Some ABC’s of my views before getting to Murray. A.) California-Yankee, Lincoln-loving me, I do not have the time of day for Confederacy-Apologists. B) If a town or state holds successful votes, to take down statues memorializing the confederate war dead or battle-heroes, that is democracy, although in some instances, were I on said council I would vote to keep them up—and to diminish public division, I would in some cases urge the town to consider the erection of new statues that signal its revised judgment of the Rebellion, in place of removing the old ones. C.) The basic problem is that, while some of the monuments honoring of the confederate soldiers and captains were appropriate, it got way overdone, as William Percy (see Titus’s post below) and Murray agree, and got flat-out ridiculous. Became an outright craze during segregationist times. And as such, became, at least in part, a lasting expression of segregationist power. (To experience a war monument that is a mix—a mix typical of this craze—of moving reverence and outright ludicrousness, visit the war memorial in beautiful Lynchburg, Virginia, where you ascend a long staircase studded with successive statuary monuments honoring the U.S. dead of every respective war, until you reach the top, where the war in question is The War, and the taller-than-any-other statue represents “Our Confederate Soldiers.”) In any case, the craze sowed the land with tens-of-thousands of potential political flashpoints across the South, to be dealt with by the sculpture-commissioners’ great-great grand-children, and those of the freed slaves. D) I likewise have no time in any day for listening to the democracy-trampling iconoclast barbarians of 2020, such as those who desecrated the statue district of Richmond, and E) nothing but total condemnation of the officials who enabled—I’m speaking of their refusals to provide police defense of statues or of their ordering tear-downs with no regular vote—the mobs’ Visual Vengeance and in many cases, such as the Richmond one, have extended its impact, by refusing to clean-up.
Albert Murray was one of the more prominent Afro-American writers of the last century. I’ve only read one of his novels, The Seven-League Boots, and my overall impression of it is very-fine albeit not major—Murray didn’t know how to finish it, and aspects of its refined taste-making are idiosyncratic to the point of self-indulgence. (Not that a music-head like myself minded all that much! There’s a scene, for example, where a flirtatious conversation unfolds as Murray tells us the guy and gal are spinning some particularly excellent small-Basie-combo sides that well, if you know them, makes it all click.) I’ve heard high praise for a couple of his other novels, but whatever happens with his reputation as a novelist, his importance as a music critic is going to last. The essential book there is Stomping the Blues. Monumental yet quick prose, and with photo-assemblages that make it a delight just to page through. Terry Teachout has made some important objections to Murray’s overall influence in our understanding of Afro-American music, and that matters a good deal, because Murray’s take influenced-and-was-influenced-by his friend Ralph Ellison, and made a big impact on many key figures, including Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and my absolute favorite music critic, Martha Bayles. (Maybe we’ll talk about the Teachout v. Murray issue another time, which has to do with accusations of Murray automatically undervaluing the contributions of white jazz artists, but I don’t think Teachout does more than give us a few reservations and caveats about the greatness of Murray’s music criticism.)
But the book I’ll quote from here is Seven-League Boots, which is about how a young college-educated black southerner, a rather Ellison-like and Murray-like fellow, but also a rather Jimmy Blanton-like one, since he’s said to be doing pioneering stuff on the bass, joins a swing band in the late 30s that seems to represent a mythic combination of the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras, even though it is pretended to be a third band, existing alongside the Ellington and Basie ones on the charts, and out there on the road. The travels on the band’s tour give the main character, often called Schoolboy, various horizon-expanding experiences, but of course, the novel wants to portray the band’s life as much as it wants to portray his doings. So during one bus tour, the novel slips into this extended partly-comic meditation on Confederate Statues and what they might mean to black individuals and groups--the italics are Murray’s:
But there were also other times when you could wake up and tell where you were even before you opened your eyes because all you had to do was listen, and somebody would start calling off and repeating either the place name, like an old time railroad conductor, or start signifying about some street name, building, or other identifying landmark as Ike Ellis did for my benefit on the next morning of my first trip south from New York by way the of the Atlantic Seaboard states.
