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AFRICAM 101 Week 6 Reading Fall 2020 Content warning: this creative essay includes a racial slur C. S. Giscombe “Boll Weevils, Coyotes, and the Color of Nuisance” (from Border Towns, 146-151). Histories of “The Boll Weevil Song” tend to lead back to Charlie Patton (1891-1934) and his 1929 recording of “Mississippi Bo Weavil Blues,” made under the name Masked Marvel at Paramount’s Gennett Studios on Richmond, Indiana. The sobriquet was a Paramount sales ploy—a free record would be awarded to anyone correctly guessing the Masked Marvel’s identity. The song has been covered and varied by any number of folks since then—Leaf Belly, Woody Guthrie, Bessie Smith, the White Stripes, among many others. In the lyrics, a farmer and a boll weevil square off about a piece of land and the cotton on it: the farmer catalogues the ways in which he’s tried to destroy the weevil, to make the environment uninhabitable for the insect and the insect’s offspring (the eggs are laid inside the plants) but the weevil replies that he’ll make himself a home-place—that he’ll make himself at home—no matter what the farmer does. It’s a call and response song, a verbal sparring contest. And there was truth there—the weevil’s still with us. Weevils, at maturity, are a scant quarter-inch long but quite capable, in numbers, of laying waste to a cotton crop. A 2003 USDA bulletin, leaning on Carl Sandburg’s version of the song for an epigraph, made this unironic observation: “Since its entry into the United States from Mexico in 1892, the insect scientifically known as Anthonomus grandis Boheman spread throughout the South, forcing radical economic and social changes in areas that had been almost completely dependent on cotton production. Many experts consider the boll weevil second only to the Civil War as an agent of change in the South.” And the insect, like the Civil War, has had different levels of meaning for the black southerners who worked the fields than it’s had for the white captains of industry who owned the fields. There are lots of ways to configure “home.” I heard the song at ten, in the spring of 1961. Hospitalized for months then, the result of an unlikely injury—a backyard fall—I lived by my radio and learned the words to all the music on the Top Forty, including Brook Benton’s “Boll Weevil Song” (which made it to number 2). I was drawn to the spoken interplay, the dialogue—with Benton’s smooth, familiar voice taking both parts—and especially to the sung refrain’s changes: “Gotta have a home” (in the weevil’s strident voice at the beginning) becomes “Ah, you have a home all right, you have a home” (in the farmer’s grudging tone) by the end of the record. Reencountering the song in other versions, including Charlie Patton’s, in the years after that I liked more and more the complex metaphoric action I’d sensed at ten—man and weevil are both homeless but at odds, profoundly alike and profoundly different. Their places in the song shift, their voices come a little undone—I was ten when I heard it first but I saw it was different than other songs on the radio and I count “The Boll Weevil Song” as being among my early encounters with the stuff of poetry. And, in those later years, I also came to understand the song’s wide appeal—worker populations, white and black, were shifted by weevil infestations and signature lines in the lyrics varied interestingly (and were interestingly similar). From an Oklahoma Cooperative Extension publication: Now if anyone should ask you Who it was that wrote this here song, You can say it was just a homeless Farmer With ragged britches on, Just hunting for a home, yes, hunting for a home. And this transcription from the “Great Migration” website at the University of Illinois: An’, if anybody should ax you Who it was dat make dis song, Jus’ tell ‘em ‘twas a bug buck niggah Wid a paih o’ blue duckin’s on, Ain’ got no home, Ain’ got no home. My sister and I were born in Ohio in the 1950s; we were northern city children. We lived in Dayton, on the West Side—all black Daytonians in the ‘50s and ‘60s lived on the West Side, the neighborhoods on the west side of the Miami River. Our parents had come from the south but we were distant from the old country and its traditions. We were a progressive family and this was the post-war prosperity; we were beyond familiarity with red dirt and cotton fields. We were Baby Boomers, we were trained to be polite; we listened to Top Forty radio and went downtown to the library and the big department stores and we watched the Saturday matinees with the white children who lived across the Miami, a waterway we knew we could not cross casually; I mean we had a different value—a different meaning—in the neighborhoods over there. But downtown was common ground and in the downtown theaters