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96-97
In Alabama I lived with Jack Ray, who’d established and owned several
banks. Jack was one of the more liberal men in Alabama and employed blacks as
cashiers. He was a loving empathic person, so it hurt me when he referred to
them as “niggers,” as people did around there. Often, as the poor tramp, I
got a strong desire to get a formal education in order to
embark on a career and rise to the upper class, but whenever I, as here, got
a chance to live the so-called good life, it usually made me so sick that I quickly
fled to the highway again. For where did all the money, with which Jack had
bought his luxurious home outside the city, come from? He told me he’d made
his fortune by giving loans to poor black sharecroppers so they could buy a
mule or move from their rotten shack into a streamlined plastic trailer and
join the new plastic proletariat of more than 30 million Americans. But many
sharecroppers couldn’t even afford these modern shacks. They have enough
trouble paying off their mules and are in debt to both the bank and the white
landowner, to whom they often had to pay the greater share of their crops,
just as we in feudal Europe paid the church and the squire. The American
system started after the Civil War, when neither planters nor freed slaves
had any money. Driven by hunger to work for little or nothing, destitute
blacks made agreements with their former slave-owners to borrow land,
housing, and seed. The profit was supposed to have been shared. But debt and
dishonest bookkeeping usually brought the sharecroppers into a situation
materially worse than it had been under slavery (the master at least had an
interest in feeding them). The system has continued from generation to
generation, and on top of the eternal debt to the landlord came the debt to the
commissary store and finally the bank, all helping to create a white upper
class. Already, when he picked me up in 1973, Jack Ray had made himself so
rich he could fly me around in his private jet. When I returned, I found that
his banking empire had grown even larger, and he invited me to dinner at a
club for whites only. As a sponsor of everything from scholarships to
orchestras, he joined the Chamber of Commerce in 1993. The Jack L. Ray Family
Park was dedicated to him, but no blacks attended the festivities. Perhaps
because his most important contribution to society consisted of monetary
policies that helped double the net worth of every white American, from 6 to
12 times that of every black American, between our first meeting and his
death in 2006.
98
Later, I visited this tenant farmer, who lived
near the banker. Both he and his wife were 78 years old and should have
stopped working years ago. But he said, “I have to work until I drop dead in
the fields. Last year my wife got heart trouble, so now I must do the work by
myself.” Twice a year he walked to the local store to buy a bit of flour and
a little sugar. That’s all he ever bought. I asked what they ate for
breakfast. “A glass of tea and a little turnip greens,”
he answered. What about lunch? “Just turnip greens,” he replied. What then
for supper? “Mostly turnip greens.”
Another tenant farmer, skinning a rabbit, spoke with me:
- But often you went to bed hungry?
- Yes, sir, more times than not. But sometimes people would give us
some bread or a meal.
- White people?
- Sometimes whites, sometimes colored. Sometimes we would have nothing
and go to bed hungry. We went to bed a million nights hungry. Sometimes we
wanted to hunt, but were too weak to catch rabbits.
My attempts to find out about conditions for these sharecroppers ran
into an almost impenetrable wall of fear and intimidation. I’d imagined that
this fear was entirely historically conditioned. One night, however, after a
visit to such a sharecropper, I was making the 10-mile trek down a dead end
to my shack when I was “ambushed” by a pickup truck with its headlights on me
and guns sticking out. I managed to talk my way out of this jam, but little
by little I realized that such intimidation was deeply rooted in the violent
system of peonage, which has prevented sharecroppers and farm workers from
fleeing their “debt” through beatings, imprisonment, and murder.
During World War II (in which the US was hailed as
the Land of Liberty), the US Justice Department admitted that “there are more
Negroes held by these debt slavers than were actually owned as slaves before
the Civil War.”
99
Yet the Justice Department did nothing to prosecute these slave
owners, who even traded and sold peons to each other. Although there was an
increasing number of peonage cases in the 1970s, only a few ended up in
court, and only the cruelest, such as a case in 1980 in which a planter
chained his workers to prevent their escape, reached the press (and the
American public).
In the 1990s, The Atlanta Constitution ran a big
story about a landowner who’d fled to the Bahamas, a tax haven, abandoning
his debt-ridden tenant farmers, who had no idea whether they’d been bought or
sold. The more I began to penetrate this undercurrent of dread and terror,
the more I felt that the 20th century had a far more violent influence on the
black psyche than slavery.
