that appear to surface in Bradford’s hit. The first concerns a widespread rumor in the aftermath of Charles’s rampage that he had drawn his “courage and coolness” from cocaine. The rumor had begun after a painstaking search of Charles’s room disclosed both a bullet mold on the mantelpiece and a small amount of a substance which the police never identified but which white New Orleans newspapers variously labeled “a bottle of cocaine,” a “box” of

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cocaine, and morphine. None of Charles’s black acquaintances remembered ever seeing him intoxicated; he was known, if anything, as a selfregulating social drinker.67 The accusation of drug use, in any case, helped make Charles the focus of growing white anxieties over black working-class pleasures in the Storyville section, where jazz was in the process of being born. Only two years earlier, in 1898, cocaine—first used in New Orleans by overworked black stevedores—had exploded in popularity, mingling with and in some quarters displacing the preexisting menu of intoxicants. “Certain drugstores,” according to Hair, “were known to sell it to anyone. . . . Morphine was still favored by some addicts, while others smoked opium; one bar near the French Market apparently stirred either morphine or opium into fusel oil and whiskey. . . . [B]y 1900 cocaine had become by far the most common hard drug taken by poorer blacks.” 68 Opium, known colloquially as “hop,” is not something Charles was rumored to have used, but we may be misled by a spurious specificity here: a “hop-joint,” according to one of folklorist Dorothy Scarborough’s white southern informants, “is the vernacular for a drug-shop, and all that implies, and ‘drug’ to a Negro means cocaine, ‘coke,’ ‘dope,’ etc, being synonymous with ‘hops.’” 69 What I suggest is that Robert Charles was associated in folk memory, white and black, with drug-inspired, gun-enabled cop-killing, and that the pertinent couplet Bradford inserted into “Crazy Blues”—“I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop / Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop”— directly engaged this folk memory, regardless of the pharmacological distinction between cocaine (a stimulant) and opium (a depressant and euphoric). In the two decades separating the Robert Charles affair from “Crazy Blues,” moreover, cocaine use had become specifically associated in the public mind with violent black antipathy toward white police. “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace,” read a New York Times headline on 8 February 1914. “When negroes get too much of it,” warned the police chief of Louisville, Kentucky in a 1909 report, “they are inclined to go on the war-path, and when in this condition they give a police officer who attempts to arrest them a hard time.” 70 In the cultural context within which “Crazy Blues” functioned, “hop” could easily partake of cocaine’s primary social meaning: explosive black unrepression. Nor should we neglect the obvious: the word “hop” has, from a songwriter’s perspective, the virtue of rhyming with “cop.” By any measure, Robert Charles had the Crazy Blues, and acted on them, long before Perry Bradford cast them in lyric form. The word “crazy” seems, in fact, to have played a notable role in the public discussion surrounding Charles’s one-man rebellion. Shortly after Charles died, antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett received a letter from one of his black New Orleans associates. “You will also find

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[enclosed],” the man wrote, apparently speaking of the materials Charles had been distributing as an agent for Bishop Turner’s African Emigration Society, one of the circulars in which Charles was in possession of which was styled as a crazy document. Let me say, until our preachers preach this document we will always be slaves. If you can help circulate this “crazy” doctrine I would be glad to have you do so, for I shall never rest until I get to that heaven on earth; that is, the west coast of Africa, in Liberia.71

Is this letter the sheerest coincidence, or did Bradford write “Crazy Blues” with Charles and his doctrine of violent black self-defense— styled as “insane” by whites, admired as “crazy” by blacks— explicitly in mind? While there exists no proof that the Harlem songwriter even knew who Charles was, the circumstantial evidence remains tantalizing, and deserves further research. “A NEW MENACE TO BE FACED”: THE RED SUMMER AND THE KU KLUX KLAN

Robert Charles and the badman ballad tradition are the cultural texts that hover, visible if not quite determinant, behind “Crazy Blues” and its badwoman’s fantasy of cop-murder. But the national black audience ultimately discovered by the song was consolidated by more proximate events unfolding during the so-called Red Summer of 1919 —indeed, during the preceding half-decade, when almost three hundred African Americans were lynched. As southern lynching prompted a northward exodus, it helped swell Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, and other urban centers with a black public who had come of age on down-home and “pop” blues—W. C. Handy himself left Memphis for Harlem in 1918 on the heels of a lynching—and whose attitude toward white mob violence was one of restive militancy. “Crazy Blues” would captivate this audience by reflecting both its musical tastes and its political attitude, crystallizing a paradox in the song’s final line: “I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news, now I’ve got the crazy blues.” If the crazy blues are the despairs bred by a seemingly unending barrage of racial “bad news,” they are also the black subject’s determination to contest that bad news—as Mamie has just revealed in the couplet that precedes this line—by picking up a gun and shooting at what most oppresses. That guns should be seen as instruments of black righteousness in the battle against white aggression was a notable element of black public discourse in 1919. The vanguard of this movement were returning black infantrymen, soldiers who had proved their valor during World War I by shooting German white men and who bridled at the thought of reinhabiting their expected “place” within the lacerating indignities of Jim

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Crow.72 Du Bois’s ringing declension in the May 1919 issue of Crisis set the summer’s tone: “We return. / We return from fighting. / We return fighting.” 73 A tipping point in race relations had clearly been reached, a wildfire spread of violent black resistance to white antagonism that eerily anticipated the black public’s unprecedented nationwide response to “Crazy Blues.” “1919 represented something new in American history,” observes Herbert Shapiro: within a span of weeks racial violence spread from one city to another, and every city feared its turn was next. It was clear that these confrontations could not be explained as simply a local phenomenon. As Americans learned the news of racial outbreaks in such diverse cities as Omaha, Washington, Knoxville, and Chicago, it was apparent that these explosions expressed tensions afflicting the national society. There was something new to be seen in the rapid spread of violence, and within the various incidents there was also a component of more determined and effective black resistance to assault by white racists. Resistance by one means or another has always been the core of the black response to violence, but in 1919 the resistance was more often overt and direct, defiant in its willingness to inflict as well as suffer casualties.74

Even as lynchings soared during the summer months, black men with guns were inflicting widely reported casualties on white mobs. In Longview, Texas, after a black high school teacher wrote a detailed account of the murder of a young black townsman, he and a black physician were ordered out of town by local whites. Trapped in the teacher’s house by a mob, the physician fired more than a hundred and fifty shots, killing four whites, before escaping. On July 19 in Washington, D.C., police who stopped a group of blacks on the street were fired on and one officer was wounded. In the rioting that shook the city over the next several days, mobs of white soldiers, sailors, and marines were met by determined black resistance; of the fifteen individuals killed or seriously wounded, ten were white. Two weeks later rioting spread to Chicago and raged for a week; twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites died, with hundreds injured on both sides. One black witness, insisting that the black community was ready for armed combat, claimed that blacks had a thousand “and enough ammunition to last for years if used in guerrilla warfare.” 75 “At the level where feelings are translated into action,” notes Shapiro, in words that gloss Mamie Smith’s turn from romantic frustration to violent reprisal, “blacks individually and collectively resisted violent assault more openly and boldly, both taking measures of self-defense and passing over to the counterattack.” 76 If one clear lesson could be drawn from the events of the Red Summer, in the eyes of the black press, it was the need for armed black

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self-defense in the face of police collusion with, and active participation in, white mob violence. The black Christian Recorder blamed white police officers outright for the rioting; the Messenger, while insisting that blacks resort to violence only as a last resort, called it “indispensable at times.” “A bullet,” the paper proclaimed, “is sometimes more convincing than a hundred prayers.” More black police were clearly called for, too, since white officers and white soldiers were unlikely to act impartially “when they are a part of the race doing the mobbing.” 77 Blacks in Harlem were spared the sort of violence that raged through many other communities during the Red Summer of 1919, but the following summer brought heightened anxieties. In the months leading up to the release of “Crazy Blues,” Harlemites were dismayed by the possibility that the resurgent Atlanta-based Ku Klux Klan might soon open a chapter in New York. “While conditions to-day are not the same as they were when the original Klan was organized,” Imperial Wizard William Simmons was quoted as saying in the New York Age in late July, two weeks before “Crazy Blues” was recorded, “the need for [an] organization like the Ku Klux Klan is just as pressing now as it ever was.” 78 The “maintenance of white supremacy” was one of Simmons’s stated goals; the Klan, he proclaimed, was ready to obey a New York call whenever it might be made. A Harlem audience would have needed no help translating such intentions: the Chicago Defender, the Crisis, and the New York Age itself had been routinely publishing stories about southern lynchings— what might be called white supremacy in its extreme policing mode. During the Red Summer, according to David Levering Lewis, lynching had been pursued “with a relish approaching that of the 1890s.” 79 Ellisville, Mississippi; Longview, Texas; and Washington DC were a few of the many theaters in which brutalized black male bodies—sometimes nude, often bullet-ridden—were put on display, then reported in the black press with vividness and outrage. Reinvigorating memories of southern humiliations left behind, mingling with current antipathies for Harlem’s white police, such images were what would have first come to mind when a Harlem audience contemplated virulent white supremacy following them north. If lynched black bodies symbolized white power at work, then the cop Mamie Smith (with Perry Bradford’s help) fantasizes about shooting represented to black Harlemites the black-power response, a way of discharging anxious outrage at the possibility that the Klan might have the city of refuge in its sights. In early December 1920, even as “Crazy Blues” was flying out of the stores and Smith was proving herself “a strong magnet” at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, James Weldon Johnson was seconding the song’s badwoman fantasy of violent black assertiveness in an editorial in the New York Age entitled “The Ku Klux Klan in New York.” 80 After reminding

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his readers of the imperial wizard’s declaration that a lodge would soon be organized in the Empire State, he scoffed at the Klan’s avowed purpose of “maintain[ing] the peace and security of the people.” “[I]f the New York lodge should contemplate carrying out any of its ‘purposes’ in Harlem,” he warned, “it will have our sympathies, even our condolences in advance.” Johnson’s tone of self-assurance is both cool and a little jaunty; it is the voice of the nerved, gun-toting southern badman—Luzanna Cholly at the typewriter—projected as Harlem’s collective intent. Smith and Johnson were working in concert, albeit unknowingly, to reinforce black public morale. Only three weeks later, on Christmas Day 1920, the threat of nightriders barreling down Lenox Avenue seemed miraculously to have been averted. “Ku Klux Are Barred from New York State” read the headline in the New York Age. Alfred J. Talley, chief assistant district attorney of New York County, had issued a statement declaring, “There is no room in this great broad-minded State of New York for so un-American an organization as the Ku Klux Klan.” 81 Johnson quoted parts of Talley’s statement with approval in his Christmas “Views and Reviews” column, but added a warning: “These threats of organizing Klans in other northern cities are not idle ones, and the colored people of the country, especially of the north, had better bestir themselves.” 82 One week later, as Mamie Smith and her Famous Jazz Hounds were preparing for a spring tour that would bestir black Chicago and other cities swelled by the Great Migration, Johnson headlined his New Year’s editorial “A New Danger to Be Met.” “There is a new danger,” he insisted, facing colored people in Northern cities, especially in the large industrial centers. Business depression has brought about curtailment in employment and colored laborers and workmen are the first to be made victims of this curtailment. . . . . . . When men are suddenly thrown out of employment there naturally follows a “crime wave.” Now, all the great cities of the North are suffering from “crime waves,” and the criminals are white men. The police are struggling as best they can to preserve safety and order; nevertheless, they are dealing with the situation by methods wholly within the established police powers. But let two or three of these crimes be committed by colored men, and you will hear cries of “Run the Negroes out of town!” and even cries of “Lynch ’em! Lynch ’em!” With such cries as these ringing in the people’s ears, not even the most honest and respectable colored people will be safe. The latter is a danger we should prepare at once to meet.83

Johnson was playing on the collective fears of Harlem and other northern black communities, and not unwisely. The police, content to work within “established . . . powers” when crime presented a white face, had

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proved during the Red Summer to be willing accomplices of white mob violence when black misbehavior of any sort was involved. Too, armed black self-defense had proved its efficacy in the face of such violence. The raging popularity of “Crazy Blues,” I am claiming, was grounded in the psychological preparation it offered its black audience to meet the danger Johnson outlines. If white mob violence begins, in Johnson’s view, as a public declaration of violent intent—“Lynch ’em!”—which quickly turns indiscriminate, then “Crazy Blues” flips the script and personalizes the response. Mistreat me, Smith declared on behalf of all who dwelled in the presence of her plaintive voice, and I’ll shoot myself a cop, any cop. Nightmarish black fears of indiscriminate victimization were countered with a sustaining black fantasy of indiscriminate reprisal. It was a loud fantasy, multiplied by the process of commodification, blaring out of countless thousands of Victrolas across America.84 THE ABANDONMENT BLUES: LYNCHING, SOUND RECORDING, AND FANTASIES OF BADWOMAN VENGEANCE

If “Crazy Blues” swerves in its final stanza toward the singer’s imagined murder of a faceless (white) policeman, then for most of its length it is apparently something quite different: an unremarkable pop-blues in which an abandoned woman bemoans her (black) lover’s disappearance, bewails the fact that he “don’t treat me right,” affirms the immutability of her love, contemplates and rejects suicide, and describes the physical manifestations (restlessness, loss of appetite) of the “crazy blues” that possess her. Such abandonment narratives, a familiar subset of women’s blues, are generally read as social rather than merely personal inscriptions, a marker of the spiritual toll wrought on black women by the material conditions within which their black male lovers were compelled to labor. In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis sees the grief of female abandonment as a correlate not just of the wear-and-tear suffered by laboring black men, many of whom were forced to travel long distances in search of work, but of the exhilaration those same men felt at their freedom to range widely. “A poor black woman of the era,” writes Davis in words that could apply to “Crazy Blues,” who found herself deserted or rejected by a male lover was not merely experiencing private troubles; she also was caught in a complex web of historical circumstances. However smoothly a personal relationship may have been progressing, a recently emancipated black man was compelled to work, and even if he found a job near the neighborhood where he and his partner had settled, he nevertheless might also be seduced by new possibilities of travel. In search of work—and also in search of the elusive guarantees of security and happiness—men jumped freight trains and

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wandered from town to town, from state to state, from region to region. There were imperative economic reasons for undertaking journeys away from home, yet even when jobs were not found and available employment was backbreaking and poorly compensated, the very process of traveling must have generated a feeling of exhilaration and freedom in individuals whose ancestors had been chained for centuries to geographical sites dictated by slave masters. This impulse to travel would infect great numbers of black men as a sociohistorically initiated compulsion. . . . Many of the absconding and unfaithful lovers memorialized by blues women were in pursuit of that fleeting glimpse of freedom.85

Davis is surely right when she claims that the “absconding and unfaithful lovers” who form the subject of so many abandonment narratives in black women’s blues song are an inscription, among other things, of black male liberation, the positive pleasure black men took in claiming their right to simply get up and go, geographically speaking, when such freedom of movement had been denied to generations of their enslaved ancestors. Yet such freedom brought with it a corresponding danger to life and limb that Davis leaves unaddressed—a danger that also registers in the sense of hurtful loss communicated by black women’s blues song. A working-class black man at large in the Jim Crow South, far from family and friends and shorn of the protection of his local white boss or patron, was shadowed always by the possibility of a disastrous confrontation with white law, such as it was. He could be arrested as an unemployed transient or vagrant and end up as a leased convict on a chain gang. Or, as happened in so many cases, he could find himself arrested as a suspect in a white woman’s rape or murder and end up as one more lynching victim. “[G]angs of colored wandering beggars have . . . begun [to pass by],” wrote a southern correspondent to the Nation in 1893. “Usually such negroes are willing to work on odd jobs only. It is probable that these vagrant bands furnish the wretched victims for the horrible lynchings described in so much detail in the local papers.” 86 Disappearing from their women’s beds—for months or years if arrested, forever if lynched—these “absconding” lovers, too, were the absent black male subjects of abandonment blues narratives. It is worth remembering, even as we consider “Crazy Blues” as a pivotal first blues recording, that the handful of black male voices who preceded Mamie Smith’s onto shellac included not just minstrels such as George W. Johnson (“Laughing Coon,” 1895) and comedian Bert Williams (1901), but several victims of spectacle lynching.87 “It is said,” wrote Robert Shufeldt of Henry Smith’s 1893 lynching in The Negro a Menace to American Civilization (1907),

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that the victim screamed and howled at a terrible rate, and that all this, from start to finish, was recorded by a graphophone, and that this has been used at various exhibitions to illustrate a full set of biographic pictures which were made at the same time. . . . It is said that the man begged the crowd to kill him,—to shoot him, a dozen times before the burning fagots caused his death.88

Edward Ayers cites another instance of a spectacle lynching providing the material for an early recording: Mell Barrett, a young white boy, . . . spent a nickel to hear his first Edison talking machine at a country picnic in 1896. “With the tubes in my ears, the Pitchman was now adjusting the needle on the machine. . . . My excitement increased, my heart was pounding so I could hardly hold the tubes in my ears with my shaking hands.” At first, he thought he was listening to a convention of some sort. “‘All Right Men. Bring Them Out. Let’s Hear What They Have to Say,’ were the first words I understood coming from a talking machine.” The young boy listened to two men confess to a rape, then beg for mercy. “The sounds of shuffling feet, swearing men, rattle of chains, falling wood, brush, and fagots, then a voice—shrill, strident, angry, called out ‘Who will apply the torch?’ ‘I will,’ came a chorus of high-pitched, angry voices.’” Barret could hear “the crackle of flames as it ate its way into the dry tinder,” and the victims asking God to forgive their tormentors. The crowd fell quiet; only the sound of the flames remained.89

If Henry Smith and these two unnamed lynching victims cannot quite be called Mamie Smith’s precursors in the field of black popular music, then we may nevertheless read “Crazy Blues” and other abandonment blues as symbolic responses to such murderous spectacles, a way of mourning their victims and contesting their white propagators. In “Haunted House Blues” (n.d), for example, Bessie Smith depicts herself as the haunted survivor of a series of dead black male lovers in a way that may help us hear the deathly subtext of “Crazy Blues”: 1

[spoken] Don’t bring no ghosts in the front, carry ’em ’round to the back door [sung] This house is so haunted with dead men I can’t lose This house is so haunted with dead men I can’t lose And a sneaky old feelin’ gives me those haunted house blues.

5

I can’t sleep no more, I done lost my appetite I can’t sleep no more, done lost my appetite ’Cause my mistreatin daddy hangs around me day and night.

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10

He moans when I’m sleepin’, he wakes me at two A.M. He moans when I’m sleepin,’ he wakes me at two A.M. And he makes me swear I’ll have no other man but him. Now I’m so worried and I’m blue all the time Now I’m so worried and I’m blue all the time Go tell the undertaker to fix that old coffin of mine. [spoken] Lord, help us to get it right

15

[sung] I’m scared to stay here, I’m scared to leave this town I’m scared to stay here, I’m scared to leave this town But a feelin’ just tell me to burn this house on down, hainted house on down.90

“Haunted House Blues” was authored by J. C. Johnson, who also wrote “Empty Bed Blues,” one of Smith’s best-known recordings and a paradigmatic abandonment blues. What “Haunted House Blues” depicts is the trauma suffered—a kind of charnel-house overwhelm—by the black female blues subject whose bed has been emptied not by infidelity, but by death: the blues-lyrical rendering of “many thousands gone.” The role of white racist terror in this process is hinted at in the spoken introduction (line 1), where Smith, hardening her grief with blues laughter, instructs an unnamed black ghost-bearer to carry his latest cohort “’round to the back door.” That Jim Crow protocols must be maintained at such a moment of extremity suggests just how extreme they are—and with what ghost-producing violence they are, in fact, maintained. Phantasmic death (what Mance Lipscomb would call “ether”) hovers over the black female blues subject throughout the song, producing an anxiety that surfaces in lines 11–13 as the anticipation of her own death, the “fix[ing]” of her “old coffin,” and crystallizes in lines 15 –16 as a classic blues paradox: “I’m scared to stay here, I’m scared to leave this town.” She is scared, she tells us, because her “mistreatin’ daddy hangs around me day and night.” Mistreatment in this case has little to do with the familiar theme of domestic violence and much to do with a deadly subtext that rarely surfaces so overtly in blues song. The singer’s dilemma is not that she’s alone— or not only that she’s alone—but that she is forced to acknowledge, and in this fashion is “mistreated” by, not just her dead “daddy,” but numberless ghostly victims of the black southern (and northern migrant) holocaust: lynched, prison-farmed, race-rioted. This “mistreatment” fills her with dread for the fragility of her own life. Subtending many abandonment blues is the continuing

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presence of such violence, suffered by black folk as a group, and the cultural haunting that results.91 I use the term “cultural haunting” as a way of denoting this collective resonance, a resonance that makes “Haunted House Blues” something more than a mere ghost story designed to provide chills and thrills. In Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Kathleen Brogan explores the way in which ghosts function—in a series of recent novels by Toni Morrison (Beloved), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day), Leslie Marmon Silko (Almanac of the Dead), Carole Maso (Ghost Dance), among others—as agents of ritual commemoration for beleaguered ethnic groups. Such ghosts occupy a liminal space within which, if properly attended to by the living, they may transform themselves from cannibalistic, vampiric besiegers to revered, life-sustaining ancestors. “The story of cultural haunting,” according to Brogan, needs to be distinguished from the more familiar ghost story, that genre of short fiction that blossomed during the nineteenth century, leaving us with thrilling fireside tales of haunted houses, graveyard revenants, and Christmases past. . . . [T]he focus of [such] work[s] is first and foremost on the tortured mind of an individual. . . . The story of cultural haunting, however, brings to the foreground the communal nature of its ghosts. . . . Stories of cultural haunting differ from other twentieth-century ghost stories in exploring the hidden passageways not only of the individual psyche but also of a people’s historical consciousness. Through the agency of ghosts, group histories that have in some way been threatened, erased, or fragmented are recuperated or revised. . . . Centrally concerned with the issues of communal memory, cultural transmission, and group inheritance, stories of cultural haunting share the plot device and master metaphor of the ghost as go-between, an enigmatic transitional figure moving between past and present, death and life, one culture and another.92

The “mistreating daddy” and “dead men” who beleaguer Bessie Smith in “Haunted House Blues” function, I suggest, as black cultural go-betweens, agents for the dead-but-not-sufficiently-mourned. They serve as jealous spokespersons for that element of recent black history— the “sentence of death” described by John Dollard, under which so many black men labored and perished down home—which had been threatened with erasure by the understandable desire of northwardly migrant, newly urbanized black folk to forget, repress, and otherwise leave the misery of Jim Crow behind. The song serves, in other words, to consolidate ethnicity, insisting that jazz-age black folk acknowledge where they’ve come from and what they’ve survived by attending to those who

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were scythed from the ranks. If cultural haunting in “Haunted House Blues” takes the form of possession, a possession represented wittily in the third stanza as the moaning jealousy of Smith’s deceased “mistreating daddy,” then that moaning—and Smith’s answering blues moan— is a crucial border, marking as it does an escape from invisibility and voicelessness, a difficult first step toward cultural health. “The saving movement from reenactment to enabling memory,” argues Brogan, “is represented as a movement from traumatic silence into language.” 93 Smith’s song, breaching silence with audible fear and gallows humor, enables a needed cultural mourning by offering its listeners a representation of what Roberta Rubenstein calls “loss”: “a lack that continues to occupy a palpable emotional space: the presence of absence.” 94 Absence in this case is a social inscription, the wholesale death of black men for no obvious reason; presence is their unwanted reappearance as ghosts in the “house,” a free-floating metaphor that signifies not just a domestic space, but a black cultural space and—when Smith imagines revenge— the (white) civilization responsible for so much death. “Haunted House Blues” is a song of loss in the deep sense evoked by Rubenstein: a darkly witty ghost story that is also a way of mourning the immemorial victims of Jim Crow. “Crazy Blues,” like “Haunted House Blues,” is a song of cultural haunting and cultural mourning that ends with fantasized vengeance. Evoking the loss of the singer’s male lover as a kind of possession-by-theblues in the first two stanzas, it moves quickly toward the grave that seems prepared to embrace him with the help of the “undertaker man” (line 20). The opening stanza (lines 1– 4) parallels the second stanza of “Haunted House Blues” (lines 5 –7), with its talk of sleeplessness, appetite loss, and romantic mistreatment: 1

I can’t sleep at night I can’t eat a bite ’Cause the man I love He don’t treat me right.

5

He makes me feel so blue I don’t know what do do Sometimes I’m sad inside And then begin to cry ’Cause my best friend . . . said his last goodbye.

10

There’s a change in the ocean Change in the deep blue sea . . . but baby I tell you folks there . . . ain’t no change in me

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My love for that man Will always be. 15

20

Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t got no time to lose I must find him today Now the doctor’s gonna do all . . . that he can But what you gonna need is a undertaker man I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues.

I read lines 15 –20 not as an evocation of murderous romantic despair— or not only as that—but as a desperately lonely woman’s elegy to a dead lover whose death is, as in “Haunted House Blues,” a social inscription: he is Everyman who has been lynched, killed in a race riot, imprisoned in a distant location. Such a reading helps account for the protestation of undying love in lines 10 –14, a protestation that makes more emotional sense if the lover’s “last goodbye” was involuntary: not a pursuit of the “fleeting glimpse of freedom,” as Angela Davis suggests, but a deadly encounter that has, so to speak, disappeared him. The romantic despair felt by any abandoned lover is a kind of mourning, bespeaking pain at the loss of the cathected object; “Crazy Blues” grounds this mourning in social reality, the plague of “bad news” confronting African Americans—particularly, as lynching surged after 1915 and race riots swept through community after community, violence to black bodies requiring the undertaker’s ministrations. The black female subject’s “crazy” blues response to such a situation is to avenge herself on violence with a fantasized violence of her own. In “Haunted House Blues,” Bessie Smith confesses that “a feelin’ just tell me to burn this house on down, hainted house on down”; Mamie Smith hungers to commit cop-murder. Such protorevolutionary imaginings have a long and covert history in African American culture; they emerge, among other places, in the spiritual from which James Baldwin took the epigraph to his 1963 jeremiad on the crisis of American race relations: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

Vengeance in this case is a secondhand affair, enabled through black communal identification with God’s wrath. Another antebellum spiritual, “Sampson Tore the Building Down,” places the singer and audience in Sampson’s first-person subject position, making his threatened vengeance theirs:

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If I had-a my way I’d tear this building down.95

Blues song draws on this sacred tradition, modernizing and individualizing it still further, transforming Old Testament apocalypse into the blues subject’s own wrathful fantasies. In “Ease it to Me Blues” (1927– 30), Barbecue Bob invokes a distinctly modern catalogue of armaments: I’m gonna buy me a gun, airplane and a submarine I’m gonna buy me a gun, airplane and a submarine I’m gonna kill everbody ever treat me mean.96

In “Mad Mama’s Blues” (1924), Violet Mills ( Josie Miles) offers herself as a badwoman avenger of biblical proportions and hellish ferocity; the white world’s violent provocations are everywhere felt, but left unsaid: Wanna set the world on fire, that is my one mad desire I’m a devil in disguise, got murder in my eyes. Now I could see blood runnin’ through the streets Now I could see blood runnin’ through the streets Could be everybody layin’ dead right at my feet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Give me gunpowder, give me dynamite Give me gunpowder, give me dynamite Yes I’d wreck the city, wanna blow it up tonight. I took my big Winchester, down off the shelf I took my big Winchester, down off the shelf When I get through shootin’, there won’t be nobody left.97

In Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), Ann Moody explicitly names the bodily trauma suffered by black people as the motive for her fantasy of indiscriminate violence against whites: Two weeks later, Samuel O’Quinn was murdered. One night as he was walking the few blocks from town to his house he was shot in the back from close range with a double-barreled shotgun. The blast left a hole through his chest large enough to stick a fist through. His death brought back memories of all the other killings, beatings, and abuses inflicted upon Negroes by whites. I lay in bed for two days after his death recalling the Taplin burning, Jerry’s beating, Emmett Till’s murder, and working for Mrs. Burke. I hated myself and every Negro in Centreville for not putting a stop to the killings or at least putting up a fight in an attempt not to stop them. I thought of waging a war in protest against the killings all by myself, if no one else would help. I wanted to take my savings, buy a machine gun, and walk down the main street in

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Centreville cutting down every white person I saw. Then, realizing that I didn’t have it in me to kill, I slowly began to escape within myself again.98

Moody’s text and this chapter’s epigraph from Black Boy foreground what “Crazy Blues” merely hints at: that a black woman’s suicidal fantasy of picking up the gun and exacting revenge is a way of leveling the field, in psychological terms; of exacting rough justice for the continuing murderous flow of violence from white hands to black bodies. The fantasy remains, for all that, suicidal—a vital imaginative relief valve, but one whose grave consequences place a corresponding psychological check on she who would seriously consider enacting it, as Moody’s subsequent inward retreat suggests. Yet the subject’s inward turn may just as easily spur fantasies of badwoman (or badman) vengeance as reflect the spiritual paralysis of their would-be enactor. Mamie Smith imaginatively girds herself to shoot a cop by “get[ting] [her]self some hop,” as though the requisite psychological liberation can only be achieved in a drug-induced trance. (The word “assassin,” we might remember, derives from the Arabic “hashashin,” an order of Muslim warriors from Persia and Syria who ate hashish to inspire themselves for the task of murdering Crusaders.) And “Crazy Blues” shares a family resemblance with Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Drinking Man Blues,” a slyly humorous badman confessional in which consumption of alcohol leads the singer not merely to assault a cop in a moment of “crazy”-ness, but to usurp his identity entirely: The dealer ask me, “Peetie, how come you so rough?” The dealer ask me, “Peetie, how come you so rough?” Well, now, I ain’t bad, ooooh well, well, but I just been drinking that stuff. That stuff will kill you, but it just won’t quit. That stuff will kill you, but it just won’t quit. It will get you to the place, ooooh well, well, that you don’t care who you hit. I been drinking that stuff, and it went to my head. I been drinking that stuff, and it went to my head. It made me hit the baby in the cradle, oooh, well, well, and kill my papa dead. It made me hit the policeman, and knock him off his feet. It made me hit the policeman, and knock him off his feet. Taken his pistol and his star, oooh, well, well, and walking up and down his beat. I been drinking that stuff, I been drinking it all my days. I been drinking that stuff, I been drinking it all my days. But the judge give me six months, oooh, well, well, to change my drinking ways.99

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The protorevolutionary moment of “Crazy Blues”—that song’s fantasy of a drug-induced and murderous act of violence against the embodiment of a repressive order—surfaces here as real (if less than murderous) aggression, although the song itself remains, as far as we know, an imaginative projection rather than a report on Wheatstraw’s actual behavior. What the two songs share is the unexpected last-second swerve toward rebellion, as though the black subject, progressively losing control, has finally lashed out “accidentally” at what emotional logic tells us was the forbidden-but-quested-for antagonist all along. In both cases, the gesture of black-on-white violence is prepared for by black-on-black violence: emotional violence in “Crazy Blues” (the singer’s “mistreat[ment]” at the hands of her lover), physical violence in “Drinking Man Blues” (the singer’s hitting of a baby and murder of his own “papa”). In both cases, too, the gesture of black-on-white violence is masked by the black subject’s claimed loss of reason: the “crazy blues” that render Mamie sleepless, appetiteless, reckless, and thus willing to shoot a cop; the fact that inebriation has taken Peetie to a “place,” emotionally speaking, where he doesn’t care who he hits, and is thus willing to hit a cop. If “blues is the truth,” as a number of blues performers have insisted, then Paul Garon reminds us of the crucial role played by fantasy, particularly violent fantasy, in the truth blues song delivers: The most vital sense in which the blues singers act as “reporters” is the way they become reporters of the mental processes. Not so much the social or economic conditions of black life in America, but the effects of these conditions on the mind are expressed in the blues. Thus what the songs contain may be “reflections” of reality, but they might also contain images projected with the purpose of overcoming reality.100

Drawing on the southern-born tradition of badman heroism, playing on her mass black audience’s memories of distant and recent racial violences, addressing Harlem’s anxieties about new white threats to be met, Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” projected an image of badwoman vengeance that offered those who consumed it a way of sustaining themselves in the face of harsh realities. We are mistaken, “Crazy Blues” reminds us, if we think of blues song as solely or even primarily an evocation of helplessness, a report on the mental processes surrounding painfully failed love. Existential revolt, which is to say affirmation in the face of romantic despair, is an equally vital component of the blues response. And romantic despair, as I have tried to show, may transcode black female mourning at the nearly unbearable burden of murderous white violence falling on the “absent” men whose loss she lyrically bemoans. All the more reason why revolt—violent, expressive, and inspiring symbolic action—is demanded of the blues singer. “[W]hat is

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ultimately at stake,” writes Albert Murray in Stomping the Blues, “is morale, which is to say the will to persevere, the disposition to persist and perhaps prevail; and what must avoided by all means is a failure of nerve.” 101 The blues often take the form of pain hardened with laughter, as Langston Hughes defined them, but they sometimes also take the form of pain hardened with nervy, morale-sustaining violence against any and all who would compromise the singer’s, and community’s, peace of mind. “Crazy Blues,” animated by a fantasy of cop-killing, falls into this latter category. The cultural enemy against which it imagines retributive violence has shown no signs of disappearing from black popular song, these many decades later. “CRAZY BLUES”

I can’t sleep at night I can’t eat a bite ’Cause the man I love He don’t treat me right. He makes me feel so blue I don’t know what to do Sometimes I’m sad inside And then begin to cry ’Cause my best friend . . . said his last goodbye. There’s a change in the ocean Change in the deep blue sea . . . but baby I tell you folks there . . . ain’t no change in me My love for that man Will always be. Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t got no time to lose I must find him today Now the doctor’s gonna do all . . . that he can But what you gonna need is a undertaker man I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues. Now I can read his letter I sure can’t read his mind I thought he’s lovin’ me . . . He’s leavin’ all the time Now I see . . . My poor love was lyin’.

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I went to the railroad Hang my head on the track Thought about my daddy I gladly snatched it back Now my babe’s gone And gave me the sack. Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t had no time to lose I must find him today I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues. Those blues.102

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Guns, Knives, and Buckets of Blood The Predicament of Blues Culture What you call a club now, we called em Satiddy Night Dances. Dances all night long. I had three crews ta interpetate with: The first crew was eight o’clock. I played a hour fur them. They had everthang in the bloom! Long about twelve o’clock, here another crew come in there. Fresh crew! I fan them outta there. Played all night til foe o’clock in the mownin, sometime eleven o’clock on a Sunday. Settin right in one chair. . . . [S]omebody had ta die ever Satiddy night. Somebody gonna git kilt. An I had ta git up under the bed ta stay safe. Git ta shootin over my head. Long bout twelve or one o’clock, you hear a gun somewhere, in the house or out the house: “Boom!” Somebody died. —Mance Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman You don’t need no pistol . . . don’t need to run Don’t look behind you, girl . . . cause I’ll be your gun I’m your .44 . . . and I’ll be your bullets too Cause I love you baby, I swear I’ll kill for you. —Lurrie Bell, “I’ll Be Your .44” He fell for an eighteen-year old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy, he shot her just to keep the feeling going. — Toni Morrison, Jazz

INTIMATE VIOLENCE AND SELF-MAKING

Blues culture is, or was until recently, a culture permeated by intimate violence, both figurative and real, threatened (or promised) and inflicted. When I speak of “blues culture,” I am referring to an African American blues culture that evolved in southern jooks during the postReconstruction years, spread to the urban north with the help of a racerecords boom and several Great Migrations, and remained relatively intact into the 1960s. When I speak of “intimate violence,” I am speaking not of the disciplinary violence that whites inflict on blacks, nor the retributive violence that blacks inflict on whites—although both these forms of violence are not wholly separable from intimate violence. I am speaking instead about the violence that black folk inflict on each 195

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other: the cuttings, shootings, razor slashings, beatings, and murders described—and, more often than one might expect, celebrated as a locus of power and self-making—by African American blues people in both story and song. Blues performers such as Honeyboy Edwards, Son House, Bessie Smith, Bukka White, Memphis Minnie, Mance Lipscomb, Muddy Waters, and Leadbelly were witnesses to, victims of, and sometimepropagators of such intimate violence. The possibility of deadly confrontation with jealous girlfriends, jealous husbands, overexcited jook patrons, back-alley criminals, and even one’s fellow musicians—a kind of deep blues communication—hovered in the cultural air, a constant threat. “Everybody carried guns,” remembers Paul Oscher of his 1967– 68 stint as the first white harmonica player with the Muddy Waters Blues Band. Muddy, he claimed, always packed a .25 automatic, plus a .22 in his shirt pocket and a .38 pushed down the back of his car seat. “It was not uncommon for band members to point guns at each other,” adds Oscher. “That’s the only reason why everybody didn’t get killed, because everyone knew everybody else had a gun.” 1 When Charley Patton sang “Every day seem like murder here,” he was speaking not just about his chances of being lynched by a white Mississippi mob, but about the dangers he faced from his black blues audience at plantation “frolics” and jooks. “Charlie had been wounded kind of bad right before then,” remembered Honeyboy of a near-fatal injury Patton had suffered after playing a house party in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi in 1929. “He had been cut in the throat; he had a mighty bad scar, clean all around. I heard some guy cut him with a razor, cut him about a woman. Then he caught something like pneumonia. You can hear it in his recording, his voice was kind of staggered.” 2 Pre-blues black performers and ragtime-jazzers such as Lucius Smith and Charles Love, in fact, viewed early blues culture with alarm as singularly violent, profane, and disruptive. “[W]herever the blues is played,” insisted Love, “there’s a fight right after. You know the blues apt to get them all bewildered some kind of way, make ’em wild, they want to fight. They want to dance and fight and everything.” 3 The black-owned guns and knives that wreak havoc on black bodies in blues histories and memoirs resurface in blues lyrics, where they take on iconic force as instruments of pleasurably violent retribution—and violent pleasuring—in songs such as Bessie Tucker’s “Got Cut All to Pieces” (1928), Uncle Skipper’s “Cuttin’ My ABC’s” (1937), Big Maceo’s “Maceo’s 32-20” (1945), Little Walter’s “Boom Boom, Out Goes the Light” (1955), and Lurrie Bell’s “I’ll Be Your .44” (1982).4 Blues literature, too, engages the issue of intimate violence, adding dramatic intensity and narrative flesh: knives and guns gleam, wound, mutilate, and kill

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in Langston Hughes’s poems “Suicide” (1926) and “In a Troubled Key” (1942), Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), J. J. Phillips’s Mojo Hand (1966), Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar (1974), Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man (1976), August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) and Seven Guitars (1996), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Walter Mosley’s RLs Dream (1995), and Clarence Major’s Dirty Bird Blues (1996).5 When the blues literary tradition is enlarged to include works by non-AfricanAmerican writers, guns and knives reassert their primacy as agents of intimate communication—across racial lines, in some cases, that had begun to soften with the emergence of a white blues subculture during the 1960s. Both Michael Bloomfield’s memoir Me and Big Joe (1980), and Gerard Herzhaft’s novel Long Blues in A Minor (1986), reach a crisis of misunderstanding in which an older black bluesman, after drinking heavily, takes out a knife and stabs his shocked young white blues apprentice; in both texts, this gesture not only doesn’t end the apprenticeship, but serves as a kind of initiatory scarring, making the bluesman’s hidden emotion—a generalized fury at white people bred by life under Jim Crow—indelibly apparent to his naive white admirer.6 More often than not, the jook is the textual scene where knives and guns are deployed, the subcultural Ground Zero from which blues violence, figured as a particularly intense form of expressiveness, radiates outward. “Miss Etta’s Tavern,” muses Manfred Banks, the blues-singing protagonist of Dirty Bird Blues, as he quits his regular watering hole and walks into Omaha’s lowest-class jook, is “[a] place of weekend stabbings . . . also known for great blues on the jukebox. Right across the street from the Palace, this was a whole different world, the bottom, the gutbucket.” 7 “You ever been to Lula White’s?” asks Mississippi-born blues trumpeter Levee of his black bandmate Cutler in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, referring to a New Orleans jook: Cutler: Lula White’s? I ain’t never heard of it. Levee: Man, they got some gals in there just won’t wait! I seen a man get killed in there once. Got drunk and grabbed one of the gals wrong. . . . I don’t know what the matter of it was. But he grabbed her and she stuck a knife in him all the way up to the hilt. He ain’t even fell.8

“I’m gonna buy me a knife . . . ,” insists the blues singer of Hughes’s “Suicide,” “with / A blade ten inches long. / Gonna buy a knife with / A blade ten inches long. / Shall I carve ma self or / That man that done me wrong?” 9 The “carving” fantasized here is both a mode of expressive violence—an outpouring of wounded heart that joins faithless seducer and jilted lover in a shared suffering—and a mode of stylized inscrip-

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tion, a kind of writing-on-the-flesh whose very excess is a marker of the jilted lover’s passionate individuality. “You know his old lady put a knife through his back two or three years ago,” a coworker tells Manfred Banks in Dirty Bird Blues, speaking of a man they both know. “Said she did it just to mark him, make him hers.” 10 In Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar, Bea Ella Thornhill is rechristened “Red Ella” by the regulars at Sodawater McFadden’s jook after she disembowels her two-timing sweet man, Beau Beau Weaver, with a switchblade knife. Murray’s text lingers on the mutilated body, which makes visible, as a furious Zorro-signature, the emotional mutilation Weaver has inflicted on her: There was a deep gash that ran all the way from his ear to the corner of his mouth. His right arm was doubled up under him, but his left hand was still clutching his private parts, because the lower part of his stomach had been ripped open, and his very insides were hanging out. He must have been stabbed and cut in almost a dozen different places on his arms and the upper part of his body alone. His silk undershirt was just a mess of blood and sand and rips, and there was I don’t know how much blood puddled under him, especially under his waist. There was so much there that it was as dark and sticky thick-looking as fresh liver, and there was something grayish white oozing from his bowels and there was water still dripping from his bladder too.11

Murray is working within a tradition of blues-violence-as-inscription that finds its starkest expression in “Cuttin’ My ABCs,” Uncle Skipper’s 1937 remake of Josephine Miles’s “A to Z Blues” (1924): I’m gonna cut RST on your abdomen and secret place, When I get down there that’s what runnin’s goin’ take place, I’m gonna cut UVW on your sides, legs and feet, So you can’t even walk up and down the street, Now I done got tired o’ the way my baby’s treatin’ me, When I get through with my left-hand razor, I swear she’ll stop messin’ with me.12

“Such expressions of unreasoning violence,” observes Paul Oliver, “are sung as humorous songs, but the humour is chillingly grim.” 13 Sometimes grim humor is the bluesman’s way of laughing off the violent signature that jealous love has carved into him. “I was up in Charleston, Illinois,” remembered Honeyboy Edwards, playing in the streets, and a hustling woman, Thelma, she was throwing me nickels and dimes and pouring whiskey down my throat. A man come up to me and said, “I’m John Wood and that’s my woman.” He pulled his knife out to cut me and I swung around to hit him with my guitar. I busted

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my guitar on a tree and then broke and run, and that man cut me as I was running. And the funniest thing, when I went to the doctor to get it sewed up that doctor knew who done it just by looking at me. He said, “I bet it was one of them Woods brothers. They’ll cut you!” 14

Grimmer still, and chillingly humorous, is the blues boast tossed off by Mozelle, a minor character in Phillips’s Mojo Hand who has been imprisoned in a North Carolina jail for murdering her husband. When asked about her crime, Mozelle replies, “Aw, I don’t wants to go through with that no more, but since you ask, he just kept on bothering me and breaking in on me, so finally he bothered me so much I had to go shoot off his old cock-sucking face.” 15 Mozelle has found her voice here, by any measure; she has refused to be silenced by failed love. But at what cost? The vernacular intimacy, the familiarity, of her boast is its blues note—as is the violent gesture itself, indivisible from the life force that animates her. “[T]oughness of spirit is an essential aspect of the ethos of the blues,” Larry Neal has rightly claimed; the shadow-side of that survivor’s toughness is the “bad” blues subject who strikes back not at oppressive whiteness, but at black intimates on a casually (or fiercely) murderous basis.16 That such intimate violence has been conditioned by, and sometimes directly provoked by, white-on-black violence and long-suffered racial humiliations should go without saying. August Wilson’s blues trumpeter Levee stabs his black bandmate Toledo to death at the end of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom out of a raging powerlessness grounded in memories of his mother’s rape, his father’s lynching, and his own stabbing at the hands of white men down in Mississippi. Canewell, a knife-wielding blues harmonica player in Wilson’s Seven Guitars, lectures fellow musicians—and handgun advocates—Floyd Barton and Red Carter on how “[c]utting don’t ever go out of style”; “There’s a whole lot of niggers around here wearing Canewell’s scars,” Floyd admits. A moment later Canewell rejects the idea of traveling to Chicago for another recording session, describing the shoddy way the producer had treated him last time, cheating and then dismissing him. “He told me ‘Leave.’ Just like that, ‘Leave.’ Just like you tell a dog ‘Sit.’” Chicago had been a disaster for a second reason, it turns out: playing harmonica on Maxwell Street, Canewell had been arrested, he insists, “for nothing,” a nothing that bespeaks disciplinary encirclement: “The police said I was disturbing the peace. Soliciting without a license. Loitering. Resisting arrest and disrespecting the law. They rolled all that together and charged me with laziness and give me thirty days. I ain’t going back up there.” 17 “The colonized man,” writes Frantz Fanon in words that apply to Levee, Canewell, and other black blues people wounded by life under Jim

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Crow and its northern equivalents, “will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people.” 18 Yet my claim about in-group violence should in no way be taken as a version of the cultural pathology argument—unless one wants to claim that American culture as a whole is pathologically violent, which may be a defensible claim. Blues music begins, in its turn-of-the-century barrelhouse days, as the expression of a southern, working-class, frontier sensibility, a (blues)man speaking to men with brutal and enlivening vernacular directness. The violence that pervades blues culture is overdetermined, a subset of southern violence, working-class violence, frontier violence, the violence endemic among young single men—American gun culture as a whole.19 “The signs of this gun culture are everywhere,” writes Michael A. Bellesiles in Arming America, invoking blues song and its contemporary soul equivalent, from movie posters to the daily newspaper, book jackets to CD covers, emergency rooms to police blotters. When the velvet-voiced D’Angelo sings, “I’ll tell ya what’s on my mind / I’m ’bout to go get my nine / And kill both ya’lls behind,” his audience understands that he means his .9mm semiautomatic pistol, and that using it is an understandable response to catching his best friend and wife together in bed. D’Angelo is only updating older cultural references such as the classic “Forty-four Blues,” about a man walking the streets with his .44 looking for his woman and the friend who stole her away. “I walked all night long, with my .44 in my hand. / Looking for my woman, looking for her other man.” The caliber may change, but the sentiment remains the same.20

Race is only part of the equation here, and “pathology” has little to tell us about the way intimate violence actually functions in the blues culture evolved by southern black folk. My desire, I should stress, is neither to sensationalize blues culture nor to ignore its dark undercurrents for the purposes of cultural celebration. My intent is rather to look with clarity at what many might consider that culture’s most troubling gesture: inflicting wounds on black bodies and finding in such violent acts a source of fierce expressive pleasure. What to make of the razor-bearing bluesman who glories in the damage he has wreaked on a hapless black antagonist in a Florida jook, and who beats the woman he loves—a beating that seems only to increase her sexual ardor, until she shoots him dead? What to make of the knife-wielding badwoman who rules another Florida jook and cheerfully instructs her black female acquaintance in the art of eviscerating one’s romantic rivals? Troubled minds, aching hearts, and anxieties about lynching are fit subjects for blues song, but what to make of these blues passions? What

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to make, in other words, of Tea Cake and Big Sweet, two of Zora Neale Hurston’s, and the blues literary tradition’s, most vital and vexing protagonists? I will discuss Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men at length in chapter 6; this chapter grounds those readings by seeking to articulate the predicament of blues culture as Hurston came to know it: that the culture’s astonishing expressive vitality—a survival tool in the face of Jim Crow proscriptions designed to silence and kill—was inseparable from the bodily pain that blues people regularly inflicted, or threatened to inflict, on each other. (RE)CLAIMED BODIES AND BUCKETS OF BLOOD: A THEORY OF THE JOOK

“Jook is the word for a Negro pleasure house,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), an essay published the year before Mules and Men: It may mean a bawdy house. It may mean the house set apart on public works where the men and women dance, drink, and gamble. Often it is a combination of all these. . . . Musically speaking, the Jook is the most important place in America. For in its smelly, shoddy confines has been born the secular music known as blues, and on blues has been founded jazz. The singing and playing in the true Negro style is called “jooking.” 21

Although Hurston would speak frankly in Mules about the terrifying vulnerability she felt within the “shoddy confines” of the Pine Mill jook in Polk County—“I shivered at the thought of dying with a knife in my back, or having my face mutilated” 22 —she excludes violence from the list of defining atttributes she offers here. Later in the essay, however, the theme rears its head in the form of a grimly humorous tale retailed by male jook habitués about the black woman’s supposedly murderous dream life: [O]n the works and in the Jooks the black man sings disparagingly of black women. They say that she is evil. That she sleeps with her fists doubled up and ready for action. All over they are making a little drama of waking up a yaller wife and a black one. A man is lying beside his yaller wife and wakes her up. She says to him, “Darling, do you know what I was dreaming when you woke me up?” He says, “No honey, what was you dreaming?” She says, “I dreamt I had done cooked you a big fine dinner and we was setting down to eat out de same plate and I was setting on yo’ lap jus hugging you and kissin you and you was so sweet.”

