“Rosy,Possum,Morning Star: African American Women’s Work and Play Songs”

An Ijaw Story (Nigeria, 20th Century)

Among the Ijaw, they say that in the beginning God was a woman who sat down, below her tree, with her birthing stone, and shaped the fates of spirits according to their choosing before sending them, along two streams, into the land of the living. They say that, when her spirit came before the creator, Ogboinba asked only for great mystic power, to be a seer and a healer, whereas another beside her asked for many children, and that those two were later born to be women, in the same town, and became close friends. Each year Ogboinba’s power grew. She knew the languages of all the animals and the meanings of dreams and, in time, touched and healed legions. They say that in time both women married but, whereas her friend gave birth to many children, who she cared for like her own, Ogboinba gave birth to no children, though she deeply wanted them. So, they say, Ogboinba packed her most powerful medicines and set out to return to the place of beginning, to recreate herself, to have children. On her journey, Ogboinba met and battled kings, sorcerers, deities, and magicians. In each meeting and contest, Ogboinba declared her name, her story, and her determination, and sang her incantations, circling round and round, countering her fabled opponents, and gaining greater power so that, when she came to crossing the primal sea, her bag of medicine was heavy with all she had won. They say that when, despite all warnings to turn back, she came, as no living being had ever come, to the place of beginning, God cursed her boldness for challenging fate and would have struck her down had Ogboinba not hidden in the eyes of a pregnant woman where, according to the story, she remains, watching.

Journeys of Experience, Work, and Imagination: Playing Possum

Our storytelling begins with a journey of creation and the liminal figure of a woman in motion, stories within stories within her own. Countering the fragmentation of the broken calabash of Ashanti story, Ogboinba, the seer and healer, undertakes a journey embracing earth, tree, branch, and water crossing, stream, and ocean. She is pounded and shaped, like grain into flour, below the communal gathering tree, by the water twice crossed, remakes herself in the journey back, and becomes a part of the endless cycle of being and transformation (Beier, 1966). Like early inscriptions of the mythical Khoisan woman, she rides the bull of her opponents and gathers the dispersal of power and knowledge (Bleek, 1911). Like the Egyptian Goddess Isis, she traverses cosmological terrain, re-composing the torn body of the universe in her migration (Budge, 1960). In this telling, Ogboinba walks across a deeply contested, patriarchal landscape, brandishing her bold testimony and her circles of song as weapons and augmenting her power in her peregrinations.

Ogboinba’s journey, from the Goddess/mother’s womb into the vision of her womanhood transformed, is a wonderful allegory for the performance of blues singing women and, closer at hand, the trails of women’s songs of work and imagination which lead to them.

African American women’s work and play songs utilize characteristically African modalities of storytelling, improvisational “bantering,” and historical documentation, pairing song and dance in percussive, multi-metered, polyphonic, call and response performance, to engage in circles of ancestry, articulation of journey, acts of witness, transformative pedagogy, and communal art making. These performances, in the African tradition, chronicle a specifically diasporic legacy, expressing both received values and cumulative historical knowledge.

Countering what novelist, critic, and theorist Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called the “dismembering practices” of European colonialism, these performances are part of the dynamic cultural lineage of linguistically subversive acts of agency, construction of identity, and cultural survival, of Africans kidnapped, enslaved, and yet in perpetual vibrant resistance and human presence (Thiong’o, 2009, pp. 3-29). In the potent incantation of their dance and song, African American women, who had been called “sow,” “breeder,” “hoe,” “hand,” less than fully human, in the killing metonymy of “chattel” slavery, re-member and name themselves daughters, sisters, lovers, dreamers, dancers, workers, survivors.

African Americanist theorists have identified “Black culture” as a vessel of “Black consciousness”; the “signifying” acts and signal circle forms of a Black oral, performed, and literary tradition, the “flash of the spirit” of African art, and the shining continuum of “African art in motion,” as well as the “reconstruction of womanhood” and “conjuring” in Black women’s storytelling (Carby, 1987; Gates, 1988; Levine, 1977; Spillers, 1985; Stuckey, 1987; Thompson, 1983, 1979). This writing draws on these generative theoretical frameworks, the voices of practitioners, and a story or two, to explore the collective autobiography in a selection of African American women’s work and play songs, which form a bridge into a “blues closing.” We begin with the voice of a little girl singing, dancing, and acting like a woman.

Put your hand on your hips and let your mind roll forward.

Back, back, back back until you see the stars.

Skip so lightly, shine so brightly,

That is the Possum-a-la.

