Conclusion
Contradiction and Continuity in the Southern Sporting Field
In October 1911, a group of wealthy Lowcountry denizens gathered in Berkeley County, South Carolina, for a meeting of the St. John’s Hunting Club, an organization founded before the Civil War. Since 1900, the organization had ceased to be a functioning hunting club and had become solely a social club for wealthy South Carolinians. But although the club had abandoned hunting as its central activity, it did not completely give up the traditions associated with it. Hunting continued to play an important symbolic role for the club’s membership.
Although the club was no longer directly involved in field sports, for its members, its long history of hunting in the Lowcountry was a connection to an immutable past, a time when hunting both reflected and solidified white elites’ position at the top of the Southern social structure. And, while clinging to the tradition, if not the act, of hunting, club members preserved the connection between hunting and race relations that elite sportsmen had long cultivated. At the October 1911 meeting, for example, members gathered around to listen to a poem entitled “Opening the Hunt” by M. E. Ravenel. The poem, written in the stereotypical black dialect common to sporting literature of the period, left no doubt that the symbolic place of hunting, as a reflection of elite white status and African-American subordination, remained important to club members:
Look sharp dere boys, quit your foolin’ roun’,
It’s time you was ready for true;
Uncle Quash done loadin’ ol’ Maussa gun,
An’ de hosses don saddle too.
An’ quick as de brekfas’ is done at de house
Ole Maussa gwine blow ’im a blas’.
So he ’spectin’ de dribers and dogs waitin’ den
To git in de woods bery fas’.
Written from the perspective of a devoted servant named Pompey, the poem confirms both the importance of African Americans’ labor to Southern hunting and fishing and the centrality of the ideal of blacks’ service to elite white sportsmen. Indeed, the verse seems to celebrate racial subordination as much as the tradition of hunting. Pompey goes on to enthusiastically describe both the degree to which “ol’ Maussa” depends on him and his fellows for their service and his own excitement at the opportunity to meet his master’s expectations:
For Maussa got cump’hy wid ’im today
Which he anxious to gi’ dem some shootin’;
He countin’ on Pompey to clean up dese woods
An’ bring out de game a-skootin’.
An’ I says moreober on cashuns like dis,
Do its me dats doin’ de praisin’,
(What perhaps I isnt ought to) but yet I does say
Dat I gin’rally shows my raisin’.1
Nearly half a century after the end of slavery, Ravenel’s poem, complete with its loyal black servant eager to impress his employer with his skilled service and the chance to “rally shows my raisin’,” reminded St. John’s Hunting Club members that while the club’s active sporting days had ended, its lofty social position, typified by the historical white-over-black mastery found in the hunting field, lived on. By 1911, Jim Crow was firmly in place and the legislative assault on blacks’ customary rights was in full swing in Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, and elsewhere in the South. But it seemed that, at least at the St. John’s Club, preserving and celebrating the racial significance of hunting had perhaps become more important than hunting itself. By the early twentieth century, some Southern elites had abandoned hunting as a pastime, but not as a vibrant symbol of white supremacy.
Yet even if hunting and fishing—or, in the case of Ravenel’s poem, the memory of hunting and fishing—are understood to have been an important part of the evolution of the Southern racial divide, such “racial conservation” did not affect all African Americans equally. Indeed, ironically, the process coincided with the booming popularity of Southern sporting tourism that guaranteed African-American hunters and fishermen a permanent, if limited, place at fish and game plantations and sporting resorts. The establishment of private clubs and preserves may have dramatically decreased the amount of land available for the free taking of wildlife, but some African Americans nonetheless carved out a long-term place for themselves in Southern hunting and fishing. Even as the creation of state fish and game departments and the employment of a growing number of game wardens challenged African Americans’ ability to hunt and fish freely, native and visiting sportsmen’s dependence on black labor—or, again, in the case of the St. John’s Club, the memory of such labor—guaranteed that Dixie’s sporting field would not be lily white. While whites celebrated the restrictions on African-American independence, their desire to recapture the mythical Old South guaranteed that part of the region’s sporting field would remain permanently biracial.
