JFlo's World

            In the heart of the old cotton plantation country of Middle Georgia, where ‘old times are not forgotten’ and the War Between the States casts a long shadow over the present, is the town of Eatonton, home of Joel Chandler Harris and Alice Walker. One a white man, the other a black woman, born and writing a century apart, they recounted recent pasts of plantation slavery and Jim Crow sharecropping with biographic intimacy, writing in the oral dialects of the people who lived through them. But they are divided by race, gender, and the ideological differences of their centuries. Chandler Harris wrote for white audiences in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, the zenith of scientific racism, working within the clichés of minstrelsy, while, one hundred years, Walker wrote for a post-Civil Rights generation determined to attack the legacy of racism in American history and culture, and one of her most personal targets was Chandler Harris. 

            These two writers from the same small town both looked towards the past, and in today’s Putnam County, of which Eatonton is the seat, ‘de land ob’ cotton,’ slavery and sharecropping is now consigned to history. Old fields have been turned into dairy-cattle pasture to meet the needs of Atlanta’s metropolis, with the aid of invasive Bermuda grass; crossing the county line, signs proclaim, ‘Welcome to the Dairy Capital of Georgia.’ Eatonton is a sleepy town of 6,720, midway between Athens and Macon, and Augusta and Atlanta, but far enough from either of them or the Interstate not to be devoured by sprawl.  In a poor region loosing people, despite being in one the nation’s fastest-growing states, it is a relatively prosperous place, with a modest industrial base and a handsome red-brick Main Street, lined with shops, banks, and insurance agencies serving the counties dairy farms. Southern gentility persists, not only after Civil War but also Civil Rights; near the town center, an officer politely gives me directions to the Uncle Remus Museum in his syrupy drawl; nearby, the Monument to Our Confederate Dead is festooned with the controversial Confederate battle-flag, but the policeman is a slim, middle-aged, and brown-skinned, the polar opposite of images of small-town Southern cops as fat old racist rednecks usually named Bubba.

Gentility is valued, but recent history is rife with conflict.  Four miles north of Eatonton, on the grounds of a 4-H camp, is Rock Eagle, a quartz bird effigy mound built by Woodland Indians 1,000 to 3,000 years ago, one of the only two known to archaeologists, both of which are in Putnam County. Rock Hawk sits in a disheveled state, hidden away on land near a reservoir, but Rock Eagle was restored and in the 1930s the Works Progress Administration built an aerial tower at the foot of the effigy. Since then, it has attracted the interest of more than just tourists and archaeologists. In 1993, a black supremacist cult known as the Nuwaubians relocated from New York City to be close to Rock Eagle, claiming it was built by there ancestors, a civilization of Native American Moors existing centuries before the continents drifted apart. They constructed a compound of plywood Egyptian pyramids and obelisks called Tama-Re and lashed out at the counties politicians, law enforcement as well as the local chapter of the NAACP, who they derided as servile Uncle Toms. In 2002, their leader, Dwight York, a onetime 70s Soul backup singer and friend of Hip-Hop pioneer Afrikaa Bambatta, was arrested on charges of child molestation. Tama-Re was demolished to build a hunting lodge.     

The monuments of the Nuwaubians were bulldozed, and none have been erected to Alice Walker; in a place like Eatonton, it is impossible to imagine the dreadlocked voice of African-American womynism sharing a place with the Confederate soldier and the iconic little statue in the shade of its Neoclassical brick County Courthouse, dedicated to its most famous native son, ‘Br’er Rabbit, born and raised in the briar patch, he survives by his courage and cunning.’ He wears a bright red suit and blue trousers and smokes a pipe, and his fur is white. An older version of this statue stands on the front-lawn of the Uncle Remus Museum, ‘the world’s only air conditioned slave cabin,’ on a street running parallel to railroad tracks that still serve as the towns main divide, near a kaolin refinery, pawn shops, a Popey’s Fried Chicken chain, a gas station converted into a hair salon, and tiendas servicing Mexican and Central American immigrants. With this statue, the metal is rusted, the paint faded, and the color of his suit and tie have dulled; the white paint giving way to rust that has revealed Br’er Rabbits’ true skin-color, a dark shade of black.

Born in 1844, Harris was an illegitimate child of a mother was cut-off from her family for her affair with his Irish day-laborer father, who abandoned them before his birth. He received a basic education with the help of a family friend, but as a small boy, a bastard with no father, a severe stutter and red hair, mark of disdained Irish Catholics, he was subject to vicious ridicule by his fellow students. In 1862, at age thirteen, he took a job as a typesetter for the South’s only newspaper published on a plantation, The Countryman, written by Addison Turner, an ardent secessionist and country squire in the mode of Jefferson who strove to cultivate ‘corn, cotton and literature.’[1] In Turner’s library, he read Homer, Aesop, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Edgar Allen Poe, while receiving another education in the slave quarters. Here he found sanctuary from the ridicule he had always suffered, and the family he had always lacked, in Aunt Crissy, Old Harbert, and his surrogate father, Uncle George Terell, the principle model for Uncle Remus.

Sherman’s armies passed through Turnwold on their March to the Sea, and Chandler Harris left in 1866 with little more than useless Confederate money. Turner, placed under arrest by Union officers and died two years later, while Chandler Harris found similar newspaper jobs in Macon and Savannah, where he met his French-Canadian wife, with whom he relocated to Atlanta in 1876, fleeing Yellow Fever. Here he took a job at Henry Grady’s Atlanta Constitution, where he first introduced readers to Uncle Remus. In his seven-volume Tales of Uncle Remus, the first of which was published in 1880, Joel Chandler Harris invented children’s writing and folklore with his tales of ‘Dem Critters,’ told in the ‘rhythmical and spellbinding’ cadences of the Geechee dialect of the Georgia plantation.[2] The first volume sold over 7,000 copies in its first month, and his fame continued to grow over the next two decades, with Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Ruyard Kipling, and Queen Victoria among his biggest fans. When he died in 1908, he was described as ‘the most beloved man in America.’ In an age when any Negro writer was required to write in proper English, Chandler Harris introduced the world to a rich tradition of oral folklore stretching back across the Middle Passage to West Africa: ‘Br’er Rabbit,’ has been identified as a North American version of the West African trickster-heroes Anansi the spider and Ijapa the turtle. A wily underdog triumphing over his bigger, stronger adversaries, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear, he was a hero to people subtly resisting enslavement.

If the black Br’er Rabbit was a visual image of underappreciated trickster ironies, the fate of his home is another. With the profits of his writings, Chandler Harris bought a farmhouse in West End, dubbed the Wrens Nest for the birds living in the mail box, turning it into a lavish Queen Anne as the town was annexed to Atlanta, becoming an exclusive suburb. More than fifty years after his death, white flight made the neighborhood all black, and today, despite gentrification it remains nearly so today. Along a street once named for a Confederate General, renamed for a local Civil Rights leader, there are hair braiding salons, soul food joints, barber shops, a mall with a black Santa Claus, pan-Africanist churches, and mosques, such as the one founded by now-imprisoned Imam Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, 1960s spokesman of militant ‘black revolution.’ The urban black present is haunted by painful historical memories of slavery and unforgiving of any attempts to honor or defend any part of this past, and Chandler Harris has been attacked, his writings deemed political incorrect, but the fate of his house is strangely appropriate for a man who knew the black world with an intimacy few white Americans could ever have.

His great-great-great-grandson Lain Shakespeare, executive director of the Wren’s Nest Museum, his preserved home, suggested Chandler Harris exemplified these wily virtues himself. A eulogist for the Old South in the capital of the New, seeking to preserve its endangered folkways on the newspaper espousing progress and industrialization, he developed the Uncle Remus character while working as a dialect-writer, and his portrayal of the plantation as an Arcadian landscape is superficially in keeping with the popular clichés of minstrelsy that he discreetly undermines. Through the voice of a character whose name, Lain insisted, was an allusion to the silent brother of Rome’s founding twins, he “managed to maintain his racial views while masking it was so it was sanitized for his readers. A trickster like Br’er Rabbit, he pulled the wool over the eyes of their readers by conforming to their expectations.”[3] He noted in his blog, “under the guise of ‘plantation romance,’ the reader has been duped into an education from Uncle Remus-the former slave who has assumed the role of father and teacher.”[4] Chandler Harris’s writings brim with subtle satire of the world they subtly eulogized. Remus is portrayed as the central parent to the little boy, his own wisdom favorably contrasted with the father, who is mentioned but never portrayed. While there is no mention of planters, the most powerful characters in Uncle Remus’ plantation world, ‘Miss Meadows en de gals,’ whom Br’er Rabbit often visits, play up Southern belle stereotypes while describing a bordello, sanitized for his young readers.  In ‘Why the Negro is Black,’ ideas of innate biological differences are discreetly mocked in Uncle Remus’ a fantastical story of the origin of the races, describing a time “w’en all de w’ite folks ’uz black—blacker dan me,.  .   . Niggers is niggers now, but de time wuz w’en we ’uz all niggers tergedder.”[5]

Chandler Harris was racial liberal by the standards the post-Reconstruction era, an age of voter disenfranchisement, lynch mobs and violent race riots. He supported efforts to provide public education to black children and publically attacked lynching, fired his first illustrator in disgust over what he considered a demeaning depiction of Uncle Remus, and sheltered many close friends and their families when mobs of white Atlantans attacked the cities black neighborhoods in the infamous 1906 race riot, the year the last of his Uncle Remus tales were published. In the 1920s, one of his sons, a journalist in Columbus, Georgia, led a quixotic war of words against the state’s powerful Ku Klux Klan. But his stories never directly attack slavery, and his autobiographical On the Plantation, his first-hand experiences cast slavery a benign light-despite the presence of cruel overseers, Turner, who Chandler Harris viewed as a close friend and valuable mentor, is a kind and just master. During the early years of the war, when fears of slave insurrection lead to vigilante patrols, “he laughed at talk of negro uprising, saying of his that the people who treat their negroes right had nothing to fear from them.”[6] And the character of Uncle Remus and his close relationship with the little boy, loosely based on Turner’s son, embodied to many of his readers the old-time ‘plantation darky,’ whose humility and obedience was contrasted favorably with the perceived laziness and impudence of younger generations of blacks born into freedom.