(“Possum-La,” play song, 20th century; B. Jones & Hawes, 1972, pp. 12-128)

Skipping or shuffling around in a circle, “chugging” to the side with a deep knee bend on the word “Possum,” clapping, patting, and heel tapping throughout, a little girl in Alabama performed the “Possum-La” for folklorists John and Alan Lomax in 1937. Her movement and song recalled the work songs, ring shouts, and “Juba” patting of the 19th century, as well as the older ritual theater forms they drew on, in a rite of passage play highlighting both continuity and change in diaspora performance. Hands on hips, arms akimbo, in her circling dance song storytelling, the little girl’s Possum-La leads the way on a journey, in the African tradition, to “see the stars” and shine “so brightly,” engaging beautifully with fable and allegory. Yet, where African girls’ rites of passage plays evoked the potter, the hunter, the snake, the zebra, the elephant, “Possum-La” plays with the phrase “playing possum,” alluding to a creature who “plays” dead (or unconscious) when threatened, and to a practice of feigning ignorance in self-protection. What a resonant image for cultural hermeneutics, the story within the story, from Alabama, a Creek place name that means “we may rest here.”

The trickster possum, and its partner Raccoon, a pair of small tree-dwelling animals who between them work night and day, appear in many of the songs 19th-century African American women sang while working.

Raccoon has a bushy tail Possum’s tail is bare

Rabbit’s got no tail at all but a little bunch of hair.

Chorus

Bile them cabbage down, down

Bake that hoe cake brown brown

The only song that I can sing is

Bile the cabbage down.

(“Bile the Cabbage Down,” work song, 19th century; Lomax, 1960, pp. 493-494)

Work songs document the central experience in the lives of most Africans in the early history of the Americas who worked “from sun up until sundown,” recognized the true extent of their worth, and despite the pervasive and horrific violence, brutality, and trauma of enslavement, drew sustenance from their own strength and accomplishments. Both Jacqueline Jones, in her Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow, and Angela Davis, in her Women Race and Class, bring our attention to enslaved women’s particular oppression and forms of resistance (Davis, 1981; J. Jones, 1985). Black women were mercilessly exploited as workers, as women, and as the mothers of children who also would be consumed by the slave system, and those women bore the weight of their bondage throughout the cycles of their lives. Yet, they often met the challenges of their condition with incredible imagination and resilience, cultivating extraordinary internal resources, as they cultivated the world around them. Jones’s history of Black women’s work paints a vivid description of the cycles of their physical labor.

The rhythm of the planting-weeding-harvesting cycle shaped the lives of almost all American slaves, 95% of whom lived in rural areas. . . . Dressed in coarse osnaburg gowns; their skirts “reefed up with a chord tied tightly around the body, a little above the hips” . . . with their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, Black women spent up to fourteen hours a day toiling out of doors, often under a blazing sun. In the cotton belt they plowed fields; dropped seed; and hoed, picked, ginned sorted, and moted cotton. On farms in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, women hoed tobacco; laid worm fences; and threshed, raked, and bound wheat. For those on the Sea Islands and in coastal areas, rice culture included raking and burning the stubble from the previous year’s crop; ditching; sowing seed; plowing, listing, and hoeing fields; and harvesting, stacking, and threshing the rice. In the bayou region of Louisiana, women planted sugar cane cuttings, plowed, and helped to harvest and gin the cane. During the winter they performed the myriad of tasks necessary on nineteenth century farms: repairing roads, pitching hay, burning brush, and setting up post and rail fences. (J. Jones, 1985, pp. 14-16)

African labor, knowledge, and vision laid the foundations for the European colonial settlements and “occupying” nations of the Americas and the Caribbean. Regional examples abound. Tim Hashaw (2007), in his The Birth of Black America, draws on the Virginia historical record to show how the agricultural and husbandry skills of kidnapped and captive, and subsequently free, Malunga, Africans was essential to the “success” of what had long been a failing colony. Before the arrival of the Africans, Virginia could not feed itself. Historian Peter Wood writes that in South Carolina, as elsewhere, Africans were “the source of rice agriculture, new forms of cattle breeding and herding, boat building, inland water navigation, hunting and trapping, medicine and other innovations” (Abrahams & Szwed, 1975, pp. 26-45). According to Wood, in his Black Majority, “no development had greater impact upon the course of South Carolina history than the successful introduction of rice,” a crop that European colonists had no familiarity with, but which had long been cultivated in Africa, primarily by women (Wood, 1974, p. 33). In his study, Down by the Riverside, Charles Joyner (1984) points out that the desire to “acquire” the rice cultivation skills of the people of the Senegal/Gambia region is clearly reflected in the records of colonial South Carolina’s human trafficking and notes that “African and Afro-Carolinian methods of planting, hoeing, winnowing, and pounding (de-husking) persisted through slavery and on into recent years” (p. 14).

