Growing Up under Southern Apartheid, Part 10

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The Last Work Song

My family moved to Jackson’s Gap, Alabama around the time I turned six. It was a small rural community, known as “The Gap” to folks living around there. Small farms were scattered throughout the county where textile mills had become the major source of employment. For my family, it was a move from town to country and my world changed from small-town sidewalks to creek banks and woods. 

Our small house at the Gap was flanked by a pasture on one side and woodlands on another. In front of our house, just across the road lived a black couple who were our nearest neighbors. If you walked down that road just a little piece, you would pass Mr. Wilson’s fish pond just before you got to the site of the old train depot. The train no longer stopped there but the old folks remembered when you could catch the train and go down to Opelika or you could go in the other direction to Alexander City. There remained only a cement platform where the small train station had once been. 

Watching Trains

The one activity that still occurred at the old depot site was mail pickup and delivery. The postmaster would go down every morning before the nine o’clock passenger train came through. He would hoist a canvas bag of outgoing mail on a chain that ran up a pole beside the tracks. When the train came by, someone on the train would swing out a hook to grab the bag of mail. Simultaneously, a canvas bag containing incoming mail would be tossed from the train onto the ground. The postmaster would then pick up the bag of mail and take it to the post office to be sorted and delivered. 

The quiet of my childhood home on the hill by the woods was disrupted only by the routine passing of the trains. When we had first moved there, the midnight train would jar me from my sleep as it barreled through blowing its horn, “whining low” as Hank Williams described it in song. In a short time, I grew accustomed to the sound of the trains as they passed through. 

There were freight trains: the Georgia Pacific and the L & N were two of the lines that came through; and there were passenger trains, sleek and black with a red line along the side. The passenger train came through twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. I enjoyed watching them pass by, rumbling down the tracks.

On one memorable day, it was a different sound down by the old depot that got my attention. It must have been around 1963 or 1964. I would have been 9 or 10 years old when I heard the nineteenth-century echoes of rhythm and harmony that lasted into the night. 

What I heard was a loud and robust men’s chorus chanting songs along the railway. It was not the sweet strains of a church choir, which was where I normally heard songs being sung, but it was bracing and compelling. My father took me down to see what was happening. Down by the old train depot, we saw a crew of Black men laying new rail along the tracks. They were singing songs I had never heard before, but the sounds seemed to go directly to my chest and made something stand up on the inside. It was the first and only time I had seen men singing together while they worked. 

My father told me that the singing was a tradition that went back to the old plantation days when slaves would sing in the fields. When doing hard physical labor, that singing helped to keep them going, my dad said. The pounding of a hammer or the chopping of a hoe might become the beat of a song, and the song kept them together with their work. Much later in life, I would learn that musicologists classified the songs we heard as “negro prison work songs.” I would also learn that the railroad employed Black work crews that they could dispatch for such labor-intensive projects. 

Black workers on the B & O Railroad line

A New Day Ahead

That vivid work song memory has remained with me as a briefly opened door to the past. Perhaps I was witnessing one of the last remnants of the Old South. Even though Brown v. the Board of Education had been settled by the Supreme Court in 1954, it had yet to have an impact in our community – or even in our state, for that matter. As I stood on that summer evening listening to the Black men singing songs that could be heard in the distance from our front porch, I had no inkling of the drastic social changes that would soon be headed down the line. 

The bus boycott in Montgomery had been the first wave of unrest. My parents would have known about it, but I, of course, had no knowledge or understanding of the unrest that would soon erupt. Cities like Selma and Birmingham were tinderboxes ready to explode, but it would take a little longer for change to arrive in small rural communities like Jackson’s Gap. 

As I continued to watch the trains go by throughout my childhood years, I noticed with each passing year that the numbers of passengers grew smaller and smaller. I was witnessing the nation’s shift in traveling habits as train use declined. In the end, the passenger lines stopped. They would be replaced by Amtrak, but not on these lines; not in Jackson’s Gap. By the time I finished high school those sleek black trains with the red stripe along the side were no more. 

The railway lines were fading, as were the sounds of those work songs that had pierced the night so many years before. It would soon become a distant memory – as if the turning of a page could instantly place a child’s memory into a past era. While cities across the country would erupt in violence, we would quietly hunker down to greet the new day with varying degrees of resistance and acceptance. 

We were neighbors, after all, Black and white. We knew everybody’s dog and saw each other's backyard clothesline. We would all find ways to navigate the new rules of the day, and somewhere in my being I would retain the strains of those work songs that made something stand up on the inside>  

< Part 9, Learning to Read and Other Important Things              Index >

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Photos Credits:

Upper: Illinois Central's train 25, the "Southern Express", an all stops local from Chicago to New Orleans is seen passing through Fraser on the north side of Memphis on Oct. 02, 1965.

Bill White Photo. Collection of Phil Gosney. (See Illinois Central Passenger Trains, Memphis, TN)

Middle: "African-American track workers labored long, hard hours. They were known as 'gandy dancers' and used rhythmic songs and chants to maintain motion and unity necessary to move sections of rail, hammer spikes, and perform other back-breaking labor to build our nation’s rails." (Photo and quote from B & O Railroad Museum, found on Pinterest.)

Lower: "Autumn Leave on Railroad Tracks" (Getty Images)

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