In December 2017, he sat down with Zócalo Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Gregory Rodriguez in Los Angeles to talk about what “the South” is, how the South came to embrace Thanksgiving, and why old country songs often reinforce a cult of the noble loser.

This transcript of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

The post Why Has America Been So Reluctant to ‘Own’ the South? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“We need to forget about this so we can heal,” said an elderly white woman, as she left my lecture on the history of enslaved cooks and their influence on American cuisine.  Something I said, or perhaps everything I said, upset her.

My presentation covered 300 years of American history that started with the forced enslavement of millions of Africans, and which still echoes in our culture today, from the myth of the “happy servant” (think Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottle) to the broader marketing of black servitude (as in TV commercials for Caribbean resorts, targeted at white American travelers). I delivered the talk to an audience of 30 at the Maier Museum of Art in Lynchburg, Virginia. While I had not anticipated the woman’s displeasure, trying to forget is not an uncommon response to the unsettling tale of the complicated roots of our history, and particularly some of our beloved foods.

It is the story of people like Chef Hercules, our nation’s first White House chef; and Emmanuel Jones, who used his skills to transition out of enslavement into a successful career cooking in the food industry, evading the oppressive trappings of sharecropping. It is also the story of countless unnamed cooks across the South, the details of their existences now lost. But from its most famous to its anonymous practitioners, the story of Southern cuisine is inseparable from the story of American racism. It’s double-edged—full of pain—but also of pride. Reckoning with it can be cumbersome, but it’s also necessary. The stories of enslaved cooks teach us that we can love our country and also be critical of it, and find some peace along the way.

It’s not easy uncovering the histories of enslaved cooks, who left few records of their own and whose stories often appear in the historical record as asides—incidental details sprinkled through the stories of the people who held them in bondage. In my recent study of enslaved cooks, I relied on archaeological evidence and material culture—the rooms where they once lived, the heavy cast iron pots they lugged around, the gardens they planted—and documents such as slaveholders’ letters, cookbooks, and plantation records to learn about their experiences. These remnants, scant though they are, make it clear that enslaved cooks were central players in the birth of our nation’s cultural heritage.

In the early 17th century, tobacco farming began to spread throughout Virginia’s Tidewater region. Before long, plantations were founded by colonists, such as Shirley Plantation, constructed circa 1613; Berkeley Hundred, and Flowerdew Hundred, whose 1,000 acres extended along the James River. These large homes marked a moment of transition, when English cultural norms took hold on the Virginia landscape.

Traditions surrounding dining and maintaining a grand household were part of those norms, and the white gentry began seeking domestic help. At first, the cooks they hired on plantations were indentured servants, workers who toiled without pay for a contractually agreed-upon period of time before eventually earning their freedom. But by the late 17th century, plantation homes throughout Virginia had turned to enslaved laborers, captured from central and western Africa, to grow crops, build structures and generally remain at the beck and call of white families. Before long these enslaved cooks took the roles that had once been occupied by white indentured servants.

Black cooks were bound to the fire, 24 hours a day. They lived in the kitchen, sleeping upstairs above the hearth during the winters, and outside come summertime. Up every day before dawn, they baked bread for the mornings, cooked soups for the afternoons, and created divine feasts for the evenings. They roasted meats, made jellies, cooked puddings, and crafted desserts, preparing several meals a day for the white family. They also had to feed every free person who passed through the plantation. If a traveler showed up, day or night, bells would ring for the enslaved cook to prepare food. For a guest, this must have been delightful: biscuits, ham, and some brandy, all made on site, ready to eat at 2:30 a.m. or whenever you pleased. For the cooks, it must have been a different kind of experience.

Enslaved cooks were always under the direct gaze of white Virginians. Private moments were rare, as was rest. But cooks wielded great power: As part of the “front stage” of plantation culture, they carried the reputations of their enslavers—and of Virginia—on their shoulders. Guests wrote gushing missives about the meals in they ate while visiting these homes. While the missus may have helped design the menu, or provided some recipes, it was the enslaved cooks who created the meals that made Virginia, and eventually the South, known for its culinary fare and hospitable nature.

These cooks knew their craft. Hercules, who cooked for George Washington, and James Hemings, an enslaved cook at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, were both formally trained, albeit in different styles. Hercules was taught by the well-known New York tavern keeper and culinary giant Samuel Frances, who mentored him in Philadelphia; Hemings traveled with Jefferson to Paris, where he learned French-style cooking. Hercules and Hemings were the nation’s first celebrity chefs, famous for their talents and skills.

Folklore, archaeological evidence, and a rich oral tradition reveal that other cooks, their names now lost, also weaved their talents into the fabric of our culinary heritage, creating and normalizing the mixture of European, African, and Native American cuisines that became the staples of Southern food. Enslaved cooks brought this cuisine its unique flavors, adding ingredients such as hot peppers, peanuts, okra, and greens. They created favorites like gumbo, an adaptation of a traditional West African stew; and jambalaya, a cousin of Jolof rice, a spicy, heavily seasoned rice dish with vegetables and meat. These dishes traveled with captured West Africans on slave ships, and into the kitchens of Virginia’s elite.

You also see evidence of this multi-cultural transformation in so-called “receipt books,” handwritten cookbooks from the 18th and 19th centuries. These were compiled by slaveholding women, whose responsibilities sat firmly in the domestic sphere, and are now housed in historical societies throughout the country. Early receipt books are dominated by European dishes: puddings, pies, and roasted meats. But by the 1800s, African dishes began appearing in these books. Offerings such as pepper pot, okra stew, gumbo, and jambalaya became staples on American dining tables. Southern food—enslaved cooks’ food—had been written into the American cultural profile.

For the women who wrote and preserved the receipt books, these recipes, the products of African foodways, were something worthy of remembering, re-creating, and establishing as Americana. So why can’t we, as Americans today, look at this history for what it was? Colonial and antebellum elite Southerners understood fully that enslaved people cooked their food. During the 19th century, there were moments of widespread fear that these cooks would poison them, and we know from court records and other documents that on at least a few occasions enslaved cooks did slip poisons like hemlock into their masters’ food.

Depiction of Aunt Jemima, 1920, in the Saturday Evening Post. Courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons.

But the country began recalibrating its memories of black cooking even before the Civil War, erasing the brutality and hardships of slavery from a story of Old Southern graciousness. The revisionism went full throttle during the era of Jim Crow, when new laws made segregation the norm. Post-emancipation America still relied heavily on the skills and labor of newly freed African Americans. In a highly racialized and segregated America, still grappling with its guilt over slavery, white people created a myth that these cooks were—and always had been—happy. Advertisers leaned on characters like Aunt Jemima and Rastus, stereotypical black domestics, drawn from minstrel song.

While newly free African Americans fled the plantations to find work as housekeepers, butlers, cooks, drivers, Pullman porters and waiters—the only jobs they could get—Aunt Jemima and Rastus smiled while serving white folks, enhancing the myth that black cooks had always been cheerful and satisfied, during slavery and with their current situation. You can find their faces throughout early 20th-century black Americana, and they are still on the grocery shelves today, though modified to reflect a more dignified image. 

