When the subject of Leadbelly comes up, his criminal record is not far behind. I think this is unfortunate. The police records in Louisiana mention only one criminal case involving Huddie Ledbetter, and that stemmed from an incident that took place on Wednesday, the 14th of January, 1930. On this one, Huddie incriminates himself; but the closer you look into the incident, the less it seems like his fault.
The story Huddie told to John and Alan Lomax, [Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly], which they never confirmed, the one which has been generally accepted and told and retold in accounts of his life like the fictional "Midnight Special," goes like this:
Huddie says he had a run in with "a gang o' niggers" as he was coming home from work that Wednesday, carrying his lunch bucket. "Lord God," he says,"I was cuttin' niggers fast the next while! Pretty soon they was six of them running down the street with blood just gushing out. The police ran up and caught me by the arm and got me down by the calaboose. Next day Sheriff Tom Hughes carried me down to the Shreveport jail and kept me there 'til I came to be tried."
Time magazine reported that he "had been convicted of stabbing six Negroes in a fight over a can of whiskey." Frederick Ramsey, Jr., who knew Ledbetter in the late '40's and recorded the wonderful and highly praised "Leadbelly's Last Sessions," with Huddie and Martha in his New York apartment, repeated the Lomax version in an oft-reprinted article for the "Saturday Review of Literature." Ramsey wrote that "he was attacked as he was coming home from work by members of a gang who said he had whiskey in his dinner pail. The gang demanded whiskey; he eventually produced a knife and defended himself."
Many years later, Ramsey was to postulate a theory based on Huddie's never having challenged a white man, and thus never having challenged the system. "All his convictions and all his sentences were for assault, or for assault with intent to kill, but never against a white person. He wouldn't have lived to be tried." (If he had attacked a white person.)
In fact Huddie was challenged by a gang o' whites in Mooringsport that Wednesday in January, and he lived to tell the tale — tho' perhaps not to a white person. However, one could have read the story on the front pages of both the Shreveport daily papers, the Times and the Journal.
Deputy Sheriff Bert Stone was one of the two deputies delivering Thomas Rivers to the Bossier Parish jail back in August, 1922, when Rivers was abducted from the law and lynched by the mob. If Huddie was aware of that fact, or similar situations, he may have realized how precarious was his predicament. The Shreveport Journal of 16 January, 1930, also carried a front page report of Huddie's arrest. There was no mention of hog-butchering.
A month later, Huddie was convicted of assault with intent to murder one Dick Ellet, which was the white man's real name. "The verdict was reached a few minutes after the completion of testimony," according to the Times of 18 February, 1930. The story continued, The testimony showed that Ledbetter had resented the efforts of white men to prevent him dancing on the streets of Mooringsport while a Salvation Army religious service was in progress. Ledbetter, who was said to be drunk, after quarreling with the man, went away and returned with a knife, it was charged. In an encounter which ensued, Ellet was severely cut about the arm.
No matter what the true facts of the case were, Huddie was not likely to get justice. The Ellet family owned land near to the Bob Ledbetters; they were a prominent Mooringsport family and had probably known all the Ledbetters all their lives. Dick Ellet's father served for some time as Justice of the Peace. Ellet had served in the Ambulance Corps during the Great War.
The basic elements of the story are: 1. A Salvation Army band was playing publicly downtown Mooringsport. 2. A mainly-white crowd was present. 3. Huddie was dancing. 4. Some white people, including Dick Ellett, objected to the dancing and that's when the trouble started. Years later, Huddie thought it necessary to concoct an entirely fictional account of the event, one which deleted all racial overtones. He made the story dangerous and lurid, but he limited it to the black community.
Another light is shed by a remark of his cousin Blanche Love; in her interview with Loree Ousler, Mrs. Love said that she hadn't told many folks what really happened because she was "scared they might come and get her." Huddie likely feared for the safety of his family. He told John Lomax that while he was in the Shreveport jail, none of his people came to see him. However, he didn't blame them because they were worried that if they came to the jailhouse, they might get into trouble.
To give some indication of the racial situation at the time in Louisiana, here is a quote from a black Louisiana informant, a contemporary of Ledbetter's, in Alan Lomax's "The Rainbow Sign:"
"They were always running after the colored folks down (in Louisiana). When they would hear of a colored man doing wrong or practicing anything they didn't like, they'd go around with a crowd and call him out and warn him and tell him what they wanted him to do. Some places they'd go and take a fellow out and whip him. Some places they'd turn him loose. But the thing was they wanted to keep us afraid and keep us down.