I got a rainbow Huh!

Round my shoulder Huh!

It ain’t gonna rain Huh!

It ain’t gonna rain Huh!

(“Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” work song, traditional)

The “success” of the colonial project was due, in no small part, to the work ways of Black men and women, in and despite their enslavement. A powerful component of those work ways was the role of communal song. This story is intrinsic to the interpretations offered by African American historians dating back to George Washington Williams’s work in 1882 and is recorded in the histories the people sang.

Come on Mr. Tree

You almost down

Huh!

Come on Mr. Tree

Hit the ground

Huh!

(Work song, traditional)

The African tradition of communal work song was a tool for the survival and achievement of Africans laboring in the diaspora, and its performance is a recording of their historical contribution. The Black sailors and pilots of 18th-century Caribbean and North American sea islands built boats, navigated them, and reportedly, “trained the boat hands to the oar” within rich performance traditions (Epstein, 1977, pp. 69-70). On land, the practice of field hollers, whoops, and yodeling formed the basis of communication and coordination of work across distant rural locations, and call and response singing coordinated the pace and spirit of group agricultural work in the sowing and harvesting of cotton, tobacco, and rice, as well as in grain processing and building construction. That work was, in turn, chronicled in song.

Work songs indelibly connect African American performance with ancestral and historical recognition, “bantering,” social commentary, and communal articulation traditions of Africa (Fisher, 1953; Southern, 1971; Thompson, 1979). Africans, on the continent and in the diaspora, “danced” with work, composing histories of their journeys, their past and present, in these performance traditions. Work songs assisted the people in sustaining a sense of transcendent identity, agency, and authority, and as deeply pedagogical sites, are vessels of vision.

Raccoon and the Possum

Racklin cross the prairie

Raccoon ask the Possum

Do she want to marry

Bile them cabbage down, down

Bake that hoe cake brown brown

The only song that I can sing is

Bile the cabbage down

(“Bile the Cabbage Down,” work song, 19th century; Rawick, 1972, pp. 3-96)

While much of the discussion about African American work songs has been concerned with the experience of men, there is much to be learned from the experience told in the songs and narratives of women, which seamlessly blend stories of their particular journey, witnessing, and acts of transformation, with folkloric allusions. From their lullabies, to the songs they sang while working in the fields or cooking, women’s performances of work are as much about story as about rhythm and pacing, intricately interweaving questions of work and freedom with ideas about love and relationships. And yes, her songs are about race, class, identity, and “playing possum,” domestic arts, cleaning, and cooking.

One of the many women who recounted their experiences in slavery for the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) remembered singing the above verse while working. The lines of her version of “Bile the Cabbage Down” alternate between a contemporary fable and a chorus that brings us back to the kitchen, staple foods, and cooking. Black women did the work of men and the work traditionally done by women, and recorded that range of work, and how they felt about it, in their songs.

Work songs in a woman’s voice narrate, in Zora Neale Hurston’s words, “everything they don’t want to forget,” and pass on experience and instruction in their chronicling (Hurston, 1978, p. 9). Work and craft were important to these women. You got to brown that hoecake and the cabbage needs to be thoroughly boiled “down.” The narratives of many women who were enslaved give detailed descriptions of the consuming tasks of day-to-day rural life and of how they were done, properly. In her reminiscences, Silvia DuBois, who served in tavern, described how to make all kinds of brandy (Larison, 1988, p. 68). Jenny Proctor and Millie Evans, two other WPA informants, gave painstaking descriptions of how dyes were made from barks and plants, perfumes from flowers, winter sage gathered for brooms, wool corded and cooking done, “in swing pots,” over a fireplace (Botkin, 1969, pp. 61-65; 89-93). Landscape and larder come together in these women’s chronicles; the bigger vision and the microcosm. While Possum plays at marrying, our narrator keeps work on the domestic front going.

The sexual allusions in women’s songs are a little different from those recorded in songs sung, for instance, among Carolina ferry men but similarly express the value women and men placed on work, community, kin, and the transforming power of bearing witness in song (Epstein, 1977; Katz, 1969; Lomax & Lomax, 1947; Parrish, 1942). Like them, antebellum work songs in a woman’s voice contain recollection, moral lessons, adult observations, social commentary, joke, and lament.