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Wake up a black woman, and before you kin git any sense into her she be done up and lammed you over the head four or five times. When you git her quiet she’ll say, “Nigger, know whut I was dreamin when you woke me up?” You say, “No honey, what was you dreamin?” She says, “I dreamt you shook yo’ rusty fist under my nose and I split yo’ head open wid a axe.” 23

“But in spite of [this] disparaging fictitious drama,” Hurston quickly adds, “. . . the black gal is still in power, men are still cutting and shooting their way to her pillow. To the queen of the Jook!” 24 Hurston’s ambivalence about the jook’s violent passional economy is another way of formulating what I am calling the predicament of blues culture: are “cutting and shooting” merely boisterous good fun, to be celebrated with tongue in cheek—a kind of roughneck wooing ritual— or homicidal pursuits that should make one shiver and flee? “[T]he dreams of the native,” writes Fanon, “are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression. . . . During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.” 25 The night time is the right time for both jooking and dreaming, and the violent dream imputed to the black female protagonist in Hurston’s tale may, I suggest, have something to contribute to an understanding of the role jook aggression plays in earning blues people a pleasurable release from the world’s domination—albeit at the cost of a perpetually threatened collective self-mutilation. The claim I make is this: that intimate violence was not only not a distraction from the jook’s principal activities limned by Hurston (musicking, dancing, drinking, gambling), but was one of the jook’s principal activities, a de facto constituent of the cultural institution. Intimate violence—threatened, figured in blues song, woven into “disparaging fictitious drama,” and sometimes enacted—was the way in which black blues people reclaimed their own and each other’s bodies from the depredations of wage labor, conjured with the spiritual wounds that had been bequeathed to them by slave-born parents and inflicted on them by Jim Crow, rediscovered their pride and agency, and lived out their freedom within the imperiled zone of autonomy the jook had staked out on the unforgiving terrain of the post-Reconstruction South. Intimate violence was also, and unavoidably, the way in which blues people maimed and murdered each other within the confines of an evolving black secular institution that quickly became infamous for the disinhibited riotousness of its citizens. The roughest black jooks were termed “Buckets of Blood,” and there were many of these. Here, again, is the predicament of blues culture: reclaimed bodies exacted a payment in flesh.

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My claims about the centrality of violence to the jook’s ritual enactments owe much to Saidiya Hartman and Elaine Scarry, and they represent a critical revision of Katrina Hazzard-Gordon and Robin D. G. Kelley, both of whom have written extensively on jook life. HazzardGordon rightly notes that “[al]though the jook emerged during Reconstruction, its most intense development occurred in post-Reconstruction before the mass migration to the industrial North—that period when African-Americans were terrorized, lynched, and excluded from public life. . . . The reign of terror forced the black community into a tightly knit cultural group.” 26 What she neglects to theorize is the way in which that reign of white terror, resisted and transformed, resurfaces within the “tightly knit cultural group” as a mode of identity formation and collective pleasuring. The ritual of slave beating, for example, which persisted into the post-Reconstruction period as disciplinary floggings administered at Parchman Farm and other penal institutions (and so traumatized young Willie Dixon), and persisted also as the “whippings” administered by ex-slaves to their wives and children (Hurston’s Ned Crittenden is such a disciplinarian in Jonah’s Gourd Vine), was transformed by Mississippi blues musicians into a playful, painful party game.27 “Tampa Red’s birthday,” remembers Big Bill Broonzy in his 1955 memoir Big Bill Blues, is on December 25. Every year all the musicians go to his house to eat and drink, talk about different blues and songs, and give him a good beating with a strap. Sometimes it takes from twelve to fifteen men to hold him down and sometimes there is about thirty of us musicians at this birthday party. Some hold him down while the others march around and hit him, not light but hard and he hollared sometimes. That’s the way blues singers celebrate, and sometimes there was three of those parties in each month, but maybe in different towns.28

If this is the way blues singers celebrate, then how—apart from their songs themselves— do they grieve? The answer, as Hartman’s discussion of slave recreations suggests, is that they grieve as they celebrate, using their own and each other’s bodies to reinscribe and redress the soul-deep wounds engendered by histories of violent white domination. The ritually repeated blows of the bluesmen’s party game, like the repetitions of a playfully murderous blues song such as John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” (1962) are, strange as it may seem, the mechanism of a deep healing—if a healing inevitably rendered partial by its inclusion of the very violence it seeks to redress. “The incompleteness of redress and the constancy of breach and crisis,” observes Hartman of slave-era songs, dances, and Saturday-night get-togethers,

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are primary determinants of the force of repetition in black performance and the ambivalent formation of pleasure. Therefore, rather than think of these [slave] practices as providing a reprieve from domination, we must think about pleasure not only in the context of domination but also as an articulation of these tensions, limits, fissures, wounds, and ravages. . . . Rather than the dance providing an occasion for forgetting or escaping the ‘reality’ of slavery, the pleasure such opportunities afforded were bittersweet, fleeting, and tempered by the perpetuity of bondage. Moreover, the pleasure to be had was infected with despair, fear, dissatisfaction, and a desire for freedom.29

What distinguishes jook pleasures from slave-era recreations is the freedperson’s (and freeborn person’s) legislated freedom, circumscribed as it may have been on every front. This freedom was experienced within the jook as both a relative immunity from white surveillance and an unprecedented latitude of self-expression and self-creation. “Juke joints,” wrote Paul Oliver in 1970, at a late point in the institution’s evolution, “are . . . the last retreat, the final bastion for black people who want to get away from whites, and the pressures of the day. It was in these juke joints that the blues found a home.” 30 Extending Hartman’s insight into the post-Reconstruction era, we might theorize that blues culture, as it emerged in the pressurized free space of the jooks, was a way of articulating, vigorously and often violently, the tensions, limits, fissures, wounds, and ravages of embodied life as lived by the first black generation to come of age after Emancipation, and those that followed. Blues culture was, among other things, the scene within which an indelible individuality denied by the white South (with its ritual imposition of “boy” and “girl”) could be inscribed with the help of a weapon, or a distinctive wound: Razor-Totin’ Jim, Razor-Cuttin’ Fanny, Peg Leg Howell, Automatic Slim. Gender equality in such dealings was presumed. Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” (1962), which he wrote specifically for blues singer Koko Taylor, vividly evokes the violent and liberating communal pleasures that sustain jook individuation: Tell Automatic Slim To tell razor totin’ Jim To tell butcher knife totin’ Annie To tell fast talkin’ Fannie That we’re gonna pitch a ball Down to the union hall We gonna rump and trump till midnight And fuss and fight till daylight We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long.

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Tell Kuda Crawling Red To tell Abyssinia Ned To tell old pistol toting Pete To tell everybody he meet Tonight we need no rest We’re gonna really throw a mess We’re gonna break out all the windows And kick down all the doors.31

“I remember once there was a woman,” mused Bill Broonzy, “we called her Black Saddy, she was real dangerous with a razor and she always kept it sharp. Her man’s name was Abraham and we called him ‘One-Eyed Abe.’” “They tell me she shot one old man’s arms off, down in Mississippi,” Johnny Shines recalled of blues singer Memphis Minnie. “Shot his arm off, or cut it off with a hatchet, something. Some say shot, some say cut. Minnie was a hellraiser, I know that!” “Go up to Jim Canands,” said one aging habitué of a well-known Memphis jook, “they used to be a woman there, used to call her Razor-Cuttin’ Fanny. Every time you see her if you didn’t give her that piece of bread and piece of fish she cut your throat.” 32 The expressive freedoms blues people claimed for themselves in the jook, violent and otherwise, were asserted within a larger context of relentless economic subjugation: cotton sharecropping, turpentine production, various forms of domestic and low-wage labor. As Robin D. G. Kelley’s useful but incomplete analysis makes clear, a central function of the jook in its various incarnations was to contest such economic expropriation by helping black working-class patrons reclaim their bodies, and dreams, through the pleasures of collective leisure time: Black working-class culture was created . . . for pleasure, not merely to challenge or explain domination. . . . [F]or a working class whose days consisted of backbreaking wage work, low income, and pervasive racism, these social sites were more than relatively free spaces in which the grievances and dreams of an exploited class could be openly articulated. They enabled African Americans to take back their bodies for their own pleasure rather than another’s profit. . . . The black body is here celebrated as an instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of labor. The nighttime becomes the right time, and the space allocated for recovery and recuperation is assertively and provocatively occupied by the pursuit of leisure and pleasure. . . . Aside from house parties, some of the most popular sites of Friday and Saturday night congregation were dance halls, blues clubs, and “jook joints.” In darkened rooms ranging in size from huge halls to tiny dens,

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black working people of both sexes shook and twisted their overworked bodies, drank, talked, engaged in sexual play, and—in spite of occasional fights—reinforced their sense of community.33

The weakness of Kelley’s analysis is its refusal to acknowledge violence as an essential constituent of jook sociality, rather than as occasional distraction. By clumping various urban and rural locations on what Hazzard-Gordon has called the “jook continuum,” Kelley has occluded an indisputable truth: that the lower one ventures on the class spectrum of black entertainment, the more impoverished the performance environment within which “space [is] allocated for recovery and recuperation . . . [and] assertively and provocatively occupied by the pursuit of leisure and pleasure,” the more visibly blues culture emerges as the culture of violence it has been from its earliest barrelhouse days. “The class and status associations with blues,” reported Michael Haralambos in 1974, are aptly illustrated by the local assessment of bars in the Minneapolis North Side ghetto. The Blue Note Lounge, the Cozy Bar and Lounge and the Regal Tavern are ranked by North Side residents in terms of their respectability. . . . The Regal Tavern is judged by one and all to be the least respectable of the three bars. It is the only bar that regularly features blues. In 1966 and 1967 a blues band led by Mojo Buford played four nights a week. Known locally as the Bucket of Blood, the Regal was seen as a place where brawls and ‘shootin’s and cuttin’s’ were common, and as a hangout for prostitutes. There is evidence to support this characterisation. The Regal was closed by the police from time to time after shootings, and reopened after a cooling-off period. Observations include a man cleaning a .38 pistol in the gentlemen’s toilet and an argument between a group of men which ended with one of them running out of the Regal shouting, “I’m gonna get my motherfuckin’ Winchester.” Local prostitutes are a common sight and sound at the Regal, and some go to the Blue Note on their nights off. As a background to the arguments, fights, and business transactions of the girls, the blues band plays on.34

Kelley is right to characterize the social sites of black working-class culture as loci of enlivening pleasures; he underestimates, as Haralambos’s account suggests, both the pervasiveness of violence within the blues-consuming sector of that culture and the extent to which “Bucket of Blood” habitués transformed grievances and violent dreams into enlivening pleasures: insults (such as the “Dirty Dozens”), threats, tall tales describing violences one has engaged in, witnessed, or heard tell of. “She know if she scratch yo’ skin,” Big Sweet brags to Hurston one night in the Pine Mill jook, speaking of a bullying regular named Lucy, “Ah’ll kill

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her so dead till she can’t fall.” 35 The violent, ax-wielding “black gal” described by Hurston as the focus of the “disparaging fictitious drama” she heard in the jooks is a figure for black blues culture in its rough, vulgar, unrepentantly low-down incarnation; the black gal stands in relation to the sweet-talking, sweet-loving “yaller wife” as the Regal Tavern and other “Buckets of Blood” in Haralambos’s schema stand to the upscale Blue Note Lounge. Lie down with her and you risk getting “lammed . . . over the head four or five times,” or having your head split open; her explosive vitality is also her very real threat. Real means real. Chicago blues clubs in the mid 1960s were as rough as the Regal Tavern, according to Mike Bloomfield, a young white blues guitarist who had recently entered the scene, and the disparaging fictitious drama evoked by Hurston could manifest as real-life violence against women as well as by them. “I can’t say I wasn’t scared,” Bloomfield confessed in later years, ’cause I was scared, lots of times, because it was a rough thing, man. I saw knifings and shootings—it was a man’s world. There was no jive. The kids were scary, man, the youngbloods, the lowriders in the street. They were scary. It was a very violent scene, man. Cats that didn’t get a lot of bread. . . . One time I was standing in a bar, and a guy walked in, and he took a woman’s head and slammed it on the bar and said, “Bartender, give this bitch a beer.” Her severed head was on the bar. The guy had cut off his old lady’s head in some horrible fight, and he slammed it down on top of the bar and said, “Bartender, give this bitch a beer.” That freaked everybody out.36

Struggling to survive in such a world, blues people lyricized, mythically inflated, and otherwise conjured with the violence that surrounded them, creating just enough aesthetic distance that the violence could be contemplated and enjoyed. What might be called the wounded blues body—the body beaten, stabbed, mutilated, scarred—figures widely in juke lore and blues musicians served as both the propagators and objects of such enlivening legend making. “Muddy Waters’ appearance at the Cozy Bar,” Haralambos notes in this vein, “occasioned a discussion of the forty scars he was supposed to have on his chest from various knife fights.” 37 “Don’t you bother my baby,” Muddy sings in “Walking Through the Park” (1958), transforming his alleged wounds into badwoman myth, “. . . no telling what she’ll do / You know that girl, she might cut you . . . she might shoot you too.” 38 Muddy is warning his imputed jook community here, but he is also taking a positive pleasure in the fearsome power of “his” woman, the woman whose violence threatens bodily to claim all who are foolish enough to make a play for her. The ravaging he warns against is emotional as well as physical: cutting and

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shooting are allegories for the hurting—an impressive hurting, one worth singing about—that Muddy’s baby is capable of putting on you. In “Oh Yeah,” Muddy responds to such a hurting by threatening violent revenge of his own—a revenge that Bloomfield’s decapitating jook patron seems to have enacted: Oh yeah . . . someday I’m going to catch you soon Whoa yeah . . . someday I’m going to catch you soon Whup you in the mornin’, I’m gonna cut you in the afternoon. This girl think my heart . . . must be made of steel She stay out all night boys . . . she don’t know how that makes me feel . . . but Oh yeah . . . someday I’m going to catch you soon Whup you in the mornin’, I’m gonna cut you in the afternoon.39

Anything but the traditional cold and heartless badman, Muddy insists that the violence he threatens is a wronged man’s last resort, an outpouring of overheated heart. Yet the gusto with which he roars through these lyrics on the recording itself alchemizes romantic agony and threatened reprisal into an explosive and pleasurable release. (Blues texts in performance are often buoyed—and hardened—by a comic tone that seems at odds with violent content. Uncle Skipper’s “Cutting My ABC’s” was sung, as Oliver notes, with “a thin veil of humour over a brutal theme”; John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” narrates a cartoon-like fantasy of badman reprisal that ends with the singer imagining the sound made by the “bubbles . . . coming up” from the expiring victim’s submerged body.) 40 Muddy plans to enjoy these particular tortures—forsaking other labors, relishing the hunt, taking his time with the body he has claimed. He wants male company, too. With the word “boys,” Muddy explicitly inscribes the jook audience in his song, encouraging their vicarious participation in the all-day, hands-on punishments he hopes to enact. Jooks were, in other words, very much a place in which “African Americans [took] back their bodies for their own pleasure rather than another’s profit,” as Kelley argues. But violence wasn’t— or wasn’t always—merely an unpleasant distraction from this recuperative process: it was the circulating discursive currency by means of which this process, albeit internally compromised, was carried out. Sometimes pleasure—a lover’s body— could only be claimed, freed from the grasp of other male or female claimants, with the help of a gun or knife. “[M]en are still cutting and shooting their way to her pillow,” writes Hurston admiringly of “the black gal . . . queen of the Jook!,” even as her own jook writings depicted a world in which jook queens such as Lucy and Ella Wall flourished knives as a way of arbitrating their claims on desirable local men. Cutting and shooting, the paradigmatic jook violences, were aids in the

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attainment of sexual pleasure, instruments for the communication of sexual jealousy and other strong feeling, occasions for the demonstration of physical prowess, markers (as survivor’s scars) of unkillability, post facto occasions for the making of legends. Cutting and shooting, literal and figurative, were ways in which black blues people, male and female, claimed and reclaimed their own and each other’s bodies within a selfcreated passional economy that was none of the white man’s business. Cutting and shooting were also, as Elaine Scarry helps us understand, a way in which laboring blues people struggled to contest the erasure that the “backbreaking wage work” referred to by Kelley had wrought on them as social actors. Guns and knives, capable of wreaking visible and long-lasting damage on black bodies, were extraordinarily effective ways of magnifying one’s labors, of leaving one’s indelible mark on a material world that otherwise presented itself as a scene of endless, exhausting, deindividuating drudgery, so-called nigger work. “The power of alteration,” notes Scarry, resides equally in weapons and tools. In each there is a tremendous distance between what is occurring at the two ends, not simply because one end is active and the other passive, but because a fairly inconsequential alteration at one end is magnified into an occurrence full of consequences at the other. A small shift in the body at one end of a gun (so small it is almost imperceptible, only the position of one finger moves) can wholly shatter a body at its other end. The pressure of a hand pushing on the handle of a knife, itself too small to alter (to dent, to scar) even slightly the surface of the handle, will as it begins to be transferred and concentrated across the broad half-inch of the handle to the drastically thin surface edge of the blade, be magnified into a huge power of altering whatever surface it touches at its other end. . . . A person using a weapon or tool . . . objectifies his presence in the world through the alterability of his world. . . . In addition to whatever practical benefits are gained by hurting an enemy . . . , there is a magnification of the actor because he has brought about an alteration not only larger than the one he himself experiences but of much greater duration.41

For black southern laborers, enmeshed in an an exhausting, exploitative agricultural economy, and to a large extent for their migrant peers in the urban North, intimate violence served several purposes. It was a way of releasing pent-up frustration at one’s oppression by “hurting an enemy”—a black enemy, in all but the most grievous circumstances, since the white enemy one might prefer to hurt was protected by the full force of white law and lynch law. It was a way, if one had been wronged, of exacting something like rough justice in a world where the criminal justice system refused to take black-on-black crime seriously. “If you

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killed a black,” insists Honeyboy Edwards, speaking of Mississippi in the early decades of the century, “generally wouldn’t nothing much happen to you.” 42 Intimate violence was a way of saving face in a panracial southern culture of honor and vengeance where self-respect could only be preserved through swift, brutal, hands-on reprisal. But intimate violence, Saturday night jook violence, was also a way in which a man might “objectif[y] his presence in the world through the alterability of his world.” Cutting and shooting were ways in which a black southern laborer— or a northern ghetto dweller—might radically increase his labor power, magnifying his role as an actor and leaving his mark on vulnerable flesh. Disempowered and exploited anonymity could, with an “almost imperceptible” squeeze of a trigger-finger or a quick flourish of a razor, be instantly transformed into revitalized and empowered identity. The pleasure provided to the black actor by such a drastic increase in effective labor power is visible, I suggest, in Mozelle’s comment in Mojo Hand that her husband “kept on bothering me and breaking in on me, so finally he bothered me so much I had to go shoot off his old cock-sucking face.” Guns and knives are labor-saving devices. The labor they save— which is to say, the radical alterations they effortlessly effect in the material world—made them particularly attractive to those caught up, for the bulk of their lives, in economies where the product of one’s labors were ruthlessly spirited away. “White folks run it down there,” insists Honeyboy. The boss always said, “When a nigger dies, hire a nigger. If a mule dies, buy a[nother].” That’s right! On Saturday nights at them country dances, making white whiskey, guitar playing, all them women dancing and drinking all night, cutting and shooting each other sometimes, the man tells the niggers, “You stay out of the ground, I’ll keep you out of jail.” 43

The predicament of blues culture is visible here in the nigger–mule equivalence, which surfaces in the recollections of many Delta blues musicians.44 After Emancipation, black working-class bodies were “worthless” in white eyes apart from the labor that could be extracted from them; one could always hire another black laborer to replace the workedto-death, or murdered, body one had been exploiting. Fresh mules, on the other hand, required a cash outlay. Spiritually depressed by this inverted hierarchy of value, ruthlessly exploited for their labor power, southern blues people transformed Saturday night into a long, exhausting, enlivening, and often murderous ritual of redress. They reclaimed their bodies, pride, and agency with the help of music and dance, insults and threats, boasts and tall tales. But they also claimed each other’s bodies through the medium of intimate violence; asserted their fragile pride

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with the help of guns and knives; became agents of their own fate at the cost of inflicted pain and social mayhem. The same blues culture that brought them back to life every Saturday night, body and soul, threatened to bury them every Sunday morning. The jooks roared on, by and large, with the white man’s approval. OUT OF ORDER PIECE: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE JOOK

One way of understanding the jook is as the post-Emancipation transformation of the Saturday night parties that were a traditional feature of slave life on southern plantations. Musicking, flirting, dancing, satirical storytelling, and a limited amount of heavy drinking—almost all of it at Christmastime, the “vicious dissipation” encouraged by slaveowners and lamented by Frederick Douglass— characterized these slave entertainments, as did a relative peacefulness enforced primarily through the slaveowner’s surveillance and discipline.45 “Only occasionally,” observes Eugene Genovese, “did planters or former slaves report chronic drunkards or even periodically heavy drinkers among the slaves. Even less often did such complaints fall on the women, who seem to have restricted their consumption of alcohol to light drinks.” 46 During the postbellum years, however, both heavy drinking and weapons begin to make their presence felt as components of a newly unruly black sociality, in both the South and the North. “All night, during Christmas week,” remembered Booker T. Washington of his first visit to Tuskeegee in 1881, “they usually had what they called a ‘frolic,’ in some cabin on the plantation. This meant a kind of rough dance, where there was likely to be a good deal of whiskey used, and where there might be some shooting or cutting with razors.” 47 The “shooting” that begins to manifest along the jook continuum was a function, as Michael Bellesiles makes clear, of a panracial irruption of guns into American culture, and southern culture more specifically, on the heels of the Civil War: There was wide acceptance by the 1870s of the saying “God created men; Colonel Colt made them equal.” The belief was widely held that two men with guns were equals. However, the reality of gun use during Reconstruction demonstrated the gun’s ability to undermine equality in America. With freedom, many blacks took to carrying pistols as symbols of their newly gained authority. A Senate investigating committee was told that the South “is the greatest place on the face of the earth for pistols. No man is comfortable down there unless he has got his pistols.” 48

The cost of firearms continued to fall after the Civil War, Bellesiles notes, to the point at which “anyone could afford the so-called ‘suicide special’ of the 1890s.” As southern blacks migrated north during the

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post-Reconstruction decades, they carried with them both a predilection for handguns and, according to sociologist Jon D. Cruz, a taste for alcohol. “[L]iquor . . . became associated with the new urban life and freedom from white southern oppression. . . . [I]n a rather short period, the drinking practices of blacks changed greatly,” transforming African American culture from “dry” to “wet” and fostering the sort of tempestuous socialities found in “saloons, barrelhouses, juke joints, taverns and cafes.” 49 This explosive combination of alcohol, weapons, and working-class black restiveness alarmed both the northern black elite—which created its own arm of the temperance movement to combat it—and the white South, which felt its mastery of “the Negro” to be in peril when that restiveness became visible in the public sphere. “Cuffey, when primed with a few drinks of whisky,” writes W. J. Cash, uncritically dramatizing this white southern mindset as it persisted into the 1930s, was, and yet is, lamentably inclined to let his ego a little out of its chains and to relapse into the dangerous manners learned in carpetbagging days—to pour into the towns on Saturday afternoon and swagger along the street in guffawing gangs which somehow managed to take up the whole breadth of the sidewalk, often to flash razors and pistols when anybody ventured to object.50

Even as blues song was coalescing as a black folk music in the 1890s, black and white popular music was beginning to reflect a somewhat exaggerated image of swaggering black aggression in the form of “coon songs,” first popularized by May Irwin and other white female vaudevillians. “[C]oon songs,” write David Jasen and Gene Jones, “added a potent symbol to minstrel images of watermelon, chicken, and possum that supposedly typified the race: the razor as a weapon. ‘The Bully Song,’ ‘Never Raise a Razor ’Less You Want to Raise a Row,’ and ‘R-A-Z-O-R’ celebrate the possibility of mayhem in playful melody and rhyme.” 51 John Lowe offers a representative 1904 ditty entitled “I’m the Toughest, Toughest Coon”: I’m the toughest, toughest coon that walks the street; You may search the wide, wide world, my equal never meet I got a razor in my boot, I got a gun with which to shoot; I’m the toughest, toughest coon that walks the street.52

Such songs clearly offer a lyric precedent for “Cuttin’ My ABCs,” “I’ll Be Your .44,” and other guns-and-knives blues, but they reveal with equal clarity, in their stilted Tin Pan Alley phrasing (“a gun with which to shoot”) and the “darky” dialect in which many of them are written, how wide a gap separated “coon songs” from the vernacular folk poetry of an

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early blues such as “See See Rider,” in which aggression is counterposed with romantic grief to create deep, hurtful feeling: I’m gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I am tall, Lord, Lord, Lord Gonna kill my man and catch the Cannonball If he don’t have me, he won’t have no gal at all.53

Blues song, it must be remembered, begins as southern song: the violence it inscribes is the violence of a people, black and white, who hail from a region that sociologist John Shelton Reed once labeled “Below the Smith and Wesson Line.” 54 The Hatfields and the McCoys, too, had their murder ballads. Yet even by southern standards, and from its first emergence as jook entertainment, blues music was seen as a special kind of provocation, uniquely liable to prod its black enthusiasts into murder and mayhem. Lucius Smith, a black Mississippi banjo player, was born in 1885 and began playing in 1902; in an era when many musicians of his generation were beginning to turn toward blues, he hewed to an older string-band style—reels and ballads, which provided the backdrop for square dancing. When blues became the rage with the publication of W. C. Handy’s instrumental composition “Memphis Blues” (1912), according to Smith, it brought with it a provocative form of couples dancing, accompanied by drunkenness, disorder, and death: Blues is, I’d say, a whole lots of difference. It’s owing to the dances, new dancing. Now the blues is swinging dancing, like double together, you know . . . that done ruined the country. . . . It just make ’em go off at random, I’d say, frolicing, random, you see. More folks have got killed since they start playing the blues than ever been. It’s just a, you know, just a out of order piece. . . . [T]he “Memphis Blues” and all that, it done brought about a whole lots of it, you know, I’d say, trouble. They started that “Memphis.” That’s these young folks. Started that “Memphis.” Hear ’em say, “Oh, do it once for me!” Done started a mess then. . . . The blues ain’t nothing but a racket. A whole lot of drunk folks, you know, don’t care for nothing. . . . They gonna start something. You can’t do nothing with ’em. Get a little drink in ’em, and that’s just trouble.55

We might dismiss Smith’s charge as merely a moldy fig’s gripe about pop music’s decadence were it not corroborated by the testimony of Charles Love, a ragtime-jazz trumpeter from Placquemine, Louisiana: [W]herever the blues is played there’s a fight right after. You know the blues is apt to get them all bewildered some kind of way, make ’em wild, they want to fight. . . . Everywhere we played and started playing the blues the dance would be all right until right up to the time we put the blues on. . . . I remember one time we were playing those rags and then they

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wanted to hear the blues. I had a little brown derby I used to use on the blues and we started to playin’ the blues and everythin’ come down, you know. Got way down, and I commenced to fannin’ the trumpet with that little brown derby puttin’ in all kinds of stuff in there, growlin’ and everythin’ and I made it as low-down as I could make it, you know. And after a while somebody hit the policeman and downstairs, there comes the wagons, about eleven wagons puttin’ everybody in jail. That broke the dance up. People was fightin’ and usin’ razors and everything else. I had to run, get out of there, get under some trees! . . . Every time I played the blues somethin’ happen. That’s what I said, that’s the evil spirit of music. That’s not good music, not to me.56

Although it is unclear from Smith’s testimony just where the blues-provoked violence he describes is taking place, Love is clearly referring here to a kind of multistoried urban jook. (A country jook would have several rooms, all on the same floor.) The scene of disorder he describes, like Smith’s, begins with an audience demand for blues music; it proceeds by means of a set of “low-down” instrumental techniques that quickly inflames or “bewilders” that audience, leading, as in Smith’s narrative, to an eruption of violence out of what had been merely a dance. Blues sonorities, tonalities, melodies, and rhythms had, it would seem, already been freighted at this early moment in blues history with a younger black generation’s private significations—much as the fuzz-boxed guitars and breakneck tempos of early British punk became, in and of themselves, a rallying cry for working-class white youth.57 The “racket” and “lowdownness” of the sonic palette stood as a kind of objective correlative for the youthful black audience’s subcultural attitude: markers of class and racial antagonism, but also, perhaps, the voice of the id demanding revenge against internalized racial prohibitions. The sound of early blues, apart from any lyric content, had become an incendiary call to a violent acting out, against the white law and each other. “To grasp the meaning of a piece of music,” as Simon Frith has noted, invoking the sociologist Derrick F. Wright, “is to hear something not simply present to the ear. It is to understand a musical culture, to have ‘a scheme of interpretation.’ For sounds to be music we need to know how to hear them; we need ‘knowledge not just of musical forms but also of rules of behaviour in musical settings.’” 58 One rule of behavior that seems to have attached itself to blues music almost from the start is that blues in whatever setting—at plantation “frolics,” in pinewoods barrelhouses and Delta jooks—is a music to cut loose by: an “out of order piece” rather than a soothing social-dance soundtrack. The word “juke” or “jook” is of uncertain etymology, but Dr. Lorenzo Turner has argued that it is the anglicized pronunciation of the Gullah “joog,” which

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means “disorderly” and which derives in turn from the African Bambara “dzugu,” meaning “wicked.” 59 Disorderliness and wickedness are ambiguous connotations; the blues people themselves seem to have been somewhat less shocked than Smith and Love by the violent vitality of their “evil” culture. “Violence,” according to Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, “was epidemic at plantation house ‘frolics,’ where, as [bluesman ] Son House put it, the patrons ‘wanna see some runnin’ done. . . .” 60 House and another Mississippi bluesman, Washington “Bukka” White, both served time at Parchman Farm for shootings they committed at such frolics, but blues musicians were generally less sanguine about jook violence than blues patrons, representing as it did an all-but-unavoidable workplace threat to life and limb.61 Memphis Minnie, no shrinking violet, told Johnny Shines how at “juke joints and things,” she and her husband would “have to run at night when they start cutting and shooting, but she’d always take her guitar with her. You know, she’d tell me ‘Stay out of places like that!’” 62 “Papa used to hold country dances on a Saturday night,” remembered Honeyboy Edwards, sell whiskey and play guitar at the house. Sometimes he’d go off to play at jukes. He got in a fight one time at one of them Saturday night dances. My daddy got to fighting and hollering with a guy and they run out of the dance and into the field. My daddy had a plaid shirt on and this guy Jack shot at him with a Winchester rifle. The bullet just missed Papa, but it shot a hole through his shirt! Then he quit playing.63

“The experienced bluesman,” according to William Ferris, “sings near a door or window which provides a quick escape if the crowd becomes too rowdy.” 64 In 1968 Ferris interviewed blues pianist Lee Kizart about Mississippi jook life in the 1920s, when the Delta was in high cotton; Kizart remembered a murder, and his own panicked reaction: I seen a woman git shot one night when I was playing at a jook joint way out in the country. She had just come in from St. Louis and her head fell just about that far from the end of the porch and my car was setting right up by the porch. Just broke her neck. It was a forty-five bullet shot all right enough. It broke her neck and she fell with her head just about that far from the edge of the porch. I was setting down playing and I jumped out the back door and run around to the side of the house. I got in my car and when I cranked up, I like to drove over I don’t know how many folks up under my old racer. I had a racer then.65

Even as bluesmen incorporated guns, knives, and revenge fantasies into the songs they performed for jook patrons, one of their duties, paradoxically, was to cool off the crowd by driving it to exhaustion, purging

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it of violent aggression with the help of fierce compelling music and thereby keeping mayhem to a minimum. “Now when I gits ta playin,” says Mance Lipscomb of his days as the regular performer at the “Satiddy Night Dances” in Navasota, Texas, “I go outta the bounds a reason. Cause when I stawt, I dont like ta stop. As long as it look like they pain attainsion ta me, I kin jest play all night fur em.” 66 But as the phrase “outta the bounds a reason” suggests, the process by which blues performance conjures up soul-force and purges aggression in its audience is an unstable one. Euphoric high spirits, fueled by drinking, might express themselves as friendly insults that might in turn suddenly lead to shots or blows—including, in self-defense, the bluesman’s own. “Aw man,” insists Lipscomb, you couldn never tell what them people was up to at them Satiddy Night Suppas. Everbody there little an low, big an wide’s got em half a bottle a beer in their hand here, sayin, “Ahhhh! So-and-so and so-an-so!” “This an that! This and that!” “You bastud, you!” Sometime they go ta fightin and shootin, I’d go ta gittin up under the bed. Sometime break a gittah over somebody’s head. Break gittah strangs, tryin ta play so loud where all them people kin dance behind my music.67

A bluesman tries to keep the peace, Lipscomb seems to be saying, by playing his heart out, “break[ing] gittah strings”; if that doesn’t work, he uses his guitar as a club, “break[ing] [it] over somebody’s head.” It was inevitable, perhaps, that the bluesman’s instrument be drawn into the jook’s problematic passional economy. The percussive slaps and thumps that marked the guitar style of Charley Patton, for example, became his sly way of signifying on domestic violence: while hitting his guitar in performance, an acquaintance reported, Patton was fond of shouting, “This is the way I beat my woman!” 68 “‘Jook, Johnnie,’” cries an unnamed voice, urging on the piano player as Hurston enters the Pine Mill jook in Mules and Men on her fateful final night, “‘Ah know you kin spank dat ole pe-anner.’” From the beaten guitars and spanked pianos of the black southern jooks, one may trace a direct line to the Andrews Sisters’s boogie-woogie novelty, “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” (1939) with its signature verse: In a little honky-tonk village in Texas There’s a guy who plays the best piano by far When he plays with the bass and guitar They hollar “Beat me up daddy, beat me daddy eight to the bar.”

Tin Pan Alley’s transformation of black blues performance into a white woman’s playfully sadomasochistic fantasy takes us a long way from the lived reality of the early jook continuum, which was fearsome. When

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Leadbelly was fourteen, in 1902, he began working Saturday nights at a saloon in Leigh, Texas. “[T]his part of Texas and Louisiana was still very much a frontier,” write Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell: a land of bootleg whiskey, disputes over women, knife fights, and shootings. With so much violence a part of everyday life, it was hardly surprising that Huddie soon got caught up in it. Irene Campbell recalled, “At 14 he started running around. I can remember later when he came to his mother’s all cut up. He had been out all night, and he had his guitar strapped to his back.” There was “blood all over the front of his clothes and his jaw was hanging open because someone had barely missed his eye with a cut on his jaw from top to bottom.” After a few more nights of watching his only son come home bleeding from cuts and bruises, Wes Ledbitter knew that he had to take some kind of action. When Huddie turned sixteen, Wes presented his son with a typical coming-of-age present in the frontier south of 1903 —a pistol.69

Leadbelly’s experience reminds us that the violence pervading the jooks owed much to the frontier locations within which early blues culture took shape. The Mississippi–Arkansas Delta was one such location; most of the Delta’s immensely fertile land had been panther- and cottonmouth-infested malarial swamp until the 1870s and 1880s, when gangs of black and Irish laborers were hired to clear and drain the land with the help of mule teams and later to build levees. Levee camps, which persisted in some form into the 1930s, were notoriously murderous; while the victims were almost always black, the murderers were white and black alike. “The white levee contractors,” writes Alan Lomax, “hired poor white ‘nigger drivers’ to manage their black labor. These foremen often had a black man to back them up, a professional killer who would as soon shoot you as look at you.” 70 Paid their wages every week or two—rather than the once-a-year settlement they had received as farm workers back home—these black laborers, mostly male, reclaimed their bodies and pride after hours by drinking, gambling, fighting, and listening to blues music in levee barrelhouses. “I’ve been in places,” Big Bill Broonzy told Lomax, that was, er, levee camps, I’ve been in places where they have . . . dances, and they—barrel-houses what they call it—and the Negroes all be in there gambling, you know, and they shoot a Negro down, you know what I mean, and . . . some little short guy be standing around the crap table, and the crap table was high—he can’t get up there, and have to . . . pull that dead man up there, and stand on him and still keep shooting dice.71

Some blues musicians worked this river-oriented sector of the southern frontier, but many others, including Little Brother Montgomery,

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Jelly Roll Morton, and Big Joe Williams, worked the barrelhouses and “chock-houses” that dotted the pine forests of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Florida. Erected and maintained by the sawmills, lumber companies, and turpentine distillers, these rough-hewn buildings were the “smelly, shoddy confines” Hurston is referring to when she describes the classic southern jook. “Oh they was rough,” said Montgomery, a veteran of the logging camp barrelhouse circuit: They had some rough places. See those guys wearing them big gumboots up to here, you know, most of them carried them big pistols too, German Lugers. They kill somebody, you know, and then they stand on them, and studied gambling: “Put my money down. . . .” And next morning the quarter boss would come—they’d do it on a Saturday night, the quarter boss he come, then they’d have a shooting, shoot it out with him too. . . . Oh it was rough, but they always liked musicians, and if you could play they would always take up for you and go with you.72

The striking detail shared by these two accounts, the murdered black man at the crap table who other barrelhousers stand on rather than removing, suggest that the story is apocryphal, a way of symbolizing the mixture of bottomless vitality and trigger-happy murderousness that characterized blues culture in its epic frontier phase. It is also blues culture’s way of swallowing the insult leveled by the white South—that black male bodies are worthless—and spitting it back out, hardened into an assertion of frontier indomitability. With so many guns in so many hands, owners of the jooks did make real efforts to prevent the violence that threatened (if the law showed up after a murder) to close them down. The Delta barrelhouses, according to Elizabeth Moore, sometimes paid off local sheriffs to stage sham raids and confiscate patrons’ weapons.73 Often patrons played a cat-andmouse game with the law, hiding their weapons just as the lawmen stormed in. “We’d play them gambling joints,” remembered Sam Chatmon, a Delta blues pioneer and member of the Mississippi Sheiks: We’d play in this room and they’d have gambling in the other room. Sometime the law would come, and all them was in there in the gambling room, they had to pay a fine. You’d spy more pistols laying on the floor when the law come in. You could just look anywhere and find a pistol or big, long knife laying down on the floor, some of them stuck up under the heaters. You see, the houseman tell the law to come by to keep him from having a lot of trouble. Guys what got the pistols on ’em, if the law come and take their pistols, they wouldn’t have nothing to act with.74

The “houseman,” always armed and often accompanied by an assistant, was a Delta barrelhouse institution. Floorwalker and bouncer, he also

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served as a cloak-room clerk, subjecting entering patrons to a pat-down and confiscating their guns, razors, knives, and brass knuckles for the duration of their stay. “Any patron who became too belligerent in a barrelhouse,” according to Calt and Wardlow, was “liable to get killed” by the “house” man, who was typically an intimidating personage. The latter would routinely eject a patron for fighting with another barrelhouser, in which event he would remove the cartridges from the offender’s pistol (if he had one) before returning it, or, in some instances, withold the weapon until the following day. This expedient only postponed the killing that was a likely consequence of a serious barrelhouse quarrel, Elizabeth Moore said. “They’d tell you about it, then kill you,” she said of belligerent patrons. “Say: ‘I’m gonna kill you if it’s the last thing I do.’ If they didn’t kill you tonight, don’t worry—they was gonna get you.” The frequency of such delivered promises led her to regard the average barrelhouser as “crazy”; her husband [Willie Moore] said that patrons lacked “the right understandin’.” He added: “You take back there, well I say, from 1912 on up . . . folks kill you: kill another man about a woman.” 75

The year that ushered in a new era of jook violence, according to Willie Moore, was the year “Memphis Blues” became the rage; the year, according to Lucius Smith, that Handy’s song “brought about a whole lots of . . . trouble” in the form of “young folks” with a predilection for drinking, slow-drag dancing, and murderous mayhem. As the testimony of both men suggests, blues culture has from the start been energized by possessive romantic passion: the violent effects of its frustration, derailment, or implosion, but also the undeniable power of that passion itself, a source of endless vitality and lyric potential. Intimate violence remained a constant in the Delta jooks for most of the century, despite the efforts of their owners to defend themselves against “crazy” barrelhousers with the help of the white law. In the Florida jooks she visited in 1927 and describes in Mules and Men, Hurston found a significant variant on the pattern: the after-hours power exerted by the white Quarters Boss over “his” black workers is successfully contested by Big Sweet, who refuses to surrender her knife and shouts “Don’t you touch me, white folks!” 76 This symbolic victory is also a pyrrhic one—the unpoliced jook was a more dangerous one—and leads directly to Hurston’s subsequent flight, chased by an enraged Lucy and her unconfiscated knife. Here is another facet of blues culture’s predicament: the white law, focal point of so much justified black rage over the years, could also save black jook patrons from themselves. As blues culture spread north during the Great Migration of 1915 –19, unpoliced sites along the jook continuum would continue to be marked by familiar

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modes of intimate violence. Jazz-blues clarinetist Garvin Bushell, speaking of a Harlem cabaret in the 1920s in terms—the perils of “slow drag” blues dancing—that echo Lucius Smith and Charles Love, recalled: Our clientele at Leroy’s were mainly Negroes from the South who had migrated. They lived in the 130s, off Fifth Avenue—that was one of the toughest parts of Harlem. There was a dance floor in front of the bandstand. The dancers were our inspiration. Men and women danced close together in the cabarets. When they got high, they did just one step: the slow drag. You just grabbed your gal to have the confidence to go out the back door with her. The closer it got, the better. So slow music would provide them with a chance to do that. Leroy’s was one of the most sensational joints I’ve ever been in in my life. There were at least three shootings a week there, and a murder once a month. . . . There were always big fights in the Harlem cabarets in those days. It was during Prohibition, and the stuff people were drinking made the people wild and out of control—they’d fight and shoot and cut and break up the place. . . . [F]or the first six months, I’d come home a nervous wreck.77

Thus did blues violence, a legacy of the southern frontier, make its way north, inflecting black urban entertainment in the process. The first Great Migration was followed by a second that began during World War II, when the recently invented mechanical cotton harvester sent thousands of displaced agricultural workers to Chicago, Milwaukee, and other northern industrial centers in search of well-paying manufacturing jobs. John Lee Hooker, a Mississippi bluesman who resettled in Detroit in 1943, could sing “I’m Bad Like Jesse James” with conviction; the Delta he knew was its own kind of gunfighter nation, and had produced such men—white levee bosses, above all, and black jook owners. “I got three boys / To do my dirty work,” he growled: You don’t see me I’m the big boss I do the paying off after the job is did Mm hmmm They may shoot you they may cut you they may drown you I don’t know Cause I’m mad And I’m bad.78

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I’LL BE YOUR .44: BLUES WEAPONRY AS FIGURAL RESOURCE

When guns, knives, razors, fists, and other weapons register their presence in blues song and blues literature, they often do so by means of one or more distinct but related modes of metaphorical displacement, the second of which I have already mentioned in passing: 1. weapons as phallic signifiers (“I’ll Be Your .44”) 2. weapons as intruments for wounding (writing on) another body so as to make visible one’s own embodied emotional wounds (“Cuttin’ My ABCs”) 3. weapons as transformations of musical (particularly rhythmic) violences, and vice versa (“Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights”) African American blues culture is a signifying culture of violence, a scene of relentless aggressive self-dramatizing play in which an individual actor’s expressive competence is demonstrated through the ingenuity with which he or she shifts or blurs the semantic fields within which a given weapon is deployed. When Mae West, a sometime blues singer, uttered her famous come-on, “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?,” she was flaunting her prowess as a (white) blues rhetorician.79 When Charley Patton thumped his fist on his guitar in performance and yelled “This is how I beat my woman!,” he was signifying along the three vectors outlined above—transforming his pummeling fist into a metaphorical phallus, his musical instrument into a fictive black body “written on” by his blows, and the violent rhythmic blows themselves into aural equivalents of the slap of (phallic) fist against (symbolic) flesh. His signifying depends, as Elaine Scarry helps us understand, on the hermeneutic play his provocative comment sets in motion between handas-weapon and hand-as-tool: The weapon and the tool seem at moments indistinguishable, for they may each reside in a single physical object (even the clenched first of a human hand may be either a weapon or tool), and may be quickly transformed back and forth, now into the one, now into the other. . . . [I]t is . . . clear that what differentiates them is not the object itself but the surface on which they fall. What we call a “weapon” when it acts on a sentient surface we call a “tool” when it acts on a nonsentient surface. The hand that pounds a human face is a weapon and the hand that pounds the dough for bread or the clay for a bowl is a tool.80

The hand that plucks the strings of a guitar is a tool; the fist that pounds the wooden face of a guitar is also a tool—unless the blues guitarist, in a spoken aside to the crowd, indicates that a metaphorical transformation is in effect and that the wooden guitar-face is to be imagined as sentient woman-flesh. Much the same transformation is at work in a rarely noticed moment in Their Eyes Were Watching God, where affection is

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beginning to flow between Janie and Tea Cake in the form of playfully violent banter: “Evenin’, Mis’ Starks. Could yuh lemme have uh pound uh knuckle puddin’ till Saturday? Ah’m sho tuh pay yuh then.” “You needs ten pounds, Mr. Tea Cake. Ah’ll let yuh have all Ah got and you needn’t bother ’bout payin’ it back.” 81

In the only author’s footnote the novel supplies, Hurston translates “uh pound uh knuckle puddin’” as “A beating with the fist.” I shall have more to say about this scene in Chapter Six; what we might notice now is simply the way in which Tea Cake, a Florida bluesman whose home is the jook, verbally pleasures the woman he is trying to seduce by couching his sexual interest as a metaphoric invitation to sadomasochistic battery, an invitation that is in turn metaphorized as a customer requesting a product of a tradeswoman. Tea Cake is crooning, as it were, the male equivalent of the Andrews Sisters’s “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar”; he is asking Janie to ravish him, “let him have it,” in a way he can feel down deep. As her response demonstrates, Janie hears him loud and clear. The signifying tradition Hurston draws on here and in her other jook writings is both extensive and comprehensive, uniting blues lyrics, blues poems, and blues narratives in a shared field of violent metaphorical play. Blues weapons are a seemingly limitless figural resource, thanks to the rhetorical instability that accompanies them—a function of the sentience or nonsentience of the (bodily) surfaces they not only threaten to violate, but delight in metaphorically transforming themselves into. A blues knife may be both the agent of a threatened castration and a metaphoric phallus; a blues guitar may be both a weapon (when used to beat back a violent jook patron) and metaphoric black flesh beaten by a weapon-like fist. A blues gun may be both an aggrieved woman’s protection against the male sex and, in the case of Lurrie Bell’s “I’ll Be Your .44” (1982), a male lover’s way of reconfiguring and extending himself toward a desired female, his promise of the sensual pleasure and phallic potency she’ll enjoy if she possesses him: You don’t need no pistol, don’t need to run Don’t look behind you, girl, cause I’ll be your gun I’m your .44, and I’ll be your bullets too Cause I love you baby, I swear I’ll kill for you. I don’t want you to worry, I don’t want you to hide Don’t look behind you, woman, strap me to your side I’m your .44, and I’ll be your bullets too Cause I love you baby, I swear I’ll kill for you.