In 1946, drawing on the global popularity of Gone With the Wind, Disney released a musical version of Harris’ tales, Song of the South. This cartoon music with pioneering live action-animation was an enormous commercial success, vaudeville actor James Baskett becoming the first black man to win an Academy Award for his performance as Uncle Remus, although Jim Crow laws prevented him and the other black actors from attending the film’s opening gala in Atlanta. Disney consigned Chandler Harris folktales to the lowbrow conventions of minstrelsy that his writings had risen above, permanently tarring his image among the generation that grew up during and after the Civil Rights Movement, when the films images of grinning slaves and cartoon animal black-stereotypes grew to be intolerably racist. Today, Disney has always considered the film too racially insensitive to be fully released on home video. At the Wrens Nest, in Afro-centric West End, the guides walk a fine line, accommodating fans, while refusing to feature images of the film, a source of some tension with black community leaders; in our discussion, Lane addressing its controversy by stating that ‘the terribly important and totally hokey film’ that probably ‘doesn’t deserve the scorn heaped upon it.’ In conservative Eatonton, the Uncle Remus Museum pays homage to its faded popularity, with movie stills, copies of book versions with the Dicney cartoons, and broachers featuring the chorus of its featured song, Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. The guide, an elderly white man named Eddie, criticized Michael Eisner for ‘keeping the film locked away in a vault.’ He spoke with a thick drawl and was quick to correct me when I described Chandler Harris as writing in Afro-American dialect, insisting that “it wasn’t black or African-American dialect, it was the way southerners people talked, unless you were very well educated, more than most planters were. The slaves learned English from us. And in my generation all of us, black and white, learned those tales orally.” It was a reminder of the common culture of white and black southerners who have lived side by side, in segregation, for centuries. But he grew bitter when I mentioned Alice Walker. “She resents him cause he made money off the blacks. Well he didn’t steal those stories, he always gave the people he learned them from credit. And Alice, get to writin’ cause theirs a lot more tales out there.”

  The allegation to which he referred was a 1981 essay by Walker entitled, ‘Uncle Remus: No Friend of Mine,’ where she declared of Chandler Harris, “As far as I’m concerned, he stole a good part of my heritage.”[7] For her the subject was personally because she was born less than three miles from Turnwold, nearly a century after Chander Harris, in 1944. The last of eight children in a family of impoverished black sharecroppers, she grew up “in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in rain,” at time when majority-black areas of rural Georgia were bypassed by the racist implementation of Federal Aid programs.[8]

Like Chandler Harris, Walker looked back on a bygone world, but while the former’s writings were laced with sentimental nostalgia, the latter’s were driven by righteous anger. Like other upwardly mobile blacks of her generation, Walker left behind the rural South, leaving Eatonton in 1961 on a state scholarship to attend Spellman College, where he took classes with radical historian Howard Zinn, worked on voter registration drives and met Martin Luther King. She would transfer to Sarah Lawrence in upstate New York, meeting and marrying a Jewish Civil Rights lawyer, with whom she relocated to Jackson, Mississippi. Langston Hughes included one of her earliest stories, ‘To Hell With Dying,’ in his 1967 anthology, The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, and she published her first work of fiction, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973). When her marriage ended in 1977, she relocated to northern California, where she continues to reside.

Six years later, Walker published The Color Purple, written as the letters to God of a poor black girl named Celie growing up in 1930s Georgia, who is raped by her a man she thinks is her father, married to an unnamed abusive husband, sees her children stolen and her sister arrested and beaten for striking a white man, learns her true father was lynched, finds refuge in a love affair with her husbands bisexual blues singer mistress, Sugh Aver, and personal redemption through her long-lost sister, Nettie, a missionary in Africa. The spiritual journey of Celie, and Walker through her, takes the reader from patriarchal monotheism to pantheism, the discovery of a God that is not ‘like some stout white man work at the bank,’ as Celie had initially imagined, but a sublime mystery encompassing all of creation.[9]

Like her idol Zora Neal Hurston, whose works she helped republish, Walker sought to challenge the ‘arrogance’ of whites in assuming that ‘black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions.’[10] In the process, she shifted her focus away from dynamics racial oppression and towards the inner-dynamics of black life. She wrote from the vantage point of black women, silenced not only by white racism from without but by the patriarchal injustices of their own men, addressing the deeper existential crises of the dehumanizing poverty and oppression of the Jim Crow era in a manner that spoke to the crises of former coloreds and Negroes, now Black and African-Americans, struggling with the consequences of freedom. For Walker this entailed casting black culture in a critical light by writing from the perceptive of black women doubly silenced not only by white racism but also by the more intimate oppression of black men. Both the novel Color Purple as well as its prettified Steven Spielberg-directed-movie and Oprah Winfrey-produced-play versions generated enormous controversy, due to its harshly critical portrayal of black men and the lesbianism of its heroine.

Walker was determined to explore the forms of oppression within the black community, but never shirked from condemning racism, and for her Chandler Harris was one of the greatest culprits, who had stolen and commodified her heritage for his financial gain. The program director at the Wrens Nest, younger white women named Amelia, insisted that Walkers’ criticisms of Chandler Harris were off base because they “had nothing to do with his life and writings,” but were derived from the Song of the South. The other guide, an older black woman named Geri, described herself as a fan of Alice Walker but noted that, far from being a racist, Chandler Harris was a victim of prejudice, who described the time in the slave quarters of Turnwold as “the first time he felt like a human being.”[11] But Walker was born shortly after the Song of the South was released, and like most of her readers, Uncle Remus and ‘Dem Critters’ were indelibly linked with the slapstick-racism of the Disney musical. She was also a product of the New Left, when radical critics celebrated Br’er Rabbit as the first black revolutionary, while criticizing Chandler Harris for his paternalistic defenses of slavery and dismissing his character of Uncle Remus as “one of the many masks employed by the Plantation School to justify white supremacy.”[12]

As a fellow native of Eatonton whose life oddly paralleled his, Lane suggested the subject of Chandler Harris, for Walker, ‘was far too personal of an issue.’ Eddie bristled at the suggestion, “don’t gimme’ personally affected, neither she nor anyone else alive actually experienced slavery, so its time to get on and stop dwelling on the past.” But an evocative passage from The Color Purple illustrates how personal the issue was. In a West African village one character discovers the origins of these folktales, “One day she started in on an ‘Uncle Remus’ tale to discover Tashi had the original version of it! Her face just fell. But then we got into discussion of how Tashi’s people got to America.  .  .She cried when Olivia told how her grandmother had been treated as a slave.”[13]  

For all their differences, an important similarity between Walker and Chandler Harris is that their attitude towards their subjects was far more complex than is often portrayed. Chandler Harris is seen as a justifier of slavery, but his writings subtly satirize the plantation world by presenting the black perspective. Walker is also a preservationist, a child of the Civil Rights Movement who found literary inspiration in a world whose injustices she relentlessly critiques, but whose folkways she subtly affirms. Drawing inspiration from earlier generations of black folklorists, most notably Hurston and Jean Toomer, and In The Color Purple, and to an even greater degree in her other writings, most notably, ‘To Hell With Dying,’ she affirms the joys along with its travails of black life in the rural South, and, like Joel Chandler Harris, seeking to preserve its endangered folkways for younger generations.

In a small farming community like Eatonton, people are still uncomfortable with the subjects Alice Walker exposed, but the town has made attempts to cash in on her fame, most notably by giving her a homecoming welcome for a local debut of The Color Purple. The town Chamber of Commerce distributes pamphlets with directions to landmarks of Chandler Harris and Walker, east of town. Small-town quickly gives way to oak and poplar forests, pastureland and gully-washed hills overgrown with briar-patches, like the one where Br’er Rabbit was ‘bred and ba’wn.’ A few old plantation homes still stand, among them Turnwold, now a private residence off limits to visitors, with a vine-enveloped old barn near the driveway. Amidst the pastoral scene of rolling hills and woodlands, tall power-lines carry electricity from the nearby reservoir of Lake Oconee, whose shores are now lined with second-homes of Atlanta’s urban professionals.