My angry audience member was likely raised on the old enslaved-cook narrative in which these images took root, where the cook was loyal, passive, and purportedly happy—a non-threatening being whose ultimate goal was to help a white woman fulfill her own domestic vision. But to be an American is to live in a place where contradictions are the very fibers that bind a complicated heritage divided sharply by race. It is to ignore the story of Chef Hercules, or the real story of Aunt Jemima. By forgetting enslaved cooks’ pain to soothe our own, we erase the pride and the achievements of countless brilliant cooks who nourished a nation.

The post The Enslaved Chefs Who Invented Southern Hospitality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the early 20th century, a number of Americans, seeking a more expeditious means of hauling material that could not be crammed into or strapped atop the traditional motorcar, took their tinsnips to the family flivver, affixing a large box or old wagon bed to the rear of the chassis. The frenzy of vehicular DIY-ing soon encouraged smaller entrepreneurs to install cabs and hauling containers on the slightly modified chassis of the Ford Model T.

But the Ford Motor Company itself did not offer the first fully factory-assembled pickup truck until 1924-1925 with its “Model T Runabout with Pickup Body” and 20 horsepower engine. Chevrolet and Dodge made serious moves into pickup production in the 1930s, and once the wartime production restrictions of the 1940s were lifted, the competitive scramble to cash in on pent-up demand led to a steady progression of bigger, more powerful trucks, which by the 1950s and early ’60s boasted V-6 and V-8 engines supplying 100 horsepower, improved transmissions, and easier steering.

By that point the pickup was no longer simply an adjunct but another vital technological component of one of the most far-reaching transformations in American history: the mechanization and consolidation of Southern agriculture.

Beginning in the 1920s and accelerating rapidly after 1945, with mules proving no match for the tractor in planting and cultivating his fields, the farmer needed to make not just the production but the transportation of his precious crop more efficient. When its bed was framed by slatted wooden side-bodies extending up to cab height, a pickup truck could haul a bale of cotton five miles to the gin in scarcely the time it took to hitch two mules to a wagon. And the same was no less true when there was fertilizer, feed, and seed to be picked up in town.

For families on smaller farms where there was no extra money for a car, the pickup might be forced into double duty in getting the family to church, the doctor, the grocery store, or school events. In rural farming and ranching areas, children quickly learned to drive the family pickup in the course of finishing off their chores. Local authorities tended to look the other way when one of the youngsters, whose face could scarcely be seen over the steering wheel, was dispatched via pickup to the feed or farm supply store. And even when they reached legal driving age, the pickup often remained their only means of getting to and from school or practice or simply escaping the isolation of the farm for a few hours in town.

Like country singer Alan Jackson, who couldn’t “replace the way it made me feel” when his daddy let him take the wheel of his “old hand-me-down Ford,” even in middle age and far removed for their rural roots, Americans reared on a farm retained vivid memories of the ways that experiences with pickups defined various stages of their youth. As a seven-year-old boy, I lived for the thrill of riding to the gin sprawled atop a load of cotton piled high on our pickup. But several years later, I cringed at the mere prospect of accompanying my dad in the same mud- and manure-encrusted truck on a trip to town, where I knew I faced the absolute certainty of encountering the prettiest, most stylish girl in my class.

The same forces that embedded the pickup in rural life would eventually begin to erode the very foundations of that life. The dwindling prospects of any but the largest and most mechanized farming operations pushed much of the increasingly marginalized population off the land toward the beckoning bustle of the metropolis. Although Americans fleeing the farm took their memories of the family’s dilapidated old pickup with them, actually parking such a vehicle in your driveway guaranteed a cold shoulder on arrival in the studiously urbane and fervently aspirational ’burbs.

Soon enough, however, rising metropolitan incomes and the growing popularity of camping, boating, and other outdoor activities justified the acquisition of newer, better-kempt pickups, equipped with once unheard of comforts and conveniences like leather seats, air conditioning, extended cabs, automatic transmissions, and power steering.

Annual sales of pickups topped 2 million by 1980 and had surged past 11 million in 2017, and the enormous and sustained profitability of its truck line has led Ford to limit its future sales of traditional cars in North America to the iconic Mustang and the yet to be unveiled Focus Active. With even the entry-level Dodge Ram 1500 stickering in the neighborhood of $65,000, many of today’s pampered pickups stand little chance of hauling cotton, hay, livestock, or much of anything else likely to scratch them.

Though pickups continue to have some practical applications in theory, in practice, a great number of them serve their owners primarily as “lifestyle vehicles” or some might even say “lifestyle statements.” Indeed, for a sizable contingent of Americans, the pickup truck has emerged as a means of establishing their ties to a distinctly blue-collar identity in the course of flaunting their bourgeois prosperity. (Ironically, some older pickup owners, more concerned now with asserting their rural roots than flashing their middle-class creds, have fallen into a certain reverse snobbery, deliberately hanging onto vehicles like my 1994 GMC Sierra, which sports 110,000 miles on the odometer but not much of its original paint job.)

The pickup truck had become a fixture in country music well before 1975, when David Allan Coe disputed his songwriter friend Steve Goodman’s claim that his “You Never Even Call Me by My Name” was the “perfect country song,” pointing out that it made no references to pickup trucks, trains, mothers, drinking, and prison, all of which comprised the collective sine qua non of a legitimate country offering.

Only when Goodman inserted a new verse about a fellow who admits that he was “drunk” the day his mother got out of prison and laments that before he made it to the station to meet her in his “pickup truck,” she had been “runned over by a damned ol’ train,” did Coe admit that his friend had indeed achieved perfection in a country song.

More than 40 years later, the rusty rattletrap Coe had in mind is little in evidence in songs by Luke Bryan and others about good ol’ boys and gals dancing the night away to a deafening mix of country rock and hip-hop, or just sitting and sipping on the special “diamond plate” tailgate protector of a lavishly accoutered “big black, jacked-up” pickup, likely a Chevy Silverado, which Bryan himself favors.

With luxury pickups offering some of the highest profit margins in the industry, manufacturers are riding the pop culture wave, their truck ads awash in country artists and soundtrack. Luke Bryan now serves as an official “brand ambassador” for Chevrolet, and neither the cultural or economic distance between Music City and Motor City is as great as singer-songwriter Mel Tillis suggested 35 years ago in his classic, “Detroit City.”

Today’s fancy models may be portrayed in ways that seem to celebrate a wide-open, “anything goes” social outlook, but the pickup’s political implications have most commonly skewed right, even far right. The stereotypical combination of a gun rack and Rebel flag decal once conjured images of night-riding, racist thugs. Even sans flag, the racked shotgun or rifle (or both) invited suspicions that the driver was not simply a dedicated hunter but someone just itching to be crossed. Ironically, the proliferation of extended cab vehicles in combination with the increased risk of theft amid the burgeoning illicit traffic in firearms, has largely reduced the gun rack to a garage sale item.

This is not to say, by any means, that the image of the pickup is completely toxic. Across the political spectrum, aspiring candidates looking to tout their humble, homespun roots and values seldom pass on a photo op of them in, or beside, a truck, and, in this case, if the vehicle boasts a few nicks and scrapes, so much the better.

