Born in a Mighty Bad Land: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction

by Jerry H. Bryant

Overview

The figure of the violent man in the African American imagination has a long history. He can be found in 19th-century bad man ballads like "Stagolee" and "John Hardy," as well as in the black convict recitations that influenced "gangsta" rap. "Born in a Mighty Bad Land" connects this figure with similar characters in African American fiction. Many writers—McKay and Hurston in the Harlem Renaissance; Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison in the '40s and '50s; Himes in the '50s and '60s—saw the "bad nigger" as an archetypal figure in the black imagination and psyche. "Blaxploitation" novels in the '70s made him a virtually mythical character. More recently, Mosley, Wideman, and Morrison have presented him as ghetto philosopher and cultural adventurer. Behind the folklore and fiction, many theories have been proposed to explain the source of the bad man's intra-racial violence. Jerry H. Bryant explores all of these elements in a wide-ranging and illuminating look at one of the most misunderstood figures in African American culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253215789
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	04/03/2003
Series:	Blacks in the Diaspora
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jerry H. Bryant is Emeritus Professor of English at California State University.

Read an Excerpt

"Born in a Mighty Bad Land"

The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction

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By Jerry H. Bryant

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2003 Jerry H. Bryant
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34206-5

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CHAPTER 1

The Classic Badman and the Ballad

While "bad niggers" doubtless prowled the paths of the slave quarters and picked fights in free black taverns in southern cities, the full lineaments of the classic badman were not drawn until after the Civil War, when the slave society was reconfigured as a quasi-free one. De facto slavery replaced the "peculiar institution" in the form of Jim Crow, sharecropping, and a carefully controlled labor market that forced black men and women into the worst and lowest-paid jobs. But options opened that had been closed in slavery, options that replaced such sources of slave folk expression as the spiritual, the animal tale, and the stories about the witty trickster-slave High John the Conqueror. Former slaves and their children could migrate north or go west, and did so in increasing numbers. Escape, though difficult for the impoverished freed person, became accessible in more than dreams, fantasies, and the words and music of the spirituals. Working conditions did resemble those of slavery, but the slyness and cunning of Brer Rabbit and High John, which had provided psychological satisfaction under slave conditions, ceased to be quite as relevant with the disappearance of Ol' Massa and the growing importance of money and fairness rather than legal bondage.

As the black slave community disappeared, the new freedom, even though constrained, saw change in communal structures. Old slave quarters became the homes of laborers who could come and go much as they pleased — restricted, perhaps, by the ubiquitous "paterollers," but far less so than in slave conditions. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, self-contained black enclaves grew up: neighborhoods in small towns and scattered districts in the growing cities of the North and South. The new African Americans sought entertainment with greater freedom in the vice districts of the cities, at crossroads barrelhouses, village honky-tonks, backyard picnics. New artistic forms emerged reflecting the new sensibilities that accompanied these changed arrangements, exploring new feelings and new types of people. From an elaboration of old field hollers and risqué party songs to nonsense verses, material intended for performance, rather than group participation as the spirituals had been, provided a more individualistic vehicle and a transition from folk to more professional and commercial art. The blues turned attention from Christian soldiers fighting sin and John tricking Ol' Massa to the inner experience of individual black men and women in laments over an unfaithful mate, rehearsals of the universal pain of loss, and a general sense of melancholy, all leavened with a rich irony and humor.

The ballad became one of the vehicles of the folk imagination exploring these new conditions, and the violent badman became the ballad's central actor. He pumped "rockets" into a gambling adversary who annoyed him, or "blew away" the woman who cheated on him, or gunned down a white sheriff who had broken the rules of engagement in the black quarter. He became a familiar figure in the turpentine and logging camps, among the river levee roustabouts, in gambling dens, brothels, pool halls. He represented all that the educated elite and the church-going classes sought to leave behind them. Yet in this period he became emblematic for large segments of the African American community, in both the North and South.

THE BADMAN BOASTER

Over the forty or fifty years in which the ballad badman took shape, from about 1880 to 1930, some thirty separate characters appear in as many prototype songs. Some of these prototypes occur in dozens, even scores, of different variants that amateur and professional folklorists have collected and edited over the years. Except for one or two women murderers, their protagonists are all men of violence, and the ballads and songs about them recount a particular exploit or set of qualities that, for one reason or another, had special significance for composers, singers, and audiences. As song collector John Wesley Work says, "The life and death of notorious characters fired the imagination of many song-makers. The individual flaunting [sic\ the law served to appeal much more to the creators than did those of better social status."

