The Making of African America (4 page)

Cultural malleability was and is reflected in all aspects of life. Commenting on people he had forced into the hold of his slave ship, one eighteenth-century slave captain noted the “facility with which they form new connexions,” often reinforced—in the words of yet another slaver—by having “partaken of the same food, and to have slept on the same plank during the voyage.”
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The same process of transforming shipmates into kin would be repeated a century later in the coffles transporting slaves from Virginia to Mississippi, yet another century later in the boxcars carrying African Americans from Mississippi to Chicago, and most recently in airplanes carrying black people from Accra to New York. No aspect of black life in the United States has been untouched by the great migrations—by the contrapuntal interplay of movement and place.

Place—like movement—gained special meaning because of its unique relationship to the African American experience. For much of American history, place was not merely a geographic locale, but a social imperative—as in “stay in your place”—that black men and women violated at great risk. From the time black people were driven up the gangplank of that first slave ship, white authorities defined the “place” of black people as one of subordination, and they diligently patrolled the color line in the slave quarter, the back of the bus, the segregated schoolhouse, the urban housing project. Manifested at times in fugitive slave laws, racial covenants and redlines, or urban renewal policy that required “Negro removal,” the struggle for place was an ongoing part of the African American experience. Place, in short, was more than a locale. It was an attitude, a condition, a policy that white people required to be reenacted again and again with a tip of the hat, a downward glance, a silent acceptance of subordination.
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Yet these same places of subordination became sites of subversion and, ultimately, sources of liberation. In a similar fashion, movement also secured a larger meaning because it suggested the possibility of escape from place, be it a visit to a “broad wife,” respite in a maroon colony, or the train or highway northward toward home.

Place gained particular significance because it had to be reconstituted again and again from the remembered fragments of a premigration past and the new circumstances of a postmigration world. The difficulties of preserving the sounds, tastes, and smells of the past bumped against the reality of new languages, food stocks, and landscapes. At times, men and women labored to preserve their cultural baggage, maintaining languages, cuisines, and rights of passage: the ways their parents brought children to the world, celebrated their coming of age, and buried their dead. At other times, these same men and women worked equally assiduously to lose their past—overbearing elders, rituals that confined, and attitudes that limited cherished aspirations. But whether remembered or forgotten, welcomed or denied, the old and the new came together in a form that gave place a special meaning.

As this process suggests, the very definition of movement and place were contested. Movement—forced and free—sometimes meant material loss, social dislocation, and spiritual fragmentation, yet sometimes signaled material gain, social improvement, and spiritual renewal. In slavery and in freedom, black people twisted the meaning of movement and place, transforming places of repression into places of liberation and places of confinement into routes of escape. What was generally true of these tropes was even truer for the great migrations or passages. The powerful combination of movement and place—the particular migrations and homelands they created—informed the making and remaking of African American life. The slave ship and Africa, the slave coffle and the black-belt plantation, and the northbound train and the ghetto were all critical to the formation of the African American experience. But it was the unique combination of fluidity and fixity that all these represented that came to shape African American life.

While all of the massive migrations were the product of specific circumstances and produced their own dynamic—and hence stand as unique events—their cumulative impact was derived from the power of repetition and the multiple memories they stockpiled. For more than four centuries, people of African descent in the United States have been on the move, reenacting the timeless drama of migration: the abandonment of the familiar, the trauma of transit, the confrontation with the new, the embrace—however reluctantly, tenuously, and, perhaps, unconsciously—of place, the generational struggles that followed, and finally the remembrance of the past, reflecting on what once was and what then became.

Ousted from African homelands and then driven across the North American continent like a great river of humanity, the four great migrations can be divided into many streams, each with its own eddies, whirlpools, ponds, and rills. Whether forced or free, these immense movements of men, women, and children repeatedly fragmented the extant society, smashed domestic relations, broke lifelong friendships, and reduced the familiar to the foreign. Under the best of conditions, these passages by their very nature generated fear and insecurity, as migrants struggled to learn the new protocols through the lens of the old. And the conditions under which black people moved, in slavery or freedom, were rarely the best. Often it was not simply that oppression and exploitation replaced freedom and magnanimity, but that new circumstances replaced the familiar old forms of exploitation and oppression with new ones. For some, no matter how oppressive, the familiar was preferable to the foreign. For others, no matter how liberating, the loss of old ways left unhealable wounds.

Yet, even at its most oppressive, the new society offered new possibilities, for migrations were only partially about geographic transfers and more about the refashioning of consciousness. Whereas some skills were reduced to obsolescence, others were elevated in value. New solidarities emerged from shared constraints and with them a variety of new cultural forms. The insecurities and fears that accompanied the great migrations generated fresh assertions of human dignity and renewed affirmations of the human spirit.

And even at its most liberating, the new society fostered nostalgia for the old. New opportunities and new freedoms could never replace what had been left behind. “There were no chinaberry trees, no pecan trees,” recalled Clifton Taulbert in his memoir of his northward transit from rural Mississippi. “The sound of Mama's and Ma Ponk's voices could not find their way through the maze of buildings that separated us. Never again would I pick dewberries or hear the familiar laughter from the field truck.”
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The new landscape was never quite as striking as the old. For Taulbert, as for other migrants, a longing for an idealized past flowered in an imperfect present. Even when the past was not idealized, migrants felt a sense of loss associated with change. They desired, above all else, to connect the present to the past. Their histories can be written at the point of interconnectedness or the connections that were imagined.

