The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (35 page)

With a rush the men dived in, grabbing ears and pulling off the shucks, while each captain leapt to the top of the pile,
and, turning to his team, took center stage. His job was to lead and encourage his team by making up humorous, catchy verses that the team would then repeat or answer even as they in ceaseless motion pulled off shucks, tossed the naked ears into the “clean” pile, and passed the jug. In corn-shucking competitions, captains sung out rhymes that ridiculed other enslaved people, present or absent,
by name or by implication: “Dark cloud arising like [it] going to rain / Nothing but a black gal coming down the lane.” Which dark-skinned woman steamed up with anger or sneered with contempt at these sour grapes? Other lyrics took different risks, slyly chanting half-praise of an owner. Still others talked politics in ways palatable to some owners but rankling to partisans of the other side: “Polk
and Clay went to war / Polk came back with a broken jaw.” Some even criticized, for those who had ears to hear—“The speculator bought my wife and child”—this was a slow dragged-out verse—“And carried her clear away.” Or they demanded more of the liquor that fueled the long-night labor of shucking—“Boss man, boss man, please gimme my time; Boss man, boss man, for I’m most broke down.”
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They worked
on past midnight. Whiskey flickered in their bellies and laughter roared, keeping them warm despite the chilly fall air. The smell of the ox roasting a few dozen yards away urged on the rings of grabbing, tearing men. The piles shrank. The captains’ hoarse voices sped the rhythm. At two in the morning, Reuben’s band frenetically, triumphantly shucked their
last ears and rushed to surround the
others’ sweating circle, waving their hats and singing to the defeated, “Oh, oh! fie! for shame!” But the shame did not sting for long, for now, behind Reuben, they all marched down to Taylor’s house. He waited there on the porch with his wife and daughter. The enslaved men crowded around it and sang one last time to Reuben’s lead: “I’ve just come to let you know / [Men] Oh, oh, oh! / [Captain] The
upper end has beat / [Men] Oh, oh, oh! / . . . [Captain] I’ll bid you, fare you well / [Men] Oh, oh, oh! / [Captain] For I’m going back again / [Men] Oh, oh, oh!” Then they all went back together to shuck the last ears in the losing team’s pile, after which all the corn-shuckers sat down at long tables to feast.
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The fun and local fame that enslaved people won at such occasions were as fleeting
as the meal. Two weeks later, thirty of the men who shucked corn at Taylor’s on that night were sold to buyers who were now, in the late 1810s, beginning to comb Kentucky every December. Reuben was among the first “dragged from his family,” recalled Fedric: “My heart is full when I think of his sad lot.” Yet even as raw memories of his own sale from Virginia flooded his thoughts, Fedric could
not forget Reuben’s night of triumph, the way he had led more than one hundred men with virtuosity of wit and artistry of tongue. For that night those three hundred men had all ridden on his gift despite everything that hung over them. And Reuben had soared highest of all.
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Here is something that is no accident: the most popular and creative genres of music in the history of the modern world
emerged from the corners of the United States where enslavers’ power battered enslaved African Americans over and over again. In the place Reuben was being dragged to, and in all the places where forced migration’s effects were most dramatic and persistent, music could not prevent a whipping or feed a single hungry mouth. But it did serve the enslaved as another tongue, one that spoke what the first
one often could not. Music permitted a different self to breathe, even as rhythm and melody made lines on which the common occasions of a social life could tether like beads. Times like corn-shuckings, when people sang and played and danced, became opportunities for people to meet. There they mourned, redeemed, and resurrected sides of the personality that had been devastated by forced migration.

On such occasions—and perhaps even more so on Saturday nights when whites weren’t watching—people animated by music and by each other thought and acted and rediscovered themselves as truly alive, as people who mattered for their unique abilities and contributions, as people in a common situation who could celebrate their own individuality together. Back
in Maryland, Josiah Henson’s father had
played a banjo made from a gourd, wood, and string. This African instrument, Henson remembered, was “the life of the farm, and all night long at a merry-making would he play on it while the other negroes danced.” But around 1800, Josiah’s father ran afoul of his owner, who had the man’s ear severed in punishment. Deformed and angry, the maimed man let his banjo fall silent. Soon the owner sold him
south, far away from Josiah. “What was his after fate neither my mother nor I ever learned,” Henson wrote decades later. But any southwestward course was likely to drain a man down into the great trap of New Orleans.

Image 5.1. Corn-husking: an opportunity for community-building, mutual recognition, and improvisational freestyle battling that showcased individual virtuosity.
Harper’s Weekly
, April 13, 1861, p. 232.

