The Making of African America (5 page)

The notion of
rootedness
instead speaks to attachments—personal and material—within a defined geographic frame. Douglass was never “pegged down” on the Lloyds' Great House Farm. When he—like others—spoke of his local connections, he was referring to the people—family and friends—as much as the landscape of a special piece of Maryland's eastern shore. That was Douglass's place, where generations of his family had resided, in which he seized his manhood in the epic battle with the slave breaker Covey, and to which he returned as a free man and international celebrity.

After the war, former slaves' attachment to place manifested itself in a desire for land, the legendary forty acres. The quest for land had many meanings, but few former slaves coveted mere real estate. While they appreciated the independence that land ownership might bring, land ownership was as much a matter of social identity—and the multiple personal relations that entails—as of political economy, for the land they wanted also spoke to deep emotional investments. Often it was the land they had long resided and worked. Sometimes, as a group of former slaves declared, it was “land they had laid their father's bones upon.” As one Union officer observed in 1862, “Never was there a people ... more attached to familiar places than they.”
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The former slaves' “love of locality” or what yet another federal agent called their “local attachments” resonated in the twentieth century. Reflecting on her youth in Knoxville, Tennessee, poet Nikki Giovanni insisted that it was “a place where no matter what, I belong.” Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who as a young woman integrated the University of Georgia, wrote fondly of her Southern home in a memoir she appropriately named
In My Place.
Amid her biographical account of the ugly confrontations with the segregationist educators and epithet-wielding fellow students, Hunter-Gault lovingly recalled the “evocative sights, sounds, and smells of my small-town childhood, the almost overpowering sweet smell of honeysuckle and banana shrub seducing buzzing bumblebees and yellow jackets; the screeching cries of crickets emanating from every shrub and bush; clouds of black starlings producing shadows wherever they flew over the dusty red-clay haze. This was the part of the South that I loved, that made me happy to be a Southerner, that left me unaffected by the seamier side....” “I do believe,” echoed Maya Angelou, putting a point on Hunter-Gault's confession, “once a Southerner, always a Southerner.”
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But if some loved the Southern countryside, others developed equally powerful connections to the gritty cities of the North. Jacob Lawrence, whose work captured the very essence of the twentieth-century abandonment of the South, recalled, “I lived in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem. My life was in the Harlem community.”
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The allegiances dueled, as yet other refugees from the former slave states held firm to the belief that the South was their place. It was a sensibility articulated by thousands of African Americans who fled north and then, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, returned to the place of their nativity. “Black people are Southerners,” emphasized journalist Fred Powledge. “They are of and by and from and for the South ... and have repeatedly demonstrated ... their love for and faith in the region.”
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Some suggested that the connection of black people to the South was even an essential element in their nature, going so far as to deny the possibility of transplantation. “The Negro has never been a wanderer,” asserted an officer of the Colored Organization of New Jersey on the eve of the exodus from the South. “Fixed ties have ever held for him attractions that have outshone opportunities that lie elsewhere.”
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In the 1970s, when the third great migration that carried some six million black people from the South to the North had run its course and a counterflow to the South from the North began, economists and sociologists affirmed that migrants and their children and grandchildren remained “strongly tied to historic homeplaces.” Many of these ties were those of memories that represented “the intense value put on place and landownership, a value,” as noted in a close study of one particular returned migrant, “widely-shared among her generation.” Even migrants who had been born in the North felt the pull. They were not returning to their childhood roots, but to roots nurtured through the lives of others augmented by extended family visits, reunions, and family obligations. Still others tied “their homeplace” to their marital connections or simply to the force of belief.
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Of course the South was not a single place any more than black Southerners were a single people. The South that Maya Angelou remembered differed from that of Fred Powledge, and Powledge from that of Nikki Giovanni. Their Souths were products of particular geographies and chronologies. What Angelou and others have called “the South”—as in “once a Southerner, always a Southerner”—was reified, frozen in time and in imagination as somehow “the” authentic South. The contending, opposing cultures that continually made and remade Southern society were reduced to a catchall.
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Much the same would be done for Africa.

While some understood connections to place in essentialist terms, for others
place
had much more prosaic meanings, for it drew upon routines repeated so often that they proceeded without explanation, responsibilities taken without request, and favors exchanged without question. But as a wellspring of solidarity, place also defined the grounds of suspicion; while it embraced some, it excluded others. In drawing the boundaries of community, place defined kinship in the largest sense, creating—for example—a reverence for ancestors never known, whose remains stained ground that had never been seen and whose specters remained a presence long after breath had left their bodies. Over the centuries, African Americans have held reunions that drew thousands, and the constructed genealogies reached back across the Atlantic.
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Upon exiting his native Mississippi, Richard Wright voiced the sentiment of many other migrants, declaring he could “never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South.”
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Place had such a powerful pull that its magnetic force drew in those who had never actually experienced it. Piri Thomas, man of dark-skin and Puerto Rican and Cuban descent growing up in Spanish Harlem felt compelled to visit the South as a way to explore and understand the meaning of his own blackness. A Southern-born friend encouraged him to do so, saying, “It's damn hard leaving the South and harder still goin' back to it. But now that it's come down to it, I'd like to see what's shakin' home.” What drew Piri Thomas to the South likewise annually sends perhaps thousands of African Americans back to Africa, a journey that sometimes confirms a connection to Africa, but at other times leads to profound disillusionment.
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Of course no one really ever lived
only
in Africa or
only
in the South, just as they never lived
only
in the North or in Chicago. Rather black Southerners were more the product of neighborhoods, well-defined geographic spaces that were bound together by family ties, work patterns, and political alliances, as well as by the peculiarities of the natural and built environments. In such places, men and women knew one another and knew one another's kin and near kin, their religious affiliations, their political ties, and even their dogs. Intimacy made for belonging.
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Yet the migrants' embrace of place was also uneasy, tentative, and often probationary, for there was that other place—sometimes half remembered, sometimes totally unknown, and sometimes constructed from the whole cloth—that also commanded allegiance. That distant place was the land of fathers and mothers, grandparents, and ancestry from time immemorial; it was a land of celebrated giants, of men and women of legendary strength and penetrating wit, whose wealth was uncounted, whose deeds were great and whose character was unimpeachable.
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There, life had been lived to its fullest, free of the weight of subordination and the sting of condescension. Immigrants and often their children thus looked backward as well as forward, formulating their identities and drawing strength from who they once were (or thought they were) as well as who they would become.

