This second novel by the first great African-American writer of mystery stories is a classic, deserving a place in the pantheon, right up there with T This second novel by the first great African-American writer of mystery stories is a classic, deserving a place in the pantheon, right up there with The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Big Chill.
The story is set in Harlem in the ‘50s, and begins with the shooting of a white man and the arrest of a member of a small local gang called “The Real Cool Moslems.” At first the case seems open-and-shut, for the chase and shooting is witnessed by a score of people on a busy Harlem street. But there’s a problem: the bullet the killed the man couldn’t have come from from the teenager’s gun.
The plot and the characters are both very good—particularly our two heros, the black Harlem detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones—but the real beauty of the book lies in the extraordinary liveliness of the prose, the way it conveys movement, and the color and richness of the imagery too—all of which adds up to a vivid portrait of Harlem. Hime’s prose makes me think not of writers but of caricaturists, painters, movie-makers: Daumier, Grosz; Brueghel, Rivera; Fellini, Scorsese. Himes makes memorable images, but he knows how to “move his camera” too.
Here’s a vivid passage from the beginning of the novel. In the Harlem Dew Drop Inn, a little guy pulls a knife on the white man who will soon end up dead in the street. But first he has to deal with the bartender, Big Smiley:
Big Smiley leaned across the bar and grabbed the red-eyed knifeman by the lapels of his mackinaw and lifted him from the floor.
“Gimme that chiv, shorty, ‘fore I makes you eat it,” he said lazily, smiling as though it were a joke.
The knifeman twisted in his grip and slashed him across the arm. The white fabric of his jacket slevve parted like a burst balloon and his black-skinned muscles opened like the Red Sea ….
Big Smiley draw back and reached beneath the bar counter with his right hand. He came up with a short-handled fireman’s axe. It had a red handle and a honed, razor-sharp blade.
The little knifeman jumped into the air and slashed at Big Smiley again, matching his knife against Big Smiley’s axe.
Big Smiley countered with a right cross with the r5ed-handled axse. The blade met the knifeman’s arm in the middle of its stroke and cut it off just below the elbow as though it had been guillotined.
The severed arm in its coat sleeve, still clutching the knife, sailed through the air, sprinkling the nearby spectators with drops of blood, landed on the linoleum tile floor, and skidded beneath the table of a booth.
The little knifeman landed on his feet, still making cutting motions with his half arm.
There are timeless books. Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me is a timeless book. Then there is another category of books I would call “books f There are timeless books. Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me is a timeless book. Then there is another category of books I would call “books for our time.” And Between the World and Me is that kind of book too.
But consider Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. It is definitely a book for our time, yet I doubt many people—me included—would ever consider it a timeless book. Yet paradoxically, Oluo’s book may be an even more important book for certain people to read than any of Mr. Coates’ timeless books.
When I say “certain people” I mean mean old farts like me (I’ve earned the adjective “old” by recently turning seventy; “fart” I earned a long time ago): that is, individuals who aspire to be racially and culturally sensitive but who end up offending people anyway, principally because they grew up in a world where people’s sense of humor was in some ways cruder and harsher, where—except for a classroom now and then—they rarely interacted with black people socially, and that even when they did they never gave a thought to the fact that white people might not always be on top of the world.
But these days the social world—especially of younger people, which, for us old farts is almost everybody—is different than it used to be. Everywhere we go we hear new terms and phrases: intersectionality, check your privilege, microagression, cultural appropriation, the school-to-prison pipeline, etc. What do they mean, and how do they apply in this new, scary multicultural world?
And there’s another, more immediate reason too. Some of these old farts—I’m one of them—wish they could understand black people better, yet although they may be friendly with a black person or two, they have the good sense to appreciate that continually engaging in such dialogue with clueless old white farts must be exhausting, to say the least.
What to do? Well, they could read this book. So You Want to Know About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.
I know I learned a lot reading it. Oluo is frank about her own experiences, as a woman of color whose mother is white, as a middle-class writer with a privileged position, as a lover of women and as mother of a black son. She talks about many things which well-meaning white people habitually do that drive her and other black people crazy (saying “Can I touch your hair” being near the top), and she explains in great detail—with excellent examples—not only what those words and phrases listed above mean, but how they describe things you encounter every day.
