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The Flying ________. [critical dissertation]; &, Welcome to the Coon Show [creative dissertation]

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The Flying ________. [critical dissertation]; &, Welcome to the Coon Show [creative dissertation]

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The Flying______________. [critical dissertation]
&
Welcome to the Coon Show [creative dissertation]
By
Dexter L. Booth

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Literature and Creative Writing)

August 2020

Copyright 2020 Dexter L. Booth
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract............................................................................................................................................ii

Introduction: A Strange Lope, an Absence......................................................................................1
Who Gets to Tell Their Stories..............................................................................10

References......................................................................................................................................30

Chapter One: This American Haunting.........................................................................................32
Floodghost.............................................................................................................39
Resistance..............................................................................................................44
Crowing.................................................................................................................51
Dance Dance (R)E: Volution.................................................................................58

References......................................................................................................................................67

Chapter Two: The Coon Show: An Epilogue................................................................................70

References......................................................................................................................................82

Welcome to the Coon Show............................................................................................................84

Bibliography................................................................................................................................130
ii
ABSTRACT

The process of documenting slave narratives by white historians in the United States raises
ethical questions surrounding the use of one-sided narratives, absence of cultural recognition,
omission of information, and the lack of personal agency for those enslaved. This critical and
creative exploration addresses the shortcomings of historians evident in assessments of the tale
of Igbo Landing in May of 1803, as well as the Federal Writers’ Project’s Slave Narrative
Collection, gathered in late 1920s and 1930s. In both cases, narratives of flight are represented as
the fantasy projection of people attempting to deal with the traumas of enslavement, tales of
imagined freedom. Through questioning the methods and motives of fieldworkers gathering
these tales, a complex phantom narrative appears. Many of these stories, and the spiritual
practices of song and dance that come with them, pre-date America and are important aspects of
the path to reincarnation. Qualities of these misunderstood and dismissed traditions were
appropriated by 19th-century blackface performer Thomas Rice, the “father of American
minstrelsy,” via his popular stage persona, Jim Crow. Rice’s bastardized version of the crow has
haunted and mocked descendants of African slaves for generations, first on stage, then in pop
culture as racist children’s cartoons, including the murder of crows in Disney’s Dumbo. The
effects of this on the Black psyche are deep and America is only just beginning to understand the
harm. Through an investigation of ghosts and creative engagement with the history of minstrelsy,
this project engages in and reckons with America’s apparitions.

1

The Flying ____________.
Introduction: A Strange Lope, an Absence
“Dey could make a buzzard row a boat an hab a crow fuh pilot.” -Thomas Smith

This is the African slave pictured as an ape. This is Ota Benga exhibited at the Bronx Zoo in
1906. This is Thomas Dartmouth Rice painting his face with shoe polish and burnt cork. This is
the birth of minstrelsy. This is the James Byrd Jr., dragged behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, on
June 7, 1998. This is Black bodies hung from oaks and buck broken on plantations in front of
their families. This is a cartoon with four black-talking crows, coon cards, watermelon jokes, and
slave songs. Packaging more than history, these events have defined American culture. Ancestral
trauma comes in many forms. It represents itself in variously in the body. Trauma is also
represented as a set of bodies, in the case of this book, black bodies, animal bodies.
In one account of the tale of Igbo Landing, in May of 1803, a group of 75 Nigerian slaves, on
their way to being auctioned at a slave market, usurped the slave-vessel, the schooner York,
which they were being transported on, killing the slavers and throwing them overboard. Lacking
marine navigation skills, the Igbo drifted, eventually docking on St. Simons Island, GA. Upon
landing they were spotted by other slavers and chased to the edge of a bog. Caught between
drowning and a return to slavery, the Igbo (alternately written: Ibo, Ebo) clasped hands and
walked singing into the quagmire. This rebellious mass suicide passed into folklore, as slaves
whispered stories about those whose legs bent backward, whose skin sprouted shiny black
feathers as they morphed into crows and flew back to Africa.
2
This is a story. This is a history. There are variations of the tale of Igbo Landing going back
two centuries—cultural variations, communal variations, racial and spiritual, historical
variations. It is important to note these variances, as this gives needed context to the premise in
these pages—that American history, here, particularly, for descendants of African slaves, is an
act of construction and erasure that cannot be undone, but can be reconstituted, reframed. The act
of construction has been rendered in nearly all historical accounts, accounts that suppress, mask,
or ignore both the worldly and spiritual agency of Africans, painting them as primitive and
foolish, even in the documenting of their own oral histories. Therefore, this introduction exists to
document and contemplate on the ways in which storytelling and transformation can highlight
areas of muddled complexity in our nation’s historical narrative. Before we can discuss the
aftermath of this erasure of life and culture, it’s important to contextualize the tale of Igbo
Landing, to acknowledge and give voice to those whose voices have been taken, as well as to
acknowledge what this suppression does to the descendants of those raised in suppression’s
shadow.
This task, though, requires a leap of faith where history insists on a lack thereof. As noted by
author and University of Pennsylvania lecturer of Religious studies Timothy B. Powell, in his
essay “Summoning the Ancestors: The Flying Africans’ Story and Its Enduring Legacy,” tales of
Flying Africans have “been told and embellished for more than two hundred years in the form of
communal histories, local legends, children’s stories, movies, novels, and television shows”
(253). An oral story bantered about over two hundred years would indeed be embellished, and
there’s no denying the gap in accuracy or “truth” that occurs when accounts are fashioned into
digestible bits for mass entertainment in the forms of history, films, and television shows. Add to
this the exoticization of Africans and African history in America and a bevy of questions arise.
3
How are these stories told? Who is telling them? Who has the authority to tell them? How much
of the story is told, and in what manner? What is the story to begin with?
While Igbo Landing can be found with a quick search online, details are slim and murky,
with many sites providing conflicting, and often inaccurate, information regarding the event, and
it’s unlikely any Igbo descendants are scouring Google or Reddit message boards in attempts to
correct them. Smartly, Powell’s mention of communal histories and local legends points to a vast
gap between how the Gullah and Geechee people of coastal Georgia recall this story and how it
might be presented on a Hollywood screen. “Because the ‘facts’ of the event come from archival
evidence, much of it written by slave owners and slave dealers,” says Powell, “parts of the story
remain difficult to recover” (253). It should come as no surprise that the writings of slave owners
and slave dealers makes legitimate scholarly research scarce and difficult to parse. Slave owners
gave no agency to their slaves and would have made no efforts to see an event like Igbo Landing
from the perspective of the Igbo themselves. There could only be one side to this story. A slave
owner’s story is the story of lost property, not the story of lost people.
The archival details are attainable and public. We know the specifics. The who, what, where,
and when are easy to reckon with—that the slaves were carried to Skidway Island, Georgia, not
far from Savannah, that the slave dealer William Mein sold the Ibo to Thomas Spalding and
James Couper (253). We know the official story, but the official story takes into account a single
point of view. The Igbo rebelled and took their own lives rather than return to slavery. It’s a
tragic narrative, but one that does not take into account how this conflicting and divergent
incidence is recalled by the black community of coastal Georgia—particularly, the official
account of the deaths. Powell clarifies that “[t]he distinction between suicide and flight may very
well depend on whether the analysis takes into consideration the spiritual dimension of the story,
4
the realm of the ancestors” (254). Here is where the “facts” fail to adequately detail the event.
Knowing that the Igbo walked into the swamp acknowledges what happened on a physical level,
but it leaves open the important discussion of why it happened. In fact, the interrogative words
take on entirely new weight when the answers are posed from the vantage point of the Igbo in
this situation, and again when posed to the black community of coastal Georgia at the time. To
the Igbo, the spiritual dimension and the ancestors that inhabit it are inseparable from the acts of
suicide and flight. The rebellion against enslavement manifested in the usurping of the York and
the ultimate death of the group of Igbo are deeply connected to the belief that the ancestors
would help guide their souls in flight. With this in mind, the deaths are not deaths at all, but
moments of deep transformation. The cultural implications of this are massive, but with the Igbo
having been slaves there has been little light shed on this portion of the conversation. This makes
research difficult. Here is the event horizon beyond which most scholarship hasn’t yet passed.
Powell acknowledges the Boötes void in this scholarship, saying that “[t]he greatest
challenge in summoning the ancestors within the margins of the white page of academic
discourse is overcoming conventions that inhibit the ability to speak of the spirits of the dead as
being active agents in the story” (254). But how can we summon the ancestors within the
margins of the white page of academic discourse without first acknowledging and overcoming
conventions that inhibit the ability to speak of the Igbo and other African slaves as being active
agents in the story? Without giving agency to the Igbo and to the black coastal Georgia
community we have no access to the narratives and oral traditions that make it possible to
summon the ancestors. To this day, we still do not know the names of the 75 Igbo who died in
the Georgia swamps.
5
Colonialism, slavery, and racism have played large parts in excluding a holistic narrative of
African history in America. America is largely the history of white folks. History itself is largely
the tale of the white folks. In “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories,”
Steven Feireman addresses this exclusion and the impact it has on his own research regarding
public healers in East Africa. Speaking on the imbalance present in historical documentation of
African culture, he insists that:

The world of the colonizers… is grounded in a longer history of commodities, or the
multiple varieties of Christianity, or the history of time—its measurement and its uses in
industrial production. However divided this European world might be, however fraught
with internal contradictions, its parts are assumed to be known well among historians so
that any one action, text, or bit of spoken language can be placed: a missionary, for
example, is seen as writing in a way that is appropriate to a Methodist artisan from the
north of England. Each of those terms—Methodist, artisan, and north of England.—can
be placed in the historian’s imagination; each is part of a much longer narrative, and so a
certain coherence is achieved, even if that coherence is built on implicit knowledge.
(182-216)

Given the rather difficult task of tracking down the cultural and historical information
necessary to embark on the journey in these chapters, it’s easy to see the validity in the above
statement. Most Americans are woefully ignorant of the history of pre-slavery African tribes—
how they dressed, what they ate, family structures, etc. In fact, it is unlikely that the average
American is capable of naming a large multitude of African tribes. Speaking frankly, I myself, a
Black man, am still largely ignorant about the subject. My educational upbringing, like many
underprivileged inner-city youths, barely provided more than a week’s worth of discussion on the
history of slavery. This is not unusual and most historical accounts lead us to believe that every
Black person in present day America is a descendent of Africans, a vague label that diminishes
both the scale of Africa, being the second largest continent in the world, and the richness of
6
cultures composed of 54 countries. According to Scientific America, “…we tend to
underestimate the size of countries close to the equator, and substantially overestimate the size of
countries closer to the poles. On our actual planet, Africa is bigger than China, India, the
contiguous U.S. and most of Europe—combined (Fischetti, “Africa Is Way Bigger Than You
Think”)! Surely, a conglomerate of countries that size, having existed hundreds of thousands of
years before the founding of United States, would have a rich and diverse political, social,
linguistic, and cultural history. And yet African languages are often reduced to a singular and
buffoonish series of comedic clicks; African religious beliefs and rituals are dismissed as
primitive black magic; Blacks and African immigrants are continually the focal point of ire via
statements such as “Go back to where you came from,” despite scientific consensus that Y-
MRCA and mt-MRCA (often referred to as “Scientific Adam” and “Mitochondrial Eve,”
respectively) link all of our most recent common genetic ancestors to the African continent over
600,000 years ago. If the countries of Africa can exist in the scientific imagination, why not the
imagination of the historian?
According to the Harvard Divinity School, over the course of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,
“3.5 million slaves were shipped from Nigeria to North and South America and the Caribbean
colonies” (The Transatlantic Slave Trade). A microcosm of the entire country, Nigeria itself is
home to more than 300 tribes, but you wouldn’t know it by the way our history books casually
lump slaves into the non-specific categories of West African and Nigerian. Even in my work here
with the Igbo, there are glaring omissions—Hausa, Yoruba, Ibibio and many, many others—and
it saddens me that their contributions to the world, and specifically to our understanding of Black
American identity, aren’t better documented. I hope that this changes, and that this investigation
into the Flying Africans can play even a small role in that change. Unfortunately, as Michael
7
Gomez informs us in “I Seen Folks Dissapeah,” his chapter on the Igbo and West Central Africa
from his book Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identity in the
Colonial and Antebellum South, getting to that change will require a lot of work. The Igbo were
regional to the Niger delta in the Bight of Biafra. Africans taken from the Bight of Biafra made
up around a quarter of the total number brought to North America during the slave trade. This
was a massive amount of people, equal to those taken from West Central Africa, which, as it
happens, is a much, much larger area than the Bight of Biafra. The multiple tribes of the Bight of
Biafra were ethnically heterogenous, but the name Igbo was carelessly applied across the board
during the slave trade, making the respectful and necessary academic work of identifying them
by their tribe and place of origin near impossible (Gomez 114-115). Since, initially, slave owners
didn’t care about the ethnic background of their slaves anyway, Igbo became a shorthand for an
entire population of diverse people. Such a dismissal of ethnic and personal individuality was, of
course, in line with the larger amorality required to keep the machine of slave labor up and
running.
As such, instances of cultural and ethnic compression and oppression were numerous, and
the Igbo were not the only group to be misidentified. This created obvious complications as
African families were ripped apart, sold and bred across America. Though we now often refer to
slaves wholesale, with the understanding that they were a mixed group from various countries
throughout Africa, the sheer scale of cultural confusion and misidentification is immeasurable
and deeply tragic, particularly in light of Feireman’s statements regarding the coherence of white
European history. Historians, scholars, and academics face a difficult time trying to link specific
traditions, religious practices, songs, or oral stories to individual ethnic groups amongst slaves,
and this is but one obstacle in piecing together these stories.
8
So, yes, the documenting of Igbo Landing is troubling due to its one-sided narrative, its
absence of recognition and agency for the Igbo themselves. However, if, for a second, we zoom
out further, Feireman helps us see just how insidious the act really is. Even before the slaves
were docked in the New World “…there were colonizers who attempted to destroy some forms
of practice within the African societies they governed. While some colonizers, such as
missionaries among the Tswana, introduced alien signs and commodities into African life, and
others invented traditions which they then described as African, still others attempted to suppress
deeply rooted African traditions.” (186) In this light we can see the difficulty of taking on a
subject as important as the one within these pages. By providing an absence of coherent
documented history, as well as engaging in generational attempts to complicate, confuse, and
disrupt tribal traditions, colonizers (white people) have attempted in endless and creative ways to
snuff out the humanity of Africans. As a result, my research on this subject is limited to what
“academic” sources I could find that are both verifiable and trustworthy. I say “verifiable”
knowing that an instance such as Igbo Landing can only be understood if we get as close as
possible to the people who experienced it, and if we also apply consideration to the ancestors and
the spiritual dimension of the story, something that seems unbelievable and irrational by
contemporary American standards, but is core to the Igbo experience of this incident and many
others in coastal Georgia.
Colonialism has made it extremely difficult to piece together the fragmented parts of
tradition and history that these chapters explore. White history leaves little room for things
outside of its own racialized confines of logic and academic historical narrative because it deems
them irrational and undeserving and therefore difficult to interpret—a great irony, considering
the attempts to alter African history and the well-documented, generation-spanning appropriation
9
of African American and Black culture. So, I take up this mantle, treading carefully and
thoughtfully, with healthy curiosity about the past, but also, with a strong skepticism towards
discussions of white academic ideas and their applicability here. In the following chapters I will
attempt to draw primarily from authors, historians, and academics of color, where I can. Given
the relative newness of Black people in academic and historical fields, and the general scarcity of
reliable information available on this topic, this will be difficult, but it feels inappropriate and
rude to the ancestors, to my ancestors, to tackle such a sensitive and specific topic using only the
theoretical lens of the people who oppressed them.
I use the terms “historian,” “author,” and “academic” with liberty and flexibility here,
allowing for the voices and testimonies of Africans and African Americans of the past and
present to speak with authority and agency. My primary academic text for this investigation will
be Drums and Shadows : Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, a
collection of interviews with descendants of slaves, recorded by the Federal Writers’ Project
(FWP) as a part of the Slave Narratives Collection during the 1930’s.
While I take issue with a number of aspects surrounding how and when this information was
documented, it does provide numerous mentions of both Flying Africans and Igbo Landing, with
second-hand accounts and nuanced conversation that, to my knowledge, isn’t easily found in
current history books. I believe the people in this collection are indeed historians, academics, and
authors, having been passed oral knowledge of spiritual practices, tales of folklore, myth, and
communal history that, without this book, might now be lost to the winds of time. Since it was
not long ago that Africans and African Americans were not considered people, and therefore their
thoughts, their stories, their tradition and livelihoods were not considered to have any legitimacy
and worth, I want to honor their lives and stories.
10
Who Gets to Tell Their Stories?

