Singing in a Strange Land Read online

  Along this road, for example, in the vicinity of Doddsville, the Eastland family had its vast, 2,300-acre plantation, which served as the base of their political power for generations to come. James O. Eastland, who would become one of the country’s most powerful defenders of segregation in the United States Senate, was born into this family in 1904 in circumstances that vividly expressed the area’s racial realities. Some months before Eastland’s birth, Luther Holbert, a black sharecropper on the family plantation, shot and killed Eastland’s Uncle James, who co-owned the family holdings with the future senator’s father, W. C. Eastland. Holbert had killed James Eastland and the black tenant farmer accompanying him, when they came to his cabin to threaten him for some unknown conduct involving Holbert’s wife. Immediately, both Holberts fled into the swamps, and Delta whites raised a 200-man posse to find them. It took four days. At least three other blacks were murdered in the process, but the Holberts were caught and brought into Doddsville. In a horrific ceremonious burning before an estimated crowd of more than 1,000, each finger was individually chopped off the victims and “distributed as souvenirs” to the assembled white citizens. Eyes were gouged out with sticks. Before the pyre consumed its victims, a large corkscrew “bored into the flesh of the man and woman,” tearing out as it was withdrawn by human hands “big pieces of raw, quivering flesh.” The moment lived in the memory of Delta blacks for generations.18

  Six miles north was Ruleville, and then six miles beyond that hamlet was Drew, Mississippi. Including Doddsville, the vicinity around these three small communities was home to many thousands of poor black tenants, increasingly drawn from other parts of the state by the migration northward of Delta blacks and the consequent demand for new workers on these plantations. This large, fluid population, concentrated in so small a region, created as distinctive a cultural expression as the Delta blues. If one could talk of an actual place where such a birth occurred, the Dockery plantation would be as likely a site as any.

  Will Dockery established his plantation in 1895, when the Delta was still frontierlike in its natural wilderness. He cleared and planted forty square miles of land five miles west of Ruleville and employed hundreds of black agricultural laborers and sharecroppers. Among them was Henry Sloan, who in the 1890s had begun to experiment with new musical patterns on his guitar. In 1897 the Patton family, including a sixteen-year-old son, Charley, moved to Dockery’s. Sloan taught the boy, who shortly became a distinctive musical influence throughout the Delta. Together, they touched an increasingly large number of musicians. Over the next three decades, Howlin’ Wolf, Honeyboy Edwards, Roebuck Pops Staples, Tommy Johnson, and Willie Brown were but a few of the blues singers who developed their craft, trading licks and learning new guitar runs from Sloan and Patton and from numerous singers who traveled through Sunflower County, including Robert Johnson and Son House. The space occupied by the Dockery plantation spurred this commingling. Equidistant between Drew and Doddsville, Dockery’s sat at the center of Sunflower County’s black population, which in 1920 comprised almost 75 percent of the more than forty-six thousand county residents. Just five miles to the west was Cleveland, the seat of Bolivar County, and a bit further were the adjacent communities of Boyle and Shaw. Blues could be heard throughout this whole region. A local railroad, the Pea Vine, immortalized in Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues,” carried musicians and their audiences between the Dockery plantation and the juke joints in Bolivar County.19

  Like the religious faith to which it was so intimately linked, the blues affirmed life as found even as the music sought to create new understandings. B. B. King, the blues musician and a Sunflower County native ten years younger than Clarence Franklin, described a Sanctified (i.e., Pentecostal) religious service he attended as a young boy near Indianola. The minister, King explained, “says one thing and the congregation says it back, back and forth, back and forth, until we’re rocking together in a rhythm that won’t stop. His voice is low and rough and his guitar high and sweet; they seem to sing to each other, conversing in some heavenly language I need to learn. . . . No room for fear here; no room for doubt; it’s a celebration of love.”20