I learned things about myself too. I learned why some comments I’ve made on the internet were met—mercifully, I’m sure—with silence. And checking my privilege has taught me other things too, that have nothing to do with relating to black people. For example, I now know that when my woman friends talk about how they have been wounded by the Catholic Church, that, instead of saying how I too have been wounded by the Church, I should instead just nod sympathetically, and say absolutely nothing.
So, if you are an old fart like me, I think you need to read this book. Maybe you young farts need to read it too. Come to think of it, most of you could maybe stand to read it. Particularly if you’re white....more
Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and the white kids came down and saved the day. — Julian Bond
Julian Bond’s cynical formulation of the commonly acc
Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, and the white kids came down and saved the day. — Julian Bond
Julian Bond’s cynical formulation of the commonly accepted—though deeply flawed—narrative of the USA’s Civil Rights struggle is just as prevalent today as it was during the Nixon administration, and—as Jeanne Theoharis argues in her necessary book, A Strange and Terrible History, it is just as wounding, just as damaging now as it was then.
I first encountered the work of Jean Theoharis when I read the Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, a biography which demonstrated that almost everything that I thought I knew about this Civil Rights icon was wrong. The tale of a patient, long-suffering, non-violent “church lady,” this woman who one day just “got tired” and thus started an entire movement, is nothing but a pleasant bedtime story. No, Rosa, a lifelong activist, had been committed since the days of the Scottsboro boys and was trained by a college course in the techniques of resistance. She doubted the wisdom of King’s strategic nonviolence, and later—when she was an enduring presence supporting the Black Power movement in Detroit--when asked the name of her favorite civil rights leader, replied “Malcolm X.”
What Ms. Theoharis once did for Rosa Parks, she does here for the entire Civil Rights movement. A More Beautiful and Terrible History shows us how America prefers its black heroes to be noble, pacifist, impractical, and isolated in their activism. They are heroes who eventually melt the hearts of the good white people—who are of course mostly from the North—white people who stepped up during the distant past and changed everything for the better. In other words, as Theoharis says:
As a nation, we honor these courageous men and women, then dismiss them as “impractical” when their example asks things of us that we do not want to provide—rendering the times and issues we confront as very different from these old injustices. In short, we prefer our heroes and heroines in the past and will cast aside the parts of the story that raise questions about our current directions.
Theoharis showed me many things. And she always backs them up with facts and statistics, and often with interesting stories. Here are just a few I remember: how agitation for social justice in the North is routinely ignored as being somehow different from the South; how discrimination in Southern schools is condemned, but redlining in real estate and white flight—the root of the problem in the still segregated schools of the North—is accepted as deplorable but inevitable; how the media routinely ignores the “polite racism” the North practices, so that issues like the black community’s “culture of poverty” and the “forced busing” that exacerbates white rage are seen as the source of the problem; how the movements broader goals of criminal justice reform, economic and global justice are rarely taken seriously as an extension of the legacy of Parks and King; how the privileged men of the Civil Rights movement have habitually marginalized young people, poor people, and especially women; and how we routinely forget—or choose to ignore—how viciously whites and their government power structures have acted toward our beloved civil rights heroes (except for a handful of bad Southern sheriffs. We condemn evertything about those sheriffs, of course.)
I’ll leave you with two examples from this essential book, not because they are the most important things you should take away (I expect you—like I—have much to learn) but because both of these events were news to me and because each of them makes a good story.
First, there is the story about how Lena Horne ended up missing MLK’s “Dream” speech during the March on Washington. It seems she and Gloria Richardson (leader of the Cambridge Movement) were upset because Rosa Parks and other women activists were not allowed to deliver any speeches, and that the wives of the Civil Rights leaders were not even permitted to walk with their husbands during the march.
Right before Martin Luther King Jr. was to speak, Richardson found herself being put in a cab along with Lena Horne and sent back to her hotel. March organizers claimed that they were worried the two would get mobbed and crushed, yet no one else was sent back to the hotel. “They did this,” Richardson believed, “because Lena Horne had Rosa Parks by the hand and had been taking her to satellite broadcasts, saying, “This is the woman you need to interview.’” Richardson had helped her. “We got several people to interview Rosa Parks. The march organizers must have found that out.”