Further down, towards the reservoir, most of the land has been reclaimed by forest. Abandoned homes and churches are a not-uncommon site in such stretches of the rural South, and here, by the roadside, stands the remnants of Ward’s African Methodist Episcopal Chapel, where Alice Walker was baptized and worshipped with her family as a child. The paint is worn off, the roof caved in over the pulpit, and the entrance overgrown with tall weeds and creeping vines. On the other side of the road is a cemetery with the graves of her mother and father, and many of their relatives. Their are plans to restore it and turn it into a museum, but for now it sits abandoned, an apt metaphor for the place accorded subversive social critics like Walker within their native region during there lifetimes. Eatonton is the Deep South, a place which, in either its separate, parallel white or black versions, is a region of poor but proud people, misunderstood by outsiders and resentful of their own daughters and sons who are willing to expose their flaws.   

[1]-‘Joel Chandler Harris,’ New Georgia Encyclopedia

[2]-Caldwell, Erskine, ‘Forward’ On the Plantation, pg. ix

[3]-Shakespeare, Lain, Personal Interview, 7/15/2010

[4]-‘Everything You’ve Heard About Uncle Remus is Wrong,’ 4/20/210

[5]-Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings Chpt. XXIII ‘Why the Negro is Black,’ Pg. 124

[6]-Joel Chandler Harris, On the Plantation, Pg. 50

[7]-Walker, Alice, ‘Uncle Remus: No Friend of Mine,’ Southern Exposure 21:1-2 Spring 1993 Pg. 26

[8]-Walker, Alice, ‘Lest We Forget: An Open Letter to My Sisters who are Brave,’ Meridians: Race, Feminism and Transnationalism Vol. 9, No 1, 2008 pg. 1888 

[9]-Walker, Alice The Color Purple, Pg. 91

[10]-Hurston quoted in Henry Louis Gates, ‘Afterword,’ There Eyes Were Watching God, Pg. 199

[11]-Personal Interviews, Amelia Trace Lerner, Jeri McWilliams, 7/15/2010  

[12]-Robert Cochran, Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris

[13]-Walker, Alice, The Color Purple, Pg. 165 

Two miles off Interstate 85, a short drive from the world’s largest airport, Moreland is a tiny town of 400 people, just above the Fall Line, just beyond the outer limits of Atlanta’s exurban sprawl, which remains a time capsule of timeworn clichés-train tracks running by an old cotton mill, a sleepy little general store, the spires of Methodist and Baptist Churches reaching up over the tall pines. Bypassed by time and the interstate, its claim to fame is as the home of two writers, novelist Erskine Caldwell and columnist Lewis Grizzard, born almost half a century apart, with radically different writing styles and even more radically different politics, but both only children doted on by school teacher mothers, who rose to fame chronicling the lives of white Southerners and their struggles with a changing world. 

His popularity has faded, but Erskine Caldwell was once among the most widely read writers in the U.S. The Depression created an audience for Tobacco Road (1932), God’s Little Acre (1933), and other blackly humorous tales of dehumanizing poverty, oppression, and cultural sterility amongst the ‘crackers’ of the Deep South. His works graphically described the abuses of sharecropping and textile mills, lynching and racist demagoguery, religious hypocrisy, sexual promiscuity, incest, and illegitimacy, winning national and international acclaim as a chronicler of social ills, and accusations of being a communist and a pornographer, the later benefitting sales. A lawsuit in New York against God’s Little Acre was a seminal free-speech case, making it a best seller, and with the paperback revolution publishers used his racy reputation to package his novels with covers of scantily clad women, popular among American GIs in World War II.   

Caldwell was born in 1903, in a three-room, white shingle-board house “on an isolated farm deep in the piney-wood country of the red clay hills of Coweta County,” a place he described as “buckshot soil and wiregrass land between the rock-ledged Piedmont in the north and the fertile earth in the south” which “has sustained life for generations but failed to enrich it.”[1] With such sentiments, he was unpopular here in life, although, in an act of post-mortem recognition, his home was made into a museum and relocated to the town’s main street in 1990. The son of a Presbyterian minister whose Social Gospel views clashed with his conservative denomination, his family left when Erskine was six, relocating to a succession of small towns throughout the Southeast, eventually settling in east-central Georgia, the setting of Tobacco Road. An educated family among small town folk, his schoolteacher mother sought to shield their only son. In his boyhood home, a plaque explains, “Erskine could never go to public school until he was eleven years old, because Mrs. Caldwell didn’t think that the people in these small towns were his father was the minister were fit to associate with him.” My guide, Angela, noted, “his mother kept him sheltered and this gave him curiosity. He was always seeing stuff people were afraid to talk about.”

In the brief period Caldwell lived there, Moreland was a bustling little town, with a ginnery, bank, drug store, five general stores, and five sets of rail track, a hub for prosperous farmers raising cotton and peaches.[2] Prosperity ended with the arrival of the Boll Weevil in the Deep South in 1915. Decades of overproduction, brought on by the crop-lean system, had exhausted the soil, and indebted tenant farmers, long pushed deeper into poverty, were brought to the verge of starvation, forced off their lands and into mills where their cheap labor was exploited.

From his first published essay, ‘The Georgia Cracker,’ written when he was a student at the University of Virginia, Caldwell’s focus was the Deep South, primarily the poorest of its poor whites, violent racists horrified at being as poor or poorer than their Negro neighbors. Grotesque rustics reduced by vicious exploitation to venal savagery, they are victims of and partly-redeemed by their blind faith in God and the land. In the first chapter of Tobacco Road, Jeter, patriarch of the inbred remnants of a sharecropper family on the verge of starvation, too poor to farm a barren plot of land he no longer owns but too proud to move to the city and work in a mill, declares, “It can’t always keep getting worse and worse every year like it has got since the big war. God, He’ll put a stop to it one of these days and make the rich give back all they’ve took from us poor folk.” But God never does, and when Jeter makes a final attempt to clear the land for planting, without cotton-seed, guano, or a mule, a fire burns down the family shack; his son, Dude, burying them, talks of growing “a bale to the acre, like Pa was always talking about doing.”[3] Caldwell’s characters are trapped in cycles of poverty and despair, destroying their land and enmeshed in the hypocrisy of Holly Roller religions acquiescing to their immorality. “The cruelest thing God did was make us animals and expect us to act like men,” suggests the Ty Ty of God’s Little Acre, deranged patriarch of a family destroyed by greed, incest, and nymphomania.[4]

Despite Caldwell’s popularity, in the South, where readers preferred Margaret Mitchell’s historic romances of bygone grandeur to tales of present-day social ills, he was ignored or accused of being a traitor, slandering his native region with fanciful portrayals of ignorance and immorality that violated the decorum of tight-knit small towns where ‘folk didn’t want gossip.’ He spent most of the 1930s in Maine, moving to San Francisco after the war, when a correspondents’ stint in Soviet Union ended his sympathy for communism, returning to the South only as a visitor, most notably in 1937 with his wife, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, for a pictorial survey of the rural poverty his critics accused him of sensationalizing. By the 1950s and 1960s, his support of the Civil Rights Movement increasingly kept him away, although, as he acknowledged to his personal friend and political adversary, segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox, “I am as Georgian as Br’er Rabbit.”[5]

But the Georgia he left behind was changing. Near Moreland, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had made his second home in therapeutic Warm Springs. In an anecdotal story told by one of my guides, Carol, after glimpsing kerosene-lamp lit shacks from the windows of the Little White House, FDR brought about the Rural Electrification Act. New Deal legislation reformed the tenant farm system, partly brought on by Caldwell and other writers who exposed of its abuses, and with the economic boom during and after World War II the kind of grinding poverty Caldwell focused on was increasingly a thing of the past-for whites, at least. The Deep South remained among the poorest parts of the U.S. and the struggles over Civil Rights enhanced its reputation as a backward and intolerant place, but in its aftermath, as many parts of the South benefitted from the Sun Belt real estate boom, white Southerners has cause for resentment over lingering stereotypes of violent bigots and grotesque rustics. It was these people for whom Lewis Grizzard spoke when he proclaimed, “I’m a white man and I’m a Southerner, and I’m sick of being told what is wrong with me by outside critics and I’m tired of being stereotyped as a refugee from God’s Little Acre.”

Grizzard was born on Ft. Benning in 1946 to a schoolteacher mother and Army Major father who abandoned them. Raised in the town Caldwell knew only as a small child, he had harsh words for Moreland’s other famous author, who, he declared, had “portrayed Southerners as a human garbage heap, made up of moonshine-swilling people with no brains whatsoever and precious few teeth, who married their cousins and produced slow children who did nothing but sit in the corner and play with dust.”[6] Caldwell had focused on the poorest of the poor, but Grizzard noted that he came ‘from a long line of sharecroppers, horse thieves and used car salesmen,’ archetypal crackers and rednecks but morally upright and hard-working people as far removed from Caldwell’s characters as they were from Tara Plantation.