Possum up in a ’simmon tree

Raccoon on the ground

Raccoon say to possum

Won’t you shake that ’simmon down.

Bile them cabbage down

Bile them cabbage down

Look here gal don’t want no fooling

Bile them cabbage down . . .

Went to Susy’s house

Bile them cabbage down

Susy wasn’t home

Look here gal don’t want no fooling

Bile them cabbage down . . .

My old missus promise me

When she die she going to set me free.

She live so long till her head got bald

She give up the idea of dying at all. . . .

(“Bile the Cabbage Down,” 20th century; Parrish, 1942, p. 121)

This version of the “Boil the Cabbage Down/Possum and Raccoon” was recorded on St. Simon’s island in the 1920s. It sings of women’s work and community ties and of how, with mutuality, webs of kin, strict discipline, and a sense of humor in the telling, they attempted to navigate oppression. There is playful sexual connotation in the image of “shaking” the fruit down (which would surely be redoubled in accompanying motion), but the persimmon that is out of reach can also represent a bigger prize. Alternating lines of allegory, instructional injunction, reference to a web of female relations, and the verse about “missus” and her promise of manumission for the enslaved “when she die,” the song plays smartly with history and double entendre. The often unfulfilled promise to grant “a loyal servant” or an “illegitimate” child their freedom in the last will and testament, mirrors the refusal of the slave-owning class to let the system “die” with emancipation, and belies the narrative of racial “benevolence.” The persistence of the fundamental economic inequalities of slavery brings the song poignantly into the early 20th century, in which the death grip of White racial and economic terror, violence, and institutional segregation continued to enslave.

We are the valiant soldiers, who’ve enlisted for the war,

We are fighting for the union, we are fighting for the law

We can shoot a rebel farther than a white man ever saw

As we go marking on . . .

Glory, glory hallelujah! Glory, glory hallelujah!

Glory, glory hallelujah! As we go marching on.

We are done with hoeing cotton, we are done with hoeing corn

We are colored Yankee soldiers, as sure as you are born

When massa hears us shouting, he will think its Gabriel’s horn

As we go marching on . . .

They will have to pay us wages, the wages of their sin

They will have to bow their foreheads to their colored kith and kin

They will have to give us house-room or the roof will tumble in

As we go marching on . . .

We bare the proclamation, mass hush it as you will

The birds will sing it to us. Hopping on the cotton hill

The possum up the gum tree couldn’t keep it still.

As he went climbing on.

(Truth, 1968, p. 126)

In 1863, as Black men fought to enter “the fight” in the civil war, Sojourner Truth rallied the troops of the First Michigan Regiment of Colored Soldiers by galvanizing historic banter, journey, witness, and transformative song traditions, in her improvised “We Are the Valiant Soldiers.” Her ballad, to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” plays on folk references and revels in a pride of place drawn from experience. Like the antebellum song “No More, No More,” her rhetorical performance revises the work songs of slavery toward an era of freedom and paid labor. “We can shoot a rebel farther,” she sang and “we mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight.” In Truth’s performance the people’s work is the work for social justice and national as well as personal liberation. The possum, who can’t keep still the echo of proclamation, “climbing on” as the soldiers “go marching,” is clearly a political being. Although the work song “Bile the Cabbage Down” was eventually commercialized in popular song, Sojourner Truth’s ballad underscores the conscious political import of tales of possum.

Morning Star: Making and Moving Knowledge in Song

Shoo, fly don’t bother me

Shoo, fly don’t bother

Shoo, fly don’t bother me

Cause I belong to somebody.

I feel, I feel, I feel

I feel like a morning star

I feel, I feel, I feel

I feel like a morning star.

(“Shoo Fly,” play song/work song, late 19th century; Hughes & Bontemps, 1958)

The work songs of 19th-century women, and men, chronicle the labors and imagining of people, old and young, often children, subverting the system of enslavement with the magic of dreams. “I played with the two children all day, then set the table,” recalled Francis Black who was born in Grand Bluff, Mississippi, “I was so small I’d get a chair to reach the dishes out of the safe. I had to pull a long fly brush over the table while the white folks ate” (Rawick, 1972, v. 4, p. 87). Other women of Ms. Black’s generation remembered similar chores as very small girls. Fairy Elkins told WPA interviewers that

after Miss come, I had to stay in the house with them and mind the flies off the table while the white folks eat. I had to do other things around the house too. We didn’t have time to learn to read and write and I never went to school until after the war. (Rawick, 1972, v. 11, p. 115)