Although foreign truck manufacturers have forced their stateside competitors to pay more attention to fuel economy and vehicle dependability, “Buy American!” still seems to resonate in the pickup marketplace. Significant differences in overall production levels notwithstanding, it is striking that Ford sold nearly twice as many F-Series pickups last year as all of the leading Japanese heavy and mid-size pickup truck models sold combined. Marketing experts think it is no coincidence that potential buyers are reminded periodically that Ford was the only major automaker to refuse federal bailout funds during the last recession, a message that General Motors may have been trying to counter in a Chevy Silverado ad declaring “This is our country. This is our truck.”

If the pickup truck is deeply ingrained in our national life and culture, like America itself, it has been and remains many things to many people. For generations born on the farm, it may summon a wave of classically bittersweet nostalgia. For some whose experiences with it have been less “up close and personal,” it has at times been a metaphor both for unvarnished rusticity and a comfortable, laid-back middle-class existence. For others, it has been a disquieting signifier of latent violence or vigilantism and active prejudice.

More broadly, the story of the pickup truck affirms the historic capacity of Americans to adapt not only our social and political outlook, but also our cultural and consumer preferences to dramatic changes in the economic, technological, and demographic forces that have shaped our identity as a people.

The post How the Pickup Truck Carried the American South Into the Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is a place that has been dear to my family for generations. This was the river where my grandmother, the wife of a “white trash” sharecropper, fished for most of her 80 years. It is the place I learned to savor nature. I have swum, camped, fished, and canoed there for much of my life.

It is also the site of one of the most horrible lynchings in U.S. history, which took the life of a young, black, pregnant Mary Turner in May 1918.

Mary Turner was killed by local whites because she publicly objected to the lynching of her husband Hayes, which had occurred just days before. Their deaths were part of a weeklong “lynching rampage” (in historian Christopher Meyers’s words) that killed seven other black people whose names are known, as well as at least three others who have not been identified.

In 2007 I was shaken when I stumbled across Meyers’ account of these events while doing research in the Lowndes County Historical Society. That article painfully showed me that I was unknowingly walking on blood-soaked earth, and it changed forever how I thought about the river.

Soon after Mary Turner’s death, NAACP investigator Walter White reported that Turner was captured and taken to the Little River where she was first hung upside down, doused with gasoline, and then set afire. Once her clothes had been burned off of her, one individual approached her and cut her pregnant belly open, spilling her unborn child to the ground. The group of white people then shot bullets into her eviscerated and scorched body. Her remains were later buried near the lynching tree and a “whiskey bottle with a cigar stump in the neck” was used to mark her impromptu grave.

At the time of these heinous crimes, my grandmother was 18 and my grandfather was in his early twenties. I now often wonder what they thought about these crimes and why they were never mentioned in my family.

Angered that this event remained unacknowledged, I assigned Myers’ article as a reading in a course I was teaching called “Racial and Ethnic Relations,” at Valdosta State University, less than 20 miles from the spot where the lynching took place. I wanted this “disappeared” person and the other victims of May 1918 to be resurrected from history instead of erased by it.

To my surprise, the article not only stunned my students, but several of them demanded that we do something to make these crimes known. Within two weeks, the Mary Turner Project was born.

The Project is an all-volunteer, multi-racial, multi-generational collective of students, faculty, and local community members that is now 11 years old. The Project has carried out too many actions to list here, but it has provided me and other members with some moments that shifted our understanding of this nation’s history, our community, and each other.

Audrey Grant, great granddaughter of Mary Turner, speaks at the gathering in 2014. Photo courtesy of John W. Rogers.

Shortly after the Project’s start, descendants of Turner and the other victims of 1918 began attending our meetings and supporting the organization. Their presence humanized this local history for everyone involved. The Project was able to provide family members with Meyers’ primary research—including a mound of assorted newspaper articles, telegrams, and the NAACP’s investigation. We also carried out further research helping families “fill in the details” that they didn’t have about the events of 1918. To this day, the Project is regularly contacted by descendants of victims of Georgia lynchings and asked to do research. We have done our best to fulfill these requests.

Though justice has not been served, family members have learned more about their ancestors and learned that there are others in the world who care about these events, their ancestors, and justice.

During its first two years, the Project fundraised and petitioned the Georgia Historical Society to erect a physical marker describing the events of 1918 near the site of Turner’s murder. We wanted the state of Georgia to officially acknowledge these crimes—if only in a symbolic way. After two years of work and struggle with the Georgia Historical Society, in 2010 we secured and installed that state-sanctioned Historical Marker.

Before the public dedication ceremony, I met my dear friend John Rogers, a middle-aged white Southern man like myself, and Nate Wright and Robert Jenkins, both black men from the South in their forties, to install the marker in a location just east of Hahira, Georgia. It took us two to three hours to mix and pour 1,200 pounds of concrete by hand with five-gallon buckets. We used the water of the Little River to make the concrete and secure the marker.

On that muggy May afternoon in the middle of nowhere, the four of us paused and talked about what it meant for us to come together at this place of tragedy and racist brutality to install what is essentially the tombstone for a person so horribly killed and dehumanized, given the community and times we all grew up in. As four men who grew up in the largely still-segregated South, the idea that any of us might be doing this someday would have been inconceivable to us as children, but there we were. I will never forget that day, that conversation, or those men.

A final “sacred moment” I hold close involves the Project’s 2014 commemoration ceremony for the victims of 1918. For several years the organization had held half-day gatherings at which multi-racial, multi-generational groups of 100 to 150 came together to remember the events of 1918, sharing a meal, singing, reflecting, and praying together.

Every year we would also motorcade as a group out to the marker site for a short ceremony. Led by a local deputy, that motorcade so resembled a typical Southern funeral procession that oncoming traffic always pulled over and stopped out of respect for the dead—a long-standing tradition in the South.

In 2014 the descendants of Mary and Hayes Turner planned their annual family reunion to coincide with the ceremony at the marker. Photo courtesy of John W. Rogers.

Although each year was powerful in its own way, in 2014 the descendants of Hayes Turner planned their annual family reunion to coincide with the event. Dozens of Mary and Hayes Turner’s relatives paid homage and reflected on how far their families had come. It was humbling and felt historic to witness them model how to face something so horrific and painful with grace, and love. I have been part of very few such spaces in my life that felt more human.

The Mary Turner Project has not ended racism, nor has it addressed ongoing forms of institutional and individual racism that plague the place I call home. But it does serve as a small example of what is possible when we confront our shared, collective histories instead of denying that they exist. For example, part of the Project’s work has centered on identifying streets and buildings in our community that are named for slave owners and Confederate leaders who wanted to preserve and expand the enslavement of black people.

I have also learned that we should work for justice, in all its forms, not simply because of the harm and destruction that injustice does to others in our human family, but also because we ourselves are humanized by the process.

So this May, we will once again gather at the river that my Grandma so loved, to remember the horrendous events of 1918, where we have been as a community and nation, and where we still need to go. And when we do, I and others will once again step into and cherish a sacred moment of sheer humanity.

The post How My Southern Georgia Community Came Together Around the Memory of a Century-Old Mass Murder appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This time, however, we are not talking about textile and apparel plants in the 1920s or ‘30s, but about a thoroughly globalized Japanese auto manufacturer, led until a few months ago by a French-educated, Brazilian-born CEO. What might seem to be no more than a classically Southern triumph of continuity over change is better understood as an example of continuity within change—one with implications ranging well beyond regional boundaries.