And then there is this story, about how the national leadership of the Democratic Party used the FBI to stop the MFDP (Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party) in their attempt to unseat the official delegation of the Mississippi Democratic Party at the Democratic National Convention. Here the villains are President Johnson and his special assistant and (much later) liberal journalistic icon, Bill Moyers:
According the historian John Ditmer, Johnson “turned to Edgar Hoover to provide his own “coverage” of the convention.” Johnson ordered the bureau to spy on the MSDP and on Martin Luther King’s hotel room at the Atlantic City convention, and he asked for background checks on all the participants ….
FBI agents posed as NBC reporters (with full support of the network) to solicit information from the MFDP delegates, including the identities of those who supported their efforts on the credentials committee. Bill Moyers, who was a special assistance to Johnson at the time, served as a key player, and the president’s ledger notes a number of calls from Johnson to Moyers at the convention to provide the FBI’s information to be used by Johnson’s operatives on the floor to pressure delegates to withhold support from the MFDP challenger … The idea that the FBI was completely rogue, or that Johnson’s work on behalf of civil rights meant that he didn’t also consider the movement a threat and endorse FBI surveillance at certain points, is a convenient fiction.”
One afternoon in 1925, the white poet Vachel Lindsay was dining at the Wardman Park Hotel restaurant in Washington D.C. when a black busboy dropped th One afternoon in 1925, the white poet Vachel Lindsay was dining at the Wardman Park Hotel restaurant in Washington D.C. when a black busboy dropped three sheets of typed verse beside his plate. Lindsay read one of the poems, "The Weary Blues," and—impressed—called for the busboy, "Who wrote this?" he asked the young man. “I did," answered Langston Hughes. That evening, Lindsay reciting all three of Hughes’ poem at his own poetry reading, announcing his discovery of a “bonafide poet.”
Of course—as is true of most stories like this—the “discovery” of “the Poet Laureate of the Harlem Renaissance” was not as simple as that. Four years earlier, Hughes—just out of high school—published his now celebrated poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in the NAACP’s magazine Crisis, winning the admiration of major figures in the black literary community like W.E.B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson, and, at the time of his encounter with Lindsay, Hughes’ his first book—also entitled The Weary Blues--had already been accepted for publication by Alfred A. Knopf. Still, Lindsay—who today is often derided for his over-the-top performances and naive racism (particularly of his notorious poem “The Congo) did what he could to publicize the young poet, and his contribution should be remembered. (Not forgetting, though, that it was Hughes who put those three poems down next to his plate.)
For years, I have carried around bright little memories of Langston Hughes in my head, all eight short poems I was taught and then taught in turn: “Dreams” (“...if dreams die,/ life is a broken-winged bird/that cannot fly.”), “Theme for English B” ("...will my page be colored that I write?/ Being me, it will not be white.”), “Let America Be America Again” (“The land that never has been yet—/ And yet must be—/ the land where every man is free.”), “Mother to Son” (‘...life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”), “I, Too, Sing America” (I am the darker brother./ They send me to eat in the kitchen/ When company comes,/ But I laugh,/ And eat well,/ And grow strong.”), “The Weary Blues” (“And far into the night he crooned that tune./ The stars went out and so did the moon.), “Harlem (Dream Deferred)” (“What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up/ like a raisin in the sun?”), and of course “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (“I’ve known rivers:/ Ancient, dusky rivers./ My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”) These gems, a central part of the African-American literary heritage, are an important part of the heritage of all Americans too.
Unfortunately, reading the three-hundred page Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, I have been unable to find many poems equal to these eight. Almost all possess a lyrical musicality even at their bleakest (a quality that always eluded Hughes’ major influence Carl Sandburg), but few suggest the epic scope of Whitman, even in miniature—as “I, Too, Sing America” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” undeniably do. Then again, as poet and critic Randall Jarrell once said, “A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.” Langston Hughes, who managed to be struck—not five or six, but—at least eight times, is indisputably a poet. And the heritage of America is much richer because of it.
I offer you here eight very small lightning strikes or near-strikes which I uncovered in the course of my re-reading of the first half of this book:
AMERICAN HEARTBREAK
I am the American heartbreak— Rock on which Freedom Stumps its toe— The great mistake That Jamestown Made long ago.