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You know that people call me crazy, say I’m a dangerous man But I know what I’m doing, just put me in your hand I’m your .44, and I’ll be your bullets too Cause I love you baby, I swear I’ll kill for you.82

“I’ll Be Your .44” works a metaphorical terrain mined later in the 1980s by both gangsta rap and its Jamaican equivalent, “gun talk,” in which DJs named Ninjaman, Merciless, and Terror Fabulous filled dancehalls with tunes such as “I’m Like a Gunshot Heading toward a Target.” 83 Deep feeling is represented in Bell’s case as the singer’s willingness not just to kill for his lover, but to transform himself metaphorically into cold blue steel—a nonsentient body, one would have thought, although Bell’s lyric hinges on just that paradox. The gestures by which he encourages his lover to appropriate him as a weapon (“strap me to your side,” “put me in your hand”) are also gestures of sexual intimacy. These gestures are generated by the song’s central metaphor: a man’s impassioned self-reduction into a gun and bullets, which is to say a symbolic penis and sperm. The power of self-protection Bell bequeaths on his lover, in other words—his determination to make her secure through his violence-dispensing presence—is undercut by the metaphorical violence he thrusts into her (intimate) life: his symbolic orgasm, were it to take place, would be her gruesome murder. The song finally offers its occupants no true romantic sanctuary, no safe haven from the world’s pressures. “I’ll Be Your .44” does, however, offer Bell the daemonic pleasure of virtuosic signifying—and, in that, a measure of physical and spiritual relief. This relief is a function, according to Elaine Scarry, of the singular importance that images of weapons have for people who experience extreme bodily pain: victims of torture, for example, or cancer victims. Just as the descent into pain can be measured by the dissolution of the victim’s language into prelinguistic screams, cries, and groans, so is the victim’s reemergence into language both marked and assisted by the transformation of the all-but-inexpressible pain into images drawn, more often than not, from the language of weaponry: [T]here are many outwardly visible indications that the image of the weapon is not just one among thousands of signs but is a sign occupying a primal place in the original moment of transformation [of pain into the projected image]. Of such outward indications, perhaps, the most important to recall here is the centrality of the image [of the weapon] in the language of people in physical pain. . . . [T]o be present when the person in pain rediscovers speech and so regains his powers of self-objectification is almost to be present at the birth, or rebirth, of language. That the person

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in pain very typically moves through a handful of descriptive words to an “as if ” construction, and an “as if ” construction that has a weapon on the other side, indicates the primacy of the sign in the elementary work of projection into metaphor. To describe one’s hurt in an image of agency is to project it into an object which, though at first conceived of as moving toward the body, by its very separability from the body becomes an image that can be lifted away, carrying some of the attributes of pain with it.84

If the striking presence of guns and knives in blues texts is at least partly a function of representational verisimilitude—that is, blues people are violent, the texts tell it like it is—then Scarry offers a supplemental explanation: it feels good, if you’re a blues singer in pain, to project and objectify your rage, heartache, and lust-sickness as images of guns and knives, cutting and shooting, and related tropes. Where “I’ll Be Your .44” bodies forth the voice of a hurtfully intense love-lust, “lift[ing it] away” and “carrying some of the attributes of pain with it” by troping on the bluesman-as-portable-phallic-weapon, Bessie Tucker’s “Got Cut All to Pieces” (1928) finds relief by figuring the blueswoman as the victim of an emotional razor attack, left for dead by her no-good-man’s deserting love: I got cut all to pieces, aah-aah . . . about a man I love, I got cut all to pieces, aah-aah . . . about a man I love, I’m gonna get that a-woman, just as sho’ as the sky’s above. Now when my man left me, I was half-dead, lyin’ in my do’, Now when my man left me, I was half-dead, lyin’ in my do’, I was sufferin’ and a-groanin’, “Oh, daddy, please don’t go.” 85

Langston Hughes’s “In a Troubled Key” (1942) exemplies even more clearly Scarry’s claim that “[t]o describe one’s hurt in an image of agency is to project it into an object,” which is to say a fictive weapon—an objective correlative for the hurt, but also the instrument of a possible revenge: Do not sell me out, baby, Please do not sell me out. Do not sell me out, baby. Do not sell me out. I used to believe in you, baby, Now I begins to doubt. Still I can’t help loving you, Even though you do me wrong. Says I can’t help lovin’ you

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Though you do me wrong— But my love might turn into a knife Instead of to a song.86

Here, again, a blues text reaches its crisis with an image of intimate violence—a revenge fantasy, in this case, provoked by the familiar romantic agony of love gone bad. The speaker’s gender is deliberately ambiguous. This is a generic blues poem, a template for the metamorphosis of what the southern novelist Larry Brown has called “big bad love” into inconsolable, murderous rage. The soon-to-be-shredded cathexis, a locus of looming inarticulate pain, reconstructs itself as both (fictive) knife and (achieved) song. “In a Troubled Key” combines, in muted form, the first two metaphorical displacements I listed earlier: the knife as an emblem of phallic power and as an instrument for making visible the speaker’s embodied emotional wounds. Those two displacements, still muted, take a considerably more playful form in Ida Cox’s pistol-packing blues, “How Can I Miss You When I’ve Got Dead Aim?” (1925): Don’t let your man know he can make you blue. ’Cause if you do he’ll make a fool outta you. How can you miss him, honey, when you’ve got dead aim? 87

Hardened with a laughter-inducing pun on “miss,” failed love turns into an imputed (phallic) gun here rather than into one more sad-eyed song, offering the apostrophized female lover the gift of refurbished pride. The dead aim she’s “got” will let her mark up her blues-inducing man—writing her loss, and purging it, across his sorry hide. In August Wilson’s Seven Guitars (1996), Louise, who opens the play singing a bawdy blues song in what the stage directions term “a much-needed affirmation of life,” 88 wields her ex-lover Henry’s gun with a phallic panache that only highlights her aching sense of loss. “He left a razor and a pair of shoes,” she tells Vera, describing her abandonment: Vera: That’s like Floyd left his old guitar. Louise: He got to the doorway and I told him, “Leave your pistol. Don’t leave me here by myself.” He ain’t said nothing. He took out his pistol and handed it to me. I told him say, “I ought to shoot you.” We laughed and then he kissed me goodbye. I ain’t seen him since. I got that pistol upstairs now. What I’m trying to tell you is, don’t let no man use you up and then talk about he gotta go. Shoot him first.89

When another male character tells Louise “You know a woman need a man,” she replies, “I don’t need none that bad. I got me a thirty-two

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caliber pistol up there. That be all the man I need.” 90 Like Lurrie Bell’s “I’ll Be Your .44,” Wilson’s text performs a kind of blue-toned joke-work, finding wit and expressive vitality in the image of weapon-as-phallus while at the same time using that image to body forth, and offer the blues subject at least partial relief from, aching deep feeling. When knives grasped by men materialize in blues texts, particularly within the “shoddy confines” of the jook, they are almost always spectacular embodiments of phallic aggression. In Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the bass player Slow Drag gets his name from a kind of phallic swordplay he engages in one night with a jealous boyfriend over the body of an orgasmic woman: Cutler: Slow Drag break a woman’s back when he dance. They had this contest one time in this little town called Bolingbroke about a hundred miles outside of Macon. We was playing for this dance and they was giving twenty dollars to the best slow draggers. Slow Drag looked over the competition, got down off the bandstand, grabbed hold of one of them gals, and stuck to her like a fly to jelly. Like wood to glue. Man had that gal whooping and hollering so . . . everybody stopped to watch. This fellow come in . . . this gal’s fellow . . . and pulled a knife a foot long on Slow Drag. ’Member that, Slow Drag? Slow Drag: Boy that mama was hot! The front of her dress was wet as a dishrag! Levee: So what happened? What the man do? Cutler: Slow Drag ain’t missed a stroke. The gal, she just look at her man with that sweet dizzy look in her eye. She ain’t about to stop! Folks was clearing out, ducking and hiding under tables, figuring there’s gonna be a fight. Slow Drag just looked over the gal’s shoulder at the man and said, “Mister, if you’d quit hollering and wait a minute . . . you’ll see I’m doing you a favor. I’m helping this gal win ten dollars so she can buy you a gold watch.” The man just stood there and looked at him, all the while stroking that knife. Told Slow Drag, say, “All right, then nigger. You just better make damn sure you win.” That’s when folks started calling him Slow Drag. The women got to hanging around him so bad after that, them fellows in that town ran us out of there.91

The “foot long” knife that confronts Slow Drag here is blues literature’s way of dramatizing the violent atmospherics that seem to have accompanied slow-drag dancing since its barrelhouse debut in the 1890s, and that Garvin Bushell observed with dismay in jazz-age Harlem. An expression of aggrieved masculinity, the boyfriend’s knife is also the instrument of a threatened castration. In Walter Mosley’s RL’s Dream, ten-year-old Atwater Wise, a future bluesman, has snuck into a Missis-

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sippi jook and been picked up by two flirtatious young women; the knife brandished by Cody, their boyfriend, signifies not just Cody’s phallic aggression—a way of forcing Atwater to drink emasculating corn liquor— but his earned individuality: “I—I think I had enough,” the boy [Atwater] answered. The room was hot but his forehead felt like ice. “I got . . . I gots to go home.” Cody reached down into his pants again and came out with a long homemade knife. The blade was from a five-inch metal saw that had been shaped and sharpened by a grinding stone. It was black and jagged but Atwater could see that it was still sharp. The haft was wadded cork wound tightly around with fly-green fishing twine. Cody put the knife down next to the bottle and said, “You not refusin’ my hospitality now is ya, man?” 92

Cody’s phallic potency, his knife-accrued manhood, is also his individuated selfhood, his grinding-stone-honed “style.” Weapons, as I have said, offer blues people several ways of manifesting style: serving not only as phallic totem, they may also be used as a stylus, a means of writing on or “carving” bodies, often as a way of making visible one’s own emotional wounds. “Cuttin’ My ABCs,” a razor song, is a spectacular example of this second metaphorical displacement, but there are others. “That trash!” fumes bluesman Big Johnny White in Gerard Herzhaft’s Long Blues in A Minor, raging at the invidious machinations of a French promoter. “One of these days I’m gonna cut me a few holes in his skin!” 93 “I took a gal to the beer tavern,” sings Peetie Wheatstraw in “Beer Tavern” (1939), evoking homicidal jealousy at secondhand, “. . . things was lookin’ hot, / But my ole lady took her pocket knife and cut out my baby’s heart.” 94 Razors, according to Paul Oliver, were a more effective way of writing on one’s antagonist, inflicting longlasting humiliations, where knives, clasp-knives (“two-by-fours”), and chibs were the best way of sending a death letter, of the sort Bea Ella Thornhill wreaks on Beau Beau Weaver in Train Whistle Guitar: Less likely to cause death, the razor permanently scarred a victim and razor-slashing attacks and fights arose from the vicious determination to leave a recognizable signature of revenge. With the handle removed, the spur of the blade lay back along the hand and the blade projected a fraction between the fingers: a couple of swift slaps and the victim was unaware that he had been cut until he felt the blood upon his face. . . . Double-bladed, and the width of the hand, the “two-by-four” about which the “Yas Yas Girl” (Merline Johnson) sang, was a clasp knife, much favored by the prostitute who could conceal it in her kimono without

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difficulty. . . . Longer was the chib, keen-bladed and deadly when manipulated with the upward thrust that made disarmament far more difficult. It was the weapon of the “strong arm woman” who seduced a man and when he was in her arms, robbed him and cut him “every way but loose.” It was the weapon that killed blues singer Charlie Jordan on 9th Street, St. Louis . . . .95

This notion of using a bladed weapon not merely to hurt an antagonist, but to express one’s feelings and leave a “recognizable signature of revenge,” is not unique to blues culture, although it does perhaps reach a kind of apotheosis there. In the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, the English folk tradition suddenly swells with murder ballads written by men but containing ventrioloquized “confessions,” some of them quite graphic, by women convicted of murdering their husbands for various grievances. “Anne Wallen,” for example, who killed her husband in 1616, tells us: Then presently one of his tooles I got, And on his body gaue a wicked stroake . . . Amongst his entrails I this chisel threw, where as his caule came out, for which I rue.96

What distinguishes blues violence from the “wicked stroake[s]” inflicted by sharp “tooles” in the English lyric tradition is not so much its visceral immediacy—this ballad certainly has that—but the first-person intimacy of the ravaging it proposes to the fictive “you,” and the striking tropes it employs, at once brutal and playful. Lillian Glinn’s “Packing House” (1928) opens with an exemplary stanza: A bucket of blood, a butcher’s knife is all I crave, A bucket of blood, a butcher’s knife is all I crave, Let me work in your packing house daddy, while I am your slave.97

A packing house is a sausage factory; sausage is one of countless sly phallic metaphors offered by the blues tradition.98 The precise nature of Glinn’s plea to her lover is difficult to decode, although a kind of slippery subjection is clearly being tendered. The verse is suffused with a carnivalesque sense of lovers making their mark on each other, of bodily fluids splattering across carved (human) meat, of a knife-phallus as the focus of a pleasurably sexualized exchange. “What the doers of blues do,” writes Steven G. Smith, “is hold themselves in a certain configuration in which the very forces that threaten them come to trace lines in their identity; the raggedness of oppressed existence becomes their own bold signature.” 99 What “Packing House,”

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“I’ll Be Your .44,” and “Cuttin My ABCs” do is reclaim black workingclass bodies from a violence that threatens to overwhelm them, not by denying or fleeing from that threat into the consolation of honey-toned fantasy, but by diving headfirst into violence and resurfacing with the boldest of metaphors. The need to make one’s mark on each other (and thus on the world) that animates blues people is a legacy, in part, of the white South’s attempt to deny or erase black individuality through stereotype (“the floating worthless Negro”) and violent discipline. Discipline, after all, sometimes took the form of writing-on-the-body, with a white hand holding the weapon and a black body suffering the inscription, as suggested by Son House’s “County Farm Blues” (1942), from Tunica County, Mississippi: In the South, when you do anything that’s wrong, In the South, when you do anything that’s wrong, They’ll sho put you down on the county farm. They’ll put you under a man called Captain Jack They’ll put you under a man called Captain Jack Who’ll write his name up and down your back.100

A whip is the weapon here; although “Cap’n” was the honorific applied to white supervisors at Parchman Farm, “Captain Jack” seems to invoke a more distant history of English naval discipline. Or perhaps one need look no further than postbellum life on the Mississippi. “Cruel and merciless,” writes Paul Oliver, “the white mates [on the Mississippi riverboats] controlled their rough [black] crews with their bull-whips—’black snakes’ as the roustabouts called them.” 101 The universal thump of racial discipline, in any case, was transmuted into individuating inscription: black muleskinners on the levee construction crews sang the following song, recorded by Leadbelly: . . . other men on the levee Holler, “Don’ you murder me, Please baby, please baby . . . I’m down in the Bottom . . . . . . putting in my initials Honey, on the mule’s behind, With ma line, babe, with ma line, babe.102

Within the blues tradition, such an individuating disciplinary blow against another’s flesh is sometimes bodied forth as musical violence, the third mode of metaphorical displacement I outlined earlier. By musical violence, I mean the uncanny way in which strident rhythmic accents

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function in certain blues recordings as a kind of second-order weapon, repeating or doubling the shotgunned “blows” inflicted by the lyrics themselves. John Lee Hooker’s 1962 hit, “Boom Boom,” for example, alternates a repeated four-beat stop-time riff with lines of lyric describing the singer’s violently lustful reaction to a beautiful woman’s provocations: (boom boom boom boom) Boom boom boom boom (boom boom boom boom) Gonna shoot you right down (boom boom boom boom) Knock you off your feet (boom boom boom boom) Take you home with me (boom boom boom boom) Put you in my house (boom boom boom boom) Boom boom boom boom (boom boom boom boom) I love to see you walk (boom boom boom boom) Up and down the floor (boom boom boom boom) When you talk to me (boom boom boom boom) That baby talk (boom boom boom boom) I like it like that (boom boom boom boom) When you talk to me (boom boom boom boom) You knocks me dead (boom boom boom boom) Knock me off my feet (boom boom boom boom) How! How! How! How! 103

The blues singer here, led by his lust-sickness, is both predator and prey; the musical commentary that sustains his fantasy of mutual possession bespeaks, in its relentless, pulse-thundering repetitions, the violence of his compulsion. Hooker seems to have learned a lesson from Poe, that the attractions of a beautiful, death-shadowed woman, a Ligeia of the

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jooks, is the most poetical subject in the world. What distinguishes “Boom Boom,” with its whiff of trophy-hunting necrophilia, from Poe’s equally compulsive southern gothic is the implacable vitality of the beat, denying death’s stasis even as it sounds death-dealing blows. A similar paradox is at work in Little Walter’s “Boom Boom, Out Goes the Light” (1955), where the spoken exclamation “Boom boom!” is doubled by twin shots from the drummer’s snare: No kiddin’ . . . I’m ready to fight . . . I’ve been lookin’ for my baby all night If I get her in my sight . . . Boom boom! Out goes the light. I thought I treated my baby fair . . . now she’s getting all in my hair If I get her in my sight . . . Boom boom! Out goes the light.

Rhythmic aggression bespeaks homicidal rage here, not overpowering lust, but both Hooker’s and Walter’s songs are generated by a bluesman’s hunger to possess and control the object of his passions—to mark her with his blows and make her his. Yet the musical texture of Walter’s song, apart from these aural blows, is light, jazzy, playful: a pleasurable release from compulsion into the wistful complaint of Walter’s extended harp solo. The violence that circulates within blues texts may erupt as musical energy in various ways and to various purposes, some of which may be contradicted by other significant musical elements. The passions surrounding notions of possession, however—a lover’s claims on the body of his or her lover—seem particularly inclined to take musical form, perhaps because of the metaphorical association of musicmaking and lovemaking: the feelingful caresses bestowed by both activities, the sounds drawn from one’s “instrument.” In Louise Redd’s novel Playing the Bones (1996), the white female protagonist watches her lover, a young Louisiana bluesman named Black Jesus, being led away by the police after beating up his black girlfriend. “I think of how Bill calls his keyboards his ‘bones,’” she thinks, invoking Jesus’s bandmate. “I think of Jesus’s hands hurting a woman, playing the bones of her body just to hear the sounds she makes.” 104 The wounded blues body—shot, stabbed, beaten, bruised, claimed—is sometimes, and distressingly, a musical body, a source of pained lyric utterance. The musical exclamation “Boom boom!,” inscribing a power in which violence and sexuality intertwine, is a master-trope of blues textuality; it echoes through the tradition, generating unexpected correspondences. It is the midwife’s apocryphal comment to Frank Broonzy, Big Bill’s father, on delivering his wife’s twins: “You shot both barrels off that time.” 105 It is Eugene Redmond’s blues ode to his “Double Clutch Lover” (n.d.):

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Her fire was in her fame! Her fire was in her fame! O Yeah! Uh Huh! O Yeah! Uh Huh! Cause she was a double I said a double / / two barrels I said a double / / two barrels Make it two, babeeeee! Cause she was a Double Clutch Lover.106

“Boom boom!” is the double-barreled fate of blues singer Ursa Corregidora, who is knocked downstairs by her boyfriend Mutt on the opening page of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, losing her uterus as a result.107 It is the fate of Manfred Banks, blues harmonica player, who is shot at as he tries to break into the home of a preacher who is consorting with his estranged wife in the opening paragraph of Clarence Major’s Dirty Bird Blues. “He got the window up about twelve inches but it wouldn’t move any more. Stuck. Then suddenly this big boom. And it came again real fast. A shotgun blast sho as hell.” 108 “Boom boom!” is also, significantly, the climactic moment of Their Eyes Were Watching God, when a grieving Janie faces her beloved but rabidly jealous Tea Cake and “[t]he pistol and the rifle r[i]ng out almost together,” 109 putting Tea Cake out of his misery and giving Janie new life. The uses to which Hurston puts this pair of blues guns offer a striking paradox. One gun, Tea Cake’s pistol, is raised in homicidal bitterness at love gone bad, an exemplary jook gesture, as though “Boom Boom, Out Goes the Light” were his soundtrack and “I’ll Be Your .44” his perverse promise. “Janie,” he mutters, “Ah done went through everything tuh be good tuh you and it hurt me tuh mah heart tuh be ill treated lak Ah is.” 110 He intends to claim her as his sole possession and inscribe his heartache on her flesh. The other gun, Janie’s rifle, is raised strictly in self-defense and deployed with loving compassion. What dies—and what is intentionally killed off—at the end of the novel is the violence of the jook itself, a passionate aggrieved expressiveness that Hurston locates in Tea Cake’s inciting male form. What triumphs in the novel is violence shorn of harsh or negative emotion, a self-regulating violence that acts only when necessary in order to create a world in which selfrespecting equals can, as Janie tells Phoeby, “come kiss and be kissed.” 111 Self-regulating violence, as embodied in Janie’s mercy-killing of Tea Cake, is women’s violence— or rather, a hopeful dream of women’s violence. Hurston articulated this dream in the face of what she knew to be the considerably more problematic truth. As she had discovered in the Polk County jooks, women claimed by the blues could be every bit as jealous, possessive, and murderous as their male peers.

CHAPTER SIX

“The Blade Already Crying in My Flesh” Zora Neale Hurston’s Blues Narratives I discovered that I was extra strong by playing with other girls near my age. I had no way of judging the force of my playful blows, and so I was always hurting somebody. Then they would say I meant to hurt, and go home and leave me. Everything was all right, however, when I played with boys. It was a shameful thing to admit being hurt among them. Furthermore, they could dish it out themselves, and I was acceptable to them because I was the one girl who could take a good pummeling without running home to tell. —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road Let me tell you, Baby, tell what I will do Rob, steal and kill somebody just to git home to you. Ain’t that loving you, Baby? Ain’t that loving you, Baby? Ain’t that loving you, Baby, and you don’t even know my name. —Jimmy Reed, “Ain’t That Loving You Baby”

HURSTONISM AND BLUES LEGACIES

Zora Neale Hurston’s profound engagement with blues music and blues culture—as pioneering folklorist, cultural anthropologist, memoirist, novelist, acquaintance of Bessie Smith, and occasional amateur performer—has often been invoked but never explored in sufficient depth.1 Critics have vigorously debated the socially retrograde elements of Tea Cake’s character in Their Eyes Were Watching God, but the guns, knives, and sexually-charged beatings that he introduces into Janie Crawford’s life have never been properly contextualized as blues violences, part of the wide-ranging discursive tradition outlined in the previous chapter.2 Trudier Harris offers a provocative reading of Hurston’s complex textual persona in Mules and Men (“The Collector as Sexual Being”), and of Big Sweet as an intimidatingly “extrafeminine” badwoman, but her primary concern is not with Hurston as blues writer.3 Those who do read Hurston in a blues light often succumb to forms of celebrationist mythmaking; what they miss are the true dimensions of her achievement as an investigator and delineator of Florida blues people in all their exuberant, death-dealing glory. In the aftermath of Hurston’s critical rediscovery in the mid 1970s, justified enthusiasm for her writings has, as Ann duCille 233

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aptly notes, been enlarged into “Hurstonism”: “the conspicuous consumption of Zora Neale Hurston as the initiator of the African American (woman’s) literary tradition.” 4 Hurstonism has tended to see Hurston not simply as the voice of southern black folk, but as the voice of southern black blues folk, the embodiment of their expressive legacy. Mary Ellison, for example, has called Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), “a brilliant blues ballad”; Janie Crawford is, in Houston A. Baker’s words, “a blues artist par excellence” who “recapitulates the blues experience of all black women treated as ‘mules of the world.’” “Hurston could be said to be a great blues singer,” concurs John Lowe. “In my mind,” Alice Walker has famously observed, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form a sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in the tradition of black women singers, rather than among “the literati” . . . . There were the extreme highs and lows of her life, her undaunted pursuit of adventure, passionate emotional and sexual experience, and her love of freedom. Like Billie and Bessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods, pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from “common people.” 5

“Of all the [Harlem] Renaissance artists,” claims her biographer, Robert Hemenway, defending her against Larry Neal’s general critique of New Negro aesthetics, “Zora Hurston confronted [the] ‘visceral elements’ [of black folk life] most personally.” 6 Strikingly absent from these testimonials is a close examination of the one moment in Hurston’s career—rendered, with key variations, in both Mules and Men and Dust Tracks on a Road—when it might be argued that Hurston confronted the “visceral elements” of black blues culture most intimately, and troublingly. This moment came in 1928, during fieldwork at a jook in Polk County, Florida, when Hurston precipitated homicidal jealousy in Lucy, one of the jook’s regulars. The point of contention was Slim, a former lover of Lucy’s with whom Hurston had had a calculatedly friendly if nonsexual relationship. “He was a valuable source of material,” she admitted in Dust Tracks, “so I built him up a bit by buying him drinks and letting him ride in my car.” 7 With the sound of guitar-driven blues in the air and four or five couples dancing the slow drag, Lucy suddenly bursts into the jook, open switchblade in hand. “[S]he started walking hippily straight at me,” Hurston remembered: She knew I couldn’t get out easily because she had me barred and she knew not many people will risk running into a knife blade to stop a fight. So she didn’t have to run. I didn’t move but I was running in my skin. I could hear the blade already crying in my flesh. I was sick and weak.8

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In short order Hurston’s guardian angel and instructor in knife-handling, the fearless Big Sweet, leaps to her defense. A free-for-all ensues, everyone yells at Hurston to flee, and she flees—from the jook, from Polk County, from the state of Florida, from anything like easy identification with either the “common people” invoked by Walker or the “lowdown” subject position that it has been Hurston’s principal goal, for the purposes of research, to achieve. An ethnologist’s worst nightmare, it would seem: the participant-observer is forcibly exiled from her chosen tribe; “the crisis of a self,” to reprise James Clifford on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “at some ‘furthest point of navigation.’” 9 A reappraisal of Hurston’s achievement as a literary blueswoman might begin here, in this troubling and revealing moment. How, we might ask, does Hurston’s experience in the Polk County jooks resonate with what we know of jook life across the South, and with the violent thread running through the blues lyric tradition? How does the jook immersion narrative incorporated into Mules and Men differ from that later included in Dust Tracks on a Road? How did Hurston transform a real jook fighter (Big Sweet) into a fictional one (Tea Cake), and what do these two characters have to teach us about the role of blues violence in the process of self-making? How might Hurston’s own aggression—she describes her youthful self as a physically assertive girl who was “always hurting somebody”—have made her uniquely responsive to the jook’s expressive economy? Most intriguingly, how were Hurston’s interactions with Polk County blues people marked by her class anxieties as both a university-trained intellectual and a native of a slightly more elevated location on the class spectrum of Florida black folk? (DIS)FIGURING BLUES CULTURE IN MULES AND MEN AND DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD

Class anxiety is not something we generally associate with Hurston, so routinely is she depicted as the embodiment of vernacular blackness, adept at “swapping lies” with the front-porch spinners of tales in her allblack hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Yet Hurston’s connection with blues culture is marked from the beginning by a complex web of feeling into which affiliative responsiveness and uneasy class distinctions are both woven, along with a hint of the intimate violence she will later encounter in the jooks. Shortly after her mother’s death, in her mid-teens, Zora encounters blues people for the first time on the City of Jacksonville, a side-wheel steamer she is taking home from boarding school: A group of turpentine hands with queer haircuts, in blue overalls with red handkerchiefs around their necks, . . . huddled around a tall black man

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with a guitar round his neck. They ate out of shoe-boxes and sang between drinks out of a common bottle. A stocking-foot woman was with them with a dirk in her garter. Her new shoes were in a basket beside her. She dipped snuff and kept missing the spittoon. The glitter of brass and the red carpet made her nervous. The captain kept passing through and pulling my hair gently and asking me to spell something, and kept being surprised when I did. (DT, 110)

Hurston’s solitary literacy contrasts here with the blues people’s collective orality (inspired by “drinks out of a common bottle”); her socially centering mascot-relationship with the captain contrasts with the blues people’s “queer” subcultural haircuts and the “stocking-foot woman[’s]” class anxiety in the presence of “brass and . . . red carpet.” Yet there is class anxiety on Hurston’s side, too: a sense of her own difference from their “queerness” mingled with quiet fascination at the scene of familial togetherness they present. Hurston’s anxiety registers as projective empathy with the stocking-foot woman (“the glitter . . . made her nervous”); it may be evoked, too, by that dirk in the woman’s garter: a striking but ambiguous marker of personal power. A child of the frontier South, Hurston was not unfamiliar with weapons; her father was a marksman who “could hit ninety-seven out of a hundred with a gun” (DT, 91). Strapped to the leg of a snuff-dipping woman, this knife, she seems to sense, is a weapon from somewhere else. These are not common people, but uncommon people—as is Hurston herself, a self-conscious exception to the rules people have made for her—and what separates them from her is what draws her to them. Hurston’s investigations into blues culture were her attempt to discover this “somewhere else,” this frontier-withina-frontier that had called to her as a teenager. Intimate violence, violence in the jook, is an essential constituent of that world; what is not an essential constituent, as Hurston represents it, are the disciplinary and vigilante violences inflicted by whites against blacks: lynching, whitecapping, brutal prison beatings, and the like. She leaves them out of her books, for the most part, along with the overt racial bitterness they produced.10 Hurston was criticized harshly by Sterling Brown for this omission in an early review of Mules and Men. “Her characters,” he wrote, are quaint, complaisant, bad enough to kill each other in jooks, but meek otherwise, socially unconscious. This, to the reviewer, makes Mules and Men singularly incomplete. These people live in a land shadowed by squalor, poverty, disease, violence[,] enforced ignorance and exploitation. Even if brow beaten, they do know a smouldering resentment. . . . Mules and Men should be more bitter; it would be nearer the truth.11

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Yet Brown’s critique neglects an obvious question: isn’t it possible that Hurston’s characters style themselves as “bad” and “kill each other in jooks” out of a displaced resentment at white mistreatment? They have, it seems clear, evolved a rich and sophisticated expressive culture, a culture of violent redress grounded in—if not wholly reducible to—sublimated racial bitterness, and the “truth” Hurston offers us is precisely this. Even as Brown, Richard Wright, and other early reviewers criticized Hurston for neglecting white racism and the furious resentment it produced in black subjects in favor of minstrel-tinged “laughter and tears,” so John Lowe and others in recent decades have followed Alice Walker in claiming Hurston as a comic realist intent on depicting “racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings,” white racism notwithstanding.12 This celebrationist perspective, too, elides the uneasy realities of blues culture. The drama that unfolds in the final chapters of Their Eyes, after all, revolves around the issue of Tea Cake’s sickness and profound diminishment, his reduction to a virtual caricature of the bluesman as jealous, possessive, gun-wielding agent of vengeance. Hurston uses Tea Cake’s startling metamorphosis, I will suggest, to critique both white southern racisim (which has finally driven him mad) and blues culture (which has fostered his possessiveness and violence all along). My intention for the moment is to refocus our gaze on Hurston herself, as both a pioneering folklorist and an actor in her own text. Missing from both critical and celebrationist views of her work is the paradoxical figure of Hurston as a university-educated blueswoman in training: hungry for “material,” exempt from nonintellectual labor thanks to her white patron’s stipend, eager to rub shoulders with Polk County blues people—whose confidence she quickly earns—yet pricked by class anxiety, cheerfully oblivious to the gravity of the role she is playing in the jook’s erotic economy, and stricken with class-specific terror when confronted by the distinctly unhealthy violence with which that economy is policed by the jook’s female denizens. “I thought of all I had to live for,” she admits at a pivotal moment in Mules and Men, “and turned cold at the thought of dying in a violent manner in a sordid saw-mill camp” (151). Some critics have read this textual moment as Hurston’s nod toward her white audience’s presumed condescending judgment of the camp and its blues people; I suggest, instead, that we read it as evidence of Hurston’s struggle with the predicament of blues culture, which is to say the murderous vitality that both intrigues and unnerves her. Here, in the moment she turns cold at death’s approach, is Robert Johnson’s “blues is a low-down shakin’ chill”: an unwanted yet essential epiphany, visceral enlightenment across the class barrier.13

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The blueswomen of Polk County—Lucy, Ella Wall, Big Sweet— were loud, proud, fearsome, furious. One of them, at least, was more than willing to direct the full force of that fury at Hurston. Zora may have been a fighter, but she wasn’t this kind of fighter. “I suggested [to Big Sweet] buying a knife for defense,” Hurston confesses in Dust Tracks, but she said I would certainly be killed that way. “You don’t know how to handle no knife. You ain’t got dat kind of a sense. You wouldn’t even know how to hold it to de best advantage. You would draw your arm way back to stop her, and whilst you was doing all dat, Lucy would run in under your arm and be done; cut you to death before you could touch her. And then again, when you sure ’nough fighting, it ain’t enough to just stick ’em wid your knife. You got to ram it in to de hilt, then you pull down.” (189)

“[T]he white man,” Hurston had written in “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” “is despised by Negroes as a very poor fighter individually.” 14 This observation speaks, unexpectedly, to Hurston’s own curious position as a member of the intelligentsia adventuring in a working-class subculture: despised as any white man for her ignorance of knife culture, yet still part of the family, a country cousin with city accents who can be confided in with a kind of fraternal intimacy that no white man would be and is at least marginally educatable. The trust Hurston enjoyed in the eyes of Big Sweet and other jook informants helps clarify her achievement as a blues investigator, even as it poses unanswerable questions. “My good friend and colleague Zora Hurston,” Alan Lomax writes, captured the [give-and-take of black comradeship]. But she did not report the downside—the peonage, the pitiful wages, the long hours, the brutal, often murderous bosses, the monstrous absurdities of Jim Crow. Her turpentiners and railroaders were probably afraid to venture onto this risky terrain. Perhaps she, out of concern for them, did not ask them to, or, if they did, dared not publish what they confided to her. We shall never know. At any rate, in the twenties and thirties it was too dangerous to talk or even sing about these matters. The South was virtually sealed up.15

Sealed up, the South had also been turned into a kind of pressure cooker. “[S]uch cynical violence imposed from the top,” Lomax argues elsewhere, aligning himself implicitly with Fanon, “led to violence within the exploited group—a very ugly safety valve.” 16 Hurston’s singular accomplishment is to have fingered the jagged edge of this safety valve, unsealed and depicted its ugly-beauty as culture in a way that none of her white male contemporaries (including young Alan Lomax and, arguably,

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Lawrence Gellert) were able to, precisely because she enjoyed no racial exemption from the economy of intimate violence, expressed as the will to disfigure, which grounded passional interplay within the jooks.17 “You got tuh go there tuh know there,” Janie Starks insists at the end of Their Eyes (183), and Hurston, class-anxieties notwithstanding, made the trip, placed her body at risk for the sake of thick description. In this respect, her “inside” narratives about Florida blues people represent a deliberate corrective to the writings of white folklorists Guy Johnson and Howard Odum, whose celebrated Negro Workaday Songs (1926) was published the year before Hurston first set out for Polk County.18 “I am finding lots of things which will intrigue you,” she wrote her mentor Franz Boas from the road in December of 1928. “I find Odom [sic] and Johnson in error constantly.” In October of 1929 she explained: “They have made six or seven songs out of one song and made one song out of six or seven. . . . Let them but hit upon a well turned phrase and another volume slops off the press. Some of it would be funny if they were not serious scientists; or are they?” To Alain Locke she joked in May 1928, “They have done the[ir] book just about like [Columbia University president] Nicholas Murray Butler would do the black bottom.” 19 What Odum and Johnson had done was replicate in their role as professional folklorists the white bossman–black laborer dialectic that had long distorted southern race relations. “In most instances,” they had noted in Negro Workaday Songs with clinical precision, “the Negro is at his ‘best’ when being urged to cooperate in the rendering of his folk songs. . . . Rarely ever does he ‘produce’ if let alone with only a first approach.” 20 Odum and Johnson leave it to their readers to imagine the particular forms their urgings and approaches took, but a process so inflected by a traditional southern dynamic of labor-on-demand was almost certain to produce something less than full disclosure—although the two pioneering folklorists did, to be fair, collect a broader range of material than Hurston, over a longer period of time. In Mules and Men, by contrast, Hurston depicts her scene of first contact as a homecoming in which the act of collecting, frankly acknowledged, endows local culture with a surplus value it then bequeaths on the cultural workers themselves (as fresh awareness of self-worth), rather than harvesting for profit elsewhere. “Ah come to collect some old stories and tales,” Hurston tells the men playing Florida-flip on the porch of Joe Clarke’s store in Eatonville, Florida, and Ah know y’all know a plenty of ’em and that’s why Ah headed straight for home.” “What you mean, Zora, them big old lies we tell when we’re jus’ sittin’ around here on the store porch doin’ nothin’?” asked B. Moseley.

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“Yeah, those same ones about Old Massa, and colored folks in heaven, and— oh, y’all know the kind I mean.” “Aw shucks,” exclaimed George Thomas doubtfully. “Zora, don’t you come here and tell de biggest lie first thing. Who you reckon want to read all them old-time tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear?” “Plenty of people, George. They are a lot more valuable than you might think. We want to set them down before it’s too late.” “Too late for what?” “Before everybody forgets all of ’em.” (8)

The reservoir of trust and goodwill that Hurston enjoys as a folklorist in Eatonville will evaporate when the scene of collection shifts south to the Polk County jooks, but what might be called black-skin privilege continues to ease her way. I use the term “black-skin privilege” ironically here, to signify forms of knowledge available to Hurston as cultural investigator that the white-skin privilege enjoyed by Odum and Johnson would paradoxically have rendered unavailable. White male folklorists in the Jim Crow South rarely entered back-country jooks, much less became sufficiently enmeshed in their interpersonal dynamics to find themselves threatened by knife-wielding attackers; the full force of law, not to mention lynch law, would have come down too hard on any black transgressor to make such black-on-white violence thinkable. Hurston enjoyed no similar protection, and knew it. She was a combat journalist in the land of Jim Crow. “I could have been maimed or killed,” she noted bluntly, “on most any day of the several years of my research work” (DT, 178). Blues expressiveness has always been driven by much more than sublimated rage at being forced to dwell in a world controlled and patrolled by white folk. Yet such rage, and the disfiguring violence through which it was conveyed, was an essential constituent of the jook culture Florida blues people had created for themselves—a culture that Hurston, according to Bruce Bastin, was the first to enter and describe.21 Switchblade knives are a kind of “very straight and plain” talk, a means of making a metaphorical equivalence literal in the most visceral possible way: if my heart aches with a pain that you (and, behind you, white insults) have provoked, and I plunge this knife into your heart, you will know how I feel. If internalized civic terror prevented blues people, as Lomax suggests, from including the white world within this disfiguring expressive economy—much as they might have desired to—then the jook was one place where no one held back; where speaking, singing, dancing, and fighting one’s mind, or heart, were equally valid modes within a highly charged expressive continuum.

