The South is a Place to Stay PDF

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Title: “The South Is a Place to Stay” Author: Willie Jamaal Wright Eds. Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan N. Dennis Text: A Movement in Every Direction: A Great Migration Critical Reader (2022) Publisher: Yale University Press -- WORKING DRAFT -- I am my father’s son. Not a junior, but very much a replica...

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Title: “The South Is a Place to Stay” Author: Willie Jamaal Wright Eds. Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan N. Dennis Text: A Movement in Every Direction: A Great Migration Critical Reader (2022) Publisher: Yale University Press

-- WORKING DRAFT --

I am my father’s son. Not a junior, but very much a replica. From his quippish laugh to his repressed, explosive temper, we share more than a few mannerisms. My father, Willie Jones Wright, was a migrant. In 1966 he set out for Houston, leaving Franklin, Louisiana and a young daughter behind. His story is not unlike that of many Black Southerners. He was instructed within a separate and unequal Jim Crow educational system and versed in a Jim Crow social system that required that he defer to white people and contend with the South’s segregated public spaces. Having completed no more than ten grades’ worth of education at a plantation school, he made his exodus from Franklin for reasons common within this era of American apartheid. Leading up to his departure, my father decided that he would no longer endure the white boss who ritualistically supplied the Black workers on his job site, a sugarcane field, with micro-dosages of terror.1 During his younger years, my father was rarely without a blade, or, as one fateful day would have it, in search of one: Hébert was . . . a big ole’ Creole [sic]. He was a white man, but he was white and Creole [sic]. One of them big Cajuns. . . .2 Now, I remember, when I came up here to stay in 1966, me and Hébert got into it. I was chopping cane and I was. . . . No, I was on the wagon. People would hold up the wagon, you know. Just dropping little piece of cane so they could get their rest. So, he come over there and got on us. I say, “they supposed to been done gone. They just holdin’ that wagon.” . . . So, me and him got into it. He told me, “git down off that wagon.” So, I got down on the other side. That’s where the ladies was choppin’ cane behind the wagon. That cane be crooked, they chop it so it can lay down. Me and him got into it. He come ’round there, and I went on the other side. That man would use me for a stick. So, uh, he wouldn’t let me git away from him. . . . Hébert came on the other side, and I grabbed one of them run-joes [a hooked cane knife] from the lady. I grabbed Pearly Mae Williams’s run-joe. And I was gone put that run-joe on his tail. . . . I’d made up my mind I was gone kill ’em . . .3 If it had not been for the intervention of my father’s cousin, Lewis, who was respected by the Black workers and feared by the white ones, he may have never made it to Houston.4 Soon after this altercation, my grandfather placed him on a Greyhound bus. It was September and my grandfather sent his youngest son off with these parting words, “Now, don’t you forget us, boy.” His first stop was a brief stint in Fifth Ward with hometown friends. Eventually he would end up with an aunt in Acres Homes, one of the city’s numerous exclusively Black neighborhoods. Sometime thereafter he would meet my mother roller skating in Fifth Ward in a pair of hot pants. According to her, our family life was a staging of Fences. What my father had brought with him from Franklin, what he learned from his roughshod rearing, is that all a man needed to raise a