The protagonist of these pieces was the imaginative embodiment of the real-life "bully" and "bad nigger," the id to the more genteel black superego, a man who lived on the margins, who was familiar with violence and death, and who reacted impulsively to any perceived personal injury, from friend or foe, man or woman. The genre had the distinction of being the only art form whose defining purpose was to explore and interpret the violence of the black folk, a fact suggested by folklorist G. Malcolm Laws's comment that "More than half the Negro ballads are based on murder, a percentage far higher than that of the white ballads." And of the five "traditional Negro ballads" in print that do not deal with violent crime, four are of doubtful authenticity. For the most part, the ballads and songs are not expressions of racial protest or polemical demonstrations of racial injustice. They largely confine themselves to conflict between blacks. White functionaries of the law are ubiquitous in them, to be sure, but in all but a few cases, such as "Po' Laz'us" and "Duncan and Brady," the motivating forces arise from intraracial, not interracial, relationships.

Ten of the thirty badman prototypes involve boasters and braggarts, suggesting how central to the art of the badman song is the rhetoric of badness. The boasting song is a compilation of the qualities that make the braggart special. What makes him rejected among respectable people is a virtue for him. "Ba-adness" is the sine qua non of his self-respect, the essence of his identity, and it is largely measured by the assurance with which he says he is bad. Bad-Lan' Stone, for example, whose boast I quote at the beginning of this book, glories in the description of his own and others' orneriness and his ability to strike fear in other badmen. He concludes

You may bring all yo' guns from de battleship,
I make a coon climb a tree.
Don't you never dare slight my repertatin,
Or I'll break up this jamberee.

Well, well, I wus bohn in a mighty bad lan',
For my name — name — is Bad-Man Stone.

He cherishes the most important badman possession, a "repertatin" for badness. No "jamberee," picnic, party, or gambling room, in the city or in the country, is safe from the wreckage a true badman might cause over an affront.

The boasting songs are not the most popular badman songs. They seem not to have been as widely dispersed as ballads like "Stagolee" or "Railroad Bill," since they exist in very few variants. The pieces in this group, moreover, are lyrics rather than ballads, for they do not tell stories about an act of violence and its consequences. They are the arias of "devil" music, pugnacious reflections on the central figure's inflammable toughness, spoken either by the protagonist himself or by some other first-person observer. Disentangled from the interests of a narrative, the boasting songs are the archives of the black version of manliness in these years of the installation of Jim Crow. They reveal the core standard by which the badman lives and the qualities he and presumably his audience esteem, and express what the audience deems "boastworthy," as Alan Dundes aptly puts it. "The values of a society or of a segment of a society," says Dundes, "could in theory be extrapolated by analyzing the content of the 'boasts' of that society." In the black boasting song badness and manliness are synonymous, and the badman's badness is measured by his ability to evoke fear wherever he goes. In the outrageousness of his behavior the singers and the audience recognize kin, and, while perhaps not unconditionally approving, nevertheless they take some pride in what the badman forces them to deal with.

Bolin Jones, Buffalo Bill, Joe Turner, Roscoe Bill are all boasters, bullies, and badmen who advertise their badness or have it advertised for them. They reflect, interpret, and comment on the environment in which they compete for dominance and reputation, asserting their power over other blacks in their own black community. The example of Bolin Jones will illustrate the type:

Bolin Jones wuz
A man of might,
He worked all day
And he fit all night.

O Lawsy, Lawsy,
He's a rough nigger,
Han' to his hip,
Fingers on de trigger.

Lay 'em low,
Lay 'em low,
When Bolin's 'round,
Mind what you go.

The childlike shortness of line masks an authentic metrical sophistication. The wit of the rhyme, with meaning and sound conforming so exactly to each other, shows how vastly far from doggerel and self-parody this black minstrel has traveled. His song is epigrammatic, almost gnomic, in its pithiness, calling up the whole environment in which Bolin Jones operates, the bluff terseness of men more used to acting than talking, to whom any kind of literary refinement is foreign. And yet the text is not without its own kind of eloquence.

The lack of any defining geographical background forces all our attention upon Bolin Jones himself. We cannot even tell where it is that he fights "all night" — in the streets and dives of a city like Memphis, the country juke joints, or a camp gambling room? But Bolin Jones is a composite of the typical black laborer. His life has no domestic content or personal intimacy. It is made up of a daytime of hard labor and a nighttime of blowing off steam by fighting, and illustrates how being respected and feared by others is more important than friendship, community, or racial solidarity. His is a limited and self-absorbed life, without expansive horizons or any thoughtful self-examination. Any ideas concerning racial improvement, working to enfranchise blacks, or securing a better life seem utterly alien to the sphere in which Bolin Jones moves.