Since these stories were oral dictations, it feels important to briefly acknowledge the
historical and cultural circumstances surrounding the Federal Writers’ Project and the people
they selected and trained to go into Savannah to gather and record this information. As reported
by Timothy Powell:

The Federal Writers’ Project (fwp) fell under the auspices of the New Deal’s Works
Projects Administration that employed over six thousand jobless people. The fwp hired
novelists, poets, PhD students, journalists, and freelance writers who interviewed
American Indians, former slaves, outlaws and desperados, and people reminiscing about
baseball in Chicago in a sprawling effort to recover what was known as “regional history.
(“Summoning” 259)

While interviews with outlaws and desperados and baseball memories sound entertaining,
and some, at the very least, intriguing, the narratives of former slaves and American Indians are,
I would argue, invaluable to any discussion about the history of the United States. What qualified
as "regional history" is unclear but the FWP was huge in scope and, without a doubt, did a lot for
the collection and maintenance of American culture through its collection of life histories and
accounts. It makes sense that poets, novelists, PhD students and journalists were selected for this
endeavor—you’d want the written record of American history documented by the people who
work on a daily basis with words. Many of the writers employed by the FWP were given jobs
compiling information into guide books, as the initial motive behind the project was to
“…prepare a comprehensive and panoramic ‘American Guide,’ a geographical-social-historical
portrait of the states, cities, and localities of the entire United States” (The WPA). This was
11
eventually expanded into the American Guide Series, which zeroed in on specific state and local
guides.
The value of the program to the African American community can be seen in its growth,
which spawned the Slave Narrative Collection and helped create space for writers of color such
as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston, who drew on her BA in anthropology
to conduct interviews with African-Americans, Arabs, Cubans, and Italian-Americans in Florida,
where she was stationed--interviews that were used to form the foundations for both Mules and
Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God. And as it turns out, Hurston also came across mention
of the crow.
Unfortunately, the FWP did not prioritize fieldwork assignments. Alongside scholars and
writers white collar workers were also sent out to interview, a large majority of them white. One
could argue it would be a mistake to have given such a task to an unemployed gardener or a coal
miner—not out of lack of capability, but due to the potential complications that come with
transcribing an oral narrative by hand. Today, you could set your iPhone on the table, hit record,
and let technology work its magic, but in 1933 it took time and a lot of effort to make this
happen. One could also question the choice to pass this responsibility on to whites, rather than
having African American scholars go out and interview their own.
As the Writers’ Project grew from its inception as “An American Guide,” it evolved most
profoundly, under the leadership of first FWP folklore editor, John A. Lomax, to include
emphasis on the collection of what the Library of Congress terms “American Folklore.” Lomax,
the Library of Congress says, quoting from Donald K. Wilgus’ Anglo-American Folksong
Scholarship Since 1898, “was a man whose pioneering efforts in folklore research established
him as ‘the greatest popularizer and one of the greatest field collectors of American folksong,’
12
Lomax was instrumental in identifying and preserving important black folk materials that had
previously been overlooked or ignored” (The WPA). If we put aside, for a second, the fact that a
white Southerner was chosen to lead the collection of ex-slave narratives, Lomax was a vital part
of gathering the more than two thousand interviews that would eventually be documented.
His dedication to careful documentation was admirable and worth acknowledging, as he often
impressed on his interviewers the importance of a “faithful account” of ex-slave narratives,
stating that “It should be remembered that the Federal Writers' Project is not interested in taking
sides on any question. The worker should not censor any materials collected regardless of its
[sic] nature” (The WPA). Lomax championed verbatim interviews and in his own editorial work
was careful to make only “minor grammatical corrections, never altering the substance of the
narratives. Narratives were never rejected or revised because of questions about their
authenticity” (The WPA).
These are good interview principles to follow, but difficult to put in practice when paired
with racism and human bias. In “The Background of the Slave Narrative Collection,” Norman R.
Yetman provides further insight into how the Slave Narrative Project came to be. It’s a blessing
that these interviews were completed and published, and yet this feels hard to square with the
fact that the direction and coordination of the Slave Narrative Project was given to Lomax, who
at the time was the head of the Folklore division of the project, as opposed to the infinitely more
qualified Office of Negro Affairs (550). This presented a potentially unnoticed complication for
Lomax and the African American community—how do outsiders, in this case, white people,
come into an established African community and gain rapport and trust? Yetman reports that
statistics from the Georgia narrative collection show evidence that “Negro interviewers appeared
‘able to gain better insight’ than whites and that the interviews obtained by Negros were “less
13
tinged with glamour” (551). Many of the reasons for this might be obvious. Unsurprisingly, of
those people sent to conduct interviews, an overwhelming amount were white.
Lomax’s work on the FWP produced many slave narratives, but the range in quality was
vast. Communication between the local, state, and national arms of the FWP was inconsistent,
and so, too, was the quality of training the interviewers received. Much of the interview and
collection done for the FWP was conducted on a state by state basis, with little national
organization or direction (The WPA). Only seventeen states contributed to the collection but
there was no way to ensure proper and consistent interview techniques from state to state. There
were no way to enforce standardized interview procedures, no necessary consideration for inherit
bias. Lomax created a questionnaire, designed to “suggest possible categories of discussion” in
interviews, but across the nation that was largely ignored (Yetman 552).
The complications here are numerous. For example, in his “Introduction to the Brown
Thrasher Edition” in Drums and Shadows, Charles Joyner reported that the Savannah Unit of the
FWP was in conflict with the national office, which thought that their promotion of local folklore
would lead to regionalism. Specifically, the national office felt that Drums and Shadows
“promoted a racist theory of cultural evolution in which cultural traits might ‘survive’ from
earlier, more ‘primitive’ stages of culture but would eventually disappear under contact with
more ‘advanced’ cultures” (xiv). This sentiment is reflected in the words of a fieldworker
running interviews in Yamacraw, Georgia: “Not only among these older Yamacraw Negroes but
among the younger residents we found a solid background of ancestral beliefs and practices, for
here little of modern progress has touched the dirt streets, pebbly walks, and tumble down houses
of another day” (29). If the value of the Slave Narratives varied from state to state, if “primitive”
was how the stories were perceived, if the states presumed them so unimportant that that they
14
would disappear as African Americans were assimilated into white culture, why would ex-slaves,
knowing the perceived value of their insights, open up their world of magic and ancestors to
under-trained white ears?
In Drums and Shadows, a book compiling the FWP interviews done in Georgia, other
interviewers document encountering this tight-lipped reaction to their presence and inquiries,
noting that many of the African Americans in the towns seemed inhibited by the appearance of
white people and, though “[t]hey possess great knowledge of conjure and superstitions...they
hasten to say that they ‘sho ain’t gonuh tell nobody’ what they know about these things” (2).
Throughout the book, the decision of when to quote a storyteller and how to reflect their words is
a curious one. The quotations and broken English feel hyperbolic and often verge on minstrelsy--
a thing that probably connected deeply with the biased preconceptions of many whites in the
1930’s. However, a note to the reader that precedes the introduction attempts to ease any
disillusion regarding this matter:

Except for the spelling of surnames, dialect in the interviews has been faithfully
transcribed. Great care has been taken to try to represent the pronunciation, but to have
represented literally the elision and emphasis would have made the text unintelligible to
the average non-scientific reader. Diacritical marks have not been used because it was
thought it would give the text too foreign an appearance, and apostrophes commonly used
in dialect have been discarded for simplification. (xxxix)

There is no room for one’s story, one’s history, if there is not first room for the language used
to construct it. Some four decades after the closing of the FWP, in his 1979 New York Times
article, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” James Baldwin asserted
that “[l]anguage, incontestably, reveals the speaker” (Baldwin). Language creates reality, and the
choice of diction, syntax, sentence structure, and pronunciation can often reveal a lot about the
15
speaker’s motives or emotions. The language of Black Americans, with its Southern rural and
urban overtones, with its regional and local variances, with its jive talk, and with its signifyin(g),
reveals the uniqueness of each person, but also contains within it the history of the original
African slaves who, despite their resistance, had the English language forced upon them at the
expense of their own. Black American speech is inseparable from Black American history and
identity.
Baldwin also notes that “Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other...”
(Baldwin). Why was the spelling of surnames not as faithfully transcribed as everything else?
We can pronounce Dostoyevsky, Stravinsky, (other white names) but the other is inadequate,
even in their own self-identification. By altering the spelling of surnames Drums and Shadows
functions just as Baldwin proclaims, literally defining the ex-slaves of Georgia with altered
names, altered identities. That the Notes to the Reader proclaims a literal representation of
elision and emphasis would produce an unintelligible text says everything about how readers are
being directed to read this collection, and thus, how readers are being directed to feel about the
ex-slaves/storytellers in the pages that follow. While the Notes ultimately make the argument for
simplicity, that simplicity comes with a value assessment--it is more important that we have a
simplified (read: edited) document of these stories as an artifact of American history, than that
we accurately represent the language and reality of people, praise their differences, and highlight
the value those differences contribute to the melting pot that is the United States?
Baldwin continues: “[l]anguage is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It
is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: It reveals the private identity, and connects one
with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity” (Baldwin). What is
presented as “great care” in the representation of ex-slave pronunciations has a function in the
16
erasure of a people, it in fact divorces the African American population from the larger (white)
American public. To imply that only a scientific reader would find black language intelligible
flies in the face of the diversity America was founded on. It flies in the face of John A. Lomax,
who, in his insistence on the importance of the FWP pushed verbatim interviews with minimal
grammatical corrections and unaltered substance narrative. Most of all, it flies in the face of
those black families being interviewed.
The tone of the Notes seems to position the reader in direct defiance to the very thing the
FWP was set up to maintain, the simplicity of language, the absence of diacritical marks and
apostrophes being in opposition to Lomax’s idea that “[t]he worker should not censor any
materials collected regardless of its [sic] nature” (The WPA). Removing dialectical marks
because they make the text look too foreign, in many ways, contradicts the very idea of
collecting the historical and cultural resources of the United States. If you want to properly
document America, why simplify a language that is a part of the American story? This absence
of diacritical marks is blatant censorship. Rather than represent the language as it is spoken, this
decision alienates, makes foreign the voices of the Georgian storytellers, since diacritical marks
create an important distinction within language. Marriam-Webster defines them as “marks placed
above or below (or sometimes next to) a letter in a word to indicate a particular pronunciation--in
regard to accent, tone, or stress--as well as meaning” (“How to Use Accents and Diacritical
Marks”). Following the decisions laid out in the Notes, not only is pronunciation misrepresented,
but accent, tone, and stress, the very things that give language life, are also misrepresented in the
pages of Drums and Shadows. Couple this with the knowledge that Georgian Blacks were rightly
protective of their stories and heritage and it’s easy to see how a skewed version of these
17
narratives, though important and valuable, leads to a lot of questions and historical fragments
when attempting to trace the path of Jim Crow and the Flying Africans.
It is true that a complete representation of elisions would make difficult reading for a general
audience, but the history of America is difficult, and we should not ignore that. Here, it seems
implied that a general audience is an ignorant audience. I don’t know what Baldwin’s thoughts
were on the FWP, nor if he ever read Drums and Shadows, nor, if he did, whether he combed
through the Notes, but I suspect he would have balked at what it entails. The smugness with
which it is stated that “dialect in the interviews has been faithfully transcribed,” I believe, would
have further sparked his passionate stance on the importance of Black English and its acceptance
as a language. It feels very much, form the Notes, as though the FWP was straining to accept
Black English as a language, and in fact the word language does not appear once in its
description. There is no acknowledgment that Black English was considered a language at all.
But Baldwin seeks to complicate this notion, both for the past and future of our country, claiming
that “[t]he argument concerning the use, or status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in
American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself
to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language”
(Baldwin). Yet, that is exactly the point: the idea of the FWP and, more specifically, the Slave
Narrative Project, was noble, but in 1930’s America it was, perhaps, more a gesture than
anything else. The role of Black Language in the collected interviews for the slave narratives is
documentary. The initial idea might have been well-intentioned, but the lack of cohesion
between federal and local branches and the general racial bias of the time marred the “authentic”
collection of these stories.
18
The Notes to the Reader go on to say that “in certain cases persons have learned to
pronounce certain words correctly while other words of the same type will still be spoken in
dialect” (xxxix). The emphasis on correct pronunciation and dialect being something in direct
opposition to that correctness overshadow the premise of this collection and support the tension
between blacks and their white interviewers. “A people at the center of the Western world, and in
the midst of so hostile a population,” says Baldwin, “has not endured and transcended by means
of what is patronizingly called a “dialect” (Baldwin). And this is true: they endured and
transcended because they held on to their stories, their rituals, their community, they endured
because they found a way to make the English language their own--Black English, not a dialect,
but a composite language made of what they brought over from Africa, the things they could
hold, and what was given to them.

*

In Drums and Shadows, the Georgia interviews are divided by town and community--Old
Fort, Tin City, Yamacraw, Darien, Possum Point--twenty in all. Each section begins with quaint
descriptions of the town, often heavily romanticized, but sometimes stark and brooding. Often
the writer focuses on some tragic aspect of the scenery or daily life of the inhabitants before
leading the reader to a family and then narrowing to a specific individual with whom they spend
most of the interview. In Old Fort, the interviewer describes the heavy smell of the "river,
fishboats, fertilizer plants and escaping gases...the gigantic gas reservoirs" (Joyner 1). As they
move through the streets a woman is knifed in the back. A crowd forms to watch her die. The
interviewer hears whispers from the crowd that "the death was caused by conjure, for despite all
19
efforts to remove the knife it remained firmly embedded in the victim's back" (1). The author
soon after dismisses this belief, acknowledging that the Negros were " devout believers in all the
tenants of the Christian faith," but that, "...many of them, particularly the old ones, are bound by
older beliefs and superstitions. There exists among them a deep-rooted fear of the unknown" (1).
To the uninitiated, the unknown, the unexplainable, can easily be perceived, even dismissed,
as magic. It is not my position here to adjudicate the existence of said magic, but to bring into
focus the complexity of this issue. Because this author is an outsider, they assume that old beliefs
and superstitions have the same worth to the Old Fort community as they will across the country,
when the book is distributed and read by (white) people. That a "conjuh" is described as a fear of
the unknown and not a element of cultural truth to be investigated and understood shows an
inability to truly empathize, to imagine that another person’s reality or belief system might be as
powerful and real as one’s own. The virtue Lomax possessed in his own personal field work was,
unfortunately, lacking across the sixteen states that agreed (many reluctantly) to participate in the
FWP’s Slave Narrative documentation.
Charles Joyner, in his introduction, describes Drums and Shadows as a book aimed at a
“general audience...organized by community and...presented in a straight-forward narrative
spiced with long quotations in a readable literary adaptation of the black Georgians’ speech” (xi).
It is difficult not to arrive at the implication that in 1940, when the book was published, a
“general audience” was a white audience. A “straight-forward narrative spiced with long
quotations” is a bit of a divergence from the normal interview structure of question and answer.
Inherit in a “straight-forward narrative” is the idea that it is easy to understand, that is, in effect,
simple. Certainly, the narrative portion of Drums and Shadows, in its plain language and
descriptions, is comprehensible reading material— except when it focuses on the incompressible
20
elements of superstition, magic, belief, and conjure in these Georgia communities. A “straight-
forward narrative” also implies honesty and frankness, which we presumably receive from the
fieldworkers in their reactions to the people and environment they are in, but which we are
assuredly being deprived of in any complete way by the Georgian storytellers, the ex-slaves
themselves, even if out of protection for their culture and its secrets.
It’s also important that Joyner says the narrative is “spiced with long quotations,” not that the
long quotations are spiced with narrative. Being that this is the introduction, the weight he places
on the narrative here is indicative of how he thinks the collection should be read. This is a
document of what the interviewers observed with some exaggerated quotes sprinkled in, a story
to let white America know how black Americans were living post-emancipation written in “a
readable literary adaptation of the black Georgians’ speech” (xi). Had African slaves not been
adapted enough in their image, their size, their style, their songs? Black Georgian speech did not
and does not need to be adapted, and Joyner’s statement dismisses the value of stories such as the
Flying Africans, implying that it is the interviewers, not the storytellers themselves, whose words
elevate narratives to the level of literature.
This bias is further proven if we investigate a few of the “straight-forward narrative[s]” that
Joyner insists the interviewers have provided in each section of Drums and Shadows. In a later
section of interviews conducted in Darien, Georgia, after a brief and dour overview of the town,
the fieldworker describes a woman named Aunty Jane (Jane Lewis), who “claims that she is one
hundred and fifteen years old” (146). Since we know that surnames were changed there’s no real
way to verify her identity and age, and perhaps some level of privacy was the motivating factor
behind this decision—though, were this the case it should certainly be documented upfront in the
Notes to the Reader, which fails to mention any underlying reason for this gesture. However, a
21
tone is set by the fieldworker’s assertation that Aunty Jane “claims” her age to be what it is. The
question of her age seems to be in doubt, in that this claim is understood here to be an assertion
made with little to no evidence or proof to support it. The Slave Narrative Collection compiled
some two thousand interviews with former slaves and “over two-thirds were over eighty when
interviewed. Almost all had experienced slavery within the states of the Confederacy and still
resided there” (Yetman 535). If, as Lomax stated, the FWP has no interest in taking sides or
censoring material, it seems contrary to question the stated age of an interviewee. This subtle, yet
poignant skepticism does not bode well for the overall collection of Georgia narratives. It casts
into doubt the reliability of any of Aunty Jane’s words, but also the words of Wallace
Quarterman, William Rogers, Priscilla McCullough and Lawrence Baker, who were also
interviewed in Darien.
The fieldworker goes on to detail Aunty Jane’s appearance, noting, despite the initial
disbelief that “…to see the small bent woman with the deeply lined black skin and filmy eyes is
to believe her claim” (Joyner 146). Aunty Jane is still nimble, even in her old age. During the
interview she performs a dance known as the Buzzard Lope, while dictating her life as a slave,
being sold first from North Carolina down to Georgia when she was twenty-two. A note on
dances in the appendix only tells us that “Those who danced for the buzzard had no machetes,
but went about in a circle, moving with bodies bent forward from their waists and with arms
thrown back in imitation of the bird from which their spirit took its name” (208). Rather than
prioritizing the details of her slavery or inquiring further about the nature of the Buzzard Lope,
the fieldworker “interrupted the old woman’s reminiscences about plantation days to question
her about funeral customs” (147). When she tells them that there was no time for burials, that the
fear of being whipped by your slave master meant that many who died were simply tossed into a
22
shallow hole in the ground, the fieldworker casually inquires whether or not they “used to
provide plenty of food for the mourners” (147). Clearly, this particular fieldworker was posing
overtly guiding questions during the interview, though, since they often feel like distractions, it’s
not clear to what end the questions were presented. The physical and cultural intricacies of the
Buzzard Lope are invaluable, and Aunty Jane’s willingness to perform this dance in front of
white fieldworkers could have implied an openness to discussion surrounding it’s value, purpose,
and importance to the slave community.
Yet, because she is already discredited, because she is presented as so old that she may not
accurately recall her own age, because her eyes are filmy, her spine bent, and her dance unusual,
the fieldworker does not ask what is important, how her story came to be and what she, in her old
age, wants to have documented and recorded into history. Instead, they ask about conjure,
whether it was bad luck to steal from graves, whether drum circles still took place in churches,
and how the drums were made. They ask about magic. The fieldworker is adept at asking Aunty
Jane the questions that will other her to white readers of the book, questions that, along with their
descriptions and odd verbal transcription choices, contribute to giving the text a foreign
appearance.
Aunty Jane is not the only example here. There is a pattern. Near the end of their tour
through Darien, the fieldworker finds their way to the house of Priscilla McCullough. Both the
house and presence of Priscilla are again depicted as something otherworldly, with the
fieldworker reflecting that “[i]t stood to the left of the roadway, a queer haphazard little dwelling
place that looked like something out of a fairy tale…the bizarre exterior had not prepared
us…Priscilla adjusted her eyeglasses which were tied on with a shoestring and told us
something…” (153). The fieldworkers’ choice of adjectives in describing their surroundings and
23
the people they are interviewing goes a long way in presenting a mood and delivering a message
to the reader. The choices here of “queer,” “like a something out of a fairy tale,” and “bizarre” to
describe Priscilla’s house act as a distancing elements, warnings that say here we are not in
America anymore. We are, as the fieldworker says, in a fairy tale, and this seems to be the aura
cast over Darien, Old Fort, Yamacraw, and the other Georgia towns where ex-slaves participated
in these interviews. Though it might be true that Priscilla’s glasses were held together with a
shoestring, the prior setup, the depiction of the space itself, does make this moment feel bizarre,
as though the information we are about to receive from Priscilla were being delivered by a
wicked witch living in a magical forest. Though not forward, the implication here is that we are
about to hear a story, a tale, something that is to be entertaining but not necessarily accepted as
fact.
Again, the fieldworker here approaches the information they receive with a large dose of
skepticism and condescension. Priscilla is the third Darien resident to offer up knowledge about
the Flying Africans and the fieldworker proclaims:

the old woman…she said that her mother had often told her the following incident which
was supposed to have taken place on a plantation during slavery times.

“Duh slabes was out in duh fiel wukin. All ub a sudden dey git tugedduh an staht tuh
moob roun in a ring…Den one by one dey riz up an take wing an fly lak a bud. Duh
obuhseeuh heah duh noise an he come out an he see duh slabes riz up in duh eah an fly
back tuh Africa. He run an he ketch duh las one by duh foot jis as he wuz bout tuh fly off.
I dohn know ef he wuz neah nuff tuh pull um back down an keep um frum goin off.”