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iolent aggression directed at her own person by other blacks is the

V last thing Hurston expects to find when the Polk County jooks first

present themselves to her in Mules and Men as the most desirable possible terminus for a folklorist-pilgrim in search of blues culture. “Ah learnt all Ah know ’bout pickin’ de box in Polk County,” proclaims guitarist Bubber Mimms as he, singer Charlie Jones, and the other front-porch sitters at Joe Clarke’s store in Eatonville fill her head with visions that blossom into a proto-Kerouacian romance of the open road: They talked and told strong stories of Ella Wall, East Coast Mary, Planchita and lesser jook lights around whom the glory of Polk County surged. Saw-mill and turpentine bosses and prison camp “cap’ns” set to music passed over the guitar strings and Charlie’s mouth and I knew I had to visit Polk County right now. A hasty good-bye to Eatonville’s oaks and oleanders and the wheels of the Chevvie split Orlando wide open—headed south-west for corn (likker) and song. (57)

Hurston’s willingness to render both black (intimate) and white (disciplinary) violence all but invisible under the sign of “strong stories” and song is striking here; middle-class privilege consists of the tourist’s freedom to skim adventure off a New World one has chosen to enter and yet has the social and financial leverage to remain aloof from in crucial respects. Hurston’s journey into the symbolic South of Polk County is figured in Mules and Men, in any case, as both a spatial and class descent, a deliberate “getting down” and into efficacious ethnographic closeness with her chosen blues people. “Twelve miles below Kissimmee I passed under an arch that marked the Polk County line,” Hurston recounts (59). The same “shiny grey Chevrolet” that speeds Hurston “below” and “under” the county’s metaphorical front door, a purchase made possible by patron Charlotte Osgood Mason’s generous monthly stipend, becomes a visible token of her class difference when she finally arrives in Loughman, home of the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company: “The car made me look too prosperous. So they set me aside as different” (60 – 61). Hurston reestablishes a downward class-vector by claiming she’s a bootlegger, a representative of an outlaw culture that stands, like theirs, at the farthest remove from respectability. “So I was hiding out. That sounded reasonable. Bootleggers always have cars. I was taken in” (61). Descending the class ladder, Hurston discovers, is a matter of becoming suddenly aware of a rung just below the one you’re standing on, and of its inhabitants staring up at you— or looking down on you, if you lack the competencies that structure social exchanges between the members of that class. The latter situation will confront Hurston when Big

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Sweet chides her on her lack of knifemanship; the former occurs at her first Saturday night dance at the Pine Mill jook when none of the local men asks her to dance, or even approach to chat. A Mr. Pitts gallantly explains the situation: “Miss, you know uh heap uh dese hard heads wants to woof at you but dey skeered.” “How come, Mr. Pitts? Do I look like a bear or panther?” “Naw, but dey say youse rich and dey ain’t got de nerve to open dey mouf.” I mentally cursed the $12.74 dress from Macy’s that I had on among all the $1.98 mail-order dresses. I looked about and noted the number of bungalow aprons and even the rolled down paper bags on the heads of several women. I did look different and resolved to fix all that no later than the next morning. (63)

The class distance that separated teenaged Hurston from the blueoveralled, red-handkerchiefed turpentine hands on the City of Jacksonville reasserts itself here as a gendered problematics of fashion: Hurston is a high-class lady in a low-class jook, her modest dress (by New York standards) read by male locals as a form of cultural capital that renders her prohibitively overpriced within the jook’s economy of seduction and sexual purchase. A moment later, encouraged by Hurston’s friendly repartee, Pitts describes the effect she has already had on the men of the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company: “Say, Miss, you know nearly all dese niggers is after you. Dat’s all dey talk about out in de swamp.” “You don’t say,” Hurston replies. “Tell ’em to make me know it” (64). The word “after,” with its mingled suggestions of sexual and physical aggression— a fierce hunger to master and possess—is treated by Hurston with somewhat less seriousness than it deserves. It seems not to have occurred to her that various local women might have had prior claims on the men whose declarations of sexual interest she seems willing to receive. Perhaps this was because Hurston herself had, in fact, no reciprocal sexual interest, or at least none she will confide in us. (She does admit with coy puzzlement in Dust Tracks that unwanted male advances “[have] happened so often that I have come to expect it. There must be something about me that looks sort of couchy” [262].) 22 Her purpose in encouraging male attentions here seems instead to be the professional folklorist’s legitimate desire to surround herself with friendly respondents as a way of collecting more and better material. This strategy works well, at least at first: surrounded by supportive locals Jim Presley, Slim, Joe Willard, and Eugene Oliver, backed by Presley on guitar, she sings “John Henry” and gets resoundingly down with her folk subjects:

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By the time that the song was over, before Joe Willard lifted me down from the table, I knew that I was in the inner circle. I had first to convince the “job” that I was not an enemy in the person of the law; and, second, I had to prove that I was their kind. “John Henry” got me over my second hurdle. After that my car was everybody’s car. James Presley, Slim and I teamed up and we had to do “John Henry” wherever we appeared. We soon had a reputation that way. (65)

The question of Hurston’s reputation disappears, or rather simmers with deadly silence, for eighty pages, submerged under the deluge of folk tales she collects from her newfound circle of male friends and assorted hangers-on. It resurfaces at the beginning of chapter 9, as she gets ready to head over to the Pine Mill for the most extended immersion in blues culture she has narrated thus far: Big Sweet came by and we went over together. I didn’t go with Cliffert because it would mean that I’d be considered his property more or less and the other men would keep away from me, and being let alone is no way to collect folk-lore. The jook was in full play when we walked in. The piano was throbbing like a stringed drum and the couples slow-dragging about the floor were urging the player on to new lows. “Jook, Johnnie, Ah know you kin spank dat ole pe-anner.” “Jook it, Johnnie!” “Throw it in de alley!” (143)

Jook sociality—throbbing music, slow-drag dancing, a collective pursuit of “new lows”—represents both a radical contrast to the privileged chastity Hurston-as-folklorist has thus far maintained, and a vivid embodiment of the social and sexual dynamics implicit in her research method. Hasn’t she shed various components of middle-class identity (dress, speech, occupational respectability) in a deliberate, self-conscious effort to get down “in de alley,” to achieve increasingly productive identifications (“new lows”) with men of a distinctly rougher class? Hasn’t music been the means by which this class- and gender-crossing social embrace has been cemented? “[B]eing let alone” may indeed be “no way to collect folk-lore,” but surrounding onself with friendly local men would seem a guaranteed way of precipitating jealousy among the women to whom those men belong—particularly in a working-class community where beloveds are prize possessions. Without warning, Hurston discovers that she has stumbled one step further down the class ladder than she had realized: down and into a simmering three-way feud between Big Sweet, Ella Wall, and Lucy, who considers Hurston her thoroughly low-down romantic competition:

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“Ah’m surprised at Lucy,” I agreed. “Ah thought you all were de best of friends.” “She mad[,” said Big Sweet, “]’cause Ah dared her to jump you. She don’t lak Slim always playing JOHN HENRY for you. She would have done cut you to death if Ah hadn’t of took and told her.” “Ah can see she doesn’t like it, but—” “Neb’ mind ’bout ole Lucy. She know Ah backs yo’ fallin’. She know if she scratch yo’ skin Ah’ll kill her so dead till she can’t fall. They’ll have to push her over. Ella Wall look lak she tryin’ to make me kill her too, flourishin’ dat old knife ’round. But she oughter know de man dat made one, made two. She better not vary, do Ah’ll be all over her jus’ lak gravy over rice. (149)

The jook-as-funhouse, in “full play,” has revealed itself to be for deadly real. Big Sweet speaks here with a murderous figurative vitality that places her squarely in the badwoman blues tradition of threatened intimate blade-borne violence, a tradition that includes recordings such as Edith Johnson’s “Good Chib Blues” (1929), Bessie Smith’s “Black Mountain Blues” (1930), Muddy Waters’s “Walking Through the Park” (1958), and Merline Johnson’s “Two By Four Blues” (1941), a paean to the double-bladed clasp knife favored by prostitutes: I’ve got a two-by-four, and it just fits my hand, I’ve got a two-by-four, and it just fits my hand, I’m goin’ to stop all you women from runnin’ around with my man. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . When I leave home, your other woman is knockin’ on my door, When I leave home, your other woman is knockin’ on my door, I’m going to stop so much talkin’ and raise heck with my two-by-four.23

Even as Hurston draws on an emergent badwoman blues tradition in her portrait of Big Sweet, she veers perilously close to coon-song cliché, a point Richard Wright was to make in his bitter review of Their Eyes. “Miss Hurston,” he wrote, “voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh.” 24 Razors and hot tempers in Darktown had certainly had their day on the minstrel stage, as in “The Bully Song” (1895) made famous by coon-shouter May Irwin: I’ve been lookin’ for you nigger, and I’ve got you found! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Razors ’gun a flyin’, niggers gun to squawk, I lit upon that bully just like a sparrow hawk.25

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Both Irwin and Big Sweet threaten a vengeance, with comic braggadocio, that their “songs” metaphorize as a kind of intimate bodily claiming, a lighting-upon. Yet Wright himself offers a definition of blues—“lusty, lyrical realism charged with taut sensibility” 26 —that may help us distinguish Big Sweet’s song from Irwin’s. The difference is partly a question of un-self-conscious folk freshness (“kill her so dead till she can’t fall”) versus spectacularized stage cliché (“Razors ’gun a flyin’, niggers gun to squawk”), and partly a question of the lusty, lyrical realism, the Blakean beautiful exuberance, with which Big Sweet subsequently strives to instruct her newly vulnerable charge in knife lore. It is also a question of the uncommonly taut sensibility—indeed, repressed panic—with which that physical vulnerability registers on Hurston. “Don’t let nobody git yuh intuh no fuss,” Big Sweet tells her, cause you can’t do dis kind uh fightin’. You don’t know no better ’n tuh go face tuh face tuh fight. Lucy and dem ain’t gointer fight nobody lakdat. . . . She mean tuh slip up on yuh sometime and hit yuh uh back hand lick wid her knife and turn her hand over right quick and hit yuh forward wid it and pull down. Then she aims tuh run cross back yards and jump fences so fast till me and de law neither can’t find her. (175)

“I thought of all I had to live for,” Hurston confesses, “and turned cold at the thought of dying in a violent manner in a sordid saw-mill camp” (MAM, 151). And later: “I shivered at the thought of dying with a knife in my back or having my face mutilated” (MAM, 154). In Dust Tracks: “I saw sudden death very near that moment. I was paralyzed with fear” (190). These are anything but minstrel sentiments; the joke has been changed here, turned into a nightmare Hurston wasn’t supposed to have on this particular jaunt. The tonal shift is jarring, and raises questions the text cannot answer. Is Big Sweet’s matter-of-fact attitude toward violence pathological—the cold-blooded reasonableness of a trained killer talking craft— or perfectly adapted to the frontier society in which she lives, or both? Are the jook’s female denizens braver than Hurston, more hardened, or are the cold chills of mortal panic she’s feeling something they themselves feel with every knife-brandishing confrontation—the reason, perhaps, for the warrior poses they’ve evolved? Has she been let a little deeper into the reality of their lives, or do her anxieties merely reveal her for the middle-class adventuress she’s been all along? Does she perhaps acknowledge such anxieties as a way of creating a bond with her largely white, middle-class audience, using her visceral reactions to reveal the terrifying Amazonian avenger lurking within a mythic figure her white patroness was fond of calling “the Negro farthest down” (DT, 177)? 27

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Hurston’s outsized portrait of Big Sweet and her jook accomplices certainly courted disfavor among black readers, even as it entertained white readers with a kind of southern frontier sensationalism. “[S]ome readers,” argues Trudier Harris, could rightfully make the claim that Hurston seems particularly inclined toward more antisocial types. . . . For her African American readers, Hurston refuses to “pretty up” or denigrate the reality of lower-class black people’s lives. She thus writes against the grain of what black literary analysts in the early decades of the twentieth century would have preferred. She ran the risk, on the one hand, of being accused of presenting the less than “best-foot-forward” variety of colored people, and she ran the risk, on the other hand, of being accused of romanticizing the lives of black people. [Mules and Men] suggests that Hurston made a conscious effort to ignore the unspoken—and sometimes spoken—taboos against literary portraits of black people. Her commitment to accurate representation as a folklorist would have made this an easy decision for her.28

The dilemma confronting Hurston, in her decision to represent Florida blues people, hinges on the word “antisocial.” Are Big Sweet and Lucy antisocial? Certainly they are violent, by middle-class standards, but this violence—as Hurston depicts it— clearly functions within an elaborate system of subcultural signifiers: status hierarchies linking combatants, skillful and unskillful modes of engagement, learned techniques for inflicting death. Although it can (and does) devolve into disorderly mayhem on occasion, knife fighting in the jook is in general both highly stylized and highly socialized. It has much in common, in fact, with the masculine culture of knife fighting that flourished in the taverns and streets of Amsterdam in the early eighteenth century—a culture situated on the border between the “respectable” and “disreputable” segments of the urban lower classes. Like Florida jooks, those taverns were places where habitués gathered to drink, listen to music, gamble (a kind of backgammon called “tik tak”), and sometimes quarrel violently, usually with knives. Dutchmen used the term “voorvechter,” according to Pieter Spierenburg, to denote “a man who had great skill in knife fighting and respected its rituals”: Semirespectable though they were, the people with knives cherished the rules of their game. Combats of one man against another were not just indiscriminate clashes. Rituals and cultural codes partly dictated the course of knife fights. . . . Respect for the rules was compatible with impulsive behavior and the unleashing of passions. The quarrels preceding a combat certainly were real, and the anger must have been deeply felt.29

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“When they were particularly skilled,” Spierenburg adds, “fighters enjoyed local fame in the world of the tavern.” The repute that Freek Spanjaart and Hermanus de Bruijn enjoyed among the tavern-goers of old Amsterdam finds its womanly analogue in Big Sweet, Lucy, Ella Wall, East Coast Mary, and the “lesser jook lights around whom the glory of Polk County surged” (MAM, 57). As Harris suggests, Hurston’s commitment to accurate representation as a folklorist seems to have given her the aplomb to represent Big Sweet and her cohort in all their scarifying glory, without sanitizing her portrait or voicing moral condemnation, either of which might have made for better racial propaganda. Her aesthetic creed as it concerns black readerly expectations is essentially that proposed by Langston Hughes in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain: “We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.” 30 Yet by inserting herself as an actor into the scene of folkloristic collection, and by including her stricken reactions to the cultural violences that directly threaten her, Hurston ends up evolving a unique literary hybrid that transcends Hughes’s beautiful/ugly dichotomy: folkloristic memoir as tragicomic low realism. Her barely suppressed panic in the face of Lucy’s aggression is, among other things, an accurate register of her loss of situational control. The ethnological relationship has been reversed: those who were to be her research subjects, written into textual being with the tip of her pen, have suddenly asserted their right to figure their own subjectivities, with their knives, on her body. Fighting overtakes, and is a kind of, writing. Hurston allows herself to be depicted by Big Sweet as an incompetent disfigurer, outclassed by Lucy. “You don’t know how to handle no knife,” she tells Hurston, speaking of the folk tales and tall tales (“lies”) the participant-observer has been collecting during her stay. “You would draw your arm way back to stop her, and whilst you was doing all dat, Lucy would run in under your arm and be done; cut you to death before you could touch her. . . . But don’t you bother ’bout no fighting. . . . You just keep on writing down them lies. I’ll take care of all de fighting” (DT, 189). “The conventional [African American] immersion narrative,” according to Robert Stepto, “ends almost paradoxically, with the questing figure located in or near the narrative’s most oppressive [i.e., white] social structure but free in the sense that he has gained or regained sufficient tribal literacy to assume the mantle of articulate kinsman.” 31 Hurston’s narratives of jook immersion force us to see jook sociality— the “tribal literacy” side of Stepto’s equation—as both liberating and oppressive, an expressive free-zone and bulwark against white cultural

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domination that also demands of those questing figures who would be “articulate” kinspeople a tribal literacy written in blood. To portray Hurston as a celebrant of “racial health,” as Alice Walker has, is to miss the tensed ambivalence of her vision, a brilliantly improvised solution to a representational quandary. How do you celebrate a culture defined by a paradoxical insistence on the proximity of violence and death to all the pleasures one might conceivably sing? Hurston performs a stylistic juggling act, retreating to lyricism before shattering it to sing a deeper blues that flirts with both tragedy and comedy while resolving into neither. The last act of her drama begins as she steps through the front door of the jook. “A new man had come from Groveland,” she reports, “where another big sawmill was located, and he was standing behind Jim Presley and Slim, singing new songs, and I was so glad that I had come. It didn’t take me long to learn some new ones and I forgot all about Lucy” (MAM, 176). Having recently been advised by Big Sweet of Lucy’s deadly intentions, Hurston would like nothing more than to extinguish herself as a focus of romantic attention and jealous reprisal; to resume her former place as an innocent folklorist and fellow musician, losing herself in aesthetic participation. So eager is she to do this that a few moments later, after Big Sweet arrives and a fight with Lucy seems imminent, Hurston drops the first person “I,” becoming a kind of transparent eardrum, an invisible amanuensis of the jook’s polyphonic orality: Heard somebody at the Florida Flip game say, “Ahm gone—jus’ lak uh turkey through de corn. Deal!” Heard somebody else in the game say, “Beggin’” and the dealer told him, “Eat acorns.” Heard Blue Baby ask Box-Car, “Who is dat new nigger over dere by de refreshments? God Amighty, ugly got de mug on him wid four wheel brakes.” . . . Heard the new singing man climbing up on Tell me, tell me where de blood red river ru-u-un Oh tell me where de blood red river run From mah back door, straight to de risin’ sun. Heard Slim’s bass strings under the singing throbbing like all Africa and Jim Presley’s melody crying like repentance as four or five couples took the floor. Doing the slow drag, doing the scronch. Joe Willard doing a traveling buck and wing towards where I stood against the wall facing the open door. (177–78)

“Red River Blues,” overheard by Hurston here, was a broadly popular folk-blues at the time she visited Polk County, thanks in part to Henry

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Thomas’s 1927 recording of the song. (Versions of it, or songs including this stanza, were later recorded by Josh White (1933), Buddy Moss (1933), Leadbelly (1935), Blind Boy Fuller (1937), and others.) 32 The Red River itself separates Oklahoma from Texas; in the early decades of the century it was known, according to Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, for the jooks that dotted its banks and for the “black-against-black weekend violence” that swirled through them.33 The aesthetic realm in which Hurston tries to lose herself, in other words, can offer no more than a momentary escape from the culture of violent passion that is its source and theme. Both the “blood red river” (sung) and the barely veiled display of male sexuality (danced) insist on reclaiming her, enacting her vulnerability in the moment before the crisis that now breaks: “Just about that time Lucy hopped up in the doorway with an open knife in her hands. She saw me first thing. Maybe she had been outside peeping a long time and there I was leaning against the wall right close to Slim. One door in the place and Lucy standing in it” (178 –79). “I didn’t move,” Hurston confides as Lucy comes toward her, “but I was running in my skin. I could hear the blade already crying in my flesh. I was sick and weak” (179). The blues have suddenly claimed Hurston’s body; the “blood red river” is now running beneath her skin, Jim Presley’s “crying” melody has morphed into the knife blade that threatens her, and her renascent subjectivity is overwhelmed. Big Sweet explodes into action; a free-for-all ensues, with razors and knives whizzing. The jook has transformed itself into the scene of disorder its very name implies. Jim Presley punches Hurston “violently” and yells at her to run, which she does in a moment that places her squarely in a tradition of jook flights described by Mance Lipscomb, Charles Love, Lee Kizart, and Memphis Minnie: Slim stuck out the guitar to keep two struggling men from blocking my way. Lucy was screaming. Crip had hold of Big Sweet’s clothes in the back and Joe was slugging him loose. Curses, oaths, cries, and the whole place was in motion. Blood was on the floor. I fell out of the door over a man lying on the steps, who either fell himself trying to run or got knocked down. I don’t know. I was in the car in a second and in high just too quick. Jim and Slim helped me throw my bags into the car and I saw the sun rising as I approached Crescent City. (179)

Hurston might easily have played this scene for comedy— exaggerated pratfalls and minstrel squawks—but she does not. Nor does she play it for horror, as Richard Wright portrays Big Boy’s flight in “Big Boy Leaves Home.” She plays it flat, refusing to cue our reaction: blues epiphany as a scrambling moment of Zen no-mind. The version of her flight she offers in Dust Tracks differs only slightly:

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It seemed that anybody who had any fighting to do, decided to settle-up then and there. Switch-blades, ice-picks and old-fashioned razors were out. One or two razors had already been bent back and thrown across the room, but our fight [Lucy’s and Hurston’s] was the main attraction. Big Sweet yelled at me to run. I really ran, too. I ran out of the place, ran to my room, threw my things in my car and left the place. When the sun came up I was a hundred miles up the road, headed for New Orleans. (DT, 190 –91)

The talky jocular edge here (“anybody who had any fighting to do,” “the main attraction”) evidences Hurston’s desire to speak somewhat more directly in Dust Tracks to her white audience’s assumed hunger for racial spectacle. Whether either of these two versions accurately represent Hurston’s actual leave-taking from Florida blues culture we do not know. What their shared elements tell us, however, is how she wished to represent her experience: as a panicked forced exile from the jook. Violently extruded from her chosen folk community, a community she has determinedly worked her way down and into, she has nevertheless been graced in the very act of flight with the cultural insight she has been seeking. She knows now, viscerally, what their blues are, and mean. Where, asked the “new singing man,” does the blood red river run? It runs on the floor of the jook: both symbol of life and emblem of violent death, this river of blood is the ground of the blues people’s passional existence. It runs in Hurston’s veins, too, “straight to de risin’ sun,” which is to say away—as though the song she has just heard were playing itself out through her flesh, forcing her to incarnate the most characteristic blues topos, salvation through flight. “The blues singer’s signatory coda,” observes Houston Baker, “is always atopic, placeless: ‘If anybody ask you who sang this song / Tell ’em X done been here and gone.’” 34 Hurston has indisputably been to Polk County, and gone. Yet the blues singer’s individuating call is often an assertion of directed flight toward some beckoning urban mecca: “I’m goin’ to Kansas City/Chicago/New York.” Here too, with her lyric invocation of New Orleans as “Crescent City,” Hurston deliberately takes her place in the blues tradition, arriving even as she departs. Hurston has lived out her blues odyssey without, finally, suffering the disfigurement that fate seemed to have in store for her—without losing a drop of her own blood to the jealous rage her researches had inadvertently precipitated in Lucy. Yet in another respect she has lost blood, and been profoundly marked: Lucy’s violent passion has become her own. This becomes clear when Hurston, in Dust Tracks, describes her tortured love affair with the man she calls “A.W.P.”:

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The terrible thing was that we could neither leave each other alone, nor compromise. Let me seem too cordial with any male and something was going to happen. Just let him smile too broad at any woman, and no sooner did we get inside my door than the war was on! One night (I didn’t decide this) something primitive inside me tore past the barriers and before I realized it I had slapped his face. That was a mistake. He was still smoldering from an incident a week old. . . . He paid me off then and there with interest. No broken bones, you understand, and no black eyes. (257)

Promiscuous attentions, jealousy, compulsion, stalking, and finally violence: Hurston, replaying with A.W.P. the jook melodrama Lucy earlier forced upon her, is now assuming Lucy’s role, embodying Lucy’s need to make her heartache known on the body of her blood-antagonist. That Hurston describes her inner compulsion as “something primitive” tearing past the barriers of civilized behavior is one more sign of her willingness in Dust Tracks to play to the racial expectations of her white audience.35 She is quick, for the same reason, to emphasize the absence of disfiguring result (“no broken bones,” “no black eyes”) as a way of reconstituting the class barrier that finally separates her from her Florida blues brethren. Nice people get just as angry as blues people, she seems to say, and they even indulge in a sort of intimate violence, but they do not mark each other up. Or do they? The “blood red river” of jook lore reappears, in fact, in the aftermath of Hurston’s breakup with A.W.P., and marks her indelibly. “This was my chance to release him,” she tells us several pages after their violent encounter, “and fight myself free from my obsession. . . . So I sailed off to Jamaica. But I freely admit that everywhere I set my feet down, there were tracks of blood. Blood from the very middle of my heart” (260). Striving as an adventuring intellectual to understand and describe Florida’s working-class blues people, Hurston has been claimed—metaphorically, at least—by a bodily wound. She, like her folk subjects, can now claim membership in a disfiguring passional economy. She has earned the right, and gained the craft, to sing her own blues of violent obsessional deep feeling. This fusion of feeling and figure, soul and metaphor, is her true legacy from Lucy, Big Sweet, Jim Presley, and the other cultural initiators who threaten, advise, and make music with her down in Polk County. “Blood from the very middle of my heart”: here is the authentic blues note in Hurston’s writing. Yet the undercurrent of class anxiety that has long marked Hurston’s contacts with blues people and their violent expressiveness remains in force. If Mules and Men shows Hurston fleeing for her life from the jook, then Their Eyes Were Watching God offers us a strategic return in the form

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of Janie Starks’s romance with Tea Cake: a blues guitarist and piano player, gambler, knife wielder, gun wielder, sometime wife beater, and would-be murderer. In her great blues novel, Hurston enacts a purgative revenge on the jook by killing off the loving but dangerous exemplar of its multiple violences. BUMBLE BEES AND SHOOTIN’ TOOLS: JANIE’S VIOLENT BLUES APPRENTICESHIP IN THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

In the summer of 1927, several months before her initial foray into the Florida jooks, Zora Neale Hurston met blues singer Bessie Smith for the first time on tour in Georgia. Hurston had run into Langston Hughes in New Orleans and the two young writers, eager for experience, had taken a leisurely road trip back to New York. “She had her own car,” Hughes later wrote in The Big Sea, so we decided to travel together, stopping on the way to pick up folk-songs, conjur, and big ole lies, for Miss Hurston was on a collector’s trip for one of the folklore societies. Blind guitar players, conjur men, and former slaves were her quarry, small town jooks and plantation churches, her haunts. [W]e went to Macon, Georgia, where Bessie Smith was singing in a small theater.

Hurston and Hughes attended Smith’s concert and afterward talked with her, a couple of fans paying their respects. “The trouble with white folks singing blues,” Smith told them, “is that they can’t get low down enough.” From Macon the two continued on to Savannah where, according to Hughes, “we met a little woman who was out shopping for a second-hand gun to ‘sting her husband up a bit.’” 36 There is a connection, I suggest, between the sort of “low down” blues singing Bessie Smith was talking about and the “sting” of intimate violence referred to by the “little woman” from Savannah. Both are modes of forceful communication along an expressive continuum—a continuum in which Janie Starks immerses herself, with Tea Cake’s guidance, when Their Eyes Were Watching God goes down onto the rich black “muck” of the Everglades: All night now the jooks clanged and clamored. Pianos living three lifetimes in one. Blues made and used right on the spot. Dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning and losing love every hour, fight all night for love. The rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants. (125)

The Savannah woman who plans to “sting her husband up” with a gun exemplifies a mode of expressive violence characteristic of the jook. She is speaking her mind, excavating an imputed “sting” from her own

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blues-strewn heart and writing it onto her husband’s body. Gun-borne violence offers her a kind of nonverbal voice with which to make her feelings known. Janie’s shooting of her husband Tea Cake at novel’s end seems, by contrast, the very opposite of expressive. Entirely unmotivated by anger, jealousy, or any other blues emotion, it is strictly defensive: a self-preserving response to Tea Cake’s angry, jealous, blues-strewn, and rabid attempt to sting her up. Yet Janie, too, finds her voice with the help of a gun. She saves herself, and creates herself, through the skillful deployment of intimate violence. She says no to the novel’s embodiment of rage, jealousy, murder—all aspects of the jook’s, and the blues’, expressive palette. That Janie is able to resist and silence Tea Cake and his “low down” behaviors at this moment is due entirely—in the novel’s brilliant paradox—to her prior immersion in his low-down world. The jook bluesman has taught her how to handle the “shootin’ tool” with which she ultimately kills him. I read Their Eyes, in other words, as the story of Janie’s violent blues apprenticeship: the way in which she descends (in class terms) into a blues milieu and finds her true voice as a blues subject with Tea Cake’s help. Actual blues singing, of the Bessie Smith variety, is not something Janie ever engages in, although the room she comes to rest in at the novel’s end does seem to “sing and sob” with a kind of blues song on her behalf. But blues feeling is something Janie learns all about in the course of Their Eyes, under Tea Cake’s loving, wounding tutelage. She learns to ache with sexual abandonment in a lonely rooming house on an endless day after Tea Cake disappears with her money stash. She learns how to cry when he returns a few days later from a jook encounter, all sliced up, telling her with considerable gusto of his remorseless switchblade attack on the man who first cut him. She learns, cradling her wounded bluesman, how it feels to be possessed by “self-crushing love.” She learns how to rage with sexual jealousy down on “de muck” when Nunkie becomes a competitor for Tea Cake’s affections. She learns how the man who loves you—and whom you love—may slap you around after you’ve slapped him around, and how such domestic violences may melt into the “sweet exhaustion” of hot, satisfying sex. Janie, as a nascent blues subject, learns many things from Tea Cake, not all of which are pleasant, but one of which—an ability to shoot—is absolutely vital, since it enables her to return home at the end of the novel, alive and self-possessed, with a story to bequeath on Pheoby and a voice in which to bequeath it. In making this claim about the role played by “blues violences” in enabling Janie to define herself as a both a subject and an articulate voice, I am contesting both the oft-rebutted claim by Robert B. Stepto that “Janie has not really won her voice and self after all,” and Mary Helen Washington’s claim that Hurston’s novel offers an “uncritical depiction

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of violence towards women.” Stepto errs by hewing to an unduly narrow definition of “tribal literacy” as “control of the tribal posture of the storyteller,” then critiquing Janie for having failed fully to achieve this literacy thanks to Hurston’s choice of an omniscient third-person (rather than first-person) narrator.37 But as Hurston makes clear in Mules and Men and Dust Tracks on a Road, and as Their Eyes indisputably reiterates, tribal literacy among Florida blues people is expressed not just as competent storytelling, but as the ability to draw blood, inflict bruises, hurl boasts, and engage in myriad forms of violent rhetorical play characteristic of the jook. In these terms, Janie is a success: the moment she kills Tea Cake, in fact, is the moment the apprentice demonstrates her masterly “literacy” in one of the violences her adopted culture holds dear— although she has, as I shall show, evidenced a variety of other tribal literacies along the way. Mary Helen Washington’s critique of Hurston’s novel for its “uncritical depiction” of violence against women is similarly undercut by Janie’s mercy-shooting of Tea Cake, which signifies with sly force on his troubling descent into wife beating and murderous paranoia.38 Although it is true, as Crispin Sartwell has pointed out, that “Hurston does not condemn [Tea Cake’s blows against Janie] as an abuse in the way some commentators wish that she had,” 39 it might also be argued that the “mad dog” that ultimately takes up residence in Tea Cake’s skin is, among other things, a caricature of black masculinity in its “blues” incarnation, and that in having Janie kill off the jealous, possessive, violent bluesman, Hurston is engaging in a blunt womanist critique of the jook that produced him. My claim about the role played by blues violences in Janie’s self-making owes much to both Missy Dehn Kubitschek and Maria Johnson. “For Janie,” Kubitschek argues cogently, full participation in the life of her community must include observing, experiencing, and expressing violence. . . . As an extension of emotional intensity, physical violence is a necessary component of Janie’s desire to experience truly and fully: nature contains both the pear tree and the hurricane; communities have both celebrations and brawls; individuals have both compassion and more violent feelings. . . . By the time she and Tea Cake arrive in the Everglades, Janie no longer wants compassion or protection from violence. Admitting the depth and intensity of her feelings, she is willing to use physical violence to combat the threat of Nunkie.40

Kubitscheck is exactly right in viewing physical violence—including Tea Cake’s battery—as “an extension of emotional intensity” that Janie actively pursues as part of her self-unfolding in Their Eyes. What must be stressed, however, is the degree to which both physical violence and the emotional intensity it produces function within the novel under the sign

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of blues textuality. Even the pear tree, site of the bee-stung blossom and Janie’s orgasmic “pain remorseless sweet,” is a crucially important blues inscription, as Maria Johnson has noted. More than any other critic, Johnson has elucidated the multiple ways in which Hurston’s novel functions as a blues novel, a literary appropriation and transformation of musical materials: the sequence of three marriages (two painful false starts and a relative triumph) that “suggest the tripartite aab stanzaic structure” of a blues verse; the role of Phoeby as a “witness/audience” for Janie, “similar to the female address employed by vaudeville blues singers like Bessie Smith”; and Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake, which “is itself the love of many blues, with its pain and pleasure, jealousy and passion, short life and sudden end.” 41 Where Johnson’s otherwise superb analysis falls short is in its failure to appreciate the degree to which Janie’s relationship with Tea Cake, and the emotional intensities he arouses in her, is mediated by intimate violence, both real and rhetorical. The most vital lessons Janie learns from Tea Cake are lessons in the releasing pleasures of violent language and violent acts. His approach is lighthearted, at least at first: he enters the novel as Janie’s god of play, “ending the long line of nay-sayers,” as John Lowe has noted, “that stretches back to Nanny,” Janie’s grandmother.42 But he also enters the novel shadowed by the violences of his jook milieu. His lashes, in an early description, curl “sharply away like drawn scimitars” (92), hinting at the aggressive knife fighter he soon reveals himself to be. Teaching Janie to play checkers on the day they meet, he almost immediately evokes powerful emotion in her, and a kind of instinctive violence—an intimate violence that he deftly transforms into seductive play: He was jumping her king! She screamed in protest against losing the king she had had such a hard time acquiring. Before she knew it she had grabbed his hand to stop him. He struggled gallantly to free himself. That is he struggled, but hard enough not to wrench a lady’s fingers. (92)

Playing skillful master of the violent arts to Janie’s eager apprentice, Tea Cake conjures with Janie’s nascent possessiveness; he ensures that it becomes not the soul-stifling “acquiring” of capital, which has marked her two previous husbands, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks, but the protosexual adhesiveness that binds two people together in the endless sparring of transacted play. A moment later Tea Cake confesses his mentoring intentions in startlingly prophetic terms: “‘Yuh can’t beat uh woman,’” he says. “‘Dey jes won’t stand fuh it. But Ah’ll come teach yuh agin. You gointuh be uh good player, too, after while” (92). The ironies here are multiple: Tea Cake can and does beat Janie, literally, before the novel is over, but it is also true that she does not stand for it in the long run— preferring to shoot him, finally (as the “good player” of firearms he has

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helped her become), rather than be made the object of his rabid and murderous possessional claim. Before concluding his initial encounter with Janie, Tea Cake twice more engages in playfully violent badinage, a rhetorical predilection that reflects his jook conditioning. First he tosses his hat at her feet, daring her to throw it back. “She picked up the hat and threw it after him with a laugh. ‘Even if she had uh brick she couldn’t hurt yuh wid it,’ he said to an invisible companion. ‘De lady can’t throw’” (93 –94). Then he strolls toward her as if he has just entered the store: “Evenin’, Mis’ Starks. Could yuh lemme have uh pound uh knuckle puddin’ till Saturday? Ah’m sho tuh pay yuh then.” “You needs ten pounds, Mr. Tea Cake. Ah’ll let yuh have all Ah got and you needn’t bother ’bout payin’ it back.” (94)

In an author’s footnote, Hurston translates “uh pound uh knuckle puddin” as “A beating with the fist.” Tea Cake is inciting Janie here, drawing her almost imperceptibly into the economy of passion-driven intimate reprisal within which, unbeknownst to her, he locates his being as a bluesman. The call-and-response dialogue that flows with seeming effortlessness between Tea Cake and his willing pupil is enmeshed in violence from the very start. The purpose of Janie’s apprenticeship with Tea Cake is to deepen her blueswoman’s soul by deepening her participation in both figurative violence and its hand-on enactments—ways, both, of increasing her emotional intensity. Within a matter of weeks the violent figures she deploys, and the acts she engages in, have become heartfelt ravagings, ways of communicating deep hurt. “They fought on,” Hurston tells us after Janie has struck Tea Cake for the first time. “‘You done hurt mah heart,’” Janie cries, “‘now you come wid uh lie tuh bruise mah ears! Turn go mah hands!’” (131) Readers disturbed by Tea Cake’s beatings of Janie, which soon follow, miss the extent to which those beatings are the coming-tofruition of a dynamic that was always at work in the couple’s intimate interactions, and the extent to which, spurred by Tea Cake, Janie has been happy to bruise his ears with violent (and sometimes playful) words. It is true that Janie betrays considerable ambivalence and a certain measure of uncertainty at first about the precise nature of Tea Cake’s relationship with the jook and the violences that dwell there. She does not particularly want to think of him as a man conversant with guns, knives, and other “trashy” pursuits. When young Hezikiah, her helper in the store, warns her against involvement with Tea Cake, Janie anxiously grills him: “What’s de matter wid Tea Cake, ’Kiah? Is he uh thief uh somethin’?” “Ah ain’t never heard nobody say he stole nothin’.”

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“Is he bad ’bout totin’ pistols and knives tuh hurt people wid?” “Dey don’t say he ever cut nobody or shot nobody neither.” (98)

But even as she defends him, Janie is suffused with class anxiety— an echo of Hurston’s own—about Tea Cake’s status as a possible lowlife, an anxiety that surfaces the moment he arouses blues feelings in her by suddenly suspending his seductions and laying low. “So he didn’t come that night,” Janie muses, “and she laid in bed and pretended to think scornfully of him. ‘Bet he’s hangin’ round some jook or ’nother. Glad Ah treated him cold. Whut do Ah want wid some trashy nigger out de streets?’” (102) A scant fifteen pages later, provoked by Tea Cake’s most recent disappearance from their new Jacksonville home, Janie shows that she, too, is rapidly gaining proficiency in trash talk. “‘Tea Cake,’” she warns, “‘if you don’t hurry up and tell me [where you’ve been], Ah’ll take and beat yo’ head flat as uh dime’” (116). Tea Cake has been out jooking: partying with his fellow blues people, picking the guitar, and—not incidentally—knocking two teeth out of the mouth of a swaggering troublemaker “who thought he was bad” (117). This sort of jook life offers something that Janie desperately needs: lived within the endlessly swirling passions of Jacksonville’s darktown and the Everglades muck, it is a carnival of self-expression and egalitarianism, a needed corrective to all that would keep her up in the classedoff “high ground” that is her slave-born grandmother’s dream of a suitable destiny for her. But jook life is also rough, “lowdown” in a way that Tea Cake can’t quite believe Janie wants to experience, at least at first. “You ain’t usetuh folks lak dat,” he says, after he has returned alone from his excursion, “and Ah wuz skeered you might git all mad and quit me for takin’ you ’mongst ’em” (119). Janie’s response is to threaten violence in a way that reveals the degree to which she has already been mucked up, as it were, by the playfully violent banter she and Tea Cake have been exchanging. “Looka heah, Tea Cake,” she booms, “if you ever go off from me and have a good time lak dat and then come back heah tellin’ me how nice Ah is, Ah specks tuh kill yuh dead. You heah me?” (119) These words reflect the extraordinary change that Tea Cake’s tutelage has begun to work on a woman who, when he first encountered her, was “making aimless pencil marks on a piece of wrapping paper” (90). Hurston is reconstructing Janie here as a kind of Big Sweet figure, a swaggering jook-babe ready to rumble. Violent rhetoric has now become a principal means by which Janie articulates her needs, insists on her agency, and writes herself into being. Yet Hurston’s own ambivalence about “nasty” blues people and their violent propensities resurfaces almost immediately. Tea Cake buys a new switchblade knife and two decks of cards and disappears on a jook

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gambling-run, leaving Janie behind with one more case of Worried Blues that quickly discloses her residual class bias— even as it reinscribes her newfound blueswoman’s fondness for hands-on reprisal. “Please, Jesus,” she thinks, “don’t let them nasty niggers hurt her boy. If they do, Master Jesus, grant her a good gun and a chance to shoot ’em. Tea Cake had a knife it was true, but that was only to protect himself. God knows, Tea Cake wouldn’t harm a fly” (120). Janie’s vision of Tea Cake, it turns out, is more dream than truth; she has profoundly deluded herself about his attitude toward violence. When he staggers back through the door around dawn, grievously wounded, he begins to narrate the story of his night with a gusto that bears uncanny echoes of Big Sweet’s lectures to Hurston in the Pine Mill jook. “Honey,” he says, “no up-to-date man don’t fool wid no razor. De man wid his switch-blade will be done cut yuh tuh death while you foolin’ wid uh razor” (121). Tea Cake is a flyharmer after all, an enthusiastic jook brawler who gives better than he gets: “Baby, Ah run mah other arm in mah coat-sleeve and grabbed dat nigger by his necktie befo’ he could bat his eye and then Ah wuz all over ’im jus’ lak gravy over rice. He lost his razor tryin’ tuh git loose from me. He wuz hollerin’ for me tuh turn him loose, but baby, Ah turnt him every way but loose.” (121)

The phrase “all over ’im jus’ lak gravy over rice” is, with the gender changed, exactly the same phrase Hurston attributes to Big Sweet in Mules and Men (MAM, 149). Such language, and the violent life that accompanied it, clearly fascinated Hurston, not least because it spoke to the physically aggressive tomboy she had been as a girl, long before entering her first jook—a girl who was “always hurting somebody” when she played with girls and could “take a good pummeling” from the boys “without running home to tell” (DT, 39). Clearly, too, such violent expressiveness disturbed her: it was as though her own youthful propensity for roughhousing had been exaggerated and rendered deadly by an entire culture. Hurston’s ambivalence is encoded in Janie’s aggrieved response to Tea Cake’s boastful narrations as she ministers to his wounds. “Janie,” she tells us, “was painting on iodine and crying” (121). Janie is crying because Tea Cake, whom she loves, is a bleeding wreck, but she is also crying, I suggest, because she has been saddled with new knowledge, blues knowledge, about who Tea Cake really is. He relishes his competence as a fighter, it turns out. He enjoys knife fights. If Janie loves him— and indeed she does, with a “self-crushing love” (122)—then she has no alternative but to follow him down into “de muck.” She must participate fully in the blues pleasures and blues violences that constitute his world.