102-103
How important it is to vagabond in the fourth dimension - with the time
factor included - my friendship with Lefus Whitley shows. For pictures often
lie even for the photographer himself. Lep, a gangster in New York, in 1973
invited me home to visit his parents in the woods of North Carolina. There I
took the photo of his father Lefus drunk and apathetic at the TV on page 99.
Such "honest" pictures of Lefus made it difficult later to get my
show into high schools for fear they would intensify students' negative
prejudice of blacks as "lazy" and "apathetic". I am
afraid I even myself saw him that way since every time I over the years visited
him he was laying drunk on the floor except one time
in 1991 when we made him sit up to be on Danish TV. I always needed the help
of his son to find his family deep in the forest in new rotten shacks since
he burned the previous down in drunkenness. So my
prejudice lasted 30 years until I in 2003 traveled around to make video
interviews with my friends about their own perception of their lives,
contrary to MY interpretations in my show. For both family and neighbors
confirmed that Lefus had never missed even one day of work in his entire
life. As a hardworking tenant farmer in his youth, he only drank a bit on
weekends, but it worsened when he lost his land when white landowners forced
out the remaining black farmers. He then became a construction worker, and
his crew picked him up every morning at five and drove him to Raleigh where
he built most of the skyscraper seen in the state capital today. All those
years he only drank after work and after giving his wife Mosel what she
needed to raise the family – that is, when I was visiting in the evening. My
superficiality came from never having lived with the family because I always
lived with his son Lep. I had been “lazy”, not Lefus, which again taught me
never to judge people until we have lived with them 24 hours a day.
Years later Bruce Springsteen did the same mistake
when he stole this picture to put on his bestselling “57 channels and
nothing's on” album without asking or paying neither me nor Lefus a dime.
Contrary to our stigmatizing thinking about people like Lefus as a “lazy
freeloading n……” he had until his death March 17, 2004
never received any support from society. So why do we blame free let “high
society” get away with both landgrapping and
freeloading? Bruce Springsteen might be “Born in the USA”, but as I always said,
“my friend Lefus built America!”
105
My friend Jack Ray, a recent beneficiary of this violent ignorance,
unknowingly fit one more piece for me into the pattern of hunger and dread I
saw in the rural underclass of the ’70s.
Racism haunts all countries but is more visible in America because
it’s intertwined with ruthless class oppression—the biggest gap between rich
and poor in the industrialized world. Without a protective welfare state to
keep the market forces at bay, many are made so poor they lose both their
freedom and the initiative to brave the market. When 2% today own 80% of
everything in the US, it’s easier to see where this banker’s mink fur comes
from. The only thing he couldn’t buy was real happiness. Again and again I see that the upper class is compelled to
substitute mink coats, alcohol, nerve pills, and cocaine for personal
happiness.
I began to feel poles apart from the prevailing
white ignorance, which seems forever unable to understand why their own white
ancestors could “make it” in a short time, while, after more than 100 years
of “freedom,” blacks still struggle.
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96-97
I Alabama kom jeg til at bo hos Jack Ray, som havde oprettet og ejede
flere banker. Jack var en af de
mere liberale i Alabama og ansatte sorte i sin bank. Han var et kærligt, empatisk
menneske, så det sårede mig, når han omtalte dem som ”niggere”, som folk gjorde der. Tit fik jeg som fattig vagabond stærk lyst til at få en formel uddannelse for at gøre karriere og komme op i
samfundet, men hver gang jeg som her kom til at leve det såkaldt gode liv på
toppen, fik jeg i reglen så stærk kvalme, at jeg flygtede ud på landevejen
igen. For hvor kom alt dette guld fra, som Jack brugte på sit luksushjem uden
for byen? Han fortalte, at han havde skabt sin formue ved at give lån til
sorte fæstebønder, så de kunne købe et muldyr eller flytte fra den rådne
shack ind i en plastikskurvogn og tilslutte sig det nye plastikproletariat på
mere end 30 millioner amerikanere. Men mange fæstebønder havde end ikke råd
til disse moderne shacks. De havde problemer nok med at betale af på deres
muldyr og var i konstant gæld både til banken og den hvide godsejer, som
ejede markerne, og til hvem de ofte måtte betale størstedelen af høsten,
fuldstændig som bønder i Danmark under hoveriet måtte betale kirken og
herremanden. Dette system startede efter borgerkrigen, da hverken
plantageejerne eller de frigivne slaver havde penge. Drevet af sult til at
arbejde for lidt eller intet, indgik de fattige sorte aftaler med deres
tidligere slaveejere om at låne jord, husly og såsæd. I teorien skulle de
dele profitten. Men gæld og uærlig bogføring bragte i reglen fæstebønderne ud
i en situation, der materielt set var værre end under slaveriet, hvor
slaveherren i det mindste havde en interesse i at bespise dem. Systemet fortsatte
fra generation til generation og, oveni den evige gæld til godsejeren, kom
gælden til landhandelen og senere banken, alt sammen medvirkende til at skabe
en hvid overklasse. Allerede da bankmanden samlede mig op i 1973, havde han
gjort sig så rig, at han kunne flyve mig rundt i sin private flyvemaskine.