From his rise in the 1970s to his death in 1994, Grizzard was the voice of a younger generation of Southerner whites, more suburban than rural or small-town, newly middle-class, or at least capable of imagining that they were, angrier at being robbed by the government than the rich, and, more importantly, angry at the many people who found fault with their way of life.  A culture warrior in the backlash against the New Left, he was loved and reviled for humorous tirades disparaging liberal academics and journalists, feminists, gays, anti-Confederate flag protestors, transplanted Yankees, and the environment of politically correct age in which ‘redenck’ was the one socially acceptable slur. “They don’t like us. They don’t trust us. They want to tell us we are wrong. They want to tell us how we should change. They is practically every s.o.b. who isn’t one of us.”[7]

He and his readers bristled at depicts of the rural and small-town South as a land of injustice and exploitation; the version they preferred was Mayberry, the small-town of the Andy Griffith Show, beloved by suburbanizing America for itsidealized image of a disappearing way of life. Moreland was Grizzard’s Mayberry, not Southern Gothic landscape of grotesque social realities but a quaint place of simple virtues, where “the only crime I remember.   .   .when I was a kid was three rowdy brothers breaking into Cureton and Cole’s store and stealing some candy bars and soft drinks. They were sentenced to six months of Sunday school at the Methodist church.”[8]

Unlike Caldwell, Grizzard never lived outside the South, except for a brief stint working in Chicago, which he hated. He made his home in Atlanta, the self-proclaimed capital of a New South he disdained, even as he embodied it with his Horatio Alger story as the ‘boy wonder’ of the city’s newspaper business. He was “the patron saint of the new suburban South, where you could have both the values of the old general store and the designer label wares of the megamalls.”[9] Grizzard celebrated small-town values and redneck stereotypes while living in Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhoods, amidst Sun Belt transplants he decried as later-day Carpetbaggers, using his gun-rack to hold golf clubs. For all his reactionary gusto, Grizzard was out of step with much of the New Right; he loathed and satirized televangelists (in the way Caldwell had ridiculed Holly Rollers), was reluctantly pro-choice on abortion, and decidedly pro-gun control.

Caldwell’s vision of the South is damningly critical while Grizzard is defiantly celebratory, but they both chronicled the struggles of agrarian communities deeply attached to their land and way of life, grappling with a world which apparently had no place for them. Their writings and lives offer insight on those misunderstood classes of Southern whites, belligerent rustics and coarse braggarts, as Shakespeare had used the word ‘cracker.’ Both poked fun at their own region, but Caldwell’s humor is unremittingly dark, while Grizzard’s is filled with pathos, celebrating the folkways Caldwell and other writers in the Southern Gothic vein had critiqued. Caldwell exaggerated the inequities of the South, just as Grizzard exaggerated its virtues, and these exaggerations led many to doubt their credibility. But the Southland is a land of storytellers, and stretching the truth is stock and trade.

[1]-Caldwell, Erskine, In Search of God, Pg. 3, 200

[2]-Historical and Architectural Tour, Moreland, Georgia

[3]-Caldwell, Erskine, Tobacco Road Pgs. 21, 221 (G.K. Hal & Co.: Thorndike, Maine, 1995, 1966)   

[4]-Caldwell, Erskine, God’s Little Acre, Pg. 42

[5]-Mixon, Wayne ‘Caldwell, Erskine,’ ‘New Georgia Encyclopedia’

[6]-I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962 and other Nekkid Truths, Pg. 63

[7]-‘ If You Don’t Like Dixie, Delta is Ready,’ Lewis Grizzard Archives

[8]- Guess What Happened in Moreland?,’ Lewis Grizzard Archives

[9]-‘Grizzard, Lewis,’ ‘New Georgia Encyclopedia’

Two miles off Interstate 85, a short drive from the world’s largest airport, Moreland is a tiny town of 400 people, just above the Fall Line, just beyond the outer limits of Atlanta’s exurban sprawl, which remains a time capsule of timeworn clichés-train tracks running by an old cotton mill, a sleepy little general store, the spires of Methodist and Baptist Churches reaching up over the tall pines. Bypassed by time and the interstate, its claim to fame is as the home of two writers, novelist Erskine Caldwell and columnist Lewis Grizzard, born almost half a century apart, with radically different writing styles and even more radically different politics, but both only children doted on by school teacher mothers, who rose to fame chronicling the lives of white Southerners and their struggles with a changing world. His popularity has faded, but Erskine Caldwell was once among the most widely read writers in the U.S. The Depression created an audience for Tobacco Road (1932), God’s Little Acre (1933), and other blackly humorous tales of dehumanizing poverty, oppression, and cultural sterility amongst the ‘crackers’ of the Deep South. His works graphically described the abuses of sharecropping and textile mills, lynching and racist demagoguery, religious hypocrisy, sexual promiscuity, incest, and illegitimacy, winning national and international acclaim as a chronicler of social ills, and accusations of being a communist and a pornographer, the later benefitting sales. A lawsuit in New York against God’s Little Acre was a seminal free-speech case, making it a best seller, and with the paperback revolution publishers used his racy reputation to package his novels with covers of scantily clad women, popular among American GIs in World War II. Caldwell was born in 1903, in a three-room, white shingle-board house “on an isolated farm deep in the piney-wood country of the red clay hills of Coweta County,” a place he described as “buckshot soil and wiregrass land between the rock-ledged Piedmont in the north and the fertile earth in the south” which “has sustained life for generations but failed to enrich it.” Given such sentiments, he was unpopular here in life, although, in an act of post-mortem recognition, in 1990, three years after his death in an Arizona retirement home, his home was made into a museum and relocated to the town’s main street. The son of a Presbyterian minister whose Social Gospel views clashed with his conservative denomination, his family left when Erskine was six, relocating to a succession of small towns throughout the Southeast, eventually settling in east-central Georgia, the setting of Tobacco Road. An educated family among small town folk, his schoolteacher mother sought to shield their only son. In his boyhood home, a plaque explains, “Erskine could never go to public school until he was eleven years old, because Mrs. Caldwell didn’t think that the people in these small towns were his father was the minister were fit to associate with him.” My guide, Angela, noted, “his mother kept him sheltered and this gave him curiosity. He was always seeing stuff people were afraid to talk about.” In the brief period Caldwell lived there, Moreland was a bustling little town, with a ginnery, bank, drug store, five general stores, and five sets of rail track, a hub for prosperous farmers raising cotton and peaches. Prosperity ended with the arrival of the Boll Weevil in the Deep South in 1915. Decades of overproduction, brought on by the crop-lean system, had exhausted the soil, and indebted tenant farmers, long pushed deeper into poverty, were brought to the verge of starvation, forced off their lands and into mills where their cheap labor was exploited. From his first published essay, ‘The Georgia Cracker,’ written when he was a student at the University of Virginia, Caldwell’s focus was the Deep South, primarily the poorest of its poor whites, violent racists horrified at being as poor or poorer than their Negro neighbors. Grotesque rustics reduced by vicious exploitation to venal savagery, they are victims of and partly-redeemed by their blind faith in God and the land. In the first chapter of Tobacco Road, Jeter, patriarch of the inbred remnants of a sharecropper family on the verge of starvation, too poor to farm a barren plot of land he no longer owns but too proud to move to the city and work in a mill, declares, “It can’t always keep getting worse and worse every year like it has got since the big war. God, He’ll put a stop to it one of these days and make the rich give back all they’ve took from us poor folk.” But God never does, and when Jeter makes a final attempt to clear the land for planting, without cotton-seed, guano, or a mule, a fire burns down the family shack; his son, Dude, burying them, talks of growing “a bale to the acre, like Pa was always talking about doing.” Caldwell’s characters are trapped in cycles of poverty and despair, destroying their land and enmeshed in the hypocrisy of Holly Roller religions acquiescing to their immorality. “The cruelest thing God did was make us animals and expect us to act like men,” suggests the Ty Ty of God’s Little Acre, deranged patriarch of a family destroyed by greed, incest, and nymphomania. Despite Caldwell’s popularity, in the South, where readers preferred Margaret Mitchell’s historic romances of bygone grandeur to tales of present-day social ills, he was ignored or accused of being a traitor, slandering his native region with fanciful portrayals of ignorance and immorality that violated the decorum of tight-knit small towns where ‘folk didn’t want gossip.’ He spent most of the 1930s in Maine, moving to San Francisco after the war, when a correspondents’ stint in Soviet Union ended his sympathy for communism, returning to the South only as a visitor, most notably in 1937 with his wife, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, for a pictorial survey of the rural poverty his critics accused him of sensationalizing. By the 1950s and 1960s, his support of the Civil Rights Movement increasingly kept him away, although, as he acknowledged to his personal friend and political adversary, segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox, “I am as Georgian as Br’er Rabbit.” But the Georgia he left behind was changing. Near Moreland, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had made his second home in therapeutic Warm Springs. In an anecdotal story told by one of my guides, Carol, after glimpsing kerosene-lamp lit shacks from the windows of the Little White House, FDR brought about the Rural Electrification Act. New Deal legislation reformed the tenant farm system, partly brought on by Caldwell and other writers who exposed of its abuses, and with the economic boom during and after World War II the kind of grinding poverty Caldwell focused on was increasingly a thing of the past-for whites, at least. The Deep South remained among the poorest parts of the U.S. and the struggles over Civil Rights enhanced its reputation as a backward and intolerant place, but in its aftermath, as many parts of the South benefitted from the Sun Belt real estate boom, white Southerners had cause for resentment over lingering stereotypes of violent bigots and grotesque rustics. It was these people for whom Lewis Grizzard spoke when he proclaimed, “I’m a white man and I’m a Southerner, and I’m sick of being told what is wrong with me by outside critics and I’m tired of being stereotyped as a refugee from God’s Little Acre.” Grizzard was born on Ft. Benning in 1946 to a schoolteacher mother and Army Major father who abandoned them. Raised in the town Caldwell knew only as a small child, he had harsh words for Moreland’s other famous author, who, he declared, had “portrayed Southerners as a human garbage heap, made up of moonshine-swilling people with no brains whatsoever and precious few teeth, who married their cousins and produced slow children who did nothing but sit in the corner and play with dust.” Caldwell had focused on the poorest of the poor, but Grizzard noted that he came ‘from a long line of sharecroppers, horse thieves and used car salesmen,’ archetypal crackers and rednecks but morally upright and hard-working people as far removed from Caldwell’s characters as they were from Tara Plantation. From his rise in the 1970s to his death in 1994, Grizzard was the voice of a younger generation of Southerner whites, more suburban than rural or small-town, newly middle-class, or at least capable of imagining that they were, angrier at being robbed by the government than the rich, and, more importantly, angry at the many people who found fault with their way of life. A culture warrior in the backlash against the New Left, he was loved and reviled for humorous tirades disparaging liberal academics and journalists, feminists, gays, anti-Confederate flag protestors, transplanted Yankees, and the environment of politically correct age in which ‘redenck’ was the one socially acceptable slur. “They don’t like us. They don’t trust us. They want to tell us we are wrong. They want to tell us how we should change. They is practically every s.o.b. who isn’t one of us.” He and his readers bristled at depicts of the rural and small-town South as a land of injustice and exploitation; the version they preferred was Mayberry, the small-town of the Andy Griffith Show, beloved by suburbanizing America for its idealized image of a disappearing way of life. Moreland was Grizzard’s Mayberry, not Southern Gothic landscape of grotesque social realities but a quaint place of simple virtues, where “the only crime I remember. . .when I was a kid was three rowdy brothers breaking into Cureton and Cole’s store and stealing some candy bars and soft drinks. They were sentenced to six months of Sunday school at the Methodist church.” Unlike Caldwell, Grizzard never lived outside the South, except for a brief stint working in Chicago, which he hated. He made his home in Atlanta, the self-proclaimed capital of a New South he disdained, even as he embodied it with his Horatio Alger story as the ‘boy wonder’ of the city’s newspaper business. He was “the patron saint of the new suburban South, where you could have both the values of the old general store and the designer label wares of the megamalls.” Grizzard celebrated small-town values and redneck stereotypes while living in Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhoods, amidst Sun Belt transplants he decried as later-day Carpetbaggers, using his gun-rack to hold golf clubs. For all his reactionary gusto, Grizzard was out of step with much of the New Right; he loathed and satirized televangelists (in the way Caldwell had ridiculed Holly Rollers), was reluctantly pro-choice on abortion, and decidedly pro-gun control. Caldwell’s vision of the South is damningly critical while Grizzard is defiantly celebratory, but they both chronicled the struggles of agrarian communities deeply attached to their land and way of life, grappling with a world which apparently had no place for them. Their writings and lives offer insight on those misunderstood classes of Southern whites, belligerent rustics and coarse braggarts, as Shakespeare had used the word ‘cracker.’ Both poked fun at their own region, but Caldwell’s humor is unremittingly dark, while Grizzard’s is filled with pathos, celebrating the folkways Caldwell and other writers in the Southern Gothic vein had critiqued. Caldwell exaggerated the inequities of the South, just as Grizzard exaggerated its virtues, and these exaggerations led many to doubt their credibility. But the Southland is a land of storytellers, and stretching the truth is stock and trade.