Having small children fan flies was apparently common on the large estates of the slave economy. In his pioneering book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavas Vasa, the young Equiano’s (1987) first assignment on a Virginia plantation was the weird task of fanning the flies from the body of a sleeping man. An unnamed male informant, whose oral history is recorded in Botkin’s Lay My Burden Down, remembered moving into the “big house” as soon as he was “big enough to step around.” He recalled how young girls were put to work gathering feathers and making fly brushes, and how he, as a little one, was put to the task of fanning the table while perched in a swing suspended from the ceiling. In his recollection, he was so young he “took to going to sleep up there.” The exploitation and abuse of children as personal servants, sleeping at the foot of the bed or standing ready at the kitchen sideboard, was painfully common in “the particular institution.” In time, the informant continues,

They took down the swing and got a little gal to stand behind the missus chair and fan the flies. The missus allow to Master Johnson that the style done change, when he wants to know how come she took the swing down (Botkin, 1969, pp. 141-142).

“Shoo Fly,” a ditty that became a popular 20th-century child’s play, remembered by some formerly enslaved WPA informants as a ring play or dance song and by others as a children’s ring game, recalls the chore laden childhoods of many 19th-century African American women and men who “never had time for any games.” The second stanza speaks of the unstoppable dreaming of small children fanning flies, though they were often under threat of severe punishment. A song of work rather than, strictly speaking, a work song (though it may well “dance” with the task of fanning flies), “Shoo Fly” bears witness to the conditions and consciousness of children working. Might the “morning star,” Venus in the east, an ancient point of metaphor and reference, also be a reference to the stellar pathways, like following the Polaris, leading to freedom?

The lullabies their mothers sang to them were quickly passed on as little girls worked as nurses while they were still children themselves. Ellen Betts of Louisiana recalled of her childhood:

I don’t do nothing all my days but nurse, nurse, nurse. I nurse so many children it done went and stunt my growth. . . . When the colored women had to cut cane all day “till midnight come and after, I has to nurse the babies for them and the white children, too. Some of them babies so big and fat I had to tote the feet while another gal tote the head. I was such a little one, about seven or eight years old. When late of night come, if the babies wake up and bawl I set up and out screech them till they shut they mouth.” (Botkin, 1969, p. 125)

Joanna Draper of Mississippi told WPA interviewers a similar story of a childhood spent taking care of other children. “When I was about six years old,” she recalled, “they take me into the big house to learn to be a house woman, and they show me how to cook and clean up and take care of babies” (Botkin, 1969, p. 99). These were common childhood experiences among enslaved and free Black women, most of whom, as their songs remind us, had to attend to multiple shifts of domestic work including field work, child care, and cooking. The narrative of Silvia Dubois and the fictionalized autobiography of Harriet Wilson, two 19th-century Black women who lived in the northeastern regions of the United States, tell of childhoods bound out into domestic service, of cooking, sewing, washing, house cleaning, and taking care of infants in return for meager room and board (Larison, 1988; Wilson & Gates, 1983).

The work songs that in African and then African American tradition coordinated group work like rowing, planting, and harvesting, also danced with the tasks, like cooking and child care, which were often done by small groups or individual women. “There was a song we usta sing about hoecake when we were making them,” recalled Harriet Jones who had lived in both North Carolina and Texas as a young girl in slavery. Hers is a song of satire not very subtly masking women’s consciousness of slavery, race, and the conditions particular to women.

If you want to bake a hoecake

To bake it good and done

Slap it on a nigger’s heel

And hold it to the sun

My Mammy baked a hoecake

As big as Alabama

She throwed at against a nigger’s head

And it ring just like a hammer

The way to bake a hoecake

The old Virginia way

Wrap it around a nigger’s stomach

And hold it there all day. (Rawick, 1972, v. 4, p. 233)

Ms. Jones also recalled other songs, sung by women and men together in work gangs, which chronicle day-to-day history.

It’s a cool and frosty morning

And the niggers goes to work

With hoes on their shoulders

Without a bit of shirt.

Another song Ms. Jones recalled offers playful yet critical comment.

I goes up on the meat skin

I comes down on the pone

I hits the corn pone fifty licks

And makes the butter moan.

Her song echoes of the chronicling of economic injustice in the “Juba” and the spiritual “No More, No More,” the hard work, the peck of corn, the crust of bread, the meat skin, and expresses this recognition of injustice with humor and defiance.