For well over a century, only when the sporting exploits of slaves and freed persons were conducted in proximity to white superiors did they escape criticism. When hunting and fishing were done away from white oversight and exclusively for the betterment of African Americans and their families, and particularly when used, after Emancipation, as powerful symbols and key protectors of black independence—then, whites cried for action. The cultivation of independence was the most important benefit African Americans drew from their long-standing reliance on such customary rights. That independence became the most convincing reason offered by whites in their efforts to make those practices more expensive and more exclusive. The realization that whites had more to protect than fish and game, that hunting and fishing had a strong racial component, and that the Southern conservation movement used racism to garner support is central to any understanding of the fight to protect wildlife.
Thus the story of the place of African Americans in Southern hunting and fishing between 1865 and the 1920s is one of apparent contradictions. The sporting field became, for blacks, a place of economic opportunity where valuable wildlife, marketing opportunities, and steady employment awaited them. For former slave Jake Williams, who relied on hunting with his loyal hound Belle for subsistence after escaping bondage, and later with Belle’s offspring to cultivate independence after Emancipation (as recounted in the Introduction), hunting and fishing stood as bellwethers for freedom. Yet they also helped elite whites reconstruct a racial hierarchy swept away by Emancipation. For Southern elites, particularly landowners, the sporting field became both a site where they celebrated continued mastery over people of color by re-creating the old master-servant relationship and an arena in which they expressed their fears about black liberation through their antipathy toward unrestricted customary rights. For sportsmen, in Southern hunting and fishing they celebrated their own traditions and acumen and, at the same time, lamented blacks’ apparent rejection of whites’ sporting codes, a rejection that both threatened fish and game supplies and challenged whites’ sporting dominion. All those, both black and white, who were directly touched by former slaves’ long relationship with the pursuit of Southern wildlife knew the story to be a complex and multi-sided one. Hunting and fishing reflected African Americans’ ability to use long-cultivated subsistence traditions to better their lives, and whites’ willingness to circumscribe that freedom to combat the negative consequences of black independence. Simultaneously providing economic competence and racial subordination, guaranteeing long-term employment and economic exploitation, and foretelling both physical and symbolic liberation and emerging segregation, hunting and fishing encompassed all the racial tensions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century South and thus defy simple labels.
It is therefore difficult to describe hunting and fishing in the post-Emancipation South as exclusively a source of either black independence or white supremacy—an ambiguity demonstrated by the uncertainty of even contemporary observers. When Archibald Rutledge described a former-slave sportsman as possessed of a “kind of eerie skill instinctive to him and a few others of his race but denied the white man,” while also declaring that “if he brings home a rabbit or a squirrel or a ’possum, he will be both lucky and happy,” he expressed the inescapable fact, for elite whites, that African Americans’ hunting and fishing could be good or bad, effective or immoderate, depending on the observer’s point of view.2 Likewise, when Henry Wellington Wack asserted that black subordinates were “teeming with ideas about tarpon and local taxes, national politics and peach brandy” and thus made valuable companions, he nonetheless warned readers to “have a club handy, for when the king of game fish starts your line for Jamaica you’ll need vigorous inducements to bring that nigger to consciousness.” Wack thus furthered the notion that while hunting and fishing could reflect African Americans’ competence and skill, those traits were invariably bound by the limitations of black character.3 And when C. W. Boyd described hunting with “a genuine Southern negro” named Barney whose sporting “accomplishments were considerable,” and “not an event of importance took place in local sporting circles of which Barney did not know,” he was careful to point out that Barney remained a devoted servant who “in social intercourse constantly inclined to risibility.” Thus Boyd further demonstrated that whites recognized black sporting skill only if accompanied by tacit acknowledgment of white supremacy.4 At first glance, then, few observers of African Americans’ hunting and fishing failed to at least begin to grasp these contradictions. Yet if one examines such statements closely, the apparent contradictions begin to unravel.
Despite the often-conflicting descriptions of hunting and fishing by people of color, there is an essential component of all these descriptions that makes the story clearer: the attitude of white observers toward black independence. When commentators such as Rutledge, Wack, Boyd, and scores of other whites criticized blacks’ hunting and fishing, they were invariably referring to times when people of color hunted and fished on their own and for their own benefit. Away from white oversight, hunting and fishing by African Americans represented a loss of white Southerners’ power and reminded them that former slaves now had the freedom to earn a living apart from exclusively white-directed labor, and to express that freedom by trespassing on Southern cultural traditions that ideally should be reserved for whites.