The laconic lines and repetitions of these songs express the volcanic psyches of their protagonists, poised constantly on the edge of violence, as well as their physical strength, their recklessness, and their indifference to public opinion and community values. Conventional respectability is reversed. The respectable man honors women and avoids the low life of fighting, gambling, drinking, killing. The pious sing of God and heaven as the source of their grace and comfort. The badman takes pains to evoke imagery that aligns him with quite the other side of the battle. He is the quintessential black man living in a quintessential black world. He readily, eagerly, seeks other black men against whom to test himself, to kill if necessary, rejecting with gusto the nonviolent propriety of the respectable community.

THE FACES OF STAGOLEE

The boaster, though, is a one-dimensional figure, at times verging on the ridiculous. It is the ballad that provides the nuances in the delineation of the classic badman. While Bolin Jones and Bad-Lan' Stone and the rest of their boasting-song companions all seem very much alike, each of the thirty figures who are the protagonists of their own ballad "protonarratives" possesses his own personality. But they evade most of the easy generalizations that have often been made about the group. Roger Abrahams calls them "murderers and thieves, sadistic in their motivation, badmen looking for a fight just to prove their own strength and virility." In similar language, Lawrence Levine characterizes the ballad badmen as "pure force, pure vengeance; explosions of fury and futility," anarchical and lawless, preying "upon the weak as well as the strong, women as well as men," and killing "not merely in self-defense but from sadistic need and sheer joy." They are "hard, unyielding, remorseless." They represent, says another commentator, "a misanthropic perception of society."

To be sure, nearly all of them are killers. Stagolee and John Hardy shoot other black men over trivialities like Stagolee's Stetson hat and Hardy's twenty-five-cent bet. But words like "remorseless" and "sadistic" do not apply consistently or universally. Dupree is what later black men might call "pussy-whipped." He is driven by his irresistible lust for his girlfriend's "jelly roll" to rob a jewelry store, and in doing so he inadvertently kills a policeman. Po' Laz'us is celebrated for his badness, but his death at the hands of a posse in the mountains is full of pathos. Railroad Bill becomes a feared train robber, but by the time another posse tracks him down and kills him, he is nothing but rags and desperation. Devil Winston, a psychopath; Bill Martin, a meek man who suddenly turns violent; and Bad Lee Brown, insulted at being punished for his crime, are all motivated by insecurity and jealousy when they kill their women. They flee, they are caught, they are taken to court, and they are jailed or executed. Some badmen engage white police and win, like Duncan in Leadbelly's "Duncan and Brady" and Danny Major in "Bugger Burns." But for the most part, they are bound inescapably by a white law, and are figures of awe and pity rather than of sadism and remorselessness.

Even the variants of a single protonarrative contain varying portraits of the eponymous protagonist. Stagolee — a.k.a. Stacker Lee, Staggerlee, Stackalee, Stackolee, Stack-O-Lee, Staggalee, Stack-O, and Stack Lee — is the star of the badmen. The several forms his name takes suggest the numerousness of the versions of his story, and those versions reflect a range of attitudes toward this most famous of the badmen: the exaggeratedly bombastic, the boastful, the tragic, the pathetic, the heroic. They do not all add up to the Stagolee Greil Marcus speaks of, "an archetype that speaks to fantasies of casual violence and violent sex, lust and hatred, ease and mastery, a fantasy of style and steppin' high ... [of] no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves. It is both a portrait of that tough and vital character that everyone would like to be, and just another pointless, tawdry dance of death." Marcus's figure is more the superstud of the later "toasts," celebrated by young street men for the size and virility of his penis, than the Stagolee of the earlier ballads. Many of those ballads are precisely about the limits of black life, about what black men can and cannot get away with, about their power (or powerlessness) over women. It is this that gives them their depth and substance.

In most ballad variants Stagolee does mercilessly shoot Billy Lyons merely for abusing his Stetson hat, sneeringly indifferent to Billy's plea for his life because of his wife and children.

"Don't care nothin' about your chillun,
And nothin' about your wife,
You done mistreated me, Billy,
And I'm bound to take your life."

But Stagolee does not kill with impunity. Sometimes the deputies the sheriff attempts to form into a posse are so intimidated by the famous badman they refuse to help with his arrest. But almost universally the sheriff kills Stagolee or apprehends him. He is taken to court and sentenced to death. At this point the variants show the greatest difference in their treatment of Stagolee. In the most ribald, the scene moves to hell, where Stagolee overwhelms the devil himself, a clear demonstration of the ultimate badman's incorrigibility. The aim is clear enough, but the devil episodes often twist the ironic-realistic ballad into the form of the exaggerated tall tale. Indeed, some, in which the hijinks are cartoonishly violent, approach farce:

Stagolee, he told the Devil,
Says, "Come on and have some fun —
You stick me with your pitchfork,
I'll shoot you with my forty-one."

