Folklore, Urban Insurrection, and the Killing of the Black Hero in the Turn of the Century South

DOUGLAS J. FLOWE Washington University in St. Louis Folklore, Urban Insurrection, and the Killing of the Black Hero in the Turn of the Century South I’m gonna do like a Chinaman . . . go and get some hop Get myself a gun . . . and shoot myself a cop. —Mamie Smith, “Crazy Blues” (Gussow 10) ON A SWELTERING EVENING INTERMITTENTLY COOLED BY SHOWERS, Robert Charles and his younger roommate Lenard Pierce emerged from their New Orleans flat both wearing coats with the visible bulges of matching .38 Colt revolvers. Looking forward to a night with two of Charles’s women friends, Pierce likely had not conceived of the twists and turns their immediate future would take. After stopping at Charles’s sister’s house, the men sat on the front steps of a home in a racially mixed neighborhood waiting for the two women. A dubious Pierce was likely not surprised by how soon they drew the attention of the Sixth precinct’s police sergeant, who was responding to a report of “two suspicious Negroes.” But Pierce was probably shocked by how dramaticallyCharlesdepartedfromthescriptofblackdeferencetowhite civic and social authority when approached by three police officers. A patrolman named Mora later recalled that as he and two other officers questioned Charles and Pierce, “the larger of the two Negroes got up” in a threatening manner. Feeling imperiled by Charles’s size, Mora reportedly grabbed him and began beating him with his billy club. After Charles freed himself from Mora’s grasp, each drew his gun and fired a number of shots at the other. Charles’s bullets struck officer Mora in the leg and grazed one of his fingers before Charles disappeared down the street. Still in shock, the officers arrested Pierce and called in the shooting, which sparked one of the bloodiest race riots in New Orleans history. Over the next five days, the incident completely dislodged city residents from a relatively peaceful racial coexistence as bands of white civilians rampaged through black neighborhoods searching for Charles (Hair 116-20). 582 Douglas J. Flowe Robert Charles’s brazen self-defense against police brutality is astonishing because of where and when he lived. Roughly six months into the twentieth century, Charles lived in an American South where a likely innocent Sam Hose had recently been dismembered and cooked in the fast flames of a kerosene bonfire before thousands of revelers. He lived in a city where police brutalized blacks nightly, often condemning them to perish on one of the chain gangs, convict labor plantations, or turpentine camps across the South. He also found himself at the end of a decade of brutal lynchings that claimed the lives of scores of blacks eachyear(“ThreeMenShot”;“10Die”).Giventhesecircumstances,what made men like Charles choose to fight and die rather than acquiesce? InordertounderstandCharles’sreaction,we need to understandhow hefitsintothebroadercontextofAfricanAmericanhistory.Consciously or not, Charles mirrored the archetype of the African American badman herowhichoriginatedinAnansispiderandanimalAfricantrickstertales smuggled to the Americas in the memories of chained Africans. The badman hero model that partly informed Charles’s actions emerged as an essential component of black culture during slavery. Similarly, it served as the apex of white fears of black masculinity, particularly during and after Reconstruction. Just as men like Charles and popular black folk heroes such as Stagolee and Railroad Bill personified an exaggeration of black disorder, violence, andmasculinity,theyalsosymbolized the black self and cultural defense ideologies that Negrophobic Southern whites condemned with Malthusian and social Darwinist ideas. Still, regardless of the questionable efficacy of the black badman hero, his model represented a format for resistance that we see historically in black popular culture and in the actions of men like Robert Charles. In From Trickster to Badman, folklorist John W. Roberts addresses the evolution of African trickster characters into outlaw figures by analyzing the function of black folklore in different stages of African American history. He concludes that black communities forged after emancipation experienced diminished “social restraints against certain types of actions which violated the law” owing to the “brutality of black treatment by the law” (198, 197). Roberts also attends to the dilemma caused by the violent, self-centered, and often nihilistic actions of the badman for black citizens. In “transforming their conception of...