family was a steady paycheck. Tenderness and open, amorous expressions of affection were not his strong suit. Perhaps his proclivity for being a provider is why he took up several jobs: truck driver for Western Commercial Transport, dockworker at the Houston shipyard, pipefitter for Kellogg Brown & Root, furnace operator for Lone Star Heat Treating, and, finally, mailroom clerk for Southern Pacific Railroad. It is the Southern Pacific worker that I grew up knowing. At times he would take me to work with him and plant me in front of an IBM computer, where I would sit for hours playing Solitaire. As a child, I knew little of my father’s journey. Just that he was from a small town in Louisiana where I had scores of kin. His reference to these faceless members of my bloodline often came with a warning about falling for anyone with the last name Jones, Broussard, Wright, or Verrette (Verrett or Veret)5—because they could be my cousin. And heaven forbid I contribute to an already complicated lineage. You see, my father grew up on a plantation, which for all intents and purposes was sovereign land.6 There everyone was kin, in terms of social and biological reproduction. Thus, it was not uncommon for one’s lover to double as a distant relative. Propelled by dreams of better days, my father followed a quixotic path trodden by generations of subjugated Black Southerners. Those who relocated north often did so at the behest of industrialists like Henry Ford and the promise of higher wages.7 Others were wooed by the stories passed by Pullman porters who worked the region’s railways.8 Public relations aside, in general, migrants were in pursuit of the North’s temptations (e.g., gainful employment and political enfranchisement). While the de jure system that defined the racist practices of the South was absent up North, the segregationist desires and designs of white Northerners resulted in similarly constraining conditions for Black migrants (e.g., residential segregation and mob violence).19 Marcus Hunter and Zandria Robinson have remapped the South such that all regions across the American landscape are rendered Southern.10 They build upon Black migratory patterns and musical creations to suggest, similar to the Nappy Roots, that “the whole damn world is country.” In this case, “country” is a euphemism for Black Southernness and its reach and reformation as the blues, jazz, hip hop, and (G)funk. Their work also situates the Great Migration not just as the movement of northbound subjects but as an exodus to any place where Black migrants sought a home. Within this vivisected migration, intra-South exoduses receive little attention despite the fact that Black migrants circulated the South prior to heading north. W. E. B. Du Bois noted that following the Civil War, newly freed Black people moved to industrialized Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama, where, according to Bobby Wilson, “the wage-labor arrangement they encountered required them to become proletarianized, or acculturated to the industrialist’s work order.”11 Stretching the parameters of the migration narrative further, during World War II many Black migrants relocated to California to become shipbuilders in the nation’s defense industry. Former Chairman of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense Huey P. Newton’s family were fellows in a caravan of Black Louisianans who helped convert Oakland into a “city of migrants.”12

My father’s experience builds upon this expansive understanding of the Great Migration and helps to reveal what Katherine McKittrick has called “unorthodox practices of belonging that discredit ethnic absolutism and its attendant geographic fictions.”13 One gets a glimpse of Black migrants’ mixed geographic heritages in Akea Brionne Brown’s The Path Laid by the Phelps Sisters. Brown treks her family’s migrations via her own excursion from Baltimore to New Orleans, and finally Albuquerque. In the process she reflects on her matrilineal forebears’ collective decision to raise their sons as a unit and how their choice set the foundation for her family’s middle-class future. Not only does Brown’s family history illustrate a complex and creolized Blackness, her installation points to how the Great Migration extended even to the badlands of New Mexico. As in her earlier works, Brown’s photographs use light in such a way as to create a temporal narrative. Looking at the relics of her family’s life—a butter churn, a Singer sewing machine, and a Hardwick stove with its clock frozen to 11:02—those familiar with the intimacies of Black social life may feel as if her family’s home is their own. This is not Brown’s first exploration of property relations and intergenerational wealth. In her series Black Picket Fences, Brown exposes regional and racialized fictions regarding Black homeownership and the discriminatory origins of white suburbia.14 Brown’s photographic archives inform the viewer that though associated with the South, residential segregation was (and remains) rife throughout these United States. Movements such as those archived within Akea Brown’s family annals often extended along Interstate 10. For generations, the Louisiana-to-Texas junction of this route led those in search of safety and sustenance to Texas’s oil towns. In Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust, Robert Bullard marks a shift from the old to the New South as Southern cities became in favor. He states, “The black population in the South is concentrated in the major urban centers of the region. Southern cities of 100,000 or more attracted the bulk of blacks who migrated to the region. These large cities also attracted the lion’s share of black rural-to-urban and urban-to-urban migration within the southern states.”15Amidst this intra and back-to-the South migration, Houston “emerged as the premier Sunbelt city in the mid-1970s, becoming the mecca of thousands of individuals seeking opportunities.”16 Ultimately, it was Black Texans, Louisiana Creoles, and ethnic Mexican migrants who would give the budding metropolis its multicultural character. As Tyina Steptoe has established, “Whereas much of the historiography on race and migration following World War I has focused on cities in the Northeast and Midwest and on the West Coast . . . Houston’s geographic location makes the city a revealing laboratory for how overlapping migrations affected race formations.”17 These accounts document the regions, industries, and interludes within which Black Southerners hoped to sustain a fulfilling sense of place. With these migrations would come several cultural additions. Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, blues, jazz, and zydeco sprang from Houston’s juke joints and formal halls. In Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues, written just prior to the infrastructural and demographic changes now re-characterizing many of the city’s historically Black neighborhoods, Roger Wood notes, “the Texas city of Houston has long maintained a tradition of blues performance as an African American community event— especially in the near-southeast area known as Third Ward, as well as the near-northeast location called Fifth Ward.”18 Black migrants from rural East Texas and beyond were vital to the city’s cultural boon.

