The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (36 page)

Of course, if one could not hold the stage, someone else would break in, riffing on the songs as they sang them, even in the chorus—even familiar songs with known names like “Virginny Nigger Very Good.” Listeners and singers at the corn-shuckings disdained song leaders who stuttered or
ran out of rhymes. The tongues of the enslaved learned to keen or growl or laugh their songs a different way each time through. This was very different from white music and white people’s songs, which stuck to the same lyrics for decades. White musical ensembles played one rhythm at a time, their dancers following steps that might as well have been painted on the floor. White musical culture was
a formation that approved those who marched in time. Black culture was a ring, with space in the middle for anyone willing to try his or her step. And by nourishing, practicing, and training themselves in improvisation, enslaved masters of innovation learned to think creatively as new demands and new dangers emerged. To the extent that they could institutionalize anything while living in the midst
of white-created chaos, enslaved African Americans made the encouragement of creative individual performance the center of gatherings. At Saturday night dances, “when a brash nigger boy cut a cute bunch of steps, the men folk would give him a dime or so,” even though dimes were scarce.
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Dimes earned in that way, and the love implied by them, had taught Reuben as a boy—had taught him to teach
himself. Their equivalent kept teaching him as a man. At the corn-shucking, it was his peers, the ring, who sang the base to guide and bear him up. Even his rivals were the steel on which
he sharpened himself. And it was no foregone conclusion that enslaved migrants would support each other in this process, that they would form a ring and clap, or sing the base from which others could improvise.
Their traumas could have made them too selfish, too arrogant, too amoral, too self-isolating. They were desperately poor. Enslavers teased them with stolen abundance. On Sunday mornings, remembered George Strickland of his boyhood in Alabama, “they”—white folks—“would give us biscuits for breakfast, which was so rare that we’d try to beat the others out of theirs.” Children fought for the taste
of white flour, to the laughter of enslavers, and some enslaved people old enough to know better acted much the same when the music started.
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Image 5.2. Dances during the off-times and Saturday nights provided one type of social setting that allowed people divided and measured and sold, forced through what were in effect divorces—though against the will of each party—to perform the gender roles and individual personalities that they believed made them special. “The Christmas Week,” from “Album varieties no. 3; The slave in 1863,” Philadelphia, 1863. Library of Congress.

Yet in musical and social rituals that played out as rings surrounding a changing cast of innovators, enslaved people chose to act in ways that reinforced a sense of individual independence through the reality of mutual interdependence. And those choices mattered. Music can do things to our emotions, our thoughts, and our bodies in ways that analysis
of the words of a song like “Liza Jane” cannot encompass. Those were the things about music that could, and did, save lives. Cold metal shackles now bound Reuben’s hands, and he sat silent on the flatboat as the shoreline scrolled by him. But in his tongue, his memory, his spirit, and his spine were well-honed tools. In Louisiana, Reuben would wield once again his power to adapt old songs
to new
situations: to call out emotions, to urge his coparticipants to merge with and play off each other’s voices and rhythms in greater collective effort that also allowed space for individuals to shine. What they did for themselves would do for him as well. For people made into commodities had a desperate need to resist the ways in which the rapidly changing world treated them like faceless units.
Many had the creative capacity to do it, just as many had the creativity to survive the ever-increasing demands made on hands in the field.
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Eventually, white Bohemian communities of artists in Paris and New York and San Francisco would build on Whitman’s ideals of individualism by trying to make life into art and vice versa. But they trailed behind Reuben in many ways, and his depths were deeper.
His powers of observation and creation were more powerful, for he knew the weight of iron on his wrists. He drew on the old and the new more effectively, for change had cost him a price the white Bohemians might never comprehend. Nor could the man or woman who was about to buy him understand, and southwestern enslavers who compelled performance—such as the enslavers who forced marching coffles
of captives to sing as they marched southwest in the slave trade—even found themselves the objects of ironic imitation. The circle became an opportunity for in-jokes, for sheltering together from the white stare, for facing outward together in defense.
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The circle, of course, became all the more fascinating to whites as it grew more impenetrable. Whites’ belief that there was a distinct “Negro
music” helped shape another commodity: this one something that some whites wanted to possess and inhabit as a put-on self. It began with a few black performers who had made their way to the North as sailors on cotton vessels. They became a sensation in New York’s working-class theaters, playing their banjos, singing, dancing, and clapping rhythms with their hands and feet. In the increasingly fast-paced
and novelty-seeking culture of commercializing cities, the impact of black performance was shocking yet entrancing. White men—including many working-class ones who had worked in the South as functionaries of the expanding cotton empire—began to imitate and demonstrate what they had learned on the Ohio River or in New Orleans. Former cotton-gin mechanics, flatboat pilots, and apprentice clerks
sang, bucked, and jived while frailing their banjos in the most authentic way, often while (weirdly) blacked-up, “playing Negro.”
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It was very strange for such white men to sing “Oh, Susanna, don’t you cry for me”—the story of an enslaved man trying to find his true love, who’d been taken to New Orleans—when the losses of a million Susannas made jobs for such white men. But as these white imitators
created the minstrel
show genre, and “Oh, Susanna,” the most popular song of 1847–1848, made Stephen Foster the nation’s first professional songwriter, blackface became the quintessential American popular entertainment of the nineteenth century. Blackface also became the archetypal model for how non-black performers would sell a long series of innovations created by enslaved migrants and their
descendants—ragtime, jazz, blues, country, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, and hip-hop—to a white market. From that time forward, many whites saw African-American song and dance as mere instinct, and have not understood that it is really deep art in control of complex passion. That art took shape in the creation of new ways to talk and to sing and to dance, it took shape on the cotton frontier,
and it took shape in the loss and transcendence that lies seven hundred miles deep in the words of “Old Virginia, Never Tire”—a song first sung by men and women whose personal histories pivoted around the endlessly repeated march from Virginia to the new ground. But over time, iterations and recombinations of what enslaved migrants created on the cotton and sugar frontiers gave birth to American
and then global popular music. Musical elements from African cultural traditions surely explain some of this appeal, but what African Americans did to always make those roots new on slavery’s frontiers made this musical tradition uniquely attractive.
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CHARLES BALL HAD EXPERIENCED
the full array of devastations practiced upon his body and his life by the new kind of slavery growing on the South’s
frontiers. He contemplated the choice that almost swallowed up Lucy Thurston, whose first few weeks in the Louisiana field had been the death-in-life of the zombie. Like Lucy, Ball chose otherwise. Perhaps his survival, and perhaps Thurston’s as well, were miracles. Then again, there were times when to those who struggled on, death seemed more merciful than these resurrections. But just as Lucy
ended up singing with the men in the fields on Friday, on a Saturday night in 1805 Charles Ball danced until dawn in the yard between the slave cabins. Several men took turns playing the banjo. Everyone sang. The older people soon grew too tired to dance but they still beat rhythms with their hands. When the music slowed to a pause, they told stories of Africa. “A man cannot well be miserable,
when he sees every one about him immersed in pleasure,” Ball remembered. “I forgot for the time, all the subjects of grief that were stored in my memory, all the acts of wrong that had been perpetrated against me.”