[“The slaves was out in the field working. All of a sudden they get together and start to
move round in a ring…Then one by one they rise up and take wing and fly like a bird.
The overseer hears the noise and he come out and he see the slaves rise up in the air and
fly back to Africa. He run and he catch the last one by the foot just as he was about to fly
off. I don’t know if he was near enough to pull him back down and keep him from going
off.”] (154)

24
Two things stand out here. First, before we’re given any information the fieldworker narrows
in (again) on Priscilla’s age, as if to caution the reader that she may be an unreliable narrator
because of it. They then posit that the event her mother dictated to her “was supposed to have
taken place on a plantation during slavery times” (154). That it was supposed to have taken place
implies a passive-aggressive disbelief of the events Priscilla divulges. At the very least, such
diction could engender doubt in the mind of a reader. Clearly, the fieldworker is hesitant to
believe her. Yet, what Priscilla has to say is important. Equally so, how she chooses to say it, and
how that saying is represented for readers.
The transliteration of Priscilla’s speech is cartoonishly minstrel. It’s “[d]uh slabes was out in
duh fiel wukin” reminiscent less of the speech of Black Vernacular English in Georgia and more
akin to Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, and the comic stump speeches given during an olio, the
second act of a minstrel show. So exaggerated is her speech and so heavy is the fieldworker’s
doubt that it’s easy to ignore the important recounting of flight and transformation that she is
giving. Whenever I quote from a descendant I will present the voice as it was written by the FWP
with a translation of my own that I believe best approaches the intention of the speaker. It is
debatable whether or not these moments need to be translated in this way. There is an argument
to be made that such transcriptions may only serve to placate white readers, to give them a
simplified and easily digestible rundown of what was stated by African Americans in what was,
in the 1930’s called “negro dialect.” My translations exist to separate the subjective qualities of
recorded dialect from the information being provided. I hope to highlight, not the perceived
ignorance of the speakers, but the importance of the history their statements provide.
If we look at the characterizations of both Aunty Jane and Priscilla McCoullough—Aunty
Jane hopping her Buzzard Lope and Priscilla telling her mother’s fairy tale—it’s difficult to
25
ignore the parallels to blackface minstrel characters. Neither woman is represented with the
credibility or authority they deserve for being the cultural historians that they are. Drums and
Shadows (and perhaps the Slave Narrative Project as a whole) feels less concerned with the
documenting of stories than it does with the telling and constructing of them.
Here I’ll return here to Timothy Powell, who has considered the same interaction between
the fieldworker and Priscilla McCullough and concludes that the conversation “reveals a degree
of condescension and distrust that must be factored into how these oral histories are read. The
distrust, of course, cuts both ways” (261). Powell posits that the disrespect shown to Priscilla and
others must have engendered some resentment towards the white fieldworkers, who were being
paid to document these important oral histories. “It is,” he says, “admittedly difficult to know
when precisely the stories turn from honest assessments of the past to carefully contrived evasion
or even veiled jokes” (261-262). This does not suggest that Priscilla, Aunty June, and the many
Black folk interviewed were lying to the fieldworkers, only that certain elements of the slave
experience, particularly those things having to do with magic, transformation, and the ancestors,
may have been obscured as a means of preserving and protecting the culture from outsiders who
did not believe or understand them.
Here, my intention is not to dismiss the invaluable material the FWP interviewers have
produced, but to acknowledge the disparity between its intentions under Lomax and what it
eventually became--to look at the opportunity these interviews presented for the history of the
underprivileged black population, for its future descendants such as myself, and ask what we can
take from it while also noting that it was ultimately a failed, or at the very least, incomplete
mission. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 (or
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former
26
Slaves, as it was later renamed in 1941) did not live up to it’s potential. As the information I’ve
provided thus far displays, there are innumerable reasons for this. However, these reasons do no
distract from what should be an important question: what is the ultimate effect of these missed
opportunities on its readers? On Black people and the knowledge of their past? On our nation? It
is in the answers that the heart of this text lies.
It is my claim that the discordant nature of the Slave Narratives Project inevitably
performs the ways in which dissimilitude, rather than being simply rejected or marginalized,
becomes staged and ersatz. The linguistic, documentary, social, cultural, and spiritual road
blocks set up, however inadvertently, by the FWP, make it hard to visualize the Slave Narratives
Project. By this, I mean that the slaves and the stories they carry are translucent, that the writing
represents a shape that we see only in outline, a vague smudge that tells us something is here, but
also not. If the Slave Narratives were a river, on one side would be the storyteller and on the
other, the person who translates the story, the one with the authority to write it down. It’s
impossible to know what happens in between.
Folklore and slave narratives were spoken in dialect, which was often regionally or even
locally dependent, meaning they first had to be understood by the interviewer, then translated.
Without sufficient training, how could a white interviewer record stories that maintained the
integrity of the storyteller? Oversight for the FWP didn’t consider the role of race in the
interactions the interviewers would have with those whose narratives they recorded. While some
things can be verified by the number of individuals across multiple states who shared similar
stories, it’s plausible that at least some of those interviewed simply told interviewers embellished
versions of what they thought white people wanted to hear. Who can blame them? Given the
trickster nature of the crow and African American’s penchant for inside jokes, this is likely to
27
have happened. A white person in a Black community speaking to ex-slaves leaves a lot of room
for misinterpretation and misrepresentation. Timothy Powell puts it this way:

…[B]lack communities throughout coastal Georgia were interviewed by “fieldworkers”
who, with good reason…were perceived by the oral historians as outsiders. To the Black
community, the stories were not just interesting ethnographic “facts” to be objectively
recorded, but cherished vessels that contained valuable information about magical
powers, medicine, and the ancestors. (259)

These Black communities represented a rich cultural history, with traditions and beliefs,
rituals, stories—secrets the slaves created code to keep. In Florida, people opened up to Zora
Neale Hurston because she was like them, she made them comfortable because she was an
insider. Joyner notes in his “Introduction to the Brown Thrasher Edition” in Drums and
Shadows that ”Southern fieldworkers were closer to their folk roots and were more sensitive to
local folklore than those outside the region and largely avoided the condescending tone that
distanced the collector from the folk. When white southern fieldworkers reported black folklore
and folk-ways, however, they could be as patronizing as their counter-parts in other states”
(xiii). Though she should be praised for her work collecting interviews in Florida, there should
have been more Zora Neale Hurston’s in every state. The FWP was perhaps well-intentioned, but
the shadow of its former self as “An American Guide” looms. The Slave Narratives exist as
documents recounting the “interesting ethnographic ‘facts’” of slavery. One of those facts is the
tale of Igbo Landing. What would we know now if there had been a Hurston in Georgia?

*

28
There is great value in what we do have, despite the fact that many of those “facts” may
forever remain a mystery, another hole in the narrative of America. Another hole in the history of
Black identity. The Slave Narrative collection was an ambitious endeavor, endlessly valuable but
not entirely well planned, and in 1939, when the FWP was cancelled, “… records and data were
hurriedly boxed and stored in local libraries and archives in anticipation of the project's renewal
after World War II. They remained untouched for many years or, in some cases, were destroyed”
(The WPA).
In their own words, the Library of Congress says:

[The items in the FWP] are comprised of correspondence, memoranda, field reports,
notes, drafts of essays, lists, drawings, maps, graphs, newspaper clippings, transcripts of
documents, oral testimony in the form of life histories, folklore material, inventories,
statements, critical appraisals, speeches, administrative records, instructions, scripts,
plays, and surveys (New Deal Programs).

Much of what has survived is freely accessible online, but it is a massive archive. If we
narrow the collection down to just the writings and interviews for the Slave Narrative Project, or
even further, down to just the Slave Narrative Project volumes for Georgia, that amounts to four
volumes of interviews at roughly 396 pages each. That’s 1,584 pages of collected interviews, just
for Georgia alone. While this might sound like a wealth of information, the information is only
as good as its source.
The point here is not to highlight the failure of the FWP in its collection, but to observe the
parallel between Feierman’s observations and the continued and complex ways in which
generations of slave narratives and folklore have been manipulated and obscured from history.
To be as respectful and specific as possible, this introduction mainly highlights the specifics of
African culture within the coastal plains of Georgia, specifically the Igbo, from the historical
29
period beginning and ending with the slave trade. I refer to Africans more generally, in respect to
the larger group of mixed slaves, the first generation to be brought over to America, to whom
ethnic origins are unclear; African American to refer to those who were a few generations
removed from the direct impact of the Middle Passage and were born and raised in America post-
1830; and Black to refer to contemporary descendants of said Africans. I am aware that these
designations are ripe with cultural and political meaning, and I acknowledge that this topic
deserves attention and discussion that extends well beyond the purpose of these pages. However,
for the sake of respect and clarity in this complex presentation of ideas, we will move forward
with this in mind as one way to open what I hope will be a plethora of important conversations
that encourage others to take up their own deeper investigations.

30
References

Baldwin, James. “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” The New York
Times, The New York Times, 29 July 1979,
archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html.
Feierman, Steven. “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories.” Beyond the
Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, by Victoria E.
Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, University of California Press, 1999, pp. 182–216.
Fischetti, Mark. “Africa Is Way Bigger Than You Think.” Scientific American, Scientific
American, 16 June 2015, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/africa-is-way-
bigger-than-you-think/.
“How to Use Accents and Diacritical Marks.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster,
www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/how-to-use-and-understand-diacritics-
diacritical-marks.
“I Seen Folks Dissappeah.” Exchanging Our Country Marks The Transformation of African
Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South, by Michael A. Gomez, University of
North Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 114–153.
Joyner, Charles W. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes.
University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Meek, C. K., and E. J. Arnett. “Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe. A Study in Indirect
Rule.” Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 37, no. 146, Jan. 1938, pp. 115–118.
31
“New Deal Programs: Selected Library of Congress Resources.” Federal Writers' Project: New
Deal Web Guide (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress), Congress.gov,
www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/newdeal/fwp.html.
Powell, Timothy B. “Summoning the Ancestors.” African American Life in the Georgia
Lowcountry: the Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee, edited by Philip D. Morgan,
University of Georgia Press, 2011, pp. 253–280.
“The Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Religious Literacy Project, Harvard Divinity School,
rlp.hds.harvard.edu/faq/transatlantic-slave-trade-nigeria.
Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate?
Discoveries from a Secret World. Greystone Books, 2018.
“The WPA and the Slave Narrative Collection : An Introduction to the WPA Slave
Narratives : Articles and Essays : Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal
Writers' Project, 1936-1938 : Digital Collections : Library of Congress.” The Library
of Congress, Congress.gov, www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-
writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-
narratives/wpa-and-the-slave-narrative-collection/.
Yetman, Norman R. “The Background of the Slave Narrative Collection.” American Quarterly,
vol. 19, no. 3, 1967, pp. 534–553. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2711071.
32

Chapter One
This American Haunting

…the forest for the [family] trees

In his book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben discusses how connected oak, fir,
spruce, and Douglas firs can be in the wild. Wohlleben mentions observing stumps “…still alive
long after the trees had been cut down” (5). These trees are dependent on one another for
communication and nutrients. However, “planted forests” behave differently “[b]ecause their
roots are irreparably damaged when they are planted, they seem almost incapable of networking
with one another. As a rule, tress in planted forests like these behave like loners and suffer from
their isolation” (5). When trees are moved from their natural homes in the forest and replanted,
they can’t reconnect with the new trees around them. They don’t speak to one another or work to
provide one another the nourishment that they so quickly and easily share in the forest. They
struggle to adapt alone to their new environments. As Africans were uprooted from their homes
and replanted on plantations along the North American east coast (particularly since tribes were
carelessly intermingled) they no longer shared and connected in the deep and meaningful ways
they did in their various home countries. They did, of course, share beliefs and traditions and
stories. They influenced and were influenced by the landscape, Native Americans, and the
traditions, beliefs, and stories of their slave owners.
33
You may find yourself thinking this has nothing to do with the Igbo, and even less to do with
ghosts, but the connections become apparent as when we return to the subject of the Flying
Africans. In his own research on the subject, Michael A. Gomez discovered that “[t]he ability to
fly was associated exclusively with native-born Africans, who were believed to possess
supernatural power capable of such a feat. American-born or country-born blacks are never
depicted as having this ability or experience” (Gomez 118). Though there are many who claimed
to have witnessed these moments of transformation and flight, it appears that this was not a
genetic trait passed along in the blood. Rather, it was a deep and intense connection between the
Igbo, the ancestors, and the very soil of Nigeria. In Drums and Shadows, Jack Tattnall from
Wilmington Island, Georgia, recalls:

Long as I kin membuh, missus, I been heahin bout dat. Lots uh slabes wut wuz brung
obuh frum Africa could fly. Deah wuz a crowd ub um wukin in duh fiel. Dey dohn lak it
heah an dey tink dey go back tuh Africa. One by one dey fly up in duh eah an all fly off
an gone back tuh Africa.

[Long as I can remember, misses, I been hearing about that. Lots of slaves what was
brung over from Africa could fly. There was a crowd of them working in the field. They
don’t like it here and they think they can go back to Africa. One day they fly up in the air
and all fly off and gone back to Africa.] (Joyner 108)

Like the trees and the world wood web, Igbo transplanted in America seem to have had their
ties to the spiritual world and its abilities severed. Loss of this cultural and spiritual magnitude is
incredible, and thinks that by 1830, assisted by the changes in politics, religion, and social
structures, we began to see the full shift from African slaves (those “African-born”) into African
Americans (American-born or country-born blacks). This makes sense, and explains the deep
connection between slaves and their homeland, as well as the spiritual disconnect between the
slaves and their American-born relatives—later generations in coastal Georgia believed in the
34
power of flight and understood the Igbo desire for freedom, but were physically incapable of
manifesting this power within themselves because the power came from a deep connection to a
land second-generation slaves never had the opportunity to know.
Even if one does not agree with the spiritual and magical elements of these stories, on a base
human level it is impossible to deny the importance of home, and the Flying Africans could be
read as a desire for Africans to have agency over captivity by reclaiming their bodies and their
homelands in death. Hilariously, turning into a crow and flying back to the land you were stolen
from is quite literally flipping the bird to your captors. There’s more to Flying Africans than a
good middle finger joke, though. While attempts at suicide might have been acts of rebellion
against the inhumane conditions of slavery, the story doesn’t end with death, as American history
seems to imply. Here enters the starring ghosts(s) of our story.
This idea of the afterlife, of the spiritual and physical journey home is one that was occurring
in African countries long before Europeans showed up on the shores of Nigeria, waving their
white flags and coercing children onto ships. Ryna Johnson, and eighty-five-year-old former
slave from Harrington, St. Simons Island recalls talking to three older slaves on a plantation who
remembered being brought over from Africa:

“…dey ain hab much trouble gittin tings tuh eat in Africa cuz so much grow free. Dey cut
duh tree and let duh suhrup drain out. Duh women tie duh leedle chillun an duh babies on
tuh deah back tuh carry em roun.

“[William] say wen day come in duh boats tuh ketch em, dey trail a red flag an dey ain
use tuh see red an das duh way dey get duh load.”

[…they ain’t have much trouble getting things to eat in Africa cause so much grow free.
they cut the tree and let the syrup drain out. The women tie the little children an the
babies onto their back to carry them round.

35
William says when they come in the boats to catch them, they trail a red flag an they ain’t
use to see red and that’s the way they get the load.] (Joyner 176)

The FWP acknowledges the importance of this travel in the appendix of Drums and
Shadows, with an entire section title “Burial at Home.” In it, one sub-section pulls from the
enlightening article “Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe. A Study in Indirect Rule,” by C.K.
Meek.

Meek says of Nigeria: ‘When a man dies at a distance from his home his body is always
taken back, when possible, to his home, wrapped up in mats covered by a cloth and
placed on a bier or cradle, which is carried on the shoulders of relatives. The reason
assigned for this is that the dead must not be severed from the company of other
ancestors—they should be buried close to their living descendants on whom they are
dependent for nourishment.’ (115-118)

Curiously, tress that die or are cut down in a forest will also continue to draw nutrients from the
living trees around them. Perhaps, when we are in full alignment with nature our relationship to
the land is one of healing and magic. In Among the Ibos of Nigeria, George Basden points out
that:

The desire of every Ibo man and woman is to die in their own town or, at least, to be
buried within its precincts. For a long period it was very difficult to persuade a man to
travel any distance from his native place, and if he were in need of medical assistance an
Ibo would seldom agree to go from home in spite of assurances that he would be able to
have better treatment elsewhere. In case of death occurring at a distance, if it can be done
at all, the brethren will bring the body home for burial. (115-116)

And so, this historical narrative, the one in which the ancestors are not currently considered
as agents of spiritual and physical change, is one that hinges on a desire to be at home upon
36
death, one that requires a distanced body to be returned because without this how can any spirits
rest peacefully? At a glance, Igbo Landing is a story created by people who could not fathom
how to cross the ocean and return to a land they could no longer see on the horizon. Traumatized
by the middle passage and encapsulation in the guts of ships it makes sense that they would
project themselves into the animal they perhaps viewed as the most free, one that could close the
distance between home and this new world without ever touching the water. It is no wonder they
wanted to fly.
Despite this focus on the Igbo, enslaved Africans around the world seem to share similar
traditions regarding death. In 1967 William Bosman documented the same thing among Africans
in the Coast of Guinea. In A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea : Divided into
the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts he writes that “[t]he Negroes are strangely fond of
being buried in their own Country; so that if any Person dies out of it, they frequently bring his
Corpse home to be buried, unless it be too far distant” (232). Oh, what’s so strange about the
compulsion to be buried in your home country? There is no other factor influencing this
statement than blackness. Even now, years and sometimes decades after death, a soldier’s body
and remaining belongings will be returned from overseas to America for an honorable and proper
burial. The premise of this is, of course, that they served their country during a time of war. If
you protect this country you deserve to have your body placed here, in the ground you fought
for. What of those who fought differently? What of those who built the foundation for this
country? If they were brought here against their will do they not also deserve to buried in their
homeland upon death?
If we remove patriotism from the conversation, a large number of burials in the U.S. are still
predicated on Christian ideals. These ideals were introduced to slaves and eventually became
37
central to the African American community and their concept of death. However, as John E.
Eberegbulam Njoku tells us in A dictionary of Igbo names, culture and proverbs:

The Igbos had a strong belief for reincarnation until the arrival of the Christian
religion….The condition for coming [back] is that when one is dead, all the funeral
ceremonies due to the deceased must be performed to them on earth; when such is done
the ancestor is reborn in a child. Failure to perform all the necessary ceremonies and
rituals cause a lot of trouble (15).