My father’s journey and Black/Creole cultural heritage are a case study in Houston’s interregional, interracial, and intercultural legacies (fig. 2). His presence, and those of other migrants, endorsed a Louisiana-to-Texas trajectory that helped nurture a Black culture of the arts throughout Houston’s racially excluded Black wards, a cultural heritage that is present in the dated stories he tells of its nightlife. “I could dance,” he said to me with a nostalgic grin that was noticeable even behind the face mask that had filtered our interactions for over a year. When in Third Ward he preferred the Pladium Club. However, it was at the Honey Hut (Kashmere Gardens) that he first saw the Jazz Crusaders. On some nights he would visit Latin World, a predominantly Latinx joint on Navigation Street. And on others he would travel to the Bamboo Club (Trinity Gardens) or Al’s Lounge (South Park). Digging deep into his fading memory, he states, “Every weekend you had a choice to see some big stars.” For instance, he saw Otis Redding and James Brown in concert at the Eldorado Ballroom and Johnnie Taylor performing “Who’s Making Love” at the Continental Club.19 Robert Pruitt is a product of this localized culture of the arts. Raised chiefly in Houston’s Third Ward, his drawings are informed by graphic novels, Black revolutionary politics, and his familial connection to the city. His drafts are often creolized representations that depict everyday Black folk in traditional (e.g., African masks) and contemporary garb (e.g., Air Force Ones). Expounding on the nature of his practice for the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Department of Art & Art History, Pruitt discussed the drawing GAWWWD, which presents a figure with a Mende helmet and a face adorned with script pulled from an untitled painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. He stated, “For me, the use of these two things kind of bridge[s] a gap of time, a gap of culture, a gap of identity, and kind of wrangles all of that stuff into one body and one moment.”20 For A Movement in Many Directions Pruitt continues his syncretic rite with Holding It Down, a series of large-scale drawings culled into a 20 x 7-foot mural. With this work he venerates what he calls “the center of Black life” in Houston, in part, through the techniques of John Biggers—a muralist who was inspired by the lives of Black residents of Third Ward—and his own fascination with the working-class residents of this historically Black community. Those familiar with his singular, life-size drawings might view Pruitt’s style as a deconstructed take on the mural format. With Holding It Down, he references a distinct migration era (i.e., 1930s–90s). He also revisits his training at Texas Southern University (TSU), the home that Biggers built. His frieze consists of four panels. The conté crayon for which Pruitt is known lends a deep contrast to each of his images. It is as if he lent heavier strokes to these figures than those in works’ past. Conjoined, the individuals on the panels present in such a way as to give their sole attention to a lead figure. The bulbous vestiary which enshrines the groups’ doyen resembles the potteries stationed in the foyer of the TSU art department.21 As with most of Pruitt’s drawings, his muses are draped in regalia. It is here that his subjects’ aesthetics shift from an oft-galactic and African-centered attunement. In sum, the mural signals Houston’s local histories,22 linguistic styles, diasporic monetary traditions, as well as its pleasure and social clubs. However, as he creates, the Houston he hopes to highlight wanes. As Third Ward absorbs whiter and more affluent residents, one is pressed to consider: “What is the future of the communities that shaped my father’s early experiences and the neighborhood that has informed Pruitt’s art?”.23