“Women worked in the fields the same as the men,” recalled George Fleming of Spartanburg, South Carolina,

some of them plowed just like the men and boys. Couldn’t tell them apart in the field as they wore pantlets or breeches. They tied strings around the bottom of their legs so the loose dirt wouldn’t get in their shoes. (Rawick, 1972, v. 11, p. 130)

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

Such a long long way from home.

(“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” spiritual, traditional)

Throughout the antebellum period and into the post-reconstruction era in the United States, women worked with men and as hard as men but were articulately conscious of the difference. The image of the “motherless child” far from home resounds through their storytelling as does the complexity of being powerful but constrained, “homemakers” in the homes of others, and nurses to children who were not their own, in addition to doing, as equals, the work “of men.” Mary Kincheon Edwards was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She recalled an average workday in the course of which she “wet nurse the baby son, what name was Elijah. Then I knit the socks and wash the clothes and sometimes I work in the fields and I helped make the baskets for cotton.” Her story is illustrative.

I pick two and three hundred pounds in one day and one day I picked four hundred. . . . I so fast I take two rows at a time. The women bring oil cloths to the fields so they make a shady place for the children to sleep but them what’s big enough has to pick. Sometimes they sing “o-he I’s going home and cuss the old overseer. (Rawick, 1972, v. 4, pp. 15-16)

Exuberant or light, their song was resonant. John Moore, also of Louisiana, remembered picking corn, making molasses, and the “corn hollers . . . my mother would jump up and sing.”

Sugar in the gourd

Sugar in the gourd

If you want to get

The sugar out r-o-o-l-l the gourd over. (Rawick, 1972, v. 5, p. 127)

Mr. Moore’s memory illuminates a root poetic. Vocal elaborations, “moans,” “field hollers,” “whoops,” and “shouts,” which musicologists trace to the hockets and yodeling common to Central African and Khoisan languages, embellish a range of diaspora performance including the work song. These song modalities and vocal techniques, rich with ostinato and onomatopoeia, come from a long history of casting sound, “throwing the voice,” against the canopy of tree and sky, over the distances of veld and forest, in calls to community, ancestry, and to the divine. Those vocalizations continued to resound in the sacred hush arbors and over the fields of the diaspora. In these “talking drum” vocal forms, Africans in the diaspora sang yet another mapping of their journey, bearing witness to trials and sweetness, in performances fully embracing the dialectical possibilities of testimony and prayer. This sound play enlivens the work songs (in the emphatic “Huh!” at the end of a line) and later, the blues and jazz “scatting,” creating, in an ancient tradition, sites of expression, meditation, reflection, and power beyond words (Africa, the Ba-Benzélé Pygmies, 1998; Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest, 1992).

Wayman Williams of Mississippi recalled an aunt who split rails alongside men during the hard days of the reconstruction era. The song she sang “when she come down on a rail,” plays, in a familiar way with breath, vocalizing technique, and turning hard work into transformative song.

Times are getting hard. (Biff)

Money’s getting scarce. (Biff)

Times don’t get no better here. (Biff)

I’m bound to leave this place. (Rawick, 1972, v. 5, p. 1255)

The nature of African American women’s work did not change significantly with the move from slavery to freedom. In the U.S. South, women continued to labor in agriculture as had their foremothers while struggling to locate themselves in relationship to mainstream concepts of gender and womanhood. Nineteenth-century African American women certainly recognized what we have come to call their triple oppression. Pauline Grice, born on a large plantation near Atlanta, Georgia, remembers, as did many informants, singing about cotton.

Old cotton, old corn, see you every morn

Old cotton, old corn, see you since I was born

Old cotton, old corn, hoe you till dawn

Old cotton, old corn, what for you born? (Rawick, 1972, v. 4, p. 127)

Like the riddle of the sphinx, “Old Cotton Old Corn” narrates the parallel courses of a day, a life, and the cycles of agricultural seasons. The staple crops of North American slavery and industrialization were sung in many songs of both slavery and freedom including the Juba songs and the monumental epic of liberation “No More, No More.” Songs about working cotton chronicle a labor history written by men and women who worked the crop from July through December, and harvested it “carrying a bag strapped around the neck” (J. Jones, 1985, p. 17).

Lydia Parrish (1942) recorded the following song in the Georgia Sea Islands in the 1920s:

Way down in the bottom

Where the cotton boll is rotten

Won’t get my hundred all day

Before I’ll be beated

Before I’ll be cheated

I’ll leave five fingers in the boll.

Black man beat me.

