Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
118
Cars, Commercials, and Crime
The 1920s started in 1919 and have not really stopped. They are movies with
sound—“talkies”; women in pants or short dresses smoking cigarettes in bars
with men, laughing and teasing, not giving an inch; state work crews spreading
asphalt over mountain passes and along Main Street, followed not ten feet
behind by herds of honking, puttering motorists—and women are driving,
cigarettes in hand. The 1920s are commercial radio; black jazz men jazzing up
white-only dance halls; Ku Klux Klan rallies in the heart of Washington, DC;
race riots in big cities; debates about the benefits and dangers of immigration,
leading to immigration restriction; fear of communism and interest in com-
munism;
fear of difference and exaggeration of difference; fundamentalist
Christians challenging the teaching of evolution in public schools; national
surveys and sociological studies of every habit, curiosity, peccadillo, belief,
and disbelief of the American people; mass marketing campaigns designed
to create brand image, brand recognition, and brand affiliation for cigarettes
(“Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet”), for cars (“Buy a Ford and Spend
the Difference”), for mouthwash (“Often a Bridesmaid but Never a Bride”),
and for every other product on the market whose backers had enough money
to pay for ads. Advertising agencies themselves developed aggressive tech-
niques,
seeking to scare, shame, or scam shoppers. Here was the new motto
of selling: “Advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode
of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not
as profitable as discontented ones.”
1
What better symbol for the discontented
masses than a customer having a nicotine fit every ten minutes?
The 1920s were standardized: racks of clothes in uniform sizes, with
uniform stitches, made in uniform factories with more machines and fewer
workers than before; planned suburban matrixes of look-alike houses, sheathed
in exact-cut squares of plywood, spreading out like a cartographic virus from
the fast-growing industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest; cigarettes spill-
ing
in the billions from the metal mouths of the third-largest industry in the
United States—giant tobacco; Ford Motor Company’s Model T’s sputtering
from the gates of the River Rouge factory-city in Michigan—every Model T
in one easy-to-spray, fast-to-dry color: black. Ford’s assembly-line produc-
tion
system was so well standardized that by 1927 a new car came rolling out
every twenty-seven seconds. Henry Ford, a former farm boy with a flair for
mechanics and business, knew exactly how to tame the cost of automobiles
while increasing his profits: “The way to make automobiles is to make one
automobile just like another automobile; to make them all alike, to make them
come through the factory just alike, just as one pin is like another pin when
it comes from a pin factory.”
2
119
THE 1920S
In the 1920s, gangs and gangsters smuggled bootlegged booze in hollowed-
out cavities underneath rear-facing rumble seats. Al Capone captured the dual
American fascination with well-dressed lawless millionaires being chased
by law enforcement officials eminently less interesting but necessary all the
same. But did the very process of making a law—Prohibition and its Volstead
Act—also create a new criminal class and hence the need for a new kind of
cop? Could a law create crime?
I
n the 1920s, prominent scientists advocated eugenics, the “improvement”
of the species by sterilizing supposedly inferior people. Twenty-seven state
governments established programs to forcibly sterilize epileptics, the retarded,
and the mentally ill. In 1927, for example, the state of Indiana passed a law
empowering hospital superintendents, with the approval of a review board,
to “sexually sterilize” anyone “feeble-minded” or epileptic. This surgery
was supposedly done in the “best interests” of the individual and of society.
3
(Later, in the 1970s, doctors sterilized more than 3,000 Native American
women in the hospital after childbirth, but without the benefit of a review
board and not because of any feeble-mindedness. The surgeries were paid
for with federal dollars. “The women widely reported being threatened with
the loss of welfare benefits or custody of their children unless they submitted
to sterilization.”
4
) In 1927, the Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in
order to protect future generations from what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
called “the transmission of insanity, imbecility, &c.” Holmes added that the
welfare of society would be promoted through selective sterilization because
“feeble minded” people “sap[ped] the strength of the State.”
5
And there was Henry Ford behind much of it, if only accidentally: bored by
the boondocks, Ford helped to perpetuate and exaggerate the modern indus-
trial
city, whose noise, congestion, racy dancing, and racy women he feared.