  The mixture of the sacred and secular tones in these songs erased the loneliness and terror, if only for a moment. King and his coworshipers needed the love they sang into being: working conditions may have been better than elsewhere in the state, but by any other criteria, the Delta remained a brutal environment. By the end of the 1920s, almost 12,000 blacks operated farms in Sunflower County but only 194 of them, working less than 3 percent of the cultivated land, actually owned the ground they toiled over. The remaining black farmers, including Henry and Rachel Franklin, were tenants, the minority economically secure enough to supply their family’s needs and pay rent in cash to the white owner. Most tenants, however, either sharecropped or worked as day laborers. Sharecroppers depended on the plantation store for their needs in the long stretch between planting the cotton seed in April and the final settlement of accounts in December. Prices were higher at the plantation store than in town—by as much as 10 to 25 percent—but many sharecroppers lived outside of a cash economy and had little choice. The yearly rent usually consumed half the crop, and when the sharecropper brought his cotton to the owner’s mill for processing, grading, and sale, the farm and family supplies furnished during the year were deducted as well. Given the 25 percent illiteracy rate among blacks and the near-total powerlessness before a determined white owner, few tenants finished any year with a profit. If they did, they were usually paid in scrip, redeemable only at the plantation store. Vagrancy laws, enforced by the sheriff, and behind him by a posse of white men, prevented many from simply leaving while in “debt.”21

  Even when good fortune prevailed and a sharecropper reinvested his profit in animals and equipment in the hopes of doing even better the following year, trouble often ensued. Fannie Lou Townsend, who four decades later, as Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, became a civil rights activist of profound moral courage and strength, recalled a time in the early 1920s, when she was about six or seven and living with her large family on the E. W. Brandon plantation near Ruleville. The year before had been a banner year for her father. He had invested his profits in three mules, two cows, and some new farm tools in an effort to make the leap from sharecropper to cash tenant. On returning home one evening, the family found all the animals dead, poisoned—the work of a local white man. Mrs. Hamer explained: “White people never like to see Negroes get a little success.”22

  Knowledge of the Franklin family in Sunflower County during the 1920s is sparse. Early in the decade, possibly in 1921 or 1922, Rachel delivered her third child, her first with Henry, a daughter they named Aretha. During this decade as well Henry adopted Clarence and replaced Walker with Franklin as the boy’s last name. Not much is known about Henry’s personality. In family memory, he is remembered as a hardworking man, perhaps a bit distant, but a good father and a devoted husband. He and Rachel remained together until his death more than three decades later. But whose land they worked in Sunflower County, what church they attended there, how they spent their leisure time, and with whom—all this and more remains unknown. It is not even clear precisely how long the Franklins remained in the Doddsville area. Clarence said he “grew up partially” near Doddsville, and he also recalled that he attended school “in [a] church in Sunflower County.” It is likely, then, that the family stayed in the county until Clarence was nine, possibly ten.23

  On December 14, 1923, when Clarence was but a month shy of his ninth birthday, the molten violence just below the placid formality of the region’s enforced racial etiquette erupted once again. Up near Drew, Joe Pullen, a proud black man, a sharecropper, and a World War I veteran got into a dispute with his boss man, W. T. “Tom” Sanders, over the total that was due him on that year’s settlement day. Sanders refused to pay what Pullen insisted he was owed and refused as well to give Pullen permission to move off the plantation. Accounts vary at this point; some suggest that Sa
nders first shot Pullen. But it is clear that Joe Pullen went to his cabin, loaded his gun, returned to the office, and shot Sanders dead. He immediately fled into the swamps east of Drew, carrying with him about seventy-five rounds of ammunition. A posse of more than one thousand white men quickly formed, prominent among them the sheriff of Clarksdale (a town of some ten thousand just northwest of Tutwiler), bearing his department’s machine gun. But Pullen knew the terrain and was a sharpshooter to boot. Before he was eventually taken, alive, Pullen killed four posse members and wounded eight others. What then followed was the familiar ritual murder. As Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer testified: “They dragged him by his heels on the back of a car and paraded about with that man for all the Negroes to see. They cut his ear off and for the longest time it was kept in a jar of alcohol in a showcase in a store window at Drew.”24

