Traveling Soul (2 page)

In presenting his story through my eyes, I have tried to tell it like it is and like it was, even when a crafted piece of public relations would have made him look better. After all, as the man himself once sang:

Pardon me, brother, while you stand in your glory
,

I know you won't mind if I tell the whole story
.

“People get ready, there's a train a-coming
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board.”

—“P
EOPLE
G
ET
R
EADY
”

M
ansfield
,
Louisiana, circa 1910
—Slavery was dead, but its terror still hung in the hot air over the cotton fields near my great-grandmother's house. The crack of the master's whip echoed through the generations of her family up to her own grandparents, who as slaves were worth almost $800 on the trading block in their prime. After suffering in bondage so long, they couldn't help but feel their current freedom was negotiable.

Like much about my great-grandmother's birth, a cloud surrounds her real name. She sometimes introduced herself as Gertrude, while others knew her as Annabelle, but most likely she went by Annie Bell. Such confusion about names occurred often in the land of slavery. Negroes could never know their true last names, and even first names could carry the indelible imprint of the plantation. For almost two centuries, they traded in nicknames and pseudonyms, perhaps as a way to assume control of their identity in a world that gave them none.

Annie Bell's father, Elmore Scott, toiled at a sawmill—a comparative luxury. He earned enough money to let his wife, Lula, stay home—
another luxury, although she had to pick up jobs on the side with her old Singer sewing machine. Their hometown of Mansfield was a tiny, stifling place occupying less than four square miles of land. Cotton took to the black, fecund topsoil there, and its downy tufts had formed the backbone of the economy since slavery times. By Annie Bell's birth, most Mansfield Negroes had become sharecroppers—a kind of virtual slavery that kept them in perpetual debt, eking out an existence on the knife-edge of starvation. Still, Elmore and Lula hoped their daughter might have a better chance at life than they did, just as they once had a better chance than their parents. They also knew how nominal the definition of “better” could be.

Lula kept her little house spotless, decorating the inside with a three-foot-tall porcelain collie. Out back, she tilled a garden, showering special adoration on her elephant leaves and four-o'clocks. Annie Bell loved exploring the enchanting garden in the afternoon when the four-o'clocks would open as if by some magic, right on time. The house had running water but no bathroom, so Annie Bell, born severely nearsighted, trudged cautiously through the chicken yard rain or shine to reach the dilapidated outhouse. Sundays Lula took the family to a country church where the preacher sweated and moaned, conjuring the Spirit from thin air. The church provided the only true sanctuary for her family, as it did for Negroes across the South. Within its sacred walls, they had the freedom to drop their defenses and spill out their troubles like vessels filled to the brim. As Annie Bell grew, these gospel-drenched sounds became part of her flesh and blood and bone.

While Elmore and Lula struggled to raise her the best they knew how, Jim Crow drew lines around them they couldn't control. They couldn't always see those lines, so Annie Bell had to learn to sense where they stood. If not, she could meet her demise at the hands of the lynch mob, the South's most gruesome death sentence. During Annie Bell's childhood, Louisiana citizens lynched a Negro once every four months, by a conservative estimate. It served as a grim warning of what happened when you didn't know your place.

Jim Crow laws in Louisiana reinforced that message at every turn. Under those laws, Annie Bell couldn't ride the same streetcars as whites,
drink or buy alcohol from the same taverns as whites, or build a house in a white neighborhood. It was illegal for her to marry a white man, buy tickets for public events at the same window, occupy the same jails, attend the same schools, or rent in the same buildings as white people.

As awful as segregation was, better days beckoned like unfulfilled promises. In 1909, the scholar W. E. B. DuBois helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which would soon set in motion the legal death of segregation. The NAACP took most of its membership from the Negro middle class, so Annie Bell and her family in Louisiana didn't know much about it at the time. Soon, though, it would cause significant improvements to Negro life throughout the country, hers included.

By confronting the power structure, the NAACP created niches for more radical groups like Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and planted the seeds for the great civil rights movement that would begin three decades later. Unlike the NAACP, Garvey recruited poor, working class, and rural Negroes. As Annie Bell neared her teenage years, she might very well have heard of Garvey and his exhortation “Up, you mighty race! You can accomplish what you will.”

The event that affected her most personally, though, was the first Great War. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, Negroes began slipping out of the South to the promised land north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but when America entered World War I in 1917, the trickle burst into a flood historians call the Great Migration. Over the course of six decades, six million Negroes, my great-grandmother among them, left the South and spread across the country in search of anything better.

Annie Bell's father might have considered fleeing as the exodus began around him, but the South was all he knew. He stayed in Mansfield with his family while many of his friends harked to the siren song of northern factories, sometimes only taking the clothes on their backs for fear their white bosses might find out what they were up to and stop them—or worse.

Weaker ties bound Annie Bell to Louisiana, and while the war thundered on, major changes in her life pushed her closer to leaving. First, she found Spiritualism, a belief system that didn't square with her mother's
Christianity. Spiritualists believe they can communicate with the dead through a medium. The movement started in the late 1840s, when a woman in a New York farmhouse claimed she communicated with the spirit of a man who was murdered there years before. After that, it mushroomed but faded almost as quickly once most of the Spiritualist seers proved to be simple hucksters. It gained steam again during World War I, when Annie Bell found it.

