First sip: Blues for the white man by Fred de Vries

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Like a good beverage, a good book holds promise from the first sip. This extract is used with the permission of Penguin Random House.


About the author

Fred de Vries is a Dutch writer/journalist. He published Club Risiko (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, Amsterdam, 2006), a close and personal look into the dark but lively underground culture of the eighties in seven cities (Jo’burg, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Ljubljana, New York), focusing on the relationship between the city and the post-punk music scene. He was a writing fellow with WISER at Wits University to do research for a biography of South African beat-poet Sinclair Beiles. And he has a regular interview column for The Weekender. He previously worked as a correspondent and foreign editor for de Volkskrant daily newspaper in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He has lived in Kenya, Uganda, South Africa and Eritrea, where he made a living by freelancing. Together with his colleague Toine Heijmans he wrote Respect! (1998), a book on hiphop in Europe. He recently published a collection with the highlights from his interviews for The Weekender and Empire Magazine, called The Fred de Vries Interviews; From Abdullah to Zille (Wits University Press, 2008).


About the book

Blues for the white man: Hearing black voices in South Africa and the Deep South
Fred de Vries
9781776096008
Penguin

It started with a question about the blues: what makes the music of the downtrodden black man so alluring to white middle-class ears? And that’s where it gets interesting. Because blues is more than a musical genre: it’s a cultural phenomenon that spans several centuries on both sides of the Atlantic, from slavery to Black Lives Matter, from Jan van Riebeeck to Fees Must Fall, from Robert Johnson to Abdullah Ibrahim.

In Blues for the White Man, Fred de Vries looks for answers in America’s Deep South, drawing historical parallels with South Africa’s experience of colonialism, slavery, racism, civil war, segregation and protest. Travelling to Atlanta, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, De Vries speaks to musicians, Black Lives Matter activists and Trump supporters. He continues the conversation in South Africa, interviewing student protesters, white farmers and political thought-leaders to develop an understanding of white supremacy and black anger, white fear and black pain.

A fascinating, insightful journey through time and space, Blues for the White Man is a celebration of multiculturalism and a plea for white people to do some ‘second line dancing’ for a change.


First sip

In Birmingham, I play civil rights tourist once again. I visit the church, that church, the one the KKK blew up. I have a chat with the administrator, Lamarese Washington, a seventy-one-year-old black Vietnam veteran. He tells me that groups such as Black Lives Matter should stop whining about the fact that so many young blacks are jailed for drug possession. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘if you’re caught with an ounce of crack cocaine, you’ll get a twenty-year sentence. And do you know what’s the solution? Just don’t carry any drugs. It’s very simple.’

Washington is a no-nonsense man. When I ask him about traumatic experiences in Vietnam, he snorts. ‘Everyone who talks about traumas must already have been traumatised before they went to Vietnam.’ When he sees my surprise, he shouts across the room to another black man who is busy sweeping the floor. ‘Joe, did we get traumatised in Vietnam?’ The man grins and shakes his head. ‘See,’ says Washington, ‘it’s 100 per cent bullshit. Those who claim to have been traumatised just want money.’

In the city centre, I follow the signs that mark the black protests of 1963, when the police used dogs and water cannons against schoolkids who demonstrated against the segregation in their city. Martin Luther King called Birmingham ‘probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States’. Until the mid-sixties, segregation here was comparable to apartheid: separate neighbourhoods, separate public transport, separate shops, separate schools, separate fountains, separate parks, separate lives. Maintaining law and order was in the hands of Eugene ‘Bull’ Conner, who was vehemently opposed to anything with even a whiff of racial integration. Connor was a tough-looking dude with a high forehead, a hanging mouth and fat lips. His main ally was the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, the man Pat Godwin mentioned when she gave me the bale of cotton and the Confederate flags. During his inauguration, Wallace summarised his ideas in one sentence: ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’

Some say the civil rights movement ‘used’ the children and exposed them to danger. They were attacked by dogs, hit with truncheons and blown off their feet by water cannons. Connor loved it. He urged bystanders to come and enjoy the spectacle from nearby. ‘Let them come closer, sergeant,’ he urged one of the policemen. ‘I want to watch the dogs do their work. See how those niggers run.’ But Conner would capitulate. Racial segregation in Birmingham ended shortly after the children’s protests.

The memorials remind me of the 1976 Soweto uprising, which contributed to the unravelling of apartheid; the only difference was that the apartheid police shot at the children with live ammunition. The main memorial sites for Birmingham’s brave schoolchildren are in Kelly Ingram Park, near the bombed church. Here, you can see bronze sculptures depicting ferocious dogs attacking children. ‘We were trained to serve, trained to be non-violent soldiers,’ reads one of the banners. I am reminded of the photograph of a young man carrying Hector Pieterson, the twelve-year-old boy hit by a bullet in Soweto, his sister running beside them, her expression a mix of pain and horror.