I am not familiar with the details of the Igbo funeral ceremonies because this information is
kept secret, but it can be assumed that because American-born slaves did not possess either the
magic of flight or a spiritual a connection with their African ancestors, they were not
knowledgeable and perhaps therefore incapable of performing these ceremonies. Viewed through
the eyes of the Igbo, the inability to return to Nigeria upon death represented more than just
homesickness and was much more than just a frivolous tradition. A physical death in America
was a missed opportunity at reincarnation: a sentence of spiritual death.
How can you erase a people? You can write them out of history, you can alter and manipulate
their story. To take one’s dignity, one’s freedom and humanity, that is an atrocious act. But take
to take from someone the fate of their soul is, I argue, much, much more heinous.
Whether one gives credence to the Flying Africans and the ancestors or not, the knowledge of
what it truly represents is stunning and tragic. If, as Njoku says, failure to perform these
ceremonies and rituals causes a lot of trouble in the spiritual realm, it is no wonder the people of
coastal Georgia believe that the ghosts of those from Igbo Landing still haunt St. Simons today.
Physical death, for the Igbo, was a part of a cycle. This cycle kept knowledge and magic and
ancestral connection in their bloodline by reincarnating souls once their physical experience in
this life was done. Their deaths on U.S. soil would imply an exceptional cultural and spiritual
38
loss. This is strong evidence that explains why the Igbo would rather commit mass suicide than
to die in the horrific conditions of slavery. It seems a universal belief that if one is not properly
laid to rest, unrest is inevitable. Unrest, we know, is trouble; an affliction not limited to the dead.

39

Floodghost

In her brilliant intertextual work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination, sociologist Avery F. Gordon paves the ground for new contexts to be posed around
our understanding of ghosts. “If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is
often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities,” she
says, “the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting
taking place” (8). In Georgia the Igbo are still haunting the minds of residents along the marshy
grounds at St. Simons. Now, some 200 years after the events at Igbo Landing, their tales, both
recorded and passed down aurally, still act as a “seething presence” in the historical, physical,
and cultural reality of Georgia, as well as in the bodies of African Americans who continue to run
guided tours of the area and tell the story of Igbo landing to whoever will listen. The
transformation from slave body to crow body, the liberation of the soul via flight, the very
presence of the soul, seem to be “not there,” not entirely believed or even accounted for in the
sparse historical documentation we have, and yet the story is a persistent reminder of the ills of
slavery—signs, empirical evidence if you like, of this American haunting.
Gordon further posits that the ghost “… is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social
figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social
life” (8). That is why I have written this chapter. I am haunted by (Jim) Crows. It is not my aim
to prove that a historical figure known as Jim Crow existed (though perhaps someday a historian
will do so), but that the name, the signifier, the sign, has taken hold of various cultural bodies,
and it will not let go until we have heard what it has to say.
40
I began these chapters by telling a ghost story, though it was not previously introduced as
such. This is the nature of ghosts, though, to be unseen, to go unnoticed, unbelieved. This is the
story of ghostly words, transparent histories, disappearing bodies. It is the story of 75 Nigerian
slaves, locked beneath the schooner York, who, in 1803 sang, who killed their captors, who were
chased to the edges of a swamp where they continued singing as they held hands and walked into
the mire and to their deaths. Gordon goes on to say that “The way of the ghost is haunting, and
haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening” (8). This is the
story of what happened after, how Igbo left their bodies behind and their feathered souls took
flight across the Atlantic—how they grew tired after days of flying and crashed into the waters,
how the waves scooped their souls and pushed them back, back to American sands.
In piecing together what history we can find we know, or at least have a sense of, what
happened, but that is a very different thing from understanding. If a haunting is a way of
knowing what has happened then the next logical step is to comprehend the haunting, to discern
the reasons behind it. Because we know that some ghosts haunt because they want. Gordon
continues: “[b]eing haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit
magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we have come to experience, not as cold
knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (8). This is the story then, not of belief, but of
transformation and recognition. This is the story of what happened after. I say this because you
cannot have a ghost without life, life’s ending. Jim Crow is a cultural ghost, a thing seen and felt
by Blacks across the generations, but worn and discarded, then ignored or dismissed by many
white people. Jim Crow’s haunting manifests as folklore, yes, in flight and song and rebellion,
but also as minstrel figure and cartoon.
41
The tale of Igbo Landing is by no means the first major act of slave rebellion, nor is it the
first instance of folk transformation as a means of survival in the slave community, though it is
often referred to as the first major freedom march in American history. Michael Gomez does
point out a similar account of slave uprising in North Carolina, though. While not concretely tied
to the Igbo, its narrative is familiar. Gomez quotes an account of the clearing of the Collins
plantation on Lake Phelps in Washington County, where slaves newly arrived from Africa were
tasked with digging a waterway. It was dangerous work and numerous slaves died on site, the
informant claiming:
[a]t night they would begin to sing their native songs, and in a short while would become
so wrought up that, utterly oblivious to the danger involved, they would grasp their
bundles of personal effects, swing them on their shoulders, and setting their faces towards
Africa, would march down into the water singing as they marched till recalled to their
senses only by the drowning of some of the party. (119)

Due to the innumerable hardships and trauma of slavery it was within this belief system that
slaves were sometimes willing to kill their own children and commit mass suicide; an attempt to
reach freedom. Such acts extended well beyond the arrival of slaves in the states and within both
large and small communities African Americans have, for years, crafted oral and folk stories of
suicide into tales of survival, as Terri L. Snyder notes in The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide
in British North America:

Well after slavery ended, former slaves and their descendants, along with African-
American writers, reshaped stories of slave suicide into a powerful regional folklore and
an enduring literary motif. These cultural expressions reflect the ways in which memory
transfigured the tragedy of self-destruction in slavery and reveal the perseverance and
relevance of both slavery and suicide as historical subjects (14).

42
Memory seems to be the key word here, as it’s memory that lives on after the body, memory
created first on the body, upon the body, within the body. It is memory that motivates the ghost,
the recognition of the past. To be remembered is to survive, to be recognized. For many years the
narrative of Igbo Landing was brushed aside as hearsay, the government dismissing the fact of
the event as it made its rounds on plantations and through the oral and eventually written
histories of slaves. However, “A Savannah written account of the event lists the surname
Patterson for the captain of the ship and Roswell King (overseer of Butler Plantation) as the
person who recovered the bodies of the drowned Igbo” (Snyder “Suicide, Slavery, and
Memory”). It’s documented that thirteen bodies were pulled from the swamp and research done
since the 1980’s has been used to pronounce the authenticity of the event. One would think that
this important location of mass suicide and cultural rebellion would become a national and
historical monument, that a museum would be built with plaques and statues honoring the story,
the slaves who died there, and what their lives meant. What their memory is. Instead, as noted by
Timothy Powell on the Ebos Landing page of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, “Sadly, no
historical marker commemorates the site of Ebos Landing, which is adjacent to a sewage
treatment plant built in the 1940s” (“Ebos Landing”). This swamp exists without even a ground
marker, a marker, one would think, that could only add to the relevance of both slavery and
suicide as historical subjects, as things we should remember.
Is the result of the sparse documentation of Igbo Landing, the initial historical denial and
subsequent folklore that memory has transfigured the tragedy of self-destruction in slavery? That
Snyder’s diction led her to transfiguration is interesting, and relative to the larger debate of this
chapter. Transfiguration is akin to, but more drastic than simple transformation. Transfiguration
marks a metamorphosis, a conversion into something more, and more beautiful. It implies
43
exaltation and glorification. It implies a change so great that the outside is abracadabraed to
match the inside. This is, I think, the “transformative recognition” of which Avery F. Gordon
speaks (8). Don’t we, as humans, often glorify and exalt those we want to remember? Just take,
as an example, Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, a story so heavily force-fed to slaves that
it lies more readily available in the minds of most African-Americans than the names of the Igbo
lost in Dunbar Creek. The notion that folklore acts to glorify and exalt those slaves lost to mass
suicide reads to me, as unmistakably defiant in the face of erasure.
This erasure is not uncommon, and often slave owners were mildly competent of what this
transfiguration meant to their slaves, as “[s]hip captains and planters alike understood this
motivation for suicide and dismembered the recovered corpses, telling slaves that desecration
would prevent their return to Africa” (Snyder, “Slavery, Suicide, and Memory” 54). What we are
experiencing is a necessary haunting via transfiguration, from the Latin transfigurare, “change
the shape of.” Trans—meaning “across, beyond” and figura, meaning “to form, shape.” Facts
aside, transfiguration is a belief—in the power of change. Those 75 Igbo were able to transcend
the tragedy of their situations, to change their forms and fly off, fly across, fly beyond this mortal
coil. Even if we don’t believe it, we recognize it. We must, for that is what a haunting demands.
In a small victory, Igbo Landing is now part of the curriculum for coastal Georgia schools. At the
same time local people, both Black and white, claim that the Landing and surrounding marshes
in Dunbar Creek where the Igbo people committed suicide in 1803 is haunted by the souls of the
dead Igbo slaves.

44

Resistance

Reasons for and attempts at slave suicide were many, and complex, but from the shores of
Africa, across the Atlantic Slave Trade, into Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, and many other
states, Africans carried ancient ritual beliefs about the ways in which their survival outside of the
mortal body could be manifested, and the importance of those manifestations. One of the most
interesting motifs to spring out of this belief system is that of the image of the crow.
Specifically, the symbol of the crow—especially that of Jim Crow—which has been expropriated
from slaves and transformed from a trickster figure and a symbol of freedom into a multifaceted
totem of relayed trauma.
In modern times, Jim Crow, circumstantially, has been appropriated from his African origins
and used to derogatory effect in minstrel shows, literature, laws, cartoons, and popular culture in
America. The ways in which these images of the crow have endured, while the traumatic
historical weight associated with it has been excised from America’s collective memory has
overwhelmed any critical intellectual deep-dive into the meaning it once held for those slaves
taken from their homes and separated from their traditions. There are many reasons for this and,
difficult though it may be to uncover a direct path on this subject, it is inarguable that it deserves
investigation.
But where do we begin? In speaking of the historical plight of African Americans in the
United States it is inevitable that the term Jim Crow surfaces, invariably in the context of the
segregation laws established after Reconstruction in 1877. While an innumerable amount has
been written and discussed regarding Jim Crow laws, far too little light has been shed on the
45
potential origins of the term itself. Jim Crow, as it relates to the beliefs and lives of early Black
Americans, has a rich and convoluted history—one that opens doors to layered and important
conversations about memory, trauma, ownership, dance, storytelling, moral and intellectual
values, and the belief systems that continue to shape an entire culture. Jim Crow is not just a
series of laws, but a series of bodies—physical, metaphorical, literary, minstrel, folk,
intellectual—bodies that dance and bodies that sing, bodies that drown and bodies that fly, bodies
that haunt, bodies of words and bodies of meaning. If we approach each of these bodies as texts
to be decoded, read, and analyzed, we might find that the many suppressed and unspoken
narratives they hold lead to an important and nuanced conversation about nature of Black
trauma.

*

In 1828, New York actor and comedian Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice donned the name
Jim Crow for his traveling blackface song-and-dance minstrel shows, perhaps marking the first
popularized incarnation of the term. The origin of the name pre-dates Rice, but an absence of
documentation in historical and slave literature has made it an American legend—some
historians say the name was taken from an interaction Rice had with an African slave named Jim
Crow, though this is debated. Rice didn’t stop at borrowing a name, though, because Jim Crow
held within it the constitution of a cultural phenomenon, encompassing a particular way of being
in the world; it was a song deeply rooted in the folk and mythic traditions of slaves; it was a
ritual dance developed on plantations and expanded upon over time; a particular gait that
fostered a subversive way of moving through the world as a slave on plantations and later in
46
churches, then the harsh openness of white cities. While a lot about this history is not known,
what is most clear from the sources and documentation we do have is that Jim Crow was, prior to
Reconstruction and according to historians, distinctly and recognizably Black.
In taking from the slave population the figure of Jim Crow, Rice not only appropriates
clothing and ritual dance, but the very language of resistance. By “blacking up,” Thomas Rice
made himself a ghost, a vessel he used to antagonize and disrupt a culture. He became the
phantom that haunts Black people, a false spirit holding closed the mouths of the dead Igbo, the
slaves who sang, danced, told stories, and were physically and culturally murdered. Rice’s Jim
Crow represents the Black body, the body without spirit, the body ignoring its own haunting.
That is to say, Rice, in his Jim Crow stage character, commodifies and thus mutates not just the
name but the very essence of Black history, culture, and spirituality.
Taking the notion of possession in its numerous ideations, Rice quite literally possesses Jim
Crow in name, body language, skin tone, vernacular, clothing, and personality; like a method
actor, he embodies the character, then violates it by deflating him of any air of purpose and hope
he once possessed for the antebellum slave communities. For slaves, the world expressed and
implied by Jim Crow was one of resistance and freedom. With this in mind we can approach a
deconstruction of the history of this figure, beginning with his popularity in the minstrel world
and working backward, essentially, following Jim Crow from the stage back into the plantation
fields. This process cracks open Rice’s depiction of Jim Crow while also probing his
appropriation of African culture and its repackaging and rebranding of cultural customs and
history as simple entertainment for mass cultural consumption.
It wasn't until Thomas Rice’s rise in the field of minstrelsy in 1803 that people began paying
attention or even became aware of Jim Crow, and this is a history masked by the broader use of
47
Jim Crow in segregation laws, so it makes sense that we should investigate the character, who,
by Rice’s own admission, was not a star born in a moment of epiphany. This chapter’s aim is to
explore what underlies Rice’s representation of the Jim Crow moniker, to investigate the
relationship between Jim Crow and the numerous facets of crow folk beliefs and practices that
existed on plantations. Rice’s appropriations via Jim Crow, and the historical documentation and
choice blind spots, mark a thievery, rebranding, repackaging, and ultimately complete disregard
for slave trauma and the stories that Jim Crow was built to honor. To deconstruct, as best as one
can, the component parts of Jim Crow, to take apart the packaging and branding of the minstrel
character and interrogate the collection of folk and mythic culture and customs that helped create
this figure of mass entertainment that Rice marketed, some digging is required. First we need to
further interrogate the present historical understanding of how Rice acquired and developed Jim
Crow, as well as the isolated elements of the slave persona he culled together for his
performances.
In some variants of the origin story the slave Rice is said to have first encountered is
reportedly an armless stable boy named Jim Cuff, while Thomas Rice scholar W.T. Lhamon
documents him being portrayed as “an old black slave who walked with difficulty…” (Jump Jim
Crow 142). In an interview for NPR’s American RadioWorks podcast, Leon Litwack, a
professor of history at the University of California Berkeley commented that Rice’s character
and the accompanying song were based on “a routine he's seen performed in 1828 by an elderly
and crippled Louisville stableman who belonged to a Mr. Crow” (“Remembering Jim Crow”) In
Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History, Canstance Valis Hill speaks of “…a number of
conflicting stories about how Rice first saw a black livery stable boy, who was crippled, do a
little song and dance—which the actor quickly copied and transformed into one that consisted of
48
limping, shuffling, and jigging movements, with a little jump at the end of each refrain…” (12).
In Darkest America, Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen mention a legend that claims “‘Jump Jim
Crow’ was a black folk song, and the New Orleans black banjo player John ‘Picayune’ Butler,
who would later teach banjo to a number of northern minstrels, sang it to a white blackface
circus clown, who later taught it to Rice” (33).
The sheer number and variation of these stories indicates a missing link on the part of
historians, and thus history itself. In this void of facts Jim Crow is an apparition. The truth of Jim
Crow is not “cold knowledge,” as Avery F. Gordon reminds us:
[f]ollowing ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social
relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in where only a vague
memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about
writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive
to understand and the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place,
toward a countermemory, for the future. (Ghostly Matters 22)

Despite slave accounts of Jim Crow’s identity as a slave or a slave master, there is no single
verifiable incident marking this occasion and the disagreement amongst historians is evidence of
the problem of constructing a single historical narrative of slaves and slavery. Put plainly: there
are holes in the literature, transparencies we can’t make out entirely, but feel, recognize as we
pass through them, as they follow us into the future. It is difficult to discern the identity of the
aforementioned slave, or to track down the factual existence of a Mr. Crow. Like the names of
the Igbo who waded into the swamps of St. Simons, this information is lost in the murky bog of
time.
However, in 1867 an Atlantic Monthly writer recounts the fascinating tale of Thomas Rice’s
first blackface performance as Jim Crow, in Pittsburgh in 1803:
There was a negro in attendance at Griffith’s Hotel, on Wood Street, named
Cuff…precisely the subject for Rice’s purposes. Slight persuasion induced him to
49
accompany the actor to the theatre, where he was led through the private entrance, and
quietly ensconced behind the scenes…Rice, having shaded his own countenance to the
“contraband” huge, ordered Cuff to disrobe, and proceeded to invest himself in the cast-
off apparel. When the arrangements were complete…Rice, habited in an old coat
forlornly dilapidated, with a pair of shoes composed equally of patches and places for
patches on his feet, and wearing a coarse straw hat in melancholy condition of rent and
collapse over a dense black wig of matted moss, waddled into view. The extraordinary
apparition produced an instant effect…[s]uch were the circumstances—authentic in every
particular—under which the first work of the distinct art of Negro Minstrelsy was
presented. (“Stephen C. Foster” 609-610)

Even this reporter, however unconsciously, recognized the haunting, recognized the
“extraordinary apparition” Jim Crow. By putting on the slave Cuff’s clothes and painting his
face and body the “‘contraband’ hue,” Rice found his identity as a stage performer by clothing
himself in figurative and literal black skin. As Jim Crow he walked on stage wearing both the
living and the dead.
Rice’s attempt to hide his own identity by “blacking up” is equivalent to his failed attempt at
hiding Cuff, the slave from whom he took his stage outfit. It is the unseen light, the flicker from
visibility to invisibility which the audience engaged with vigor. Prior to Rice’s stage debacle,
Cuff was tasked with carrying passenger luggage from steamboats to nearby hotels. While Rice
performed Cuff was informed of the approach of another boat and after a stint of patience he
whispered “Massa Rice, Massa Rice, must have my clo’se! Massa Griffif wants me,—
steamboat’s comin’!” (610). When Rice, absorbed in the uproar of the crowd, did not respond, a
naked Cuff “in ludicrous undress as he was, started from his place, rushed upon the stage, and,
laying his hand upon the performer’s shoulder, called out excitedly…” (610). This was such an
exciting moment that it was “…the touch, in the mirthful experience of that night, that passed
endurance. Pit and circles were one scene of such convulsive merriment that it was impossible to
50
proceed in the performance…the entertainment was ended…Next day found the song of Jim
Crow, in one style of delivery or another, on everybody’s tongue” (610).
Unbeknownst to the audience, this layered stage moment was more than the birth of Jim
Crow in the theater, it was a continuation of African’s generation-long struggle with visibility,
here both in a literal and metaphorical manner. Quoting herself from Laura Kipnis’ 1988 work
“Feminism: The Political Conscience of Postmodernism?” Avery F. Gordon notes that
“[v]isibility is a complex system of permission and prohibition of presence and absence,
punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness” (Ghostly Matters 15). Taking
nothing away from Kipnis’ position, I believe this statement applies across the board to all
marginalized groups. The result, in this case, is that Rice, in his Jim Crow skin (much like the
Slave Narratives Project conducted under the Federal Writers Project) performs the ways in
which difference, rather than being simply excluded or marginalized, becomes staged and/or
simulated (16). Thus, what the name Jim Crow gives us then, is a text, one by which we can
attempt to fit together the present puzzle pieces of history to better establish the stories of
cultural preservation, survival, and assimilation as slaves transformed, over four hundred year,
from Africans into African-Americans.