Though an advocate of Prohibition, he sold cars that got turned into rolling
liquor stores. A believer in sexual modesty, he sponsored square dances, but
customers necked at lookout points in his rolling motels. A hater of Jews, he
published anti-Semitic diatribes that became popular reading for KKK mem-
bers
and even for a distant madman, Adolf Hitler, who was equally impressed
by Ford’s attitude toward Jews and by the U.S. eugenics programs. Hitler kept
a copy of some of Ford’s anti-Semitic writing on his desk.
In the 1920s, it was as if a second Pandora’s box had been discovered, and
from inside its hidden dark leaped fads, styles, entertainers, and entertainments:
each bearing two faces, one horrifying and one enchanting. Americans kicked
up farm dirt with gas-powered harvesters and reapers, kicked up their heels
in speakeasy nightclubs, and kicked up a fuss about what the people on the
other side of the cultural dividing line were (or were not) doing. The 1920s
have not ended because we have not answered the questions that got asked
AMERICAN STORIES
120
and we have not stopped enjoying the fast cars, the soothing voices of gor-
geous actors, or the tempting wink of corporate money and its never-ending
array of the new-and-improved.
Al Capone:
The Powers of Money
In 1919, Prohibition became the law of the land, established by the Eighteenth
Amendment to the Constitution, backed up by the Volstead Act. This was the
last dry gasp of the Protestant reformers whose Victorian predecessors had
merely urged moderation; banning alcohol would not have been practical in
previous centuries when many municipal water supplies were full of harm-
ful
bacteria and a “tumbler of whiskey” was a common breakfast beverage.
6
Now, however, it was illegal to make, transport, or sell liquor, beer, hooch,
moonshine, rotgut, demon rum, spirits, booze—or whatever an indulger pre-
f
erred to call the stuff—in concentrations greater than 0.5 percent alcohol. But
with more than half the nation enjoying the fantasy at the bottom of a bottle,
it would take more than an amendment, a law, and a few thousand enforce-
ment
officers to stop the masses from drinking, particularly when there was
so much money to be made.
B
rewers, vintners, bartenders, bar owners, investors, and the teamsters who
hauled the booze: these people represented more than a sliver of the economy,
and when enforcement officers opened a keg of whiskey with a hatchet, a lot
of people stood to lose out. And it was not just sooty coal miners and singed
steel workers—drudges without much political clout—who wanted to relax
with a drink at the end of a day. Mayors, governors, police chiefs, bankers
. . . men and women from every class, career, and neighborhood wanted what
the law said they could not have.
Fewer
people were drinking beer or sipping martinis now that Magistrate
Prohibition sat at the bench, but the numbers of drinkers had not fallen much.
In New York City, the legal bars and saloons closed their doors in January
1920, but twice the number of speakeasies (about 5,000) opened in basements
and back rooms. Illegality provided a new thrill that doubled the pleasure
of a drink. Risking the danger of arrest, being allowed into a club only with
the secret password, associating with the criminal element: all of it electri-
fied
the alcohol molecules, made the Manhattan a little sweeter, got the feet
shimmying to the crazy swing of the Charleston. Skinny flappers with beads
and skirts racing to the knees slid and stepped to the hottest tune in town, in
any town:
Y
ou may not be able to buck or wing
Fox-trot, two-step, or even sing,
121
THE 1920S
If you ain’t got religion in your feet
You can do this prance and do it neat
Charleston! Charleston!
7
It was fun to be bad—always had been—but now the law had given fun an
extra twist of lemon. Besides, few of those charged under the Volstead Act
spent more than a night in jail—in New York City alone, 7,000 arrests took
place between 1921 and 1923, leading to only twenty-seven convictions.
Odds were that you could buy a drink or deliver one and suffer nothing for
your crime. Knowing—or owning—the right people made prison an even less
likely scenario. Al Capone owned all the right people in Chicago.
Gangsters and organized crime were nothing new. In every major city where
jobs were hard to come by and immigrant groups clustered together in their
own neighborhoods, young men formed gangs for mutual protection: Italians,
Sicilians, Jews, Irish, African-Americans, and more. The Irish “micks” and
the Italian “wops” tended to be Catholic, a religion still mistrusted throughout
the United States, almost as detested as the ever-misunderstood and falsely
maligned Jewish “kikes” and African-American “niggers,” as their antagonists
called them. In fact, by 1925—when the Ku Klux Klan underwent such a re-
s
urgence that about 5 million white Protestant males were members (especially
active in Indiana and Oregon)
8
—Catholics and Jews had to withstand abuse
and ridicule right alongside African-Americans. Fear, hatred, and bigotry
were rampant in the resurrected Klan—America’s biggest gang—that tried
to defend the nation from the sin of not being the right kind of white. Some
gangs started out as social clubs, but metastasized into knots of brawlers and
petty thieves; new members got inducted into a preexisting association of
violence and crime. It can be no coincidence that “vicious” and “vice” come
from the same root word.