I start chatting with a woman who sees me taking photographs. She is wearing a green army cap, a tie-dyed shirt and blue jeans, and she tells me she was one of the young black ‘footsoldiers’ who took part in the student protest of 2 May 1963. Her name is Najah NaJive, and she is seventy-two years old. I look at her in disbelief and tell her she still looks fabulously cool. She laughs and tells me she was seventeen when the protest took place. The day before, she had been listening to a black radio station and a DJ had mentioned an upcoming ‘slumber party’, which she knew was code for an illegal gathering. She asked her dad if she could join. Dad, who had himself been beaten by the cops a couple of times, told her he had no problem with that. ‘I was too young to understand the full context of the protest,’ says NaJive. ‘But I knew it was about justice.’

All alone, she went to the 16th Street Baptist Church where the crowd had gathered. Here, she was given a placard and told to join a group of other young protesters. It didn’t take long before she was arrested. She was locked up in the central jail, where the women were kept on the upper level. It was packed, she says. Detainees took mattresses from the beds and put them on the floor so that more people could lie down. ‘Some of us had to sleep on the cold floor, others slept on the spiral base,’ she says. ‘We were woken at 2 a.m. because they wanted to take our mugshot. We sang songs to keep our spirits up. They didn’t treat us badly, we were with too many. They gave us egg powder and oats.’

She was held for two weeks, after which her father could fetch her. Her first treat as a free girl was a chocolate bar. ‘I can still remember the taste,’ she says.

NaJive now lives in a neighbourhood called Smithfield, better known as Dynamite Hill, a nickname the area acquired after an endless series of bomb attacks that took place in the 1950s and ’60s. Center Street, which climbs up the hill, is the road that used to separate black and white residents. The idea behind the bombings was to blow up or set fire to the houses that black people wanted to buy, to stop them from crossing the imaginary border.

These efforts to stop the ‘black invasion’ were in vain, because now virtually the whole neighbourhood is black. I stroll up the hill past ranch-style houses. Billboards tell me which ones were bombed, some of them more than once, like the house that belonged to the feisty black lawyer Arthur Shores, who often took cases that challenged the racial segregation in Birmingham. He wasn’t alone. Almost fifty attacks took place. Sometimes, a front door was burnt down or shots fired through a window. But more often, dynamite was used to blow up the whole structure. That happened to Monroe and Mary Means Monk in 1950 when they wanted to move into their newly built house on 950 North Center Street. They had bought the plot from an Italian greengrocer. The local authorities wanted to stop the process: no blacks in a white neighbourhood. The Monks called in the help of lawyer Shores, who lived nearby. They won the case, and on 20 December 1950 were the proud owners of a spacious house on the ‘white side’ of Central Street. Their happiness was short-lived; the next day their place was blown up. The black residents didn’t take it lying down. Soon, self-defence units were seen patrolling the streets. For many years, Center Street resembled a war zone.

When I finally reach the top of the hill, I stop at a big light-grey house. This is where the iconic activist and Black Panther Angela Davis grew up. There’s a sign in front that reads like a resumé. The house, it says, used to belong to a white family, who sold it in 1948 to Frank and Sallye Davis, Angela’s parents. Soon after the deal was closed, a burning cross appeared in the front garden, a welcoming message from the KKK. To avoid physical attacks, the Davis family waited until the night was pitch-black before they moved into their new home. Angela was four at the time. When she was five she heard her first explosion. She described it as ‘a hundred times louder than the loudest, most frightening thunderclap I had ever heard … Medicine bottles flew off the shelf, shattering all around me. The floor seemed to slip away from my feet as I raced into the kitchen and my frightened mother’s arms.’

It must have been a terrifying, anxious childhood. Often, she saw her father run outside to check if the KKK or some other scoundrels hadn’t hidden a bomb in the bushes. Angela’s mother was good friends with the parents of one of the girls killed during the bomb attack in the church. And the church that Angela visited as a teenager was burnt to the ground after white supremacists heard that an interracial discussion group had been set up. These experiences, explains the sign, all contributed to her life as a renowned activist. She became a member of the Communist Party and the Black Panther Party and appeared on numerous posters with her impressive Afro that framed her face like a halo. She went into hiding after she was found to be the owner of a gun that had been used in a murder. The FBI put her on their ‘most wanted’ list and President Nixon called her ‘a dangerous terrorist’. For a long time, she was on the run, but eventually she was caught and jailed. Two years later, a jury found her not guilty. These days, she travels the world and gives lectures.

I try to take it all in, while I head back to my car. Despite its dark and dodgy past, I enjoy my stay in Birmingham. It might of course be a coincidence, but I only meet hospitable, friendly people, black and white. I check out what, during the segregation years, used to be the very lively black downtown neighbourhood. Here were the hair salons, the jazz clubs, the soul food restaurants, the grocery stores. Following the student protest, the segregation laws were lifted and the area fell into decline because residents were eager to enjoy their new freedoms and visit the previously off-limits white shops and restaurants further away. Over the last few years, there have been efforts to revamp the place. It seems to work, albeit in a hesitant way. Loud music sounds over a little square with no people. There are a few bars, hair salons, and the odd car wash. Every now and then I’m stopped by people eager to strike up a conversation. They want to know where I’m from and what I’m doing here. They are helpful and talkative. It feels as if Birmingham has come to terms with its toxic history and realises that we all have to work together to improve the situation. It’s a pragmatic attitude.

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