Entering a discussion on the Great Migration illustrates the harsh and aspirational realities that fuel(ed) Black migratory patterns and settlements across the South. As much as the Great Migration was the product of a particular time in US history, it continues to be a multidirectional movement of Black Southerners taking risks in exchange for a chance to access liberties, practice rites, and access largesse absent in their current location. While the push-pull factors of the past were the result of the threat of white rage, a quest for economic selfdetermination, and a desire for political enfranchisement, today’s migratory patterns are not limited to these concerns. Development plans that benefit incoming middle-class residents are divorcing long-term working-class residents from their communities and sources of social reproduction. Many are relocating to suburban rings where they are over-policed, excessively taxed, and politically underrepresented. In exchange, community residents are succeeded by museums, libraries, and murals that tout the cultural productions of a dwindling population of Black tastemakers.24 Today, extreme weather poses a particular concern. As climate crises, of which Houston has become an epicenter, assail the Gulf Coast region, Black residents are enacting temporary and more permanent solutions, such as the New Orleans-to-Houston exodus of 2005. These immediate and finite relocations happen in an attempt to evade the trauma tax associated with an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events.25 Such tolls (e.g., power outages, floods, and deaths) though burdensome to all, impact people experiencing homelessness as well as Black and other working-class people of color most. For Gulf Coast cities to be both resilient and sustainable, they must address not only infrastructural impediments, such as failing electrical grids and exclusive development models, but also the pre-existing structural discriminations through which denizens have been made migrants.

Figures/captions: 1. Akea Brionne Brown, Black Picket Fences (2017–19), installation view at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 2019 https://www.akeabrown.com/Black-picket-fences-2019

2. The author (left) with his father, Willie Jones Wright (1941-2022) (right), and his uncle Earl Nicholas, Jr. (1939-2020) (center). 3. Robert Pruitt, GAWWWD, 2015. Fabric dye, Conté crayon, charcoal, and pastel on paper, 84 x 60 in. (213.4 x 152.4 cm). Notes 1. My father grew up on Oaklawn Manor plantation in Franklin, Louisiana (St. Mary Parish). 2. In Louisiana, “Creole” and “Cajun” are ethnic categorizations that denote racial difference and cultural mixture. Creole is as a reference to ethnic Black Louisianans, whereas Cajun is a reference to ethnic white Louisianans. In this passage, [sic] has been included where my father conflates these terms.

3. Willie Jones Wright, conversation with the author, May 2021. All subsequent quotations with this text come from this communication. 4. According to my father, it was well known that Cousin Lewis had shot his own father and carried (while in the field) a 44-caliber pistol. 5. There were two sets of Verrette families in Franklin: one white and one Black. The white Verrettes originated in Canada. The Black Verrettes were a result of their settler colonial migration South. 6. Katherine McKittrick argues that the plantation is a spatial referent for all valorized and grided forms of development today: city, town, neighborhood, prison, dog park, etc. She also states that the plantation was a sovereign place, meaning the plantation-as-territory was reigned over by a master who was the judge and the jury. And as such, he doled out sentences at will. This feudalstyle relationship to land and labor carried over into the Jim Crow era. My father recalled how transgressions between workers or between spouses that took place on the plantation were handled by the boss/landowner, not the local sheriff. When my father was arrested for cutting a man during a baseball game, he was released from jail on the recognizance of his boss (i.e., his lordship). See McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Social & Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (December 2011): 947–63, and “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (November 2013): 1–15. 7. See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 8. See Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) 9. See Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), and Lawrence T. Brown, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). 10. See Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson, Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018). 11. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1935), and Bobby M. Wilson, America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 96–97.

12. See Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 13. 13. The subject of her images resonates with Mickalene Thomas’ “A Moment of Pleasure” installation which converted a section of the Baltimore Museu...