Alphonse
Capone was born in 1899 in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood of
New York City and earned his own reputation for nasty valor. His mother and
father were working poor, his father a barber, and Capone found that a strong
jaw, meaty fists, and a flexible conscience opened certain business opportuni-
ties.
Expelled from school for hitting his teacher, he ran the neighborhood
pool tables, worked as strong-arm bartender, and joined the infamous Five
Pointsers gang. Capone showed loyalty and no compunction about violence,
whether taken or given. While still in his teens, he reputedly killed more than
one man and took a knife cut to the face—leaving him with a permanent scar
and a nickname to match, “Scarface.” Capone appreciated the man who cut
him, Frank Galluccio, more than he appreciated the nickname. He later hired
Galluccio as a bodyguard, but hid the scar with makeup and always tried to
have photographs taken from his left side.
AMERICAN STORIES
122
John Torrio watched the young tough grow up. Born in 1882 in Naples,
Italy, Torrio—short and slender—had a brilliant mind for planning and orga-
nization
and was the nephew of “Big Jim” Colosimo, the rising crime boss
of Chicago, who fed meatballs and wine to every bigwig felon and politician
in the city (two groups whose only difference was in name). By 1919, Tor-
rio
had permanently relocated to Chicago, and when he invited Capone to
come too, there was no hesitation. Capone had a new wife and baby and an
impending murder charge hanging over his head. Untold murder, mayhem,
and money waited.
P
rior to national Prohibition, more than half the states had passed their own
laws banning alcohol, which meant organized criminals got a new market to
add to their ongoing operations in gambling, theft, graft, prostitution, and
killing and hurting for hire. Some enforcers printed lists of their charges for
different types of punishment: five dollars for a punch in the face, 100 dol-
lars
for a “whacking.” Of all these crimes, prostitution drew the most citizen
outrage during the progressive years around the turn of the century, and in
1910 the Mann Act made it illegal to transport a woman across state lines for
any “immoral” purpose. Nevertheless, a pimp or a madam could have money
and clout. When John Torrio’s uncle, Big Jim Colosimo, was gunned down
in his own restaurant in 1920, he received a king’s funeral, described here
by historian Laurence Bergreen: “Colosimo was universally recognized as
Chicago’s premier pimp, yet his honorary pallbearers included three judges,
a congressman, an assistant state attorney, and no less than nine Chicago
aldermen.”
9
The attendance of lawmakers and law enforcers is even more
startling given Colosimo’s business methods. He and pimps like him regu-
larly
lured girls and young women into applying for other kinds of jobs, like
maid services, and then had the girls locked away and gang-raped as a way
of “breaking them in” for prostitution. After Colosimo was murdered, Tor-
rio
ran his brothels. Although Torrio himself did not personally do anything
violent—his wife considered him a doting, faithful, and gentle husband—he
had others to do his dirty work for him. There was serious money to be made,
more than $100,000 per month from prostitution alone just in Torrio’s brothels,
with some prostitutes costing two dollars for every five minutes. As in any
business structure, that money got handed out to necessary associates: pros-
ecuting
attorneys, mayors, judges, and police. Local officials’ susceptibility
to tainted money and threats meant that the diamond-studded gangsters of
Chicago could get away with murder and face little chance of prosecution. In
fact, during the 1920s, “Chicago was the scene of nearly five hundred gang-
related killings. Not one murderer was brought to trial.”
10
In the mid-1920s, Calvin Coolidge was president, and he spoke for a lot of
Americans when he said, “The chief business of the American people is busi-
123
THE 1920S
ness.”
11
Corporate profits were soaring. Warehouses, stores, and showrooms
were overstocked with merchandise: radios, dishwashers, refrigerators, dozens
of brands of blue jeans (Levi’s, Lee’s, Carharrt, and Osh Kosh B’Gosh, to
name a few), and a range of automobiles in a range of colors, thanks to Gen-
eral
Motors, which outflanked one-model-fits-all Ford by offering choices.
