Made In America (30 page)

By this time, however, immigrants everywhere were proving the iniquity of the prejudice against them. The eastern European Jews in particular showed a regard for education and self-improvement that should have been seen as a model. By 1927, two-thirds of New York’s 20,000 lawyers were Jewish,
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and thousands more had built distinguished careers as academics, musicians, playwrights, journalists, doctors, composers, entertainers and in almost every other field of human endeavour. Having faced four decades of complaints that they did not work hard enough, Jews now found themselves accused of working too hard.

A quiet drive began to restrict Jewish admissions to law schools (echoing present-day concerns over Asian domination of institutions of higher learning) and a new expression entered the language,
five o’clock anti-Semitism,
by which was meant that people would work with Jews during the day, if they must, but wouldn’t dream of socializing with them at night. For at least another three decades Jews would remain casually excluded from large parts of the American mainstream. Not until the 1960s could they hope to be admitted
to non-Jewish country clubs, college fraternities and sororities, and other bastions of gentile life.

But the prejudice the Jews experienced paled when compared to that meted out to the most visible, least voluntary of all minorities: black Americans. It may come as a surprise to realize that blacks were one of the least numerous of immigrant groups to the United States, outnumbered by Swedes, Sicilians, Poles and almost every other national or ethnic block. Between 1505, when the first consignment of black slaves arrived in the Caribbean, and 1888, when slavery was finally outlawed in its last New World stronghold, Brazil, an estimated twelve million black Africans were transported across the Atlantic. The overwhelming majority, however, went to Brazil and the Caribbean. Just 5 per cent – no more than about half a million people – were imported into what was to become the United States.
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For obvious economic reasons, blacks were encouraged to propagate freely. As early as 1775, they accounted for 40 per cent of the population of Virginia, 30 per cent in North Carolina, Maryland and Georgia, and well over 60 per cent in South Carolina.
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Though the physical cruelties to which they were subjected have perhaps been somewhat inflated in the popular mind – most were at least passably fed and clothed by the standards of the day; it was after all in the slave-owner’s interest to look after his property – the psychological humiliations to which they were subjected are immeasurable. It was not merely the imposition of involuntary servitude but the denial of even the most basic human dignities that made American slavery so singularly odious. Fischer reports how a visitor to Virginia ‘was startled to see ladies buying naked male slaves after carefully examining their genitals’.
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Female slaves were routinely regarded as sexual playthings for owners and their overseers. Scarcely a plantation existed that didn’t have a sprinkling of
mulattos
(originally a Spanish term denoting a small mule),
and visitors from outside the South were often taken aback at encountering a light-skinned slave bearing a more than passing resemblance to their host. (Sally Hemings, the slave woman who may have been the long-standing mistress of Thomas Jefferson, was in fact his late wife’s half-sister.)

Slaves were commonly wrenched from their partners – about a quarter ended up so separated – and mothers divided from their children. A typical advertisement of the time read:
‘NEGROES FOR SALE. –
A negro woman 24 years of age, and two children, one eight and the other three years. Said negroes will be sold separately or together as desired.‘
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In a thousand ways they were daily reminded of their subhuman status. As the words of a slave song had it:

Almost everywhere they were kept in a state of profound ignorance. Learning of any sort was assumed to be an invitation to insubordination. As Joel Chandler Harris had his fictional creation Uncle Remus say: ‘Put a spellin-book in a nigger’s han’s, en right den an dar’ you loozes a plowhand. I kin take a bar’l stave an fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de schoolhouses betwixt dis en de state er Midgigin.‘
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In consequence, their awareness of the world beyond the plantation bounds was stupefyingly limited. Frederick Douglass recounted in his autobiography that until he secured his freedom he had never even
heard
of New York and Massachusetts.
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Even if they managed to secure their freedom, they scarcely
enjoyed the fruits of democracy. By 1820 America had 233,000 freed blacks, but they weren’t in any meaningful sense free. White workmen refused to work alongside blacks or to allow them apprenticeships, so their prospects of worthwhile employment, much less advancement, were exceedingly meagre. Iowa, Illinois and Indiana would not allow even free blacks to settle within their boundaries. Even where they were allowed to settle, blacks were subjected to constant indignities which they had to suffer in silence. Every white child knew that he could pelt a black person with a snowball without fear of reprisal. Even in the case of the most serious grievances, blacks were often denied the privileges of habeas corpus, trial by jury or even the freedom to testify in their own behalf. Almost nowhere were they allowed to testify against whites.

Though slavery was widely detested in the North, only a handful of idealistic eccentrics saw abolition as a prelude to equality of opportunity. Even Lincoln, in his debates with Stephen Douglas, made his position clear: ‘I am not; nor ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.‘
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Most preferred to think of blacks as happy-go-lucky, childlike creatures who wanted nothing more from life than something good to eat and a chance to sing and dance. It appears never to have occurred to them that that was as much as the average freed black could hope for. The popular image was captured in the song ‘Jim Crow’, popularized by Thomas D. Rice in the mid-1830s:

What is remarkable is how durable this perception remained right up to modern times. Well into the 1940s,
Time
magazine was still commonly referring to blacks as ‘pickaninnies’ and revelling in news snippets in which black people fell down wells or otherwise came amusingly a cropper. Hollywood roles for blacks were largely limited to the shuffling, eye-rolling, perennially timorous and befuddled types as played by actors like Stepin Fetchit and Buckwheat Thomas. The 1950s saw the stereotype extended with television characters like Amos ‘n’ Andy and the faithful Rochester on the
Jack Benny Show,
while in the wider world of commerce almost the only black face one saw was the smiling countenance of Aunt Jemima, a fat and irrepressibly happy black woman who clearly saw no higher gratification in life than to fix pancakes for white folks. Elsewhere blacks simply didn’t exist. Even a program like the
Andy Griffith Show,
set in the South, appeared to take place in a surreally all-white world.

