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Authors: Edward Baptist
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not hurried, to lose themselves without losing their souls. All this was also the legacy of slavery’s expansion. This was the collective body that survived forced migration even as many bodies did not survive it, ordied in the war that ended it, or suffered through impoverishment and disfranchisement in the wake of Reconstruction.
In the war, survivors ended slavery. When the survivors began to die off, they could pass on to their descendants very little in the way of material wealth. So much had been stolen from them. But African Americans had a story that made them a people. They had a unity that wasultimately political. This had led them to choose solidarity over individual deals. They had lodged their claim to citizenship in the Constitution, a precedent that would grow in leverage as the century went on and the United States found itself up against enemies eager to point to the hypocrisy of first-class language and second-class practice of civil and political equality. They had, with whiteallies, created in the form of abolitionism the ideological template of American dissent, of progressivism, of the faith that social change, pursued with a religious zeal, could make America truer to its ideal self.
At the same time, from lands devastated by forced migration, creativity continued to boil forth in the years after Reconstruction’s collapse. African-American cultural forms permeatedand reworked American popular culture, which then exported these cultural forms to the entire globe. Over the century that followed Cade McCallum’s burial, using all these tools, working in all sorts of métiers, African-American people transformed the world. They remade the social, cultural, and political geography of the United States through their own volition in the course of the Great Migration.They changed the South and the United States and the world forever through the civil rights movement. And they built a tradition of community organization that eventually led the American electorate, in an astonishing development, to elect a black president who was the son of an African immigrant. As a political force, the solidarity that African Americans first built while still enslavedremains impressively coherent, generations later, despite two centuries of temptations to give up, turn aside, or dissolve into nihilism.
Image A.4. Alfred Parrott, formerly enslaved man, photographed in 1941, when he was ninety-one. Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress.
Image A.5. Formerly enslaved woman, living on a farm near Greensboro, Alabama. Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration, 1941, Library of Congress.
The descendants of enslaved African Americans could do these mighty deeds for many reasons, but one root of every reason was this: those who survived slavery had passed down what they had learned. The gifts, the creations, the breath ofspirit, songs that saved lives, lessons learned for dimes, the ordinary virtues, and the determination to survive the wolf. The lessons came down in the strong arms that held babies in sharecroppers’ cabins, in the notes of songs, in the rocking of churches, in jokes told around the water bucket on hot days of cotton-picking, and in lessons taught in both one-room schoolhouses and at places likeHampton. Day after day, year after year, the half untold was told. And in the tomb, the body stirred.
The wind washed the sun clear of clouds. Claude Anderson scribbled the last few words with his pencil, and then noticed that the old man had come to a stop. The sunlight had marched far across the pine board floor. It must be well past noon. Glancing up, Anderson saw Lorenzo Ivy looking at himwith a calm smile, one that belied the catalog of horrors he had detailed. Outside, children were calling to each other in wild play. Anderson heard two pairs of bare feet shooting down the street in chase. He could feel the dirt kicking out behind his own heels, only a few years since.
Somewhere,
In the war, survivors ended slavery. When the survivors began to die off, they could pass on to their descendants very little in the way of material wealth. So much had been stolen from them. But African Americans had a story that made them a people. They had a unity that wasultimately political. This had led them to choose solidarity over individual deals. They had lodged their claim to citizenship in the Constitution, a precedent that would grow in leverage as the century went on and the United States found itself up against enemies eager to point to the hypocrisy of first-class language and second-class practice of civil and political equality. They had, with whiteallies, created in the form of abolitionism the ideological template of American dissent, of progressivism, of the faith that social change, pursued with a religious zeal, could make America truer to its ideal self.
At the same time, from lands devastated by forced migration, creativity continued to boil forth in the years after Reconstruction’s collapse. African-American cultural forms permeatedand reworked American popular culture, which then exported these cultural forms to the entire globe. Over the century that followed Cade McCallum’s burial, using all these tools, working in all sorts of métiers, African-American people transformed the world. They remade the social, cultural, and political geography of the United States through their own volition in the course of the Great Migration.They changed the South and the United States and the world forever through the civil rights movement. And they built a tradition of community organization that eventually led the American electorate, in an astonishing development, to elect a black president who was the son of an African immigrant. As a political force, the solidarity that African Americans first built while still enslavedremains impressively coherent, generations later, despite two centuries of temptations to give up, turn aside, or dissolve into nihilism.
Image A.4. Alfred Parrott, formerly enslaved man, photographed in 1941, when he was ninety-one. Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress.
Image A.5. Formerly enslaved woman, living on a farm near Greensboro, Alabama. Jack Delano, Farm Security Administration, 1941, Library of Congress.
The descendants of enslaved African Americans could do these mighty deeds for many reasons, but one root of every reason was this: those who survived slavery had passed down what they had learned. The gifts, the creations, the breath ofspirit, songs that saved lives, lessons learned for dimes, the ordinary virtues, and the determination to survive the wolf. The lessons came down in the strong arms that held babies in sharecroppers’ cabins, in the notes of songs, in the rocking of churches, in jokes told around the water bucket on hot days of cotton-picking, and in lessons taught in both one-room schoolhouses and at places likeHampton. Day after day, year after year, the half untold was told. And in the tomb, the body stirred.
The wind washed the sun clear of clouds. Claude Anderson scribbled the last few words with his pencil, and then noticed that the old man had come to a stop. The sunlight had marched far across the pine board floor. It must be well past noon. Glancing up, Anderson saw Lorenzo Ivy looking at himwith a calm smile, one that belied the catalog of horrors he had detailed. Outside, children were calling to each other in wild play. Anderson heard two pairs of bare feet shooting down the street in chase. He could feel the dirt kicking out behind his own heels, only a few years since.
Somewhere,
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