Much—including investments in the form of company stocks—could now
be had on credit, which made the decade’s prosperity seem more certain than
it was. President Coolidge probably did not have Al Capone’s new brothels
or breweries in mind when he said, “The man who builds a factory builds
a temple.”
12
But Al Capone could still try to improve his public image by
making his name synonymous with the respectable high life: jazz at the Cot-
ton
Club, appearances at the opera, donations to the sick and needy. Capone
opened a three-meal-a-day soup kitchen in 1930 to feed the hordes of men
made unemployed by the settling Depression. Americans generally understood
that wealthy businessmen made money by paying others to do their work, but
illusions of fairness, equity, and decency were necessary to keep capitalism as
the dominating force in national life. Few newspaper readers wanted to pick
through stories about the falling wages of coal miners (down by one-fourth
over the decade), the sinking fortunes of farmers (who earned on average 70
percent less than a city worker by the end of the decade), or the desperate
plight of most Native Americans living on reservations (almost three-fourths
of whom lived on about $200 per year, far below the poverty line, which was
$2,500 per year for a family of four). Al Capone’s operations took in $165
million in 1927 alone.
13
But rather than irking people outside his ring of
cronies and satisfied customers, newspaper stories about Capone’s opulent
downtown business suite in a grand hotel fueled the capitalist fantasy: life
was swingin’ and it was fun to watch the fat cats swing.
A more popular big man known for his literal swing, for his swat, for his
bashes, for his out-of-control-but-adored-all-the-same style, for his charity to
children and children’s causes, and especially for his 714 home runs that sent
balls halfway to the moon (and sometimes through the windows of houses that
neighbored the ball park) was Babe Ruth. Where Capone broke bones with
a bat (three people’s in a single evening), the Babe broke records—passing
the previous total of 138 career home runs early in his career. Where Capone
made $1 million selling beer and women’s bodies, the Babe brought more
than 1 million visitors to the Yankees’ stadium in 1921, yet another record.
Babe Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat,” “the Behemoth of Bust,” could eat three raw
steaks in one night. He could flip his convertible without injury and go to jail
for speeding in his twelve-cylinder auto-rocket at 11 in the morning and
still
make the second half of a game by 4:45. The Babe could steal third base, get
an infected elbow from the slide, and then play two more games in the series
AMERICAN STORIES
124
with a tube on his elbow draining away the pus from his swollen, blue arm.
He could hit a home run with only one hand on the bat and strike out Ty Cobb
when the Yankees pitching lineup tired out. Babe Ruth did what he wanted,
when he wanted, and how he wanted no matter how much his coaches, han-
dlers,
and managers tried to say otherwise. A fellow Yankee whom Ruth was
supposedly rooming with on the road said, in answer to whether the Babe was
in fact his roommate, “I don’t room with him. I room with his suitcase.”
14
The
Los Angeles Times proclaimed Ruth America’s national hero in 1921, the year
sports writers dubbed the Yankees’ hitting lineup “Murderer’s Row.” When a
62,000-seat coliseum, Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923, some 74,000 people
attended on opening day and watched Ruth clock a homer, a present to the
nation. As the sportswriter Heywood Broun said of Ruth in 1923 in the New
York World, “The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail.”
15
This was one year before
newspapers first spotlighted Al Capone in a less-than-flattering way.
Unfortunately for Capone, gangsters and dead bodies went together like
bullets in a tommy gun (the murder machine of choice for 1920s gangsters,
able to fire 1,000 .45-caliber slugs per minute). Capone’s reputation as a “mil-
lionaire
gorilla”
16
stemmed largely from a series of brutal and public killings.
In 1924, Capone and Torrio had to find new ground for their operations because
Chicagoans elected a moral-minded mayor whose idea of reform included
shutting down brothels and breweries. Like other entrepreneurs looking to
urban sprawl for new customers and revenue, Chicago’s gangsters searched
for a promising nearby town they could “develop.” These gun-slinging small
businessmen without licenses or tax records chose Cicero, Illinois, a sleepy
town with few people and lots of room to expand. To ensure that Cicero’s
Capone-friendly mayor got reelected, Capone and more than 100 goons
stormed Cicero on Election Day, literally filling out citizen’s ballots for
them—at gunpoint—and watching the ballots drop into the boxes. Anybody
with an attitude got a readjustment, courtesy of Capone and free of charge,
unlike most of his services. Police from outlying towns, including Chicago, got
called in to stop the violence. One of Capone’s brothers died in a shoot-out, and
Capone himself was seen blazing away at the cops. Capone threw a gangster’s
funeral for his brother—replete with $10,000 flower bouquets—and his own
face, now synonymous with death and corruption, showed up in newspapers.