In 1819, as white people began to shout and threaten each other over Missouri, a visitor wandered on a Sunday to the open space on the northern
border of the French Quarter. Today the
maps call this place Louis Armstrong Park. The visitor had already heard it referred to as Congo Square. He saw men drumming in a circle while a wizened elder played a banjo. Two women danced in the middle while “squall[ing] out a burthen to the playing, at intervals.” In the 1830s, William Wells Brown, then an enslaved employee of a slave trader, found Congo Square still thundering with African
drumming. In each corner, a different African nation—the Minas, the Fulas, the Congos—played their own music and danced their own dances while others watched, nodded heads, and jumped in. Drums sped and slowed, talking in rhythms brought thirty years before from beyond the salt water. Dancers wove patterns that talked, too. If Henson’s father had come there, he might have realized that he and they
sang in the same family language.
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So perhaps he would have picked up his banjo again. Long-lost relatives had much to teach him and others from the Chesapeake and Carolinas, where the drum had long been outlawed. And southeastern migrants had much to teach immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean. The surging patterns of sawing fiddle and plunging banjo, and the stripped-down, charging syncopation
of their music, were innovations produced over the course of two hundred hard years in the New World. Southeastern migrants’ own personal experiences of exile and movement within the country spread and then transformed their performance styles again. One 1800s writer claimed that “the Virginian negro character therefore has come to prevail throughout the slave states,” and that “every where
you may hear much the same songs and tunes, and see much the same dances.” Virginia’s exiles now sang about what made them no longer Virginians. Their songs evoked the traumas of separation in a modernizing society in musical ways more complex than words alone could achieve.
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“Traveling through the South,” wrote an early white commentator on nineteenth-century African-American music, “you may,
in passing from Virginia to Louisiana, hear the same tune a hundred times, but seldom the same words. This necessarily results . . . from the habit of extemporizing, in which the performers indulge on festive occasions.” Only one thing about these performances was fixed: that they were not to be fixed. Instead they mixed together even well-known components of rhythm, melody, lyrics, and motion
in fresh ways. So, for instance, from 8 p.m. until 2 a.m., Reuben had kept his footing on the pile of corn because he had trained for it; he had gained, under the tutelage of peers and elders, the ability to sing a song that he continually made up, and revised, and created all over again.
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In the nineteenth century, white European and American authors began to claim that they had become uniquely
individualistic, modern, not bound to
repeat the old. And the modern Western world did seem to be celebrating the individual. Think of Walt Whitman, singing a song not about the greatness of the tradition he’d been handed, but of himself. By the time Reuben sat chained to the deck of the slave-trader’s flatboat on his way from Kentucky to Louisiana, every state he floated past had opened up voting
to almost every individual white man. Hence Whitman’s song to himself, and the celebration of the self and of American individualism, which would be emphasized over the coming century in white art forms. When white people wrote about black culture in the nineteenth century, however—and often when they have written since—they placed African-American art forms with the traditional cultures of the
premodern world, which supposedly did not have a concept of the autonomous self. White people’s accounts depicted black dancers and singers as acting on tradition, or even instinct, rather than attributing individual genius to them—and these accounts served as just-so stories that had the added benefit of implicitly justifying slavery. Whites explained their own attraction to enslaved people’s
music by crediting African Americans with unusual “powers of imitation,” the primitive ability to forget the self in bacchanalian revels. By the late nineteenth century, whites believed, as many still do, such quasi-biological myths—that African-descended peoples had a “natural,” biologically innate, unchanging, common response to rhythm.
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But it was enslaved African Americans who were the true
modernists, the real geniuses. The innovation that flooded through the quarters of frontier labor camps in the first forty or fifty years of the nineteenth century was driven by constant individual creativity in the quarters’ tongues. In the real world in which people like Reuben were trying to survive, individual creativity improved an enslaved African American’s chance of survival, and not just
by enabling him or her to find a faster way to pick a pound of protection from the whip. Skillful words made one valuable to self and peers; they helped the enslaved to see themselves not as hands but as voices. And being a voice recognized by one’s peers gave one a reason to live. So no wonder music and dancing on slavery’s frontier emphasized individual improvisation, not imitation, and not
unison. No wonder that at corn-shuckings, at log-rollings, and at every Saturday night party, people swept from every mooring by slavery’s westward-rolling tsunami sought moments like the ones that seared the memory of Reuben into the folds of Francis Fedric’s brain. They strove to loose their tongues from fear and anxiety, so that they could do something that marked them as unique, their words and
steps as novel, themselves as worthy of their peers’ respect. There always came a space in the gathering and a moment in the song where, like Reuben, the individual performer did
his or her unique thing. And then the performer’s peers reveled in his or her triumph, while “all the peoples,” said Hattie Ann Nettles, “cut the high step,” young and old, man and woman.

For not everyone was a virtuoso,
but in contrast to the vast majority of whites, no one was a specialist non-performer. Everyone could sing and dance in the circle. Anyone willing to try could jump in the middle of a ring. Women and men both took the center. As was the case wherever African Americans gathered together in the young United States, not even the men expected the women to be modest and retiring. “You jumped and I
jumped / Swear by God you outjumped me!” sang out the man at the corn-shucking. The workers, laughing with a man laughing at himself, sang back “Huh! Huh! Round the corn Sally!” Sally was a name from a song, but maybe Sally’s stand-in danced while the men recognized that her boldness might outjump that of her husband or lover. Other women earned the reputation of the “fastest gal on the bayou” by
“dancing down” one man after another in the center of the floor. Liza Jane was alive on every dance floor.
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