White man cheat me.

Won’t get my hundred all day. (p. 247)

Observation and metaphor enrich these lyrics. Parsing the rich metonymy of the song, Parrish’s informant explained that the five fingers referred to the compartments holding the bolls at the bottom of the cotton stalk. The “hundred” refers both to the £150 of cotton a field-worker, a field “hand,” was “required” to pick in slave times and to the false promise of a living wage after emancipation. The rotten boll “down in the bottom” was both a real source of lost income as well as symbolic of systematic social disintegration and corruption. “Way Down in the Bottom” chronicles the wages of new forms of slavery after emancipation, when Black men became overseers (“Black man beat me”) and all Black workers were cheated (“white man cheat me”) in the market places of paid labor. These were hard times. “I, as a colored woman have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man and every man’s hand against me,” Francis Ellen Harper wrote of her experience within this crucible of crisis and exploitation (Harper & Foster, 1990, p. 218).

Where do you come from

Where do you go

Where do you come from

My cotton eyed Joe?

If it hadn’t been for, if it hadn’t been for

My cotton eyed Joe

I’d have been married a long long time ago.

Well I come from the east

And I come from the south . . .

(“Cotton Eye Joe,” ballad/work song, traditional)

The folk ballad and work song “Cotton Eyed Joe” is akin to the songs of John Henry that were sung by workers on the railroad lines. “Cotton Eyed Joe,” a lament of love unrequited, and of a woman “waiting,” tied to work at the expense of self-fulfillment, is also a symbolically rich song of disillusionment with the land’s promise. African American women had been carried through the fields in their mother’s wombs and on their backs, and laid swaddled at the end of crop rows as infants, before taking up work in the fields themselves. They had a deep relationship to the crop, to the land, and to the nation that they had built. Gathering working knowledge in a woman’s narrative, the song is a commentary on race, sex, and the failure of American democracy set in a story of love’s betrayal. “Cotton Eyed Joe” is also a song of transcendence, a song that charts a journey to keep moving, a song that sings of the experience, work, and imagination, that brings a young girl into adulthood knowing, and motion, at the turn of the 20th century.

Trouble and Transformation: Rosy

Poor Rosy, poor gal

Poor Rosy, poor gal

Rosy break my poor heart

Heaven shall be my home.

I can not stay in hell one day

Heaven shall be my home

I’ll sing and pray my soul away

Heaven shall be my home.

(“Poor Rosy,” work song, 19th century; Southern, 1971, pp. 164-165)

“I like ‘Poor Rosy’ better than all the rest but it can’t be sung without a full heart and a troubled spirit,” a woman of Port Royal told song collector Lucy Mc Kim, dismissing children’s performances of the song as mere copying (Katz, 1969, pp. 9-10). Mc Kim was an abolitionist and a trained musician working among the newly emancipated African American community of Port Royal, South Carolina, at the beginning of the American civil war. Mc Kim reports that her informant was “a respectable house servant who had lost all but one of her twenty two children” (Katz, 1969, p. 10). The song the unnamed informant suggests is in a mature woman’s voice was known on many stages. W. E. B. Du Bois (1997) speaks of “Poor Rosy” as “among the oldest” of the sorrow songs and closes his classic study, The Souls of Black Folks, with its refrain (pp. 732-738). Many sources, including WPA informants, recall the song “Poor Rosy” as a reel or as a ring play, others as a love song to a dance tune, or sung as a spiritual and a work song.

Nineteenth-century Carolina and Georgia boat men sang “Poor Rosy” as they rowed barges along the vast island channels, and contemporary women were recorded singing versions of the song, set to the pace of a hominy mill’s grinding stone (Katz, 1969, pp. 9-10). Several variations on this antebellum song to “Rosy” were still sung, shaped to the cadences of hard labor on Southern prison work gangs, when John and Alan Lomax recorded the voices and folklore of men incarcerated in the American penal system in 1933 (Prison Songs Historical Recordings From Parchman Farm 1947-1948, 1997).

Hard trials on my way

Hard trials in my way

Hard trials in my way

Heaven shall be my home.

(“Poor Rosy,” second stanza)

“Poor Rosy” was among the first of the African American songs to be chronicled in what was to become a growing popular recognition of the cultural heritage of Black song, and its publication in Dwight’s Journal during the civil war marks a milestone in North American musicology and cultural documentation. Within the song is a record of the old work songs of Africa, remnants of sacred circles, rings of play and transformation, and the lullabies of women with babes in arms, as well as the genesis of the blues. Most of the early Port Royal chroniclers marveled at the versatility of song in a community where day-to-day tasks were all accompanied, and coordinated, by singing. “Poor Rosy” in its multiple incarnations reminds us of the African conception of absolute webs of connection between the sacred and the secular, the living and the dead, art and life, philosophical constructs sufficiently different from prevailing Western notions. At its heart, “Poor Rosy” dances with work in a performance of journey and motion; a journey toward freedom and a motion toward home.