51

Crowing

The history of Blacks in America has been constructed and written largely by white men,
which presents a cultural and social conundrum. How can we discuss what is important to the
African-American community if the purveyors of history who dictate the rules of importance
have, for generations, controlled not just what is documented, but how and why it is so? The very
fact of African American existence hinges on hundreds of years of cultural erasure, of silencing,
of visible invisibility leading to easily accessible information on figures like Rice and his famed
minstrel character, but with little public knowledge and even less inquiry into the deep well from
which Rice drew his inspiration. This is evidenced by the fact that entire books exist solely about
Thomas Dartmouth Rice, about his life, about his journey from failed actor to taking the moniker
Jim Crow. In them, much is hypothesized about the reasons Rice “blacked up,” about the
misrepresentation of Rice’s Jim Crow and its subversion of black culture, its relation to a shared
trouble between races, yet individual articles about the crow’s importance to the Igbo or the
larger slave community are scant, at best.
In his work reconstructing the history of Rice’s Jim Crow, W.T. Lhamon Jr., the prominent
Thomas Rice/Jim Crow scholar, asserts that “…people who arrived here separately as Ibo
women, Yoruba children, and Hausa men became Africans together…[m]embers of every tribe
sold across the middle passage to North America…lost their specific tribal ethnicities in the
crucible of slavery…”(Raising Cane 182). I cannot argue with the loss of specific tribal
attributes, but it seems, to me, feckless to propose that the middle passage is the Big Bang that
poofed Africans into existence. These tribes did not become Africans, they were Africans. Those
52
of the Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo tribes were no less African than the Lakota, Navajo, or Apache
were Native Americans. Though tribes differed, they originated from the same continent. Yet
Lhamon doubles down, claiming that “On these shores, disparate unrelated peoples gathered
kinship within slavery. They eventually became Africans. They gathered together motifs of
roaming and freedom that they might share…They were perforce assembling a new mask of
identity, a Africanness, a blackness for a new ground never yet planted” (182-183).
Herein lies the complexity of the problem with our current account of African, African
American, and Black history. Lhamon’s focus is, admittedly “… to understand his first
permutations…the arc of development that the folk and then the dramatized figure of Jim Crow
survived during the push coming to shove over his meaning” (Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays 7).
While he does acknowledge that the “African tales of buzzards and crows are doubtless forebears
of the African American Jim Crow” (8) and that it is difficult to determine when and how these
myths and legends made their way into American culture, Lhamon’s three books focus almost
entirely on Rice’s acting career as the character in the years between 1830 and 1850, largely
bypassing the crow’s life cycle in the African community, or even in the early practices of the
Igbo on the Georgia Sea Islands decades prior to Rice. The crow’s “first permutations” on the
minstrel stage are, I believe, not accurate depictions of his first permutations in America. They
represent only a fraction of the story. To truly understand the folk and then dramatized figure of
Jim Crow, as well as the “push coming to shove over his meaning” requires a deeper historical
dig, one that predates the 1830’s but seems significantly absent or transparent. This lends an
irony to Lhamon’s goals, as he also aims “to deepen the sense of tragedy one feels upon seeing
how those who controlled the public space increasingly bent Jim Crow to their purposes” (7)
without, it seems, the realization that the well of tragedy, for Blacks, runs fairly deep already.
53
Those who controlled the public spaces were largely white in 1830 and continue to be now. They
controlled and increasingly bent black bodies to their purposes. They contributed to the making
of Jim Crow.
While I do not begrudge Lhamon his passions, the sheer volume of works on Jim Crow and
his value in the white community is disproportionately larger than that which can be found for
the Black community. It would seem the ghosts of slaves don’t leave footprints, streaks on
mirrors, or feathers in their wake. We hear echoes of their singing, though their voices are often
ignored or imitated at such a high volume that we can no longer tell the dead from the performer
of it. Our history is much harder to parse, yet it deserves the same amount of time and care.
Without it we, as Americans, have no clear history.
We have Rice’s plays and documentation of his performances, but only songs, dances, and
oral tales by which to recognize the stories former slaves lived through, their secret spiritual
dances and practices dismissed as conjure, magic, and farce. Still, Lhamon posits that “…white
and black song-and-dance men working in and out of blackface laid down cultural templates that
brought people of every hue into troubled relation” (Jim Crow American ix). The troubled
relation between Africa and Africans. The troubled relation between the cotton field and the
stage.

*

There are things we can glean from the information that is available on the matter of Jim
Crow, most prominently that though the stories surrounding how Rice attained Jim Crow vary in
specificity, they all share the same ending: Rice takes this knowledge he’s come across and goes
54
on to develop a character that becomes what W. T. Lhamon notes as “…the most popular actor of
his era, in the United States and Britain.” How? By “blacking up and imitating black men.”
(Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays 1). Minstrelsy presented, for Rice, a road to fame via stage comedy,
but it happened on the backs of thousands of slaves, slaves whose lives, languages, and stories
were obscured by insistence from their slave masters that their very culture was savage,
sacrilegious, and not important enough to be properly documented, let alone remembered,
despite white actors stealing from and exaggerating on the art of what they considered a lesser
culture for the sake of dollars and laughs.
For Black people, this is another haunting, one which “occurs on the terrain situated between
our ability to conclusively describe the logic of Capitalism or State Terror...and the various
experiences of logic, experiences that are more often than not partial, coded, symptomatic,
contradictory, ambiguous” (Gordon 24). We can see this in the introduction for Love and Theft:
Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, as cultural historian Eric Lott
acknowledges:

While [minstrelsy] was organized around the quite explicit “borrowing” of black cultural
materials for white dissemination, a borrowing that ultimately depended on the material
relations of slavery, the minstrel show obscured these relations by pretending that slavery
was amusing, right, and natural. Although it arose from a white obsession with black
(male) bodies which underlies white racial dread to our own day, it ruthlessly disavowed
its fleshy investments through ridicule and racist lampoon. (3)

You could argue that the minstrel show did not obscure the material relations of slavery by
pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural, but that minstrelsy completely embodied
those relations by further promoting the already established belief that slavery was, while not
largely held as amusing, at the very least, right, and natural. This lifts the veneer of “borrowing”
55
and forefronts the theft of Lott’s book title. White obsession with Black (largely male) bodies,
and the presentation and belief that those bodies were and are both tantalizing and yet somehow
distinctly inferior is what lent white men like Rice the agency to darken their faces with cork,
ash, and shoe polish and commence acts of racial lampooning. However, not all of the materials
white minstrelsy borrowed from black culture were visible. Pain does not always show itself on
the body.
Already, we can see the convoluted and labyrinthine nature of Black identity being
disassembled and reconstructed here, before Rice even steps foot on stage. The recurring image
of the crippled or armless slave in these stories speaks to the physical trauma of enslavement—it
is widely noted that Rice’s Jim Crow limped and hopped across the stage through most of his
performances and though we can’t pin down a specific slave as the origin of Rice’s theft, the
recurrence of physical disability can be read as a very present trauma from which Rice’s
minstrelsy pulled inspiration, both in appearance and gait, as we know that the physical impact
of slavery on the body was immense. As the cherry topping his minstrel sundae, when Rice strips
Cuff of his clothing and has him watch from backstage as Jim Crow flies in front of a cheering
audience, the audience sees the skin Rice is wearing, but does not see the stitching, does not see
the trauma, does not, perhaps cannot, see or recognize the ghost.
Fanon astutely observed that “There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in believing
the world will open as borders are broken down” (Black Skin 5). Lhamon, though perhaps not
intentionally, supports this notion with his view of the effects blackface minstrel shows had on
America, particularly on people of non-African descent. Rice, Lhamon says, “coded positive
desire into the inevitable stereotypes that defined his gestures...” because “Imitating perceived
blackness is arguably the central metaphor for what it is to be an American, even to be a citizen
56
of that wider Atlantic world that suffers still from having installed, defended, and opposed its
particular history of slavery” (Jump Jim Crow 1-2). It’s unclear how we might determine Rice’s
individual desires or what Lhamon sees as positive about them, but we can ascertain who they
would have been positive for. Jim Crow may have opened the world, but not all borders are
broken down from the outside.
If we are to believe that “T.D. Rice was primarily copying black gestures to identify himself
and his public with them” (12) should our eyebrows not raise at the simultaneous suggestion that
“Rice…found the seeds of blackface in transactions of fascination among Africans and
Europeans circulating in the Atlantic, sharing gestures within unequal and exploitative political
situations that were continually changing…They display that most fundamental lesson of lore:
use it or lose it” (Raising Cain 156)? True, in the petri dish of America cultural sharing has
always been unavoidable, but “use it or lose it” feels a cutthroat way to describe the lead-up to,
and defense of, blackface minstrelsy. It’s an assessment that ignores the haunting, ignores the
reality of Avery F. Gordon’s “transformative recognition” in favor of fascination.
But it is a fascination veiled in the sequin dress of togetherness and unity. Because “The
buzzard seemed to be a nomad. He was most elaborated in African-American performance,
but…traces of what he figured stuck in the cultural adaptations of Germans, Swiss, Irish,
English, and others come to North America, as well as the displaced local rustics who migrated
to the cities. In other words, for all the migratory publics that were adopting blackface
performance as the mortar of their identity, the buzzard and the crow became insignia” (Raising
Cain 183). Maybe this is true, but it seems to again ignore the impact that the crow/Jim Crow
had on African culture. For the Africans, and the Igbo specifically, the crow represented a belief
system, not just for their place in society and culture, but for their place in the physical world.
57
The crow was more than an insignia for their adopted black faces. In this, Lhamon exemplifies
my frustration with our historical documentarians, dismissing important history in favor of
fronting a motive that does not include asking proper contextual questions of, for, or about Black
lives and history. While he implies social connectivity via Rice’s synthesis of African culture,
Lhamon seems instead to be enforcing the fact that “[w]e have become adept at discovering the
construction of social realities and deconstructing their architecture, confounding some of the
distinctions…[w]e have rethought the relationship between knowledge and power, between text
and context, highlighting the relationship between authorization and modes of authority”
(Gordon 20).

58

Dance Dance (R)E: Volution

Rice took his rendition of the mannerisms he observed to the stage, where they played a huge
role in how he presented himself, especially as he engaged in what would become the popular
“Jump Jim Crow” stage dance, which involved jumping, wheeling, and turning not too dissimilar
from the movements slaves were known to do in the fields. It went on to inspire others in the
world of minstrelsy, as historian and choreographer Len Sloan notes in the documentary Ethnic
Notions: “It was an instant success. And America loved it. And a bevy of imitators came about…
literally hundreds of men tore up their clothes, discarded their perfect dialects of the black man,
and began to do this exaggerated character dance which became known as the Jim Crow
character.” This is not to say that other groups in America did not have similar dance steps, or
that the specific dance Rice performed was not, by the 1830’s an amalgamation of cultural
physical performance, but if we were to weigh these characteristics on a scale, adding his dress,
his dialect, his makeup, his undeniably popular presentation leans heavy with blackness. And
that is what his audience came to see.
While Rice’s caper was performed for money, laughter, and applause, the cost of his
borrowing and lampooning is immense for the African community. According to African-
American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance, 1600s-1920 : an Annotated
Bibliography of Literature, Collections, dancing was a vital part of African culture and could
help “…build a bridge to the supernatural, where [slaves] could communicate with the ancestral
spirits, the lesser deities, and the Supreme being” (xxi). If acting is embodying a character, a
voice, a personality, then dancing is the completion of this, the filling oneself with the totality of
59
the character. It is the living, the inhabiting, the possessing of another (self). Dancing (shouting)
is to be filled with the ghost. It should go without saying that satirizing a religious ceremonial
dance should be considered an egregious act, but performing a Frankensteined and ridiculously
exaggerated version of religious ceremonial dance without proper care for what the dance means
to the people from whom it was taken seems, somehow, even worse.
Frantz Fanon makes the argument that “A man who possess a language possesses as an
indirect consequence the world expressed and implied by this language” (Black Skin, White
Masks 2). This articulation of the effects colonialism has had on the development of the black
man as it relates to language can also be applied as a theoretical lens through which dancing is
also considered a language, the language, in part, of communication with the ancestors and their
spirits. The figure of Jim Crow, too, is a language— one that has mutated over time, the body a
text—both the body of folklore that Jim Crow became for slaves, and the physical body Rice
developed on stage—that can be read and critiqued like literary texts. Whether intentional or not,
Rice, when he performed, was tying himself to the Igbo walking into the swamps, to their ghosts,
to the slaves crossing their legs in the fields. By blacking up and wheeling about, Rice stitched
the world expressed and implied by these slaves into his acts. By proxy, he is inseparable from
the Igbo attempting to make the flight back across the Atlantic. It seems irresponsible for history
to not research and further discuss these connections. Were it not of enough importance to the
aims of American historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it should be now, in the
twenty-first. My aim here is to respectfully pose a recontextualization of Lhamon’s goal cited in
the previous section. Understanding and exploring these connections, I argue, is how we
“deepen the sense of tragedy one feels upon seeing how those who controlled the public space
increasingly bent Jim Crow to their purposes” (Jump Jim Crow 7).
60
Assuming the primary purpose of minstrelsy was entertainment, essentially, watching a racist
sketch comedy show, a valid inquiry can be raised regarding additional motives. Despite any
hidden desires to bring together poor and lower class whites the by subverting African qualities
of perseverance as a means of representation under the banner of the downtrodden, minstrel
shows served the clear secondary purpose, intentional or otherwise, of denigrating Africans, but
to what end? Were Rice’s presentation of the Jump Jim Crow dance and his eternal revisions of
the song an attempt at understanding the Black population, of subverting the tropes of blackness
in the face of rampant racism, as W.T. Lhamon suggests? Is understanding on this scale even
possible? Did white people attending minstrel shows actually believe they were receiving an
education on the nature of Africans? Though it would be impossible to know the reasoning of
each individual who attended or participated in a minstrel shows, these seem unlikely.

*

The slave populations were immensely resilient and intelligent, though, and their dances
were a solid marker of creativity and spiritual awareness in the presence of cultural destruction.
Choreographer Leni Sloan follows the trail of the “Jump Jim Crow” dance further into the past,
pointing again to the idea that “the Jim Crow was a dance that started on the plantation as a result
of dancing being outlawed in 1690” (Ethnic Notions). As their spiritual and physical ties with
their homeland were severed, slaves were prohibited from participating in traditional African
dance—which often involved crossing one’s feet in a way deemed sacrilegious by the church.
Similar to the development of Capoeira in Brazil, dancing became a vital cultural and survival
mechanism for the slaves. “And so,” according to Slaon, “[the slaves] created a way of shuffling
61
and sliding to safely glide around the laws without crossing their feet.” For the antebellum slave,
dancing was a language that formed a bridge to the metaphysical, a way they could communicate
with ancestors and other spiritual deities. And if accurate, its 1690’s origin sets the roots of Jim
Crow 140 years prior to Rice’s stage debut.
Sloan goes on: “And so here we have Jim Crow, T.D. Rice, taking a dance which was altered
by a law, from a man who was crippled, and exaggerating it again. And he had no intention of
presenting the truth” (Ethnic Notions). This particular dance was an amalgamation of sacred and
cultural practices, based partially on the movements of the crow, but also believed to have been
culled from a combination of the Irish jig and the customary slave broom jump (Hill, Tap
Dancing 12). Due to colonialism, cultures would necessarily and invariably swap stories, songs,
dance steps and traditions and be inspired by the innovation of others, so the issue of origin is
perhaps an impenetrable one. However, that does not mean we ignore the toe for the view of the
foot.
“The Jump Jim Crow” dance also shares similarities with the later nineteenth century
phenomenon of ring shouting on plantations, described as an African influence by Kenneth
Thomas in his book The Religious Dancing of American Slaves, 1820-1865 as “…the slaves’
reaction to, and influence of, the evangelical and emotional content of white camp meetings,
along with the Methodists’ disapproval of dancing as heathenism” (104). But by then "[t]he
shuffling heel-and-toe step of the ring shout was allowed as it was not deemed to be, strictly
speaking, a dance at all, as the feet never crossed. No doubt the white camp meetings around the
imaginations of the black slaves, and the rather dour, worthy approach of the Methodists must
have had a halting impact on at least some of the slave population’s dancing habits" (104).
62
If we fly back to Priscilla McCullough’s interview with the FWP fieldworkers we can now see
the apparition the fieldworkers ignored as she described the ring shout:

“Duh slabes wuz out in due fiel wukin. All ub a sudden dey git tuhgedduh an staht tuh
moob roun in a ring. Roun dey go fastuhnfastuh. Den one by one dey riz up an take wing
an fly lak a bud. Duh obuhseeuh heah duh noise an he come out an he see duh slabes riz
up in duh eah an fly back tuh Africa.”

[“The slaves was out in the field working. All of a sudden they get together and start to
move round in a ring. Round they go fasterandfaster. Then one by one they rise up and
take wing and fly like a bird. The overseer hears the noise and he come out and he see the
slaves rise up in the air and fly back to Africa. ”] (Joyner 154)

If you are paying attention you can see in the wheeling, spinning ring shout the aura of Jim
Crow, flickering, haunting, not easily dismissed. With this knowledge, I can only again
acknowledge the vastness of this topic, and again pause to contemplate further yet another
apposite inquiry: “How do we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly? How do
we develop a critical language to describe and analyze the affective, historical, and mnemonic
structures of such hauntings?” (Gordon 18).
Ignoring the relationship between Thomas Rice’s dancing and the movements that happened
on plantations betrays important contributions Africans gave to the history of the United States in
the forms of art and spirituality. This isn’t lost on Len Sloan, who sees the power in the Jim Crow
persona Rice presented onstage, positing further that: “…what was bought by the majority of the
people in Ohio, and the Louisiana Territory, and in, along the Erie Canal, was that this was a true
image. And it was a devastating image. People in small towns who had never seen blacks… and
suddenly saw Rice, bought that as black image” (Ethnic Notions). This view of the Black image
persists to this day. This image, this caricature of Blackness, was developed and spurred on by
the tastes and value of white audiences who attended minstrel shows and it quickly spawned
63
numerous other blackface characters onstage, in literature, and even children’s cartoons. In the
nineteenth century, there was no Works Progress Administration, no Federal Writers’ Project, and
no Slave Narrative Collection documenting (however unevenly) Black culture. What whites
saw onstage and took for gospel in small towns was the ghost of culture.