HOPE
Sometimes when I’m lonely, Don’t know why, Keep thinkin’ I won’t be lonely By and by.
EVIL
Looks like what drives me crazy Don’t have no effect on you— But I’m gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too.
WINTER MOON
How thin and sharp is the moon tonight How thin and sharp and ghostly white Is the slim curved crook of the moon to night.
ARDELLA
I would liken you To a night without stars Were it not for your eyes. I would liken you To a sleep without dreams Were it not for your songs.
SUICIDE’S NOTE
The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss.
DESIRE
Deesire to us Was like a double death Swift dying Of our mingled breath, Evaporation Of an unknown strange perfume Between us quickly In a naked Room.
ME AND THE MULE
My old mule, He’s got a grin on his face. He’s been a mule so long He’s forgot about his race.
I’m like that old mule— Black—and don’t give a damn! You got to take me Like I am.
Radio Golf, the tenth and final entry in August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and Wilson’s final plays, marks a fitting ending both to an award-winning Radio Golf, the tenth and final entry in August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” and Wilson’s final plays, marks a fitting ending both to an award-winning cycle and an illustrious career. Although it lacks the expressionist daring, the resonant music, and the larger-than-life characters that grace many of the other nine plays, it benefits from a tight dramatic structure, a keen sense of the ironies of city politics, shrewd observations of the black middle class, and—as always, with Wilson—superb realistic dialog and a profound grasp of heritage and history.
It tells the story of Harmond Wilks, a successful real estate developer and aspiring candidate for mayor. He is putting the finishing touches on a grand building project he hopes will revitalize Pittsburgh’s black Hill District—two upscale high-rise apartment buildings, with room for a Whole Foods, a Barnes and Noble, and a Starbucks—but he has to wait for two things: 1) for the area to be designated as “blighted” (which will free up some government money), and 2) for the demolition of the only remaining old house, 1839 Wylie Street (the home of the spiritual mother of the district, Aunt Ester, well known to those familiar with the Pittsburgh Cycle). Although the “blighted” designation is almost certain to come through, there is a problem with the demolition. Old Joe Barlow has started to paint the rundown house on Wylie; he claims old Ester’s house is his.
I liked this play very much. True, the dialog isn’t as lyrical as in many other Wilson plays, but that is because Wilson wishes us to see that the black middle class characters who dominate—or attempt to dominate—the action have lost much of the music and poetry and once filled the souls of their fathers and mothers. Radio Golf is a successful—though somewhat melancholy—conclusion to the Cycle, yet it leaves its audience with much to think about.
I’ll leave you with a taste of the dialogue. Here Old Joe Barlow is discussing with Harmond Wilks the nature of the American Dream:
HARMOND: This is America. This is the land of opportunity. I can be mayor. I can be anything I want.
OLD JOE: But you got to have the right quarter. America is a giant slot machine. You walk up and put in your coin and it spits it back out. You look at your coin. You think maybe it’s a Canadian quarter. It’s the only coin you got. If this coin ain’t no good then you out of luck. You look at it and sure enough it’s an American quarter. But it don’t spend for you. It spend for everybody else but it don’t spend for you. The machine spits it right back out. Is the problem with the quarter or with the machine? Do you know? Somebody running for mayor ought to know that.
HARMOND: If it don’t take all the quarters you fix it. Anybody with common sense will agree to that. What they don’t agree on is how to fix it. Some people say you got to tear it down to fix it. Some people say you got to build it up to fix it. Some people say they don’t know how to fix it. Some people say they don’t want to be bothered with fixing it. You mix them all into a pot and stir it up and you get America. That’s what makes this country great.
The Life of Josiah Henson is not only an interesting slave narrative and the memoir of an important leader of Canada’s black community, but is also an The Life of Josiah Henson is not only an interesting slave narrative and the memoir of an important leader of Canada’s black community, but is also an important source of a classic of American popular literature. Josiah Henson’s Life is widely recognized as the inspiration for what of the American novel’s most noble and unfairly maligned characters: “Uncle Tom,” the morally principled Christian slave of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Henson’s brief as-told-to memoir presents a rich portrait of the life of an honorable and determined man, but—at least for me—three things about Henson’s life stand out. The first is that, as the trusted supervisor of his master’s estate, he agreed to lead a score of slaves from Maryland to Kentucky, and, although he could have easily lead them all—including himself—out of slavery, he led them to Kentucky instead because he refused to break his word. The second thing is that Henson only decided to run away after his master cheated him out of the money he had saved up to buy his freedom, thus absolving him of his obligation of faithful service. Third, after he escaped to Canada, he became a minister and leader of the Dawn Community, a self-sufficient group of half a hundred former slaves who bought and worked their own land.