When Vicente Fox declared Mexicans in the U.S. did work that even black people wouldn’t do, it caused a firestorm of controversy, but I remember nearly every person who mentioned it, usually with embarrassment, admitting it to be true. In the 21^st century, as Latinos surpass blacks as the largest minority, both groups surpass whites in demographic growth, and the most populous U.S. states become minority-majority, the common struggles against white racism that enabled the black Civil Rights movement to inspire Chicano and Puerto Rican activists have given way to tensions between the different non-white minorities, jostling for breathing room on the margins of a multicultural United States.

Desire to counteract black-Mexican tensions has spawned ground breaking scholarship on long-overlooked Afro-Mexican cultures, but Mexico is seldom a country that comes to mind when discussing the African Diaspora. Particularly since the Revolution, Mexican nationalism has placed mestizaje front and center, but it is a hybrid of the indigenous and Hispanic, with little room for anything else. The mainstay of New Spain’s colonial economy was not sugar and African slavery but silver mining and indigenous serfdom. Compared to the islands of the Spanish Caribbean or the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama), the number of African slaves in Mexico was very small, peaking around 35,000 in 1658; by the time slavery was abolished in 1829 there were only 10,000.[1] Today, blacks are probably little more than 1% of Mexico’s population, comparable to the American Indian population of the U.S. Mexicans are often surprised to learn that there are any indigenous people at all in the U.S. Similarly, U.S.-Americans of all colors, myself included, are surprised to learn that there are black people in Mexico.

So were a group of students from the West Indies, who had received scholarships to the National Autonomous University of Mexico but, needing to learn Spanish first, were taking intensive courses where I was studying in Taxco, Guerrero. It was a difficult transition. Winded like all of us by the altitude and the ludicrous steepness of the town, many complained bitterly about the ‘cold weather,’ which seemed quite warm to me, being sick from the spicy food, and being annoyed by looks they received from locals unaccustomed to seeing people with black skin. The only one to speak Spanish, Garth, a towering and powerfully built but soft-spoken jet-black man in his mid-30s from St. Kitts who had traveled in Venezuela and Colombia, said he would have preferred to be there, “where there are black people, so I don’t stick out.” It was inevitable; in Mexico City, occasional sightings of blacks, usually immigrants from Cuba and Panama, always caused me to turn my head. Added to this was the divide of height. The average person in Taxco is less than 5’4”, short even by Mexican standards; they viewed me as giant, a güerote (big white-boy). Garth was several inches taller than me, I can only imagine what people thought when they saw him.

For a country with so few people of African descent, it is easy to forget that New Spain’s ‘Apostle to the Indians,’ Fray Bartolome de las Casas, was the first to lobby for the African slave trade, and records suggest that as many as 200,000 slaves were brought to Mexico.[2] But demographic imbalances they were quickly submerged in the melting pot of mestizaje. Epidemics and violence of the Spanish conquest, in particular smallpox, which reputedly originated in an African slave left behind by Cortes’ expedition, led to a demographic collapse of genocidal proportions. A study by Berkley researchers concluded that 25 million people lived in central Mexico when Cortes landed. By 1625, a little more than a century later, that number had dropped to 750,000.[3] Violent wars of conquest and forced labor in Spanish mines took a disproportionate toll in the lives of indigenous men, and indigenous women took partners among enslaved Africans, who, like Spanish colonists, were overwhelmingly male.

In coastal ports and haciendas, where Yellow Fever, spread by mosquitoes introduced from Africa, took huge tolls on whites, indios, and lighter-skinned mestizos alike, black labor was advantageous. But Spanish experiments with African slaves in the silver mines ended in disaster. As my history professor Rodrigo explained, blacks brought from the tropical lowlands of the Gulf of Guinea or Cuba obviously fared poorly-ventilated mountain shafts over 5,000 ft. above sea level. However, slavery in the mining industry did endure in a limited form, because Africans, considered physically superior to indios, served as overseers and in the labor-intensive, above ground parts of silver extraction, while a significant number served as domestic servants, mostly woman, whose children with white men enjoyed a privileged place within the emerging caste system.