*

Present in this discussion is the fact that African myths, songs, and dance are, without
question, forms and works of art, and so too is minstrelsy, though a bastard art built partially on
the erasure and mockery of another. We can return to Eric Lott, who says it is apparent that:
“…blackface minstrelsy’s century-long commercial regulation of black cultural practices stalled
the development of African-American public arts and generated an enduring narrative of racist
ideology, a historical process by which an entire people has been made the bearer of another
people’s “folk” culture” (17).
We see this in the spinning, flapping, heel-to-toe dance of Rice, but we also hear it in his
songs. Though the first appearances of the crow in African song were passed down orally and not
transcribed, there are a few folk variants that exist. “Knock Jim Crow,” a song “which has black
children still turning and clapping and kicking in the North Florida Panhandle, on Georgia’s Sea
Island, even inland in Gary, Indiana” (Lhamon, Raising Cain 152) is one of them. The folk song:

Where you going buzzard?
Where you going, crow?
I’m going down to the new ground
to knock Jim Crow.
Up to my kneecap.
Down to my toe,
And every time I jump up,
64
I knock Jim Crow (181-182)

It’s unclear what the power of knocking manifests in this song, or where the new ground is,
but the opening line’s mention of buzzard and crow seems a meeting of solidifying identity. A
nodding to the feathered guides of both the slaves origin continent and their new country.
There’s no way to know for certain, but the folk “Knock Jim Crow” may be related to the slave
chant “Kum buba yali kum buba tambe, Kum kunka yali kum kunka tambe,” (Joyner, Drums and
Shadows 79) cited in the FWP Slave Narrative Project by one interviewee, identified only as
Prince Sneed of White Bluff, as being spoken by slaves just before they took flight from
plantations. Perhaps they were also headed to the new grounds? It not clear whether this was
chanted in combination with the ring shout or completely independent of it, but it’s difficult to
ignore its cultural proximity to “Knock Jim Crow,” and much of Rice’s earliest printed “Jump
Jim Crow” lyrics are eerily similar, such as this, printed in 1832:

I neeld to de buzzard
An I bou’d to da Crow
an eb’ry time I reel’d
Why I jump’t Jim Crow (182)

Whether or not Rice was aware of oral versions of the song is indeterminable, as is pinning
down where or from whom he might have first heard “Knock Jim Crow,” but we know that he
did likely encounter it in some form, given the otherworldly echoes in his own song. What is
interesting about his song, though, is also the verbal and oral language, the exaggerated
vernacular of “neeld,” “bou’d,” and “eb’ry” that feel like a mocking attempt to duplicate African
American speech akin to the characterization of those interviewed by fieldworkers for the Slave
65
Narratives Project. It feels more a parody of speech, of character, than an attempt to relate to the
struggles of a Black population.
Fanon also infers that “[T]o speak a language is to appropriate its world and culture,” (Black
Skin, White Masks 21) and though he was investigating the psychological affects that speaking
the language of Whites ultimately had on colonized Antilleans, it seems applicable here to
discuss the equally literal appropriation of world and culture in which Rice participated. Rice
presents Fanon through a looking glass—“adopting the cultural tool of language,” for Blacks, to
this day, comes with the presumption of success, the notion that we will be seen differently from
our less articulated brethren and therefore we might be given a foot in the door, be seen as
smarter than others that look like us and as a consequence offered access to different monetary
scale. Conversely, Rice took the private language of slaves, rearranged it and made it a public
spectacle and center-stage laughing stock—a success for his acting career, yes, but, in the minds
of his white and black viewers, a representation of a crude and baseless, foolish, degraded
population. This matters because language is a responsibility and “[t]o speak means being able to
use a certain syntax and possessing the morphology of such and such language, but it means
above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization” (1-2).
There’s no evidence that Thomas Rice had any intention of acknowledging the history of this
ritual dance, and as his skewed version of Jim Crow became more and more popular it developed
a life that overshadowed the cultural importance of its origin and tradition. Rice—regarded as
“the Father of American minstrelsy”— was one of the initiators of blackface, and Jim Crow went
on to become a stock character in minstrel shows, documented on Ferris State University’s “Jim
Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia” presenting blacks as “singing, dancing, grinning fools”
(Pilgrim). It wasn’t long before imitation ran rampant, many performers becoming colloquially
66
known as Ethiopian Delineators. Despite the name, little, if any, African roots were present in
these shows—the reference to Ethiopia was used as a general hat to encompass the entirety of
Africa, and many of the audiences that gathered to watch the minstrel shows (particularly those
in small towns throughout the Louisiana Territory and along the Erie Canal) had no prior contact
with Africans at all. They took the exaggerated racial displays as factual evidence of the way in
which slaves were presumed to have acted: ignorant, loud, and buffoonish. In the middle of
generations of ancestral and religious annihilation, when your bridge to the next world has
crumbled, where do you turn for guidance? Who do you see in the mirror?

67

References

Anonymous. “Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy.” The Atlantic Monthly (1857-1932),
Nov. 1867, pp. 608–616. ProQuest Central; ProQuest One Academic,
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com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/203571567?accountid=14749.
Basden, George Thomas. Among the Ibos of Nigeria. New York, Barnes & Noble, 1966.
Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea: Divided into the
Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts. Cambridge University Press, 2011, www-
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Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2008.
Gomez, Michael A. “I Seen Folks Dissappeah.” Exchanging Our Country Marks The
Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South, University of
North Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 114–153.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of
Minnesota Press, 2011.
Hill, Constance Valis. Tap Dancing America: a Cultural History. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Joyner, Charles W. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes.
University of Georgia Press, 1986.
Lhamon, W. T. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular
Culture. Harvard University Press, 2003.
68
---. Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Harvard University Press,
2000.
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford
University Press, 2013.
Meek, C. K., and E. J. Arnett. “Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe. A Study in Indirect Rule.”
Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 37, no. 146, Jan. 1938, pp. 115–118.
Njoku, John E. Eberegbulam. A Dictionary of Igbo Names, Culture and Proverbs. University
Press of America, 1978.
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University, Sept. 2000, www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/who/.
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28 Feb. 2017, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/ebos-landing.
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Smith, Stephen. “Remembering Jim Crow.” Transcript: Remembering Jim Crow, American
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Southern, Eileen, and Josephine Wright. African-American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and
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70
Chapter Two
The Coon Show: An Epilogue
“One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit.”
-Joseph Campbell

In Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop, Yuval Taylor and Jake
Austen make the proposition that “[t]he minstrel show was a vehicle for parodying almost
anything whatsoever, white or black. In fact, a great number of minstrel skits that survive in
acting editions are loosely based on Shakespeare plays…” (26). Many of the poems in Welcome
to the Coon Show are based not on entire Shakespeare plays, but on monologues and soliloquies,
specifically. This is because I wanted to focus on one of the many things my ancestors were
robbed of: voice. In its parodying of “almost anything whatsoever,” I wanted this book to be a
response to the canon of literature and a reflection of the absurdity that built and maintains this
fever dream of a country we call America.
With this aim, the book is a parody of a parody—embracing hyperbole and absurdity to
speak about the history, treatment, and (mis)representation of African Americans—using the
page to represent the stage. Loosely adopting elements such as stage directions and the choir
(standing in for the Greek chorus) and mixing them with components of minstrel shows and the
younger sibling of minstrel shows, early American animation, I wanted to ask: What would a 21st
century minstrel show look like? What would it sound like? How would its purpose and impact
be altered by the times we live in? I didn’t have to look very far for inspiration. Our century has
no shortage of fraternity parties, bakeries, fashion shows, and politicians blacking up, openly, on
digital forums and in public spaces. We live in an era of Neo-Klansmen who have traded their
71
sheets for tiki torches and Dockers. You live in the era of stop and frisk. I live, still, in the era of
police enforced public executions, taped and recorded, where the word reparations can’t be
floated on a government stage without a scoff from the audience. We live, together, in the Coon
Show. Minstrelsy never ended, it just evolved.
Welcome to the Coon Show, both in its title and individual poems, is not an invitation to
engage with a text, it is an acknowledgement of the production we live, watch, and participate in
every day. We have updated the set, purchased finer LED spotlights and a silk grand drapes, but
we are still in the theater. The Coon Show takes as its inspiration the stage character Jim Crow,
prominently performed in the mid to late 1800’s by traveling white actor Thomas Dartmouth
Rice. Rice’s performance itself draws from the speech patterns, songs, and dances popularized
on southern slave plantations. His character went on to inspire early twentieth century animation
dramatis personae such as Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, the crow duo Moran and
Mack, and the rambunctious murder of crows in Disney’s 1941 film Dumbo, all of whom also
play some role (visible or otherwise) in the formation of this collection. What we see is often a
conglomerate of generations and those small details—the wide red lips, the white gloves, and
overexaggerated speech—should not be ignored.
John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, suggests that “The past is never there waiting to be
discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation
between the present and its past” (11). Poetry seems as good a medium as any to analyze this
relationship and Welcome to the Coon Show, with its premise of a cartoon facade, converses with
the literary histories and songs of John Berryman’s Henry and Ted Hughes’ Crow. It speaks to
and with the voices of a long line of Black poets and intellectuals. It is, in its characters,
narratives, obsessions, and voices, interacting with the ever-present nature of historical, cultural
72
and artistic traditions, continuing to push against the notion of a canon and fronting another
persistent and invaluable question: who gets to speak?
At the heart of Welcome to the Coon Show, though, is trauma, as I attempt to reckon with the
scale and heaviness of what has been lost, as well as what has been purposefully erased, revised,
excised. This trauma comes packaged in the form of the book’s main player, the crow. A
complex symbol whose meaning changes depending on which culture it roosts with, the crow,
for the African American community, carries on a tradition of revolution, freedom, and
reincarnation. Since the crow, like the many cultures who claim it, like the Africans, like the
African Americans of the North and South, are not monoliths, I’ve chosen to represent them
wearing the skin and feathers of animated caricatures America would be familiar with: as Jim
Crow, Fat Crow, Glasses Crow, Preacher Crow, and Straw Hat Crow. These eccentric personas,
in their animated incarnations, all represent the stereotypes of the uniformed, ignorant, and racist,
with their patched clothes, jive talking, ignorant servile nature, and magical negro qualities.
Absurd and ridiculous in their depictions on screen, these characters seem ghostly, dancing in
invisible, heavy, historical and cultural chains. Chains that make them ripe for social and artistic
exploration.
In her thoughtful and poignant book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination, Avery F. Gordon describes haunting as a “a very particular way of knowing what
has happened or is happening” (8). Being haunted in the United States is less about knowledge
and more about what Gordon calls “transformative recognition” (8). Black people are a haunted
people. How could we not be, given the horrors of slavery? A friend of mine is working on a
book based on her grandmother’s journals. When she was young, her grandmother asked a group
of family members what slavery was like. The entire house broke down in tears and wailing.
73
This is not just an intellectual haunting, but a haunting of the body, of the spirit, of the blood
brought on by epigenetic trauma. We are haunted by many things. Rapes. Murders. Lynchings.
Things too terrible to name. We are haunted by Jim Crow, by his flights and his laws. I am
haunted by Jim Crow. I am haunted and the result of that haunting is the book you hold in you
hands. Oh, America.
The crows that narrate their lives throughout this book are both a ghostly and social point of
conversation and were constructed with the understanding that “[h]aunting is a constituent
element of modern social life. It is neither pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is
a generalizable social phenomenon of great import. To study social life one must confront the
ghostly aspects of it” (17). And these ghostly aspects are plentiful, both in early twentieth
century animation and on antebellum plantations. The crows in my book are all ghosts. They
know this. They are filled with this recognition. You can see this most blatantly in Phat Crow,
who is variously murdered, lynched, and erased across the course of the collection, but who
nonetheless resists death, accumulating voices with each killing, recognizing the social
implications of the ways in which they are killed and brought back.
Of the nearly 13 million slaves shipped during the Atlantic Slave Trade, an estimated 1.4
million were Igbo. They came from the Bight of Biafra, in a region we now know as Cameroon,
and they made up around a quarter of the total slaves brought to North America during the slave
trade. The Igbo represented one of the multiple tribes taken from the Bight of Biafra but the
name Igbo was applied as a blanket classification across the board during the slave trade (Gomez
114-115). It’s impossible to know which beliefs belonged to which tribes, but we do know that
the buzzard was important to most of the tribes in Nigeria and many believed in a relationship
between the buzzard, their home, and reincarnation—so much so that those who died away from
74
home were carried back so that their souls were not cut off from the ancestors (Meek 115-118).
This was not just for comfort. They believed that if the bodies were not present they could not be
reborn—conditions of reincarnation held until slaves were introduced to Christianity (Njoku 15).
Once in America, slaves adopted the crow. A long history of songs for, to, and about the
crow existed on plantations, many them only orally transmitted and never documented. So
prevalent were these traditions and beliefs that in 1690 when African dancing was outlawed on
plantations because it was seen as sacrilegious to cross your feet, slaves creatively took to
mimicking the crow’s movements, shuffling, gliding, and flapping as they danced (Ethnic
Notions). These chants, dances, and songs moved particularly, though not specifically, around
the South. So connected to their faith were slaves that in 1803 a group of 75 Igbo, rather than
return to slavery, clasped hands and walked, singing, into a swamp. The site is historically
referred to as Igbo Landing. The slaves believed that in their deaths they would be transformed
into crows with the ability to fly back to their homes in Africa. The Federal Writers’ Project
Slave Narrative Collection documents numerous stories of slaves morphing into crows after
wheeling and spinning in dance and often reciting the phrase “Kum buba yali kum buba tambe,
Kum kunka yali kum kunka tambe,” (Joyner, Drums and Shadows 79). Similar songs and dances
on plantations included the ring shout, “Knock Jim Crow,” “Jump Jim Crow,” and the Buzzard
Lope. The Library of Congress (and occasionally YouTube) even possesses a 1939 audio
recording of Zora Neale Hurston (who participated as a fieldworker for the FWP Slave
Narratives Project) singing “Crow dance (Momma come see dat crow)” (Halpert Crow dance
Mama). This history makes up the DNA of the cast in this book.
As a timeless symbol, the crows are composed of what history, both African and (white)
American, has given them. Straw Hat Crow, for example, chooses to offer his soliloquies via
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singing and dancing, nodding to Hurston’s “Crow dance,” flapping his wings to “Knock Jim
Crow,” but also wheeling about to Ada Jones’ 1907 hit “If The Man In The Moon Were A
Coon” and T. Brigham Bishop’s politically problematic 1869 song “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me”
(“Straw Hat Crow Singing with the Minstrels”). In this, they have a meta-awareness of their
nature. They know inherently what Nicholas Sammond tells us in Birth of an Industry, that
“[c]ommercial animation in the United States didn’t borrow from blackface minstrelsy, nor was
it simply influenced by it. Rather, American animation is actually…an integral part of the
ongoing iconography and performative traditions of blackface” (5). They know that “Mickey
Moues isn’t like a minstrel; he is a minstrel (5).
The cast of this book follows in suit, being inspired heavily by the characters in Disney’s
1941 animated film Dumbo. Though the crows are given detailed and distinct features like hats
and glasses, the correlation between them and hardworking slaves is easily apparent. Alex
Wainer, in his essay “Reversal of Roles: Subversion and Reaffirmation of Racial Stereotypes
in Dumbo and The Jungle Book” notes that both “…visual and vocal cues quickly indicate the
particular traits that fit the crows according to the names informally assigned them during the
film's production: Glasses Crow, Preacher Crow, Fat Crow, Straw Hat Crow…” (Wainer). In
name alone, each crow presents common African American stereotypes. Fat Crow (more
recently referred to simply by his proportions as Fats) is overweight and, according to the Disney
fandom wiki page “speaks in a baritone and has a jolly deposition… is not particularly smart”;
Straw Hat Crow (referred to as Dopey) “lives up to his namesake with his sloppy posture and
clothing—his signature ensemble includes a yellow hat with a missing top, which is held up by
his beak” (“The Crows”); and if this were not enough, the leader of the group of crows is named
Jim Crow, smokes cigars and wears a vest, spats, and a derby hat, and is voiced by Cliff
76
Edwards, a white man. In later versions of the film Jim Crow’s name was conveniently changed
to Dandy Crow, emphasizing his fashion sense—a clever attempt on the part of Disney to
dismiss claims of racism, though the Dandy caricature fails to do anything other than further
support their animated offense.
Sammond also tells us that “[v]eteran animator Dick Huemer, confronted with the suggestion
that the crows he had a hand in animating…were racist caricatures, was shocked, and responded
that the ‘colored’ choir that had voiced most of them ‘like it very much and enjoyed doing it
hugely…I don’t think the crow sequence is derogatory’” (256). Despite the fact that the Hall
Johnson Choir, and all-black singing group, supplied the voices for Fat Crow, Preacher Crow,
Straw Hat Crow, and Glasses Crow, and that Freddie and Eugene Jackson, two members of a
black song-and-dance trio renowned for their vaudeville and film works, aided in the crows’
various on-screen song and dance routines, the crows were still molded from the clay of
minstrelsy. The fact that they were hinted at but mysteriously absent from Tim Burton’s 2019
live-action adaptation of the film says that Disney isn’t as confident in their assertions as
Huemer. Moreover, considering the importance of crows to the Igbo and the legacy of “Jump
Jim Crow” as a potential path to reincarnation, the defining moment of Dumbo, in which the
crows teach the film’s protagonist elephant to fly carries an incredible commentary and cultural
weight. Weight that is invisible in the original and unloaded and quietly dismissed in the remake.
The crows in Welcome to the Coon Show know this weight. They know that, like Mickey,
Minnie, and Clarabelle Cow in Mickey’s Melodrama (Disney, 1933) they have “become vestigial
minstrels, carrying the tokens of blackface minstrelsy in their bodies and behaviors yet no longer
immediately signifying as such” (3). However, with their roles in Dumbo highlighting the
relationship between imagined blackness and imagined whiteness, my crows throw themselves
77
into their blackness (and the historically and socially imagined versions of that blackness) in an
attempt to raise the immediacy of their signifyin(g). Boasting, bragging, rapping, and shaking
their stanky legs, Glasses Crow and Jim Crow, in particular, seek a deeper connection with Black
audiences.
In “Jim Crow’s Dirge,” Jim adopts the language of Julius Caesar’s Mark Antony to reflect
on the implications of the events at Igbo landing. After being baptized by the Klan, Glasses Crow
embraces the diction, syntax, and lyrical styles of hip-hop, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Malcolm X
as he navigates the fever dream of a dystopian American landscape (“Glasses Crow’s
Recounting of Being (Filled with the Spirit)”). “Jim Crow’s Adoption” finds Jim confronting
minstrel performer Thomas D. Rice, reliving and questioning the tales of Rice’s poor treatment
of a slave named Cuff, from whom Rice was said to have taken clothes, affects, stature, dialect,
and cultural dance moves to inform the birth of his own on-stage character Jim Crow. In their
voices, narratives, and actions, these crows resist both rhetorical and historical shackles and
instead embrace and engage in the deep, mysterious, but necessary ancestral work of securing
spiritual freedom.
This freedom comes at a cost. The national cost may be immeasurable. The personal cost is
the relationship between myself and the crows; my mental health; my people’s health; and thus
the relationship between myself and the history of oppression in America—to take up and
repurpose the tropes of blackface cartooning I had to become the animator. Though each crow
represents a side of my internal confliction, though I am the throat from which tarred words
stream, I am also the ungloved hand that guides them. Like Berryman and Henry “[w]e touch at
certain points” (77 Dream Songs, xiii). However, while Berryman saw himself as “an actual
human being” and Henry as “nothing but a series of conceptions” (xiii), the crows in this book
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are no less human than my ancestors, less conception and more (em)bodied song. Unlike
Berryman’s songs, these songs are not “mockery…filled with snatches of Negro minstrelsy,” as
Lowell described them in The New York Review of Books. I approached this project wary of the
fact that “[a]ttributions of racism in and of themselves too often stumble into this sort of
discursive quagmire of intent, where they may become framed as calls for atonement, which of
necessity collapse the social into the individual” (Sammond 17). Perhaps, with a project of such
scope and weight, such a collapse is inevitable and unavoidable-- the social is, by design,
inseparable from the individual. I write these poems not because I want to, but because I need to.
Because poetry is, among other things, a way to process the complexity of grief. This grief, in
particular, is historical, is generational. This history, in particular, surreal and fantastic. In this
waking hallucination anything that happened to my people can be used at random, anything they
have “seen, over-heard or imagined can go in” (Lowell). I accept this responsibility.
The crows embrace the fantastic nature of grief as an element of their performativity, to
reflect the absurdity of their cartoon inspirations. They take back from their minstrel counterparts
“…the ability to twist and deform their bodies…to express extreme emotions, to extricate
themselves from intractable situations, or simply for the sheer pleasure of the act” (28). They can
express in bodily extremes the emotions I can only articulate with words—the anger, grief,
depression, overwhelm, and sorrow, but also the joy, exuberance, confidence, jubilation, and
liberation. Phat Crow defies Henry’s claim that “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.”
(Berryman 16) with their resistant shout: “Life? Nigga, life / is a house party. We must spin /
wax / make it rain” (Insert Poem). In this they are “indifferent or even hostile to the social norms
of polite society, as well as the laws of physics” (28). Their spinning is the revolution of the DJ’s
records and the revolution of the body that spins as it defies gravity.
79
Moreover, and perhaps expectedly, the crows fashion elements of their tragicomedic origins
and physical elasticity from Ted Hughes’ seminal Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow.
For how would a book of poems about crows be taken seriously if it didn’t acknowledge the
other Crow in the room? Similarly to Hughes’, my crows are exist in a timeless loop, as Keith
Sagar observes that Hughes’ Crow is stuck in a limbo of sorts, where “everything is happening
simultaneously…all the episodes of history are present” and “every single thing goes on
happening for the first time forever” (Laughter 174). In Welcome the Coon Show Cadillacs park
on antebellum plantations and rap music blares from the empty hulls of slave ships. Plantation
slavery and “freedom” co-exist. Such is the eternal nature of the crow. But, while Hughes’ Crow
crucifies frogs under microscopes and squints into the brains of dogfish in search of his creator,
my crows peer outward, less concerned with the white hands that historicized them as savages
than they are with maintaining what they themselves have created in this world: Culture. Style.
This play, this collection, is a documentation of years of ongoing research, a record of
generational silencing, anxieties, celebrations, and nightmares. While “[e]arly animation’s play
with metamorphosis, with the relationship between surface and interior, and with the boundaries
between the page, the screen, and the worlds outside of them, makes cartoons an important
location for witnessing the creation and working through of the fantastic,” (18) it also offers an
opportunity to acknowledge and explore the strength, creativity, ingenuity, and perseverance of
my ancestors that has been for so long hyperbolized as hulking, superstitious, lazy, and stupid.
Acts and skits set the conditions for these wild and sprawling narratives, parodying racial
stereotypes (“Act II: Scene One”) and often mimicking 19th century entertainment and carnival
games like “Drop the Chocolate Drop,” “Hit the Coon,” and “Hit the Nigger Baby” (“Moon
Crickets”). The use of direct address implicates the reader in personalized myths and
80
cannibalized histories (“Glasses Crow Says Some Professional Negro Shit”). The crows are not
shy about their convictions and each is personalized and individual in their dialect and
performance. Tricksters that they are, they speak a sometimes coded but always unapologetic
tongue, full of Black colloquialisms, Black slang, and Black idioms, Black love. They speak of
niggers and niggas, sisters and sistas, coons and crackers, and they argue about the ethics of
racial pejoratives and word ownership. They speak the language of the plantation and the
language of the streets—a polylithic choir.
“A people or a class which is cut off from its own past,” says Berger, “is far less free to
choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history. This
is why—and the only reason why—the entire art of the past has now become a political issue”
(33). The stage-as-mind setting is a device used not just because racism and minstrelsy have
existed on my mind-stage for decades, but because it is stagnant yet malleable place, it is a space
of observation and performance, it is an archive of the entire art of the past. It is a space for
historical situationing and discussion. There is an ocean at the edge of the mind-stage that the
crows can’t cross. Whoever attempts either disappears or is washed up later on the shore—
bullets and bodies, boats and books, history washes them all up on the shore— metaphors for the
things we can’t escape in this country; metaphors for the fact that we can’t escape this country,
our home.
All art is an attempted cry in the dark, a shouting into the void of eternity that stretches into
the future, way past our individual lives. It says I am here. I am thinking. I am feeling. I am
mortal. I love. I want to be heard. Zora Neale Hurston saw shouting as “a survival of the African
‘possession’ by the gods…a sign of special favor from the spirit that it chooses to drive out the
individual consciousness temporarily and use the body for its expression” (Folklore, Memoirs,
81
and Other Writings 851). In Lexicon of the Mouth Brandon LaBelle aptly tells us that crying,
shouting, screaming, and singing are all elements of voice, and the voice “conjures which it
speaks; it may animate the inanimate, lending great power to the vocal imagination to affect ‘the
order of things’…to speak gives realization to particular freedoms—to embody the promise
found in having a say” (48). It’s clear, given our history, it’s erasure and obscurification, that
Blacks have not had a much of a say—or at the very least, not have been heard in that saying.
Welcome to the Coon Show joins a choir of contemporary Black poets all coming together to
have a say. It is inspired, in part by Shane McCrea’s Blood, its archival digging and mining of
the Slave Narratives in the Federal Writers’ Project; by Tyehimba Jess’ Olio, it’s embracing of
the voices of first-generation freed slaves who performed in minstrel shows; Nathaniel Mackey’s
Song of the Andoumboulou and “Mu,” their continued attempt to recover place and self via song
ancestral song. These books help fill the void left by the erasure via a white literary canon. They
give voice, and thus, agency, to othered communities whose stories are so often dismissed. Other
voices of inspiration include Evie Shockley, Warsan Shire, Tracy K. Smith, A. Van Jordan, Gary
Jackson, and many, many more. These, contemporary voices in harmony with James Baldwin,
Alice Walker, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton…the list is long. The voices many. As LaBelle says,
“Singing brings us explicitly into the realm of the spiritual, the theological, and the metaphysical;
in short, into the rituals of transcendence, as well as that of sharing” (Lexicon of the Mouth 51).
My hope is that this text takes up the defense of language so eloquently laid out by scholars
and intellectuals like LaBelle and Baldwin, that the language here can be said to reveal its
speakers, define (a Black) reality, to, out of necessity, “confront life, in order, not inconceivably,
to outwit [Black] death” (Baldwin). Let this play be, among many things, a prayer, and the
biggest house party my ancestors have ever seen in this or the world beyond.
82
References