The style in which the memoir is written—as you may see from the passage below—is a little too formal to capture completely the voice of the former slave. But, as it seems to adequately reflect Josiah’s beliefs and sentiments, it nevertheless gives us a memorable portrait of the man.
Below is the account of how Josiah justifies leading his fellow-slaves from a free state back into the land of slavery:
In passing along the State of Ohio, we were frequently told that we were free, if we chose to be so. At Cincinnati, especially, the colored people gathered round us, and urged us with much importunity to remain with them . . . From my earliest recollection, freedom had been the object of my ambition . . . No other means of obtaining it, however, had occurred to me, but purchasing myself of my master. The idea of running away was not one that I had ever indulged. I had a sentiment of honor on the subject, or what I thought such, which I would not have violated even for freedom; and every cent which I had ever felt entitled to call my own, had been treasured up for this great purpose, till I had accumulated between thirty and forty dollars. Now was offered to me an opportunity I had not anticipated. I might liberate my family, my companions, and myself, without the smallest risk, and without injustice to any individual, except one whom we had none of us any reason to love, who had been guilty of cruelty and oppression to us all for many years, and who had never shown the smallest symptom of sympathy with us, or with any one in our condition. . . But it was a punishment which it was not for me to inflict. I had promised that man to take his property to Kentucky, and deposit it with his brother; and this, and this only, I resolved to do. . . . What advantages I may have lost, by thus throwing away an opportunity of obtaining freedom, I know not; but the perception of my own strength of character, the feeling of integrity, the sentiment of high honor, I have experienced.—these advantages I do know, and prize; and would not lose them, nor the recollection of having attained them, for all that I can imagine to have resulted from an earlier release from bondage. I have often had painful doubts as to the propriety of my carrying so many other individuals into slavery again, and my consoling reflection has been, that I acted as I thought at the time was best.
I'll answer the obvious question first: no, King Hedley II is not as good as Fences. I have read all ten plays of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” exce I'll answer the obvious question first: no, King Hedley II is not as good as Fences. I have read all ten plays of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” except Radio Golf, and not one of them is as good as Fences, that masterpiece of modern drama. Then again, not many plays—by anyone, from anywhere, at anytime—are that good. Wilson, however, has written other very good plays: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson, come immediately to mind. But King Hedley II,though it has fine qualities, is not one of the very good plays.
The plot has possibilities. Set in the 1980’s, the play features a cast of characters enmeshed in a societal decline, caught in the inescapable web of history. Its hero, King Hedley II bears the name of the prophet Hedley featured in Wilson’s earlier Seven Guitars, and part of his destiny is to discover his proper relation to this long vanished father. But he has more immediate problems too. Recently released from prison for murdering a man who cut him in the face, he literally bears the scars of his painful past. Can he move forward, become a success (he wants to open a video store), and make a life for his woman Tonya and the baby she carries? Or will the forces of the past be too much for King?
Wilson makes us feel the urgency of King’s challenges and the enormity of the past, but somehow there is no progress or struggle in Hedley's life—nothing but a unrelated series of hustles and stumbles. The play is loose in construction and disorganized in its effects. True, Wilson has always favored expressionistic techniques and an organic approach to structure, but, in his best work, the rhythms of speech, the power of music, and the hint of a pervasive mystical unity lend to even the most arbitrary misfortunes a sense of purpose and meaning.