While taking to the field in the service of white elites, African Americans did so as extensions of the sportsmen whom they served. In these instances, blacks’ skill ceased to be a threat because, while in the field with their employers, everything African-American subordinates did came under the umbrella of service. In that context, white sportsmen believed, all challenges to assumptions of white supremacy and black inferiority proved fleeting. Even the great skill demonstrated by so many African-American hunters and fishermen, when plied under a rubric of subordination, testified to whites’ own position at the top of the racial and sporting hierarchy. As independent sportsmen, African Americans might threaten whites’ economic and cultural interests, but as subordinated laborers, they could only serve and reinforce them. The relative levels of freedom expressed through hunting and fishing thus became the axis on which whites’ assessments of such activities turned. For elite white observers, struggling to come to grips with the loss of their slaves and eager to maintain control over black labor, independent hunting and fishing expressed the worst consequences of black liberation. Yet at the same time, when black subordinates hunted and fished for and with white superiors, those same activities proved a proscriptive for the many problems posed by that liberation.
The two great transformations in Southern hunting and fishing between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s—the rise of the tourism industry and the rise of the conservation movement—reflect these two distinct sides of African-American liberation. Much of the popularity of Southern sporting tourism may be explained by the lasting appeal of the idealized antebellum master-servant relationship, which both comforted native whites and created for visitors a sense of Southern authenticity. The central role of black labor in maintaining that relationship made hunting and fishing a powerful celebration of whites’ sporting and social supremacy and an effective means of exploiting African-American skill and labor for the continued benefit of white elites. Likewise, much of the force behind the drive to enact wildlife protections in this period may also be laid at the doorstep of black liberation. For as much as hunting and fishing by subordinate African Americans helped native and visiting whites resurrect an era of control over people of color, independent hunting and fishing by former slaves, with its specter of self-subsistence, labor intractability, and open challenges to white sporting privilege, reflected the consequences of losing that control. If advertising former slaves’ abilities as sporting laborers became an indispensable way for elites to profit from and express their belief in continued racial subordination, then creating a comprehensive legal apparatus to restrict blacks’ customary rights became an essential strategy to minimize the freedom African Americans expressed through independent hunting and fishing.
Despite such efforts, however, African Americans would never completely abandon hunting and fishing. As demonstrated by the long relationship between African-American sporting employees and resorts and plantations such as Pebble Hill in Thomasville, Georgia, and the Medway plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina, the presence of black subordinates remained a crucial part of Southern hunting and fishing for generations. Physically dependent on black labor and, more importantly, tied to the tradition of racial subordination it symbolized, white Southerners refused to give up African-American sporting labor. White Southerners hoping to use the sporting field to recapture the social and racial trappings of the antebellum era, even well into the twentieth century, found the presence of black laborers a continuing comfort. Indeed, as South Carolinian Henry D. Boykin insisted with his romantic description of his father’s loyal huntsmen, Spaniard, Rabbit, and Bootie, “the thrill of many ancient hunters must surge up from the shadows to join the sweet song of those three dark experts.”5 For many white sporting enthusiasts, African Americans remained a key part of a particular version of Southern sporting and racial relationships that had to be preserved and celebrated.
White Southerners and visiting sportsmen, however, did not remain the only champions of the biracial Southern sporting field. Despite the decades-long struggle to restrict blacks’ customary rights, and despite the imposition of legal measures to circumscribe their access to hunting and fishing, whites failed to eliminate such practices altogether. In time, African Americans emerged as notable advocates of the hunting and fishing tradition. In 1996, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service conducted the National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, with the aim of gathering information on how and why different population groups spent their time engaged in wildlife-related recreations and to better identify those groups whose participation traditionally lagged. The study found that “hunting and fishing have predominantly been white male activities since at least 1955 when the Fish and Wildlife Service began tracking the demographics of hunters and anglers. Participation rates of females and minorities have consistently been below the national average.”6 Then, in a 2000 addendum, Participation and Expenditure Patterns of African-American, Hispanic and Women Hunters and Anglers,7 it became clear that although African Americans’ participation trailed that of white hunters and fishermen by a wide margin (5),8 hunting by blacks was far more concentrated regionally than hunting by whites. According to the study, 73 percent of all African-American hunters, and 64 percent of all African-American fishermen, lived in the South (8, 16).
