Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove
were leaving the rural, slave-holding areas of the South, known as the Black Belt, to which Harold Rose gave the lovely name “the Hearth of Black Culture.” This was—in 1910, the peak year of black residence in the South before the Great Migration—an area “. . . some two hundred miles wide which spanned the plainsland South from the Black Prairies of Texas to Virginia, and then tapered to a narrow tip in Megalopolis. This belt widened perceptibly where it crossed the Mississippi River bottomlands, sent a finger curling into northern Florida, and had outliers in the middle Tennessee River Valley–Nashville Basin–Pennyroyal Plain area and in the Kentucky Bluegrass.”9
One and a half million black people left the South between 1910 and 1930, settling in major cities in the Northeast and Midwest, while others moved from rural areas in the South to the southern cities. The years 1940–70 marked another great wave of migration, during which millions more moved to the nation’s cities. Though African Americans were 90 percent rural at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were 90 percent urban one hundred years later.
In the usual manner of migration, such a diaspora would have been the beginning of the decline of the culture of the old country, in this case, the culture of the Black Belt. Immigrants themselves hold on to their culture, but their children and especially their children’s children stop speaking the old language and switch to the customs of the American mainstream. However, the virulent racial segregation that was instituted all over America—and which remains at the time of this writing a potent force influencing residential life—has impeded the African American people’s transition from the culture of the Black Belt to the dominant American culture.
Instead, the geography created by dispersal-in-segregation created a group of islands of black life. “Archipelago” is the official geographic term for a group of islands. Black America is an archipelago state, a many-island nation within the American nation. The creation of the archipelago nation had two consequences for African Americans. The first is that the ghettos became centers of black life; the second is that the walls of the ghetto, like other symbols of segregation, became objects of hatred. In this ambivalent, love/hate relationship, it was impossible to choose to dwell. Yet people did choose to make life as vibrant and happy as they possibly could.
Black people worked hard to help one another. They worked especially hard to help the gifted child realize his potential. Paul Robeson, who spent his early childhood in the ghetto in Princeton, New Jersey, described the nurturing that accompanied the community’s conviction that he was a gifted child who would express their culture. “Hard-working people, and poor, most of them, in worldly goods—but how rich in compassion! How filled with the goodness of humanity and the spiritual steel forged by centuries of oppression! . . . Here in this little hemmed-in world where home must be theatre and concert hall and social center, there was a warmth of song. Songs of love and longing, songs of trials and triumphs, deep-flowing rivers and rollicking brooks, hymn-song and ragtime ballad, gospels and blues, and the healing comfort to be found in the illimitable sorrow of the spirituals . . .
“There was something else, too, that I remember from Princeton. Something strange, perhaps, and not easy to describe. I early became conscious—I don’t quite know how—of a special feeling of the Negro community for me. I was no different from the other kids of the neighborhood—playing our games of Follow the Leader and Run Sheep Run, saying ‘yes ma’am’ and never sassing our elders, fearing to cross the nearby cemetery because of the ‘ghosts,’ coming reluctant and new-scrubbed to Sunday School. And yet, like my father, the people claimed to see something special about me. Whatever it was, and no one really said, they felt I was fated for great things to come. Somehow they were sure of it, and because of that belief they added an extra measure to the affection they lavished on their preacher’s motherless child.”10
Ralph Ellison experienced the same investment in the “special” child while growing up in Oklahoma City. “During summer vacation I blew sustained tones out of the window for hours, usually starting—especially on Sunday mornings—before breakfast. I sputtered whole days through M. Arban’s (he’s the great authority on the instrument) double- and triple-tonguing exercises, with an effect like that of a jackass hiccupping off a big meal of briars . . . Despite those who complained and cried to heaven for Gabriel to blow a chorus so heavenly sweet and so hellishly hot that I’d forever put down my horn, there were more tolerant ones who were willing to pay in present pain for future pleasure. For who knew what skinny kid with his chops wrapped around a trumpet mouthpiece and a faraway look in his eyes might become the next Armstrong? Yes, and send you, at some big dance a few years hence, into an ecstasy of rhythm and memory and brassy affirmation of the goodness of being alive and part of the community? Someone had to, for it was part of the group tradition, though that was not how they said it.”11
And when the special child appeared, was nurtured, and took the stage of some city club, the ecstasy happened, as the people knew it would. In 1944, Billy Eckstine’s legendary big band went to St. Louis to play at a white nightclub called the Plantation Club. The owners insisted that Billy enter through the back door. He walked in the front door and they fired him on the spot. He took his band to the Riviera Club, an all-black club on Delmar and Taylor. The band included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Standing in for an absent trumpet player was eighteen-year-old Miles Davis.12
“Listen,” Miles wrote in his autobiography. “The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together . . . when I heard Diz and Bird in B’s band, I said, ‘What? What is this!?’ Man, that shit was so terrible it was scary. I mean, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie ‘Yardbird’ Parker, Buddy Anderson, Gene Ammons, Lucky Thompson, and Art Blakey all together in one band and not to mention B: Billy Eckstine himself. It was a motherfucker. Man, that shit was all up in my body. Music all up in my body, and that’s what I wanted to hear. The way that band was playing music—that was all I wanted to hear. It was something. And me up there playing with them.”13
The triumph of the legendary band of Billy Eckstine was in part a result of the nurturing those amazing musicians had received throughout their lives.
There is another piece to the puzzle of “neon” and that is understanding that places can have a special quality that is greater than the sum of their parts. Neighborhoods can have magic.
Among the truly magic places on earth is the Hill District in Pittsburgh. I believe that, pound for pound, the Hill District was the most generative black community in the United States. When I say “pound for pound,” it is like arguing whether the lightweight Sugar Ray Leonard was a greater boxer than the heavyweight Muhammad Ali. The size difference is so great, the two would never have met head-to-head. So the discussion is always framed “pound for pound.” Take, for example, photographs. The Hill was so photogenic that Charles “Teenie” Harris took eighty thousand photographs. Richard Saunders was only in Pittsburgh a few months, but took three thousand pictures, mostly of the Hill. W. Eugene Smith almost succumbed to the photographic equivalent of narcosis of the deep, he struggled so hard to capture the images of the city, and the Hill District. The key is this: it was so lively, so absorbing, so hilly, that every picture was interesting. And that’s just for openers.
Eighty-six-year-old tap dancer Henry Belcher told me, “[The Hill District] was amazing. There was people all up and down the street all the time. It was like, well, I never did go to New Orleans, but I would say it was like in New Orleans or something, where if something was going on, people would be out mingling. The only place that I see now, that reminds me of what it used to be here, is on Carson Street on the South Side. See, on Carson Street after dark, people are mingling all up and down the street and in the joints. Well, that’s the way it used to be here. All up and down Centre Avenue.”
Everyone was in the streets, the fundamental place where the magic was created. The young boys were in the streets a lot, trying to make money to help their families and to take care of their own needs. Lots of men told me stories about their adventures doing little jobs. Ken Nesbitt, who was part of a focus group I led, talked of delivering dinners to the brothels and deciding that a pimp’s life was definitely better than the iceman’s. “The iceman, he had a horse and buggy. And I used to watch those guys, and say, ‘I’m never going to be like that,