Still, I have the nagging sense that I may be wrong about King Hedley II As always with August Wilson, though, the language of the characters is filled with a convincing music. Here four characters—King, King’s best friend Mister, King’s mother Ruby’s old hustler boyfriend Elmore, and Stool Pigeon, the neighorhood eccentric—discuss how even violence itself doesn’t make the sense it used to anymore:
ELMORE: “Teen Killed in Drive-By.” I’m tired of hearing that. See . . . a man has got to have honor. A man ain’t got no honor can’t be a man . . . Now what is honor? You evedr see that movie where this man goes to kill this other man and he got his back to him and he tell him to turn around so he can see his eyes? That’s honor. A man got to have that else he ain’t a man. You can’t be a man stealing somebody’s life from the backseat of a Toyota. That’s why the black man’s gonna catch hell for the next hundred years. These kids gonna grow up and get old and ain’t a man among them.
KING: It used to be you get killed over something. Now you get killed over nothing.
MISTER: You might look at somebody wrong and get in a fight and get killed over that.
STOOL PIGEON: I see a man get killed over a fish sandwich. Right down there at Cephus’s. Had two fish sandwiches . . . one with hot saucs and one without. Somebody got them mixed up and rthese two fellows got to arguin over them. The next thing you know it was a surprise to God to find out that one of them had six bullets in him.
ELMORE: That’s why I carry my pistol. They got too many fools out there.
After completing her pamphlet Southern Horrors (1992), Ida Bell Wells—aided by the excellent statistics on file at the Chicago Tribune—continued her r After completing her pamphlet Southern Horrors (1992), Ida Bell Wells—aided by the excellent statistics on file at the Chicago Tribune—continued her research on lynching, and, in 1895, published a more extensive work, The Red Record, which constitutes her definitive treatment of the extrajudicial killings of black people in the U.S.A, principally in the Southern states.
The Red Record, a classic both of black resistance and of “muckraking” investigative journalism, is an effective combination of: 1) sociological analysis (lynching is mostly about power, a retaliation not for rape but for consensual sex between the races), 2) practical exhortation (black people must fight back with their economic power and protect themselves with firearms when necessary), 2) a wealth of supportive statistics (demonstrating that lynching punishes lesser crimes too, such as burglary, thievery, and barn burning), 3) a vigorous defense against attacks against the earlier Southern Horrors (mostly initiated by Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Association), and 4) a series of disturbing, carefully crafted narratives which convey the savagery of lynching in all its horrors.
It is these narratives which constitute the beating heart of Miss Wells book. I will end with the conclusion of her account of the lynching of C.J. Miller, at Bardwell, Kentucky, July 7, 1893—on the flimsiest of evidence—for the murder of two young girls, Mary and Ruby Ray.
Notice how the narrative echos the Passion of the Christ: Mr. Ray (the girl’s father) standing in for Pilate, the stripping of the garments, the loincloth, the log-chain instead of a cross, the procession through the streets to the place of execution, the faintings and fallings, etc., etc, and the mention of Christianity at the end:
At three o'clock the mob rushed to the jail to secure the prisoner. Mr. Ray had changed his mind about the promised burning; he was still in doubt as to the prisoner's guilt. He again addressed the crowd to that effect, urging them not to burn Miller, and the mob heeded him so far, that they compromised on hanging instead of burning, which was agreed to by Mr. Ray. There was a loud yell, and a rush was made for the prisoner. He was stripped naked, his clothing literally torn from his body, and his shirt was tied around his loins. Some one declared the rope was a "white man's death," and a log-chain, nearly a hundred feet in length, weighing over one hundred pounds, was placed round Miller's neck and body, and he was led and dragged through the streets of the village in that condition followed by thousands of people. He fainted from exhaustion several times, but was supported to the platform where they first intended burning him.
The chain was hooked around his neck, a man climbed the telegraph pole and the other end of the chain was passed up to him and made fast to the cross-arm. Others brought a long forked stick which Miller was made to straddle. By this means he was raised several feet from the ground and then let fall. The first fall broke his neck, but he was raised in this way and let fall a second time. Numberless shots were fired into the dangling body, for most of that crowd were heavily armed, and had been drinking all day.
Miller's body hung thus exposed from three to five o'clock, during which time, several photographs of him as he hung dangling at the end of the chain were taken, and his toes and fingers were cut off. His body was taken down, placed on the platform, the torch applied, and in a few moments there was nothing left of C.J. Miller save a few bones and ashes. Thus perished another of the many victims of Lynch Law, but it is the honest and sober belief of many who witnessed the scene that an innocent man has been barbarously and shockingly put to death in the glare of the nineteenth-century civilization, by those who profess to believe in Christianity, law and order.