When I talk I talk with God

Heaven shall be my home.

(“Poor Rosy,” third stanza)

Like all work songs, “Poor Rosie” artfully engages with dualities, with “hard trials,” and with dreams and visions, and composes new locations within. The song bears witness to the overwhelming “hell” of the present and to its own power, to “talk with god” and “sing and pray my soul away,” as a vehicle for transformation. Expressing frustration with this world, the singer creates and recognizes home in a divine one. Interweaving questions of self and relations, personal and community mobility, work, love, and freedom, the complex antiphony of “Poor Rosy” recalls the voice of “Cotton Eyed Joe” in its existential expression. As Mc Kim’s female informant underscores, the true performance of “Poor Rosy” is wrought from adult understanding. Only “a full heart” and “a troubled spirit” could, in her informed opinion, really sing it. “Poor Rosy” performs a mature, multi-layered, articulation.

I don’t know what people want of me

Heaven shall be my home.

(“Poor Rosy,” fourth stanza)

One story, published by Northerners who lived and worked among the people of Port Royal during the civil war, connects “Poor Rosy” with the story of an enslaved man named Caesar. According to this chronicle, Caesar related his experience of the early 1820s some 40 years later. Caesar claimed to have been the author of the song or at least its partial subject. He said that he had been in love with a woman named Rosy who broke his heart. Subsequently, Caesar became interested in an African colonization project but was unable to purchase his freedom and take leave of the “hell” he was in without his love.

The anecdotal story of Caesar touches on some essential quests and questions in the lives of African American during the period of civil war and reconstruction. Their existential quest was for a place to call home. The question was how to navigate political condition, history, distance, and time. Some were still reaching, as did the earliest Africans enslaved in these regions, for a return to an African motherland. Others were struggling to make, to claim, a home in these lands. For all African Americans, the question of “home” sat beside the question of freedom. In literary narrative and vernacular performance forms, people wondered about the meaning, and range of motion, of their “emancipation,” and the economic requirements of living as free men and women composing “home.” “Poor Rosy,” like many songs of women’s sacred, work and play performance, necessarily complicates the question of freedom by asking of love and its fetters or wings. Caesar, according to the story, can neither be with the woman he loves in these United States nor buy his freedom from bondage in this place to reconstruct an African homeland. His conundrum is analogous to that of African Americans of the period, free or enslaved, and this conundrum is at the root of a performance of lament, of witness to “trouble” and hard times, which is also a performance of agency and, in the telling, an act of transformation.

Blues Closing

Poor gal a long ways from home

Poor gal a long ways from home

I’m a poor gal a long ways from home.

(“East Coast Blues,” 20th century)

Asked for her memories of North American slavery, Lucy Galloway, of Harrison County, Mississippi recalled,

One gal that come from Africa. She was a poor African that had long hair and plait it in two long braids down her back and tie it with a red ribbon bow. She say that they put her on a block to sell, they told her to dance for them. She sure was a good dancer. She dance the same way what she did in Africa and what she had learned there. She was fifteen when they bring her over here. They bought her in South Carolina from a speculator. She said she was a slave in Africa. Lucy (the girl) was smart and clean as a pin. (Rawick, 1972, v. 8, p. 804)

“Poor Gal” that she was Lucy could dance. And perhaps if we could see her dance, on the auction block in a strange country, speaking at least two languages at once, if we could see her, knowing what we know, we would know infinitely more. At least some of the possibilities for looking back through the lives between Lucy’s and our own are in our ability to recognize and hear her storytelling. Was Lucy’s movement a precursor to the “Possum-La?” Might we see her footprints in the “morning star” and “the motherless child,” in “Cotton Eyed Joe,” in “Poor Rosy’s” song, and in the articulation of the Port Royal woman who inscribed the complexity of U.S. reconstruction when she stood up in a meeting house, in 1865, to sing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen?” Surely, her blues dance was shaped by the currents of Ogboinba’s epic journey, witnessing, and transformation, which would continue to ebb and flow in the performance of women’s work and play songs and into the oft repeated refrain of “The East Coast Blues.”