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1973.
Berryman, John. 77 Dream Songs. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014.
“The Crows.” Disney Wiki, disney.fandom.com/wiki/The_Crows#Jim%20Crow.
Gomez, Michael A. “I Seen Folks Dissappeah.” Exchanging Our Country Marks The
Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South, University of
North Carolina Press, 1997, pp. 114–153.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of
Minnesota Press, 2011.
Hurston, Zora Neale, and Herbert Halpert. “Crow Dance (Mama Come See Dat Crow).” Library
of Congress: Audio Recordings, Congress.gov, 1939,
www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.6938.
---. Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings: Mules and Men, Tell My Horse, Dust Tracks on a
Road, Selected Articles. Library of America, 1995.
Joyner, Charles W. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes.
University of Georgia Press, 1986.
LaBelle, Brandon. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary.
Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Lowell, Robert. “The Poetry of John Berryman.” The New York Times Review of Books, vol. 2,
no. 8, 28 May 1964. The New York Review of Books, www-nybooks-
com.libproxy2.usc.edu/issues/.
83
Meek, C. K., and E. J. Arnett. “Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe. A Study in Indirect
Rule.” Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 37, no. 146, Jan. 1938, pp. 115–118.
Njoku, John E. Eberegbulam. A Dictionary of Igbo Names, Culture and Proverbs. University
Press of America, 1978.
Riggs, Marlon. “Ethnic Notions.” Transcript: Ethnic Notions, California Newsreel,
newsreel.org/transcripts/ethnicno.htm.
Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American
Animation. Duke University Press, 2016.
Taylor, Yuval, and Jake Austen. Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip Hop.
W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Wainer, Alex. “Reversal of Roles: Subversion and Reaffirmation of Racial Stereotypes in
Dumbo and The Jungle Book.” Scholarly Essays - Jim Crow Museum , Ferris State
University, www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/links/essays/reversal.htm.

84

Welcome to the Coon Show

85
Welcome to the Coon Show---Contents

The Choir Sings as Porky Pig Sits Next to a Boy in the Street.....................................................86

The Coon Show: Act I...................................................................................................................88
SCENE I........................................................................................................................................89
SCENE II..................................................... .................................................................................90
Phat Crow Explains Black Living to Henry Pussy-Cat.................................................................91
SCENE III......................................................................................................................................94
Glasses Crow on Fiat Money.........................................................................................................95
Straw Hat Talking Race Over a Slice of Watermelon ..................................................................96
Straw Hat Crow Singing with the Minstrels..................................................................................97
SCENE IV......................................................................................................................................98
Preacher Crow’s Sermon on the Ark of Bones..............................................................................99
SCENE V.....................................................................................................................................101
Jim Crow’s Dirge.........................................................................................................................102
SCENE VI....................................................................................................................................105
Phat Crow IN WHITE HEAVEN DRINKING FROM THE AYEM CEMANI.........................106
Glasses Crow Puts on His White Voice to Say Some Professional Negro Shit..........................107

Olio..............................................................................................................................................109
Moon Crickets..............................................................................................................................110

The Coon Show: Act III...............................................................................................................115
SCENE I.......................................................................................................................................116
SCENE II.....................................................................................................................................117
SCENE III....................................................................................................................................118
Glasses Crow Has a Vision..........................................................................................................119
SCENE IV....................................................................................................................................120
SCENE V.....................................................................................................................................121
Glasses Crow Has a Second Vision.............................................................................................122
Glasses Crow Has a Third Vision................................................................................................123
SCENE VI....................................................................................................................................125
Glasses Crow’s Recounting of Being (Filled with the Spirit).....................................................126

86

The Choir Sings as Porky Pig Sits Next to a Boy in the Street

and eats lunch from a picnic
basket on a checkered blanket
the color of the nigger’s blood.

The neighborhood watch volunteer made sure
a boy is just a body now.

The scattered crows return
and bow their heads
not to pray thanks for this meal. No,

they won’t take the body’s flesh into their beaks,
nor lick the crusted wounds,

but the pig cleans his entire face with his tongue
until all evidence of bread crumbs is gone.

That’s all, folks.

He who who grows tired of cliché’s
should avoid ‘30’s cartoons and the evening news.

No Jail Time For Cop Who Shot Unarmed Black Man

Operation Ghetto Storm.

Another Unarmed Black Teen Shot and Killed…

Every gun is a toy

—all the dead boys are pretending.
the bullets are crazed canines.

Freeze

while the articulated ham exits the scene

to sell his gun
to the highest bidder,

tell the media the Guggenheim
wants to place it behind glass preserve it
like a mother’s memory of her only son.
87

The murder lifts the boy.
The murder buries the body
beneath the Echo Tree.

Pretend this show is not a rerun,
that we aren’t shot for syndication,
another cartoon in which the dead won’t stay.

Come back.

Say it three times
loud as gunshots.

Boy. Boy. Boy.

88

The Coon Show: Act I

89
SCENE I

[cue thunder]

[raise curtain]

(The wave comes down with the weight of a breaking nation. This is so
because there is nothing before or after—the first noise,
a mountain of chained birds, which is to say wailing
which is to say singing, which is to say being beaten, or filled
with spirits who take their pain like)

[lightning]
(thieves with white faces
Pilfering—)

[thunder]

(The water dumps corpses onto the stage illuminated feathers make their passage
from the fly loft. In the dark the audience is absence, the color: nothing
reflecting feathers, feathers falling into absence.)

[cue Grande Drapes]

[lights]

(The not-yet-dead tunnel through the remains and crawl downstage.
They have survived, and so, broken and naked
hunt for new life. In the sand one finds a pair of glasses, another
a topless straw hat and loincloth.)

[thunder]

(They fly off in every direction).

90
SCENE II

(The white folks feed the black bird
until she can’t fly. They gift her a vest and
hat to make her feel civilized. They gift her corn
meal after meal, and sometimes the leftover hog.

They gift her sugar, too, tell her
if she doesn’t keep picking in the field
they’ll string her up in the elm
with the other dead.

The white folks name her Phat Crow,
and though she can’t fly she can make a cloud
of dust—is gone by dawn.)

91
Phat Crow Explains Black Living to Henry Pussy-Cat

honey dusk do sprawl sir bones dem white faces powdered clownish when they find out next
time we died a white woman’s lips nipped da tip of our tongue inhaled strong all da water
from da Atlantic gulped the splintered ships da splintered bodies n manilla from the moisture in
our cells gasped so strong muscle n bone slid from our buzzin sack of gelatin feathers she
munched our fibula n clavicle picked her teeth with our phalanges n when we was a
puddle on the grass thinkin dis love her brothers came to bleed oil from mah brothas nuts thats
when we learned to whistle whistle loud enough n under a microscope you see our cells
weepin buck broken n drowned n drugged n drug behind trucks n horses _____cartoon
deaths______ wet cells n spurned crispy cells wit rope burns round they adenin n thymin cells
like bullet holes n brow booty holes n cells wit names sandra bland n jim crow cells fuming
wit da swamps of st. simmons georgia wit da bones n da sewage from da plant built in spite of da
bones next to it cells where they chalk outlines of nameless darkies shakin every time a pig
in a hat waltz by these cells wit tiny chicks n niggas stuffed inside they center correctional
facility fo broken spirits who knows sellin drugs is just sellin faith trades hands like dollahs dirty
dirty niggas faces dirty niggas records we is our own shine...be endless in our juke n jive

92
wear blackface cause we
gotta lay on high school
floors wit our wrists taped
n white children standin on
our spine gotta approach
on our knees round the
governor wife who feed us
raw cotton wit her tongue
we her baby bird we choke
on da cotton n die thinkin
the gold in our grills is
worth more’n our bodies
93

da first time we died hangin from a tree we was there to scare away da others
protect da things man covets more n life we was there picked clean by da sons
right there in da open where dey prayed we was there while dey made service

da first time we died hanging fo free we was there to scare away da mothers
protect da things man covets more n life we was there picked clean by they guns
right deah in da open where they play we was there while they made burgers

da first time we died slangin a key we was there to scare away da drug lovahs
protect da green man covets more n life we was there stripped teens fo they sons
right there in da open where they prayed we was there while they made murdah

da first time we died laying in da street we was there to bear witness
savor da lean more n life itself this blood we was there torn bare servin up
our rights there in da open where dey fucked us we was there
in the sunday son

we knew da tree its sadness its yellow eyes n fosillized pale sap leaves spun in da air round
us we knew we was heavy we knew da tree must be tired oh oh oh tired of holding on we
thought its fingers might snap when da fire eat its way up da rope but it aint flinch it aint cry
some white children tears da boys bet dey never heard whoopin like ours never smealt
burnin flaps or seen black skin crack n pus

we watched da choir gather shadows wit yellow teeth like boils onna frog like a fog da
shadow bulged barkin ninny faces in a thunder cloud dats how we died in a Gucci sweater
snow adidas wit a dead choir singin n a fat fire gobblin up our nappy ass hair

94
SCENE III

(Straw Hat and his brother Glasses Crow
whistle at every white woman in the city.
And the women giggle. And the crows whistle.

And then they find a brother in the street,
unmoving, with a line of chalk,
whiter than the woman, around him.
And the white men giggle. And the crows caw.

The white men pluck the brother’s plumage,
unzip the skin, remove the blue-black
boy curled inside. His talon-less feet.
His smooth, beak-less face. His beautiful,
wing-less limbs. Straw Hat and Glasses
dance around the chalk drawing for days.
And the white men leave the brother’s skin
in the streets. And the crows take his bones
to rest.)

95
Glasses Crow on Fiat Money

You’d think there’s more copper in a black man
blood than in a penny—every time they shoot a nigga
dollar signs spring from his back don’t matter
whose face they print on bills dead is dead money ain’t
nothing not even time watches
tick till arms get tired—
that’s a heartbeat not a slot machine
we all assigned worth
armed pieces dipped in gold
fiat niggers
they lynchin’ us
wit our own braids
while a nigga body still warm
they cover it in hundreds say it rained
po-pos pack our cheeks
with change
96
Straw Hat Talking Race Over a Slice of Watermelon

Ain’t no use talking from now 'til noon don't try to tell me
Big Mammy wasn’t the white man’s boon
she used to breast feed his babies them white-rice-
turn-into-sugar-an’-kill-yah-type babies I call their daddies
crackers ‘cause the noise of the whip
they could suck the milk from a pickaninny’s tit

but couldn’t share no water fountains
negro girl Ellen three years old sold for $200
down in Perry County
grew up pickin’ seeds from a melon jus’ like dis here

singin’: “he lubs me—he lubs me not”

y’all know rose petals the same as inside a melon
rose petals the same as inside our kin

wake up
y’all dreamin’ with no eyes

Ada’s singin’ bout some coon coon coon

on the moon.

97
Straw Hat Crow Singing with the Minstrels

CHOIR
I feel, I feel, I feel

Straw Hat
the angels pouring grape drank
down upon this nigga head.

CHOIR
I feel like a star;

Straw Hat
nappy feathers blinding.
If I sleep in the sun this nigga knows,

If I sleep in the sun this nigger knows,
If I sleep in the sun this nigga knows

a moon cricket grows from the center
of a concrete rose.

Whenever this nigga goes
to sleep he must
cover up his heart with the tarp of unsurrender.

CHOIR
I feel, I feel, I feel

Straw Hat
the gospel of my browness:
Black cherumbs cherry picking—

painting portraits of Baldwin
playing Justin Holland on wax.

In the sky a thousand babies—white children
without wings.
98

SCENE IV

(Preacher Crow watches the spirit house,
but he never sees any spirits. He listens
to the pastor reading to the ghost-faced
people from sliced tree bark. He listens
to the singing and he wonders why

the people have no soul. He thinks sometimes
the growling of the sky is the voice of god.
But when the clouds roil and pop
like tar bubbles it doesn’t end in revelation.
Released rain seems, to Preacher Crow, to be
the opposite of possession. An exorcism.

The pastor says

the white man hanging from the tree
is holy, a symbol. Preacher Crow can’t read

but he knows a liar when he sees him.)