But the great migrations created vast chasms in the experience of black people. Addressing these violent ruptures—to the extent they could be addressed—required enormous energy and extraordinary creativity, for these massive migrations eroded established customs that professed ancient pedigrees and unseated long-standing conventions. They dissolved regionalisms and localisms while creating, at the same time, new cosmopolitanisms and then new provincialisms. These new cultures contained possibilities as well as constraints. Explosions of cultural creativity followed each of the great passages.

Again and again, the protocols and ideas of race were transformed. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, black people learned the meaning of enslavement on the periphery of the North American continent. In the nineteenth century, blackness was remade on the rich loam of black-belt Alabama, taking on meanings unknown on the red clays of Virginia and the swamps of South Carolina. In mid-twentieth-century America, blackness secured yet different meanings in the stockyards of Chicago than it had in the cotton fields of Mississippi. In the late twentieth century, as people of African descent from all over the world converged on the United States, race was interpreted yet anew. At each turn, migrants relearned the constraints and possibilities race allowed, as blackness took on new meaning.

The multiple passages entailed joining worlds that were lost to worlds whose full dimensions could barely be imagined, even by the most prescient. Of necessity, the unfamiliar required innovation. The novel circumstances in which black people again and again found themselves caused them to place a premium on adaptation. These strategies were spun out in endless variety, for the contingencies created by migration challenged old verities and required new truths. Few truths survived long in a landscape of rapid change, as the repeated reinvention of self and society created patterns of thought and action that prized the originality of a John Coltrane riff, a Toni Morrison novel, a Richard Pryor skit, or an LL Cool J rap.

New forms and new structures set the boundaries for new polarities that quickly emerged in the wake of these massive movements: Africans and creoles, slave and free, newcomers and old settlers, homeboys and street dudes. These new forms delineated the societies that emerged in the wake of immense transfers of peoples, but they hardly defined the contours of the new order, whose complicated cultural matrices depended on specific circumstances: who went where and why, the baggage migrants carried, and the nature of their new habitat. The cultures of black peoples in the transit from Africa, across the American continent, from south to north, and then from all parts of the globe to the United States were made and remade not by maintaining the old in some reified form but by creating something new as migrants became natives.

Although the great migrations marked extraordinary discontinuities in the African and African American experience, the frequency with which these massive, periodic transfers occurred caused them to be incorporated seamlessly into everyday life and, in time, to become the backbone of African American history. For some, such movements became routine, if hardly normal or welcome. “The traders was all around,” remembered the former slave Lewis Hayden, “the slave pens at hand, and we did not know what time any of us might be in it.”
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The endemic nature of migration—whether the feared arrival of a slave trader, eviction from a tenant shack, or sale to a convict lessee—required men and women to prepare themselves and their loved ones for what could only be seen as inevitable. For much of their history, black people lived not so much in flux—a circumstance endemic to the human condition—but in anticipation of catastrophic change. Husbands and wives, parents and children, kinfolk and neighbors understood that their ties would at some point be severed and that they would be required to reconstruct their lives anew often in radically different circumstances. Such expectations—and the accompanying anxieties—informed black life, for the migrations' reverberations echoed throughout African American communities. They gave rise to rituals that both anticipated and cushioned change, as few were so foolish as to await the moment of departure to consider what the new realities might bring.

Between the great migrations stood periods of deep rootedness.
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Movement might be omnipresent in the African American experience between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, but so too has been a sense of place. Indeed, one of the great ironies of migratory history is that diasporas rooted people in place—sometimes places where people came from and sometimes places where they went.
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The church, Masonic hall, beauty parlor, barbershop, storefront, and even the street corner and stoop were just as significant to the African American experience as the slave coffle and the Chicken Bone Special, for they were points of sociability where bonds of trust and collaboration were established and maintained. More than an attachment to landscape, the concept of
place
spoke to relationships, often deeply personal, and the institutions that emerged from those relationships.

The linkages created by movement had to be disentangled, decoupled, and fixed socially and culturally as well as geographically.
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The value of place in African American life seemed to increase with the constancy of movement and its often dire consequences. In time, Africa, the plantation South, and the inner city each became—by turns—a kind of Jerusalem. Although slaves and their mobile descendants were historically characterized as the ultimate outsiders—dismissed as socially dead denizens by some—they quickly made the land their own, mastered the terrain, and created dense networks of kinship and friendships that stretched across the land.
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In a word, they were rooted. Frederick Douglass, speaking from his own experience as both slave and free man, contrasted the difference between the expectations of enslaved and free peoples. Free people, declared Douglass, developed no “extravagant attachment to any one place,” while the slave “had no choice, no goal but was pegged down to one single spot, and must take root there or die.” From Douglass's perspective, the firm connections necessitated by chattel bondage created a profound respect and even affection for place and the men and women connected to those places, even when another place—perhaps any other place—would have been preferred. “Perhaps the most marked trait in the negro character,” declared a
New York Times
reporter amid the chaos of the Civil War, “is his love of home and of the localities to which he is accustomed. They all pine for their homes.”
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Douglass's image of the slave “pegged down” and this imputation of the love of locality as the “most marked trait in the negro character” evoke the figure of a people without motion, of being literally frozen in place.
Rootedness
—at least as employed here—does not refer to immobilization. Much as slaveholders, planter-merchants, and others who followed in their wake wanted to extend their sovereignty over the slave, sharecropper, tenant farmer, or ghetto dweller, they utterly failed to do so, if only because mobility was precisely what made these men and women so valuable. The image of the slave or cropper locked in place belies reality. The plantation regime as it developed in mainland North America and the industrial order that followed it required even the most constrained workers to move, as messengers, wagoners, and sailors, as well as husbands visiting wives, lovers courting sweethearts, and friends calling upon neighbors.