Cheap labor has been the mainstay of efforts to lure industrial employers into the South since the 1880s. By the 1920s, union agents venturing into the region could expect withering inhospitality, not excluding brutal beatings by local sheriffs or company thugs. With these shows of physical force came a powerful and cohesive propaganda barrage, courtesy of racist and sectionalist politicians who linked labor unions to the abolitionists of the 1850s and the “race mixing” NAACP of the 1950s.

According to one study of Southern industrial development, it was common practice to remind workers that unions were ruled by “potbellied Yankees with big cigars in their mouths” sporting names “even a high school teacher couldn’t pronounce.” From the pulpits came warnings that “CIO means Christ is Out,” with editors and Chamber of Commerce types chiming in to make a vote to unionize tantamount to “endorsing the closing of a factory.”

Between 1944 and 1954, all of the old Confederate states strengthened their anti-union arsenals with right-to-work statutes outlawing the practice of requiring all employees of union-represented plants to belong to the union or pay dues. The union membership rate in the South was 50 percent of the national average in 1939, and as of 2016, the Southern average had slipped to 43 percent of the national mean—particularly telling given that the national figure is now only 10.7 percent.

Since the 1930s, a steady proliferation of industrial enticements and subsidies, including free land, tax-exemptions, and low-interest bond financing offered by state and local governments has effectively made anti-unionism the sine qua non of Southern regional development strategy. Protecting these investments of public revenue and resources in private firms made it even more vital to keep the subsidized company union-free.

As the cost of these concessions soared, the South became something akin to a lavishly appointed gated community for industrialists, maintained primarily at the expense of their own workers. Not only were union recruiters sent packing, but even potentially high-wage employers like United Airlines. In 1991, the airline met with vociferous opposition from the Greensboro, North Carolina business community when it revealed plans for a maintenance facility that would bring 6,000 well-paid unionized workers to a well-known haven for non-union industries.

With Rust Belt employers already opting for the balmier business climate of the “Sun Belt,” foreign industrial investment in the South got a huge boost in 1971, when the Nixon administration moved to boost exports by devaluing the dollar while simultaneously imposing a 10 percent surcharge on imported manufactures. At that point, exulted a British banker, industrial investments in the United States were “like getting Harrods at half price.”

Initially, labor supporters presumed that these foreign companies, coming from environments where labor enjoyed greater bargaining rights and prerogatives, would not insist on union-free work forces. Yet, many of them were drawn to the South precisely because it had neither the labor issues nor the leftist political pressures that they felt at home. Although they consistently offered wages higher than the local average, none of the South’s new foreign employers like Nissan or BMW showed much inclination to lug along the high wages and extensive benefits that one German executive called “the social baggage we have back home.”

This much became apparent in 1977 when the French tire maker Michelin, which had recently opened a plant near Greenville, South Carolina, joined forces with local development leaders to keep a large, relatively high-wage, but likely-to-be-unionized Phillip Morris plant out of the area. Thirty years later, developers were still reminding Japanese industrialists that because South Carolina’s unionization rate was “one of the lowest in the nation” its manufacturing wage was also “among the lowest in the country.” In the long run, emerging global competition for new plants made it all the more imperative for the region to hold down labor costs by continuing to resist the incursions of organized labor.

Nissan became the South’s first major international auto manufacturer in 1980, when it agreed to open a truck plant near Smyrna, Tennessee. Toyota would follow four years later with a facility near Georgetown, Kentucky, and over the next 20 years an invading horde of foreign automakers including Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, and Volkswagen would stake their claims in the American South. As the list of firms grew, so did the size of the subsidies offered. With the bidding for new foreign car plants in full runaway mode, Tennessee’s initial $33 million payoff to Nissan seemed like pocket change compared to the $295 million show of affection that sealed its original agreement in 2000 to come to Madison County, Mississippi. Mississippi’s subsidy guarantees to Nissan now exceed $1.2 billion, with the total for all foreign automakers with plants in the South topping $4.2 billion.

To this day, not a single production workforce at any of these heavily subsidized foreign auto plants has opted to join the United Auto Workers. Nissan’s non-union Tennessee and Mississippi operations are the only such plants among its 45 production facilities world-wide. Like its international peers as well as the great majority of the domestic manufacturers preceding it to the South, the company has frequently reminded workers, state officials, and leaders of the affected communities of their stake in keeping it that way. In the struggle in Canton alone, Nissan has racked up eight NLRB charges of unfair labor practices in the last 36 months.

The anti-union onslaught in Canton over the protracted build-up to this month’s vote had a ferocity reminiscent of many such campaigns in years past. This time, however, the stakes were much higher, not simply in terms of money and jobs locally, but in the future of what has long been Mississippi and the South’s foundational development strategy of bringing jobs in by keeping unions out. Though the terminology and technology employed by both camps were different than they would have been 75 years ago, elements of race, religion, regional bias, and, of course, fear, were still part of the story this time around.

With blacks accounting for a large majority of plant employees, race came into play more subtly this time, as anti-UAW spokesmen pointed to the union’s donations and close ties with certain black churches and civil rights advocates, while union supporters cited preferential treatment for white plant employees. There was ministerial involvement on both sides, with pro-union clergy concentrating on linking workers’ rights to civil rights and pointing to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s advocacy of both. Meanwhile, instead of Satanizing the UAW, opposing clerics came closer to deifying Nissan for, as one put it, making “such a change in the life of the people … The lights are on, the water is running … Everything is fine. It is just superb.”

Ironically, representatives of Yokohama-based Nissan cast the UAW as an “outsider” trying to disrupt the plant “family.” Although the old-fashioned appeals to sectional bias were not apparent in official company statements, they lurked just below the surface among rank-and-file union opponents, such as the one who took to an anti-union Facebook page to condemn organizers as “21st-century carpetbaggers” and urge workers to “help these Yankee aholes pack … and tell [them] to get back to Michigan and stay there.”

Meanwhile, anti-union politicians were hardly less given to fear-mongering than they had been several generations earlier. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant warned, “If you want to take away your job, if you want to end manufacturing as we now know it in Mississippi, just start expanding unions.” Bryant’s message echoed one in a video shown to workers from Steve Marsh, the plant’s top executive, who pointed out that UAW workers at Ford and GM had “experienced significant instability in recent years,” including, “many layoffs and plant closings.” A representative of Kelly Services, which recruits temporary workers for Nissan, had warned more explicitly on Facebook that the Canton plant might close if the union came in.

In the end, Nissan’s not-so-veiled threats of lost jobs were almost certainly critical to the roughly two-thirds vote against the UAW. An estimated 40 percent of the workforce are temporaries, who are hired at much lower starting wages, currently advertised by Kelly Services at $13.46 per hour. If they eventually join the regular workforce, these former temps come in at their current pay under a two-tier wage-benefit scale that caps their hourly wage at $24, roughly $2 per hour less than the average for a worker hired earlier on regular terms. Even so, a Nissan employee making $24 per hour would still be making as much as $385 more each week than the average for workers surrounding counties, including Hinds, which is home to the state capital.

With temporary workers ineligible to vote, the second-tier status of some 1,500 former temporary workers seemed more likely to support the union than their senior-coworkers, and a reasonably unified pro-UAW stance on their part might have swung things the other way. When it came time to vote, though, in a state that is down more than 30,000 manufacturing jobs over the last decade, even an inequitable work situation was clearly preferable to flipping burgers or cleaning motel rooms. One former temp reasoned that even her second-tier paycheck meant that she could finally, “put food on my table without worrying about having to pay my light bill.” 