Self—individual and collective—was constantly being constructed between movement and place. Black people—as opposed to Angolans, Igbos, and Mandes—discovered their common Africanness had become a race on the western shore of the Atlantic. In much the same manner, African Americans hustled from the seaboard to the interior came to recognize their Virginian or South Carolinian origins in Mississippi, so black Georgians and Mississippians became Southerners in the cities of the North and ancestral places like Barbados and Jamaica, Ghana and Kenya came alive in twenty-first-century America. While the ligaments by which black people constructed their identity had been snapped in the process by which Africans became African Americans, the connections testify to the constant remaking of what had been and what would be. The old or the new might fail to be recognizable in these hybrids, as neither the rearview mirror of history nor the telescope of the future could capture the realities of the new mixtures.

Over the course of four centuries, the great migrations and the intervening periods of stability have created a culture in which physical movement has been both resisted and embraced and in which identification with place has been alternately espoused and disowned. If those on the move yearned for the stability of place, those chained to place—often literally so—wanted only to move. The great migrations or passages—from Africa to the New World (the Middle Passage); from the seaboard to the interior, or black belt (a second “Middle Passage”); from the rural South to the urban North (a third passage); and the global diaspora to American cities (a fourth passage)—provide critical markers in the formation and re-formation of the African American people.
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Each initiated a reconstruction of black life on new ground, creating new measures of cultural authenticity and new standards of cultural integrity. To be sure, the old ways were incorporated into the new, blending what once was with what would be, and creating an illusion of a seamless, unchanging cultural concord that reached back to antiquity. But not even the most powerful continuities could suppress the arrival of the new, as manifested in the most deeply held beliefs or the most transient fads. Thus, at various times, to be black meant to wear one's hair in an eel skin queue, to conk the kinks straight, to bush au naturel, to plait into tight braids, or to shave the pate clean.
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The neck-snapping discontinuities between change and stasis have drawn black people to their past and invested that past with enormous weight, even as they wrestled again with an ever-changing present. At times, such connections with the past have created nostalgic longing for the old country, the old homestead, or the old neighborhood by men and women who—by force or choice—had been uprooted. These themes—the necessity to make life anew and the yearnings for a barely remembered or wholly imagined past—remain the great constants of African American life, echoed in literature, politics, and certainly music. Antebellum colonizationists, post-Reconstruction Exodusters, early twentieth-century Garveyites, and late-twentieth-century street vendors, generation upon generation, articulated a desire to recall, revisit, and sometimes return to the ancestral homelands and reclaim an African, then a seaboard, and even a Southern zion. Such projections suggest why African Americans constructed new histories from the ur-narrative of King Buzzard, the egalitarian guarantee of the Declaration of Independence, the biblical promise of exodus, or the Afrocentric roots of civilization.
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Yet the force of change—the serial migrations and repeated cultural reconstructions—made it impossible to recoup the past fully, despite the powerful propensity to freeze identity at a single moment, sometimes defined by ancestry, ideology, or even body image. In truth, the old societies could never be fully reconstructed as they had been, as they were remembered, or even as they were imagined. Indeed, the great passages themselves transformed the old societies. They were felt as much by those left in the seaboard South after their children were sold away as those who remained in the black belt after their neighbors had gone north. The transatlantic slave trade remade black life on the west coast of Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; the internal slave trade again remade the settled seaboard South in the nineteenth century; and the movement to the urban North remade the rural South in the mid-twentieth century; and yet again the global diaspora has transformed blackness in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. No matter how strong the identification with the “old country,” the world that migrants had left was no more. Immigrants—whether forced or free—might some day return to the old country, but they could not go home.

But if the Old World could not be transferred to the New, it was never entirely forgotten. In making and remaking themselves—first as Africans, then as African Americans—over the course of some four hundred years, black people never turned their backs on the past. Rather, in successive iterations, they incorporated the past into their new selves, not in heroically remembering, but in drawing upon their experience often with a great sense of purpose.

The boundaries between movement and place and the resulting tension grew over time as immigrants faced the necessity of divesting themselves of portions of the past. While transnational languages—pidgins and creole tongues—might temporarily knit the past and the future together, the disjuncture was inevitable, if not for the immigrants themselves then certainly for their progeny.