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This is a hard lesson. It is also a lesson that Janie has begun to learn long before she sets eyes on Tea Cake. As Maria V. Johnson has noted, Janie’s sexual awakening—indeed, the whole of Janie’s sexuality, from girlhood into adulthood— can be said to take place under the sign of one particular blues song in which her governing pleasure–pain dialectic is inscribed with uncanny precision.43 This song, Memphis Minnie’s “Bumble Bee,” was immensely popular; Minnie herself released five different versions within two years after the song’s 1929 debut, and it spawned a number of lyric responses, including Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee,” John Lee Hooker’s “Queen Bee,” and Muddy Waters’s “Honey Bee.” 44 While no proof exists that Hurston actually knew “Bumble Bee,” in either Minnie’s multiple renditions or the cover versions and responses that followed, she would have had a hard time not having at least a passing familiarity with a song that so thoroughly dominated the race-records market during the early 1930s, shortly before she composed Their Eyes. The version below is “Bumble Bee No. 2”: Bumble bee, bumble bee, where you been so long. Bumble bee, bumble bee, where you been so long. You stung me this morning, I been restless all day long. I met my bumble bee this morning as he flying in the door. I met my bumble bee this morning as he flying in the door. And the way he stung me, he made me cry for more. Hmmmmm, don’t stay so long from me. Hmmmmm, don’t stay so long from me. You is my bumble bee, you got something that I really need. I’m gonna build me a bungalow, just for me and my bumble bee. I’m gonna build me a bungalow, just for me and my bumble bee. Then I won’t worry, I will have all the honey I need.45

Except for the fact that Janie Crawford’s sexual awakening in her backyard takes place on a “spring afternoon” rather than in the morning, Minnie’s song is a remarkably prophetic encapsulation of Janie’s search for relational fulfillment in Their Eyes. Young Janie, Hurston tells us in her novel’s most celebrated passage, was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dustbearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So

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this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. . . . Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in her grandma’s house answered her. She searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps and then went down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. (10 –11)

Janie’s blossoming sexuality, her vicarious orgasmic participation in the delicious bloom-thrust “sting” inflicted by the “dust-bearing bee,” has awoken her into a romantic hunger, a gnawing all-day restlessness. This is a mode of blues knowledge, one voiced in Minnie’s lyric plaint: Janie’s “impatience” matches Minnie’s cry, “[D]on’t stay so long from me.” The mingling of pleasure and pain, in the form of a sexual sting that sets Janie flowing, is the novel’s animating paradox. The most distinctive thing about Janie’s developing sexuality, after all, is her continuing search for a romantic passion that will replicate the “pain remorseless sweet” into which this witnessed, orgasm-inducing bee-thrust has initiated her. Metaphorically speaking, Janie wants and needs a man who will sting her. She needs a man who will pleasure her sexually but also, in Minnie’s words, will “make [her] cry for more,” as Tea Cake repeatedly makes her cry by abandoning her for a day to go jooking, and falling through her doorway cut to ribbons, and slapping her to “reassure him[self ] in possession” (140). Until she finds this kind of bumble bee, a “singing bee” who can plumb her emotional depths, alternately pleasure and pain her (the latter with the help of intimate violence), and offer her “a pain remorseless sweet,” her sexuality will not blossom and remain “petal-open” (67). Reading Their Eyes in this manner, under the sign of “Bumble Bee” and the passional logic it encodes, helps us understand why neither Logan Killicks nor Joe Starks, Janie’s first two husbands, can finally satisfy her. Logan’s shortcoming, from Janie’s perspective, is that he treats her too gently, sexually speaking. The fact that he has a misshapen head and “toe-nails [that] look lak mule foots” (23), and thus arouses little desire in her, is only part of the problem; the real problem is that he does nothing to make her desire him—including, strange as it sounds, stinging her with passionate slaps. As Janie reassures her worried grandmother Nanny when describing her lack of desire, “No’m, he ain’t even talked ’bout hittin’ me” (21). Nanny herself does hit Janie in a crucial early scene, a violent face slap followed immediately by a remorseful embrace and a “half sung, half sobbed . . . running chant-prayer over the head of the weeping girl” (14)—a wounding moment in which, as Ralph Ellison has observed in connection with Richard Wright’s Black Boy, “[e]ven

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parental love is given a qualitative balance akin to ‘sadism.’” 46 Janie’s tortured relationship with Nanny is not only a source of later anguish— “She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love” (85); it is the source of a spiritual wound that shapes her emergent sexuality in the direction of painful (rather than heavenly) pleasures. This particular kind of pleasure is not one to which Logan Killicks can grant her access. He does make Janie “cry for more,” as stipulated by Minnie’s song, but the “more” she wants is something Logan cannot give her. “She began to cry,” Hurston tells us. “‘Ah wants things sweet wid mah marriage,’” she sobs to her grandmother, “‘lak when you sit under a pear tree and think. Ah . . . .’” (23). But the pear tree is not, for Janie, a locus of “things sweet”; it is the scene within which she experienced a sting of sweetness and pain. Thus she hungers for a “pain remorseless sweet” that only a playful, singing bumble bee with an edge of danger can give her. Logan, dutiful agrarian worker-bee, is unable to provide her with that—although he does, as if sensing her unmet need, threaten intimate violence just before she abandons him. “Ah’ll take holt uh dat ax and come in dere and kill yuh!” he cries (30). Too little, too late. Janie must look elsewhere for her “love embrace” and “ecstatic shiver.” On first meeting Joe Starks, Janie is not at all convinced that he can give her, in passional and sexual terms, what Logan Killicks could not. “Janie pulled back a long time because he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees, but he spoke for the far horizon” (28). Once again her soul’s deep needs are named with metaphors drawn from a palette limned by both Minnie’s “Bumble Bee” and her pear-tree awakening: “sun-up” is the hour when the bee stings you, pollen and blooming trees are the bee’s symbolic sperm and fertilized products. The “far horizon” Joe speaks for is at odds with the “bungalow” invoked by Minnie, an image of domestic sexual bliss. Yet within a week Janie has managed to project her hot stinging dream, as it were, onto Starks and make it the truth. “From now on until death,” she thinks, “she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom” (31). Joe has “something,” in blues-lyrical terms, “that [ Janie] really need[s].” Janie’s projected sensual idyll is interrupted, unfortunately, by Joe’s insistence on being the “big voice” in the relationship. Unlike the singing bee of Janie’s girlhood dreams, defined by his passion-inducing absence—which leaves her “[l]ooking, waiting, short with impatience”— Joe is too present, too vocal, too domineering. He smothers Janie, oppresses her, rather than withdrawing strategically and giving her the sweet painful blues she hungers for, the blues of deferred gratification that lead Memphis Minnie to sing “don’t stay so long from me.” “It must have been the way Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say

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anything one way or another,” Hurston tells us, “that took the bloom off things” (41). The word “bloom” functions here as a synecdoche for the bee-sting/hot-sex complex: erotic fascination has been routed by overfamiliarity. Janie, deprived of the blues intensities she hungers for, is simply quietly unhappy. “The bed was no longer a daisy-field for her and Joe to play in,” Hurston tells us several chapters later. “She wasn’t petalopen anymore with him” (67). “Daisy-field” and “petal-open” are drawn from the same signifying field as “bloom.” Always hovering around Janie rather than “stay[ing] so long from [her],” Joe does nothing to animate the hungry singing petal-cluster Janie is programmed to become in the right man’s hands. “[G]radually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush” (67). Both her sexual desire and her soulful expressiveness—a blueswoman’s twin glories—have been extinguished. At precisely this point, seven years into the marriage, intimate violence enters the picture. Angered by a bad meal Janie has accidentally turned out, Joe “slap[s] her face in the kitchen . . . he slapped Janie until she had a ringing sound in her ears” (67). Here, too, Memphis Minnie’s blues song glosses Janie’s response. What Janie hungers for is not merely pain itself—pain alone doesn’t “sting” the way she needs to be stung. What she hungers for is “pain remorseless sweet,” which is to say pain and sex, in a context suffused with longing for the absent love-object. Since Joe’s overweening personality has destroyed whatever sexual attraction Janie originally felt for him, his beatings simply chill her, rather than making her hot and available. “She had no more blossomy openings,” Hurston tells us, “dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be” (68). Rather than making her cry for more, as stipulated by Minnie’s song, Joe’s blows stun Janie into awakened subjectivity and the coolest of calculations. “She had an inside and an outside now, and suddenly she knew how not to mix them” (68). Awakened subjectivity alone is not enough to make Janie the woman she has it in her to become: passionate, individuated, with well-defended ego boundaries. Her maturation as a full-throated blues subject demands considerably more than this. What she lacks, among other things, is facility in the righteous use of physical violence. Not only does she seem incapable of returning Joe’s slaps, but she is utterly incompetent at wielding that most indispensable of jook weapons, a knife. Big Sweet she is not: So one day Steve Mixon wanted some chewing tobacco and Janie cut it wrong. She hated that tobacco knife anyway. . . . She fumbled with the thing and cut way away from the mark. Mixon didn’t mind. He held it up for a joke to tease Janie a little.

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“Looka heah, Brother Mayor, whut yo’ wife done took and done.” It was cut comical, so everybody laughed at it. “Uh woman and uh knife— no kind uh knife, don’t b’long tuhgether.” (74)

Hurston sets up the entire second half of Their Eyes with Mixon’s one-line dismissal. A woman and a knife don’t belong together, within the narrow worldview of the male-dominated folk community of Eatonville, for the same reason that a woman and a gun don’t belong together: because knives and guns, skillfully wielded, are surrogate phalluses. They are markers of power, of significant selfhood (as Hurston well knew from her experience with Big Sweet and Lucy, two fearsomely powerful knife wielders). And women, in the eyes of Joe Starks, are to be catalogued along with “chillun and chickens and cows” as helpless, powerless beings who “don’t think none [for] themselves” (67). Yet Janie, who has no facility with cutting or shooting tools, manages to lash out with violent (because symbolically castrating) rhetoric that begins her long-deferred liberation. Using words alone, she strips Joe of the phallus, which is to say his cherished illusion of masculine potency. “Humph!” she snorts in a celebrated moment of signifying revolt. “Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life” (75). De-stingered, Joe weakens and dies. If Their Eyes, in Cora Kaplan’s words, is “[r]educed to its basic narrative components . . . the story of a young woman in search of an orgasm,” 47 Janie is again confronted by the dilemma she has faced since the day of her sexual awakening under the pear tree: “Bumble bee, bumble bee, where you been so long?” When Tea Cake flies into the picture, he strikes Janie almost immediately as a man who can fill her with that long-hungered-for “pain remorseless sweet.” “He could be a bee to a blossom,” she swoons, “—a pear tree blossom in the spring.” One way he accomplishes this is by flying out of the picture after their first night of lovemaking and giving Janie the Empty Bed Blues. A useful countertext for Their Eyes (and a song that Hurston had surely heard Bessie Smith perform), “Empty Bed Blues” (1928) is both a paean to a new lover and a lament at abandonment: I woke up this mornin’ with an awful achin’ head I woke up this mornin’ with an awful achin’ head My new man had left me just a room and a empty bed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He’s a deep sea diver with a stroke that can’t go wrong He’s a deep sea diver with a stroke that can’t go wrong He can touch the bottom and his wind holds out so long. He knows how to thrill me and he thrills me night and day He knows how to thrill me and he thrills me night and day He’s got a new way of lovin’ almost takes my breath away.

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Hurston directly echoes the language of Smith’s song to describe the first-night romantic enchantments that Tea Cake has worked on Janie. “Janie awoke next morning,” she tells us, “by feeling Tea Cake almost kissing her breath away” (103). But Janie’s “new man” deserts her almost immediately, gifting her with fresh, if unwanted, insight into blues emotion: In the cool of the afternoon the fiend from hell specially sent to lovers arrived in Janie’s ear. Doubt. All the fears that circumstance could provide and the heart feel, attacked her on every side. This was a new sensation for her, but no less excruciating. If only Tea Cake would make her certain! He did not return that night nor the next and so she plunged into the abyss and descended to the ninth darkness where light has never been. (103)

Four days later, when Tea Cake returns, he brings deepened passion with him in the form of a classic blues oxymoron. “She adored him and hated him at the same time,” Hurston writes of Janie. “How could he make her suffer so and then come grinning like that with that darling way he had?” (103) Like a singer working the a’ line of an aa’b blues stanza, Tea Cake drums this pleasurably painful lesson into Janie a second time. He entices her to Jacksonville, marries her, gives her a wedding night of “hugging and kissing and carrying on” (112), then runs out one morning at Janie’s urging, after a week of connubial bliss, to “go and get some fish to fry for breakfast” (112). He does not return. “Tea Cake must be hunting all over the city for that fish” (112), Janie thinks, and Hurston’s sly invocation of a familiar blues trope (fish  female sex) is limned by Smith’s song, too: he’s a “deep sea diver” on the prowl. Yet even as Tea Cake seems to be treating Janie unfairly here, he is deepening and enriching her passional life. “All day and night,” Hurston tells us, “she worried time like a bone” (113). Janie knows now, in a visceral way, the durative tortures encoded in both “Empty Bed Blues” and “Bumble Bee.” Stung joyously to life by Tea Cake in the morning of their marriage, she’s been restless all day long. In Tea Cake, Janie the eager blues apprentice has discovered her longsought-for master. He is both the Bumble Bee who instructs her in the sweet painful pleasure of abandonment alternating with sexual passion, and the “shootin’ tool” master who helps her develop what she also desperately needs, proficiency in the righteous use of violence. Tea Cake deepens Janie’s passions and sharpens her aim. He deepens her passions, moreover, with the explicit help of blues music. When he finally returns from his fish-hunting excursion, his presence is announced by “the sound of somebody playing a guitar outside [ Janie’s] door. . . . It sounded lovely too. But it was sad to hear it feeling blue like Janie was.

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Then whoever it was started singing. . . . Her heart,” Hurston tells us, “all but smothered her” (115). Blues master that he is, Tea Cake first structures Janie’s experience in a way that evokes blues feelings, then buzzes back into her life bearing the gift of blues song, an aesthetic form capable of resonating, intensifying, and expressing those feelings. Yet with the phrase “all but smothered her” we glimpse Hurston’s ambivalence about the educational process. Janie’s blues apprenticeship is a desperately needed corrective to the emotional constriction and class restrictions imposed on her by Nanny, Logan Killicks, and Joe Starks, but it also threatens to drown her in “self-crushing love” for her jook-God— at the very moment Tea Cake is beginning to reveal himself as a purveyor of intimate violence and passional excess. As Janie willingly follows Tea Cake down onto “de muck,” violences of various kinds begin to play a heightened role in the relationship between master and apprentice. Where Steve Mixon insisted back in Eatonville that “a woman and a knife don’t belong together,” Tea Cake insists on showing Janie how to shoot. “Oh,” he says prophetically, “you needs tuh learn how. ’Tain’t no need uh you not knowin’ how tuh handle shootin’ tools. Even if you didn’t never find no game, it’s always some trashy rascal dat needs a good killin’” (124 –25). Janie’s rapidly developing proficiency with “[p]istol and shot gun and rifle” (125) is one element of a more comprehensive class descent, her self-conscious movement down and into an immersion experience with Florida blues people. Janie and Tea Cake remake their temporary accommodations on Lake Okeechobee as a kind of jook, with Tea Cake as the resident blues guitarist. “Sometimes Janie would think of the old days in the big white house and the store and laugh to herself. What if Eatonville could see her now in her blue denim overalls and heavy shoes? The crowd of people around her and a dice game on her floor!” (127). The playfully violent bluster of the jook fills this domestic space as gamblers Ed Dockery and Sopde-Bottom threaten mayhem. “Sop dropped a dollar. ‘Ah’m gointuh shoot in de hearse, don’t keer how sad de funeral be.’ Ed said, ‘You see how this man is teasin’ hell?’ Tea Cake nudged Sop not to bet. ‘You gointuh git caught in uh bullet storm if you don’t watch out’” (128). This metaphorical bullet storm anticipates the next stage in Janie’s blues apprenticeship: her jealous rage at Tea Cake’s straying romantic attentions, which leads her to shower him with blows. Hurston enmeshes Janie in a novelistic version of the romantic triangle in which she herself had inadvertently become embroiled during her jook days in Polk County: where Hurston had made Lucy jealous by consorting (albeit innocently) with Slim Willard, here a young flirt named Nunkie makes Janie jealous by consorting with Tea Cake. These flirtations are transacted, as were Janie’s and Tea Cake’s initial contacts, in the currency of

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playful violence: “[Nunkie would] hit Tea Cake playfully and the minute he so much as tapped her with his finger she’d fall against him or fall on the ground and have to be picked up” (130). To compete in this romantic marketplace, Janie needs to speak her feelings with violence, too. Flourishing under “trashy rascal” Tea Cake’s tutelege, she rises to the occasion: Janie made a move to seize Nunkie but the girl fled. . . . She walked slowly and thoughtfully to the quarters. It wasn’t long before Tea Cake found her there and tried to talk. She cut him short with a blow and they fought from one room to the other, Janie trying to beat him, and Tea Cake kept holding her wrists and wherever he could to keep her from going too far. . . . They fought on. “You don’t hurt mah heart, now you come wid uh lie tuh bruise mah ears! Turn go mah hands!” Janie seethed. But Tea Cake never let go. They wrestled on until they were doped with their own fumes and emanation; till their clothes had been torn away; till he hurled her to the floor and held here there melting her resistance with the heat of his body, doing things with their bodies to express the inexpressible; kissed her until she arched her body to meet him and they fell asleep in sweet exhaustion. (131–32)

The violent sexual passion enacted here is Janie’s long-hungered-for romantic completion, a blues completion encoded in her youthful sexual awakening under the pear tree. In that earlier moment she saw “a dustbearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom” and “the thousand sistercalyxes arch to meet the love embrace”; here she “arch[es] her body to meet” Tea Cake’s. There she felt “a pain remorseless sweet” that left her “limp and languid”; here she falls asleep “in sweet exhaustion.” This is, for better or worse, just the sort of painfully pleasurable, bee-stung marriage Janie has been seeking all along. Her erotic life has shaped itself, ultimately, as a response to “Bumble Bee” ’s call. There remains, however, the passional terrain encoded in a somewhat different subset of blues song—what might be called the blues of extreme male violence, of killers rather than stingers. Muddy Waters’s “Oh Yeah” is such a song, with the singer’s threat to his woman that he’s going to “[w]hup you in the morning, cut you in the afternoon”; so is Little Walter’s “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights,” with its repeated chorus, “If I get you in my sights . . . Boom boom! Out go the lights.” Hurston knew, because her experience in the Polk County jooks had taught her, that blues people who “fight all night for love” could act with deadly vengefulness. The sort of lusty, vigorous expressiveness she admired in Big Sweet could veer on a moment’s notice into the homicidal fury that

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drove Lucy to chase her out of the jook, knife in hand. In Their Eyes, I suggest, Hurston displaces this problematic aggression from women to men, embodying it in the troubling figure of Tea Cake. No episode in the novel has disturbed readers more, arguably, than the moment at which Tea Cake suddenly escalates the level of intimate violence in his marriage with Janie: Before the week was over he had whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justified his jealousy, but it relieved that awful fear inside him. Being able to whip her reassured him in possession. No brutal beating at all. He just slapped her around a bit to show he was boss. Everybody talked about it the next day in the fields. It aroused a sort of envy in both men and women. The way he petted and pampered her as if those two or three face slaps had nearly killed her made the women see visions and the helpless way she hung on him made men dream dreams. (140)

The spectacle of Janie reduced to “helpless[ness]” by Tea Cake’s blows seems to undercut the womanist tenor of the narrative, which has showed Janie becoming progressively more self-actualized, shrugging off successive sets of false ideals imposed by Nanny and her two previous husbands. Surely Tea Cake’s “possession” is not what Janie had intended to become? At the same time, as Crispin Sartwell has noted, “It is not as though . . . any violence directed at Janie would have meant this to her; when her previous husband hit her, it was abuse. Violence, like love changes its meaning in temporal and social processes.” 48 This scene disturbs us because it hovers on the ethical line separating intimate violence as outright abuse from intimate violence as an abettor of sexual passion, a consensual “sting” that acts to heighten mutual pleasure within a bluesbased eroticism. Yet the problem Tea Cake poses within the novel is not so much that he beats Janie but that he keeps upping the ante. Beating, it must be remembered, is merely one stop along a continuum of expressive violences swirling through the jooks. If Tea Cake’s beating or “whipping” of Janie has been preceded by an escalating sequence of grabbed checker-hands, playfully violent banter, jealous face slaps, and exhausting rough sex, logic dictates that it be followed, sooner or later, by cutting and shooting. Driven by jealous, possessive, homicidal rage, these are the “mad dog” violences. And Tea Cake, who is merely human, is not immune to their call. He is claimed by the latter violence: swallowed up by his descent into irrational, trigger-happy jealousy, but also claimed, as a body, by Janie’s righteous and disciplined trigger finger. The sequence of events leading to this dual claiming begins with the novel’s largest violence, the hurricane that bears down on Tea Cake,

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Janie, and the rest of the human and animal population of the Everglades. I read this hurricane (based on the Lake Okeechobee hurricane of 1928) as both a naturalistic and symbolic event: the “monstropolous beast” (153) is a democratic equalizer almost on the order of the biblical Flood, displacing white and black, human and animal alike; but it also symbolizes the explosive return of a white racist violence that has been repressed for most of the novel while Janie has been pursuing her destiny. Just as Hurston suppressed the lynching fears that shadowed her allblack hometown of Eatonville, Florida, displacing them from Mules and Men into essays such as “The Ocoee Riot,” 49 so does she allow Janie an essentially all-black idyll, an extended exploration of her sexuality and selfhood out of white view, only to flood Their Eyes, late in its pages, with what will not finally be denied: an oppressive southern whiteness that has both Janie and Tea Cake in its sights. “White people had preempted that point of elevation,” the exhausted couple discovers as they struggle to escape rising waters by wading toward a bridge, “and there was no more room” (156). Shortly after this, the symbolic embodiment of white racism—“a massive built dog . . . shivering and growling” (157)—floats toward Janie on the back of a swimming cow. The dog, which turns out to be rabid, bites Tea Cake on the cheek even as the jook fighter flips open his switchblade and kills it. “He didn’t aim tuh jus’ bite me, Tea Cake,” Janie exclaims. “He aimed tuh kill me stone dead. Ah’m never tuh fuhgit dem eyes. He wun’t nothin’ all over but pure hate. Wonder where he come from?” (158) Janie’s disbelief resonates down through African American history, whenever blind racist fury rears its head. Where, indeed, does such hatred come from? “[B]efore that nameless prejudice,” Du Bois had lamented in The Souls of Black Folk, “[one] stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless.” 50 Although Tea Cake says of the dog, “Ah didn’t mean tuh take his hate neither” (158), taking on the psychological burden of racial hatred is what he has just done, in symbolic terms that soon become literal. Wandering through the flooded landscape two days later to survey the hurricane’s devastation, Tea Cake sees “men coming towards him with rifles on their shoulders. Two white men . . . “ (161). They viciously force him into service with mass-burial crew. “The short man made a quick move with his rifle. ‘Git on down de road dere, suh! Don’t look out somebody’ll be buryin’ you!” (162). The hurricane has introduced contemporary white racial violence into the novel for the first time, and Tea Cake suffers its pressures no less personally than Janie. “Dis town is full uh trouble and compellment” (163), he complains. He and Janie return to the muck after this brief dystopic interlude; violence—a shared passion for firearms— continues to cement their relationship, although a new emotion now manifests:

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[Tea Cake] bought another rifle and a pistol and he and Janie bucked each other as to who was the best shot with Janie ranking him always with the rifle. She could knock the head off of a chicken-hawk sitting up a pine tree. Tea Cake was a little jealous, but proud of his pupil. (165)

Tea Cake’s passing jealousy here is the first sign of the madness into which he is about to descend. The symbolic drama Hurston weaves is complex: bitten by the rabid dog, Tea Cake has been symbolically “bitten” by, unbalanced by, the evil of white racist violence—an evil he nobly attempts to combat by killing the dog to save Janie, then evades by fleeing back to the muck’s known comforts. But Tea Cake’s tragedy is that the “bite” of racist violence works on him by exaggerating his own continuing fondness for violence—a fondness, I have argued, that has been encouraged and shaped by his long-standing participation in blues culture. The face of southern violence is both black and white: the predicament of blues culture is that it cannot help but reflect, and become entangled in, a larger economy of white racist violence that the jook tries to provide a relative safe haven against. The brilliance of Hurston’s vision in Their Eyes is the subtlety with which she conveys this cultural understanding. The “compellment” that Tea Cake feels in a landscape dominated by violent white men, for example, returns on the muck as traumatic aftershock: a phantasmic lynching noose he can’t seem to evade. “Way in the midnight he woke Janie up in his nightmarish struggle with an enemy that was at his throat. . . . ‘Somethin’ got after me in mah sleep, Janie.’ He all but cried, ‘Tried tuh choke me tuh death’” (165 – 66). Here the novel echoes Little Brother Montgomery’s cry in “The First Time I Met the Blues”: “The blues got at me, they run me from tree to tree / I cried Mr. Blues, don’t murder me.” Later the novel slips for the first time into Tea Cake’s point of view, the better to convey his torment: “What was this thing that set his brains afire and grabbed at his throat with iron fingers?” (170). Tortured bodily by internalized racial poison, Tea Cake has been reduced to a kind of spectacle lynching victim here. But he has at the same moment been transformed into a caricature of a jealous, paranoid, and dangerously violent bluesman. He harangues Janie for her imagined transgressions with “dat Turner woman’s brother” (171), then begins sleeping with a pistol under his pillow. “He gave her a look full of blank ferocity and gurgled in his throat. She saw him sitting up in bed and moving about so that he could watch her every move. And she was beginning to feel fear of this strange thing in Tea Cake’s body. So when he went out to the outhouse she rushed to see if the pistol was loaded” (173). Although Janie worries about being shot by the bluesman, cutting

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also presents itself as a possibility: “She could outrun his knife,” she thinks, “if it came to that” (173). When Janie reluctantly kills Tea Cake to keep from being killed herself, Hurston’s rich symbolic drama achieves provisional closure. The “fiend” that white racist violence has put “in him”—his haunted inability to cope with its pressures—has also raised to a fever pitch the “mad dog” violences that are his inheritance as an habitué of the jook. Read in this light, Janie’s celebrated courtroom defense of her mercy shooting is both a plea for the recognition of black humanity in the face of internalized racist oppression and evidence of Hurston’s desire to purify blues culture of the internal contradiction wrought by its enmeshment in violence: [ Janie] tried to make them see how terrible it was that things were fixed so that Tea Cake couldn’t come back to himself until he had got rid of that mad dog that was in him and he couldn’t get rid of the dog and live. He had to die to get rid of the dog. But she hadn’t wanted to kill him. A man is up against a hard game when he must die to beat it. (178)

The “mad dog” that floats into view and glares hatefully at Janie as the floodwaters crest is not just a symbol of white racist violence, in other words; it is Tea Cake’s own increasingly violent enactments against Janie, bodied forth as distressing prophecy. In this latter respect, Tea Cake perfectly embodies the predicament of blues culture. As god of the jook, he is both loving and jealous, liberating and possessive, vital and murderous; he is both a repository of playfully violent figurations and a purveyor of hands-on violence designed to dominate and silence. Janie doesn’t want to kill Tea Cake—he is her playful, loving liberator—but neither does she want to be jealously possessed by a murderous bluesman who is trying to dominate and silence her. What to make, finally, of such violent vitality? Hurston never resolves this cultural predicament; instead, she offers us two alternate visions. In Mules and Men, she displays the dialectic of blues culture in its full glory, then flees as a jealous, possessive, and murderous blueswoman chases her out of the jook. The qualities that make Big Sweet and Lucy both compelling and unnerving—and that render them exemplary blues-cultural actors—are never attributed by Hurston to an internal “mad dog” having taken them over. In Their Eyes, by contrast, Hurston engages in a kind of cultural splitting: the jealous, possessive, and murderous side of the blues culture’s dialectic is exaggerated and then rejected, ultimately, as the “mad dog” snarling through helpless Tea Cake. What remains, when the bluesman and his embodied predicament have been eliminated, is a disembodied blues song that sings through Janie’s gloriously uplifted consciousness:

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The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commenced to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner in the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing and sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out of the window and lit in the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. (183 – 84)

Janie’s Paradisio is not unearned, but it comes at the price of a repression that Hurston herself alerts us to on the novel’s opening page. “[W]omen forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth” (1). The dream Hurston works in Their Eyes is the dream of her own triumphant return to, and from, the jook. Her alter ego, Janie, descends onto the muck, immerses herself in the life of blues people, selfconsciously overcomes the class anxiety that shadowed Hurston’s own jook encounters; she doesn’t merely fraternize with bluesmen, as Hurston did in Polk County, but is romanced, loved, and sexually awakened by one. Most important, she steals Tea Cake’s Promethian fire, his facility with “shootin’ tools.” If Hurston herself was, like the white men she mentions in “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” “esteemed a very poor [knife] fighter individually” by Big Sweet and Lucy, then her dream in Their Eyes is of her alter ego transformed into a supremely competent markswoman and blueswoman, an Annie Oakley of the jooks. The apprentice demonstrates her righteous mastery of her master’s most potent violence—and transforms Tea Cake, even as she kills him, into the “kiss of his memory.” A kinder, gentler, and wholly disembodied Tea Cake is born, “prancing” around Janie “with the sun for a shawl.” What is repressed for the sake of this glorious dream is the complex truth about blues culture represented in Mules and Men, and embodied in the living Tea Cake. A kinder, gentler woman’s blues: this is what Hurston seems to sing at the close of Their Eyes— even as she remains fascinated by the violent vitality, the real blues, of the jooks she knew all too well.

EPILOGUE

The white kids done discovered us. That’s what’s new. —Black patron in a Chicago blues bar, 1990s, quoted in Bebe Moore Campbell, Your Blues Aint Like Mine

In July of 1996, while Mister Satan and I were midway through a southern tour, I saw a knife pulled in a blues club for the first time. We were in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics; the bombing at Olympic Park had just taken place and a local man, Richard Jewell, was the prime suspect. People were tense. The venue, Blind Willie’s—named after Blind Willie McTell, Atlanta’s favorite country bluesman in the 1920s—was one of the best-known rooms on the national circuit and we were delighted to be making our debut there. The crowd, as such club crowds tend to be these days, was almost entirely white. It was a very different audience—in appearance, at least—from the Harlem sidewalk crowds we’d entertained between 1986 and 1991, the year we’d first begun to make our way out into what magazines such as Living Blues and Blues Revue were fond of calling “the contemporary blues world.” The first set had gone well. I was sitting, drink in hand, in one of a number of chairs rowed against a wall, listening to Terry Garland, a white country blues guitarist from Richmond, Virginia, who was sharing the bill. Garland, a traditionalist, sang and played in a style that essentially duplicated what Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, and Mance Lipscomb might have done seventy-five years earlier if one of the three had been able to synthesize Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas blues. To my right was another white guy, dark-haired with a mustache and a decided twang. Just past him was one of the club’s handful of black patrons. The two men were talking loudly over the sound of Garland’s guitar and voice—as Mister Satan and I, understood by the world to be a black man and a white man, often shouted loudly and happily at each other over the sound of loud stereo systems in blues clubs scattered across the eastern half of the United States. Brotherhood, I thought. The contemporary blues scene really is a remarkable place. Then the white man with the mustache pulled out his knife. It wasn’t a long knife, but it was real enough, and it was accompanied by the word “nigger.” The black patron stood up and backed away, glancing quickly over his shoulder. Terry Garland continued to sing, thumping his foot loudly on stage in a driving rhythm. I stared dumbly at the knife, unbelieving, then quickly stood up and backed away. The white man was on his feet, too, neither advancing nor retreating but simply holding his

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position, making sure that the black guy understood just who was holding a knife here. The small blade gleamed. Within seconds, a couple of brawny white bouncers had appeared and half a minute later the man with the knife was out on the street. He lingered briefly outside the club’s front window, shouted something twangy and obscene, and disappeared into the night. The black patron, still standing, was visibly upset; he spoke loudly with the bouncers, venting, until everything had been said and they clapped him on the shoulder and things were cool. What light can such an incident shed on the world described in this study? Among other things, it teaches by stark contrast. In Blind Willie McTell’s day, the club—rather, the jook or café—would have been located on Decatur Street, not in the fashionable Buckhead neighborhood, and the musicians, clientele, and employees would all have been black. If by some chance the white man with the knife had wandered in off the street and the same incident had occurred, the result would surely have been disastrous for the black patron and jook alike—as it was for black Atlantans in 1906, when white racial hysteria over an epidemic of black “impudence” and “presumptuousness,” particularly on the part of young black men from the country who frequented the “Decatur Street dives,” led to a four-day riot that left twenty-five blacks dead and more than a hundred injured, numerous black homes and shops looted and burned, and hundreds of blacks under arrest. That blues culture, a popular culture that sustained black folk under siege, has vanished. Scattered locations in which black folk socialize to live blues music can still be found, most notably in the Mississippi Delta and the southside of Chicago, and the sort of jook violence described in this study sometimes occurs there; bluesman’s Big Jack Johnson’s jeremiad, “Stop the Killing” (1998), decries the destabilizing effect that crack cocaine, imported from Chicago, has had on contemporary black youth in Mississippi. But for the most part the pervasive violence that marked black blues culture from its origins on the Mississippi frontier of the 1890s through its steep decline in the mid-1960s—as younger blacks turned toward soul music—has dissipated. Rough young bluesmen like Honeyboy Edwards, men who carried and used knives in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s and bear the scars to prove it, have become éminences grises. The children of aging and departed bluesmen (Bernard Allison, Shemekia Copeland, Kenny Neal, Lucky Peterson, Big Bill Morganfield) have chosen in surprising numbers to capitalize on their fathers’ popularity among contemporary white audiences by becoming blues performers themselves, rather than pursuing careers in hip-hop and rhythm and blues. The blues guns of old have resurfaced in rap, where vivid inscriptions of disciplinary violence (LAPD and NYPD brutality), retributive violence

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(fantasies of cop-killing), and intimate violence (gangbanging, gang rape) consolidate a mass audience, white and black, even as they draw moral condemnation from church-based black conservatives such as Calvin Butts and C. Delores Tucker. The emergence of a mass white audience for blues over the past several decades, on the other hand, has been accompanied by what might be called a sanitizing of the jook. No cutting or shooting has yet been reported, to my knowledge, at any of the branch locations (New Orleans, Los Angeles, Cambridge, Mass.) of the House of Blues chain, the corporate motto of which is “Help ever, hurt never.” This sanitizing has been driven by a combination of motives: a hunger for profit (violence scares off business, so let’s all keep the peace), a calculated recasting of blues as harmlessly rowdy party music (Chicago’s Alligator Records label as the home of “genuine houserocking music”), and a post–Civil Rights movement utopian strain that has sought to transform blues into the soundtrack of antiracist volunteerism (local blues societies running benefits for flood victims and food banks). A certain amount of symbolic violence, which is to say lyric violence, remains; British blues guitarist Eric Clapton’s decision to include a song on his album From the Cradle (1994) in which he threatened to beat his woman—a hoary blues theme indeed— drew protest from several feminist groups. Far more common in recent decades, however, is the spectacle of blues music as a force for racial healing, a series of tableaux in which younger white blues musicians ( Johnny Winter, Bonnie Raitt, Jonny Lang) pay ritual homage to older black blues musicians (Muddy Waters, Sippie Wallace, Buddy Guy) in paired recording sessions, and in which younger black blues musicians (Alvin Youngblood Hart, Guy Davis, Corey Harris) and soul and rap performers (D’Angelo, Heavy D.) embrace their black blues ancestors, living and departed. One of John Lee Hooker’s best-selling albums, The Healer (1989), features a series of duets with Raitt, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana, and others. Love, rather than aggression, is what drives the contemporary blues world, at least overtly. Zora Neale Hurston’s vision of a kinder, gentler blues culture has been realized in a way no one could quite have anticipated. Not everyone would agree with this Panglossian portrait I have just painted. Even as contemporary blues performance often enacts rituals of racial reconciliation, even as African American musicians are routinely honored with awards, record contracts, and press coverage, the entire superstructure of the “legitimate” blues world—record labels, DJs, journalists, magazines, blues societies and foundations, booking agencies, clubowners—remains overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) white. To this must be added a veritable deluge of white blues musicians, some of questionable talent, and the correspondingly large and enthusiastic white

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audiences that applaud them. The result, in some African American eyes, is an invidious reinscription of retrograde material relations and social dynamics: whites “stealing” the blues from black people, profiting from an appropriated cultural legacy in a dozen different ways. Roland L. Freeman begins his 1997 poem “Don’t Forget the Blues” with a cri de coeur that echoes the complaint of Langston Hughes (“Note on Commercial Theater,” 1940): “You’ve taken my blues and gone”: Do you see ’em, here they come. Easing into our communities In their big fancy cars, Looking like alien carpetbaggers Straight from Mars. They slide in from the East, North, South, and West, And when they leave, You can bet they’ve taken the best. Listen to me, I’ve been drunk a long time And I’m still drinking. I take a bath every Saturday night, But I’m still stinking. This world’s been whipping me upside my head, But it hasn’t stopped me from thinking. I know they’ve been doing anything they choose, I just want ’em to keep their darn hands off ’a my blues.1

What distinguishes Freeman’s enduring blues—which is to say, black blues—from the blues that “they” (i.e., white interlopers) are able to spirit away is disciplinary violence, a trope for cultural and economic exploitation that is also a marker of real bodily suffering: “This world’s been whipping me upside my head.” White blues fans, Freeman seems to say, can’t get low-down enough to imagine themselves at the mercy of a world that stands wholly apart from them and whips them into submission simultaneously. In Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992), Bebe Moore Campbell critiques the integrated contemporary blues scene along similar lines with the help of several older black denizens of a Chicago blues bar called the Down Home, recently renamed “The All-New Down Home Bar and Grill” after being overrun by white college kids. “Ain’t nothing worse,” complains a man in a plaid shirt and a Bulls cap, than drinking with white college kids. While it’s early, they all educated. By midnight, they done turned into the damn Klan and shit. They get

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drunk, they liable to say or do anything. Next thing you know, one of ’em done called you a nigger. If I’m in a situation where white folks is drinking, I be watching them. Soon as they faces turn red, shade number three, I’m gone. Shades number one and two are manageable. Number three is the turning point. They start looking like beets and shit. That’s when the devil commence to possessing they souls. You know what I mean? What they want to come in here for anyway? They got they own music.” “But they ain’t got no blues,” said a light-skinned man, so thin that the veins in his temples seemed to bulge out of the sides of his skull. “Yeah, they do,” the man in the Bulls cap said. “That yahoo music. Loretta Lynn. Hank Williams. Willie Nelson. That’s they blues.” “That ain’t no blues,” the light-skinned man said. He slammed his fist against the counter, and the ice in his drink tinkled. “White peoples don’t sing no blues, ’cause they ain’t got no blues. But they indirectly responsible for the music, ’cause they sure be giving black folks the blues.” 2

Campbell returns us, in a sense, to the premise on which this study rests: that blues expressiveness is grounded in the black individual’s felt subjection to an ineludable and (potentially) violent white presence, a violence figured here as the capacity of drunken college kids to morph into “the damn Klan and shit.” How can young whites possibly understand the blues that black folk know, Campbell’s novel asks, when they are the potential inflictors of white violence and disrespect rather than the long-suffering recipients of it? Jon Michael Spencer makes much the same point, and starkly, when he dismisses white blues scholars Paul Oliver and Alan Lomax for engaging in romantic primitivism. “[W]hite blues scholars,” he insists, “do not fully understand the blues because they do not understand the threat and experience of getting their heads beaten.” 3 One may sympathize with black uneasiness in the face of a blues world radically transformed by white participation, and one may applaud Spencer’s forceful assertion of the primacy of suffered (and survived) violence in black blues sensibilities. Yet at the same time it is hard not to acknowledge that his reductionist racializing of “the blues” is increasingly problematic as blues cultures multiply and spread across the globe, absorbing a remarkable range of non–African American practitioners. Even as we need scholars who demonstrate frank, unromanticized, and empathetic understandings of the material and existential conditions that confronted blues music’s black creators, we need to remain open to progressive as well as retrograde dynamics in the current scene: to the possibility that the sun has, in certain respects, shone in our backdoor someday. Certainly this was B. B. King’s experience at the Fillmore in 1968, where a crowd of white flower children showered him

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with a responsive adulation that produced, in his own words, “the best performance of my life.” May we take him at his word? May we allow for the fact that it was the black patron at Blind Willie’s blues bar in Atlanta in 1996 who was treated with dignity and respect by the white staff, and the white patron who was expelled for brandishing a knife? We miss the point of the continuing struggle for social justice, it seems to me, if we refuse to entertain at least the possibility of earned progress in the matter of racial healing. That blues music, the pure product of Jim Crow social relations, should serve as the instrument of such healing is merely one more blues paradox, and certainly not the last. As blues music circulates internationally, as African American standards such as “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Baby, You Don’t Have to Go” become the common stock of jam sessions in Tokyo and Silesia, Budapest and Singapore, Sao Paolo and Winnipeg, it seems inevitable that the blues literary tradition will, like blues culture itself, continue to evolve over the coming decades. African American texts—Hughes, Handy, Hurston, August Wilson, Sherley Anne Williams—will inevitably remain at the center of an emerging canon, but it seems equally clear that space will need to be found for an increasing number of non– African American blues texts. This last point will of course be disputed by those who find the phrase “non–African American blues texts” to be meaningless. Which leave one wondering: just what would such critics have us do with the many and variegated representations of African American blues musicians and their performance practices put forward by non–African American writers? Does it make sense to call Richard Wright’s Black Boy—a black autobiography set in Jim Crow Mississippi from which virtually every trace of blues music and jook sociality has been expunged—a blues text, while witholding that title from Peter Guralnick’s Nighthawk Blues, a fictionalized, white-authored portrait of Mississippi bluesman Big Joe Williams that strives not merely to capture the vernacular majesty of the bluesman’s voice but to depict a performing life transformed, in not entirely beneficial ways, by contact with the white northern coffeehouse and folk festival audience of the 1960s? One might, in the spirit of analytic adventurousness, propose a working canon of “white” blues literature. Such a canon might be divided into four broad periods—jazz-age blues, swing-era blues, blues revival, and postmodern blues—and would include works such as Gilmore Millen’s Sweet Man (1930), Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues (1946), Monte Culver’s “Black Water Blues” (1949), Marilyn Hacker’s “Elegy” for Janis Joplin (1974), Peter Guralnick’s Nighthawk Blues (1980), Michael Bloomfield’s Me and Big Joe (1980), Alan Greenberg’s Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson (1983), Gerard Herzhaft’s Long Blues in A-Minor (1986), Andre

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Dubus III’s Bluesman (1993), Tom Piazza’s Blues and Trouble (1996), Louise Redd’s Playing the Bones (1997), and Ace Atkins’s Crossroad Blues (1998). What emerges from such a survey is a literature of paradox: manifesting open admiration for African American blues performers, but also tending toward racial romanticism; struggling to articulate the outlines of an “authentic” white blues sensibility that acknowledges the primacy of black originals, but repressing that knowledge with the presumption of the blues’ universality; being driven, in many cases, by an investment in the Civil Rights movement’s goals of social equality and beloved community, but also sometimes being marred by the implicitly racist tropes outlined by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark. The purpose of any such canonical exercise, needless to say, must be to enlarge and complicate the tradition rather than displace African American texts from it. Freud speaks somewhere about a “narcissism of two”—the married couple so relentlessly fixated on each other that children, friends, and all external life fade from view. Black and white Americans sometimes comport themselves in such a manner, particularly when the question of white blues (or white blues literature) rears its head. The lineaments of the blues literary tradition can no longer honestly be debated within such a parochial framework. Can a French boy write the blues? A Japanese girl? As Herzhaft’s novel suggests, the European engagement with American blues music has already borne literary fruit; it seems only a matter of time before Japanese and Russian blues novels, Australian and Danish blues memoirs, Polish and Afghani blues poems find their way into print—if indeed they have not already done so. Whatever the provenance of blues literature in the future, it may be said with some confidence that the benchmark for “real” blues—the origin-myth undergirding the tradition—will remain working-class African American experience in the Jim Crow South, with secondary offshoots in the northern urban ghettos of the mid-twentieth century, the Promised Land that sadly failed the sons and daughters of the Great Migration. “You don’t understand how it was for us back then,” insists Atwater “Soupspoon” Wise in Walter Mosley’s RLs Dream (1995), trying to explain to his poor white friend Kiki—who had fled Arkansas for New York after being repeatedly raped by her father—just how bad things were down in Mississippi during Robert Johnson’s day: You think all that drinkin’ and consortin’ an’ playing wit’ danger was too much an’ why didn’t we do sumpin’ else? But you don’t know our place back then. We was the bottom of the barrel. We were the lowest kinda godless riffraff. Migrants and roustabouts, we was bad from the day we

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was born. Blues is the devil’s music an’ we his chiren. RL was Satan’s favorite son. He made us all abandoned, and you know that was the only way we could bear the weight of those days.