This system arose from a need to classify the enormous number of mixed race people outside the juridical units of the Spanish Empire, the república de indios and the república de españoles. It is explained in many paintings, including one early eighteenth century Pintura de las Castas in the Museum of the Viceroyalty, a former Jesuit monastery and seminary in Tepotzotlan, a colonial pueblo engulfed in the sprawl of Mexico City. Detailed miniature portraits of elemental families-father, mother, child-are arranged and numbered by social rank. The first shows a lavishly attired Spanish man and india, a progression showing, with three generations of intermarriage, descendants becoming mestizo, castizo and finally español. The next has a similarly attired Spanish father, a mora (negra)mother, wearing a head-wrap, and a mulatto child; the child of a mulatto and a Spanish woman is morisco, a morisco and española beget a chino, while the union of a chino and india begets a salta atras, ‘jumps back,’ alluding to the perceived racial regression. The following rows show the castas of indigenous and African blood-with slight European blood disappearing in the final row. These are motley-looking figures, dressed in coarse or ostentatiously luxurious clothing, names reflecting the contempt with which the Spanish officials who commissioned the painting regarded them: lobo (wolf, corrupted in zambo), tente en el aire (hold yourself in the air), no te entiendo (I don’t understand you), torna atrás (turns back). The unions were a form of manumission for blacks and biological survival for indias, as the children were born free from slavery and taxes leveled on indios, but burdened ‘infamous mark’ of their Negro origin, which placed them at the bottom of the caste system, if not necessarily society as a whole, a place occupied, as shown in other visual representations of the castas, by indios gentiles, pure-blooded indios who, although usually notionally Catholic, as gente sin razon are beyond the pale of Hispanic civilization.          

Today, in silver-mining towns from Zacatecas to Taxco one sees morenos with dark-brown skin and tightly curled hair; in the tierra caliente of southeastern Mexico’s Gulf and Pacific coasts, both surprisingly close and surprisingly far from one another in the mountainous waistline of America, such people form sizeable minorities, in some areas even majorities. But Mexico’s African heritage is La Raiz Olvidada, the Forgotten Root, as one documentary about the costeño cultures was entitled, which I saw at the National Black Arts Festival, an even held in my hometown of Atlanta, a city proclaimed the ‘Black Mecca’ for its relatively large black bourgeoisie, although, like many things in Atlanta, this was partly based on disingenuous hucksterism. The film attracted a large crowd of English-speaking blacks, but after traveling to these almost a decade later, I got the sense that whatever expectations they might have had for racial solidarity was far off. As a white man, I was well treated, but left with doubts that most people in the audience would have been. As dark skinned mestizos with visible American Indian features, Afro-Mexicanos seemed to have limited interest in affirming their African roots.. Indeed, the term Afro-Mexicano is a new word, used primarily in revisionist academic circles. Afro-Mexicanos prefer the familiar racist colloquialisms of the colonial caste system.

Mexican historian Enrique Krauze insists that, “the purely racial problem in Mexican history was largely resolved through mestizaje.”[4] In South America criollo aristocrats revolted against a heavy-handed Spanish monarchy; Mexico’s War of Independence was first and foremost an insurrection of castas (fought under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe) against the royalist criollo aristocracy. In the colonial order, the casta majority was in a precarious position, with restricted opportunities for honor and labor and none of the protections enjoyed by indigenous communities. The insurgent leaders were of middling origin, priests and small landowners who had not traveled outside of Mexico; their most successful general, and Mexico’s second President, Vicente Guerrero, for whom Guerrero is named, was of partial Afro-Indian descent, and was ridiculed by his criollo opponents for his dark skin and wooly hair. Early 19^th century Liberal legislation abolished African slavery-in a decree issued by Guerrero, ignored by Anglo-American settlers flooding into Tejas-and officially obliterated the distinctions of caste. The architects of the mid-19^th century Liberal revolution that created the Mexican state-Benito Juarez was a Zapotec Indian and his successor, Porifrio Diaz, a mestizo raised by his Mixtec mother, ignored the scientific racist component of the Positivism he embraded, while promoting archaeological excavations of pre-Colombian ruins as an act of nation-building. The Mexican Revolution destroyed the power of the criollo hacendados and gave birth to an ideology of indigenismo, exalting the indigenous heritage of Latin America. But African slavery was an accident of colonialism, and their descendents were given little place within the Mexican nationality.

The one Mexican city taking pride in its African heritage is Veracruz, a state set apart from much of Mexico by both Spanish and Afro-Caribbean influences. Veracruz was the place signaling the beginning of the Aztec Empire; it “faces the east from where the conquerors came, and willingly accepts them,” although it was unwilling to accent subsequent invaders, facing the invasions and gunboat diplomacy of the U.S. and France with the brave but futile acts of resistance that earned it the title, ‘Cuatro Veces Heroica.’[5] Puerto Veracruz and Havana are sister cities, dating back to the time of Hernan Cortes, when Havana was the largest Spanish outpost in the New World, continuing in the centuries of the Flota de Indias, when galleons embarking from Veracruz laden with silver and the silks, porcelain and spices of the Orient rendezvoused with South American galleons in Havana. The local Jarocho accent is a variation of the soft, slurred, rapid-fire español caribeño, utterly incomprehensible to most Mexicans.

Cortes established the first sugar haciendas in the region, and African slaves were imported in large numbers, from Cuba and Santo Domingo or directly from Africa, although, during a brief period in the early sixteenth century, Veracruz was a center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jarocho originally referred to slaves and zambo (Afro-Indian) peons-the majority of the colonial era population in a region where Yellow Fever and hurricanes discouraged permanent settlement-who labored in the cane-fields and were allowed into the walls of the port only during carnival.[6] Since then it has grown to include all people from the state of Veracruz, and more specifically the region between Puerto Veracruz and the Rio Papaloapan. The towns south of Puerto Veracruz, famous for cane aguardiente and spiny lobsters, have obviously African-derived names, Mocambique, Mobambo and Mandinga. These areas were the cradle of Son Jarocho, a Mexican Blues of harp and guitar, without the Bantu percussion of the more famous Cuban son, but with polyrhythmic major chords and animated storytelling echoing West African griots. Afro-Caribbean ingredients are present in local cuisine: plantains, yucca, mondongo (tripe soup), and pollo encacahuatado (chicken in peanut sauce). But as my boss, whose boyfriend was from Veracruz, explained, “the people their don’t think of themselves as blacks, they think of themselves as indigenous, like the blacks of Louisiana,” alluding to the Buffalo Bill-inspired Mardis Gras Indians and other acts of racial drag of Creoles of color ambivalent about their blackness.

Based on accounts from Mexicans, including a student of mine from the oil-town of Poza Rica in northern Veracruz state, I went to Puerto Veracruz half expecting it to look like Santo Domingo. But in the city, the number of black-looking people was quite small; what was more striking, especially given the steam-bath humidity, is a predominance of whiter looking people, descendants of Spanish, Spanish Cuban, Italian, and Lebanese immigrants. As a general rule, it seemed, the blacker you were, the more likely you were to be diving for pesos by the docks along the malecon, or working on a boat.

A trip to an offshore sandbar dubbed Cancuncito ‘Little Cancun,’ took us to a lancha embarking from outside Veracruz’s Aquarium, one of the largest in Latin America. There we were hustled on board by a black-skinned captain with sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a jersey of the Mexican football club Cruz Azul, Javier, ‘Lobo’ as his two friends, who were even darker, called him one man about his age and gaunt woman with distended buck-teeth and knappy hair. True to stereotypes of Caribbean inefficiency, it took over an hour for the lancha to leave, Javier and his friends idling the time away, telling jokes about the freckly daughter of a Mexican family we shared the boat, who they referred to as a güerita (little white girl). Their impossibly thick accents conjured up the name given to one of the lowest tiers in the Pintura de Castas, no te entiendo. I continued to struggle to understand Lobo, as he showed us the schools of fish swimming in the crystalline waters around off-limits Isla de Sacrificios, a little speck of white-sand and coconut palms with a Mexican Naval lighthouse, named by the first Spaniard to explore these shores for a temple with the remains of human sacrifices, and the one place to resemble the Caribbean paradises of tourist broachers so absent in this westernmost part of the Caribbean. Attempting to make conversation, Lobo explained that his family came from Cuba, but he didn’t know when. Back on shore, in a dingy cantina, my brother paid a ragged-looking elderly black troubador whose missing teeth were matched by a guitar with missing strings; he sang a song that opened with the line ‘Cuando salió de Cuba’ (when I left from Cuba).   

Trade and migration between Veracruz and Havana endured after independence put an end to the royal flotas. Along with Tampa, Key West and New Orleans, Veracruz was a major port of refuge for the more than 100,000 Cubans, 10 percent of the island’s population, who fled the violence of La Guerra de los Diez Años (1868-1878), an initial unsuccessful insurgency against Spanish rule.[7] But a good many of these immigrants were peninsulares and upper-class criollos, escaping a racial revolution.  Their most famous contribution, danzón, which thrived in Veracruz long after it died out in Cuba, was an upper-class pastime evolving from traditions carried west by refugees of slave revolution; contradanse of French Creole refugees from St. Domingue, who came to Cuba in the 1790s and 1800s, infused with the rhythms of Andalusia. The original Jarochos were zambos who looked like the people gathered around the lancha, but the contemporary image conformed more closely to a handsome, Spanish-looking couple in folkloric costumes that performed a danzón on the malecón to a pre-recorded La Bamba, a Son Jarocho standard that sixteen-year old Los Angeles Chicano remade into the seminal Latin Rock song.