The key to this and countless other union defeats in the South and elsewhere, is not the ignorance of those who vote “No,” or their blindness to the potential benefits of union representation. Rather, it is the sobering, self-preservational realism of workers steeped in generations of unrelenting, sometimes unthinkable poverty. Although making some headway at long last, they remain acutely sensitive to the ephemerality of even the incremental progress they are finally enjoying as individuals and, understandably, are given to far greater skepticism of the more expansive version they are asked to accept on faith by others whose lived experiences often differ dramatically from their own.

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What makes some artwork timeless?

History shows that neither high prices at auction nor gallery attendance figures are good predictors of how artists, artworks, and art movements will be viewed in decades to come. The Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition 1900: Art at the Crossroads was noteworthy for revealing that the artists we lionize today were far from acclaimed in their time.  The Guggenheim’s 2000 show reprised the Paris ‘Exposition Universelle’ of 1900, which featured works by the likes of artists now forgotten—Leon Lhemitte, Fritz von Uhde, Alfred Guillou, Ferdinand Khnopff, and Franz von Stuck—but lacked works by the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and modern masters we now love like Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse.

Today, major museums still follow the whims of the art market. The trustees who foot the bills often collect market favorites, and are not disgruntled when the museums they govern reflect their taste. Exceptions abound, but so do reputation-enhancing monographic shows of artists represented by the most powerful galleries on both coasts. And so the carousel built by talent-affirming players in the art world—dealers, curators, critics, and collectors—spins and spins with minimal friction. But is this really the art that our era will be remembered for?

The Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which I serve as its president, seeks to get art that matters into major museums, while enhancing audiences’ ability to appreciate it. We want to enlarge the canon of American art history to include dozens of artists whose contributions have not heretofore been noticed, let alone embraced, by the market, critics, or museums.

What unites these artists is that they are all African Americans from the Southeastern United States. But their individual contributions are just that: individual. The objects themselves are undeniably ciphers of our time that come from this particular stream of the American experience. The quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama; assemblages by Thornton Dial; and sculptures by Lonnie Holley are today recognized as fundamental examples of American art.

The Foundation’s goals are not to entreat art world leaders to acknowledge that these artists merit inclusion by virtue of race or class. Our aim is instead to place important objects in permanent collections of leading art museums, so as to allow curators, scholars, and critics to situate them in the greater narrative of art history for public benefit.

Jessie T. Pettway, Bars and string-pieced column; 1950s; Cotton; 95 x 76 in.; Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Photo by Stephen Pitkin/Pitkin Studio. Courtesy of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection.

The project has its roots in the prescient life’s work of William S. Arnett, an Atlanta collector who devoted decades to assembling thousands of objects by almost 200 artists from the Southeastern United States. He identified artists whose achievements had never made it out of their home states to arbiters of art world success in major cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West. And he sought, through books and exhibitions, to tell their stories.

These stories are related by means of powerful and insightful artworks, drawing on the artists’ faith and from their awareness of major events on the world stage. As African Americans in that part of the United States still coping with stubborn traces of the Confederacy, they bear first-hand witness to racial injustice and overt discrimination. But their contributions are universal, not parochial. And while the formal attributes of their works are varied, from assemblage to painting to sculpture to textiles to site-specific projects, there is nothing in their art not found in mainstream art practices from the combines of Robert Rauschenberg to the mise-en-scène installations of Edward Kienholz to the heroic testaments of Anselm Kiefer.

That said, the acceptance of these artists and their artworks over the generation since Arnett set his sights on them has been episodic and conditional. Consider the works of Thornton Dial, shown at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993. Dial’s assemblages at this time invoked representations of tigers—avatars for African Americans making their way through the South’s jungle of racial strife and exclusion.

But acclaim for the exhibitions was cut short by a slanted segment on the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which cast doubt on Arnett’s efforts by suggesting that his motives were born not of advocacy but of greed. Many gatekeepers of the museum and art market establishments were loath to countenance the unconventional Arnett or his championing of previously unknown artists, and the producers fed the storyline of exploitation of African Americans by an eccentric white collector. While there are grounds to question the fairness of the patronage system he implemented in assembling a comprehensive collection of thousands of objects, no one who knows him can question his intentions.

A better chapter began nearly a decade later with the pioneering exhibition The Quilts of Gee’s Bend in 2002, that earned accolades from the chief art critic of The New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” The repurposing, by black rural women, of scraps of worn work clothes and other textile remnants into functional bedcovers became expressive, formally sophisticated testaments of the African American struggle. Once considered outside the mainstream, the quilts are now timeless since the US Postal service issued stamps. With that imprimatur in place, other exhibitions followed with appreciative evaluation of the oeuvres of Thornton Dial and Ronald Lockett.

A second obstacle to acceptance of these artists has been the assertion that a lack of credentialed training should by definition exclude them from the mainstream. The fact is that a majority of top-tier artists who figure prominently in the art market lack an M.F.A. (Master’s of Fine Arts degree). But as for the Southern artists represented within the Souls Grown Deep collection, their limited formal education has yielded the epithets self-taught, vernacular, or outsider. The ensuing marginalization has excluded them from entering the white-walled enclaves of the art world outside of the South except as curiosities or folk art.

Arnett decided, in 2010, to donate the highlights of his collection to the then newly established Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which takes its name from a 1920 Langston Hughes poem, “The Negro Speaks of River,” the last line of which is “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

This allowed for a fresh start in achieving Arnett’s lifelong ambition. And in fall
2014, the foundation made an initial donation of 57 objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was the start of a planned transfer of hundreds of artworks to dozens of museums. in 2016, the Foundation entered into discussions with U.S. museums, modeling its approach on the methodology of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation by which art purchases are met with donations.

We believe that the willingness of a museum board and staff to commit resources, expertise, and space when making an acquisition offers a greater likelihood that artworks so acquired will become integral to the Museum’s holdings. The recent acquisition of 62 artworks from the Foundation by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco was the first such major commitment.

Audiences living in or visiting the Bay Area now find an open door to the achievements of American artists previously excluded from the art world’s prevailing narrative. The stories told by these powerful artworks should attract new viewers seeing their heritage represented for the first time, and will open the eyes of traditional museum-goers previously unaware of long-neglected artistic achievements.

It is our hope that a century hence, in survey exhibitions of art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the artworks of Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, the quilters of Gee’s Bend, and dozens of others will be shown alongside works by artists who are today household names—together with other artists whose names have yet to surface.

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I was born there in 1978, less than a mile from the house where King grew up. As a schoolchild, I like others, visited Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue—the street where King was born, worked, died, and is honored. To see King’s neighborhood, and the home he was born in, humanized him for us children, letting us know that he was once young like us, wrestling with classes and playing with siblings. We went to the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King declared, “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” and to the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization he led until his death in 1968. We visited the King Center built by his widow to spread King’s nonviolent doctrine, and saw the eternal flame that burns near his tomb and reminds us that his work endures.