I sat through Bambi, Snow White, and the loose-limbed jiving crows of Dumbo; watching TV at home, staying with the Disney industry, I caught the act of ineffectually wicked Br’er Fox and dim-witted Br’er Bear, seeing only much later their connection to both the minstrel tradition and the animal stories from black folklore. I came to the animal stories themselves after I was grown, in my thirties; I was teaching by then in universities and would cover a week or so of folklore as part of my course in African-American Literature. I argued in those classes for the primacy of the trickster figure, the figure often cast as a small animal (a rabbit, say, or a spider) or a marginal one (a coyote, e.g.). We read beyond Joel Chandler Harris (whose Uncle Remus stories were an origin point for Disney’s Song of the South), we read stories collected by Richard Dorson and published by Langston Hughes; I scandalized my students with “The Signifyin’ Monkey.” I sent them out to look at graffiti that someone had painted on a paved rail-trail near campus, part of the city’s much-publicized Circle Greenway project: “Emerald Necklace? Feels more like an ass-fault choker to me, said Coyote.” Teaching the animal stories made me like and admire them—I fell hard for the stories, for the language I heard and saw there, the language that created them with repetitions and varieties of address. Reading them, I could hear the performance, I could feel the resonance with moments of speech in my own experience with black adults and children (including unguarded moments of my parents’ speech). Everything connected—language, race, geography, animals in a variety of roles. And I recalled the farmer’s complicated conversation with the bo weevil, the articulation of difference and confrontation that I’d first heard in a black voice at ten, in a “novelty song” on the radio. Charlie Patton sang and spoke thus: Bo weevil left Texas, Lord, he bid me “fare ye well,” Lordie (spoken: Where you goin’ now?) I’m goin’ down the Mississippi, gonna give Louisiana hell, Lordie (spoken: How is that, boy?) Suck all the blossoms and he leave your hedges square, Lordie … But we were far from all that as children and, later, as young professionals in the ‘80s and ‘90s, further still—at least in our daily lives. We both left Dayton after high school but have visited frequently over the past forty years, have witnessed the inevitable economic and social changes. There’s still an old-money neighborhood in Dayton where black people don’t live—though, to be fair, my sister and I do shop there, when we’re in town together, and eat at the fine restaurants on its main drag, Far Hills Avenue. Our Visa cards are welcomed and the waitresses are polite. I tend to “read” cities and locations as though they were poems—ambiguous, contradictory, riddled with echoes of other poems and other places. You can understand a place, in part, by the kind of animal life it supports (a sentiment not original with me). How might all a town’s population work their way into the big poem, the epic, of a particular location? Or how might the population resist the poem’s definitions or prove more slippery than the demographic? And how can the sentimental be avoided? November 2007 came and the Giscombe children were back in Dayton for a long weekend. Our parents were old and ill and we were in town to interview health care providers. One rainy evening, on the way back from an appointment, I pulled off into the shoulder of a new highway so we could examine a piece of roadkill. This was Ohio Route 49 just below the intersection with Little Richmond Road, the old way over to faded Indiana; this was the half-rural edge of the storied West Side, unchanged black Dayton, and my sister and I piled out to see that I’d been right—a coyote, Canis latrans, legs almost broken off, head half-smashed, the fur still beautiful in the rental car’s headlights. They’re western animals; I knew they’d been extending their range east for decades but I’d not known they’d made it as far as Dayton, as far as the fields and scrubby woods and culverts between the houses and businesses of the West Side. This was no trickster figure; Googling “coyote” and “ohio” later I found that there’ve been coyotes in Dayton for a while now and that in the state game laws they’re a nuisance animal, an animal with “no closed season”—you can shoot a nuisance animal at any time. How’d this guy get here? Let music come up: First time I saw Mr. Boll Weevil, He wuz on de western plain; Next time I saw him, He wuz ridin’ on a Memphis train… I’ve taken pains to locate the coyote among us but there’s really no lesson in any of it, no complicated metaphor; and neither is this a poem about “swerving” or my heart being ambiguously “fastened to a dying animal.” Location’s a jumble of proximities and coincidence.