Two facts emerge from the 2000 addendum. The first is the noticeably large gap in the prevalence of hunting and fishing by white and black Americans. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, that gap exists because of “cultural differences” that are “deep-seated enough to transcend the effects of income, education, age and other factors normally assumed to have a large influence on behavior” (16). Yet one must wonder if a more persuasive answer might be found by looking at the historical relationship between African Americans’ hunting and fishing and attacks on these activities, beginning in the late nineteenth century. In considering why minorities tend to hunt and fish far less than whites, Fish and Wildlife researchers might wish to consider whether the present-day disparity represents exactly what beleaguered elite white sportsmen fought for over so many decades—a sporting field dominated by whites. They might also consider the possibility that “cultural differences” between white and nonwhite Americans could be a less critical factor in modern-day differences in hunting and fishing than was the creation, in the early twentieth century, of wildlife regulations that privileged men of means and, at least in the South, specifically targeted African Americans.
The other key fact that emerges from the addendum is that African Americans in the Southern states are far more likely than African Americans nationally to hunt or fish. As noted above, in 2000, nearly three-quarters of all African-American hunters and nearly two-thirds of all African-American fishermen lived in the South. These statistics, aside from reflecting the predominantly Northern, urban nature of the country’s black population since the Great Migration, perhaps confirm the deep roots of these customary practices for black Southerners and demonstrate that efforts to eliminate blacks’ independent hunting and fishing in the early twentieth century proved incomplete. Even if whites’ participation in hunting and fishing nationally outstripped blacks’ participation by more than three to one, the concentration of blacks’ hunting and fishing in the South indicates that the roots of these practices run deep. This was confirmed by another study, undertaken two years after the original U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey.
Given the lag in minorities’ participation in hunting and fishing, and the desire to increase participation in order to make outdoor recreation and boating industries more profitable, in 1998 the Sport Fishing and Boating Partnership Council commissioned the report Women’s, Hispanics’, and African Americans’ Participation in, and Attitudes toward, Boating and Fishing.9 This report was drawn from ten focus-group interview sessions with female, Hispanic, and African-American volunteers. The results show that some African-American participants not only were well aware of the long-standing connection between people of color and hunting and fishing traditions, but also worked to cultivate that heritage. According to one African-American woman, “I was a born fisherman … I come from a long line of fishermen … A lot of African Americans before us didn’t have a lot of things to do. It’s been passed down through the generations … For our ancestors, there was nothing else for them to do” (8).
Other interviewees confirmed this appreciation for the deep, generational roots of African-Americans’ use of wildlife. “I’ve got an uncle who just passed. He could go out and catch fish to fill his table,” a black resident of Tampa, Florida, noted. “I just inherited it from him I guess. It’s a family thing. At family reunions, we all go fishing” (9). A third participant, clearly aware of the historical connection between hunting and fishing and the African-American community, noted that such tradition influenced his choice to continue hunting and fishing. “When I was little, you fished or hunted because you had to,” the subject noted. “I still hunt (and fish) … there’s not very good hunting in this area, but I still enjoy it. Since my family has been connected to it for over 200 years, I still do it” (9).
African Americans’ participation in hunting and fishing activities may be low for the United States as a whole, but the testimonials of these individuals indicate that this rich tradition has not died. Such findings in fact suggest that at least some contemporary African-American hunters and fishermen continue to roam Southern fields, forests, and streams for food or sport, well aware of the historical connection between hunting and fishing, people of color, and the struggle for independence. Despite elite whites’ attempts to drive blacks out of the sporting field, the decline of the Southern sporting tourism industry since mid-century, and the life and death of Jim Crow segregation, this rich tradition has endured and continues to influence how African Americans interact with the natural environment, feed themselves, spend their leisure time, and honor long-standing, important traditions that have served them for so long.
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