My grandparents—native Floridians who first came to Atlanta as college students in the late 1930s—and my mother tried to shield my brother and me from the indignities they suffered during the era of Jim Crow. They did this mostly by trying to give us a better life; I seldom spoke to them about the racism they endured. But the living history was everywhere in Atlanta, and the frequency with which I saw King’s lieutenants and associates on television reminded me of both the progress we’d achieved and the work still left to be done. John Lewis, for example, was leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee when he was gassed and beaten badly on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, during the start of a march to the state capitol that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” But he went on to represent Atlanta as a U.S. congressman and has fought for decades to preserve the Voting Rights Act he, King, and hundreds of foot soldiers helped usher into law.

Whack with John Lewis

When I became a journalist, I found myself gravitating toward telling the stories of black people, and focusing specifically on the legacy of the civil rights movement. As a college student, I got my first reporting job at the Atlanta Daily World, a black newspaper first published in 1928. The office was on Auburn Avenue—the same street I’d first visited as a child. I was working blocks away from where King worked.

By taking on civil rights as a beat in Atlanta, I not only had a front row seat to history, but the ability to ask those who lived it how they felt about current-day racial struggles. It was an extraordinary opportunity.

Even though I have left Atlanta, I carry all this history with me. This fall, almost a half-century after the enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act that King supported, I spent a few weeks in Ferguson, Missouri, as a reporter for Fusion covering the Michael Brown shooting and the ensuing protests.

From the day I arrived, the parallels between the Ferguson context and that of King’s struggles were everywhere.

Even though segregation is no longer legal and discussion of the civil rights movement has appeared in textbooks for decades, I still found neighborhoods in Ferguson so divided along color lines that I thought I had stepped into those black-and-white TV images of the 1960s I had seen. In the same way Bull Connor referred to King and other protesters as “outside agitators” in Birmingham, authorities and some residents in Ferguson referred to “outsiders” and the “negative influence of the media” on the African-American community—as if this community had no grounds to be unhappy of their own volition with the status quo before August 9, 2014. I talked to people on both sides of the racial divide who did not know each other’s daily lives.

The way the police deployed tear gas, dogs, smoke bombs, and riot gear certainly reminded me of stories I’d been told by people like Lewis. Images of clashing police and protesters in Ferguson—and the real-time reactions on social media—reminded me of the nation’s horror at the sight of water hoses, clubs, and snarling dogs 50 years before.

A rally in Ferguson, Missouri

The Ferguson rallies, both there and elsewhere in the country, were full of young people—much like those during the civil rights movement. But there were important differences, too. Unlike the masses who rallied around King in Alabama, there was no single leader of the protests I covered in Ferguson night after night. The shooting of Michael Brown had been the catalyst, but inequality—and specifically unequal treatment of black people in the criminal justice system—was the real subject, one with many stories to tell.

During the 1960s, the black church had a central role, serving as the moral foundation of the movement. In Ferguson, churches served as the site of several rallies and meetings, and preachers could regularly be seen keeping the peace on the front lines during protests. But the burgeoning movement was neither started nor maintained through the church.

And while the protesters on West Florissant Avenue were mostly peaceful demonstrators, there were some who would have disappointed King—looting, committing arson, firing guns.

There are some who think of the events in Ferguson as an isolated incident, simply a moment in time. But to me it seemed like part of the continuum in the struggle for progress in our country. When I interviewed King’s aides, they were always quick to mention that the civil rights movement didn’t die with King; it’s ongoing. While our nation has made racial progress, we still have far to go before we achieve full equality among America’s citizens. The reaction to what happened in Ferguson exposed that chasm anew.

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The assumption arrived out of nowhere, planted itself, and for a while, took root. I let it bloom. Quietly, I kept a list in my head. My mother would refer to objects or routines by names I never heard on television nor picked up in the chatter along the breezeway at my southwest Los Angeles school. What this meant was that words took on an exotic flourish—the sink became “the zink”; the concrete traffic median we’d sometimes get marooned on crossing one of L.A.’s wide boulevards was known as the neutral ground. My mother would announce to my father that she was off to “make groceries”—and though he would just nod and turn back to the TV news, there was part of me that hoped she didn’t need the car keys, that there’d be magic: a cluster of brown shopping bags would simply appear—conjured up from thin air—on the breakfast-room table.

Things were not clarified when my grandfather would make his monthly call from New Orleans, my mother’s birthplace, to attempt a conversation. Over the hiss and crackle of a long-distance connection, I’d cup the powder blue receiver tight against my ear and squeeze my eyes tight in an effort to hear him more clearly, to picture the unfamiliar arrangement of words (the ones I could pick out, anyway). But the problem wasn’t the volume or pitch of his voice, or even the ambient noise cluttering the line. It was the lacy tumble of phrases, the odd architecture of his sentences. Only a slight uplift in tone told me that whatever he had just said was a question to which I should respond.

Lynell George, her mother Elodie Bowers George, and her brother Leonard George, Jr., at Union Station in Los Angeles, 1965

New Orleans, though more than 2,000 miles away from our Los Angeles home (where the Crenshaw District meets Hyde Park), was a daily part of our household for as long as I could remember. It was a guest at the dinner table; it was a bedtime story; it was the Zulu Mardi Gras coconuts on the piano; it was the special trip to the New Orleans Fish Market—past the “regular” supermarket—for proper crabs and oysters; it was the correct way to devein a shrimp; it was the Lloyd Price and Fats Domino rhythm & blues spinning round-and-round the hi-fi. Louisiana was the lagniappe—the little something extra.

Through most of my childhood, my mother kept New Orleans in plain sight, like the bouquet of fresh-cut irises on the polished dining table—living echoes of the fleur-de-lis. Though she’d been away for decades, the city wasn’t part of her past; it was as if she’d slid her finger in a book she had been reading to hold her place temporarily. She’d be back into that story in a moment—or as she’d have to admit sometimes to questioning friends, “Cher, really, it’s been more like a hot minute. But I’ll get home.”

My mother was building a future for all of us, “what was” was just as important as “what would be”—she always talked about the importance of being anchored. My dad, who was born in Pittsburgh, and grew up in Philadelphia before moving to L.A., took pride in his roots, but didn’t demonstrate it in a ritualistic way.

But New Orleans was a cardinal point in my mother’s everyday life. Her way of keeping New Orleans alive was through our daily interactions: the stories of the dust-ups her uncles (Percy, Algernon) would find themselves in, the mental map of street names she’d once lived on or near (Duplessis, Rocheblave, Cortez, Miro, St. Peter).

Food and patois invoked place, as did songs at bedtime (“Monsieur Banjo”) and, later, ghost stories about chairs rocking on their own on the porch—a whole family album of noisy, walking specters. In certain ways, I knew New Orleans before I knew Los Angeles.

Well into my teens, I spent summers there, away from the ocean air, the L.A. light, the faint outline of the San Gabriel Mountains that help define our sense of place.

In the beginning, those trips felt like a sentence—hard time. August was the swampiest month of the season. The atmosphere was a being itself. It was like walking through something solid—a door into another world. My hair would curl in ways the dry heat of L.A. didn’t allow; my arms, legs, and eyelids would populate with mosquito bites. And, slicing through midday: the out-of-nowhere lightning storms descended, dumping a deluge that would quickly turn to steam. And there was that smell—like a room closed a century—something over-ripe and sharp.