Well, there’s old Johnny Jim Crow, Schoolboy, he said just loud enough not to disturb anybody else. And I knew that we had recrossed the line and were back in the section of the country that had been a part of the old Confederacy and that we had stopped for a traffic light in a courthouse square that had a gray monument of either a CSA officer on horseback, or a pack bearing rifleman, facing north.
Still up there, Ike Ellis said; and Alan Meadows said, Still up there trying to make out like them people didn’t get the living dooky kicked out of them. And Ike Ellis said, Man, did they ever mo. Man once them Yankees got all of their stuff together and got them gunboats rolling down the Mississippi and then cut across Tennessee to Georgia and the sea, kicking every living and swinging ass until times got tolerable, I’m telling you, mister.
Grant and Sherman, Joe States said. Old Grant and old Sherman, and I’m not forgetting Mr. Sheridan and old Chickamauga Thomas either. These people had old Stonewall Jackson, but the Union had the rock of Chickamauga. Him and Sheridan are my boys too, and old Admiral Farragut down in your neck of the woods, Schoolboy. And Otis Sheppard said, Hell, I know something about that one. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Hey, but wait a minute, Joe States said. Here’s what I’m talking about now. I’m talking about once old Abe got rid of that simple ass McClellan and turned things over to old Grant, and Grant teamed up with old Sherman, and they got that one-two punch going, it was all over for these people. Fare-thee well, land of cotton, jump for joy.
McClellan, Malachi Moberly said. Man, goddamn. Where the hell did they get that McClellan from? They say we was a badass somitch on the drill field and on maneuvers. But all he ever did on the battlefield was make Robert E. Lee look good even when Lee was having to retreat because he had gotten his ass in a bind. But now when they put Grant on old Lee’s case it was like stink on doodoo all the way to Richmond.
…Oh but did he show them, Ted Chandler said. So much for the Seesesh. Don’t care how mad these old peckerwoods anywhere down here get about anything, the one thing you don’t ever hear any of them ever talking about no more is secession. They wave their flag and give that old rebel yell but that’s as far as it goes, buddy.
These people, Wayman Ridgway said. These people and all this old hype, and they keep passing it on from generation to generation. That’s one of the main things I can’t understand about this whole situation. Look, Schoolboy, what about this shit. Now they put the badmouth on old Benedict Arnold for whatever it was he did, and they turn right around and let these people get away with all this old stuff. And I’m not talking about the denying us our birthrights, I’m talking about glorifying old Jeff Davis and Lee and Stonewall and them, even old Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Man, that’s right, Ike Ellis said. Man, they ruined Benedict Arnold’s reputation forever, and here these people down here still putting up all these old monuments and hanging out all these old Dixie banner all over the place on holidays, national holidays.
Then he also said, Look, you all I’m talking about the Constitution. Wasn’t no Constitution when Benedict Arnold came along. Man, old raw-boned, frozen face Jeff Davis flat out told them. He said, Look, these are my niggers just like these are my livestock, and if you don’t let me have my way about how I run my business I’m going to tear up this piece of paper because that’s all it is to me.
What about all this old stuff, Schoolboy, Osceola Menefee said, What did them college profs say about all this old historical hype? And I said, As far as my profs were concerned the greatest Civil War monument is not some piece of stone or bronze sculpture up on a pedestal anywhere, not even the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall, Grant’s Tomb above Riverside Drive, or Sherman facing south in the Grand Army Plaza. The way they see it the Civil War memorial that really counts for us and for the whole country, north and south, east and west is that little statement that Lincoln read a page of scratch pad up at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the nineteenth of November almost a year and a half before the war was over.
I could have gone on to say that all colleges like the one I went to were Civil War memorials, but I didn’t because I just wanted to go on listening to them; and also because Ted Chandler was already saying, Hey well all right, Schoolboy. And then he said, Hey you hear all this deep stuff our schoolboy is laying down for us? And Ike Ellis said, Them college profs sure did school him right on that one. And Alan Meadows said, Because they want him to be dedicated to the proposition. And that was also what he was to go on talking that afternoon when he came into the Snack Shack across the street from the auditorium and sat at the counter with Joe States and me.