“[T]he weight of those days” is what I have tried to make the reader feel in the course of this study. It is a weight that all of us, whoever we are, remain capable of feeling in the present day, as a shadow hovering above, below, and around the music itself: a negative force field of hopelessness and despair fully graspable only in the blessed moment of release from whatever fear-induced anxiety or deadness one was possessed by. The real blues live there, if they live anywhere: in the music that casts such a healing spell, and in whatever engendered the trauma, our trauma, to begin with.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Any project of this sort is a collective endeavor: a series of suggestions tendered, encouragements extended, critiques offered, mistakes pointed out, and, above all, enthusiasms shared. I am profoundly thankful for the patience, generosity, and support of my three dissertation readers, Arnold Rampersad and William Howarth at Princeton University and David Evans of the University of Memphis; all have contributed in a variety of ways to a study that would not have existed in this or any other form without their help. Also at Princeton, Diana Fuss graciously allowed me to develop my reading of Their Eyes Were Watching God as a guest lecture in her American Women Writers course; Lee Mitchell, a mentor for two decades, offered helpful early critique on my writings about “Crazy Blues”; Maria DiBattista orchestrated the dissertation seminar in which I first limned the larger claims about blues culture’s emergence developed here; and Michael Wood, like Arnold Rampersad, encouraged my attempts to bring black popular music together with literature in the graduate classroom. Nell Irvin Painter, in the fearlessness with which she explores lynching and other difficult questions facing African American Studies, has long been one of my chief inspirations. Many of the ideas in this study first took shape as papers delivered on panels at Modern Language Association and American Studies Association annual meetings and at several Delta Blues Symposia in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I’ve been truly blessed in my fellow panelists, a pantheon of irreplaceable blues scholars and writers: Houston A. Baker Jr., William Barlow, Arthur Flowers, Paul Garon, Daphne Duvall Harrison, Charles Keil, David Nelson, and Anthony Walton. Poet Sterling Plumpp, whom I had the good fortune of meeting at a reading in New York and introducing to the New York blues club scene, has been a generous friend, pressing into my hands a few more books than I’ve been able to give him in return. Trudier Harris, whose work on lynching, blues expressiveness, and Zora Neale Hurston has long helped orient my own, offered a detailed and challenging reading of this manuscript, one that I have taken to heart even where differences remain. Steve Tracy and I first met in 1987 when I was passing through his hometown of Cincinnati with the touring company of “Big River”; little did I expect that my fellow harmonica player would turn out in later years to be a fellow blues scholar. His research leads and suggestions for revision have proven invaluable. Barry Lee Pearson, too, shares my participant/observer perspective on blues culture, and our periodic path-crossings have always proved spiritually nourishing as well as intellectually fruitful. Elliott Hurwitt, who

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knows as much about W. C. Handy as any living scholar, gave repeatedly of his time and hard-won sagacity, correcting more than a few factual errors in earlier drafts of chapter 2; any errors that remain in that chapter and the rest of this study are my fault alone. I am grateful to several publishers for permission to reprint material in this book. Portions of chapter 3 appeared in “‘Make My Getaway’: The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W.C. Handy’s Father of the Blues,” African American Review 35, no. 1 (spring 2001); reprinted by permission of African American Review. Other portions will appear in “Racial Violence, ‘Primitive Music,’ and the Blues Entrepreneur: W. C. Handy’s Mississippi Problem,” Southern Cultures (forthcoming, fall 2002); reprinted by permission of Southern Cultures. A slightly different version of chapter 4 appears as “Shoot Myself a Cop,” Callaloo (25, no. 1, winter 2002); reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Marcus Rediker deserves special mention. Were it not for his perceptive and timely intervention, on the heels of several Satan & Adam performances at the Decade in Pittsburgh in 1993, I might never seriously have considered returning to graduate school; his continuing mentorship and passionate conversation over the ensuing years have been a delight. I am immensely fortunate, in the course of various conferences, to have accumulated three friends who are also superb and committed blues scholars. Patti Schroeder, the sister I never had, has matched my enthusiasm for the blues literary tradition at every stage along the way; I find it hard to conceive of my own endeavors without hers as a continuing, enlivening accompaniment. Jerry Wasserman, Canada’s gift to blues literary studies, has shepherded me through blues panel presentations, long distance runs, and a memorable visit to Junior Kimbrough’s jook in Chulahoma, Mississippi. Carlo Rotella, who read and offered insightful criticism on early drafts of chapters 1 and 3, has continually pushed me to deepen and clarify my thinking—not to mention showing me, through his own example, just how much serious fun the academic life can be. Without Peter Herman, a friend since I first fled Columbia’s grad program in the mid-1980s for the busking life in Paris, I would never have returned to the fold. I owe more than I can ever repay to his unwavering (and, at several points, clearly tragic) faith in my eventual ascendance to the professoriat. The members of the English department and Africana Studies program at Vassar College, my home during the 2000 –2002 academic years, have been wonderfully supportive of my intertwined musical and literary interests. In particular, I’d like to thank Ann Imbrie, Gretchen Gerzina, Joyce Bickerstaff, Paul Kane, and Judith Casselberry for wel-

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coming me into the family and giving me a chance to teach courses in blues and jazz literature, African American music, and Zora Neale Hurston. Alan Thomas, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, had the foresight to think “Book!” when he heard me outline my ideas about southern violence at an MLA presentation several years back; I am grateful for his faith. No list of acknowledgments would be complete if I failed to thank the blues musicians from whom I’ve learned so much over the past decade and a half, and with whom I’ve shared so much enriching time, both on and offstage: Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee, Nat Riddles, Charlie Hilbert, Irving Louis Lattin, Robert Ross, Jerry Dugger, Bill Sims, the Holmes Brothers, Michael Hill and the Blues Mob, Victor Davis, Wild Jimmy Spruill, David Honeyboy Edwards, Bo Diddley, Ted “Delta Blues” Williams, Lester Schultz, and Bob Shatkin. Lastly, it delights me to acknowledge my spiritual family at Interfaith Fellowship in New York: Diane Berke, Jon Mundy, Corine Kemp Scott, Jeff Olmsted, and others too numerous to list. Thank you for the healing you extended, the light you shared, and the glorious high spirits you conjured up.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Langston Hughes, “Songs Called the Blues,” Phylon 2, no. 2 (1941), in Steven C. Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues (Urbana, 1988), 183. 2. William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989), 142 – 43. 3. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (1867; Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1992), 80 – 81. 4. Donald L. Grant, The Way It Was in the South: The Black Experience in Georgia (New York, 1993), 160. 5. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Black Resistance and White Violence in the American South, 1880 –1940, in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 284. 6. Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York, 1976), 6, 10, 69. 7. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882 –1930 (Urbana, 1995), ix. 8. Willie Dixon with Don Snowden, I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story (New York, 1989), 20. 9. James H. Cone, “The Blues: A Secular Spiritual,” in Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader, ed. Steven C. Tracy (Amherst, Mass., 1999), 236. 10. Jerry H. Bryant, Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel (Amherst, Mass., 1997), 3. 11. August Wilson, Seven Guitars (1996; New York, 1997), 96. 12. Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York, 1998), 4. 13. Ibid., 241. 14. Cone, “The Blues: A Secular Spiritual,” 233. 15. Newman I. White, American Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), 93 –94. 16. David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York, 1996), 15. 17. David Honeyboy Edwards, as told to Janis Martinson and Michael Robert Frank, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards (Chicago, 1997), 48. 18. Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple (1961; New York, 1997), 118. 19. Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992; New York, 1993), 3. 20. Ibid., 3. 21. Ibid., 58. 22. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975; New York, 1986), 184. 23. Wilson, Seven Guitars, 19. 24. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Hangman’s Blues” (1928), in Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (1960; New York, 1990), 209. 25. Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), 34 – 42. 26. Margaret Jones Bolsterli, Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility (Knoxville, 1991), 56. 27. Muddy Waters, “Walkin’ through the Park” (1958).

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Chapter One 1. Mance Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, as told to and compiled by Glen Alyn (New York, 1993), 306. 2. Richard Congress, Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and Music of Yank Rachell ( Jackson, Miss., 2001), 56. 3. I am using the word “discipline” in its Foucauldian sense here, as inflected by Robyn Wiegman’s recent theorizations of lynching: a social practice that “communalizes white power while territorializing the black body and its movement through space.” Where Foucault distinguishes disciplines from punishments, claiming that the former (a set of nonviolent techniques, including imprisonment, for compelling politically and culturally desirable behavior) progressively displaced the latter (typified by public executions) in the history of the West, Wiegman shows how the threat of a particular kind of historically aberrant punishment, spectacle lynching, worked in the early modern South to doubly discipline black subjects: Where Foucault makes a distinction between the spectacle of public torture and execution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the strategies of surveillance that increasingly accompany the production of subjects in the nineteenth, lynching proves to be an interesting link between the two. Because the terror of the white lynch mob arises from both its function as a panoptic mode of surveillance and its materialization of violence in public displays of torture and castration, the black subject is disciplined in two powerful ways: by the threat of always being seen and by the specular scene. (13) See Robyn Wiegman, “The Anatomy of Lynching,” in American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C., 1995), 13; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; New York, 1979), esp. 25 –26, 50 –51. Useful recent narrative histories of spectacle lynching can be found in Phillip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York, 2002); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890 –1940 (New York, 1998); and Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998), 280 –312. See also David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996; New York, 1997), esp. 100 –106; and Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York, 1988), for anecdotal histories of Mississippi lynching. For recent analytic studies, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882 –1930 (Urbana, 1995); and Wiegman, American Anatomies, 13 –15, 81–113. Indispensable earlier scholarship includes Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1892, 1894, 1900; New York, 1969); James Elbert Cutler, Lynch Law: An Investigation into the History of Lynching in the United States (1905; New York, 1969); Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (1928; Salem, N.H., 1992); and Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1933). An important source of contemporary journalistic accounts of lynching is Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings (1962; Baltimore, 1988). 4. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), 78. 5. John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1935; Garden City, N.Y., 1957), 303 –5. 6. For blues scholars on the subject of lynching, see Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (1960; 2nd rev. ed., New York, 1990), 189, 270; David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (New York, 1982), 29 –30; Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, N.J., 1988), 81; Michael Haralambos, Soul Music: The Birth of a Sound in Black America (1974; New

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York, 1985), 42 –51, 71–72; and Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Knoxville, 1993). In a discussion of white southern lynching ballads (“North Carolina Lynching Ballads,” in Brundage, Under Sentence of Death, 242 – 43), Bruce E. Baker notes in passing that an African American folk culture of lynching was expressed primarily as legend, rather than song, with the possible exception of “blues songs such as one by Sam Price” (which I discuss). 7. All songs can be found in Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, (discography), 304 –35. 8. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 81. 9. Spencer, Blues and Evil, 102. 10. See Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York, 1998), 161–97. While making no direct claim for “Strange Fruit” as a blues song, and acknowledging that “formal blues played a minimal role in Billie Holiday’s repertoire,” Davis nevertheless argues that Holiday’s music was “deeply rooted in the blues tradition.” The most comprehensive account of “Strange Fruit” as cultural text is David Margolick’s Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry For Civil Rights (Philadelphia, 2000). For a nonblues black protest song about lynching that predates “Strange Fruit,” see “Scottsboro” in Lawrence Gellert, ed., Negro Songs of Protest (New York, 1936), 44 – 45. 11. Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (1976; New York, 1987), 23. 12. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 43 – 44, 48, 53. 13. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 18, 52 –53, 81– 82. 14. Margolick, Strange Fruit, 96. 15. Otis Taylor, White African (2001, NorthernBlues CD NBM0002). 16. James H. Cone, “The Blues: A Secular Spiritual,” in Steven C. Tracy, ed., Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader (Amherst, Mass., 1999), 236. 17. Cone, “The Blues,” 241. 18. There is some truth to Charles Keil’s claim that “[i]n all the blues scholarship to date no one has explained or documented how the twelve-bar blues form emerged from its undeniable roots in the oral traditions, work songs, ballads, field hollars, ring shouts of the rural black south.” Urban Blues (1966; Chicago, 1991), 232 –33. Many possible social causes, most of them plausible but none of them conclusive, have been offered. LeRoi Jones dates the form’s emergence somewhat earlier than most scholars, “a few years after Emancipation,” when “shouts, hollers, yells, spirituals, and ballits began to take shape as blues”; as a social cause he traces the self-focus of blues song to the fact that sharecroppers enjoyed a leisure and solitude not permitted during slave days. Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It (New York, 1963), 61– 62. David Evans notes that “the 1890s coincided with the coming to maturity of the first generation of blacks born out of slavery,” and argues that post-Reconstruction “freedom,” while offering black people “economic independence, individualism, industrial life, and the chance for a greater expression of love and family responsibility,” also offered “racial discrimination, Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, jail, the chain gang, sharecropping, and the life of the itinerant worker. If economic failure, breakup of the family, and a desire to escape through travel resulted from these conditions,” he adds, “it is no wonder. And it is no wonder that the blues arose at this time.” Evans, Big Road Blues, 40 – 41. See also David Evans, “The Origins of Blues and Its Relationship to African Music,” in Images de l’Africain de l’Antiquite au XXe Siecle, ed. Daniel Droixhe and Klaux H. Kiefer (Frankfurt, 1987), 129 – 41. Paul Oliver qualifies Evans’s chronology by pointing out “[t]hat there was a [black] songster generation of the 1880s and 90s [who added scattered early blues to their predominantly non-blues repertoires], an intermediate phase of singers born around the turn of the century and a virtually total blues singing generation of around 1905.” Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (New York, 1984), 259 – 60. William Barlow notes that blues song originated in “a reactionary period, a period

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when African Americans faced economic servitude, political disenfranchisement, social segregation, and a wave of brutal lynchings,” and claims that “blues were part of a widespread cultural response to renewed white oppression . . . infus[ing] the black oral tradition with a new assessment of the urgency of the situation and a mandate to change it.” “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989), 3 – 6. 19. Sandra Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst, Mass., 1981), 5, 10, 13 –15. 20. Quoted in Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (New York, 1997), 174. 21. William Broonzy, as told to Yannick Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues (1955; New York, 1992), 88 – 89. 22. Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, 1993), 467– 68. 23. Cone, “The Blues,” 240. 24. Bessie Smith, “Mama’s Got the Blues” (30 April 1923) (composed by S. Martin and Clarence Williams), in Davis, Blues Legacies, 310. 25. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York, 1987), 199. 26. Bessie Smith, “In the House Blues” (n.d.), in Davis, Blues Legacies, 297. 27. Houston A. Baker Jr., “Battling the Ghouls of a Black Southern Boyhood,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 June 2001, B12. 28. Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable, 144, 476. Other blues autobiographies in which lynching is discussed include Willie Dixon with Don Snowden, I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story (New York, 1989); Sammy Price, What Do They Want? A Jazz Autobiography, ed. Caroline Richmond (Urbana, 1990); B. B. King, with David Ritz, Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B. B. King (New York, 1997); David Honeyboy Edwards, as told to Janis Martinson and Michael Robert Frank, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards (Chicago, 1997); and Congress, Blues Mandolin Man. 29. Lynching and dismemberment, as forms of murderousness without a racialized disciplinary function, have long been the occasional subjects of American folk song. Olive W. Burt quotes several white lynching ballads, including the “Lay of the Vigilantes,” which memorializes the rough justice administered to a Colorado murderer in 1877. She also includes a ballad about a three-hundred-pound Indiana farmwoman named Belle Guiness, whose occupation was the butchering of hogs but whose occasional sideline was “a-butchering of men”—between ten and forty-two, according to legend: The bones were dug up in her yard, Some parts never came to light, And Belle, herself, could not be found To set the tally right. Such comic butchery, needless to say, plays a different role in white imaginations than the weekly and public “souveniring” of black lynching victims before large white crowds played in black southern imaginations. See Olive Woolley Burt, American Murder Ballads and Their Stories (New York, 1958), 6 –7, 168 – 69. 30. Abbe Niles, “Blue Notes,” New Republic 45 (1926): 292. 31. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings, 29. 32. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Lonesome House Blues” (1927), in Ralph Eastman, “Country Blues Performance and the Oral Tradition,” Black Music Research Journal 8, no. 2 (fall 1988): 162. 33. Ora Brown, “Jinx Blues” (1927), in Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 285. 34. Although blacks rarely witnessed spectacle lynchings during the postReconstruction period discussed in this book, the antebellum situation was quite different. On the rare and widely noted occasions when slaveowners had their slaves publicly burned, slaves were often assembled—in one case, after a master’s murder, “many thou-

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sand slaves, driven to the [burning] ground from all the adjoining counties”—and forced to watch, as a chastening warning. See Harris, Exorcising Blackness, ix, 78. 35. Wiegman, American Anatomies, 81. 36. J. B. Brook, “Appealed for Protection,” Raleigh Gazette, 5 June 1897, 1. 37. Bessie Smith, “Blues Spirit Blues” (1930) (composed by Spencer Williams), in Davis, Blues Legacies, 266 – 67. 38. See Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, D.C, 1998), 173. 39. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977; New York, 1978), 160. 40. Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues ( Jackson, Miss, 1999), 33. 41. Danny Barker, A Life in Jazz, ed. Alyn Shipton (London, 1986), 71. 42. Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945; New York, 1998), 65. 43. Quoted in Harris, Exorcising Blackness, 98 –99. 44. Little Brother Montgomery, “The First Time I Met You” (1936), in Eric Sackheim, comp., The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters (1969; Hopewell, N.J., 1993), 391. Sackheim’s anthology (138) includes a related “lynching blues,” Lil’ Son Jackson’s “Charlie Cherry” (n.d.), in which the violent and ineludable threat is a real white lawman rather than a phantasmic presence. 45. Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable, 477. 46. Barry Lee Pearson, “Sounds So Good to Me”: The Bluesman’s Story (Philadelphia, 1984). 47. Quoted in Karl Gert zur Heide, Deep South Piano: The Story of Little Brother Montgomery (London, 1970), 36 –37. 48. Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable, 111–12. 49. Leathern Dorsey, “ ‘And All That Jazz’ Has African Roots!” in African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behavior, ed. James L. Conyers ( Jefferson, N.C., 2001), 37–38. 50. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 460 – 61. 51. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 221; Tommy McClennan, “Blues Trip Me This Morning,” quoted in Brian Robertson, Little Blues Book (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (New York, 1994), 44; Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 223. 52. Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York, 1984), 236. 53. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 153. 54. Mike Rowe, “Piano Blues and Boogie Woogie,” in John Cowley and Paul Oliver, The New Blackwell Guide to Recorded Blues (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 156. 55. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 155 –56; Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “The Sociogenesis of Lynching,” in Brundage, Under Sentence of Death, 59 – 60. On the vulnerability of migrant turpentine and lumber camp workers (“floating, worthless negroes”) to lynching, see also Ray Stannard Baker, “What I a Lynching? A Study of Mob Justice, South and North” [1905], in Racism at the Turn of the Century: Documentary Perspectives, 1870 – 1910, ed. Donald P. DeNevi and Doris A. Holmes (San Rafael, Cal., 1973), 306. 56. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, intro. Peter Gay (1920; New York, 1989), 15. 57. Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Chicago, 1995), 171. 58. William Ferris, Blues from the Delta (1978; New York, 1984), 120. Barry Lee Pearson relates another blues joke about lynching, an anecdote collected in 1991 from Tennessee-born bluesman Johnny Shines. “I spent some time in the sip [Mississippi],” Shines remembered, “but not much. I spent maybe three hours there. I don’t know anything about life in Mississippi. I know I was told by a white woman she didn’t want me hanging around her place and I said: ‘Well thank you ma’am, thank you ma’am.’ And I did ap-

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preciate it, she didn’t want me hanging around her place cause it was a regular thing for blacks in Mississippi to hang around in trees. It was pretty darn rough. And Mississippi was the roughest.” Barry Lee Pearson fax to author, 28 August 1998. Mel Watkins cites a white—rather than black—joke about lynching: “What’s the favorite game show in the South? Maim that Coon.” Quoted in On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying—the Underground Tradition of African-American Humor That Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York, 1994), 29. 59. Kalamu ya Salaam, What Is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (Chicago, 1994), 13 –14. 60. Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Black Snake Moan,” in Sackheim, The Blues Line, 80. 61. Black southerners occasionally lynched other blacks as a way of administering rough justice in situations where black criminal behavior against other blacks would have been ignored by the white law. For discussions of black-on-black lynchings, see Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 94; and William Henry Holtzclaw, The Black Man’s Burden (1915; New York, 1970), 74 –75, 206 –7. 62. Clarence Major, Dirty Bird Blues (1996; New York, 1997), 1. 63. J. J. Phillips, Mojo Hand (Berkeley, 1966), 109. 64. Josephine “Josie” Miles and Billy Higgins, “A to Z Blues” (1924) (Document CD DOCD5467), Blues Lyrics on Line (http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/ Delta/2541/bljmiles.htm). In Race Rebels, 214, Kelley cites a 1966 recording by Bruce Jackson of a toast titled “The Lame and the Whore”—in which “a veteran pimp teaches a ‘weak’ mack daddy how to treat his women”—that bears an uncanny resemblance to lynching narratives: Say, you got to rule that bitch you got to school that bitch, you got to teach her the Golden Rule, you got to stomp that bitch, you got to tromp that bitch, and use her like you would a tool. You got to drive that bitch and got to ride that bitch like you would a motherfucken mule. Then take the bitch out on the highway and drag her until she’s damn near dead. Then take your pistol and shoot her right through her motherfucken head. 65. Salaam, What Is Life? 12. 66. Cited in Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 251. 67. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1992; New York, 1994), 97. 68. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery,” 128 –29. 69. Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil, 5. 70. Quoted in Giles Oakley, Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (1976; New York, 1977), 48 – 49. 71. Paul Oliver, Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1968; New York, 1989), 173 –74. 72. Richard Wright, foreword to Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, xv. 73. See Oliver, “The Blue Blues,” in Screening the Blues, 164 –261. 74. All lyrics quoted from Harry’s Blues Lyrics Online (http://members.tripod.com/ blueslyrics/artistswithsongs/bo_carter_1.htm) 75. The figure of 3,220 black lynching victims is supplied by Brundage, Under Sentence

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of Death, 4. On the subject of Mississippi newspapers, see Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery,” n. 278. 76. Booker T. Washington, “A Protest against the Burning and Lynching of Negroes,” Birmingham Age-Herald, 29 February 1904. 77. Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 23 –24. 78. Frank C. Taylor and Gerald Cook, Alberta Hunter: A Celebration of Blues (New York, 1987), 52. 79. Esther Mae Scott interview with Theresa Danley, 11 August 1976 and 11 March 1977, in The Black Women Oral History Project: From the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, ed. Ruth Hill Edmonds (Westport, Conn., 1991), 310 –12. 80. Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable, 161. 81. Steven C. Tracy, Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City (Urbana, 1993), 101–2. 82. Cassie Premo Steele, We Heal from Memory: Sexton, Lorde, Anzaldua, and the Poetry of Witness (New York, 2000), 2, 9. 83. Elijah Wald, Josh White: Society Blues (Amherst, 2000), 5. 84. Ibid., 11. 85. Ibid., 11–12. 86. Ibid., 12. 87. Jas Obrecht, “Otis Rush: Been Some Powerful Stuff Happen to Me,” Living Blues, November/December 1998, 18 –31. 88. Dixon, I Am the Blues, 20. 89. Ibid., 26. 90. LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York, 1963), 95. 91. Congress, Blues Mandolin Man, 56 –57. 92. Garvin Bushell, as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor, 1988), 4. 93. Ibid., 2 94. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing:, 29 –30. 95. Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil, 97–98. 96. King, Blues All Around Me, 53 –54. 97. Work is quoted in Barlow, Looking Up at Down, 4. 98. King, Blues All Around Me, 242. 99. B. B. King, “You Upset Me Baby” (1952) (composition by J. Josea and Maxwell Davis), on B. B. King, Live at the Regal (recorded 21 November 1964), MCA 27006. Transcription by Adam Gussow. 100. B. B. King, “Sweet Little Angel” (1956) (composition by R. King and J. Taub), on B. B. King: Live at the Regal. Transcription by Adam Gussow. King’s immediate source was probably Robert Nighthawk’s “Black Angel Blues” (1949); King changed Nighthawk’s phrase “sweet black angel” to “sweet little angel.” Nighthawk’s record is based on Tampa Red’s “Black Angel Blues” (1934), which is in turn based on Lucille Bogan’s “Black Angel Blues” (1930). I am indebted to David Evans for this genealogy. 101. B. B. King, “Rock Me Baby” (1962) (Kent 583). 102. Haralambos, Soul Music, 70 –71 (emphasis added). 103. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 201. 104. Evans, Big Road Blues, 18. 105. B. B. King, “The Thrill Is Gone” (1970) (Bluesway BL 61032). 106. Price, What Do They Want? 1. 107. Ibid., 10, 12. 108. Ibid., 12 –13.

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109. Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues (New York, 1965), 34 –35. 110. W. C. Handy, Blues: An Anthology (1926; New York, 1990), 100 –103, 209 –10. 111. Newman I. White, American Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, Mass., 1928), 391. 112. Ibid., 398. 113. Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings, 103. See also James M. Sorelle, “The ‘Waco Horror’: The Lynching of Jesse Washington,” in Lynching, Racial Violence, and Law, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York, 1992), 303 –22; and Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst, 1988), 111–13. 114. These lines may well have been adapted from the badman ballad “Railroad Bill,” versions of which often contained the line “He never worked and he never will.” For more on “Railroad Bill,” see chapter 4. 115. Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, 15. 116. Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 271; Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings, 14. Turner is quoted in Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, 45, 48 – 49. 117. Terence Finnegan, “Lynching and Political Power in Mississippi and South Carolina,” in Brundage, Under Sentence of Death, 205.

Chapter Two 1. Langston Hughes, “Songs Called the Blues,” Phylon 2, no. 2 (1941): 144 – 45. 2. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1890 –1930 (New York, 1998), 235. 3. WCH letter to WGS, 28 October 1944, quoted by Eileen Southern, “In Retrospect: Letters from W. C. Handy to William Grant Still,” Part 1, The Black Pespective in Music 8, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 231. 4. Abbe Niles, foreword to W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues (1941; New York, 1991), v. Future references to Father of the Blues will be cited parenthetically in the text. For more on dissatisfaction among black members of the U.S. armed forces during World War II, see Alan Pomerance, Repeal of the Blues: How Black Entertainers Influenced Civil Rights (New York, 1988), 165 – 83. 5. Newsweek, 7 July 1941, 46. 6. AB letter to LH, 26 January 1940, in Charles H. Nichols, Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters, 1925 –1967 (New York, 1980), 54. For more on jazz (although not blues) autobiographies as creative collaborations, see Christopher Harlos, “Jazz Autobiography: Theory, Practice, Politics,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, N.C., 1995), 146 –50. 7. The term “reliable” was invoked by Henry Clay Bruce in his 1895 narrative, The New Man: Twenty-nine Years a Slave, Twenty-nine Years a Free Man. See William L. Andrews, “The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865 – 1920,” 81, in African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. William L. Andrews (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1993). 8. “Paul Flowers’ Greenhouse” (interview with WCH), Memphis Commercial Appeal, 8 December 1950, [n.p.], W. C. Handy Papers, Schomburg Library. 9. Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago, 1984), 4. 10. “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 24 April 1897, 5. 11. Tom Fletcher, One Hundred Years of the Negro in Show Business (New York, 1954), 57. 12. Ibid., 57. 13. Abbe Niles, in Handy, Father of the Blues, 28. 14. Rebecca Chalmers Barton, Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography (New York, 1948), 58. In a problematic essay, “To Be Black and Blue: The Blues Genre in Black American Autobiography,” Kansas Quarterly 7, no. 3 (summer 1975), Elizabeth Schultz briefly discusses Father of the Blues as an example of “testimonial autobiography,” in contradistinction to “blues autobiographies” by Hughes, Himes, Moody, and others.

NOTES TO PAGES 71 – 80

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Father of the Blues receives no mention in Stephen Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst, Mass., 1974); Andrews, African American Autobiography; Roger Rosenblatt, “Black Autobiography: Life as the Death Weapon,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J., 1980), 169 –93; Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Biography (New York, 1991); Christopher Harlos, “Jazz Autobiography,” 131– 66; Alfonso W. Hawkins, The Musical Tradition as an Affirmation of Cultural Identity in African American Autobiography (Columbus, 1993). In My Father’s Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men’s Autobiography (Philadelphia, 1991), David L. Dudley offers an excellent historical overview of scholarship in African American autobiography, but makes no mention of Handy’s. 15. Earl Conrad, “The Blues School of American Literature,” Chicago Defender, 22 December 1945, 11. 16. Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act (1964; New York, 1966), 90. 17. Jackson Daily Clarion-Ledger, 24 July 1903. Quoted in William F. Holmes, The White Chief: James Kimble Vardaman (Baton Rouge, La., 1970), 109. 18. Barton, Witnesses for Freedom, 67. 19. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature,151. 20. Jerome Bruner, “The Autobiographical Process,” in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, ed. Robert Folkenflik (Stanford, 1993), 45. 21. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York, 1972), 13. 22. For a detailed discussion of “St. Louis Blues”—its composition, musical innovations, and public reception—see Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 235 –39, 250. For a useful history of the St. Louis blues from its antebellum sources through the present day, see Harriet Ottenheimer, “The Blues Tradition in St. Louis,” Black Music Research Journal 9, no. 2 (fall 1989): 135 –52. 23. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 151–52. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. “Memphis Blues Band,” Chicago Defender, 14 June 1919, reported in Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me’: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues,” American Music 14, no. 4 (winter 1996): 422. 26. Ralph Eastman, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 1 July 1941, [n.p.]. On sales of “St. Louis Blues,” see Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 236. 27. Quoted in Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (New York, 1993), 284 – 85. 28. Rudi Blesh, Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz (1946; 2nd ed., New York, 1975), 146. 29. Whitcomb is quoted in Larry Nager, Memphis Beat: The Lives and Times of America’s Musical Crossroads (New York, 1998), 31. 30. New York Times, 7 July 1941, 72. 31. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 9. 32. David Honeyboy Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, as told to Janis Martinson and Michael Robert Frank (Chicago, 1997), 45. 33. B. B. King with David Ritz, Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B. B. King, (1996; New York, 1997), 79. 34. “Revolutionary narratives are considered more worthwhile than middle-class success stories, not merely because they are revolutionary, but also because they are usually better written and their insight more profound.” Butterfield, Black Autobiography in America, 6. 35. Schultz, “To Be Black and Blue,” reprinted in The American Biography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A. E. Stone (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1981), 109 –32. 36. Willie Dixon with Don Snowden, I Am the Blues (New York, 1990); Mance Lipscomb, I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman, as told

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to and compiled by Glen Alyn (New York, 1993); King, Blues All Around Me; Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing; Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (1946; New York, 1990); William Broonzy, Big Bill Blues, as told to Yannick Bruynoghe (1955; New York, 1992). 37. “Fryed, Baked, Skinned,” Indianapolis Freeman, 8 July 1893, 2. 38. Trudier Harris, “No Outlet for the Blues: Silla Boyce’s Plight in Brown Girl, Brownstones,” Callaloo 18, no. 2 (spring–summer 1983): 57– 67. 39. Sandra Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst, Mass., 1981), 17. 40. “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 24 April 1897, 5. 41. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 401. 42. “Hell in the First Degree,” Indianapolis Freeman, 19 August 1893, 3. 43. “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 23 January 1897, 6. 44. Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists (New York, 1990), [n.p.]. 45. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 32 –33. 46. “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 30 April 1898, 5. 47. “The Texas Horror: Graphic Reflection on this Ultra Southern Heinousness,” Indianapolis Freeman, 18 February 1893, 3. 48. Barton, Witnesses for Freedom, 67. 49. “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 8 July 1898, 5. 50. “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 5 November 1898, 5. 51. New York Age, 29 March 1890, 4. 52. Indianapolis Freeman, 10 April 1897, 4. 53. “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 24 April 1897, 5. 54. Holmes, The White Chief, 122. 55. New York Times, 7 July 1941, 72. 56. For the strongest counterargument to the point I make here—the stubborn persistence of the minstrel grin in American popular culture until the mid-1960s, see Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (1986; New York, 1988). 57. Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), 270. 58. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 236. 59. LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Dutchman (New York, 1964). 60. The precise date of Handy’s departure from Mahara’s and arrival in Clarksdale is a matter of scholarly speculation. Abbott and Seroff state that Handy left Mahara’s “at the close of the 1902 –1903 season” (“‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me,” 449). According to the Indianapolis Freeman (“The Stage,” 24 April 1897, 5), the 1896 –97 season of Mahara’s—Handy’s first—was to close “in about five weeks,” meaning late May or early June. The 1903 – 4 season began roughly two months later, on 6 August 1903 (“The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 29 August 1903). How soon after the 1902 –3 season ended did Handy head south? Jasen and Jones say only “In the summer of 1903 he accepted a job as leader of a black Knights of Pythias band in Clarksdale, Mississippi” (Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 230). 61. Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, 1993), 164 – 65. Mangham’s recollections, as reported by Lomax, should be viewed with skepticism as possible extrapolations or even wholesale inventions from sketchy notes taken at the time. I am indebted to David Evans for this caveat. 62. See, for example, David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1982; New York, 1987), 34; Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (1977; 2nd ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 24; Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York, 1981), 45; William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989), 31. 63. Eugene E. White, “Anti-Racial Agitation in Politics: James Kimble Vardaman in

NOTES TO PAGES 96 – 111

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the Mississippi Gubernatorial Campaign of 1903,” Journal of Mississippi History 7 ( January–October 1945): 91–96; Holmes, The White Chief, 102 –11; David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996; New York, 1997), 85 –91. 64. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery, 100. 65. See Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings (1962; Baltimore, 1988), 263 – 65. This figure includes lynchings in Drew, Vicksburg, Greenville, Cleveland, Mayersville, Doddsville, Benoit, Glendora, Coahoma, and Boyle. 66. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C., 1995), 13. See also 81–114. 67. White, “Anti-Racial Agitation in Politics,” 96 –98. 68. Holmes, The White Chief, 109, 185; White, “Anti-Racial Agitation in Politics,” 92. 69. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (New York, 1933), 314. 70. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery, 92. 71. On Handy’s performance venues, see Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, N.J., 1988), 105. 72. “[R]agtime, jazz and the blues,” insisted Handy in an interview, “reflect the honest, the pure and the genuine expression straight out of the souls of submerged people. I dug deep into their hearts and brought forth tones untouched by artificiality, melodies unspoiled by fluff.” “Paul Flowers’ Greenhouse” (interview with WCH), Memphis Commercial Appeal, 8 December 1950, [n.p.], W. C. Handy Papers, Schomburg Library. 73. Howard W. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes,”Journal of American Folk-Lore 24, no. 93 ( July–September 1911): 261. 74. On the question of Western rhythmic (in)competence, see John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago, 1979), 39 – 42. 75. See note 61. 76. Holmes, The White Chief, 133. 77. Charles S. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (1941; 2nd ed., New York, 1967). 78. I am grateful to David Evans for this contribution. 79. Literary Digest, 19 January 1918, 18. On murderousness of Memphis, see also Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenall, Beale Black and Blue (Baton Rouge, La., 1981),18, 24 –25. 80. James Dickerson, Goin’ Back to Memphis: A Century of Blues, Rock ’n Roll, and Glorious Soul (New York, 1996), 15 –16. 81. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 23 –29. On “coon songs,” see also Arnold Shaw, Black Popular Music in America: From the Spirituals, Minstrels, and Ragtime to Soul, Disco, and Hip-hop (New York, 1986), 41– 44. 82. Charles Peabody, “Notes on Negro Music,” Journal of American Folklore 16, no. 62 ( July–September 1903): 150 –51. 83. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes,” 259. 84. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 370. 85. See Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (1995; Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 76; see also “Negro Minstrelsy Should Go,” Indianapolis Freeman, 13 March 1897, 3; “An Aristocratic Cake Walk,” Indianapolis Freeman, 29 January 1898, 4; “The Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, 20 August 1898, 5. 86. Dickerson, Goin’ Back to Memphis, 24. 87. “Wants Justice for Negro: Booker T. Washington Makes Another Kind of Plea,” Indianapolis Freeman, 29 August 1908, 1. 88. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 59. 89. W. C. Handy, The Father of the Blues: A Musical Autobiography [12 April 1952], audiocassette (SLC 5192): DRG Records, 1979.

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90. See Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (1959; 2nd. ed., New York, 1975), 39, for a related claim: “What Handy remembered hearing was a song that the opposition was singing about Crump! The shouting and confusion he noticed was probably a disturbance by the Talbot [opposition candidate’s] forces to try to harass the opening of Crump’s campaign!” 91. For a brief discussion of the musical afterlife of “Mr. Crump” (including its transformation into Cow Cow Davenport’s playfully antidomestic “Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Here),” see Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (New York, 1984), 72 –73. David Evans has argued, by contrast, that “Mr. Crump” was itself probably a local derivative of “Mama Don’t Allow,” which seems to have had some national circulation around this time, and that Handy may have altered chronologies to sustain his myth as a blues originator. “In later interviews,” writes Evans, Cow Cow Davenport dated his learning of [“Mama Don’t Allow”] to 1910. We actually have only Handy’s later word that the tune was actually performed in 1909, and this may have been either an attempt to push his “Memphis Blues” back earlier so that it becomes indisputably the “first blues” or an attempt to link it to the 1909 Crump campaign in order to deflect criticism that he “supported” Crump. The usual lyrics of the song seem to suggest that Crump is already in office and carrying out reforms. David Evans, letter to Adam Gussow, 24 September 1999. 92. Handy, The Father of the Blues: A Musical Autobiography [audiocassette]. 93. Country bluesman Furry Lewis may have been one of the low-class musicians Handy was forced to hire, suggests David Evans. Lewis, who couldn’t read music, “always claimed to have played in a Handy band and said that Handy bought him his first good guitar and offered to train him. Lewis returned to Memphis following the loss of a leg in a hoboing accident in 1916 during a period of wandering as a traveling musician.” Evans, letter to Adam Gussow, 24 September 1999. 94. For a discussion of the Handy–Patton connection, see Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 105 –7. According to Willie Moore, Patton—who was only twelve when Handy arrived in the Delta—not only knew of Handy but saw him perform on several occasions. 95. Rosenblatt, “Black Autobiography,” 171. 96. For a narrative of the Person–Rappal episode, see James Weldon Johnson, “The Lynching at Memphis,” Crisis 14 (1917), in The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, vol. 2, ed. Sondra K. Wilson (New York, 1995), 23 –29. 97. Once again Handy alters the facts slightly in his autobiography. He moved first to Chicago, briefly, before relocating to New York. I am grateful to Elliott Hurwitt for this clarification.

Chapter Three 1. Kalamu ya Salaam, What Is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (Chicago, 1994), 12 –14. 2. See Mark Twain, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” in Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race, ed. Janet Smith (New York, 1962), 96 –104; H. L. Mencken is quoted in Walter White, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York, 1969), 9. 3. George Schuyler, Black No More (1931; Boston, 1989), 204, 216 –17. 4. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings: Southern Horrors, A Red Record, Mob Rule in New Orleans (1892, 1894, 1900; New York, 1969); Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer, “Lynching,” in Collected Black Women’s Poetry, ed. Joan R. Sherman, vol. 3 (New York, 1988), 31–35; J. Lee Greene, Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel’s First Century (Charlottesville, 1996), 115 –19.

NOTES TO PAGES 122 – 139

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5. Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington, Ind., 1984); Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890 –1912 (New York, 1996) ; Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York, 1987); Judith L. Stephens and Kathy A. Perkins, eds., Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women (Bloomington, Ind., 1998). See also Jacqueline Goldsby, “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 245 – 82. 6. Kalamu ya Salaam, “The Blues (in two parts),” in New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature, ed. Abraham Chapman (New York, 1972), 377. Autobiographies by B. B. King and Mance Lipscomb were cited extensively in chapter 1. All other texts are cited below. 7. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York, 1982), 148 – 49. 8. August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (New York, 1985), 67–70. 9. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996), 3. 10. Bebe Moore Campbell, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (New York, 1992), 286. 11. Walter Mosley, RL’s Dream (New York, 1995), 99, 134. 12. Sterling D. Plumpp, “Muddy Waters,” in Blues: The Story Always Untold (Chicago, 1989), 19 –20. See also Sterling D. Plumpp, Blues Narratives (Chicago, 1999), 57–59. 13. Plumpp, “Burning Up in the Wind,” in Blues: The Story Always Untold, 80 – 81. 14. Roberta Rubenstein, “Singing the Blues/Reclaiming Jazz: Toni Morrison and Cultural Mourning,” Mosaic 31, no. 2 ( June 1998): 151, 161. 15. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 16. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York, 1997), 74 –75. 17. Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar (1974; Boston, 1989), 13. 18. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (1980; New York, 1982), 4. 19. Arthur Flowers, Another Good Loving Blues (1993; New York, 1994), 2. Subsequent citations are included parenthetically within the text. 20. Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York, 1979), 18 –26. 21. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 22. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 3. 23. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. 24. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11. 25. B. B. King, with David Ritz, Blues All Around Me (1996; New York, 1997), 29 –30. Subsequent citations are included parenthetically within the text. 26. David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996; New York, 1997), 141– 42. 27. Louisiana folktale tradition offers several suggestive legends in this vein. A tree in Ponchatoula “was known among certain white inhabitants as ‘The Christmas Tree,’ because once four Negroes hung there during a lynching. The colored folk of the town always avoided the tree, claiming a hanged Negro will invariably haunt the spot near where he is hanged. . . . A headless man stalks the grounds surrounding the Skolfield House, not far from Baton Rouge. He seems to be perfectly harmless, and wanders rather aimlessly, perhaps in search of his skull.” Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, Robert Tallant, eds., Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana (1945; Gretna, La., 1987), 273. 28. Murray, Train Whistle Guitar, 141– 42. 29. Robert Johnson, “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” (1937), transcription in booklet accompanying Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (CBS Records, 1990), 42.

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30. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 75. 31. Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, 1993), 360. 32. Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968; New York, 1970), 135. 33. Robert Johnson, “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” (1937), in Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, 36. 34. Clarence Major, Dirty Bird Blues (1996; New York, 1997), 66, 68. Subsequent citations are included parenthetically within the text. 35. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; New York, 1986), 222. 36. On Major’s fusion of blues lyricism with internal monologue, see Joe Weixlmann, “Clarence Major’s Singing Voice(s),” in Clarence Major and His Art: Portraits of an African American Postmodernist, ed. Bernard W. Bell (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001), 243 – 63. 37. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Strachey, intro. Peter Gay (New York, 1961), 11. See also ibid., 36 –37. 38. Ibid., 15. 39. Lifton, The Broken Connection, 18 –34. 40. Quoted in Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (1977; 2nd ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 14. 41. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 156. 42. See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on AfroAmerican Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; Hanover, N.H., 1987), 256 – 82; Harris, Exorcising Blackness, 20 –24; Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York, 1988), 1–14; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998), 301–7; Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black–White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York, 1986), 111, 116 –19, 182 – 89. 43. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945; New York, 1986), 102. Subsequent citations are included parenthetically within the text. 44. Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings, 29. 45. Ibid., 26. 46. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 47. Ibid., 2. 48. See Albert Murray, “Ernest Hemingway Swinging the Blues and Taking Nothing,” in The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement (New York, 1996), 143 –221. 49. Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings (1962; Baltimore, 1988), 28, 168. 50. Larry Neal, “The Ethos of the Blues” (1972), in Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings, ed. Michael Schwartz (New York, 1989), 117. 51. Larry Neal, “Riffin in the Chili House,” in Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts (Washington, D.C., 1974), 18 –19. 52. For a description of the Mary Turner lynching, see Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 288 – 89. For a discussion of the Claude Neal lynching, see McKay Jenkins, The South in Black and White: Race, Sex, and Literature in the 1940s (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 44 –50.

Chapter Four 1. The most detailed standard account of the “Crazy Blues” story is Samuel B. Charters and Leonard Kunstadt, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (1962; New York, 1981), 82 –92. Two other vital sources are Perry Bradford, Born with the Blues: Perry Bradford’s Own Story (New York, 1965); and David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880 –1930 (New York, 1998). For “Crazy Blues” as an episode in blues history, see Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (1959; 2nd ed., New York, 1975), 45 – 46; LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963; New York, 1969), 99 –100; Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (1976; New York, 1977), 92 –94; William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989),

NOTES TO PAGES 160 – 162

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126 –28; Daphne Duval Harrison, Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, 1988), 43 – 62; and Francis Davis, The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People from Charley Patton to Robert Cray (New York, 1995), 57– 67. For “Crazy Blues” as an early event in the Harlem Renaissance, see Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: A Cultural Portrait, 1900 – 1950 (New York, 1981), 130 –32; and David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981; New York, 1989), 33, 173 –74. “Crazy Blues” is notably absent from Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1921; New York, 1973). 2. This sales figure is from Charters and Kunstadt, Jazz, 85 – 86. Their estimate of 1 million total copies is unreliable and may well include sales in other formats (sheet music, piano rolls) and cover versions by other artists (Mary Stafford, Noble Sissle). For the role of Pullman car porters in distributing “Crazy Blues” and other blues recordings, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977; New York, 1978), 225; Jas Obrecht, “Mamie Smith: The First Lady of the Blues,” Blues Revue 17 (May/June 1995): 22 –23; and Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (New York, 1999), 14. On the nationwide craze for “Crazy Blues,” see also Anderson, This Was Harlem, 132; Willis Laurence James, Stars in De Elements: A Study of Negro Folk Music, ed. Jon Michael Spencer (1945 [unpublished]; Durham, N.C., 1995), 60; Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (1977; 2nd ed., Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 200; Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 264 – 65; and Bradford, Born with the Blues, 126. 3. Chicago Defender, 26 February 1921, 4. 4. Tony Langston, “‘Mamie Smith Co.’ Fills the Avenue,” Chicago Defender, 5 March 1921, 4. 5. “Mamie Smith a Hit,” Chicago Defender, 6 March 1921, 5. 6. “In 1916,” writes Francis Davis, the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest black weekly, with a circulation of roughly a quarter of a million, including subscribers in the rural South, noted that black Americans, like the rest of their countrymen, were paying hard-earned money for records by Caruso and Tetrazini but were unable to ask dealers for records by “Mme Anita Patti Brown, Mr. Roland Hayes, Miss Hazel Harrison, Miss Maude J. Roberts, [and] Mr. Joseph Douglas.” These were black concert performers whose names mean nothing to us now (save for Hayes’s), except to reveal the paper’s sense of itself as the voice of an emerging black bourgeoisie and its miscalculation of the musical tastes of the overwhelming majority of its readers. . . . Also in 1916, the Defender asked for a count of its readers who owned Victrolas, presumably to demonstrate to skeptical record companies the potential market for releases by black performers. Davis, The History of the Blues, 61. For more on the role played by commercialism on the “public emergence of a folk orality,” see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York, 1997), 157–77. 7. Chris Albertson, “Bessie Smith: T’aint Nobody’s Business if I Do,” in Bluesland: Portraits of Twelve Major American Blues Masters, ed. Pete Welding and Toby Byron (New York, 1991), 50; Davis, History of the Blues, 65. For other dismissive views of Smith and “Crazy Blues,” see Derrick Stewart-Baxter, Ma Rainey and the Classic Blues Singers (New York, 1970), 12; Charters, Country Blues, 46; and Charles Keil, Urban Blues (1966; Chicago, 1991), 55. Hazel Carby offers a usefully revisionist perspective on the presumed “inauthenticity” of urban women’s blues in “Policing the Black Woman’s Body,” Critical Inquiry 18 (summer 1992): 755. 8. All lyrics are from Perry Bradford, “Crazy Blues,” recorded by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds in New York City, 10 August 1920. Okeh single #4169, fall 1920; reis-

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sued 1993 on Rhino BluesMasters, vol. 2, Classic Blues Women, R2 71134; transcription by Adam Gussow. Two published versions of “Crazy Blues” are available at the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library. The first of these—the “clean” version, trimmed of the final chorus— can be found in The Book of the Blues, ed. Kay Shirley (New York, 1963). The second—uncollected original sheet music with the final chorus intact— can be found on microfilm with assorted uncataloged sheet music published in 1920. The only published mention of these “cop-killing” lines to date (2000) is provided by Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 265. 9. Bradford, Born with the Blues, 154. 10. The lyrics for Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” released on Body Count (1992), include, for example: I’m ’bout to bust some shots off I’m ’bout to dust some cops off Cop killer! it’s better you than me Cop killer! Fuck police brutality For more on antipolice revenge fantasies in gangsta rap, see Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, 1994), 128 –31, 183; Russel A. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany, 1995), 87– 88; Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America (New York, 1999), 256ff.; and Alan Light, “Ice-T’s Declaration of Independence,” Rolling Stone, 18 March 1993, 19, 31. “Ice says a Time Warner ‘crisis attorney’ reviewed the tapes for Home Invasion,” reports Light, “and requested that he drop one track, ‘Ricochet,’ for the line ‘got sticky sneakers from the blood of a shot cop . . . .’” Mark Essex, celebrated in Heron’s recording, was a twenty-three-year-old black serviceman, radicalized by a book called Black Rage and his own experience of prejudice in the army, who killed nine persons, five of them white police officers, in a December 1972 sniper attack in New Orleans. See Peter Hernon, A Terrible Thunder: The Story of the New Orleans Sniper (New York, 1978). 11. For more on the subject, see “Wish Fulfillment Fantasies in Five Black Power Novels,” in Jerry H. Bryant, Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel (Amherst, 1997), 246 –50. 12. James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” (1960), in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961; New York: Dell, n.d.), 62. 13. “I decided to join the Black Panther Party and pick up the gun, in April of 1967. . . . [W]hen I first came into contact with the Black Panthers—with the particularly arrogant way they talked of revolution, their total disdain for the police, and their cold blue steel pistols and rifles—I felt confident.” Earl Anthony, Picking Up the Gun: A Report on the Black Panthers (New York, 1970), vii, 2. Aunt Molly Jackson, a white Kentucky-born coal miner’s wife, folksinger, and unlikely political activist, achieved notoriety in the early 1930s, according to Shelly Romalis, as the real-life “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” inspiration for a vaudeville song by that name. Jackson carried a gun not for the purpose of shooting agents of the law, but for protection while “delivering them babies” up in the Kentucky hills. See Shelly Romalis, Pistol Packin’ Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong (Urbana, 1999), 1, 3, 83. 14. For Jelly Roll Morton’s comments about the Robert Charles song, see Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (1949; New York, 1993), 70. 15. Anderson, This Was Harlem, 132. 16. Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay (New York, 1997), 984.

