by Bill Bryson
In fact, all evidence points in the opposite direction. It was because America had a base of low-wage, adaptable, unskilled labour that it was able to become an industrial powerhouse.43 For over half a century American business had freely exploited its foreign-born workers, paying them appalling wages, dismissing them wholesale if they agitated for better pay or conditions, and replacing them with new supplies of compliant immigrants when necessary, and now it was blaming them for being poor and alienated. It failed to note that those who turned to crime or sought relief were only a small part of the immigrant whole, and that most were in fact loyal, productive, law-abiding citizens.
Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just towards immigrants but towards any kind of anti-establishment behaviour. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.44 So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police not only routinely arrested people suspected of sedition, but even those who came to visit them in jail.
In 1917, in an effort to weed out unfit immigrants, a literacy test of sorts was introduced. An aspiring immigrant had to show that he was capable of reading at least thirty words – though, oddly, these words did not have to be English. Quite why a Croat who could read thirty words of Croatian was perceived to be better prepared for life in America than a fellow Croat who could not was never explained.
At the same time, the questions that were asked of immigrants at ports of entry became far more searching and insinuating. Arriving in America in 1921, G. K. Chesterton was astonished at the probing interview to which he had to submit. ‘I have stood on the other side of Jordan,’ he remarked later, ‘in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority.‘45 Finally, in 1924, a quota system was introduced and America’s open-door policy became a part of history.
By this time, however, immigrants everywhere were proving the iniquity of the prejudice against them. The eastern European Jews in particular showed a regard for education and self-improvement that should have been seen as a model. By 1927, two-thirds of New York’s 20,000 lawyers were Jewish,46 and thousands more had built distinguished careers as academics, musicians, playwrights, journalists, doctors, composers, entertainers and in almost every other field of human endeavour. Having faced four decades of complaints that they did not work hard enough, Jews now found themselves accused of working too hard.
A quiet drive began to restrict Jewish admissions to law schools (echoing present-day concerns over Asian domination of institutions of higher learning) and a new expression entered the language, five o’clock anti-Semitism, by which was meant that people would work with Jews during the day, if they must, but wouldn’t dream of socializing with them at night. For at least another three decades Jews would remain casually excluded from large parts of the American mainstream. Not until the 1960s could they hope to be admitted to non-Jewish country clubs, college fraternities and sororities, and other bastions of gentile life.
But the prejudice the Jews experienced paled when compared to that meted out to the most visible, least voluntary of all minorities: black Americans. It may come as a surprise to realize that blacks were one of the least numerous of immigrant groups to the United States, outnumbered by Swedes, Sicilians, Poles and almost every other national or ethnic block. Between 1505, when the first consignment of black slaves arrived in the Caribbean, and 1888, when slavery was finally outlawed in its last New World stronghold, Brazil, an estimated twelve million black Africans were transported across the Atlantic. The overwhelming majority, however, went to Brazil and the Caribbean. Just 5 per cent – no more than about half a million people – were imported into what was to become the United States.47
For obvious economic reasons, blacks were encouraged to propagate freely. As early as 1775, they accounted for 40 per cent of the population of Virginia, 30 per cent in North Carolina, Maryland and Georgia, and well over 60 per cent in South Carolina.48
Though the physical cruelties to which they were subjected have perhaps been somewhat inflated in the popular mind – most were at least passably fed and clothed by the standards of the day; it was after all in the slave-owner’s interest to look after his property – the psychological humiliations to which they were subjected are immeasurable. It was not merely the imposition of involuntary servitude but the denial of even the most basic human dignities that made American slavery so singularly odious. Fischer reports how a visitor to Virginia ‘was startled to see ladies buying naked male slaves after carefully examining their genitals’.49 Female slaves were routinely regarded as sexual playthings for owners and their overseers. Scarcely a plantation existed that didn’t have a sprinkling of mulattos (originally a Spanish term denoting a small mule), and visitors from outside the South were often taken aback at encountering a light-skinned slave bearing a more than passing resemblance to their host. (Sally Hemings, the slave woman who may have been the long-standing mistress of Thomas Jefferson, was in fact his late wife’s half-sister.)
Slaves were commonly wrenched from their partners – about a quarter ended up so separated – and mothers divided from their children. A typical advertisement of the time read: ‘NEGROES FOR SALE. – A negro woman 24 years of age, and two children, one eight and the other three years. Said negroes will be sold separately or together as desired.‘50 In a thousand ways they were daily reminded of their subhuman status. As the words of a slave song had it:
We bake de bread,
Dey gib us de crust,
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss ...