Outraged by the execution of her friend Thomas Moss in the “Curve Riot” by a black-masked mob, Ida B. Wells, co-owner and editor of the Memphis negro Outraged by the execution of her friend Thomas Moss in the “Curve Riot” by a black-masked mob, Ida B. Wells, co-owner and editor of the Memphis negro newspaper The Free Speech and Headlight, began to research the facts that lay behind the lynching of black men in the South. Two and a half months later, in May of 1892, she published, in The Free Speech, an editorial on the subject:
Eight negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech, one at Little Rock, Ark., last Saturday morning where the citizens broke into the penitentiary and got their man; three near Anniston, Ala., one near New Orleans; and three at Clarksville, Ga., the last three for killing a white man, and five on the same old racket--the new alarm about raping white women. The same programme of hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless bodies was carried out to the letter. Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.
Edward Ward Carmack, editor of the Memphis Commercial, questioned whether “a black scoundrel” like the writer of this editorial should be “allowed to live and utter such loathsome and repulsive calumnies. . . There are some things that the Southern white man will not tolerate . . . We hope we have said enough.”
The office of The Free Speech was demolished and torched. There was also talk of lynching, but Ida Wells was far away, on vacation in New York. She says she was informed by telegram, however, that “bodily harm awaited my return.” Wells refused to even visit the South for thirty years.
She did, however, continue her research, the first fruit of which is this pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases. In it, Wells argues that cases in which a black man is charged with rape often suggest a more complex, consensual relationship: it is, in Miss Wells words, a case of “poor blind Afro-American Sampsons who suffer themselves to be betrayed by white Delilahs.”
This is a well-argued, well organized pamphlet, and Wells is a meticulous researcher who writes with considerable self-assurance.
I will conclude with two excerpts. First, a passage in which Wells, discussing what “Afro-Americans" themselves may do to address the problem, refers to the “Curve Riot” and its aftermath:
To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South. A thorough knowledge and judicious exercise of this power in lynching localities could many times effect a bloodless revolution. The white man's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities.
The Afro-Americans of Memphis denounced the lynching of three of their best citizens, and urged and waited for the authorities to act in the matter and bring the lynchers to justice. No attempt was made to do so, and the black men left the city by thousands, bringing about great stagnation in every branch of business. Those who remained so injured the business of the street car company by staying off the cars, that the superintendent, manager and treasurer called personally on the editor of the Free Speech, asked them to urge our people to give them their patronage again. Other business men became alarmed over the situation and theFree Speech was run away that the colored people might be more easily controlled. A meeting of white citizens in June, three months after the lynching, passed resolutions for the first time, condemning it. . . Memphis is fast losing her black population, who proclaim as they go that there is no protection for the life and property of any Afro-American citizen in Memphis who is not a slave.
The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is to be gained by a further sacrifice of manhood and self-respect. By the right exercise of his power as the industrial factor of the South, the Afro-American can demand and secure his rights, the punishment of lynchers, and a fair trial for accused rapists.
I conclude with another equally interesting passage on the subject of self-defense:
Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky, and prevented it. The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.
The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.
William Wells Brown was a formidable figure in his day. A well known lecturer in the U.S. and Britain on the abolition of slavery (and women’s rights William Wells Brown was a formidable figure in his day. A well known lecturer in the U.S. and Britain on the abolition of slavery (and women’s rights and temperance too), he was also a pioneering African-American novelist (Clotel), playwright (Experience, or How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone and The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom), travel writer (Three Years in Europe), author of brief biographies (The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements), and an historian (The Negro and the American Revolution). Inspired by the autobiography of his friend—and rival in excellence—Frederick Douglass, he decided to write this account of his own early years: Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave.
Although his autobiography lacks the eloquent rhetoric and astute observations that make Douglass’ book a classic, Brown compensates by pleasing his reader with a straightforward narrative style and the considerable breadth of his experience. In his early Kentucky years Brown learned to work a farm (and learned to endure the overseer’s whip as well), but later, when his owner moved to St. Louis, Brown was frequently hired out to work an astonishing number of jobs : tavern boy, hotel bellhop, steamboat servant, printer’s devil for the St. Louis Times (where he learned to write a little), and—most interesting of all—as the servant of a negro speculator or “soul-driver” as they were called, that is, the buyer and seller of slaves.