Though Lula wanted no part of the strange quasi-religion, Spiritualism fit naturally in Louisiana, especially around New Orleans, where African voodoo still suffused the culture like incense. Slaves had carried voodoo within their bones across the horrors of the Middle Passage and never exactly let it go, even though their masters on a new continent tried to beat it out of them. Once in America, it mixed with a dab of Christianity and became something different. Annie Bell drank deeply from this mixture of African religion and American experience, and soon she claimed to have a spirit guide, a dead person she could talk to and see.

At the same time, she found romance. In the early 1920s, she met Willie Cooper, and soon they married. In 1923, just barely a teenager herself, Annie Bell gave birth to a girl she named Mercedes. The next year, she had a boy named Curtis Lee, whom everyone called Mannish because he exhibited some of the less flattering aspects of manhood from an early age. Soon after Mannish's birth, Annie Bell and Willie split.

As she raised her children under the Louisiana sun, the exodus continued around her. With her hometown becoming ever more stifling, my great-grandmother contemplated her options. She had grown into a storm of a woman with a thunderous temper, which could only mean trouble in Louisiana. Even if she managed to survive Jim Crow, she knew it would put a permanent lid on her children's dreams. As great hordes of people fled north, sometimes returning to visit with the trappings of modest wealth, it seemed her best hope rested on a train chugging away from home. Sometime in 1928 she made up her mind. Annie Bell said good-bye to her family and the only world she'd ever known, bundled Mannish and Mercedes up tight, and plunged into the Great Migration.

When the young family left the South, they most likely boarded a train on the Texas & Pacific Railway in Mansfield, which connected to the Illinois Central Railroad in Shreveport, thirty-seven miles north. From there they would have traveled to New Orleans and caught the Illinois Central's most famous train, the Panama Limited—a hulking hunk of steel spewing smoke high into the sky. Annie Bell used the same train, renamed the City of New Orleans, to visit Louisiana with her grandchildren later in life. The Panama Limited was state-of-the-art—an all-Pullman consist featuring luxurious cars, though Annie Bell's skin likely barred her from being allowed to enjoy most of the luxuries.

The Panama Limited crawled from the muddy mouth of the Mississippi Delta up through the waving cotton fields, all the way to Chicago near the cool, blue shores of Lake Michigan. Along the way it deposited untold thousands of Negroes in new, exciting places. The trip took a full day and night and part of the next day, which left Annie Bell ample time to think about the world ahead and the one just left behind. She never talked much about her feelings, but it isn't hard to imagine what she must have felt sitting on that train with two fidgety little ones at her side. Perhaps she dreamed of how life would change for her, and her children, and their children as she dozed off in the train car, one sleep from Chicago.

After twenty-five jostling hours, the train steamed into Chicago's Central Station, at Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue. Annie Bell collected her luggage and her children and stepped onto northern ground. The city she saw around her might as well have been a different planet. The station itself was jaw dropping compared to Mansfield's ramshackle huts. Its brooding brick building towered nine stories above the tracks and connected to a thirteen-story clock tower topped with a Romanesque spire.

The streets stretched on as far as the eye could see, dotted here and there with Model T Fords. People—millions of them, it seemed—rushed from place to place, always in a hurry. Women, in thrall to the flapper craze, wore straight-line chemises with cloche hats covering their bobbed
hair. Men wore sporty suits, Oxford shoes, and fedoras, homburgs, trilbys, or straw boaters. The city buzzed with kinetic energy. It was a thrilling spectacle for a country girl used to outhouses and cotton fields.

Chicago in the late '20s was embroiled in an era of heavy tensions and epic capers. Prohibition had brought the scarred face of organized crime, as Al Capone's notorious Chicago Outfit put the city in a choke-hold through a toxic mixture of bribery and murder. Frank Lloyd Wright had brought architecture with Prairie School designs, all horizontal lines and overhanging eaves, including his legendary light court in the Rookery building, commissioned in 1905. Steel had brought industry to construct those designs, providing work for thousands of men.

When Annie Bell arrived, steelworkers plodded to work each morning in a city still reeling from the race riots that had exploded near the stockyards less than a decade before. In the summer of 1919, Eugene Williams, a Negro teenager swimming in Lake Michigan, crossed an informal line of segregation between the Twenty-Ninth Street Negro beach and the Twenty-Fifth Street white beach. As a mob of white beachgoers pelted him with stones, he became disoriented and drowned. Their bloodlust awakened, whites and Irish immigrants unleashed a flood of aggression upon Negroes in Chicago. Violence ruled for thirteen agonizing days, as roving white gangs scoured the streets around the Black Belt looking for buildings to burn, possessions to loot, and Negroes to kill.

It was the worst race riot in Chicago's history, and it formed part of the infamous Red Summer. During that summer, some twenty-five riots busted through Washington, DC, Omaha, Knoxville, and several other cities. Most of the violence was white on black, although that would change in coming decades. One thing wouldn't change, though, and it would exact a massive toll during my father's life: summer always remained a good time for riots.