After Johnny Torrio’s near-assassination in 1925, Capone took over control
of the operations. From that point until 1928, when he bought a mansion in
Miami, Florida, and went into semiretirement, Capone continued to consoli-
date his control, which involved the usual palette of blood and money.
E
lection rigging, bootlegging, pimping, and general hooliganism kept
Capone in serge and satin suits. But try as they might, local prosecutors
could not keep Capone in jail, regardless of how many concealed weapons
125
THE 1920S
arrests they made. The man was untouchable. Back in 1913, however, the
Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution had been ratified, permitting the
federal government to tax people’s income. A final slipup on Capone’s part
prodded President Herbert Hoover to tackle the thick-necked gangster with
a squad of pencil pushers. In 1929, Capone ordered the murder of his last
remaining Chicago competition, a gangster named George “Bugs” Moran.
On Saint Valentine’s Day, four hired gunmen—two dressed as police—shot
and killed seven of Moran’s henchmen, though Moran himself avoided the
ambush. The grisly murder scene, replete with rivulets of thick-pooled blood,
was captured in photographs and national news stories. President Hoover
set federal bloodhounds loose on Capone’s trail. If they could not get him
on murder charges, they would look into his tax records, or lack of records.
Capone had made millions, but had never given Uncle Sam his cut.
Eliot
Ness and Elmer Irey, a Prohibition enforcer and a taxman, a cop and
an accountant, drove a truck, literally, right through the heart of Al Capone’s
alcohol empire. Ness—with his short, dark hair parted down the middle and
slicked to a sheen—looked mild-mannered but acted every bit as tough as
Capone. Ness raided breweries, documenting Capone’s misdeeds as he went
along. Once, in the mood to sting Capone, Ness arranged to have all Capone’s
impounded distribution trucks driven slowly past his downtown headquarters.
Ness called Capone ahead of time and told him to look out his windows at
eleven o’clock sharp, when, sure enough, the confiscated fleet passed by as
planned. The sting stung, and Capone thrashed his office in a rage. As Time
magazine
put it in 1948, Elmer Irey “wasn’t a lawyer, he wasn’t a detective,
and he wasn’t physically tough,”
17
but he was smart enough to do the math
in ledgers seized from Capone’s premises—numbers that added up (at an
obvious bare minimum) to $200,000 in unpaid taxes. Luckily, the Supreme
Court ruled in 1927 that the federal government could take tax dollars from
businesses, like brothels and bars, which were not even supposed to legally
exist. With statutes of limitations for tax evasion running out, Irey brought
Capone to trial in 1931, and although Capone bribed the jury ahead of time,
the judge switched juries on the first day of the trial, leading to easy convic-
tions
and a sentence of eleven years. Capone served out his term first in an
Atlanta penitentiary and then on Alcatraz Island from 1934 until he was
released in 1939.
I
f Capone had been convicted 200 years earlier, he would have been hanged
in front of a crowd or whipped 500 times. But this was 1931, and the United
States had developed a system of penitentiaries—walled, guarded, dreary
places where lawbreakers were sent to be punished and, it was hoped, reha-
bilitated
if they were not to be locked away for life. No more eye for an eye,
tooth for a tooth: retribution had now become a year for a lie, a cell for a kill.
AMERICAN STORIES
126
In fact, according to author Cyndi Banks, after 150 years of experimenting with
types of prisons and rationales for incarceration, in 1929 “the Federal Bureau
of Prisons declared rehabilitation to be the fundamental aim and purpose.”