Siden, når jeg vendte tilbage, var hans bankimperium vokset endnu større, og
han inviterede mig på middag i en privat klub kun for hvide. Som sponsor af
alt fra stipendier til orkestre kom han i 1993 i The Chamber
of Commerce, og Jack L. Ray Familie-Parken blev indviet efter ham. Men ingen
sorte deltog i festerne. Måske fordi hans vigtigste bidrag til samfundet var
gennem en sådan pengepolitik at medvirke til at fordoble hver hvid
amerikaners nettorigdom fra 6 til 12 gange hver sort amerikaners, fra jeg
først mødte ham til hans død i 2006.
98
Senere besøgte jeg denne fæstebonde, der boede i
nærheden af bankmanden. Både han og konen var 78 år gamle og burde være holdt
op med at arbejde for mange år siden. Men som han sagde til mig: ”Jeg er nødt
til at arbejde, indtil jeg falder om på marken. Sidste år fik min kone en
hjertesygdom, så nu må jeg klare arbejdet alene.” To gange om året gik han
til den lokale forretning for at købe en smule mel og lidt sukker. Det var
det eneste, de overhovedet købte. Jeg spurgte ham, hvad de fik at spise om
morgenen. Han svarede: ”Et glas the og lidt roeblade.” ”Hvad så til frokost,”
spurgte jeg. ”Blot roeblade,” svarede han. ”Og hvad med aftensmaden?” ”For
det meste roeblade,” lød svaret.
En anden forpagter talte med mig, mens han
flåede en kanin:
- Men gik du ofte sulten i seng?
- Ja, hr. Men nogle gange gav folk os noget
brød eller et måltid mad.
- Hvide mennesker?
- Nogle gange hvide, andre gange farvede.
Nogle gange fik vi ingenting og gik sultne i seng. Vi gik sultne i seng en
million gange om natten. Nogle gange ville vi gerne jage, men vi var for
svage til at fange kaniner.
Under mine bestræbelser på at finde ud af forholdene
for disse fæstebønder løb jeg ind i en næsten uigennemtrængelig mur af frygt
og intimidering. Jeg havde forestillet mig, at denne frygt udelukkende var
historisk betinget indtil en aften, hvor jeg efter et besøg hos en sådan
fæstebonde kom gående de 15 km ud ad en blindgyde til min egen
shack, og jeg pludselig gik i et baghold af en pickup-truck, der blokerede
vejen og havde lygterne rettet lige imod mig og geværer strittende ud. Det
lykkedes mig at snakke mig ud af situationen med disse hvide, men lidt efter
lidt gik det op for mig, at denne form for intimidering var dybt rodfæstet i
det voldelige gældsfangesystem, hvormed man traditionelt har forhindret
fæstebønder og daglejere i at flygte fra deres ”gæld” ved hjælp af prygl,
fængsling og mord. Under 2. verdenskrig (hvor USA blev hyldet som frihedens land) indrømmede USAs
justitsministerium at ”der er flere negre, der holdes som gældsslaver i dag,
end der rent faktisk var slaver før borgerkrigen”.
99
Alligevel gjorde justitsministeriet intet for at retsforfølge disse
slaveejere, som endog handlede og solgte gældsslaverne til hinanden. Selv om der var et stigende antal sager om gældsfangesager i 1970'erne, endte kun få af dem i retten, og kun de mest grusomme,
som f.eks. en sag i 1980, hvor en plantageejer lænkede sine arbejdere for at
forhindre deres flugt, nåede pressen (og den amerikanske offentlighed).
I 1990’erne
skrev The Atlanta Constitution om en godsejer, der
var flygtet i skattely på Bahamas fra sine gældbundne fæstebønder, der ikke
anede om de var købt eller solgt.
