takes place away from official scrutiny, unrecorded as formalised data, but preserved as folklore and collective memory. It can also mean that the region’s ostensible political culture, and its accompanying rhetoric, bears little relation to the daily lives of its citizens, much less their inner lives. Or that, in a community which sustains a hidden world of mystical and spiritual experience behind, below and beside its orthodox religious life, anything can happen. Or even simply that only the initiated know what’s really going on, and that even if outsiders are capable of asking the right questions – i.e. questions that make sense to those questioned – the answers cannot be guaranteed to make sense to the outsider. The hidden (African) world which shares Mississippi’s 300-odd square miles with the mundane, statistical world of factuality is, to shoplift an aphorism from Carlos Castenada, a ‘separate reality’.
All of which adds up to this: that of course there are ‘facts’, but these facts explain comparatively little of what actually goes on in a culture which is, despite increasingly widespread literacy, primarily an oral one. Mississippians of African descent have little faith in so-called ‘objective’ reality: ‘facts’ tend to be part of outside descriptions of their lives; accounts of who they are into which their input has rarely been sought, and rarely accepted when proffered. So they replace these imposed facts with their own, and the distinctions between ‘truth’ and ‘folklore’ tend to blur until the distinction becomes all but meaningless. At best, it is irrelevant. This is as true of Mississippi as it is of Jamaica: Mississippi is old country, secret country, deep country. In whitebread terms, popular American mythology demands that the nation’s moral centre should coincide with its geographical centre: amidst fields of waving Midwestern corn, where adorable tow-headed children with freckles, accompanied by appropriately cute pets, forever chase baseballs and fish in the creek. This is, after all, where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two introverted Jewish kids from the decidedly unlovely urbs of Cleveland, Ohio, chose to place the adoptive home of Superman, the American saviour from the stars. Nevertheless, the secret heart of America is located in the South: for the descendants of those who involuntarily became African-Americans, it’s where the unhappy story of their lives on this continent began, and the Mississippi Delta is the wounded heart of that South. Mississippi was the hardest of hardcore Jim Crow.
African slaves were first imported en masse into Mississippi in the 1830s, around the time that the Native American Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes were finally dispossessed. The slaves’ first task was the clearance of massive tracts of forest in order to render the land arable; their second to pick the cotton which briefly made Mississippi, in the period immediately prior to the Civil War, the wealthiest state in the Union. After the war, it became the poorest, and it shares with Alabama the dubious distinction of emerging from the Civil War as the most racist state in the Union. The worst thing that could happen to a slave would be to be ‘sold down the river’ from Virginia or Maryland, comparatively less brutal only insofar as the condition of slavery is at all quantifiable, to Mississippi or Alabama, whose plantations have been comparable only to ‘prisons run by sadists’. It had the richest soil and the poorest people in the nation, and it still does today. The most-famous by-product of the Civil War was the end of legal slavery and its eventual replacement by the various bits of segregationist legislation which came to be known as the ‘Jim Crow’ laws, specifically designed to reproduce slavery as closely as possible despite its technical abolition. It may seem surprising that Mississippi was rarely the first state to opt for formal adoption of each new chunk of Jim Crow; this was no indication of any comparative liberalism, but the exact reverse. In Mississippi, the substance of those laws was already common practice and there was no immediate or pressing need for their formal enshrinement in law. The etiquette of oppression crystallized into an obscene and elaborate dance: blacks and whites walked the same streets, but in different worlds. Equality under the law – or, indeed, anywhere else – wasn’t even a theory. In any case, ‘law’ was pretty much for whites only: the black experience of it was the receiving end. They had to make do with the informal protection of the local plantation boss, who would look after his workers – provided that they were in conflict with other blacks rather than with whites – simply because he needed their labour. The lives of blacks were not considered to hold any intrinsic value whatsoever. Lynching remained legal there until 1938.
‘People would get killed, beat up, shot, out in the country,’ John Lee Hooker remembers. ‘It wasn’t such a thing as the po-lice could be right there. The po-lice would get shot and killed. Your boss who owned all the land would take care of all his people. He would come out with the sheriffs, and they’d be a day gettin’ out there. It ain’t like it is now, police there in a moment or a flash if something go wrong and someone get hurt or beat up, get killed. Police right here. You way out in the country, the closest thing be the sheriff in one of those towns, and you couldn’t get to a phone, somebody had go get him. It was just olden days, you know. Nothin’ happen in a flash. Black people, Chinese people, Spanish: they wasn’t important at all. They didn’t count Spanish people as white, they counted ’em right along with us and Chinamen. There was just a very few Chinamen was there, but a lotta Spanish people. We all lived in the same area, in the same houses, shared the same things. So they had to live under the same gun that the blacks lived under. That’s the way it was.’
There was no way, says Hooker, to work around the system. ‘It was just that way, and we never thought it would change. But people had faith that one day it would change, and it did, but we never thought it would change so soon. It was a long, long time.’ By the time he or she was five or six, any black child living in the South would have already learned how he or she was supposed to act around white people. ‘They taught you that when you had the ability to talk. Your parents taught you what you had to do and what you couldn’t do. They [whites] taught they kids not to fool with us, and they taught our kids not to fool with them, so we knowed. We stayed on our own territory. My dad, we had enough land so we didn’t have to fool with them. We couldn’t mix, you know. It was pretty rough and pretty hard. I was fortunate enough to get out of it when I was that age. I was very aware of what it was, what it was like. We had no contact at all, but I knew stuff was going on. I knew some black people did get into lots of trouble, but we knew what to do and not to do; my daddy would tell us. He told me a million things. I can’t repeat just what they said, but roughly: you just got to stay in your place. You can’t do that, you can’t do that. I can’t tell you just what he said – this word and that word – but he said, “You can not mess with those people.” He kept pounding it into our heads. We knew that, we see’d that. Everybody would be in they own place.’
Except that John Lee Hooker decided that he wasn’t going to stay in his.
A certain amount of confusion exists around the precise place and date of John Lee Hooker’s birth; much of it created by Hooker himself. He’s always cited his birthday as 22 August, but the year has been variously reported as 1915, 1917, 1920 and 1923. For a while, Hooker was insistent that he was born in 1920, rather than the more commonly cited (and accurate) 1917. ‘We all was born with a midwife, which was not in a hospital. We had our records in a big old bible, our parents did, they might not have put it in a courthouse.’ Even if they had done so, it would make no difference: almost all records were destroyed in a fire which consumed the county courthouse in 1927. As it is, surviving state records contain no mention of anyone by the name of John Lee Hooker. ‘My parents, they might have been the same. I know my birthdate – August 22, 1920. I grew up knowin’ that, but they birthday I don’t know. They go way, way, way back. My mother was born in Glendora, Mississippi, and my father was born there too.’
More recently, Hooker has recovered from the spasm of age paranoia that struck him on the eve of the release of The Healer, and led him to rewrite his personal history in order to lop those three years from his age. Nowadays, he cheerfully owns up to having been, after all, born in 1917. Not that it made a hell of a lot of difference to most people that he then claimed to be 69 rather than 71 years old, but nevertheless the John Lee Hooker of today has nothing – or, at any rate, very little – to hide.
Hooker has always given his place