18
Sociologists and psychologists had been arguing for thirty years that crime
had identifiable causes and that people who had broken the law could still be
brought back inside the ranks of the lawful. Through rigid discipline, exposure
to religious teachings, an imposed work ethic, some book learning, and the
general atmosphere of industrial habits, the criminal and the troubled were
to be taught how to behave better, how to follow rules at least. Capone was
the first notorious inmate doing time in America’s first war on drugs, though
it was not called that at the time. Al Capone would have broken the law even
without Prohibition, even without the Volstead Act, and in fact he served out
his term on Alcatraz after Prohibition got repealed in 1933 because the federal
government had convicted him for taxes, not bottles.
At
the end of his trial, as Capone was being escorted out of the courtroom,
he and Eliot Ness confronted each other. “Well, I’m on my way to do eleven
years,” Capone said. “I’ve got to do it, that’s all. I’m not sore at anybody.
Some people are lucky. I wasn’t. There was too much overhead in my busi-
n
ess anyhow, paying off all the time and replacing trucks and breweries. They
ought to make it legitimate.”
Ness
replied to the suddenly philosophical Capone, “If it was legitimate,
you certainly wouldn’t want anything to do with it.”
19
After being released from prison a year early for good behavior, Capone
lived out eight more years in a semidelusional state of mind caused by end-
stage syphilis, which he had contracted before getting married back in his
Brooklyn days. As New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin reminds us, more came
from Capone’s life than flashy stories and corpses. As part of the effort to nail
him, a doctor named Calvin Goddard figured out how to use a comparison
microscope to compare bullets:
In 1929, [Goddard] analyzed bullets collected at the site of the St. Valentine’s
Day massacre . . . Goddard test-fired all eight machine guns owned by the
Chicago police and found no match with the bullets used in the crime. Two
years later, he examined two submachine guns retrieved from the home
of Fred Burke, a sometime hit man for Al Capone, Moran’s great rival.
Goddard pronounced Burke’s guns the murder weapons, and the feat so
impressed local leaders that they established a crime lab, the nation’s first,
and installed Goddard as its director.
20
From the capture of one of America’s greatest criminals came the techniques
used to catch future generations of gunmen and outlaws. Interestingly, when
127
THE 1920S
Al Capone was still a boy, his oldest brother ran away from home. His name
was James, and after years in the circus and working with Native Americans
in the West, he became a Prohibition agent, just like Eliot Ness. Although
James Capone did not work on his infamous brother’s case, James did visit
Al the year before his death.
Zora Neale Hurston:
The Harlem Renaissance,
American Letters, and the Gr
eat Migration
Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography was titled Dust Tracks on a Road,
21
but
it could just as easily have been called Laughing at Me, Laughing at You, or
maybe just Laughing. As for dust tracks on a road, that was the anthem of
colored people in the late 1800s and well into the 1900s: by some estimates,
as many as 2 million African-Americans migrated from the South to the North
between 1890 and 1930. Hurston was one of them.
Born
in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, but raised in Eatonville, Florida, an
“exclusively colored town,” Zora soaked in every oleander blossom, each
family squabble, all the drops of her Mama’s love, and turned the whole
tangled lot into stories. Her father, John, was a gypsy-minded carpenter and
preacher who doted on his first daughter, Sarah, yet resented Zora because
two daughters were one too many. “Of course,” she wrote, “by the time I got
born, it was too late to make any suggestions, so the old man had to put up with
me. He was nice about it in a way. He didn’t tie me in a sack and drop me in
the lake, as he probably felt like doing.” But John Hurston generally did well
by the family, providing an eight-room house, a barn, five acres, and plenty
of food for all seven children. Hurston’s mother, Lucy, was an understanding
ally: “Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’
We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” The
launch pad for Hurston’s flights of fancy was Joe Clarke’s store, which beat
out the two churches—one Baptist, one Methodist—as the social club for men
in tiny Eatonville. On a hot Florida afternoon, men would gather in the shade
of an awning, and Zora loved nothing better than “to hear . . . menfolks hold-
ing
a ‘lying’ session. That is, straining against each other in telling folk tales.
God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Tiger, Buzzard,
and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men.” Sent to get sugar
or coffee from the store, Zora would linger as long as possible to listen to the
adventures of Brer Rabbit until the sound of her mother’s voice piped up over
the mens’: “‘You Zora-a-a! If you don’t come here, you better!’ That had a
promise of peach hickories in it, and I would have to leave.”
O
ften at home also was an ex-slave maternal grandmother who had a punish-
i
ng mind about her, especially regarding what she perceived as lying. For Zora,