Say now look here, Schoolboy, he said. That was some heavy stuff we were getting into this morning. Man, by the time you hit the ninth grade everybody in our school already knew that address by heart. You had to commit to memory word for word and get up before an audience and recite it with the same feeling that was always there when you heard “Lift Every Voice.”
[Here’s the third stanza of that hymn, lest you’ve be misled by media and activist accounts that might suggest it’s some kind of Kwanzaa thing:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
Overtly Bible-tuned civil religion, and “Our native land!” But back to Murray:]
Heavy, Joe States said. Man, you talking about something heavy as church. And Alan Meadows said, In church it was the Lord’s Prayer and the Lord Is My Shepherd, and in school it was I Pledge Allegiance and Four Score and Seven. And Joe States said, You know something? Until I hit the road and started to get to know some of our folks up north, I didn’t realize that they didn’t do all that up there like down the way.
Man, what we really talking about now is the old folks and the old landmarks, Alan Meadows said. And Joe States said, God bless them both. And then he said, Let me say this again because I can’t say it too often. When it comes to education, the old folks have always been on the case.
I’m talking about like way back before Emancipation. If you found a way to learn to read and write and figure it was like outfitting yourself with a pair of them seven league boots, that somebody—who was it?—mentioned the other day, for the Underground Railroad. Then after Surrender, every time somebody put up a new school they saw it as another Amen to Appomattox.
And said as much, I said. And he said, You know it too? And I said, To them it is still as if every good mark you make on your grade school report card is like another bullet to help bring old Stonewall Jackson’s final Waterloo.
But schoolboy that I still was (and still am) I also knew that you should never forget that there were also those who did not listen to the old folks because sometimes they acted as if what they scoffed at as “book learning” was a bigger threat to their well being than segregation. …So to them schoolboy was a term of contempt.
It’s been a while since I read it, but if I recall correctly, this is one of the few clearly politics-referencing sections in The Seven League Boots. Use the first link in my post above, to a City Journal piece by Catesby Leigh, if you want to reflect on contemporary debates on how to handle Confederate statues, and we can talk more about the issue in the comments if you wish; but I think you can see from this excerpt that Murray wanted to remind all of us that it is the words in the memory, the songs in the heart, and the riffs on the wing that ultimately matter more than any hard old monuments that representative bodies might have to vote about, even if sure, the Federal government might have offered the Southern states and localities more resistance on some of these monuments, when they were originally commissioned. For Murray, while politics was not to be dismissed, the healthiest form of Afro-American “resistance,” if that’s even the right word for it, was culture-making, that is, was irresistible accomplishment. It thus feels right to cap this off with a landmark of Jimmy Blanton’s bass-work and of William Ellington’s composition:
Hi Carl: good piece. Thanks for focusing on my mentor, Albert Murray! On Sunday and Monday, I'm part of an event centering on Murray and his work: event.omniamerican.org. Register and check it out.
Carl, I think statues matter a lot more than you allow. That America where many, maybe most schoolkids, black & white, memorized The Gettysburg Address is gone; but people still visit the Lincoln Memorial &, I think, it matters to them.
After all, what's wrong with the Confederate statues itself depends on the importance of statues in the public space: I agree that the Jim Crow-era building should be essentially suspect, precisely because these things are very important in general, or were, in the particular case of this forgotten drama. I don't really agree that people today will look at those statues & remember segregation, since they cannot remember what they do not know of either by learning or by experience; the outrage of the young has nothing to do with either.
I'm not sure whether North or South did more to memorialize the war. I'm sure that over the long run, & today, the South cared & cares more; they mostly accept, as they should, that Lincoln was right, slavery was wrong; still, they care more, although perhaps all-American oblivion has spread there, too. I can assure you that there is no Northern celebration of Grant or Sherman, of Sheridan or George Thomas. People should care, but they don't, & they didn't 50 years ago either...