Like most slave narratives, Brown Narrative features instances of injustice that anger you, moments of pathos that move you to compassion, and an account of escape that will fill you with excitement and apprehension. But perhaps the best thing about Brown's book is the variety and specificity of Brown’s work experience. We learn more than a little of what it is like to be a slave by seeing the things a slave does, and it is this which makes Brown’s book uniquely informative and enlightening.
Here, in one of my favorite passages, Brown describes how, at the direction of his “soul-driver” employer, he endeavored to make old slaves appear younger, so that they would fetch a better price downriver at Rodney, Natchez, and New Orleans:
In the course of eight or nine weeks Mr. Walker had his cargo of human flesh made up. There was in this lot a number of old men and women, some of them with gray locks. We left St. Louis in the steamboat Carlton, Captain Swan, bound for New Orleans. On our way down, and before we reached Rodney, the place where we made our first stop, I had to prepare the old slaves for market. I was ordered to have the old men's whiskers shaved off, and the grey hairs plucked out, where they were not too numerous, in which case he had a preparation of blacking to color it, and with a blacking-brush we would put it on. This was new business to me, and was performed in a room where the passengers could not see us. These slaves were also taught how old they were by Mr. Walker, and after going through the blacking process, they looked ten or fifteen years younger; and I am sure that some of those who purchased slaves of Mr. Walker, were dreadfully cheated, especially in the ages of the slaves which they bought.
We landed at Rodney, and the slaves were driven to the pen in the back part of the village. Several were sold at this place, during our stay of four or five days, when we proceeded to Natchez. There we landed at night, and the gang were put in the warehouse until morning, when they were driven to the pen. As soon as the slaves are put in these pens, swarms of planters may be seen in and about them. They knew when Walker was expected, as he always had the time advertised beforehand when he would be in Rodney, Natchez, and New Orleans. These were the principal places where he offered his slaves for sale.
Jitney, first composed in 1979, was the first of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” to be written and the last to reach Broadway (in 2017). Although exte Jitney, first composed in 1979, was the first of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” to be written and the last to reach Broadway (in 2017). Although extensively revised in 1996, it still seems like an early play: sunnier, with a “slice-of-life” realist feel, lacking the dark music and expressionistic touches that one comes to expect from August Wilson. Still, as is always true in a Wilson play, the language is vivid, and the portrait of the black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh is both palpable and believable.
The story—what there is of it—centers around an unofficial cab stand located in Pittsburgh’s inner city, where the drivers of “jitneys” (unlicensed taxicabs) gather to receive their assignments from Becker their respected manager. The regular drivers range from steady old Korean war vet Doub to alcoholic former “tailor-to-the stars” Fielding and the irascible, always up-in-your-business Turnbo, whom nobody seems to like. The main story involves the relationship between Vietnam vet Darnell and Rena, the mother of his little son Jesse, who love each other but have not yet learned to trust. And there other unsettling matters at the jitney station too: Becker’s son has just been released from prison, and there are rumors that the Pittsburgh Housing Authority is planning to tear the old jitney stand down.
For a taste of Wilson’s wonderful language, I give you the voice of Rena, who has just learned Darnell has been planning to “surprise” her with a house, and who is not nearly as happy with the idea as Darnell expects her to be. (I love this passage, because I’m convinced most women—including my wife—would feel much the same way):
You gonna surprise me with a house? Don’t do that. A new TV maybe. A stereo . . . a couch . . . a refrigerator . . . okay. But don’t surprise me with a house that I didn’t even have the chance to pick out!
. . . You can’t surprise me with a house and I’m supposed to say, “Oh Darnell, that’s nice.” at one time I would have. But I’m not seventeen no more. I have responsibilities. I want to kow if it has a hookup for a washer and dryer ‘cause I got to wash Jesse’s clothes. I want to know if it has a yard and do it have a fence and how far Jesse has to go to school. I ain’t thinking about where to put the TV. That’s not what's important to me. And you supposed to know, Darnell. You supposed to know what’s important to me like I’m supposed to know what’s important to you. I’m not asking you to do it by yourself. I’m here with you. We in this together.
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