  Henry and Rachel may have kept their children from Drew and thus spared them looking at that jar, but there was no way any black parent could isolate their children, especially one as old as Clarence, from the sickening knowledge of the event. The news went up and down the Delta almost immediately, in both the white and black communities. Cautious discussions among black adults took place behind closed doors at home, in church vestibules, and perhaps especially in the barbershops and drinking clubs that peppered the black Delta. After the Pullen murder, Drew and other towns in both Sunflower and neighboring Bolivar County enforced nightly curfews for blacks only. In 1924, the sheriff of Drew shot and killed seven or eight black citizens he deemed too slow in getting off the street shortly after curfew. Thereafter, Drew became known in the black community as a place to avoid.25

  Sometime in the next year or so, the Franklin family joined the slow but steady exodus of blacks out of Sunflower County. Bluesmen Charley Patton and Willie Brown both left, heading farther north in the Delta. Many others, the less famous, departed for the North, even if it meant risking arrest for a debt yet owed to the landlord. But when Henry and Rachel moved, their steps were less far-reaching, only some fifteen miles north and west of Doddsville, to a farm “about a mile out from Cleveland, Mississippi.”26

  Sharecroppers at Doddsville, the Franklins were cash tenants when they arrived in their new home. (They clearly had been frugal while in Sunflower County.) Although cotton was the major crop, Henry and Rachel also planted a vegetable garden and kept mules, some horses, chickens, milk cows, and hogs.

  By Delta standards for blacks, the Franklins were doing relatively well. Yet Henry Franklin was always at a disadvantage, Clarence later explained, both because he was black and because he was “completely illiterate to the point that he couldn’t even write [his] name.” The family soon moved a few miles south, near Boyle, where the Franklins sharecropped on land rented by the Pennington family. The Penningtons were poor but they were white, part of the 26 percent of Bolivar County that was such. “My daddy,” Clarence recalled, made a great crop that year in Boyle, both corn and cotton, “and it was obvious that we were supposed to come out ahead.” But at settling time, the Penningtons gathered their male relatives about them, including a son-in-law who “had a reputation for killing blacks.” The family patriarch told Henry: “‘No, you just didn’t make it.’ No settlement or anything.” Clarence was perhaps eleven, and the weight of Joe Pullen lay heavily on the family.27

  Deflated, the Franklins returned nearer to Cleveland, this time renting land from “a Mr. Cashbury,” a northerner and a local banker who was remembered as “a bit more fair and generous” than the Penningtons.28 Here the Franklins remained for the following decade, in a four-room, wood-shingled house. The kitchen was the family center, with an open-hearth fireplace and a wood-burning iron stove, dining table and chairs, and a chest “on the wall” to hold flour, sugar, and other staples. There were three bedrooms, each with a bed, dresser, and a mirror. In one of the bedrooms, probably that of Henry and Rachel, stood a “wind-up, floor model” phonograph. There was no parlor, but at the front and back of the hall that divided the rooms, two to a side, were porches that were especially welcome in the heaviness of a summer evening. There was pump water, outhouse, and the commissary store “at the boss’s house” for supplies.

  Even on Cashbury’s land, Henry rarely “came out ahead, despite [the] 20-25 bales of cotton” produced in a given year, and the family always struggled. Clarence remembered that “at Christmas time my mother would cry because the only thing that she could purchase for the children were raisins and oranges and apples and striped candy. I will never forget that striped candy. That’s about all. No toys. I never had toys. And that stands out: her crying.”29

  Life for a black youth in the Cleveland area was rigorously circumscribed in the late 1920s. Except when absolutely necessary, most blacks had little to do with whites. Ivory James, a teenager in the countryside some five miles out of Cleveland in the 1920s, recalled of whites at that time: “Well, I have [had] no personal experienced with them, you know.” In Cleveland, the young Cleo Myles, born the same year as Clarence, remembered that except for the white family for whom her mother worked, she too had little interaction with whites. As Clarence remembered, life revolved around the family and the farm, church, and “school at the time that schooling was provided.”30