Jo mere jeg trængte ned til denne understrøm af terror, jo mere følte jeg, at
det 20. århundrede har haft en langt voldsommere indflydelse på den sorte
psyke end slaveriet.
102-
103
Hvor vigtigt det er at vagabondere i den fjerde
dimension – med tidsfaktoren inkluderet- viser mit venskab med Lefus Whitley.
For billeder lyver ofte også for fotografen selv. Lep, en gangster i New
York, inviterede mig i 1973 hjem for at besøge sine forældre North Carolinas
skove. Der tog jeg billedet af hans far Lefus, der sidder fuld og apatisk ved
fjernsynet på side 99. Sådanne “ærlige” billeder af Lefus gjorde det senere
vanskeligt at få mit diasshow ind i high schools af frygt for, at de ville
forstærke elevernes negative fordomme om sorte som “dovne” og “apatiske”. Jeg
er bange for, at jeg selv så ham på den måde, da han hver gang jeg i årenes
løb besøgte ham, lå fuld på gulvet, undtagen en gang i 1991, hvor vi fik ham
til at sætte sig op for at være på dansk tv. Jeg måtte altid have hjælp fra
hans søn for at finde hans familie dybt inde i skoven i nye rådne shacks, da
han brændte de foregående ned i fuldskab. Så mine fordomme varede i 30 år,
indtil jeg i 2003 rejste rundt for at lave videointerviews med mine venner om
deres egen opfattelse af deres liv, modsat MINE fortolkninger i mit show. For
både familie og naboer bekræftede nu, at Lefus aldrig havde misset bare én
arbejdsdag i hele sit liv. Som hårdtarbejdende fæstebonde i sin ungdom drak
han kun lidt i weekenderne, men det blev værre, da han mistede sin jord, da
hvide godsejere tvang de resterende sorte landmænd ud. Han blev derefter
bygningsarbejder, og hans mandskab hentede ham hver morgen klokken fem og
kørte ham til Raleigh, hvor han byggede de fleste af de skyskrabere, som man
kan se i delstatens hovedstad i dag. I alle disse år drak han kun efter
arbejde og efter at have givet sin kone Mosel de penge, hun havde brug for
til at opfostre familien - det vil sige, når jeg var på besøg om aftenen. Min
overfladiskhed kom af, at jeg aldrig havde boet hos familien, fordi jeg altid
boede hos hans søn Lep. Jeg havde været “doven”, ikke Lefus, hvilket igen
lærte mig, at man aldrig skal dømme folk, før man har levet med dem 24 timer
i døgnet.
Mange år senere begik Bruce Springsteen den samme
fejl, da han stjal dette billede for at lægge det på sit bestselleralbum “57 channels and nothing’s on” uden
at spørge eller betale hverken mig eller Lefus en skilling. I modsætning til
vores stigmatiserende tankegang om folk som Lefus som en “doven snylter n......” havde han indtil sin død den 17. marts 2004
aldrig modtaget nogen form for støtte fra samfundet. Så hvorfor lader vi
skyldfrit de bedrestillede slippe af sted med både
jordtyveri og nasseri?
105
Min ven Jack Ray var en af de seneste til
at nyde godt af denne voldelige uvidenhed og passede ubevidst endnu en brik ind i det
mønster af sult og frygt, som jeg så i 70'ernes underklasse på landet.
Racisme hjemsøger alle lande, men er mere synlig i Amerika,
fordi den her er flettet sammen med en skånselsløs klasseundertrykkelse – den
største kløft mellem rig og fattig i den industrialiserede verden. Uden en
beskyttende velfærdsstat til at holde det frie initiativ og markedskræfterne
i skak, bliver mange gjort så fattige, at de mister både frihed og initiativ
til at prøve kræfter med markedet. Når 2 % i dag ejer 80 % af alt i USA, er
det lettere at se, hvor denne bankmands minkpelse kommer fra. Det eneste, han
ikke kunne købe, var virkelig lykke. Og således ser jeg igen og igen, at overklassen
er tvunget til at erstatte personlig lykke med stress, whisky, nervepiller og
kokain.
Jeg begyndte at føle mig poler fra den
herskende hvide uvidenhed, som for evigt synes ude af stand til at forstå,
hvorfor deres egne hvide forfædre kunne "klare sig" på kort tid,
mens de sorte efter mere end 100 års "frihed" stadig kæmper.
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