NOTES TO PAGES 164 – 167

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17. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: Black Resistance and White Violence in the American South, 1880 –1940,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 279 – 80. 18. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 265. 19. The black population of Harlem in 1920, and New York City as a whole, is a matter of some scholarly disagreement. The same month that “Crazy Blues” was released, James Weldon Johnson claimed that “[t]here are approximately 200,000 negroes in this city” (“Views and Reviews,” New York Age, 27 November 1920, 6), but of course not all black New Yorkers lived in Harlem. Gilbert Osofsky, invoking U.S. Census figures, lists New York’s black population in 1920 at 152,467 (Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890 –1930 [1966; New York, 1971], 128). Lewis claims that while the 1923 federal Census estimated an overall New York black population of 183,428, “[a] more likely figure of 300,000 was provided by the Information Bureau of the United Hospital Fund . . . most—perhaps two-third of them— . . . in Harlem” (Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 26). 20. Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” in The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Alain Locke, intro. Arnold Rampersad (1925; New York, 1992), 59. My account of Harlem’s negligible black police presence is drawn primarily from Marvin W. Dulaney, Black Police in America (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 22, 28; and from Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 26. For general background, also see Nicholas Alex, Black in Blue: A Study of the Negro Policeman (New York, 1969). Thomas L. Riis cites a turn-of-the-century “coon song” by black composer Bob Cole that “express[es] skepticism about the creation of a black police force”: Dey’s gwine to be colored policemen, all over dey say If dey do, it’ll be [the] leading topic of de day, I’d like to see colored people rise up to de mark, But I’d rather not see a coon on de street or in a park, For its hard enough to find a white policeman after dark. Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890 –1915 (Washington, 1989), 52. The most fascinating of all Cincinnati blues recordings, according to Steven Tracy, is “I’m Going to Cincinnati”; it memorializes, among other figures, a well-known black policeman, Stargel Bull: “Now when you come to Cincinnati don’t get too full [of booze] / You’re liable to meet the cop that they call Stargel Bull.” Bull—also known as “Police Stargel”—was Willard R. Stargel Sr., a twenty-three-year veteran of the force and cousin to bluesman James Mays. According to local resident Cleveland Green, “Stargel was not a bully. . . . Having spent all of his life in the Sixth Street area, he knew the people and they knew him as a tough and honest cop to be respected.” Steven C. Tracy, Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City (Urbana, 1993), 50 – 62. 21. James Weldon Johnson, “Views and Reviews” (“Law and Order in Harlem”), New York Age, 14 September 1918, 4. 22. Ibid. 23. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 22. 24. Edward Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York, 1984), 174. 25. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 2. 26. Ibid., 15, 17, 30. 27. On the connection between spectacle lynching and the murder of white police officers, see Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “The Sociogenesis of Lynching,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 57. 28. Arthur Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1933), 13. 29. Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; New York, 1991), 302.

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30. Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery (Amherst, 1988), 98. 31. Elijah Wald, Josh White: Society Blues (Amherst, Mass., 2000), 13. 32. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998), 15. 33. Bradford, Born with the Blues, 17–18. 34. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 264. 35. Ibid., 15. 36. Ibid., 264. 37. Charles S. Johnson, “The New Frontage on American Life,” in The New Negro, 287. 38. T. Arnold Hill, quoted in Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 20. 39. Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (1940; New York, 1993), 15. 40. W. E. B. Du Bois, quoted in Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 183. For more on the emergence of “bad niggers” in the late 1880s as figures haunting the anxious white southern imagination, see Ayers, 155ff, 231. 41. Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar (1974; Boston, 1989), 13. 42. Alan Lomax, Blues in the Mississippi Night (Rykodisc RCD-90155) [booklet, n.p.]. 43. Richard Congress, Blues Mandolin Man: The Life and Music of Yank Rachell ( Jackson, Miss., 2001), 62. 44. Willie Dixon with Don Snowden, I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story (London, 1989), 10. 45. Turner’s speech was reported, and offered qualified support, in an editorial in the Indianapolis Freeman, 10 April 1897, 4. 46. John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia, 1989), 171–73. See also Levine, Black Culture, 410. 47. Although “Railroad Bill” was based on the exploits of a black outlaw, and thus enabled a particularly close heroic identification on the part of black listeners, the song was performed widely by white hillbilly singers, too; the ballad’s freedom from explicit racial markers allowed them and their audiences to savor a desperado’s exploits qua exploits, rather than as a form of racially inflected rebellion. For more on the ballad, see Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in Folksong (Urbana, 1981), 122 –31. 48. “Railroad Bill,” Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 49. 49. See Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (New York, 1984), 35. 50. For “Wicked Blues,” see Bradford, Born with the Blues, 62. For “Sinful Blues,” see Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York, 1998), 336. 51. Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name, 62. For more on the way in which the police function in blues song as a kind of cultural superego, a sometimes benevolent but frequently malevolent agent of control over the working-class id-subject who sings blues songs, see Paul Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (1975; 2nd ed., San Francisco, 1996), 141. 52. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman, 171–72. 53. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), 69. 54. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman, 209. 55. “Stackolee,” Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 50. This “toast” version (a continuous text rather than separate verses) is entitled “A Harlem version” and reprinted along with “an old version” (also a toast) in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, eds., The Book of Negro Folklore (New York, 1958), 359 – 63. 56. Levine, Black Culture, 412. 57. Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenall, Beale Black and Blue (Baton Rouge, 1981), 27–29.

NOTES TO PAGES 175 – 184

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58. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York, 1984), 202. 59. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 405; William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge, 1976), 107. 60. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 407– 8. 61. Ibid., 407. 62. Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 69. 63. Hair, Carnival of Fury, 178 –79. 64. Obrecht, “Mamie Smith: The First Lady of the Blues,” 23. 65. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 257. 66. Bradford, Born with the Blues, 49, 94 –95. 67. Williamson, The Crucible of Race, 208; Hair, Carnival of Fury, 98. 68. Hair, Carnival of Fury, 76 –77. 69. Dorothy Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, 1925), 89. 70. David T. Courtwright, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America before 1940 (Cambridge, 1982), 97. 71. Hair, Carnival of Fury, 99 –100. 72. In Big Road Blues, David Evans relates the story of Joe Pullen, a black sharecropper in Drew, Mississippi and veteran of the war, who killed four white men and wounded eight others in 1923 before being killed himself after his plantation boss tried to cheat him out of his end-of-the-year settlement and then force him to stay and work off his debt. David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (New York, 1982), 190 –93. 73. Quoted in Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, 157. 74. Ibid., 149 –50. 75. Ibid., 151. 76. Ibid., 155. 77. Dulaney, Black Police in America, 23; Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response, 173. 78. “Georgia Whites Reorganize the Infamous Ku Klux Klan,” New York Age, 31 July 1920, 1. 79. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 18. 80. “Thanksgiving Week Bill Pleases Large Audiences at Lafayette,” New York Age, 27 November 1920, 6; James Weldon Johnson, “Views and Reviews” (“The Ku Klux Klan in New York”), New York Age, 4 December 1920, 4. 81. “Ku Klux Are Barred from New York State,” New York Age, 25 December 1920, 1. 82. James Weldon Johnson, “Views and Reviews” (“Ku Klux Klan of the North”), New York Age, 25 December 1920, 4. 83. James Weldon Johnson, “Views and Reviews” (“A New Danger to Be Met”), New York Age, 1 January 1921, 4. 84. Did “Crazy Blues,” released in November 1920, actually incite black New Yorkers to shoot white cops? Clarinetist Garvin Bushell, a member of Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds who toured with Smith in the early months of 1921, recounts a tantalizing anecdote. In the fall of 1921, on tour with Ethel Waters in Chicago, Bushell and a fellow musician were accosted one night by three white men whom they assumed were muggers. Bushell pulled out his gun, his friend pulled out a knife—at which point the white men revealed themselves to be detectives. Bushell and his bandmate were thrown in jail for three days. “It turned out,” according to Bushell, “a lot of cops had been killed in New York that year [1921], and when they found out we were from New York, they held us until they communicated with the New York Police.” Garvin Bushell, as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor, 1988), 38. 85. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 18 –19. 86. Quoted in Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 153.

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87. “At the end of 1919, there were only three black singers who were known as solo recording artists. Bert Williams, Noble Sissle, and the baritone C. Carroll Clark. [Williams had 59 sides since his debut in 1901. Noble Sissle had made 19 sides since 1917. Clark had sung light classical selections since 1907.] The solo voice of a black woman had never been heard on a commercial recording” ( Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 255). For more on early history of recording, see Harrison, Black Pearls, 43 – 45. 88. Robert Wilson Shufeldt, The Negro a Menace to American Civilization (Boston, 1907), 139. 89. This recording may possibly have been a skit or reenactment of some sort, since a real lynching would presumably have taken longer than the two minutes granted by a standard cylinder. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 159. 90. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 287. 91. Ida Cox recorded a number of death-haunted abandonment blues songs, including “Graveyard Dream Blues,” “New Graveyard Blues,” “Coffin Blues,” and “Death Letter Blues.” See Harrison, Black Pearls, 74 –76. 92. Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville, 1998), 6 –7. 93. Ibid, 10. 94. Roberta Rubenstein, “Singing the Blues/Reclaiming Jazz: Toni Morrison and Cultural Mourning,” Mosaic 31, no. 2 ( June 1998): 150. 95. John Lovell Jr., Black Song: The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out (1972; New York, 1986), 645. Blind Willie Johnson was reportedly arrested for causing a riot by singing this in front of the New Orleans Customs House. See Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues (1959; 2nd ed., New York, 1975), 161– 62. 96. Barbecue Bob (Hicks), “Ease It to Me Blues,” in Eric Sackheim, comp., The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters (1969; Hopewell, N.J., 1993), 324 –25. 97. Josie Miles, “Mad Mama’s Blues” (1924 ) (Document CD DOCD5467). For a pacifist variant of blues as civic fantasy, see William Ferris’s transcription of a 1967 song by James “Jabo” Collins of Como, Mississippi: “I had a dream, dream I had last night. / I dreamed I went to the U.N. and set the whole nation right.” William Ferris, Blues from the Delta (1978; New York, 1984), 9. 98. Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968; New York, 1976), 187. 99. Quoted in Jon D. Cruz, “Booze and Blues: Alcohol and Black Popular Music, 1920 –30,” Contemporary Drug Problems 15, no. 2 (summer 1988): 177–78. 100. Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit, 65 (emphasis in original). 101. Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (1976; New York, 1989), 10. 102. “Crazy Blues” (Perry Bradford, composer) as recorded 10 August 1920 by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds; reissued 1993 on Rhino Blues Masters, vol. 11, Classic Blues Women, R2 71134.

Chapter Five 1. Sandra B. Tooze, Muddy Waters: The Mojo Man (Toronto, 1997), 217–18. 2. David Honeyboy Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards, as told to Janis Martinson and Michael Robert Frank (Chicago, 1997), 92. In his autobiography, Edwards remembers the attack as having taken place in 1934; the date of 1929 and the incidental details are supplied by David Evans, who quotes Patton’s neice, Bessie Turner, as his source. See David Evans, “Charley Patton: The Conscience of the Delta,” in The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues Traditions: Influences and Comparisons, ed. Robert Sacré (Liège, 1987), 163 – 64. Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow describe two separate incidents: one, a house “frolic” in 1930 in

NOTES TO PAGES 196 – 200

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Moorhead or Itta Bena, where a “man attack[ed] Patton when his wife became indiscreet in her glances at the musician”; the other, a house “frolic” in Holly Ridge in 1933 where a man slit his throat, giving him, according to Honeyboy Edwards, “a deep cut in his vein . . . a bad cut.” Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, N.J., 1988), 226 –27. 3. Paul Oliver, Conversations with the Blues (New York, 1965), 81. 4. Bessie Tucker, “Got Cut All to Pieces” (1928) (Vic 38018); Uncle Skipper, “Cutting My ABCs” (1937) (Decca 7353); Big Maceo, “Maceo’s 32 –20” (1945) (Vic 20-2028); Little Walter, “Boom Boom, Out Goes the Light” (circa 1956), Boss Blues Harmonica (Chess Masters CH-2-9209), 1984; Lurrie Bell, “I’ll Be Your .44” (1982), Carrie and Lurrie Bell: Son of a Gun (Rooster Blues R2617). 5. Langston Hughes, “In a Troubled Key” and “Suicide,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York, 1995); Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928; Boston, 1987); Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; New York, 1990) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; New York, 1990); J. J. Phillips, Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale (Berkeley, 1966); Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar (1974; Boston, 1989); Gayl Jones, Eva’s Man (1976; Boston, 1987); August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (New York, 1985) and Seven Guitars (New York, 1997); Clarence Major, Dirty Bird Blues (1996; New York, 1997); Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York, 1992); Walter Mosley, RLs Dream (New York, 1995). 6. Michael Bloomfield, with S. E. Summerville, Me and Big Joe (San Francisco, 1980); Gerard Herzhaft, Long Blues in A Minor, trans. John DuVal (1986; Fayetteville, Ark., 1988). 7. Major, Dirty Bird Blues, 164. 8. Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 54. 9. Hughes, “Suicide,” Collected Poems, 82. 10. Major, Dirty Bird Blues, 202. 11. Murray, Train Whistle Guitar, 120 –21. 12. Uncle Skipper, “Cutting My ABCs” (1937), in Paul Oliver, Screening the Blues: Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1968; New York, 1989), 255. 13. Ibid., 255. 14. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 133. 15. Phillips, Mojo Hand, 34. 16. Larry Neal, “The Ethos of the Blues” (1972), in Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings, ed. Michael Schwartz (New York, 1989), 110. 17. Wilson, Seven Guitars, 23, 43, 47. 18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), 52. 19. See David T. Courtwright, Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 3 – 4, for a description of the problem posed by young single men throughout American history: American men, especially southerners and frontiersmen, were contemptuous of other races and touchy about personal honor, which they were inclined to defend by violent means. American men drank a great deal of hard liquor and grew up in cultures that equated drunkenness with obstreperousness. . . . They often took their recreation with other men in bibulous places of commercialized vice, such as gambling halls and saloons, thereby multiplying the opportunities for violent conflict. The guns and knives they carried increased the likelihood that such conflicts would have fatal results. When killings did occur the police and courts were often unable or indisposed to deal effectively with them. The preceding applies equally well to black jook patrons in Hurston’s Florida and white saloon-goers in the frontier West. It begs the question, however, of why violent women, such as Hurston’s Big Sweet, played so crucial a role in jook blues culture.

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20. Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000), 8 –9. 21. Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston (Berkeley, 1981), 62 – 63. 22. Hurston, Mules and Men, 154. 23. Hurston, The Sanctified Church, 64 – 65. 24. Ibid., 65. 25. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 52. 26. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in AfricanAmerican Culture (Philadelphia, 1990), 81. For additional discussion of the origins, history, and linaements of jook culture, see Jon Michael Spencer, The Rhythms of Black Folk: Race, Religion and Pan-Africanism (Trenton, 1995), 43 – 44; Samuel A. Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York, 1995), 66 – 67; Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (1986; Chicago, 1995), 55 –59; Julio Finn, The Bluesman: The Musical Heritage of Black Men and Women in the Americas (London, 1986), 202 –7; Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge, U.K., 1984), 41– 42; William Barlow, Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia, 1989), 29 –30. 27. Hurston offers a fictional critique of ex-slave parents as harsh disciplinarians in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934; New York, 1990), 1–2, 4 –5, 7, etc. See also Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 125 – 46, 386 –90. 28. William Broonzy, as told to Yannick Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story (1955; New York, 1992), 117. See also ibid., 115, 135 –36 for descriptions of similar beatings of Big Maceo and Memphis Slim. Both Richard Wright and Maya Angelou describe a related schoolyard game called “popping the whip” or “pop the whip,” in which black children link hands to form a human chain. The tropes Wright selects nod chillingly toward the game’s distant origins in slave-era punishments: Although I did not know it, I was on the tip end of the human whip. The leading boy, the handle of the whip, started off at a trot, weaving to the left and to the right, increasing speed until the whip of flesh was curving at breakneck gallop. I clutched the hand of the boy next to me with all the strength I had, sensing that if I did not hold on I would be tossed off. The whip grew taut as human flesh and bone could bear and I felt that my arm was being torn from its socket. Suddenly my breath left me. I was swung in a small, sharp arc. The whip was now being popped and I could hold on no more; the momentum of the whip flung me off my feet into the air, like a bit of leather being flicked off a horsewhip, and I hurtled headlong through space and landed in a ditch. I rolled over, stunned, head bruised and bleeding. Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945; New York, 1998), 128 –29. See also Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings (1969; New York, 1985), 18 –19. 29. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York, 1997), 78. 30. Paul Oliver, “Juke Joint Blues: Playing in the Barrelhouses,” in Blues off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary (New York, 1984), 45 – 47. 31. Willie Dixon, “Wang Dang Doodle” (1962), in I Am the Blues: The Willie Dixon Story, by Willie Dixon, with Don Snowden (New York, 1989), 120 –21. 32. Broonzy, Big Bill Blues, 102; Paul Garon and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues (New York, 1992), 69 –70; Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 89. 33. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 43 – 44, 48, 53.

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34. Michael Haralambos, Soul Music: The Birth of a Sound in Black America (1974; New York, 1985), 62. 35. Hurston, Mules and Men, 149. 36. Jan Mark Wolkin and Bill Keenom, Michael Bloomfield: If You Love These Blues (San Francisco, 2000), 28. 37. Haralambos, Soul Music, 63. 38. Muddy Waters, “Walkin’ through the Park” (1958). 39. Muddy Waters, “Oh Yeah” (1954). 40. Oliver, Screening the Blues, 255. 41. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985; New York, 1987), 174 –75. 42. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 48. 43. Ibid., 48. 44. See, for example, the dialogue between Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Slim in “Blues in the Mississippi Night,” in Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, 1993), 464. 45. See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [1845], in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York, 1987), 300. 46. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1975; New York, 1976), 643. 47. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; New York, 1986), 135. 48. Bellesiles, Arming America, 437. 49. Jon D. Cruz, “Booze and Blues: Alcohol and Black Popular Music, 1920 –1930,” Contemporary Drug Problems 15, no. 2 (summer 1988): 163 – 66. 50. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; New York, 1991), 227. 51. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1890 –1930 (New York, 1998), 24. 52. John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (1994; Urbana, 1997), 118. 53. This version of “See See Rider” (1925) was recorded by Ma Rainey and is transcribed in Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York, 1998), 241. 54. Reed is quoted in Margaret Jones Bolsterli, Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility (Knoxville, 1991), 53. 55. Quoted in David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1982; New York, 1987), 47– 48. 56. Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 81. 57. See Dick Hebidge, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1987), 109. 58. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 249 –50. 59. See Lynne Fauley Emery, Black Dance: From 1619 to Today (Princeton, 1988), 220; Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’, 79 – 80; Oliver, Blues off the Record, 46. According to folklorist David Evans, who has done considerable fieldwork in Mississippi jooks, [t]he word “jook/juke” may also be related to a notion of violent physical activity. I have often heard “jook” used as a verb, meaning to poke, as with a stick, knife, or an elbow. But it may also be derived from “chock,” a term for home made beer. C.f. a “chock house,” a place where chock is sold with drinking, dancing, music— i.e., a jook house. David Evans, letter to Adam Gussow, 20 August 2000. 60. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 61. 61. On Son House and “Bukka” White, see David Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996; New York, 1997), 128. According to

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Calt and Wardlow, “House (in 1928 or 1929) was sent to Parchman after shooting a man at a Saturday night ‘frolic’ in Lyon. His sentence was terminated after two years, thanks to the lobbying of his parents.” Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 210. While Barry Lee Pearson asserts that “tales of violence” retailed by blues musicians “are somewhat exaggerated— or in any event represent unusual working conditions,” he relates a series of jook mayhem tales by James “Son” Thomas, Otis Rush, John Cephas, and John Jackson, and admits that “the working artists who must go on stage night after night cannot afford to forget about” such violence. Barry Lee Pearson, “Sounds So Good To Me”: The Bluesman’s Story (Philadelphia, 1984), 101– 4. 62. Garon and Garon, Woman with Guitar, 77. 63. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 5. 64. William Ferris, Blues from the Delta (1978; 2nd ed., New York, 1984), 101. 65. Ibid., 102 –3. 66. Mance Lipscomb, as told to and compiled by Glen Alyn, I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman (New York, 1993), 205 – 6. 67. Ibid., 243. 68. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 119. 69. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1992; New York, 1994), 26 –27. 70. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 218. 71. Blues in the Mississippi Night (sound recording), Rykodisc RCD 90155 (1946; released 1990). 72. Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (1976; New York, 1977), 78 –79. 73. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 61. 74. Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenall, Beale Black and Blue (Baton Rouge, La., 1981), 184. 75. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 61. 76. Hurston, Mules and Men, 152. 77. Garvin Bushell, as told to Mark Tucker, Jazz from the Beginning (Ann Arbor, 1988), 29. 78. John Lee Hooker, “I’m Bad Like Jesse James,” Boom Boom (sound recording), Pointblank/Charisma V2-86553 (1992). 79. According to Ann Douglas, “Mae West, who sometimes sang the blues, wrote and starred in Sex, a hit on Broadway in 1926”—the show in which this quoted line appears. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 47. 80. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 172. 81. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 94. 82. See note 4. 83. On Jamaican gun talk, see Norman C. Stolzoff, Wake the Town and Tell the People: Dancehall Culture in Jamaica (Durham, N.C., 2000), 151, 166. 84. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 172 –73. 85. Bessie Tucker, “Got Cut All to Pieces” (1928), in Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (1960; 2nd rev. ed., New York, 1990), 178. 86. “In a Troubled Key,” Hughes, Collected Poems, 249. 87. Ida Cox, “How Can I Miss You When I’ve Got Dead Aim” (1925), in Anna Strong Bourgeois, Blueswomen: Profiles and Lyrics, 1920 –1945 ( Jefferson, N.C., 1996), 37. 88. Wilson, Seven Guitars, 1. 89. Ibid., 32. 90. Ibid., 19. 91. Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 54 –55. 92. Walter Mosley, RL’s Dream (New York, 1995), 80. 93. Herzhaft, Long Blues in A Minor, 93.

NOTES TO PAGES 227 – 234

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94. Peetie Wheatstraw, “Beer Tavern” (1939), in Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 157. 95. Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 178. 96. Quoted in Stuart A. Kane, “Wives with Knives: Early Modern Murder Ballads and the Transgressive Commodity,” Criticism 38, no. 2 (winter 1996): 224, 226 –27. 97. Lillian Glinn, “Packing House,” in Oliver, Blues off the Record, 221. 98. The sausage-as-phallus metaphor is grotesquely, if wittily, recycled by Gayl Jones in Eva’s Man, where Eva Medina, later jailed for having killed her lover and bitten off his penis, is shown munching on a mustard-smeared sausage while she listens to a blues singer in a New Mexico bar. 99. Steven G. Smith, “Blues and Our Mind-Body Problem,” Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992): 41–52. 100. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 20 –21. 101. Paul Oliver, “Backwater Blues: On the River Levees,” in Blues off the Record, 17. 102. Ibid., 18. 103. John Lee Hooker, “Boom Boom” (1962), Boom Boom (see note 78). 104. Louise Redd, Playing the Bones (1996; New York, 1997), 116. 105. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 425 –26. 106. Eugene B. Redmond, “Double Clutch Lover,” in The Eye in the Ceiling: Selected Poems (New York, 1991), 171–73. 107. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975; Boston, 1986), 3. 108. Major, Dirty Bird Blues, 1. 109. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 175. 110. Ibid., 174. 111. Ibid., 6.

Chapter Six 1. The best available survey of Hurston’s use of blues themes is Maria V. Johnson, “‘The World in a Jug and the Stopper in [Her] Hand’: Their Eyes as Blues Performance,” African American Review 32, no. 3 (fall 1998): 401–14. Other studies include Carol Batker, “‘Love Me Like I Like to Be’: The Sexual Politics of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women’s Club Movement,” African American Review 32, no. 2 (summer 1998): 199 –214; Lisa Boyd, “The Folk, the Blues, and the Problem of Mule Bone,” The Langston Hughes Review 13, no. 1 (spring 1995): 33 – 44; Lorraine Bethel, “‘This Infinity of Conscious Pain’: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Literary Tradition,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1987), 12 –13. For Hurston’s own theorizings about blues culture, see “The Jook” in “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” The Sanctified Church: The Folklore Writings of Zora Neale Hurston (Berkeley, 1981), 62 – 67; and “Go Gator and Muddy the Water” and “The Jacksonville Recordings,” in Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers’ Project, ed. Pamela Bordelon (New York, 1999), 68 –75, 157–77. 2. For the Tea Cake debate, see Mary Helen Washington, “The Darkened Eye Restored: Notes toward a Literary History of Black Women,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, N.C., 1994), 448; John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (Urbana, 1994), 178 – 87; Michael Awkward, “Introduction,” New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God (Cambridge, 1991), 17. 3. Trudier Harris, The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (Athens, Ga., 1996), 3 –35. 4. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York, 1993), 69. 5. Mary Ellison, Extensions of the Blues (London, 1989), 198; Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago, 1984), 14; Lowe, Jump

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at the Sun, 13; Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York, 1983), 91. 6. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana, 1977), 55. 7. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, ed. Robert E. Hemenway (1942; Chicago, 1984), 185. Subsequent references to this work (DT) are cited parenthetically in the text. 8. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; New York, 1990), 179. Subsequent references to this work (MAM) are cited parenthetically in the text. 9. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 102. 10. “The Ocoee Riot,” Hurston’s brief account of a lynching that took place in a Florida hamlet not far from Eatonville, is a notable exception. See Go Gator and Muddy the Water, 146 –50. 11. Sterling Brown, “Old Time Tales,” New Masses (25 February 1936): 25. 12. For the “racial health” defense, see Alice Walker, “Zora Neale Hurston—A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View,” published as the foreword to Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, xii–xiii; Lowe, Jump at the Sun, 184 and passim; Carla Kaplan, “The Erotics of Talk: ‘That oldest human longing’ in Their Eyes Were Watching God, American Literature 67, no. 1 (March 1995): 115 – 43. 13. Robert Johnson, “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” quoted in booklet accompanying Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings (Columbia Records, 1990), 36. 14. Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 61. In “The Porter” (1927), Ernest Hemingway has George, a black Pullman porter, deliver a disquisition on the art of razor fighting to Jimmy, a white boy who plays much the same naif that Hurston plays vis-à-vis Big Sweet: “‘The razor’s a delusion,’ [George] said. ‘The razor’s no defense. Anybody can cut you with a razor. If you’re close enough to cut them they’re bound to cut you. If you could have a pillow in your left hand you’d be all right. But where you going to get a pillow when you need a razor? Who you going to cut in bed? The razor’s a delusion, Jimmy.’” Carl P. Eby, Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood (Albany, 1999), 66. 15. Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York, 1993), 143. 16. Ibid., xv. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), 52. 17. Alan Lomax and Lawrence Gellert, both of whom made invaluable field recordings of black folksong (including blues), collected little if any material in black jooks; their primary scenes of collection were jails, prison farms, front porches, and backyards. Gellert is a special case: a New York native who moved to North Carolina in the early 1920s, he “took up residence with a black woman and obtained the status of an insider,” according to Bruce Bastin, a status that permitted him to harvest a singularly honest assortment of black protest songs from informants—prisoners on gangs, mostly—who trusted him not to betray them. Many of these songs were transcribed and published in New Masses in the 1930s; a record entitled Negro Songs of Protest was finally issued in 1973, and fifteen additional blues recordings were issued in 1982. See Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (Chicago, 1995), 64 – 67. 18. Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1926). 19. Hurston, letters to Boas, 27 December 1928 and 20 October 1929; Hurston, letter to Locke, 10 May 1928. Quoted in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 124, 128. 20. Odum and Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs, 13. 21. Bastin, Red River Blues, 55 –56. 22. In “The Collector as Sexual Being,” Trudier Harris describes Mules and Men as “an adventure into potentially romantic liasons, with Hurston as the beautiful, pursuable, but ultimately elusive female . . . implicitly cute, cuddly, and in need of protection.” Harris, The Power of the Porch, 23ff.

NOTES TO PAGES 244 – 268

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23. Merline Johnson, “Two by Four Blues” (1941), Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (1960; 2nd rev. ed., New York, 1990), 177. 24. Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” New Masses, 7 October 1937, 22. 25. Quoted in Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 370. 26. Richard Wright, foreward to Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, xv. 27. Both race and class seem to be implicated in Hurston’s moment of sickened recoil from the jook: she asserts class solidarity with her (white, middle-class) reading audience by depicting the jook as “sordid,” and the disgust engendered by this word—the distance it places the jook from white middle-class norms—inevitably translates into racial difference. 28. Harris, The Power of the Porch, 13 –14. 29. Pieter Spierenburg, “Knife Fighting and Popular Codes of Honor in Early Modern Amsterdam,” in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, Ohio, 1998): 103 –27. 30. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York, 1997), 1267–70. 31. Robert Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of African-American Narrative (1979; Urbana, 1991), 167. 32. See David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (1982; New York, 1987), 150 –1, 337. 33. Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1992; New York, 1994), 67. 34. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, 5. 35. See, for example, Judith Robey, “Generic Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road,” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 4 (winter 1990): 667– 82. 36. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; New York, 1993), 296. 37. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, 164 – 67. 38. Mary Helen Washington, foreword to Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, xiii– xiv. 39. Crispin Sartwell, Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago, 1998), 132. 40. Missy Dehn Kubitschek, “‘Tuh de Horizon and Back’: The Female Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” in Modern Critical Interpretations, 27–28. 41. Johnson, “The World in a Jug,” 401–15. 42. Lowe, Jump at the Sun, 178. 43. Johnson, “The World in a Jug,” 403. 44. Paul Garon and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues (New York, 1992), 103 –14. 45. Memphis Minnie, “Bumble Bee No. 2” (1930), Garon and Garon, Woman with Guitar, 107. 46. Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Shadow and Act (1964; New York, 1966), 101. 47. Kaplan, “The Erotics of Talk,” 115. 48. Sartwell, Act Like You Know, 132. 49. Hurston, “The Ocoee Riot,” in Go Gator and Muddy the Water, 146 –52. In Dust Tracks, Hurston also speaks with a candor more typical of Richard Wright about the terror engendered in Eatonville blacks by the possibility that a local man would be lynched by a roaming search party: We huddled around Mama in her room and kept quiet. There was not a human sound in all the village. Nothing had ever happened before in our vicinity to create such tension. But people had memories and told tales of what happened back there in Georgia, and Alabama and West Florida that made the skin of the young

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crawl with transmitted memory, and reminded the old heads that they were still flinchy. (DT, 228) 50. W. E .B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1982), 50.

Epilogue 1. Roland L. Freeman, “Don’t Forget the Blues.” Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review 13, nos. 1, 2 (spring–summer 1998/fall–winter 1998 –99): 63 – 65. 2. Bebe Moore Campbell, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (New York, 1992), 408 –9. 3. Jon Michael Spencer, Blues and Evil (Knoxville, 1993), xix.

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INDEX

abandonment blues, 183 –93; “Crazy Blues” as, 13, 183, 185; “Haunted House Blues” as, 13, 185 – 89; lynching as cause of abandonment, 13, 185 – 87 Abbott, Lynn, 62, 75, 294n. 60 abjection: blues subjects’ responses to, 13, 129; of the corpse, 129 –30; doubled, 151–54; embrace of, 131–36; Kristeva on, 132 –33; possession of, 143 –51 Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 162 African Americans. See blacks African Emigration Society, 175, 179 “Ain’t That Loving You Baby” (Reed), 233 Alabama, 81, 166, 170 Albertson, Chris, 161 alcohol, 211, 212 Alexander, Texas, 19 Allan, Lewis, 19 “All Around Man” (Carter), 43 – 44, 62 “All Coons Look Alike to Me” (Hogan), 84 Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels, 177 Alligator Records, 275 Allison, Bernard, 274 Amsterdam taverns, 246 – 47 Anderson, Jervis, 164 Anderson, W. H., 122 Andrews Sisters, 216, 222 Angelou, Maya, 79, 306n. 28 “Anne Wallen” (ballad), 228 Another Good Loving Blues (Flowers), 129, 131–36 Anthony, Earl, 162, 300n. 13 Appointed (Stowers and Anderson), 122 Arkansas, 217, 218 Armstrong, Louis, 23, 66, 155 Arnold, John Henry, 49 Arnold, Kokomo, 18 Ashantis, 36 Atkins, Ace, 279 “A to Z Blues” (Miles and Higgins), 41– 42, 198 autobiographies, blues, 79 – 81, 122, 288n. 28, 292n. 14 Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man ( Johnson), 122 Ayers, Edward L., 37–38, 150, 166, 185

“badman” figure: badwoman tradition and, 164; in blues texts, 40 – 45; “Crazy Blues” and, 162 – 63, 164, 168 –75; rejection as strategy of, 129, 169; as response to spectacle lynching, 168 – 69 Baker, Bruce E., 287n. 6 Baker, Houston A., 28, 69, 72, 74, 75, 234, 250 Baldwin, James, 8, 162, 172, 189 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 52, 93, 287n. 18 Barbecue Bob, 190 Barker, Danny, 32, 35, 177 Barlow, William, 1, 287n. 18 barrelhouses, 38, 218 –19 Barrett, Mell, 185 Barton, Rebecca Chalmers, 71, 72, 86 Bastin, Bruce, 240, 310n. 17 Battle, Samuel J., 165 “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” (Andrews Sisters), 216, 222 bebop (bop), 7, 156 Beck, E. M., 2, 45 “Beer Tavern” (Wheatstraw), 227 Bell, A. D., 170 Bell, Lurie, 10, 195, 196, 212, 221, 222 –24, 229 Bellesiles, Michael, 6, 200, 211 Berlin, Irving, 67, 91 “Between the World and Me” (Wright), 33, 34 Big Bill Blues (Broonzy), 25, 80 “Big Boy Leaves Home” (Wright), 72, 249 Big Maceo, 196 “Black Angel Blues” (Nighthawk), 291n. 100 Black Boy (Wright), 32 –33, 34, 79, 159, 278 black men: black women fearing abandonment by, 183 –93; coon songs popular with, 108 –9; economic dislocation of, 38; eyes as dangerous for, 53 –54; individualism in younger, 37–38; as lynching victims, 18, 26, 37, 150; seen as “black beast rapist,” 2, 40, 45, 139, 150, 151, 152, 153; sexual potency attributed to, 45; veterans of World War I, 179 – 80; violence in culture of, 42. See also “badman” figure

328

INDEX

black minstrelsy: decline of, 90, 91–92; discretion required in, 87; disillusion in, 83 – 84; disjunction in, 91–92; Handy on wistful cry of, 83; material benefits of, 70, 75, 88 “Black Mountain Blues” (Smith), 244 black music: coon songs, 84, 108 –9, 212 –13, 244 – 45; race records, 92, 159, 195; ragtime, 69, 84, 108; rap, 13, 22, 162, 223, 274 –75; spirituals, 4, 92. See also black minstrelsy; blues; jazz black newspapers, 85 Black No More (Schuyler), 120 –22 black-on-black (intimate) violence, 195 –232; as essential to jook sociality, 201–11; in Hurston’s Mules and Men and Dust Tracks, 235 –52; as intimate violence, 4 –5; in jooks, 42, 211–20; pent-up frustration released by, 209 –10; at Saturday night frolics, 211; for saving face, 210; and selfmaking, 195 –201; and sexuality, 9 –10, 209; “somebodiness” affirmed in, 4 –5; white-on-black violence conditioning, 199 black-on-white violence, 159 –94; heroes produced by, 4; as retributive, 3, 13. See also cop killing “Black Ophelia’s Shouting Jailhouse Blues” (song), 10 blacks: cheapness of lives of, 6; disciplinary encirclement of, 18; “nigger work” done by, 209; northward migration of, 53, 168, 179, 219; as second-hand spectators of lynchings, 130. See also black men; black music; black-on-black (intimate) violence; black-on-white violence; black women “Black Snake Moan” ( Jefferson), 40 “Black Water Blues” (Culver), 278 black women: abandonment feared by, 183 – 93; badwomen, 164, 192, 244; blues heroism of, 157–58; classic blues sung by, 7, 46; fantasies of picking up the gun, 191; fear of lynching in, 26 –27; gender exemption for, 164; in jook joint violence, 305n. 19; as lynching victims, 18; sexual violence by white men, 37 Blake, Blind, 7 Blease, Cole, 49 Bledsoe, Sam, 174 Blesh, Rudi, 76 –77 “Bloodhound Blues” (Spivey), 19 Bloomfield, Michael, 197, 207, 278 “blue blues,” 44 – 45

Blue Boy, 19 blues: AAB form, 8 –9; advertising of, 23; “blue blues,” 44 – 45; blues texts, 8 –11; cathartic musical repetitions in, 104; “classic” blues, 1, 7, 46; “confessing the blues,” 11–12, 45 –59; culture emerging for articulating, 83; disjunction in minstrelsy resolved in, 92; exaggeration in aesthetic of, 42, 120; fantasy in truth of, 192; forbidden aggression by proxy in, 36 –37; Handy encountering, 69, 93 – 94, 99 –106; haunting sound of early Mississippi, 104; Hurston and blues legacies, 233 –35; “jinx all around my bed,” 23 –38; jook joint violence provoked by, 213 –14; joys and pains of the flesh in, 154; literature versus orature, 8 –9; lynching addressed in, 10 –11, 18 –19, 22; lynching and blues humor, 39 – 45; lynching as haunting, 130; lynching in formation of blues subject, 4, 17– 65; as mode of resistance, 15 –16; as music to cut loose by, 214; origins of, 3, 23, 287n. 18; as pain hardened with laughter, 193; piano blues, 38; as reaffirmation and continuity in face of adversity, 2; as rowdy party music, 275; self-focus in, 37; “somebodiness” affirmed in, 4; as symbolic of what unconsciously oppresses blacks, 27; torture and dismemberment in, 29; violence in blues culture, 5, 195 – 232; weapons in, 221–32; white appropriation of, 274 –79; white images of blacks altered by, 92. See also abandonment blues; blues musicians; blues venues; and songs by name Blues All Around Me (King), 54, 80, 129 Blues and Trouble (Piazza), 279 blues autobiographies, 79 – 81, 122, 288n. 28, 292n. 14 Blues in the Mississippi Night (Lomax), 25 Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (Davis), 183 Blues Line, The: A Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters (Sackheim), 289n. 44 Bluesman (Dubus), 279 Blues Mandolin Man (Rachell), 52 blues musicians: autobiographies of, 79 – 81, 122, 288n. 28, 292n. 14; badman ethos in, 169; blues heroism of, 157; as confronting and naming abjection, 154; as conscience, 105; and jook joint violence, 215 –16; lynchings witnessed by, 46 –50;

INDEX

money-making by, 78; as subjects of their own songs, 3; weapons carried by, 42. See also by name Blues Narratives (Plumpp), 124 “Blues School of American Literature, The” (Conrad), 71, 79 “Blue Spirit Blues” (Smith), 11, 30 –32, 39 Blues: The Story Always Untold (Plumpp), 124 “Blues Trip Me This Morning” (McClennan), 37 blues venues: barrelhouses, 38, 218 –19; Saturday night dances, 10, 128, 195, 210, 211, 215, 216. See also jooks bo akutia, 36 Bolsterli, Margaret Jones, 14 Bontemps, Arna, 67 “Boom Boom” (Hooker), 14 –15, 203, 208, 230 –31 “Boom Boom, Out Goes the Light” (Little Walter), 14 –15, 196, 221, 231, 232, 266 bop (bebop), 7, 156 Born with the Blues (Bradford), 167 Bradford, Perry: with Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels, 177; Born with the Blues, 167; “Bullfrog Hop,” 171; and Robert Charles incident, 163, 177; and cop-killing couplet of “Crazy Blues,” 161, 162; “Crazy Blues” written by, 13, 159; and Morton, 177; on Pullman porters selling “Crazy Blues,” 160; “Sinful Blues,” 171–72; and southern policing, 167; “This Thing Called Love,” 171; “Wicked Blues,” 171–72 Brewer, Christopher, 68 Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (musical), 20 Brogan, Kathleen, 187, 188 Broonzy, Big Bill: Big Bill Blues, 25, 80; on Black Saddy, 205; “Conversation with the Blues,” 22, 24 –25, 59; on “crazy niggers,” 169; on cussing the mule instead of the boss, 36; on levee camps, 217; on Mississippi, 25; on Tampa Red’s birthday parties, 203 Brown, Claude, 79 Brown, Larry, 225 Brown, Ora, 30 Brown, Sterling, 23, 83, 236 –37 Bruce, Henry Clay, 292n. 7 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, 2 Bruner, Jerome, 73 Bryant, Jerry H., 4 Buford, Mojo, 206

329

“Bullfrog Hop” (Bradford), 171 “Bully Song, The” (Trevathan), 109, 212, 244 – 45 “Bumble Bee” (Memphis Minnie), 259 – 63, 264 “Burning Up in the Wind” (Plumpp), 120, 125 –26, 129 Burt, Olive Woolley, 288n. 29 Bushell, Garvin, 53, 55, 220, 226, 303n. 84 Butler, Judith, 12, 133 Butterfield, Stephen, 293n. 34 Butts, Calvin, 275 Byrd, James, Jr., 50, 127 Cahill, Marie, 108 Calt, Stephen: on attacks on Patton, 304n. 2; on barrelhouse violence, 219; on function of Mississippi blues, 20; on House sent to Parchman, 307n. 61; on jooks, 110; on Patton and lynchings, 19; on selffocus of early blues, 37; on violence at Saturday night frolics, 215 Campbell, Bebe Moore, 123 –24, 273, 276 –77 Carby, Hazel, 122 Carroll, Charles, 92 Carter, Bo, 43 – 45, 62 Caruth, Cathy, 12, 17, 123, 127, 135 Cash, Wilbur J., 167, 212 “Chain Gang Blues” (Arnold), 18 chain gangs, 38, 184 “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (Hurston), 201, 238, 271 Charles, Robert, 163, 175 –79 “Charlie Cherry” ( Jackson), 289n. 44 Charters, Samuel B., 296n. 90 Chatmon, Sam, 218 Chicago: black migration to, 53, 168, 179, 220; blues clubs in the 1960s, 207; call for black police in, 165; contemporary blues culture in, 274; race riot of 1919, 180 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 85, 160, 161, 181, 299n. 6 Chisenhall, Fred, 174 Christian, Charlie, 139, 142 “City of Refuge, The” (Fisher), 165 Clapton, Eric, 275 Clark, C. Carroll, 304n. 87 “classic” blues, 1, 7, 46 Clifford, James, 235 cocaine, 108, 177–78, 274 Cole, Bob, 301n. 20

330

INDEX

Coleman, George and Nana, 62 Collins, James “Jabo,” 304n. 97 Coming of Age in Mississippi (Moody), 14, 142, 190 –91 Cone, James, 4, 5, 22, 23 Conrad, Earl, 71, 79 “Conversation with the Blues” (Broonzy), 22, 24 –25, 59 convict lease system, 17, 166, 184 cool-pose, 154 coon songs, 84, 108 –9, 212 –13, 244 – 45 Copeland, Shemekia, 274 “Cop Killer” (Ice-T), 162, 300n. 10 cop killing: Robert Charles incident, 163, 175 –79; cop killers as literary protagonists, 162; in “Crazy Blues,” 13, 161– 62, 171– 83, 191–93, 303n. 84; Mark Essex incident, 162, 300n. 10; lynching for, 166; in rap music, 275 corpse, the, 129 –30, 135 Corregidora ( Jones), 9, 157–58, 232 Councill, Willie, 109 “County Farm Blues” (House), 229 Courtwright, David T., 305n. 19 Cox, Ida, 27, 59, 164, 171, 225, 304n. 91 Cox, Minnie M., 95 “Crazy Blues” (Smith), 159 –94; as abandonment blues, 13, 183, 185; advertising of, 160; and “badman” figure, 162 – 63, 164, 168 –75; badwoman in, 164, 192; and black anger at police, 167, 168; black resistance spurred by, 164; and Robert Charles incident, 163, 175 –79; cop killing couplet in, 13, 161– 62, 171– 83, 191–93, 303n. 84; and “crazy nigger,” 169; cultural haunting and cultural mourning in, 188 – 89; disjunction in minstrelsy and, 92; as first blues recording, 13, 160, 161; “going down to the railroad” stanza in, 1; low critical opinion of, 13, 161; in New Orleans, 177; and “Railroad Bill,” 172 –73; in Red Summer of 1919, 164, 179 – 83; retributive violence in, 13; sales of, 13, 160, 299n. 2; and “Sinful Blues” and “Wicked Blues,” 171–72; text of, 193 –94; Wheatstraw’s “Drinking Man Blues” compared with, 191–92 “crazy niggers,” 168 –75 Crossroad Blues (Atkins), 279 Crump, E. H.: Handy working for, 68, 109 – 14; “Mr. Crump,” 111–14, 296nn. 90, 91; as reform candidate for mayor, 109

