Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain't Never Been Told: A Narrative Account with Entertaining Passages of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation Thereof

Chapter 10. Reconstruction & Beyond: William T. Sherman, Eadweard Muybridge & Syncopated Loco-Motion of Moving Images & the Transcontinental Railroad, 1871–1877

135 Fade forward to 1871. Hear the inspiriting Sousa like umph! umph! umph! umph! See the Confederate colors, the Stars & Bars being run up the flag staff. All is not lost. See the South in retrograde Reconstruction . See the North turn its back on landless, lobby-lacking negroes, & see the sun setting on those reconceived darkies’ false hopes. See their forward motion stopped in its tracks. Stopped? Or only slowed again, like moveChapter 10 Reconstruction & Beyond William T. Sherman, Eadweard Muybridge & Syncopated Loco-Motion of Moving Images & the Transcontinental Railroad 1871–1877 { Bill Harris } 136 ment in the 1870s photographs of Eadweard James Muybridge (1830–1904) a self-invented Englishman, née Edward James Muggeridge, the father of the movies, acquitted murderer, & A-MERICA’s first rag-time photographer. The pictures, so-called sun drawings of Muybridge, moved. Riffled in rapid succession they are a frieze of reconstructed notions of loco-motion & time, often in silhouetted shades against stark whiteness, or white starkness, depending on the section you’re seated in. He slowed time. Showed time slowed. Syn·co pat·ed it to a flicker so the common man might glimpse the complexities of visual prosody, the scansion of tem·po, me·ter, the graphic representation of ca-dence with a hitch & a halt, you know, a “Wheel about & turn about, do just so . . .” like in the gait of Jim Rice’s apocryphal “Negro character on Southern plantations.” E. Muybridge’s renowned stop-time series on Occident prove a trotting horse does, { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 137 as Negroes often must, move forward without their feet touching the ground. LNSPACE> Quick dissolve back to 1863–1869. Add (a) nitroglycerin, (b) The Most Magnificent Project Ever Conceived, (c) Orientals & work gangs of the common slew of suspects & rejects into the mix, then stay tuned for yet another inspiring & wretched tale of A-MERICAN can-do. On the soundtrack: the trance inducing 4/4 of tom toms & chug chug chug chug of wheels on steel & ballads & reels of backcountry Anglo Celtics & the form-seeking call & response moans of the “emancipated” & the cosmological 5 tone inflected affects of Chinese music & the triple time bobs & jerks of Irish jigs. Music of the world of the workers, carried-over from whence now aids & eases their cross country cross-over of their daily lift & tote, lift & tote. Long shot: Wide-ranging turmoil. See separate but linked struggles as East meets West & North meets South. See the invaders in each instance benefiting from the tried & true subjugators’ tactic of consolidation through destruction, y’know, 138 multiplication through subtraction, employed against an entrenched way of life, in the name of unification & progress toward a continent united under the eagle’s wingspan . & in the doing opening the way for the right of entry of Speculation, Opportunity, Settlement, Religion &/ or the A-MERICAN drive to escape to (someone else’s) territory, indigenous folk, to be specific. Of whom Sherman, Union terrorist bad ass, remember, who, recently in the North/South sector, signified to his Southern opposition, “The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make.” Then in a demoralizing display of macho militarism humbled the rebels, but changed his tune when it was time for the piper to be paid, by cutting them mucho slack. Note: Sherman was a loud & avowed & unapologetic white supremacist. Nigger was his name for those he reluctantly elevated from the disenfranchised to wage slaves. Note: Sherman signed an armistice that re-stored to the South the very slaves & privileges they thought they’d lost forever: The gentle-man’s agreement not only did not guarantee the emancipation of slaves, but affirmed prewar Southern property rights & state governments & granted carte blanche amnesty. Doodah. Note: Sherman did sign much discussed 40 acres & a mule SPECIAL FIELD ORDERS, No. 15, granting land on off-coast islands & “abandoned rice-fields . . . 30 miles back from the sea.” Note: It came to naught as President Andrew Johnson, knuckling under to good old boy pressure, nixed it. Johnson (1808– 1875), segregationist successor to Abe Lincoln, assassinated while at the theater. Doodah. Hear the lamentations of the lobby lackers continue to take shape. { Bill Harris } { Birth of a Notion: Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told } 139 Sherman, rewarded for his deeds, succeeds U. S. Grant as commander in chief of the U.S. Army. But for now, in...