We skim de pot,
Dey gib us de liquor
An say dat’s good enough for nigger51
Almost everywhere they were kept in a state of profound ignorance. Learning of any sort was assumed to be an invitation to insubordination. As Joel Chandler Harris had his fictional creation Uncle Remus say: ‘Put a spellin-book in a nigger’s han’s, en right den an dar’ you loozes a plowhand. I kin take a bar’l stave an fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de schoolhouses betwixt dis en de state er Midgigin.‘52 In consequence, their awareness of the world beyond the plantation bounds was stupefyingly limited. Frederick Douglass recounted in his autobiography that until he secured his freedom he had never even heard of New York and Massachusetts.53
Even if they managed to secure their freedom, they scarcely enjoyed the fruits of democracy. By 1820 America had 233,000 freed blacks, but they weren’t in any meaningful sense free. White workmen refused to work alongside blacks or to allow them apprenticeships, so their prospects of worthwhile employment, much less advancement, were exceedingly meagre. Iowa, Illinois and Indiana would not allow even free blacks to settle within their boundaries. Even where they were allowed to settle, blacks were subjected to constant indignities which they had to suffer in silence. Every white child knew that he could pelt a black person with a snowball without fear of reprisal. Even in the case of the most serious grievances, blacks were often denied the privileges of habeas corpus, trial by jury or even the freedom to testify in their own behalf. Almost nowhere were they allowed to testify against whites.
Though slavery was widely detested in the North, only a handful of idealistic eccentrics saw abolition as a prelude to equality of opportunity. Even Lincoln, in his debates with Stephen Douglas, made his position clear: ‘I am not; nor ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.‘54
Most preferred to think of blacks as happy-go-lucky, childlike creatures who wanted nothing mor
e from life than something good to eat and a chance to sing and dance. It appears never to have occurred to them that that was as much as the average freed black could hope for. The popular image was captured in the song ‘Jim Crow’, popularized by Thomas D. Rice in the mid-1830s:
Come, listen all you gals and boys,
I’se just from Tucky hoe;
I’m goin’ to sing a litle song,
My name’s Jim Crow.
What is remarkable is how durable this perception remained right up to modern times. Well into the 1940s, Time magazine was still commonly referring to blacks as ‘pickaninnies’ and revelling in news snippets in which black people fell down wells or otherwise came amusingly a cropper. Hollywood roles for blacks were largely limited to the shuffling, eye-rolling, perennially timorous and befuddled types as played by actors like Stepin Fetchit and Buckwheat Thomas. The 1950s saw the stereotype extended with television characters like Amos ‘n’ Andy and the faithful Rochester on the Jack Benny Show, while in the wider world of commerce almost the only black face one saw was the smiling countenance of Aunt Jemima, a fat and irrepressibly happy black woman who clearly saw no higher gratification in life than to fix pancakes for white folks. Elsewhere blacks simply didn’t exist. Even a program like the Andy Griffith Show, set in the South, appeared to take place in a surreally all-white world.
On the few occasions when blacks were treated more seriously, it was almost always with a degree of patronizing ignorance that simply takes one’s breath away. As late as 1949, the author of a nationally syndicated newspaper science column could solemnly inform his young readers that the American Negro was constitutionally incapable of pronouncing r’s in words like ‘cart’ and ‘horse’ because ‘his lips are too thick’. Almost no scholarly attention was devoted to black Americans. The few books that focused on them, like The Negro in Africa and America (1902) and The Negro in American Life (1926), took it as given that blacks were incapable, except in certain exceptional cases, of higher cerebral activity. Often, it was asserted that their distinctive speech habits were an inevitable consequence both of their impaired mental powers and of their physiology, as in this passage from The Negro in American Life discussing the Gullah dialect:
Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs seized upon the peasant English used by some of the early settlers ... wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and, enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses and thick lips as ... speech.55
And this, I urge you to bear in mind, was a scholarly work. Even the most eminent of linguistic scholars found it impossible to credit blacks with even the most modest capacity for linguistic innovation. In The English Language in America George Philip Krapp contended: ‘American words brought into the language through the negroes have been insignificant in number ... A few words like juba, a kind of dance, banjo, hoodoo, voodoo, pickaninny, exhaust the list of words of non-English origin.‘56 Of Gullah – now widely regarded as the richest, most expressive and most ethnically pure of all the Afro-American dialects in America – Krapp contended that ‘very little of it, perhaps none, is derived from sources other than English’.
Almost every term of black speech was claimed to have its roots in English. Jazz, Krapp insisted, was an old English dialectal word. Another scholar went so far as to pronounce that moke, once a common word for a black person, came from the Icelandic möckvi, ’darkness’.57 That even an eight-year-old child could see a certain implausibility in the idea of black Americans picking up and employing a term that had originated on a chilly island two thousand miles away didn’t matter. What was important was that the credit had to go to some source other than the blacks themselves.
Not until a black academic named Lorenzo Dow Turner and a Swede named Gunnar Myrdal began studying black speech in the 1940s was it accorded serious, scholarly investigation. Turner and Myrdal quickly established that certain syntactical features of Gullah, a dialect still spoken by some 250,000 people on the Sea Islands off South Carolina and among neighbouring coastal communities, are clearly traceable to the languages of West Africa, and appear also in other New World patois as far apart as Brazil and Haiti, which clearly precludes British dialectal origins. Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) suggested that as many as 6,000 Gullah words showed signs of concordance with West African terms.58
Turner and Myrdal showed, among much else, that the Wolof hipikat, denoting a person who is attuned to his environment, literally ‘has his eyes open’, is the most plausible source for hepcat and hip and their many variants.59 Other words almost certainly of ultimate African origin are chigger, gumbo, banjo (at first also spelled banjou or bangy), jitter, cola, yam, zombie, juke, goober, tote, okra and boogie-woogie, though many of these, like banjo, chigger and gumbo, reached America by way of the Caribbean, often after being filtered through an intermediate language.