George’s grandfather, Frank Dixon Bowers, III, at Jackson Square in New Orleans, c. early 1970s

Here, without the interference of wires and time zones, I understood my grandfather fully. As well, I saw my mother become a more vivid, if vulnerable, version of herself—a daughter to her father who would never leave this place, chatting, on the narrow porch in her mother tongue. Their roots were four generations deep here in Louisiana. We settled into the little double-shotgun, painted white. A stowaway from another century, his neat narrow home was perched on a street that you could take four steps across and be on the other banquette. You lived so close to other families that everything floated into the street—intersected—music, conversation, fights, “relations.” There were few hiding places or secrets.

Like most of the other black families who lived in our L.A. neighborhood, we disappeared “elsewhere” for long pauses. Sometimes kids alone were sent for a full summer away, shipped off to relatives still residing at the starting point of their family’s Great Migration. Come fall, when we were tossed together again, I began to realize that my South was very particular, and that being of “Southern roots” was both a specific and relative thing. I heard the differences in their language, in their rituals, and most particularly in their food: I never ate chitlins or pig’s feet. My friends from other southern locales didn’t know about étouffée, beignets, or coffee with chicory (which, only on these trips, I would be treated to with a generous pour of condensed milk).

Not until my early 30s did I start to realize how much I was altered by this dual citizenship of sorts: how much my mother’s layering of stories had shaped who I am in the world—or perhaps more importantly, that I cared. A visit back to New Orleans after both my grandfather and mother were gone sharpened the feeling that I should carry these family traditions forward and fed a worry that I might not be able to.

A few months back, I was interviewed for a New York Times story about marginalia. I’d written an essay about discovering my mother’s notes and cross-outs on the pages of her old New Orleans cookbooks. She’s now been gone five years and there, in those pages, I still hear her.

As we were finishing up the conversation, the reporter asked if she could describe my mother’s voice as being “accented.” No. I answered quickly. She didn’t have an accent, “Not like my granddad.” Funny thing. I admitted, “I actually sound just like her.”

“Well you have it.” The swift confidence of her assessment disarmed me. “Not the thick accent, but the manner of speaking.” There it was: stealth but perceptible. Embedded.

Emotionally, I realize, I still commute between two homes—a physical one and a spirit one where I feel most understood. I always wear a silver fleur-de-lis, originally an emblem of the French influence on New Orleans and now a symbol of the city itself, on a chain around my neck. It rests against my throat, just at the place someone else’s Star of David or crucifix might.

Strangers glimpse it and ask: “Are you from Louisiana?” And depending on where I am situated in my head or in my heart I’ll tell them—“I’m from the other L.A.”—and not clarify, because I want to own both. The territory between those two points is my own personal neutral ground.

The post New Orleans Is My Second Language appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe that’s because they aren’t looking hard enough. Hidden in plain sight between an ad-hoc oil field and the Pacific Coast Highway, a nondescript Long Beach hotel holds a twice-monthly “Zydeco Night.”

Zydeco is a Louisiana Creole jazz music style with a matching eccentric dance that’s a little too swinging to be called folk and a little too folky to be called swing. Following the quick rhythm and bold chords of the music, dancing zydeco requires a blithe and loose spirit. Though the combination of a trumpet, accordion, washboard, drum set, and violin could assault the ears, those instruments, when put together right, are the perfect accompaniment to hopping and twirling your partner around the dance floor.

Growing up in Chicago, I took piano lessons, played violin in my high school orchestra, and attended the occasional street festival. But like most city kids north of the Mason-Dixon line, my knowledge of the Gulf Coast and its music was limited. All of that changed during a memorable spring break in New Orleans this past March.

I spent an evening at “Rock and Bowl,” a combination bowling alley-dance floor featuring a local zydeco band. The feeling was electric. Energy radiated from every corner of the room as at least 50 couples crowded on the floor, jumping and jiving in partnership with the musicians.

It was a blast, but I had little reason to believe that zydeco would follow me back to Los Angeles, where I attend college. Missing New Orleans, however, I did a late-night Google search and learned about the zydeco event at the Best Western Golden Sails in Long Beach.

I lured my friend Frank into joining me one Sunday with half-baked promises of fully-baked gumbo—hoping that I had not been deceived by blog posts alleging to the presence of this Louisiana staple. Thanks to a misdirected turn on the 405 by my travel guru Siri, we arrived almost an hour late; to what, though, we weren’t quite sure.

From the parking lot, the Best Western Golden Sails looked as barren and culturally devoid as one would expect, especially on an early Sunday evening. With few patrons in sight, even in the lobby, we began to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into. However, the encouraging smell of simmering meats accompanied by the faint pulses of horns and drums directed us onward. We followed our ears (and noses) to the PCH Club, the hotel’s venue for Grateful Dead tribute bands, and sure enough, a good old-fashioned zydeco dance.

Greeting us at the door were two ladies donning large cowboy hats and speaking in accents so deliciously thick they could turn a fish tank into a crawfish boil just by asking nicely. Poised by the entrance—blessed deliverance—were two slow-cooking vats: one with rice, the other with the promised gumbo. Next to it sat the ever-necessary Louisiana hot sauce. Though Frank and I were initially skeptical of this Los Angeles version of gumbo, our fears were assuaged while our taste buds were massaged.

The band was onstage and well underway with their jamming and hollering. The instrumental staples were all present: a drummer, a trumpet, a violin. The main singer played an accordion while shouting out food throughout the songs: “Jambalaya!” “Étouffée!” A boy no older than 10 was invited up onstage to accompany the band on the washboard, the apron-style instrument hanging down to his knees. While he clearly had limited washboard experience (or any sort of rhythmic experience, for that matter), that wasn’t the point.

The crowd included people ranging in age from 8 to 80. Some played pool or sat at the bar noshing on Southern cuisine—though most livened up the dance floor in pairs or solo. Couples who had clearly taken lessons repeated their practiced sequences across the dance floor (and tried in vain to stay on beat), while less trained dancers just hopped back and forth to the music. Frank and I toyed with the idea of joining the dance to give the other couples a run for their money. Before we could make any moves, however, we were intercepted by two regular attendees, who insisted on taking us for a spin on the floor.

There are as many ways to dance to zydeco as there are ways to play it, though the one taught to me by this very nice (albeit very drunk) woman followed a side/step/side/hop pattern that kept us in constant motion. Once I got the hang of the basic movement, the real fun started. For thrills, I would spin her around while side-step-siding. Occasionally I would change out the hop with a little dip, causing her to blush a shade similar to the Louisiana hot sauce (though it was probably less about me than the wine). Frank, however, was in desperate need of rescue as his partner seemed more preoccupied with where she was placing her hands than her feet, so I eventually cut in to remind him that he “owed me a game of pool.”

Before we headed out, we were corralled for a little more gumbo and conversation by a welcome committee of ladies in cowboy hats, one of whom we learned was from Mamou, Louisiana, about 150 miles inland from New Orleans. “Mamou is the real place to spend Mardi Gras,” she told us. Her brother, it turned out, was in the band. They had been bringing this musical (and culinary) extravaganza to the Los Angeles area for years. When we asked for her name, she replied: “You can call me whatever you like, just don’t call me late for dinner!” (Though it sounded more like: “Ja ca’ cahl meh whate’a’ jou like, jus’ dun’ cahl meh la’e fo’ dinuh!)