99
Preacher Crow’s Sermon on the Ark of Bones

when we leave we all
headed for that Glory Boat
but we ain’t gotta go easy

the waters is hungry
so is the men who brought us

here in the early days
they licked sweat
from our chins

to know our age
and who was strong
so now yo dna remembers
the weight of cotton

just the same
the seed remembers
the discomfort of its boll

don’t let them paper gods turn you
into no fistulated coon praise

the red doves liftin from yo grandfather’s father’s back
as the whips chewed through praise

the red doves tumbling from the torsos—the bodies
fetishisized as they drained

pack yo heart to the brim with hot tar
all yo scars retain the tears of black folks
with troubled souls listen to them

moanin out on the river sista Bland
brotha Till
brotha Byrd Jr
brotha Rice

the brotha Dumas—who said it best

the people get tired of dying

pack the fragile bones of faith prepare for the ritual
100
move from the apartment of yo skin

no more police tape sliced watermelon or cocaine

planted round on or inside our bodies

when the ark returns yo feet’ll remember
praise cabins they’ll guide yo soul to the bonehouse

come join me on the soulboat
where ain’t nothin to lose
but them chains

101
SCENE V

(First the white men tell Jim Crow to stay away
from the drinking fountains. Then the food.
Their children. Their wives.

The white men make a law, say
Nigger Jim, you learn your place
we’ll give you the basketball, the whip, chains
the crack pipe, a noose.

WHITE MEN
Jump, Nigga Jim! Jump!
That’s what animals do when they’re scared.

(The white men forgot
Jim can fly).

102

Jim Crow’s Dirge
-After Mark Antony

niggas brothas sistas
from other mothas

lend me your ears the evil gods
do live on the backs of men tonight

we spill cognac on the dead—
booze over drum beats no shoes

let me say:

i do believe ya’ll is honorable men i do believe

ya’ll understand i come to bury this
watermelon you see

not to raise it i do though praise them
Igbo usurped that slave ship

over near Georgia
made the white men jump right from the bow

i done seen a house fly
from the fight cloud of smoke

muskets’ muzzle burning crosses— i be done
seen about everything after that
Fat Crow say

them Igbo washed up in Saint Simons
then the slavers come
for their dough the Igbo man

they walked into the swamp
they went by choice

Glasses Straw Hat
Preacher Fat

we felt the cypress sigh let us go
the Igbo flew that way

money in the wind
103
that kind of freedom

kind that let’s me whistle
at every woman i see white
let’s me shake

my stanky leg in church and at festivals

and birthday parties bear with me ya’ll

my heart in the cotton field
my coffin the shimmying ghetto

i ain’t shivering inside

police search lights crack

pavement eye of chimera
the way it comes down on you—

that white

after the club

when the ground surrenders
Hennessey

then comes the wave

all there is
this here world—
all there is—

sun flaring
they walked into the swamp

they went by choice
burning effigies

belly full of spinner kibbles

start drinking when the bodies wash up
rain from the sky

until the water is sable
until the water is uh—
104
that feathered wave we

climb over our dead during

the break friends dig your beak
into the present
and don’t let go
don’t go

too far out in raw waters
the wave so big

ain’t yo story to tell but ya’ll honorable

men ya’ll swallow
your expectations like the skull

of a week-old fox or eagle egg—

stuck in the throat
arrested

105
SCENE VI

(Police pull up to the BBQ
at the Whitney Plantation
in a black and white Caddilac with American flags
lighting the night. The crows have rebuilt a slave
ship, where they are having a plantation-house party.

They are wheeling to Juvenile’s “Back That Azz Up.”

The call was not for a complaint. The call was
a request. The pigs smoke Phat Crow on sight. Smoke
his joints. Leave the other birds to pick up the mess)

106
Phat Crow IN WHITE HEAVEN DRINKING FROM THE AYEM CEMANI

white hands deliver us a bib snipped confederate flag n snifter purple blood poured
from necks sable chickens on da rocks every niggette n bird be da same every golliwog n
pickaninny shamed n named precious jazmine jemima madea rekia gakirah tanisha yvette—
we eat our fam black beak soot bones memories wash em down
wit continental gulps they ain’t make us no heaven white hands deliver us
glocks to drill our own become a hitta or get hit cyber-bang or get banged in da
windy city our chest jaw leg n neck whistling dixie land seventeen slugs in em no
morgue stuff seventeen thugs in em three-headed darwin in his masculine descent
towards a single cell say a black life aint worth a ham sandwich the choir is my gang open
mouths our only intiation affliated with hoodlums n hood-slums i know i know
there be two gods up here

one way whiter than da other hatin his enemies havin all da weapons
but what loves the niggas and speaks nigga? dey must exist too
or am i out of my cotton pickin’ mind?

107
Glasses Crow Puts on His White Voice to Say Some Professional Negro Shit

1. There is a boy who needs to speak, but his mouth is stuffed with a flag. I use both hands
and help tug it out. It’s longer than you’d expect and real work; the boy is clearly in pain. When
the flag is out the boy smiles and I can see that his teeth are not teeth. His gums are stuffed with
pills. He grinds them to dust—he is trying to tell me something about being.

Every time a white man dresses in blackface a crow unzips itself and a black baby falls out.
Every day Mickey Mouse puts on his gloves a white man grows wings. A Virginia governor’s
college year book went national with a photo of a man in Klan robe and another in blackface.
The governor swore it wasn’t his after claiming it was his. He swore it wasn’t because he
remembered another time he wore blackface as Michael Jackson. Recap: a white man in power
dressed as a black man who looked like a white man and maybe molested white children.
Blackface? Whiteface? When questioned about this, my mother says it doesn’t matter—it’s
about what he does for black people now, not what he did in college. I take a pill every time a
black mother cries on the news. I smoke a joint every time another anchor says the cop who
killed me will walk away. Every black baby on this boat is named Jim Crow.

Scholar W.T. Lhamon says that Thomas Rice—the “first Jim Crow”— was really subversive.
That because his retelling of Othello left Desdemona alive and with a negro offspring, Rice was
saying to his white audience what Black folk wanted to but couldn’t. He disarmed audiences
with his mask—how foolish the negro Jim Crow looks! But at his heart he’s not a crow or a
nigger! This white man can speak AND he can jump (Jim Crow!).

Have I lost my words? I have. I am a black man in an eggshell world. I am a black man in a
world made for pearls. And have I lost my nerve? I have. I am a black man afraid to love ghosts,
afraid of what they carry in their mouths their jaws full of sharp red grass.

And if you look to your left, just near the trees you’ll see a black woman leaping from a garret
window. She does this every day. Forever. Each morning the white man tells her she’s been sold,
she and her children are going to Georgia, but she can’t say goodbye to her husband because,
well, she’s a fucking slave and niggers don’t get the luxury of farewells. So each night she
launches from the window. She cannot die. Spends days in the air, held in the arc of the sky,
given nothing. Let’s write a version where she floats her Merry Poppins best down the street. In
this version you can sing your children back into your womb and she does; they crawl out into
the sky and pack themselves back into her stomach. There’s space for them all here. Here all
black women’s singing can raise the dead.

108
2. There is a mosque in my throat. A skinhead appears and reads from his manifesto. It is
long. As he reads other white nationalists gather to hear. We are smashed into this boat-turned-
praise cabin. White bodies pile in through the door, spill over and consume the pews. White
bodies spill in through the windows and come up through the floorboards like trolls. There is a
mosque in my throat. There are red hats inside of every book in this praise cabin-turned-church. I
know this. The skinhead reads from his manifesto: Long live the peach-faced god of disillusion—
if you wash yourself in the river of dark and blood, if you exfoliate the chambers of your heart in
the river of dark and blood, if you purify your race in the river of dark money and piss you can
press into him, become him. I listen to every word and when he is done he opens my mouth and
says "there is a church in your throat." It's a praise cabin, turned.

It doesn't matter. He climbs inside.

My heart doesn't break. It bursts. It regenerates. It bursts again.

It is a forest, my heart. And It is Black. And in that forest the trees bear fruit that look like Aunt
Jemima statues. Correction: the trees are Aunt Jemima statues. My heart is Black. It is a forest.
And in that forest the trees don’t grow.

109

Olio

110
Moon Crickets

1. “Drop the Chocolate Drop” (Buck Breaking)
[setting: 19th century carnival.]

(The white man gathers his slaves around a tree-stump.
He makes them watch as he bullwhips Fat Crow
until his feathers are gone, his legs and back
weak and bloodied. As he is bent over the stump,
Fat Crow sees his son at the front of the crowd
and the chick watches as the white man lowers his britches
and takes the crow from behind.

When the deed is done, Fat is paraded around the stump,
his asshole leaking, his pride smeared along his thighs,
the trunk of the oak tree weeing its slow, thick sap—)

CHOIR
Oh, what a thing.
111
2. “Hit the Coon”

(The white man sneaks into the field where the niggers are sleeping;
He sneaks into the spirit house; finds a slave girl holding her baby
he slips the niglette from her arms; replaces it with a chicken;
the chicken, large-eyed and confused—questions marks
Big Bang into existence around its head.

The white man hog-ties the child and heads to the river; finds
the deepest bed and tosses in his bait. Minutes later he feels
a tug on his rope. The nigger baby explodes
from the water, its infant legs mimicking a run in midair.
An alligator snaps the baby up in one bite
and the white man wrestles in his catch.

He shoots the gator between the eyes with a Remington.
With the baby still in the throat he rolls the gator
over and guts it for dinner.)

112
3. Old Point Comfort

(The white folks come on a Sunday. The picnic is
just next to the church. They lay out blankets—
always scarlet—and bring their children, the Pig,
and Sam, who twirls his mustache.

When the thing is done, each family takes
a souvenir: one clips a talon, another the tongue,
scorched beak, penis, eyes, testicles, a name.)

113
4. “Hit the Nigger Baby”

(In the corner of the field Glasses Crow is lynching a Klansman.
He has unzipped himself. His muscled and glistening self.

This is not hate.
He is posing for a moment.
He is pausing for a picture.)

114
5. The Gold Dust Twins
[enter Goldy and Dusty, nigger twins]

(Two niggers in their tutus in a bathtub
filled with washing powder, bubbles
piling up until pink lips, beady eyes,
and black toes grow. Dusty and Goldy
take turns scrubbing one another’s back
with a bristle brush until their skin is bloody.)

GOLDY
We ain’t yet white nuff.

DUSTY
Just keep oooon scrubbin!

115

The Coon Show: Act III

116
SCENE I

(raise curtain)

CHOIR
The mind is this beach—

Take this stage and fill it. The body,
a robe swaddling the fistful of atoms
that make us. It is enough.

(stage left: enter the angel
Azrael, leading a string of men,
pants sagging)

117
SCENE II

(This wind

[cue wind]

can take a man’s head
off. The dunes are heaps
of bullets—what the water returns.

*

All night Preacher Crow goes on
moaning and yelling, filling with the spirit
of things unnamable. The moon slices
through purple clouds to hear gold
teeth pushing away from receding gums.)

CHOIR
It aches still, to know the ocean is not ignorable.

(The sand, for now, just sand, the ocean
a waving field of poppies
beneath which black and blacker flow
and flow. Along
this beach is the mind
coming to terms with the stage—
the stage, like everything,
momentary, cherishable
because it is so. All night,

the deep cries dragging themselves to dry land—)

118
SCENE III

(Glasses Crow flies out. Three days go by.
He returns. He fell into the eye of his Orisha—
the peacock, deep into the sun.

And Jim Crow drives his Cadillac
back and forth along the beach.
He sells crack from his Cadillac. Once

his Cadillac is swallowed by sand
but the ocean is not ignorable,

the beach large. Larger
than the sista they named Phat
Crow, who lays open and staring
through the collard greens,
through insulin induced dreams,

chanting, There. There.
There. There.

[dim lights]

All night Preacher Crow yells.

PREACHER CROW
You ain’t never seen no elephants fly.

*

OCEAN
There is no room for elephants.

119
Glasses Crow Has a Vision

Sistas I flew forever so far out
the whole of life was just sea no land
in any corner of the universe See G
I crossed over into whatever
heaven used to be

a scribble of chalky clouds Hell
that’s what awaits you covfefe

at last my bones denied me I fell
exhausted onto the shoulders of the of the sea
I rode on the bottle-shaped faces of demons
floated by the white-gloved palms of demons

Sistas I saw cannibal gods

I saw two angels with flaming swords
guarding the edge of the world
sexless as freedom

listen sistas the world ended

with a poof of lemongrass
and lard
at Old Point Comfort where the clouds flake away as purple corn flour

boats so many boats
full of darkies that look like me and you
men in white sheets plucking their feathers
unzipping their bodies
discarding them overboard
like bags of honeysuckle tea
I thought I could make it back home

but there ain’t no home

120
SCENE IV

(And overhead flaps a drone
casting the shadow of a woman
carrying a torch—like a flag,
the tips of the fire waving.)

CHOIR
We will cut down our own
bodies from trees. We will cut down
our own.

[cue horns] [cue laugh track]

[applause]

121
SCENE V

(Deep in the forest Preacher finds trees
the white man stripped to make his papyrus, his spirit
house, pews, so called good book, and crosses. The brooke
coughs dry and Preacher thinks it too is made
by talcum hands, is suddenly afraid to have them—
those hands. Those hands he followed into the wood
like a trail of candy skulls each placed
with calculation. Deep in the magic forest
Preacher finds everything dipped in dark
holiness. He feels the tip of a word, like a pen,
suddenly. There is a mouse. There is a dog,
Suddenly there is language to explain
what is severed from the wrist)

122
Glasses Crow Has a Second Vision

I was in a church a black church with shoe polish walls

and pulpy like inside a throat,
I was wadin’ in water or wine or blood

I was in a church
I was wading’ in blood-wine water

I knew set free
my mind set free a tobacco leaf
leaf of scripture
smokin’ flag
on the beach dotted with monks
shamans spirit women

medicine men gazing into water like it was tellin ‘em it wasn’t
a swell of corpses elephant corpses red -sprouting -carnations -corpses

gold star- speckled skin floppy-eared one was

wearin a yellah tip point hat a clown ruffle ‘round his neck

eagles with beaks full of trash bellies split and spillin’

dollah bills washin’ up to the pulpit y’all it was madness

behind that pulpit a stained window where the sun was burnin’ a hole in the sky
like money burns a hole in a nigga’s pocket

123
Glasses Crow Has a Third Vision

A voice said the Big Man dead
you free set free
my mind set free on a lotus petal
leaf of scripture
burnin’ flag
on that beach dotted with chocolate
this mind a spirit women
in dookie braids

*

unlockin’ a gate

above on the other side Uncle Tom
the sun a mirrored pupil
his eyes took up the sky
his hands held a lion’s skull
a knife a lily a sand timer
a snake a nuke a bell
I swear

he had ten thousand arms I swear

he had a thousand faces
all of ‘em Southern
Sugar Plantation stereotype
swollen-pink-lipped and nappy-headed
‘round the sides bald on top faces

he started singin’ first a single head then others, singin’

“Oh, Jim Crow’s come to town
as you all must know,
an’ he wheel about, he turn about,
he do jis so,
an’ ebery time he wheel about
he jump Jim Crow.”

voices harsh harmonized saltier than soul food
in each mouth three moons pregnant-round
chocolate spirit women

124
bleating in tongues beating their breasts

I cried man
I joined in

125
SCENE VI

(Jim likes the heat and thinks the voice of the fire
might be a woman’s. It should, he thinks,
because only a woman’s love can be this warm.

But the spirit of the forest is sour. The circle
is not made of brothers. No brother’s heart
is so curdled he could burn his own. Even now
the white folks can’t look at who they kill
without hiding under blankets
like bleached animal skins they’re burning
the trees they touch and calling it magic. Singing
about the fire. How it strangles life from the body,
breaks the body back into atoms
where there are no fingerprints there is no crime)

126
Glasses Crow’s Recounting of Being (Filled with the Spirit)

My brothas I swear I saw two
angels guarding the gates to the hood
el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz with his burner
Huey Freeman his flame & sword

*

liberty my brothas the world ends with liberty
a POOF of lemongrass
from a salpinx
prophecy of bell & mouthpiece of bone—what I saw
dwelling in the house of Elegba:

*

hail-fire & blood roasting of trees of grass
moldering mulberry then umber & ebony

beneath the bare feet of comedians
clutching the heads of politicians
wandering the viscera of churches

I witnessed Uncle Tom & Uncle Sam

sharing bowls of greens fingers stained
with the juice & pulp democracy—
Alice Coltrane at the alter
braiding the devil’s beard

*

We are said Gwendolyn each other’s harvest

*

CHOIR
Till ... Till ... Till ...

&
Black children in the pews harmonizing
bridges over troubled water

127
Shoe polish & tar walls hotter than the roof
of a white man’s mouth

Hotter than the mouth
of a white man’s gun

hot as the potato of this race—war
for our spirit
this stolen land

*

My brothas I swear I saw
a governor in Blackface moonwalking through pews
feet squeaking through the blood of Katrina victims.

*

I felt a whoop comin on but I swallowed it

when The Mother touched me
when the preachers passed by
carrying their own eyeballs in their palms

chanting
Behold the Invisible!
Thy will be done O Lord!
I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all.

*
One whispered to me

CHOIR
You shall see the unknown wonders.

[So] I followed them into the rain
where Black mothers were kneeling
on the lawn of the white house

a second line blaring Dixie in the distance oh,

what must the lawn have been thinking feeling
spilled wine from the senators’ skull cups

128
*

My brothas I swear eyes
opened in the earth

newborn[s] deities in new coupes
fresh ice chains & Adidas—all white

our gods pulled knives & disemboweled each other

stretched their entrails across the lawn to the mouth of the white house

the leader waiting with his double helix crown osseous tissue [bone
drone]

&
he levitated over the garnet rug feet above everyone
forked tongue preening baby fingers
negligent to the confederate toilet paper clutching his shoe

&

as he passed the mothers he licked each one on the forehead

*
Oh, brothas
I'm choking on the spirit
I feel it fiddlin through the vinyl
records of my heart crate

I swear I swear

129

CHOIR
Om shanti shanti
Om shanti shanti
Om shanti shanti shanti shanti

[curtains]
[applause]

130
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Asset Metadata

Creator Booth, Dexter L. (author)

Core Title The Flying ________. [critical dissertation]; &, Welcome to the Coon Show [creative dissertation]

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 08/02/2020

Defense Date 04/22/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Africa,African,blackness,Buzzard Lope,Crow,Drums and Shadows,Dumbo,Ebos,Federal Writers' Project,Igbo,Igbo Landing,Jim Crow,Jump Jim Crow,minstrelsy,Nigeria,OAI-PMH Harvest,St. Simons,The Flying Africans,Thomas Rice

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Smith, Bruce R. (committee chair), St. John, David (committee chair), Irwin, Mark (committee member), McCabe, Susan (committee member), Ticheli, Frank (committee member)

Creator Email dbooth@usc.edu,dexterlbooth@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-357423

Unique identifier UC11666171

Identifier etd-BoothDexte-8871.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-357423 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BoothDexte-8871.pdf

Dmrecord 357423

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Booth, Dexter L.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA