Willie Dixon (1915-1992) penned and played on some of the most enduring and
influential music of the last half of the 20th century. He put the words "I
just Want to Make Love to You" and "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man" in Muddy
Waters' mouth and he played bass behind Chuck Berry's guitar on
"Maybelline," Bo Diddley's "Hey Bo Diddley," and John Lee Hooker's "Shake it
Baby." His songs were covered by Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, the Allman
Brothers, and Peggy Lee. Sitting in an Atlanta hotel room shortly before he
died Dixon told me how space, objects, and people influenced his music.
"All you have to do is name an object," mused Dixon as he leaned back in an
oversized recliner as we spoke. "Whatever the object is that you want to
write about, you think of the pro's and con's of that object from as far
back about it, from the beginning of it to the ending of it. Then you think
about what good it's doing and what harm it's doing." As a black man born in
Jim Crow's South and who matured in corporate Chicago, Dixon's songbook -
like many African American musicians - was his history book. The blues he
became known for was to Dixon a "statement of the true facts of life is the
blues and that's what they're built on and all blues is built on them. Them
yesterday, them today and them that will be tomorrow."
Johnny Shines (1915-1992) also was a bluesman. A guitarist, songwriter, and
powerful singer, he bunked and busked with Robert Johnson as they chased
trains, fortune, and whores across the country in the 1930s. His music was
as much an expression of aesthetics and a way of life as it was a window
into the African American landscape. "I am a part of the world. I am
history," he boldly asserted one evening while we were waiting for his set
to begin. To him the African American landscape was sacred. ""My people
built all these highways you see going through here. My people helped to
build these highways. The levees that re-routed the rivers. They planted
willows in the rivers, re-route the rivers, straighten them out and so on
like that, because they was washing into places. They put willows down
there, they planted willows. When the willows grew up, and the vegetation
and stuff like that hung on to the willows, would pull the water back the
other way." He paused for a moment and said, "We are nothing but history.
The black man is the backbone of America."
There are many thousands of acres of planted pine longleaf forest in the
American South. These forests are complex compound artifacts framing
surviving African American communities that were settled in the 20th century
as sawmill hamlets and turpentine still towns. The landscapes bear the names
of entrepreneurs and capitalists imprinted on road signs and maps
memorializing each white man's self importance as placenames. In a sprawling
pine forest planted and exploited by naval stores entrepreneurs in St. Johns
County just 16 miles west of St. Augustine the road names celebrate white
foresters and turpentine still owners while the names of crossroads
communities and abandoned still sites survive only in the memories and
narratives of the African American former laborers. The land is flat and the
relict pine trees dominate the horizon. The turpentine and lumber industries
long ago became insignificant and many of the black and white former workers
have sought their fortunes elsewhere.
Some folks, however, still live and work among the pines. One, a white
former forest manager, once took me back into the woods to a gnarled live
oak tree where he recounts how one of the turpentine workers was lynched.
None of the former black workers survived to tell on tape how they chipped
"boxes" into the pine trees or lived in debt peonage at the mercy of the
company commissary. The former manager, however, had what he told was the
definitive reason why the pine-based economy died out in the area. "What we
call the old pulpwood niggers, you know," he said in discussing the former
African American workers. "Of course it's gotten so sophisticated now they
don't want much colored in pulpwood anyway. They want to get somebody with a
little more education before you put him on that 120,000 dollar machine, you
know ... When they used to throw them sticks of wood by hand, you know, it
was alright. Chainsaw's about all they could figure out how to run."
Johnny Shines, Willie Dixon, and other African Americans as well as whites
have strong ties to the land and landscape that transcend buildings, graves,
sites, etc. Last year the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the
National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, and the Federal
Communications Commission signed an agreement to pass new rules (the
Nationwide Programmatic Agreement or NPA) for the FCC to follow as it
complies with the National Historic Preservation Act. Although the National
Park Service and others use a more inclusive definition of "traditional
cultural properties" to embrace all races and ethnic groups, the FCC now
only requires cell tower companies and broadcasters to consider impacts to
Native American and Native Hawaiian groups and their traditional cultural
properties. It's as if African Americans, Asians, Latinos, Appalachian
whites, and others cannot have sacred ties to the land and landscape. Last
week (April 21, 2005), the congressional Subcommittee on National Parks
(chaired by Devin Nunes, R-Calif.) held an oversight hearing on the National
Historic Preservation Act
<http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/archives/109/nprpl/042105.htm>.
The FCC policy, which is described at the agency's Web site
<http://wireless.fcc.gov/siting/npa.html>, appears to be the basis for
proposed changes to the National Historic Preservation Act. African American
communities around the nation are used as dumping grounds fertile for the
sprouting of tower farms that affect not only the quality of life in those
communities but also adversely affect the same kinds of sacred spaces Native
Americans lobbied so successfully to protect from FCC action. If Congress
approves the changes under discussion African Americans will again be
disenfranchised from federal policymaking.
"Edward Howell, colored, shot and killed George Fauver, white, near Fairmont
schoolhouse, across the Shenandoah river [sic.] from Myerstown at dusk
Wednesday night," reported a Jefferson County, West Virginia, newspaper 18
January 1906. Howell allegedly shot Fauver because the latter repeatedly
watered his livestock in a spring the Howell family used for its drinking
and cooking water. The same paper reported that the day Fauver was shot the
white man was again watering his horses in the spring and allowing the
animals to "trample dirt into it." Howell encountered Fauver at the spring.
"Howell met him and, it is said, Fauver used insulting language to Howell,
who secured a rifle and shot him in the breast."
The day after shooting Fauver Howell surrendered himself to the authorities
and he was jailed. Three months later, the same paper that reported Fauver's
shooting at the spring reported another death. "Edward Howell, colored, in
jail here awaiting trial for the killing of George Fauver, white, on the
east side of the Shenandoah river [sic.], in January last, committed suicide
Wednesday morning by hanging."
The 1906 incidents are recounted by African Americans and whites throughout
Jefferson County, West Virginia. An oral history project sponsored by the
NAACP recorded several versions of the event. A 1993 report prepared by the
project described a lengthy feud between the Howell and Fauver families. The
1906 murder by the spring and Ed Howell's death while in custody survive as
oral traditions with differing versions told by each man's descendants. One
of Ed Howell's great grandchildren once told me, "I was just shocked to find
that it was a rumor still alive in the white community as recently as a
couple of years ago." Ed Howell's family firmly believes that he was lynched
in his jail cell only three days before the start of his trial. The white
newspaper of the time and white residents living in Jefferson County near
the turn of the 21st century steadfastly maintain that Howell hung himself
with his dirty underwear.
Each year members of Edward Howell's extended family gather on the banks of
the Shenandoah River to hold a family reunion, a widespread African American
tradition. Ed Howell's kin swap stories about births and deaths, share
meals, and catch up on each others' lives. They also recount the fateful
period in 1906 when Ed Howell shot George Fauver. The stories, white and
black, are inextricably tied to the hillsides flanking the Shenandoah River.
They are tied to recognizable places in the landscape and they are highly
significant to the historically disfranchised African Americans who have
lived in Jefferson County since the end of the Civil War. "The official
history - one of my former college professors ... hardly ever mentions
blacks," explains one of Howell's great-grandchildren. "I mean here we've
been here all this time and in the numbers we've been and still we never
figure in the history. And when you think about slavery and the fact that
free labor built many of these places around here, still, we were ignored.
So it was just good to have that unofficial history at any rate." That
unofficial history includes the old Howell homeplace, the banks of the
Shenandoah River, and the Spring where the feud between the Howells and the
Fauvers and the tensions between white and black were played out one winter
day in 1906.
So where does this fit into the discussion of proposed changes to Section
106? None of the places mentioned in the "official" (white) nor the
"unofficial" (black) histories are listed in the National Register of
Historic Places. None have been formally determined eligible for listing in
the National Register of Historic Places. Do these technicalities make these
places any less sacred to Jefferson County's African Americans? Do any of
these technicalities make these places any less historically significant? If
the FCC programmatic agreement precedent is to be repeated by Congress in
its moves to reform Section 106 by limiting the Section 106 process to
properties already listed in or formally determined eligible for listing in
the National Register of Historic Places, then we might well be engaging in
a different kind of lynching and returning to the kind of sanitized
homogenous history Ed Howell's great-granddaughter learned in school.
-David Rotenstein
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