Even Teddy Roosevelt’s speak softly and carry a big stick appears to have its roots in a West African proverb. Likewise, Yankee Doodle Dandy’ shows a striking similarity to a slave song from Surinam, which goes:
Mama Nanni go to town
Buy a little pony.
Stick a feather in a rink
Calling Masra Ranni.60
Other terms that have been credited with African roots include bogus, banana, gorilla, funky, phoney and jazz, though in each instance the evidence is largely conjectural. Jazz is one of the most hotly disputed terms in American etymology. Among the suggested possibilities are that it comes from Chaz, the nickname of an early ragtime drummer named Charles Washington, or from chasse, a kind of dance step. Others have linked it to various African or Creole sources. In any case, its first use, among both southern blacks and whites, was to describe sexual intercourse. It wasn’t until after World War I that it entered the wider world conveying the idea of a type of music. Quite a number of Afro-American terms contain some forgotten sexual association. Boogie-woogie appears originally to have signified syphilis. Juke, from the West African dzugu, ’wicked’, originally carried that sense in English. Eventually it came to signify a brothel and then, by about 1930, a cheap tavern where lively music was played – a juke joint. Jukebox dates from 1937. Blues, a term popularized if not invented by one its greatest exponents, the cornet player W C. Handy (his ‘Memphis Blues’ was written in 1910; ‘St Louis Blues’ followed in 1914), also originally had ‘a strong sexual significance’, according to Mencken, though he doesn’t elaborate.61 So, too, did rock ‘n’ roll.
A distinctive and long-standing feature of black speech was a tendency to apply food terms in a sexually euphemistic sense. Thus, angel-food cake, custard pie and other dishes often had a distinctly sexual connotation, especially in songs. When you realize that shortening bread was commonly used to describe sexual intercourse, the words of the well-loved song take on a whole new meaning:
One turned over to the other an’ said,
‘My baby loves short’nin’,
short’nin’, ‘My baby loves short’nin’ bread.’
The same applies to jelly roll, as in the lyrics
Jelly roll, jelly roll ain’t so hard to find,
There’s a baker shop in town makes it brown like mine.
I got a sweet jelly, a lovin’ sweet jelly roll.
If you taste my jelly it’ll satisfy your worried soul.
Among the many hundreds of neologisms created in America by blacks we find to blow one’s top, gimme five for a handshake and high five for a congratulatory hand slap, honky (of unknown significance), ragtime (also obscure, but possibly arising from its ragged syncopation; it was first recorded in 1896), right on, uptight, jive, be cool, bad mouth, bad in the sense of good, get down in the sense of to attend to pleasures, and cool in the sense of being admirable.
Finally, a word needs to be said about descriptive terms for black people. Negro is Spanish and Portuguese for ’black’, and first noted in English in 1555. Nigger appeared in 1587 and was not at fir
st a pejorative term but simply a variant pronunciation of Negro. Sambo, a Nigerian word meaning ‘second son’, was not originally pejorative either. Blacks were generally called blacks (or, more politely, coloureds) until the 1880s when negro became the preferred term. It wasn’t usually capitalized until the 1930s. Uncle Tom comes of course from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though its use in the general sense of a servile black hasn’t been found earlier than 1922.
10
When the Going was Good: Travel in America
I
On 8 January 1815 General Andrew Jackson led American troops in a stormy rout of the British at the Battle of New Orleans. It was a decisive triumph – or would have been had there been anything to be decisive about. Unknown to the combatants on both sides, the War of 1812 had been amicably concluded over port and brandy two weeks earlier with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. More than two thousand men died fighting a battle in a war that was over.1
I bring this up here to make the point that, throughout the early American period, communications were a perennial problem. If winds were unfavourable it could take months to cross the Atlantic. In December 1606, when John Smith and his party set off to found Jamestown, the winds proved so ‘unprosperous’, as he rather mildly put it, that it took them six weeks just to get out of sight of England. A good crossing, such as that of the Mayflower Pilgrims, would take eight or nine weeks, but crossings of six or seven months were by no means unknown.2
In such circumstances food rotted and water grew brackish. If the captain or shipowner was unscrupulous, the food was often rotten to begin with. Journals of the time are full of baleful remarks. ‘What with the heat and dampness, even the biscuit was so full of worms that, God help me, I saw many wait until nightfall to eat the porridge made of it so as not to see the worms,’ wrote one dismayed mariner.3 Personal hygiene became an impossibility. Lice grew ‘so thick that they could be scraped off the body’.4 Occasionally circumstances would be so dire that sailors would refuse to put to sea and would ‘strike’, or lower the sails to show their defiance, which explains why workers today who withhold their labour are said to be on strike.5