On the few occasions when blacks were treated more seriously, it was almost always with a degree of patronizing ignorance that simply takes one’s breath away. As late as 1949, the author of a nationally syndicated newspaper science column could solemnly inform his young readers that the American Negro was constitutionally incapable of pronouncing r’s in words like ‘cart’ and ‘horse’ because ‘his lips are too thick’. Almost no scholarly attention was devoted to black Americans. The few books that focused on them, like
The Negro in Africa and America
(1902) and
The Negro in American Life
(1926), took it as given that blacks were incapable, except in certain exceptional cases, of higher cerebral activity. Often, it was asserted that their distinctive speech habits were an inevitable consequence both of their impaired mental powers and of their physiology, as in this passage from
The Negro in American Life
discussing the Gullah dialect:

And this, I urge you to bear in mind, was a scholarly work. Even the most eminent of linguistic scholars found it impossible to credit blacks with even the most modest capacity for linguistic innovation. In
The English Language in America
George Philip Krapp contended: ‘American words brought into the language through the negroes have been insignificant in number ... A few words like
juba,
a kind of dance,
banjo, hoodoo, voodoo, pickaninny,
exhaust the list of words of non-English origin.‘
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Of Gullah – now widely regarded as the richest, most expressive and most ethnically pure of all the Afro-American dialects in America – Krapp contended that ‘very little of it, perhaps none, is derived from sources other than English’.

Almost every term of black speech was claimed to have its roots in English.
Jazz,
Krapp insisted, was an old English dialectal word. Another scholar went so far as to pronounce that
moke,
once a common word for a black person, came from the Icelandic
möckvi,
’darkness’.
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That even an eight-year-old child could see a certain implausibility in the idea of black Americans picking up and employing a term that had originated on a chilly island two thousand miles away didn’t matter. What was important was that the credit had to go to some source other than the blacks themselves.

Not until a black academic named Lorenzo Dow Turner and a Swede named Gunnar Myrdal began studying black speech in the 1940s was it accorded serious, scholarly investigation. Turner and Myrdal quickly established that certain syntactical features of Gullah, a dialect still spoken by some 250,000 people on the Sea Islands off South Carolina and
among neighbouring coastal communities, are clearly traceable to the languages of West Africa, and appear also in other New World patois as far apart as Brazil and Haiti, which clearly precludes British dialectal origins. Turner’s
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect
(1949) suggested that as many as 6,000 Gullah words showed signs of concordance with West African terms.
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Turner and Myrdal showed, among much else, that the Wolof
hipikat,
denoting a person who is attuned to his environment, literally ‘has his eyes open’, is the most plausible source for
hepcat
and
hip
and their many variants.
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Other words almost certainly of ultimate African origin are
chigger, gumbo, banjo
(at first also spelled
banjou
or
bangy), jitter, cola, yam, zombie, juke, goober, tote, okra
and
boogie-woogie,
though many of these, like
banjo, chigger
and
gumbo,
reached America by way of the Caribbean, often after being filtered through an intermediate language.

Even Teddy Roosevelt’s
speak softly and carry a big stick
appears to have its roots in a West African proverb. Likewise, Yankee Doodle Dandy’ shows a striking similarity to a slave song from Surinam, which goes:

Other terms that have been credited with African roots include
bogus, banana, gorilla, funky, phoney
and
jazz,
though in each instance the evidence is largely conjectural.
Jazz
is one of the most hotly disputed terms in American etymology. Among the suggested possibilities are that it comes from
Chaz,
the nickname of an early ragtime drummer named Charles Washington, or from
chasse,
a kind of dance step. Others have linked it to various African or Creole sources. In
any case, its first use, among both southern blacks and whites, was to describe sexual intercourse. It wasn’t until after World War I that it entered the wider world conveying the idea of a type of music. Quite a number of Afro-American terms contain some forgotten sexual association.
Boogie-woogie
appears originally to have signified syphilis.
Juke,
from the West African
dzugu,
’wicked’, originally carried that sense in English. Eventually it came to signify a brothel and then, by about 1930, a cheap tavern where lively music was played –
a juke joint. Jukebox
dates from 1937.
Blues,
a term popularized if not invented by one its greatest exponents, the cornet player W C. Handy (his ‘Memphis Blues’ was written in 1910; ‘St Louis Blues’ followed in 1914), also originally had ‘a strong sexual significance’, according to Mencken, though he doesn’t elaborate.
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So, too, did
rock ‘n’ roll.

A distinctive and long-standing feature of black speech was a tendency to apply food terms in a sexually euphemistic sense. Thus,
angel-food cake, custard pie
and other dishes often had a distinctly sexual connotation, especially in songs. When you realize that shortening bread was commonly used to describe sexual intercourse, the words of the well-loved song take on a whole new meaning: