Vera Hall Sings “Another Man Done Gone”

Americana

While my son and I build with blocks in the playroom, YouTube becomes our jukebox, time machine, history lesson, giving us Jean Ritchie, Odetta, songs its autoplay chooses, Vera Hall singing about a man who runs, a man in chains, a man who gets killed.

Boil

Vera worked as a cook and washerwoman in Livingston, Alabama. The day John Lomax first recorded her in 1937, she may have stewed a hen, cut biscuits, stirred laundry in a boiling washpot.

County Farm

Alabama worked its prisoners—both men and women, mostly black—in lumber camps, road gangs, mines, quarries. Alabama outlawed the whipping of prisoners in 1962.

Don’t Interfere

with white folks, Vera’s father told her when she was young. Don’t throw rocks back at white children. Don’t make one cry, because the old boss might come out and shoot you like a rabbit.

Encyclopedia

In sixth grade, I skimmed the World Book—multivolume, aardvark to zygote, burgundy covered, shelved behind the teacher’s desk. Encyclopedias seemed like the bread of life, fair and true, a storehouse of learning, everything I should know.

Free at Last

Lomax recorded Vera singing duets with Dock Reed, her cousin. I bend my knees, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last. Dock wouldn’t sing wicked songs.

Lomax also recorded Vera singing by herself. He asked her if she knew any blues songs. She said, I never sing any but to myself.

Greens

After Vera had her baby, Granny Ilsie sewed her bellyband. Her mother gave her branmeal coffee and greens: collard, turnip washed in several waters, pokeweed, patience leaves.

Handle

Vera said, The elders tried to handle me—put me out of church—when I sang that blues for the white man.

I Didn’t Know His Name

Haywood Patterson said, At the Atmore Prison Farm, we raised corn, cotton, rice, and sorghum. Sometimes I dug up Negro bones, convicts put to death in the 1920s, convicts used in turpentine work.

Jesse Harris

was blind, played a one-lunged accordion, sang “Boll Weevil” and “Stagolee.” Vera learned songs from him and from Rich Amerson, a double-jointed lumberjack who lived in a burrow. Rich knew conjure roots, played mouth harp.

Kitchen

I imagine Vera working her cast-iron stove, pots steaming on the top eyes, woodbox, meal bin, flour-sack towels, Vera singing there, a blues that fit her case.

Long Chain

Vera’s second husband sang ballads. He couldn’t keep out of trouble, was jailed, on a chain gang, built the county roads, irons on his feet.

Malleable

While my son and I squeeze and flatten salt dough, I’m thinking about the stories that shape us, I’m playing Vera’s songs in my head. Take my stony heart, I want to pray, renew our spirits.

Nichols Quarter

When Vera was eleven, a woman hired her as a nursemaid. Vera sang and talked to the woman’s children, slept between them on a quilt on the floor. Thirty years later, after Mr. Nichols died, his widow paid Vera to sleep in the twin bed next to hers.

Oxen

Here’s a story I’ll tell my boy about how the world could be, one Vera told her Sunday school class, perhaps her sisters, her daughter: The inn was full, Mary was crying, the oxen in the barn said Come in, they gave the baby a hay bed, warmed him with their breath.

Poor Lazarus

Vera’s song about a prisoner who escaped, hid in the mountains, was shot with a great big number, forty-four, four, four, taken back to the camp, laid out on the commissary counter.

Quart Jars

of peach preserves, poinsettia salad, trays of ham, spiced devil’s cake, orange whip, Don’t you eat this, you have no business, for you and Old John, syrup and bread.

Railroad Bill

Vera’s song about a turpentine worker who could disappear: the high sheriff wanted his rifle, said Give it here, shot at Bill, but he had faded away, turned himself into a mustang mule, a gum tree.

Shackles

Alabama reinstated chain gangs in 1995. Shackled by leg-irons, the prisoners cut grass, broke rocks in ten-hour shifts. Some were tied to hitching posts, hands cuffed above their heads, all day in the sun.

Tin Cup Alley

Vera went to Brown Chapel and Shiloh Church, sang the old songs that made the church folks rock and moan. She went to the café in Tin Cup, listened to the Rock-Ola, drank a little blind-tiger whiskey.

Unanimous

is the word of the day on Sesame Street. The grouch, the pink fairy, and the famous rapper find things they agree on, and my boy is watching. I want to believe someday he will work for justice and fruitful harmony.

Visit

When Lomax and his wife came to town in 1941, Vera had been tending her sick mother all day. Vera agreed to cook dinner and sing for us, Lomax wrote. A spiritual, a hymn, “Another Man Done Gone.” Such dignity and composure, Lomax wrote. After dinner, Vera washed the dishes.

Walk Your Log

Some men in Vera’s songs abused their women. One man said, I’ll walk your log if you don’t meet me by the waterfall. Meaning he’ll kill her, Vera said.

X

was what Vera signed on her will, said the white employers in Tuscaloosa who inherited her royalties. She was almost blind, they said. Couldn’t read or write, they said.

Vera’s grandchildren said the white people were wrong. She ironed clothes for them, her grandchildren said. She baked their corn bread.

She read the Bible to me, Vera’s great-grandson said.

Yonder

When asked about the word chariot, Vera said, Chariots swing low, pick you up, carry you off way up yonder where everything’s sweet. Chariot is the spirit of the Lord, waves moving the waters, so soft and close to you.

Zion

In Vera’s song, Zion was down the hill, she’d been there, her soul got happy. I want to believe she had many days down the hill, she found shade trees, rooms beneath the branches, a spring of cool water.

note: Material in italics incorporates quotations from several texts, including Alan Lomax’s The Rainbow Sign: A Southern Documentary, Stephen Wade’s The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience, Haywood Patterson’s Scottsboro Boy, Sarah Haley’s No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, Alan Lomax’s Selected Writings, 1934–1997, and Ruby Pickens Tartt’s Dim Roads and Dark Nights.

Read more from Issue 16.2.