Cruz, Jon D., 212 cultural haunting, 187– 88 cultural mourning, 127, 129, 188 Culver, Monte, 278 “Cuttin’ My ABC’s” (Uncle Skipper), 196, 198, 208, 212, 221, 227, 229 Da Lench Mob (rap group), 22 D’Angelo (performer), 275 Danley, Theresa, 46 Davenport, Cow Cow, 18, 296n. 91 Davis, Angela Y., 5, 13, 79, 183 – 84, 189, 287n. 10 Davis, Francis, 161, 299n. 6 Davis, Rev. Gary, 39, 49 Davis, Guy, 275 “Death Letter Blues” (Cox), 59 de la Roche, Roberta Senechal, 38 Dickerson, James, 108, 109 Dirty Bird Blues (Major), 40, 129, 142, 143 – 51, 197, 198, 232 Dirty Dozens, 206 disciplinary violence: Foucauldian notion of discipline and, 286n. 3; Hurston’s work and, 236; lynching as, 2 –3, 18, 37, 96; police repression as, 7 dismemberment, 29, 127, 137, 158 Dixon, Thomas, 92 Dixon, Willie: autobiography of, 80; on fear in black people, 3; on his father as “crazy,” 170; I Am the Blues, 50; on Mississippi county farm, 50 –52; “Wang Dang Doodle,” 204 –5 Dollard, John, 18, 35, 187 domestic violence, 253 –54, 275 “Don’t Forget the Blues” (Freeman), 276 “Don’t Mash My Digger So Deep” (Carter), 44 Dorsey, Learthen, 36 “Double Clutch Lover” (Redmond), 231–32 Douglas, Ann, 83, 308n. 79 Douglass, Frederick, 52, 80, 211 Dozens, the, 206 “Drinking Man Blues” (Wheatstraw), 14, 191–92 Du Bois, W. E. B., 64, 70, 92, 125, 168 – 69, 180, 268 Dubus, Andre, III, 279 duCille, Ann, 233 –34 Dulaney, Marvin W., 166 Duskin, Big Joe, 47– 48 Dust Tracks on the Road (Hurston), 235 –52; on attack on Hurston in Polk County jook,

INDEX

234, 243 –50; as blues ballad, 234; on fear of lynching, 311n. 49; on Hurston fighting with boys, 233; on Hurston’s affair with “A.W.P.,” 250 –51; on unwanted male advances, 242 “Dyin’ in the Electric Chair” (Blue Boy), 19 “Ease it to Me Blues” (Barbecue Bob), 190 economic dislocation, 38 Edwards, David “Honeyboy”: attack in Charleston, Ill., 198 –99; on attack on Patton, 196, 304n. 2; on blues and money making, 78; as éminence gris, 274; on killing blacks, 6, 210; on Quack lynching, 53, 54; on Saturday night dances, 210, 215; as source for this study, 14; The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 8, 80 “Elegy” (Hacker), 278 Ellison, Mary, 234 Ellison, Ralph, 71, 72, 73, 260 – 61 embrace, 13, 130, 131, 137 “Empty Bed Blues” (Smith), 186, 263 – 64 English folk ballads, 228 “Escaped Convict, The” (Williams), 105 Essex, Mark, 162, 300n. 10 “Ethics of Living Jim Crow, The” (Wright), 168 Evans, David, 105, 287n. 18, 296nn. 91, 93, 303n. 72 Eva’s Man ( Jones), 9, 157–58, 197, 309n. 98 “Every Day I Have the Blues” (King), 57 Fanon, Frantz, 173, 199 –200, 202 Father of the Blues (Handy), 75 – 81; in American war effort, 66 – 67; as case study of black minstrelsy, 90, 91; critical neglect of, 12, 71; on Handy leaving Memphis, 68, 107; Handy’s learning to acknowledge racial feelings in, 99; Native Son compared with, 67, 68 – 69; original title of, 67– 68 Ferris, William, 23, 38, 39, 215, 304n. 97 “First Time I Met You, The” (Montgomery), 11, 33 –36, 39, 56, 59, 269 Fisher, Rudolph, 165 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 92 Fletcher, Tom, 66, 70 Florida: barrelhouses in, 218; Hurston on jooks in, 201–2, 219, 235 –52 Flowers, Arthur: Another Good Loving Blues, 129, 131–36; on literary hoodoo, 154; lynching as theme of, 4 Flowers, Isaac, 2

331

Foucault, Michel, 286n. 3 Fredrickson, George, 150 Freeman, Roland L., 276 Freud, Sigmund, 39, 48, 147, 279 Frith, Simon, 214 frolics (Saturday night dances), 10, 128, 195, 210, 211, 215, 216 Fuller, Blind Boy, 249 Fuller, Handy, 47– 48 Furia, Philip, 84 gangsta rap, 13, 22, 162, 223, 274 –75 Garland, Terry, 273 Garon, Paul, 192 Gaye, Marvin, 162 Gellert, Lawrence, 239, 310n. 17 Genovese, Eugene, 211 Georgia: Atlanta riot of 1906, 274; blues and lynching associated with, 23; Hose lynching in Atlanta, 125, 163, 175; Milledgeville lynching of 1923, 154; no black police in, 166; police doing nothing to stop lynching in, 167; South Carolina compared with, 39, 49; timber industry in, 38 Gillum, Jazz, 107 Gilroy, Paul, 57, 58, 63 Glinn, Lillian, 10, 228 –29 Glover, Savion, 20 “God Bless America” (Berlin), 67, 91 “Good Chib Blues” ( Johnson), 244 “Got Cut All to Pieces” (Tucker), 196, 224 Grant, Donald L., 1–2 Grant, William, 66 Green, Cleveland, 301n. 20 Greenberg, Alan, 278 Greene, J. Lee, 122 Griggs, Sutton, 122 guitars: B. B. King’s first, 141; B. B. King’s “Lucille,” 137, 140 – 43; Patton slapping his, 102, 216, 221; as weapons, 222 Gunning, Sandra, 122 guns: American gun culture, 200; the badman picking up, 170; in black-on-black violence, 196 –97; black veterans and, 179 – 80; black women’s fantasies of picking up, 191; Charles calling for blacks to get, 175; freed blacks taking to carrying, 211; handguns becoming widely available, 6, 211; Handy carrying, 68, 90; in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, 268 –70; jook owners attempt to control, 218; as phallic signifiers, 222; Turner

332

INDEX

guns (continued ) calling for blacks to get, 89, 91, 170; Muddy Waters carrying, 196 “gun talk” ( Jamaican), 223 Guralnick, Peter, 278 Guy, Buddy, 56, 275 Hacker, Marilyn, 278 Hager, Fred, 159 Hair, William Ivy, 176, 177 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 29 Handy, W. C., 66 –119; armed resistance by, 90 –91; Batesville, Miss., incident, 118; as “Beethoven of Beale Street,” 67; and black minstrelsy, 81–93; the blues encountered by, 69, 93 –94, 99 –106; blues subjectivity of, 79; class bias of, 69; and Cleveland, Miss., trio, 94, 99 –100, 102 – 6; country bluesmen contrasted with, 7; and “Crazy Blues,” 164; and Crump, 68, 109 –14; fear of his own band, 107, 114 – 19; guns carried by, 68, 90; “The Hesitating Blues,” 9, 12, 22, 59, 61– 63; lack of originality attributed to, 76 –77; with Mahara’s Minstrels, 12, 68, 72, 87; in Memphis, 106 –19; “Memphis Blues,” 20, 62, 76, 92, 113 –14, 213, 219; in Mississippi Delta, 93 –106, 294n. 60; “Mr. Crump,” 111–14, 296nn. 90, 91; near lynching of, 72 –75; as newspaper reader and distributor, 85; northward move of, 119, 179; performance venues of, 100; profiteering attributed to, 76, 77–79; as “reliable,” 68, 85; “Tom Smith” lynching affecting, 106 –7, 114, 116 –17; stoned in Texas town, 87; on “submerged peoples’” music, 205n. 72; and Tutwiler, Miss., slide guitarist, 94, 99 –102; and Vardaman, 12, 72, 97– 99; “Wall Street Blues,” 66; on Wright lynching, 86 – 87; written compositions of, 9. See also Father of the Blues; “St. Louis Blues” Handy, William Wise, 67– 68 “Hangman’s Blues” ( Jefferson), 10 “Hangman’s Tree” (ballad), 10 –11 Haralambos, Michael, 206, 207 Hardy, Jack, 173 Harlem: antagonism against police in, 162, 165, 168; black police for, 165, 301n. 20; black population of, 164, 301n. 19; as city of refuge to southern blacks, 166; “Crazy Blues” in, 160, 164; Ku Klux

Klan concern in, 181– 83; riots in, 162, 165; “slow drag” dancing at cabarets in, 220 Harney, Ben, 84, 85 Harris, Aaron, 174 Harris, Corey, 275 Harris, Marion, 161 Harris, Trudier, 18, 83, 122, 233, 246, 247, 310n. 22 Hart, Alvin Youngblood, 275 Hartman, Saidiya: on redress, 127–29, 133 –34, 135, 139, 141, 155, 203 – 4; on simulated wholeness, 140; this study drawing on, 12 –13 “Haunted House Blues” (Smith), 13, 185 – 89 haunting, cultural, 187– 88 Hawkins, Erskine, 153 Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina, 14, 203, 206 Healer, The (Hooker), 275 Hearts of Gold ( Jones), 122 Heavy D., 275 “Hellhound on My Trail” ( Johnson), 28, 32 Hemenway, Robert, 234 Hemingway, Ernest, 310n. 14 Heron, Gil Scott, 162, 300n. 10 Herzhaft, Gerard, 197, 227, 278, 279 “Hesitating Blues, The” (Handy), 9, 12, 22, 59, 61– 63 “Hesitation Waltz” (song), 62 Higgins, Billy, 41– 42 Hill, Bertha “Chippie,” 1 Himes, Chester: blues autobiography of, 79; in “Blues School of American Literature,” 71, 79; If He Hollers Let Him Go, 129, 151–54 Hindered Hand, The (Griggs), 122 Hogan, Ernest, 84 Holbert, Luther, 43, 104 –5 “Hold On, I’m Coming” (Sam & Dave), 157 Holiday, Billie: and blues tradition, 287n. 10. See also “Strange Fruit” Holsey, Albon, 167 Holt, Sam, 17 Home to Harlem (McKay), 197 “Honey Bee” (Waters), 259 Hooker, John Lee: “Boom Boom,” 14 –15, 203, 208, 230 –31; The Healer, 275; “I’m Bad Like Jesse James,” 220; “Queen Bee,” 259; settles in Detroit, 220 Hopkins, Lightnin’, 18, 40 Hose, Sam, 125, 163, 175 House, Son, 24, 30, 196, 215, 229, 307n. 61 “houseman,” 218 –19

INDEX

House of Blues chain, 275 “How Blue Can You Get” (King), 55 “How Can I Miss You When I’ve Got Dead Aim?” (Cox), 225 “How Long Must I Wait” (Coleman and Coleman), 62 Hughes, Langston: AAB structure in work of, 9; on blues as pain hardened with laughter, 193; blues autobiography of, 79; on bop, 7; on Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” 66, 70; and Hurston, 252; “In a Troubled Key,” 197, 224 –25; “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 247; “Note on Commercial Theater,” 276; “Suicide,” 197; “Trouble in Mind” as quoted by, 1; “The Weary Blues,” 8 humor, lynching and blues, 39 – 45 Hunter, Alberta, 46 Hurston, Zora Neale, 233 –71; ambivalence in vision of, 248, 257; attack in Polk County, Fla., jook, 234 –35, 243 –50; and badwoman tradition, 164; black-skin privilege of, 240; blues autobiography of, 81; and blues legacies, 233 –35; blues people encountered for first time by, 235 –36; celebrationist view of, 237, 248; “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 201, 238, 271; class anxiety in, 15, 235 – 36, 237, 239, 243, 251, 257, 311n. 27; fighting as a child, 15, 233, 258; as highclass lady in low-class jook, 242; and Hughes, 252; Jonah’s Gourd Vine, 203; on jook violence, 15, 201–2, 219, 235 –52; Mason’s patronage of, 241; middle-class privilege of, 241, 243; “The Ocoee Riot,” 268, 310n. 10; on Odum and Johnson, 239, 240; on “queen of the Jook,” 202, 208; signifying tradition drawn on by, 222; and Bessie Smith, 252; white violence as ignored by, 236 – 37. See also Dust Tracks on the Road; Mules and Men; Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurstonism, 234 I Am the Blues (Dixon), 50 Ice-T, 162, 300n. 10 If He Hollers Let Him Go (Himes), 129, 151–54 “If We Must Die” (McKay), 164 “I’ll Be Your .44” (Bell), 10, 195, 196, 212, 221, 222 –24, 229 “I’m a King Bee” (Slim Harpo), 259 “I’m a-Trouble in De Mind” (song), 1 “I’m Bad Like Jesse James” (Hooker), 220

333

“I’m Going to Cincinnati” (song), 301n. 20 “I’m in a Lowdown Groove” (Hawkins), 153 Imperium in Imperio (Griggs), 122 “I’m the Toughest, Toughest Coon” (song), 212 “In a Troubled Key” (Hughes), 197, 224 –25 Indianapolis Freeman (newspaper), 85 “Inner City Blues” (Heron), 162, 300n. 10 “In the House Blues” (Smith), 27 intimate violence. See black-on-black (intimate) violence Invisible Man (Ellison), 72, 73 Irwin, May, 84, 108, 109, 212, 244 – 45 Jackson, Aunt Molly, 300n. 13 Jackson, Bruce, 290n. 64 Jackson, Lil’ Son, 289n. 44 “Jail House Blues” (Hopkins), 18 James, Skip, 42 – 43, 53 –54 Jasen, David A., 93, 164, 177, 212, 294n. 60 jazz: bebop, 7, 156; blues and jazz subjects compared, 6 – 8; Handy on, 69; Morton and, 76; in Storyville section of New Orleans, 178 Jazz (Morrison), 7, 120, 195, 197 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 7, 9, 10, 29, 40, 60 “Jim Crow Blues” (Davenport), 18 “Jinx Blues” (Brown), 30 “Jinx Blues” (House), 24, 30 Johnson, Big Jack, 274 Johnson, Blind Willie, 304n. 95 Johnson, Charles S., 105, 168 Johnson, Edith, 244 Johnson, George W., 184 Johnson, Guy B., 239 – 40 Johnson, James Weldon, 79, 99, 122, 165, 168, 181– 83, 301n. 19 Johnson, J. C., 186 Johnson, Maria V., 15, 254, 255, 259 Johnson, Merline, 244 Johnson, Robert: and Edwards, 8; “Hellhound on My Trail,” 28, 32; “Me and the Devil Blues,” 31; in Mosley’s RL’s Dream, 8, 124; “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” 27, 143, 237; “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues,” 139 “Johnson Machine Gun” (Sunnyland Slim), 171 jokes, lynching and, 39 – 45 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston), 203 Jones, Gayl, 9, 157–58, 197, 232, 309n. 98 Jones, Gene, 93, 164, 177, 212, 294n. 60 Jones, J. McHenry, 122

334

INDEX

Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka), 52, 93, 287n. 18 Jones, Richard M., 1 jooks: attempts to prevent violence in, 218; badmen frequenting, 173; blues culture evolving in, 195, 204; as “Buckets of Blood,” 202, 206; etymology of term, 214 –15; freedom of, 6, 204 –5; Hurston on violence in, 235 –52; in Memphis, 110; as one place where no one held back, 240; social history of, 211–20; violence as essential to, 201–11; violence in, 4, 42, 211–20; white male folklorists rarely entering, 240; violence in women in, 305n. 19 Joplin, Janis, 278 jukes. See jooks Kaplan, Cora, 263 Keil, Charles, 287n. 18 Kelley, Robin D. G., 14, 203, 205 – 6, 208, 290n. 64 “Key to the Highway” (Gillum), 107 King, B. B.: Blues All Around Me, 54, 80, 129; on blues and money, 78; “Every Day I Have the Blues,” 57; at Fillmore West in 1969, 55, 277–78; guitar “Lucille,” 137, 140 – 43; “How Blue Can You Get,” 55; on life in Mississippi, 56 – 67; Price compared with, 61; primal healing scene in, 12, 58 –59; primal lynching scene in, 12, 54 –56, 138, 140; redressive erotics of, 137– 43; “Rock Me Baby,” 55, 56, 58 – 59; “Sweet Little Angel,” 55, 56, 58, 136, 291n. 100; “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” 57; “The Thrill Is Gone,” 57, 58; Twist, Ark., fire, 141– 42; “You Upset Me Baby,” 55, 56 King, Freddie, 17, 24, 30 Kizart, Lee, 215 knife-songs, 102 knives: author first sees knife pulled in blues club, 273 –74; Dutch men using, 246; in Hughes’s “In a Troubled Key,” 225; in Hughes’s “Suicide,” 197; Hurston’s juke joint companions using, 238; in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, 258, 262 – 63; phallic aggression embodied in, 226 –27; rhetorical instability of, 222; as stylus for writing on bodies, 228; the “two by four,” 244 Kristeva, Julia, 12, 129 –30, 132 –33, 135, 153

Kubik, Gerhard, 32 Kubitschek, Missy Dehn, 15, 254 Ku Klux Klan, 32, 47, 50, 82, 181– 83 “Lame and the Whore, The” ( Jackson), 290n. 64 Lang, Jonny, 275 Langston, Tony, 160 “Laughing Coon” ( Johnson), 184 “Lay of the Vigilantes” (ballad), 288n. 29 Leadbelly, 42, 196, 217, 229, 249 Lee, Lonesome Jimmy, 58 levee camps, 217, 229 Levine, Lawrence, 31, 37, 174 Lewis, David Levering, 181, 301n. 19 Lewis, Furry, 296n. 93 “liberation / poem” (Sanchez), 159 Lifton, Robert Jay, 131, 134, 148, 149 Lipscomb, Mance: autobiography of, 80; and black-on-black violence, 196; on disciplinary encirclement of blacks, 18; on Jim Crow protocols, 35; on lynching achieving its purpose, 3; on lynching of a friend, 46 – 47; on many ways of white violence, 34; on Navasota, Texas, lynching, 28; on Saturday night dances, 195, 216; as source for this study, 14 Little Walter, 14 –15, 196, 221, 231, 232, 266 Litwack, Leon F., 37, 176 Lofton, Clarence “Cripple,” 131 Lomax, Alan: Blues in the Mississippi Night, 25; and Broonzy, 25, 217; criticized for romanticism, 277; on guitars and sex, 141; and Hurston, 238 –39; on internalized terror in blacks, 240; on Mangham, 294n. 61; on “nigger drivers,” 217; primary scenes of collection of, 310n. 17 “Lonesome House Blues” ( Jefferson), 29 Long Blues in A Minor (Herzhaft), 197, 227, 278, 279 Lornell, Kip, 217, 249 Louisiana: barrelhouses in, 38, 218; no black police in, 166; timber industry in, 38. See also New Orleans Love, Charles, 196, 213 –14, 215 Love in Vain: A Vision of Robert Johnson (Greenberg), 278 Lowe, John, 212, 234, 237, 255 lumber camps, 38 lynching, 17– 65; and abandonment blues, 13, 185 – 87; as abjection, 129 – 30; attempting to hide the crime, 2; black emancipation and, 6; blacks as

INDEX

second-hand spectators of, 130; black self-defense called for, 64, 65, 89 –90; and blues humor, 39 – 45; blues musicians addressing, 10 –11, 18 –19, 22; blues musicians witnessing, 46 –50; in blues subjects’ formation, 4, 17– 65; around Clarksdale, Miss., 96; as disciplinary violence, 2 –3, 18, 286n. 3; dismemberment, 29, 127, 137, 158; as gendered phenomenon, 18; Handy on Wright’s, 86 – 87; Handy’s near lynching, 72 –75; as haunting the blues, 130; in literature, 120 –58; as “Negro barbecues,” 154; as ne plus ultra of southern racism, 22; newspaper accounts of, 23, 45 – 46; number between 1880 and 1930, 45; number in 1892 and 1893, 65; original meaning of term, 52; origins of, 23; postcards of, 23, 30; for rape, 2, 40, 45, 139, 150, 153, 184; recording of, 184 – 85; and redressive embrace, 131–36; in Red Summer of 1919, 179, 180 – 81; rural areas associated with, 7; of “Tom Smith” in Memphis, 106 –7, 114, 116 –17; southern police and, 167; souvenirs of, 23, 30, 43, 63, 125, 154; in timber industry areas, 38; torture, 11, 18, 29, 139, 223; Vardaman on, 72, 96, 104 –5; white ballads about, 288n. 29; “worthless Negroes” as target of, 42. See also primal lynching scene; spectacle lynching “Lynching” (Moorer), 122 “Lynching Blues” (Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk), 20 “Maceo’s 32-20” (Big Maceo), 196 “Machine Gun Blues” (Wheatstraw), 59 “Mad Mama Blues” (Mills), 13 –14, 171, 190 Mahara, Frank, 72, 73, 87 Mahara’s Minstrels, 12, 68, 72, 87 “Maid Freed from the Gallows, The” (ballad), 10 –11 Major, Clarence: Dirty Bird Blues, 40, 129, 142, 143 –51, 197, 198, 232; lynching as theme of, 4 Malcolm X, 79, 80 Malone, William, 82 – 83, 101, 104 “Mama Don’t Allow No Easy Riders Here” (Davenport), 296n. 91 “Mama’s Got the Blues” (Smith), 26 “Mama ’Taint long ‘fo’ Day” (McTell), 24 Mangham, Stack, 94 –95, 96 –97, 99, 294n. 61

335

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wilson), 123, 197, 199, 226 Marcuse, Herbert, 113 “Mashing That Thing” (Carter), 44 Mason, Charlotte Osgood, 241 Mayhew, Stella, 108 McClennan, Tommy, 37 McKay, Claude, 79, 164, 197 McKee, Margaret, 174 McTell, Blind Willie, 24, 273 Me and Big Joe (Bloomfield), 197, 278 “Me and the Devil Blues” ( Johnson), 31 Memphis (Tennessee): Beale Street, 109, 110, 113; Handy in, 106 –19; as murder capital, 107– 8; Razor-Cuttin’ Fanny, 205; “Tom Smith” lynching, 106 –7, 114, 116 –17; Two-Gun Charlie Pierce, 174 –75; vice in, 108. See also Crump, E. H. “Memphis Blues” (Handy), 20, 62, 76, 92, 113 –14, 213, 219 Memphis Minnie, 14, 196, 205, 215, 259 – 63, 264 Memphis Slim, 169 men. See black men Mezzrow, Mezz, 80, 278 Midwest, lynching in, 53 Miles, Josephine “Josie,” 41– 42, 198 Millen, Gilmore, 278 Mills, Violet, 13 –14, 171, 190 minstrelsy, black. See black minstrelsy Mississippi: barrelhouses in, 218; blacks’ attitude toward, 32; blues and lynching associated with, 23; Broonzy on, 25; contemporary blues culture in, 274; Doddsville lynching, 43, 104 –5; Handy in the Delta, 93 –106, 294n. 60; jook joint violence in, 217; King on, 56 – 67; lynchings reported between 1900 and 1909, 45; no black police in, 166; Parchman Farm, 203; Shepherd lynching, 137–38, 139, 142; Shines on, 289n. 58; Till lynching, 58, 123; timber industry in, 38, 218. See also Vardaman, James Kimble Mojo Hand (Phillips), 40 – 41, 197, 199, 210 Montgomery, Little Brother: asks to take Barker to Mississippi, 32; “The First Time I Met You,” 11, 33 –36, 39, 56, 59, 269; playing in barrelhouses, 38, 217–18 Moody, Ann, 14, 79, 142, 164, 190 –91 Moore, Elizabeth, 19, 25, 218, 219 Moore, Willie, 115, 219, 296n. 94

336

INDEX

Moorer, Lizelia Augusta Jenkins, 122 Moreau, Julian, 162 Morganfield, Big Bill, 274 morphine, 178 Morrison, Toni, 7, 12, 26, 120, 195, 197, 279 Morton, Jelly Roll, 76, 174, 176, 177, 218 Mosley, Walter, 8, 124, 197, 226 –27, 279 – 80 Moss, Buddy, 249 mourning, cultural, 127, 129, 188 Moxley, George L., 87 “Mr. Crump” (Handy), 111–14, 296nn. 90, 91 “Mr. Johnson, Turn Me Loose” (Harney), 84, 85 “Muddy Waters” (Plumpp), 124 –25 Mules and Men (Hurston), 235 –52; on attack on Hurston in Polk County jook, 234, 243 –50; on blues instruments and violence, 216; Sterling Brown’s criticism of, 236 –37; on fear of violence in Florida jook, 201; Trudier Harris’s reading of, 233; on Hurston’s first contact, 239 – 40; intimate violence in, 197; on pleasure in violence, 206 –7; romantic liaisons in, 310n. 22; on white law in jooks, 219 muleskinners, 229 Murray, Albert: on blues and morale, 193; on blues and the Saturday night function, 19; on blues as protective shell, 154; on blues ethos, 2; on “Strange Fruit,” 20; Train Whistle Guitar, 129, 138, 169, 197, 198, 227–28 music, black. See black music musicians. See blues musicians “My Pencil Won’t Write No More” (Carter), 44 “My Soul’s in Louisiana” (Taylor), 20 –21 Native Son (Wright), 67, 68 – 69 Neal, Claude, 158 Neal, Kenny, 274 Neal, Larry, 129, 154, 155 –57, 199, 234 Negro a Menace to American Civilization, The (Shufeldt), 184 – 85 “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, The” (Hughes), 247 Negro Workaday Songs (Odum and Johnson), 239, 240 “New Negro,” 85 – 86 New Orleans: Robert Charles incident, 163, 175 –79; Mark Essex incident, 162, 300n. 10; policing in, 166

newspapers, black, 85 New York Age (newspaper), 181– 82 New York City. See Harlem “Nigger Bully” (coon song), 108, 109 Nighthawk, Robert, 291n. 100 Nighthawk Blues (Guralnick), 278 Niles, Abbe, 29, 62, 67, 71 “Note on Commercial Theater” (Hughes), 276 “Ocoee Riot, The” (Hurston), 268, 310n. 10 O’Connor, Flannery, 154 Odum, Howard W., 102, 108 –9, 239, 240 “Oh Yeah” (Waters), 208, 266 Oliver, Paul: on blues violence and humor, 198, 208; criticized for romanticism, 277; on jook joints as refuges from whites, 204; on origins of the blues, 287n. 18; and Price, 60; on razors and knives, 227; on whips for controlling roustabouts, 229 “One Time Woman Blues” (Cox), 171 opium, 178 Oscher, Paul, 196 Oshinsky, David, 96, 137–38 Osofsky, Gilbert, 301n. 19 Pace, Harry, 116 –17 “Packing House” (Glinn), 10, 228 –29 Paige, Satchel, 95 Parchman Farm, 203 “Parchman Farm Blues” (White), 19 Parker, Charlie, 155, 156 Patterson, Orlando, 31 Patton, Charley: compared with jazz musicians, 7; as conscience of the Delta, 105; “every day seems like murder here,” 16, 196; as first-generation blues singer, 60; and Handy, 296n. 94; near-fatal attack on, 196, 304n. 2; slapping his guitar, 102, 216, 221; “this is the way I beat my woman,” 216, 221 Peabody, Charles, 108 Pearson, Barry Lee, 35, 289n. 58, 308n. 61 peonage laws, 17, 166 Person, Ell, 117 Peterson, Lucky, 274 Phillips, J. J., 40 – 41, 197, 199, 210 Phillips, Mattie, 84 – 85 piano blues, 38 Piazza, Tom, 279 Pierce, Two-Gun Charlie, 174 –75 “Pin in Your Cushion” (Carter), 44

INDEX

Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 279 Playing the Bones (Redd), 231, 279 Plumpp, Sterling: Blues Narratives, 124; Blues: The Story Always Untold, 124; “Burning Up in the Wind,” 120, 125 –26, 129; lynching as theme of, 4, 124 –26; “Muddy Waters,” 124 –25 Poe, Edgar Allan, 230 –31 police: black police for Harlem, 165, 301n. 20; collusion with white violence, 166, 181; Harlem’s alienation from, 162, 165, 168; repression by as disciplinary violence, 7; southern police, 166 – 68. See also cop killing “Poor Man Blues” (Smith), 18 “popping the whip” (game), 306n. 28 “Porter, The” (Hemingway), 310n. 14 possession, 13, 129, 143, 151, 157 postcards, 23, 30 “Preaching Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)” ( Johnson), 27, 143, 237 Price, Sammy: “Hesitating Blues” traumatizing, 12, 22, 59 – 65; recording with Wheatstraw and Cox, 59; as secondgeneration bluesman, 60; What Do They Want? 59 primal healing scene, 12, 58 –59, 157 primal lynching scene: blues stanzas evoking, 24, 26; Douglass and, 52; Duskin and, 48; in Flowers’s Another Good Loving Blues, 134; B. B. King and, 12, 54 –56, 138, 140; and Major’s Dirty Bird Blues, 145; and Neal’s “Riffin in the Chili House,” 157; Price and, 61; as unparalleled scene of subjection, 128; Wright and, 33 prison farms, 17, 38, 51, 166 Pullen, Joe, 303n. 72 Pullman-car porters, 160 Quack (lynching victim), 53 “Queen Bee” (Hooker), 259 race records, 92, 159, 195 race riots, 162, 165, 180, 189, 274 Rachell, Yank, 18, 52 –53, 170 ragtime, 69, 84, 108 “Railroad Bill” (ballad), 3, 162, 170 –71, 172 –73, 302n. 47 railroads, blacks mistreated on, 88 – 89 Rainey, Ma: and badwoman tradition, 164; blues heroism of, 157; as classic blues singer, 7; B. B. King listening to, 138;

337

material success of, 88; as moaning the blues, 83; popularity of, 23; “See See Rider Blues,” 5, 213 Raitt, Bonnie, 275 “Rambling Blues” (Cox), 27 “Ram Rod Daddy” (Carter), 44 rape: in Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, 151–54; lynching of “black beast rapist,” 2, 40, 45, 139, 150, 184; in Major’s Dirty Bird Blues, 144; Shepherd lynched for, 139; Henry Smith lynched for, 139, 152 Raper, Arthur, 166 rap music, 13, 22, 162, 223, 274 –75 “R-A-Z-O-R” (song), 212 Razor-Cuttin’ Fanny, 205 razors, 212, 227–28, 258 Really the Blues (Mezzrow), 80, 278 recording: of lynching, 184 – 85; race records, 92, 159, 195 Redd, Louise, 231, 279 Redding, J. Saunders, 79 Redmond, Eugene, 231–32 Red Record, A (Wells-Barnett), 29, 122, 152 “Red River Blues” (song), 248 – 49 Red Summer (1919), 164, 179 – 83 Reed, Ishmael, 9 Reed, Jimmy, 233 Reed, John Shelton, 213 Reid, Whitelaw, 6 rejection, 13, 129, 169 retributive violence: “badman” resistance as, 3; in “Crazy Blues,” 13. See also cop killing Richards, Carlos, 275 Richards, Keith, 275 “Riffin in the Chili House (In Memory of Bird)” (Neal), 129, 155 –57 Riis, Thomas L., 301n. 20 riots, 162, 165, 180, 189, 274 RL’s Dream (Mosley), 8, 124, 197, 226 –27, 279 – 80 Roberts, John W., 170, 173 “Rock Me Baby” (King), 55, 56, 58 –59 Roosevelt, Theodore, 95, 96 Rosenblatt, Roger, 117 Rosewood (Singleton), 121–22 Rowe, Mike, 38 Rubenstein, Roberta, 12, 126 –27, 129, 158, 188 Rush, Otis, 50, 57, 127 Sackheim, Eric, 289n. 44 St. Cyr, Johnny, 174

338

INDEX

“St. Louis Blues” (Handy): duality of pain and strength in, 93; Handy living on profits of, 72; Handy’s near lynching and, 12, 62, 72, 74 –75, 119; Hughes on, 70; and “Memphis Blues,” 66; popularity of, 75 –76, 92; Smith’s refashioning of, 70 –71; in written blues tradition, 9 “Saint Martha’s Blues” (Taylor), 20 –21 Salaam, Kalamu ya, 39 – 40, 42, 120 Sam & Dave, 157 “Sampson Tore the Building Down” (spiritual), 189 –90 Sanchez, Sonya, 159 Sartwell, Crispin, 254 Saturday night dances (frolics), 10, 128, 195, 210, 211, 215, 216 sawmills, 38, 218 Scarborough, Dorothy, 10 –11, 92, 178 Scarry, Elaine, 203, 209, 221, 223 –24 Schultz, Elizabeth, 79 – 81, 292n. 14 Schuyler, George, 120 –22 Scott, Esther Mae, 46 Scott’s Refined Negro Minstrels, 88 “Section Gang Blues” (Alexander), 19 “See See Rider Blues” (Rainey), 5, 213 Seroff, Doug, 62, 75, 294n. 60 Seven Guitars (Wilson), 5, 10, 197, 199, 225 –26 sexuality: and black-on-black violence, 9 –10, 209; black selfhood expressed in, 5; “blue blues,” 44 – 45; and domestic violence, 253; in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, 255, 259 – 66; potency attributed to black men, 45; weapons as phallic signifiers, 221, 222 –27. See also rape Shakur, Assata, 162 Shapiro, Herbert, 64, 167, 180 Shepherd, Charley, 137–38, 139, 142 Shines, Johnny, 14, 205, 215, 289n. 58 Shufeldt, Robert, 184 – 85 signifying, 221–22 Simmons, William, 181 Simpson, Fred W., 88 “Sinful Blues” (Bradford), 171–72 Singleton, John, 121–22 Sissle, Noble, 304n. 87 Slater, Morris, 3, 170 Slave Songs of the United States (Allen, Ware, and Garrison), 1 Slim Harpo, 259 Sloan, Henry, 60

slow-drag dancing, 220, 243 Smith, Bessie: and badwoman tradition, 164; “Black Mountain Blues,” 244; and blackon-black violence, 196; blues heroism of, 157; “Blue Spirit Blues,” 11, 30 –32, 39; as “classic” blues singer, 7; “Empty Bed Blues,” 186, 263 – 64; “Haunted House Blues,” 13, 185 – 89; “In the House Blues,” 27; B. B. King listening to, 138; on “low down” blues singing, 252; “Mama’s Got the Blues,” 26; “Poor Man Blues,” 18; “St. Louis Blues” as sung by, 70 Smith, Henry, 11, 29, 83, 139, 152, 184 – 85 Smith, Lucius, 196, 213, 215, 219 Smith, Mamie: as first commerciallyrecorded blues singer, 160, 161; B. B. King listening to, 138; low critical opinion of, 161. See also “Crazy Blues” Smith, Stephen G., 228 “Smith, Tom” (pseudonym), 106 –7, 114, 116 –17 Snyder, Howard, 150 “Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin), 8 Sousa, John Philip, 94, 106 South, the: Alabama, 81, 166, 170; Arkansas, 217, 218; “don’t let the sun go down on you here” signs, 70; policing in, 166 – 68; South Carolina, 39, 49, 166; as uniquely violent region, 14, 16, 213; Virginia, 167– 68; white campaign of disenfranchisement in, 81– 83. See also Georgia; Louisiana; Mississippi; Tennessee; Texas South Carolina, 39, 49, 166 Southern Horrors (Wells-Barnett), 122 Speckled Red, 131 spectacle lynching: in antebellum period, 288n. 34; the badman hero as response to, 168 – 69; the blues shaped by, 37; blues subject confronting, 154; for cop killers, 166; as disciplinary violence, 2 –3, 18, 37, 96; double abjection of victims of, 152; as doubly disciplining its subjects, 286n. 3; emergence after 1890, 2, 11; fear of bearing witness to, 46; as psychologically destabilizing to black spectators, 130; recording of, 184 – 85; secondgeneration bluesmen affected by, 64 – 65; Charley Shepherd lynching as, 137; Henry Smith lynching as, 11, 29; in Wright’s “Between the World and Me,”

INDEX

33; younger whites and blacks in, 38. See also lynching Spencer, Jon Michael, 19, 277 Spierenburg, Pieter, 246 – 47 spirituals, 4, 92 Spivey, Victoria, 19 “Stagolee (Stackolee),” 162, 173 –74 Stargel, Willard R., Sr., 301n. 20 Steele, Cassie Premo, 48 Stephens, Judith L., 122 Stepto, Robert B., 247, 253 –54 “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” ( Johnson), 139 “Stop the Killing” ( Johnson), 274 Stowers, Walter H., 122 “Strange Fruit” (Holiday): blues structure lacking in, 19, 287n. 10; and Broonzy’s “Conversation with the Blues,” 24 –25; and Flowers’s Another Good Loving Blues, 135; lynching blues as paradigms for, 11; Murray on, 20; serious tenor of, 122; Josh White covering, 49 suicide, 1, 2 “Suicide” (Hughes), 197 Sunnyland Slim, 171 “Sweet Little Angel” (King), 55, 56, 58, 136, 291n. 100 Sweet Man (Millen), 278 Talley, Alfred J., 182 Tampa Red, 203 Taylor, Koko, 204 Taylor, Otis, 20 –22 temperance movement, 212 Tennessee: Williams lynching in Brownsville, 52 –53. See also Memphis testimonial autobiographies, 79 – 81 Texas: barrelhouses in, 38, 218; blues and lynching associated with, 23; Byrd lynching, 50, 127; Handy and band stoned in, 87; Jim Crow protocols in, 35; Longview incident of 1919, 180; Navasota lynching of 1906, 28; Price on lynching in, 59 – 65; Henry Smith lynching, 11, 29, 83, 152, 184 – 85; timber industry in, 38, 218 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 252 – 71; affection and violence in, 221–22; as blues novel, 255; blues violence in, 233; climactic violence of, 232, 253, 270; guns in, 197, 268 –70; hurricane in, 267– 68; Janie Crawford’s blues apprentice-

339

ship in, 15; knives in, 197, 258, 262 – 63; and Memphis Minnie’s “Bumble Bee,” 259 – 63; white racist violence critiqued in, 237, 268 –70; Wright on, 244 – 45; “you got to go there tuh know there,” 239 “This Thing Called Love” (Bradford), 171 Thomas, Henry “Ragtime,” 60, 65, 248 – 49 Thompson, Ralph, 75 –76 “Three O’Clock in the Morning” (King), 57 “Thrill Is Gone, The” (King), 57, 58 Till, Emmett, 58, 123 timber industry, 38, 218 Tolnay, Stewart E., 2, 45 Tolson, Melvin B., 9 “Tore Down” (King), 17, 24, 30 torture, 11, 18, 29, 139, 223 Townsend, Henry, 80 Tracy, Steven C., 47, 48, 301n. 20 Train Whistle Guitar (Murray), 129, 138, 169, 197, 198, 227–28 “Traits of My Plantation Negroes” (Snyder), 150 transcoding, 57–59, 63 trauma, 48, 123, 127, 135 Trevathan, Charles, 109 “Trouble in Mind” ( Jones), 1–2 Tucker, Bessie, 196, 224 Tucker, C. Delores, 275 Tucker, Sophie, 108, 161 Turner, Henry McNeal, 65, 89, 91, 170, 175, 179 Turner, Lorenzo, 214 –15 Turner, Mary, 158 Turner, Nat, 166 turpentine camps, 38, 218 “22-20 Blues” ( James), 42 – 43 “Two By Four Blues” ( Johnson), 244 Uncle Skipper, 196, 198, 208, 212, 221, 227, 229 uplift ideology, 145 vagrancy laws, 17, 37, 38, 100, 166 Vance, Myrtle, 152 Vardaman, James Kimble: blacks as characterized by, 90, 95 –96; on education for blacks, 97–98; Handy working for, 12, 68, 72, 97–99; on lynching, 72, 96, 104 – 5; as racist demagogue, 71–72, 94, 101; Roosevelt criticized by, 94; vagrancy campaign of, 100

340

INDEX

violence: in American culture, 200; domestic violence, 253 –54, 275; race riots, 162, 165, 180, 189, 274; the South as uniquely violent, 14, 16, 213; young men and, 305n. 19. See also black-on-black (intimate) violence; black-on-white violence; disciplinary violence; retributive violence; weapons; white-on-black violence Virginia, 167– 68 wailing, 155 Wald, Elijah, 49, 50 Walker, Alice, 4, 164, 234, 237, 248 Walker, T-Bone, 139, 142 “Walking Through the Park” (Waters), 207– 8, 244 Wallace, Sippie, 275 “Wall Street Blues” (Handy), 66 Wand, Hart, 84 “Wang Dang Doodle” (Dixon), 204 –5 Wardlow, Gayle, 19, 20, 110, 215, 219, 304n. 2, 307n. 61 Washington, Booker T., 37, 45, 79, 110, 145, 211 Washington, Jesse, 63 – 64 Washington, Mary Helen, 253 –54 Washington, DC, riot of 1919, 180 Waters, Harry, 83 Waters, Muddy: guns carried by, 196; “Honey Bee,” 259; “Oh Yeah,” 208, 266; scars sported by, 14, 207; “Walking Through the Park,” 207– 8, 244; white musicians paying homage to, 275 Watkins, Mel, 290n. 58 weapons, 221–32; blues musicians carrying, 42; metaphorical functions of, 221; as phallic signifiers, 221, 222 –27, 233; razors, 212, 227–28, 258; rhetorical instability of, 222; rhythmic aggression of, 221, 229 –32; whips, 51, 229; for writing on bodies, 221, 227–29. See also guns; knives “Weary Blues, The” (Hughes), 8 Wells-Barnett, Ida B.: and Robert Charles incident, 178 –79; in lynching literature, 122, 152; A Red Record, 29, 122, 152; on Henry Smith lynching, 29; Southern Horrors, 122 West, Mae, 221, 308n. 79 What Do They Want? (Price), 59

“What We Would Do, if the Law Would Allow Us” (Wilson), 84, 112 Wheatstraw, Peetie, 14, 31, 59, 191–92, 227 whips, 51, 229 Whitcomb, Ian, 77 White, Eugene E., 98 White, Josh, 49 –50, 167, 249 White, Leroy “Lasses,” 84 White, Newman, 6, 62, 66 White, Washington “Bukka,” 19, 196, 215 White African (Taylor), 20 white-on-black violence: black-on-black violence conditioned by, 199; blacks take up armed resistance to, 179 – 83; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God on, 237, 268 –70; Ku Klux Klan, 32, 47, 50, 82, 181– 83; police collusion with, 166, 181; victims produced by, 4; the young in, 37–38. See also lynching; police white women: black men reputed to desire, 40; in Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, 151, 152; Skip James on, 54; B. B. King’s guitar compared with, 142; lynching of black men accused of raping, 40, 45, 46, 139, 150, 184; in Major’s Dirty Bird Blues, 144, 147, 150 “Wicked Blues” (Bradford), 171–72 Wideman, John Edgar, 162 Wiegman, Robyn, 30, 96, 286n. 3 Williams, Bert, 184, 304n. 87 Williams, Big Joe, 78, 218, 278 Williams, Clarence, 25 –26 Williams, Elbert, 52 Williams, George “Bullet,” 105 Williams, Sherley Anne, 278 Williams, Spencer, 30 Williamson, Joel, 175 Wilson, August: in emerging canon of black blues literature, 278; lynching as theme of, 4; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 123, 197, 199, 226; Seven Guitars, 5, 10, 197, 199, 225 –26 Wilson, George, 84 Wilson, John, 68 Winter, Johnny, 275 Wolfe, Charles, 217, 249 Wolfe, George, 20 women. See black women; white women Work, John W., Jr., 55 World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, The (Edwards), 8, 80 World War I, 179 – 80

INDEX

Wright, Derrick F., 214 Wright, Louis, 86 – 87 Wright, Richard: “Between the World and Me,” 33, 34; “Big Boy Leaves Home,” 72, 249; Black Boy, 32 –33, 34, 79, 159, 278; blues autobiography of, 81; “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” 168; Handy contrasted with, 67; Hurston criticized

341

by, 237, 244 – 45; on “lusty lyrical realism” of the blues, 1, 44; Native Son, 67, 68 – 69; on “popping the whip,” 306n. 28 Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (Campbell), 123 –24, 273, 276 –77 “You Upset Me Baby” (King), 55, 56