In the United States, Cubans are among the whitest Latino groups; the Cuban Revolution brought much of the island’s upper and middle classes to South Florida. By contrast, when people in Mexico City see a black person speaking Spanish, they assume they are Cuban. Cubans arriving since the Revolution, who, in an age of air travel, mostly bypass Veracruz for the D.F., have been people who opted for Mexico, which has always maintained relations with Cuba, because they want to maintain ties with the island. Many are negros and mulattoes, suspicious of the racism of the Miami Cuban elite. The Cuban enclave in Colonia Roma was the only place in Mexico City where I saw more than five black people on a single street. Cuban-Mexicans of the D.F., in dealing with the many Mexicans distrustful of immigrants, frequently lie and claim to be from Veracruz, as one dark-skinned fashion designer who had recently moved to the design-district of Condesa from the Havana on the Hudson of Union City, New Jersey explained to me. Conversely, dark-skinned Jarochos seemed to claim Cuban descent, as if in denial that some of their ancestors might have arrived on these shores directly from Africa.

Mexico’s most famous Cuban black is comic book character Memín Pinguín, inspired by black Cuban immigrants in Mexico City. A classic pinckanniny with bug eyes, thick lips, protruding ears and an Aunt Jemimah-like mother, Memín has long been a hero of working-class Mexicans, who identified with his struggles against racist tormentors. But as the comic crossed the border, the racist caricatures drew angry complaints from black shoppers at a Wal-Mart in Texas, and protests by Civil Rights leaders when Mexico issued postage stamps to honor Memín Pinguín. This angry reaction left many Mexicans confused, because ‘Memín Pinguín es lo bueno,’ as my Spanish teacher in Taxco, Jorge, pointed out.

More than fifty, Jorge had lived almost fifteen years of his life in Chicago, pointing out that when he first traveled there as a kid, he was one of the darkest people on the bus, but now when he goes back, he is a ‘white Mexican.’ Jorge insisted that U.S.-Americans needed to leave behind their racial preconceptions to understand Latin America, that the racial prejudices of the English-speaking world had little bearing in Mexico. Many Mexicans passionately claim that they are a post-racial nation, a claim that seems strange to foreigners, who note that skin color is the most reliable barometer of social status. Jorge recommended a visit to the Costa Chica, for its idyllic, un-crowded beaches and stereotype-shattering Afro-Mexican people and culture, proof that ‘Mexico is multicultural, not because it has a lot of different immigrant or ethnic groups, but because the Mexican people are of many different cultures.’ He had traveled there many times, including once with a Dominican friend from Chicago who claimed that it felt like the Dominican Republic.

Free and enslaved negroes and mulattoes made up the majority of the permanent population of the Pacific port of Acapulco during the colonial era, outnumbered by those who arrived during the ferias, when the Manila galleons carrying trade goods from Asia disembarked, much as their descendants are now outnumbered by chilango vacationers and gringo spring-breakers. Traveling east from Acapulco, the towns grew smaller and dustier, the people browner, until we neared the border with Oaxaca and brown-skin had given way to black. The route I traveled from Taxco was likely similar to the one they traveled. Rodrigo explained colonial records suggest many of the ancestors of the Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica had escaped from the silver mines of Taxco, settling in coastal region reminiscent of their home. Garth, laughed at the thought. “That sounds just like the black man. Fuck dis’ mining, I’m gonna’ hang out at the beach.” But on the Costa Chica, where Garth would have been as much of a giant as he was in Taxco, people have a different story, that they are descendants of shipwrecked slaves who intermarried with indigenous people, glossing over the unpleasant experience of enslavement. One must rely on legend and anecdote because it is difficult, if not impossible, to construct a factual history of these subaltern people on the social and geographic margins of Mexican society.

The largest town in the region is Cuajinicuilapa. Little distinguishes Cuaji from the other towns of the Costa Chica, a rundown village of concrete and corrugated iron in what was, in the heart of the dry season, a parched savannah inland from the palm-fringed coasts. Little abarottes, auto part and second-hand clothing stores lined a solitary asphalt road, which passed a sun-baked, shade-less zocalo and a branch of Western Union with the longest lines in town. It could have been anywhere in Mexico, if not for streets full of people with black skin and kinky hair, a few elderly women even wearing head-wraps. It could seem reminiscent of the Dominican Republic. But the Spanish is not the soft caribeño lilt spoken in Veracruz, it is the nasally slang of Mexican vernacular, and a stall selling pirated CDs blares the thumping tuba-and-snare-drum of Mexican banda, overpowering a nearby truck stereo playing Rihanna and Lady Gaga. People have black skin, but as attested by their almond eyes, high cheekbones, straighter hair and generally shorter statures, not to mention the town’s particularly unpronounceable indigenous name, they are not negros, but Afro-mestizos.

This little town is home to the  small but well-organized Museo de las Culturas Afro-Mestizas. No comparable comprehensive museum of slavery and the black experience exists in the United States, although this is perhaps because no one is unaware of the existence of black people or slavery. Starting with an illustrated mural showing the slave-trade routes, it has exhibits documenting the history of slavery in Mexico, the Spanish colonial caste system, the Afro-Mexican cultures of the Pacific and Gulf lowlands, and a collection of masks, instruments and costumes, under a large version of a thatched casa redonada, the circular wattle and daub houses of sub-Saharan Africa that were common on the Costa Chica until the 1960s, and undoubtedly much better ventilated than the concrete that replaced them.

The artifacts demonstrate the difficulty in sorting through the mestizo mélange. There are statues looking like they could have been carved in West Africa, and mounted above them a broad-brimmed mariachi hat and a costume caricature of a Mexican general, a black mask with a white moustache and an officers’ hat decked out in huge plumes and Tri-color ribbons, the only common theme being the color black.  There is a marimba, which originated in Mozambique and is beloved by Mayans in Chiapas and Guatemala; but the regional music of the Costa Chica originates not in Africa, but mid-nineteenth Chilean sailors who stopped in Acapulco en route to the California Gold Rush, bringing a South American variation of the fandango, the Cueca, which spread throughout the Costa Chica as the Chilena. There are Polaroid portraits of locals, campesinos in American Gothic poses, with stern, weathered faces, their various shades of black copper skin glistening with sun and sweat. But what is strikingly absent are visual representations of slavery as it actually existed in New Spain, the historical displays generally relying on images culled from elsewhere to provide a context: a display on slavery in sugar haciendas of Veracruz has images of Brazil and St. Domingue, an exhibit on the slave trade has an English illustration of a slave ship. Even here, in a museum dedicated to it, Mexico’s experience with slavery is obscured, difficult to grasp.

The woman working there, Esmerelda, was short and fat, with reddish-black skin and curly hair, alternating between sweeping and reclining on a fan-cooled bench. Later on a friend, a lighter-skinned woman with dyed blonde hair joined her. Unlike Esmerelda, she spoke fluent English, having lived in Salt Lake City, where she hated the Mormons, noting with disgust that they had made many converts. Around Acapulco, I had seen some of their churches, brick buildings with white spires, gated parking lots, and faux-marble signs reading La Iglesia de Jesucristo de Los Santos de Los Últimos Días, seemingly transplanted to these working class barrios straight from some North American suburb.  Afro-Mestizos, like all Mexicans, including those with no indigenous ancestry, take enormous pride in their ancient American Indian civilizations, and Mormon beliefs that these were the works of the Lost Tribes of Israel, now fallen from grace, had an understandable appeal. I pointed out that, until the 1980s, Mormons excluded blacks, viewing them as accursed descendants of Cain. These women were both perturbed by this racist past, but I wondered how many of their paisanos actually were.

As descendants of shipwrecked slaves, ‘although this is a legend,’ Esmerelda insisted that she and the other people of the Costa Chica are not ‘puro negros,’ but rather of ‘ascendencia negra.’  The distinction is important. Pointing to the exhibit on the caste system occupying a central pillar, she admitted that she didn’t know where she belonged in it; her parents had been mixtures of negro and cambujo, but her son was clarito, lighter. Technically it shouldn’t matter, Mexico’s War of Independence and Revolution had abolished the caste system, creating what many Mexicans insisted was a post-racial society. But during my travels in Mexico, I could not help but notice that the Mexicans who insisted on this were usually light-skinned, often outright white. Esmerelda had no such illusions. “Maybe the laws don’t exist, but the ideology, the mentality still do,” she insisted. “The caste system is still part of Mexico.”  

The caste system is not the only thing that Mexicans have denied; according to her, President Vicente Fox claimed that there were no black people in Mexico. “To be Esmerelda Mexican of African descent is to have your president say that you don’t exist,” she said, with sadness and anger. But she was willing to write it off as the ignorance as those atop the caste system. “He’s rich. Their el partido de los ricos, and their turning Mexico into a colony of the U.S.” she insisted, the familiar refrain of those who opposed the ruling PAN. “The rich don’t understand that our country is made up of people of many different cultures.”