  Farm life was tedious and hard. The Franklins arose by 4:30 in the morning, and from a young age Clarence helped milk the cows and pump water for the mules before hitching them up. He and his stepfather were in the fields by 6:00 A.M. At first, Henry plowed while Clarence chopped cotton, but as he grew into what became his six-foot frame, Clarence too would take a turn behind the mules. About seven they returned to the cabin for breakfast, often ham, rice, gravy, and biscuits. Then Rachel and the two girls joined the men in the fields. When plowing, Clarence would be off alone, preparing a section of the field for planting, and even then, his nascent religious faith and a fierce drive to be someone led him to preach to the birds, his mule, or other animals. When he picked cotton, working with his mother and sisters, they could talk, swap stories, and sing hymns in a manner that alleviated some of the drudgery. Whatever the day’s task, however, Clarence and Henry left the fields about noon for dinner; Rachel had prepared it as she made breakfast, and she and the girls went ahead a half hour or so before noon to put it on the table. Black neighbors, their fellow sharecroppers, would sometimes join the Franklins for the midday meal. Presumably, the Franklins would visit in turn as well. But for all, one o’clock marked the time to return to the fields until supper, about six in the evening; kerosene lamps illuminated the house as darkness fell. Following some talk on the porch, the family retired by 9:00 P.M. to recharge their strength for the morrow.31

  Numerous other black families worked the same plantation and lived within walking distance. As a teen, Clarence played ball, rode horses, shot marbles, and picked berries with other boys. Saturday afternoon was the day to hitch up the mules to the wagon and, with the reins in Henry’s hands, ride to Cleveland with legs dangling off the tailboard. There Clarence joined with other boys, and from about age twelve on, he (and they) “began thinking about girls.” He could do little more than think, however, for at that time boys and girls tended not to mix in groups once they began noticing each other, at least not when devoutly religious parents were watching. In addition to these Saturday excursions were occasional picnics at one of the local churches, with plentiful supplies of ribs and chicken “provided by whites through certain blacks.” (Often these blacks were plantation foremen who supervised black sharecroppers for white owners, but that complicated fact did not always prevent friendship and fellowship from flourishing.) Then, too, nine miles north of Cleveland, was Mound Bayou, an all-black town, an “oasis in the desert,” one black journalist referred to it in 1923, whose summer festivals and discreet celebrations of black achievement drew people from throughout the Delta and beyond.32

  These practices among many Delta blacks—workday dinners shared with family and friends; the easy comraderie of Saturday conversations in town, punctua
ted by the blue tones of the Delta’s itinerant street musicians; the intense fellowship of prolonged Sunday church services; the visiting back and forth—signaled the presence of an intricate black folk culture critical to the maintenance of black sanity in this oppressive world. Yet it was never a smooth process. Richard Wright himself could ask with real bewilderment, decades after leaving Mississippi: “But where had I got this notion of doing something in the future?” For many, the world of the Delta remained so constrained, bound by a narrowed focus of field, faith, and family that turned them inward. But people still dreamed, and even young adolescents sought to give voice to the visions they beheld, even as they worked someone else’s cotton. “We had a field,” Clarence explained,

  that ran right up to the railroad track. Just across the railroad track was the 61 highway. And it was meaningful to me, quite an experience as contrasted with my experiences in Sunflower County, to see the trains coming from Memphis enroute to New Orleans and Jackson. The people would be waving out of the windows at us in the field. And the cars going down the highway with different license plates from New York and New Jersey and the District of Columbia, Virginia and Connecticut, and whatever. This was quite an interesting thing to me to see that, to observe it. It gave me a deep longing to someday see these places where these cars came from, where the train came from, and where the people on the trains came from.33

  Highways and railroads—central symbols of the black Delta experience, dominant metaphors in both song and story. They represented the way out of a land of virtual captivity, as the migrants traveling north throughout this decade attested. Black poets teased out the possibilities inherent in those symbols in numerous blues songs with great emphasis on the freedom and dignity a rambling man might encounter when he crossed the Mississippi line.34