Other times they are merely bumptious:

Stagolee say, "Now, now, Mister Devil, ef me an' you gonna have some fun, You play de cornet, Black Betty beat de drum."

Such puffery is designed to show Stagolee eluding the serious punishment of the mortal courts that have sent him to his death for killing Billy Lyons. The ribaldry does work as a literary effect, and Stagolee maintains his reputation for being equal to any situation, but it surrenders the tone of menace that gives the badman his real power.

The prose tale of Stagolee provides a gloss on the question of Stagolee's Stetson hat and the scene in hell. In it, Stagolee was not only born with a "veil" over his face and hence was capable of seeing ghosts and raising "41 kinds of hell," he sold his soul to the devil in return for a special "oxblood magic hat." It was the key to Stagolee's fate, for "the devil fixed it so when Stack did lose it he would lose his head, and kill a good citizen, and run right smack into his doom." In the half-ahundred ballad variants of "Stagolee" I have seen, a few refer to Stagolee's "magic" hat. But nowhere have I seen the supernatural side of the Stagolee story in such detail as in the folk tale. Yet we might surmise that the balladeers assumed that most of their audience knew of the magic oxblood hat and how Stack got it, which would support a view that Stagolee killed because of other influences besides his natural badness. Stack cannot help himself. He has been fated by the devil himself to kill any man who is foolish enough to fool with his hat, a spine-tingling feature for an audience that probably saw much of life through a lens of superstition.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from "Born in a Mighty Bad Land" by Jerry H. Bryant. Copyright © 2003 Jerry H. Bryant. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Preliminary Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. The Classic Badman and the Ballad
The Badman Boaster
The Faces of Stagolee
2. Postbellum Violence and Its Causes: "Displaced Rage" in a Preindustrial Culture
3. Between the Wars: The Genteel Novel, Counter Stereotypes, and Initial Probes
Religion, Romance, and Race
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Southern Innocence, Northern Sin
James Weldon Johnson: Murder in Ragtime
James D. Corrothers and The Black Cat Club
4. From the Genteel to the Primitive: The Twenties and Thirties
The "New Negro" Finds the Folk
Rudolph Fisher's Harlem Tour
Claude McKay's Home to Harlem
Arna Bontemps's "Don't-Care Folk"
Zora Neale Hurston: Country Men and Women
5. The Ghetto Bildungsroman: From the Forties to the Seventies
Richard Wright: Bigger Thomas and a New Consciousness
James Baldwin: Escaping from Violence
Ralph Ellison's Rinehart
The Ghetto Setting
The Nurturing Ghetto I (Mark Kennedy and Herbert Simmons)
The Nurturing Ghetto II: The Autobiographical Vision (Claude Brown)
The Struggle for Moral Character (Ronald Fair and George Cain)
The Code of the Street: The Bildungsroman World Updated
6. Toasts: Tales of the "Bad Nigger"
The Toast and Its Mysteries
Return to Stagolee
The Put-Down
The Fall
7. Chester Himes: Harlem Absurd
A Man of Anger
The Harlem Novels
The Badmen
Coffin Ed and Grave Digger
8. A "Toast" Novel: Pimps, Hoodlums and Hit Men
The Struggle Between the "Hip" and the "Lame"
The "Hip" Victorious
Anger Over White Racism
The Violent Style
The Fantasy of Sexual Dominance
Instinct, Justice, and the Allure of The Life
A Special Kind of Squalor, A Special Kind of Guilt
Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines
9. Walter Mosley and the Violent Men of Watts
Socrates Fortlow
Raymond "Mouse" Alexander
Easy Rawlins
10. Rap: Going Commercial
11. The Badman and the Storyteller: John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Trilogy
Brothers and Keepers: A Family Matter
Hiding Place: Looking for Manhood
Rot and Renewal
Sent for You Yesterday: The Skeins of History and the Sacrament of Storytelling
12. Toni Morrison: Ulysses, Badmen, and Archetypes: Abandoning Violence Outlaws
Laying the Foundation: The Bluest Eye and Sula
Into the Limelight: Song of Solomon and Tar Baby
Trilogy: Three Stages of the Badman Loving

Appendix: Analysis of Thirty Prototype Ballads