The late Anna Patterson, born in 1932, an African-American from Belcher, owned land in Caddo Parish, rich in oil and cotton. At her house seven miles Northeast of Mooringsport, she had vivid youthful recollections of white-on-black violence, of terrorism, and of the Ku Klux Klan:
We had about six or eight Klansmen that lived in Belcher. They killed one of the black men here, out where I live. They carried him, they cut him up, they cut his private out and rammed it down his throat. He had gone into the cafe in Belcher the front way. We were supposed to go in the back and they thought he was being smart. That's the kind of thing that they were killing people about. If they wouldn't say "yassir" and "nosir" then they thought they were being smart.
She named "respectable" people in town who were Klansmen. There were quite a few of them including the local sheriff. "Black people couldn't walk the road at night. They'd run them off the road. And If they'd catch 'em, they whup 'em." Anna Patterson was interviewed by me in 1991.
The case ➥
The State of Louisiana versus Huddie Ledbetter (La. state court number 28640), was based on Ellet's testimony and charges. The all-white jury, not surprisingly, believed him and not Huddie. The sentence was 6 to 10 years at Angola, the Louisiana state prison north of Baton Rouge. While incarcerated at the sprawling, swampy penitentiary farm, Ledbetter bitterly complained of lawyers and "justice;" in the words of his song, "The Shreveport Jail,"
I think about how the lawyer done me.
Send for your lawyer
Come down to your cell,
He'll swear he can clear you
In spite of all hell.
He gonna get the biggest of your money and come back for some more.
Get some of your money
Come back for the rest
Tell you to plead guilty
For he know it is best.
It was Angola, 1933, in this bitter mood, that Huddie met John Lomax.
No matter what the true facts of the case were, Huddie was not likely to get justice. The Ellet family owned land near to the Bob Ledbetters; they were a prominent Mooringsport family and had probably known all the Ledbetters all their lives. Dick Ellet's father served for some time as Justice of the Peace. Ellet had served in the Ambulance Corps during the Great War.
The basic elements of the story are: 1. A Salvation Army band was playing publicly downtown Mooringsport. 2. A mainly-white crowd was present. 3. Huddie was dancing. 4. Some white people, including Dick Ellett, objected to the dancing and that's when the trouble started. Years later, Huddie thought it necessary to concoct an entirely fictional account of the event, one which deleted all racial overtones. He made the story dangerous and lurid, but he limited it to the black community.
Another light is shed by a remark of his cousin Blanche Love; in her interview with Loree Ousler, Mrs. Love said that she hadn't told many folks what really happened because she was "scared they might come and get her." Huddie likely feared for the safety of his family. He told John Lomax that while he was in the Shreveport jail, none of his people came to see him. However, he didn't blame them because they were worried that if they came to the jailhouse, they might get into trouble.
To give some indication of the racial situation at the time in Louisiana, here is a quote from a black Louisiana informant, a contemporary of Ledbetter's, in Alan Lomax's "The Rainbow Sign:"
"They were always running after the colored folks down (in Louisiana). When they would hear of a colored man doing wrong or practicing anything they didn't like, they'd go around with a crowd and call him out and warn him and tell him what they wanted him to do. Some places they'd go and take a fellow out and whip him. Some places they'd turn him loose. But the thing was they wanted to keep us afraid and keep us down.
The late Anna Patterson, born in 1932, an African-American from Belcher, owned land in Caddo Parish, rich in oil and cotton. At her house seven miles Northeast of Mooringsport, she had vivid youthful recollections of white-on-black violence, of terrorism, and of the Ku Klux Klan:
We had about six or eight Klansmen that lived in Belcher. They killed one of the black men here, out where I live. They carried him, they cut him up, they cut his private out and rammed it down his throat. He had gone into the cafe in Belcher the front way. We were supposed to go in the back and they thought he was being smart. That's the kind of thing that they were killing people about. If they wouldn't say "yassir" and "nosir" then they thought they were being smart.
She named "respectable" people in town who were Klansmen. There were quite a few of them including the local sheriff. "Black people couldn't walk the road at night. They'd run them off the road. And If they'd catch 'em, they whup 'em." Anna Patterson was interviewed by me in 1991.
The case ➥
The State of Louisiana versus Huddie Ledbetter (La. state court number 28640), was based on Ellet's testimony and charges. The all-white jury, not surprisingly, believed him and not Huddie. The sentence was 6 to 10 years at Angola, the Louisiana state prison north of Baton Rouge. While incarcerated at the sprawling, swampy penitentiary farm, Ledbetter bitterly complained of lawyers and "justice;" in the words of his song, "The Shreveport Jail,"
I think about how the lawyer done me.
Send for your lawyer
Come down to your cell,
He'll swear he can clear you
In spite of all hell.
He gonna get the biggest of your money and come back for some more.
Get some of your money
Come back for the rest
Tell you to plead guilty
For he know it is best.
It was Angola, 1933, in this bitter mood, that Huddie met John Lomax.
No comments:
Post a Comment