Singing in the circle was teaching the people on a thousand Congarees to speak in one tongue, despite their divergent origins. Beneath all their
particular interests lay the fact that
they were all slaves, all faced by a group that exploited them together. On fundamental questions that divided black and white, the circle gave its participants practice in acting and thinking together. This did not mean they would always get along harmoniously, that they would have no conflicts, that the circle was never broken by competition, or that no one would ever seek his or her own advantage
by siding with the masters in a way that other enslaved people thought betrayed their own values. But Saturday night promoted survival, and not just the survival of one individual. What tongues sang, how they called out with joy, longing, or competition as bodies shifted in dance, all these sounds and movements drew together the bonds that would help the group to help its members. It taught
most enslaved migrants that despite all their differences and conflicts, they needed each other if they were to survive. And already they were doing more than surviving together—they were shaping new ideas, new analyses of the world and how it worked, which would in turn shape future actions.

Ball himself acted—sooner rather than later. As soon as he settled in a bit at Congaree, in fact, he
was given by Wade Hampton to the planter’s recently married daughter. She and her husband deployed Ball on a new slave labor camp deep in the woods of frontier Georgia. Within a year, he became a driver, charged with forcing others to keep the pace. Ball did so well at this that by the summer of 1808 his owner’s brothers-in-law began to feel he was getting too much confidence. They beat him severely.
Ball resolved that the time had come to leave.
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Enslaved migrants ran away all the time, hiding in the woods to escape violence. The number, not surprisingly, peaked during cotton-picking season. But most of them eventually came back to the slave labor camp. Slave patrols caught them. Random whites caught them. Other slaves betrayed them. Most of them didn’t know the way back to wherever they
had come from. And in between stood thousands of armed white people who would not be their friends. As for the free states, they were even farther away. The number of enslaved migrants who made it from the depths of the cotton and sugar frontiers all the way to the free states probably numbered under a thousand during all the years of slavery. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of all forced
migrants. Most of those who did make it got away by hiding on steamboats, oceangoing ships, and later, on railways.
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In Georgia, Ball was six hundred miles by foot from Maryland’s Calvert County. He decided to try anyway. In early August he packed a small bag with food, flint, and tinder. He tied his faithful dog, who he feared might give
away a hiding place, to a tree near the cabins of the
labor camp. He fed his pet one last time and set off north through the woods.

Night after night Ball walked, sometimes wandering in circles until he could find a road or get his bearings from Polaris through the ragged clouds. By day he hid in the woods. He stole ripe corn from the fields. When October came he was still only at Columbia, South Carolina. And his memory told him that it had taken
him more than a month on the high roads coming south there from Maryland. There were many miles still to go.