The event at the Best Western Golden Sails is just one small crawfish in a surprisingly large “Zydeco in Los Angeles” pot, one of our new friends told us. Southern California hosts several huge zydeco festivals in the summer, which we were advised to check out.

And so, as we headed into the Long Beach sunset on the Pacific Coast Highway, we decided we just might have to do that. After all, there are few places in Los Angeles, let alone the country, where so many people can experience such an intimate experience. In a city with more than a dozen freeways and a few million people, finding a corner with good food, music, dancing, and people is like a diamond in the rough—or rather, a diamond in the bayou.

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We had our Jim Crow moments, though. In the final photograph of the 1967 Panorama, a slim gold-and-black collection of public school photographs, stand two black janitors, with four black lunchroom women between them. You won’t see their names. Instead, you will find the following dismissive words: “These fill a vital role at L.H.S.”

In the world of Jim Crow rules, a white man did not shake hands with a black man, because it implied social equality. With rare exceptions, blacks and whites didn’t eat together (although I had many a meal in the 1960s with my black friends down on the farm), and if they did eat together, whites were to eat first. If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat. Another rule: White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections. Good God. Surely that was a formula for disaster!

It’s damn hard for me to believe all this. But it was real. Even black music was taboo. It used to be called “race music.” If the term sounds unfamiliar, that’s because Jerry Wexler of Billboard coined “rhythm and blues” to replace “race music” in 1948. (Although blacks referred to their music as race music, Wexler, who was Jewish and sensitive to the unintended impact of words, had found the original term derogatory.) But one group of kids did cross racial lines to listen to R&B: those were the “shaggers,” the original bad boys.

The shag is a slow, smooth couples dance that evolved out of the jitterbug and earlier dances. You can only dance the shag to beach music, which has roughly 120 beats a minute. Think of The Four Tops and The Platters. It’s hard to shag without a strong sense of seduction and romance. Few people beyond the shag world consider the first wave of shaggers to have been Civil Rights trailblazers. Well, they were. They had three confederates old timers will recall with affection: the jukebox, 45 RPMs, and that fabled music we know as the blues.

***

Some say it rolled off the Mississippi like a mist that mesmerized all who breathed it. Others say it shot up from the river’s alluvial plain, the Mississippi Delta. Something mystical, something melancholy came out of the delta all right—the blues, that sadly beautiful, beautifully sad music. And the blues, that mighty tributary of melody that grew out of work songs, spirituals, shouts, and chants, would forever change lives.

To understand how people fell in love with the blues, you have to understand the times that led to it. It was a time of taboos, a time when danger accompanied things we take for granted today. It was a time when parents didn’t approve of race music or the dancing and its settings. It was a time that called for doing the unacceptable.

Jim Crow governed music too. In a bit of reverse discrimination, whites could not enter black clubs and watch black performers. Nor could black entertainers perform in white establishments. Thus it was that unknown-but-stardom-bound blacks performed on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a string of clubs throughout the South where they could do their thing in a safe, acceptable venue.

Charlie’s Place was a club on the Chitlin’ Circuit near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, perched on a stretch of Carver Street called Whispering Pines. The pines began whispering, as Frank Beacham wrote in Charlie’s Place, Shaggin’ the Night Away, the night Billie Holliday sang there.

During World War II, the only people who heard rhythm and blues were a few bold fellows who made it a habit to jump the Jim Crow rope. “Black music influenced us from the start, and the only good place to hear it was on the Hill,” said South Carolinian shag legend the late Billy Jeffers. Another such fellow was a North Carolinian, Malcolm Ray “Chicken” Hicks. Hicks grew up around blacks, and it wasn’t a big deal to watch blacks jitterbugging at a Durham armory.

Hicks served in the U.S. Coast Guard and washed up in a club-happy place, Carolina Beach, in 1943. Back then, he said, “It was like a state fair, 24 hours a day. There were places that had no doors, ’cause they were always open.”

Hicks was such a fervent appreciator of this music that he became a pioneer. Jim Hanna, a former merchant marine, first placed African-American jump blues on his piccolo, or jukebox, at his Tijuana Inn in Carolina Beach at the behest of Hicks. Hanna called the amusement company in Wilmington that stocked his jukebox and had them bring over some music they regularly took to the black joints down the road. Soon the box that sat just to the right of the entrance to the long and narrow club was blaring tunes unheard of in postwar white America.

Hicks had an affinity for black music and white liquor. On his moonshine-purchasing trips to the African-American community of Seabreeze, Hicks heard popular songs by black artists such as Joe Liggins & The Honeydrippers, Louis Jordan & His Tympani Five, Lionel Hampton, and Wynonie Harris, forebears of the budding jump-blues style music emerging out of the swing and big band traditions.

Hicks liked to show off the new steps he picked up from Seabreeze. When he hit the dance floor, people gathered around for the show. “I’m gonna tell you the truth, I didn’t call it anything,” he said in 1996. “I couldn’t stand it, how they all called it the jitterbug. All I said was, ‘Come on, let’s go jump awhile.’”

Hicks was more than an exceptional dancer. He changed the music whites listened to. He helped bring blacks’ “bop” sound to whites, and that, in part, would give rise to the “beach music” sound, and the shag to go with it. “I got chummy with the jukebox changers. I’d say, ‘Bring that record and that record.’ I got rid of Glenn Miller in Carolina Beach jukeboxes.”

The music proved infectious, and people adored its source. As the nation was coming out of the Great Depression, the jukebox secured a reverent place in Americana and shagdom. Harry Driver, considered the “Father of the Shag” by some, lived in Dunn, North Carolina. He recalled listening to “race” and Hit Parade music in 1945 at White Lake’s Crystal Club. There they danced to “suggestive” music banned in the segregated Carolinas. They paid scant attention to the bans. Said Driver, “We had integration 25 years before Martin Luther King Jr. came on the scene. We were totally integrated because the blacks and whites had nothing in our minds that made us think we were different. We loved music, we loved dancing, and that was the common bond between us.”

As the big-band era died, rhythm and blues came on strong, and racial barriers softened. The color line began to wash out, bleached by black musicians’ crossover to white audiences, thanks to guys like Hicks who got their records into white jukeboxes. Vinyl from artists such as Bull Moose Jackson and LaVern Baker could now be heard. More and more whites turned to black music at the beach pavilions, although to do so was perilous. Sometimes the KKK showed up, showering bullets, slurs, and mayhem.

Said one veteran shagger, “You could only hear that stuff when you were at the beach and away from your parents. The whites loved what they heard, and no sheriff was going to hold them back.”

That was many, many years ago.

***

There’s an old dictum. “The more things change the more they remain the same.” Mostly whites dance the shag today. Young blacks consider it a dance performed to “white music.” Black musicians, including Maurice Williams of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs, say their own kids refuse to listen to it. “The beginning of beach music was predominantly rhythm and blues,” Williams said. “But today if you say to a young black man, ‘come on, let’s go and listen to a beach music show,’ he’ll say, ‘I ain’t going to that white music.’ The average black kid in his 20s or 30s doesn’t know what this is all about.”

Beach music has its roots in rhythm and blues, but so much has transpired since those early days that the music’s history is lost on the very descendants of those who created it.

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