Mexico is of many different cultures, but dark skinned people are on the bottom, as evinced by the poverty of Cuaji and the rest of the Costa Chica. Like most of southern Mexico in the post-NAFTA era, the region is dependent on remittances from the U.S., which have dried up with the economic crisis. As one study noted, costenos abroad are ‘sojourners’ more than settlers, illegal immigrants doing jobs black people don’t want, removed from other Mexicans by their skin color, rarely associating with English-speaking blacks, and living in fear of deportation. The largest enclave of migrants from the Costa Chica is Winston Salem, North Carolina, where they replaced blacks in tobacco packaging. A taxi driver who brought me to Cuaji, who had lived in Winston-Salem, described his black neighbors as ‘pinche flojo pendejos,’ although he admitted their woman had nice asses. But other poor people should be the least of their worries. Esmerelda’s niece had also lived in Winston-Salem, but like many, had returned home. Unable to obtain a license as an illegal alien, her car was taken and she lost her job as a cleaning lady. The land of opportunity is drying up.

Outside the museum, an elderly morena was seelling mango, tamarind and horchata aguas from a truck in the shade, which saved me from melting in the hallucinogenic heat. Here another person recently returned from the U.S. struck up a conversation in broken English; a squat little man in a wife-beater, Lionel had dark brown skin but looked more indio than negro, although, as his machismo showed, such distinctions are of rather limited importance in a culture with little idea of martial fidelity. He informed me that he had five wives and cheated on all of them. Most were lobas, ‘negritas,’ but one, he bragged, was a white woman, from when he lived eight years in Trenton, New Jersey and owned a landscaping business. As a Mexican he had been a minority, even among the Latinos; more numerous were Puerto Ricans (‘they crazy man, los puertoriqueños no tienen corazones’) and, later, Guatemalans, who he claimed were much worse. But like so many Mexicans migrants, what angered him most was not other Hispanics but the black people in the U.S. who did not seem to work. “Why you give papers to the Jamaicans, the niggers, who just sell drugs and kill people, and you no wanna’ give papers to the Mexicans who come to work?”

When the Black and Latino studies divisions of the Univ. of California-Santa Barbara conducted the first en depth ethnographic studies of the Costa Chica, it was celebrated as an affirmation of common roots in a state where black-Mexican tensions run highest. Such notions of racial solidarity inspire intellectuals and activists, but for the people from this remote corner of the African Diaspora on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, American blacks were just another poor people, and very undeserving ones at that, living on handouts while they worked like slaves.

A month later, I traveled to Acapulco. It was the week after Arizona passed its sweeping anti-illegal immigration law. In Acapulco, a man with an Indianapolis Colts cap and a Santa Muerte tattoo who sold raw oysters under the shoulder of a beachfront boulevard told me of a friend who had worked illegally for ten years in a Chinese restaurant in Phoenix, and had recently left for Nevada. Catching a fume-belching, tin-can combi that plodded through traffic, I made my way to Pie de la Cuesta, 10 kilometers from Acapulco but a world away, a magical realist sand-spit separating open-ocean with perfect sunsets from an enormous freshwater lagoon-bird sanctuary.  The first person I made the acquaintance of was Esteban, a black man with a Mexican bigote, working at a street-side palapa selling ceviche with his browner cousin. Although he spoke little English, he had lived in California, Kansas, and both Phoenix and Tucson, claiming that he had enjoyed his time in Arizona the most, noting that the people ‘were friendlier and spoke better English,’ and felt shocked and hurt by the new law.  

Estaban had never been to the eastern U.S. and said that he couldn’t live near Cubans and Puerto Ricans. I pointed out that, if he had been in New York, I would have taken him for a Dominican or Puerto Rican, not only because of his black skin, but also because, at nearly six feet, he was very tall for a Mexican, especially a darker-skinned one. Yes, like most people on the coast of Guerrero, he was the descendant of African slaves. “Pero no soy negro, soy Mexicano,” he insisted, as if the two were somehow mutually exclusive, a black Mexican seemingly confirming racist notions that there were no black people in Mexico. Whatever the color of his skin, Esteban felt no kinship with blacks, in particular the ones in south-central Los Angeles, ‘who take welfare and commit crimes,’ the familiar refrain. As I ate my ceviche, an auto-racing movie, 2 Fast 2 Furious, played on the TV. At one point, one of several stereotypical inner city black men, lounging in positions of idleness, gets up from his chair to investigate a noise from two sports cars that blow by. Esteban looked at me, laughing, “Si, es cierto. Los negros never work.”

Blacks in U.S. might not work, but in Mexico they do. One particularly hard working black man was named Alfonso, Chino, ‘because of my hair,’ he explained, this being one of the stranger nomenclatures of the caste system. A reddish brown-skinned man with an Afro and a tropical aquarium silk-screen shirt that made him look Melanesian—had his ancestors crossed the Pacific in a New Guinean canoe I saw on display in Acapulco’s history museum?—I met him in the zocalo, hustling customers for brothels and strip-clubs. He took me to a brothel, where I received a full-body massage from a woman who knew him on a first name basis, a tall, mocha-skinned beauty with an exquisitely rounded ass, born in Acapulco, but embodying stereotypes of mulata sensuality normally associated with eastern shores of Latin America, Havana or Rio de Janeiro. The next day Chino was out on the street again, hustling me through stalls of various cousins and friends of family in a fan-cooled mercado where the salesmen were disappointed to learn that I only had Mexican pesos. Chino was from the Costa Chica, a small town calling San Nicolas, although Cuaji, where he went to school, ‘is my second home.’ “My daughter is a lawyer,” he claimed, which made me ask him why he was stuck as an overworked gopher, surviving off tips. The stall-owners for whom he worked were much lighter-skinned, including one distant cousin, a light-skinned mestizo who sold books of Mayan prophecy and bags of grass. Caste matters, but never as much as family, and in the mercado, Chino was family, or close enough. I snapped a picture of him and his cousin in fraternal embrace-the kind of image affirming visions of a post-racial nation. I showed it to two black students in Taxco, a South African named Yabulo and Ainka, from the island of Grenada, surprised, Ayinka asked me, “That is a black man, what is he doin’ here in Mexico?” But Chino never seemed uncertain of his Mexican-ness. When I asked to take the picture, a friend jokingly asked me, “Are you from the FBI?” “Two months from now, they are going to come looking for me,” Chino joked.  Black Mexicans have always been at the margins of their country, but the racism that they fear is the type they encounter as Mexicans during their sojourns abroad, not as blacks within their own country.

Jorge was right, Mexico is a diverse country, but in a way that is different from the United States. Even as the U.S. moves away from a society where whiteness is the implied sine qua non of belonging, civic nationalism celebrates a ‘nation of immigrants,’ leading many to affirm their particular cultural heritage in forms of hyphenated Americanism, while descendants of slaves whose ancestors came to the ‘land of the free’ in chains engage in quixotic searches for their African roots. Race in the Anglo-American world is a matter of being, but the mestizaje of Latin America is a matter of becoming, a process through which gente sin razon become gente de razon through the assimilation of a European civilization whose superiority is always implicitly assumed, despite the post-colonial rebukes of Iberian-American intellectuals, invariably delivered in the language of the conquerors, and usually by people who are their descendants. The Mexican Revolution sought to reinvent mestizaje, exalting a new race that dissolved the distinctions of race, and paved the way for a universal man. But mestizaje is not universal, it is a product of a hierarchical society obsessed with social distinction, and the hierarchies that underlay it did not end with independence or revolution.

A caste system still exists in Mexico, in ideology, if not in law. But under this caste system, race is not a fixed category; it is an endless series of adjectives, describing the fluidities of the color line in societies where ‘miscegenation’ is the norm rather than the exception. As an identity of becoming, mestizaje has an illusory quality, the mestizo being gente de razon, but still less than a complete person, due not only to their racial inferiority but their illegitimacy in a Catholic society. But this form of oppression offers upward and downward mobility, as well as certain illusions of equality, rarely available to those on the wrong side of the white-non-white divide of the Anglo-American world. I began to appreciate the political genius of Spanish absolutism, with its idea of society as an organic unity of distinct groups. In creating this racial caste system, it had begotten a system of slavery that was more secure, more stable. And now Mexicans do the jobs in the United States that even blacks won’t do.

[1]-Vaughn, Bobby, Blacks in Mexico: A Brief Overview ‘mexconnect.com’ Aguirre Beltrán

[2]-‘Africa’s Legacy in Mexico: A Legacy of Slavery,’ Smithsonian.org, ‘Migrations in History  

[3]-Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Pg. 143   

[4]-Krauze, Enrique, Mexico: Biography of Power, A History of Modern Mexico Pg. 54 

[5]- Martinez, Zarela,  Zarela’s Veracruz: Mexico’s Simplest Cuisine, ‘Introduction,’ Pg. 4

[6]-Gonzalez, Anita, Jarocho’s Soul: Cultural Identity in Mexican Dance, Pg. 16

[7]-Gonzalez, Juan, A History of Latinos in America: Harvest of Empire, Pg. 110