Georgia Nigger

Southern Classics

by John Louis Spivak

Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang exposes the institutionalized system of sharecropping, debt peonage, and exorbitant chain gang sentences that trapped many southern black men in a cycle of labor exploitation. Spivak (1897–1981) gained unlikely access to chain gangs through the Georgia Prison Commission, and his book combines elements of muckraking reportage and proletarian fiction to offer a sensational and damning case for prison reform.

The plot follows David Jackson, the son of black sharecroppers, who is released from a chain gang then almost immediately re-arrested and bound over to a white planter as a peon. Jackson escapes peonage only to be arrested again as a vagrant and sentenced to another chain gang. He tries to escape again with the help of an older inmate, but they are both captured and suffer torturous punishments. Spivak's novel has merit both as revealing historical account of sharecropping and chain gangs and as a compelling literary allegory of an individual confronted by sweeping social forces.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

241 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1932

Reviews

[Jeff Eckert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this after reading the Pulitzer Prize winner Slavery By Another Name, a searing history of the treatment of African-Americans in the South in the early 20th century. This fictional account of men on a Georgia chain gang is a brutal inditement of the treatment of African-American men in this same time frame. At points hard to read in its graphic depictions, the characters are well-drawn and draw the reader into their painful stories.

[Nancy Chambers · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brutal book to read. Not a bedtime story. It is like the story of the Indian reservation in Days of Destruction and Days of Revolt. Tragic circumstances and amazing what the human body can endure. And how cruel men are a d how easily they can dehumanize people.

[audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An undeniably powerful book it's impossible to like. Review to come.

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOTE: This is a verbatim reproduction of my original Amazon review. As I don't know if "goodreads" follows Amazon's same censorship policy, I'll let the embedded critique stand.

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I'll only give it four stars because this is not a story or subject to "love." In the 1930s genre of social realist fiction John Spivak's book ranks with "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" or "The Grapes of Wrath" in depicting the American underclass trapped in medieval poverty and injustice. That it was not the subject of a motion picture version and was lost to literary history comes largely from its original title of "Georgia African-American” ;) (See below) (Let's see if this make it past our socially correct Amazon censor/filters, which will prove the point.) (NOTE: It did not. Point proven. See appendix below.) The "N word" is inseparable from the conditions it portrays and its reception by US literary history reflects the general American squeamishness over its racial heritage. (Which continues. See below).

That said, the conditions endured by the central character of "David" are accurate enough, substantiated by decades of direct observation by locals and Federal investigators alike. Slavery-parallel circumstances were still common enough, even into the post-WW I era (see Douglas A. Blackmon's "Slavery By Another Name" for a recent historiography.) The chain gang system is still associated with the 1930s South thanks to this genre, but in truth the system was by then on its way out thanks in no small measure to such publicity. A word on this Southern exposure is worth exploring.

John L. Spivak (no known relation to the NBC "Meet the Press" commentator) was a member of the Communist Party USA whose career ranged from early exposes of 1930s European fascism, ending in pseudonymous soft porn in mens' pulp magazines of the McCarthy era. In the early 30s, one of the Party's prime publicity concerns was to counter the charges of forced labor in the USSR being leveled by the British Anti-Slavery Society, among others. Comintern instructions were to publish counter-exposes of forced labor in Liberia on US rubber plantations, in the Philippines, and in works like Walter Wilson's "Forced Labor in the United States" by International Publishers in 1933.

Perhaps the difference in a single photograph can sum this concern: the photograph "The Georgia Rack," appearing on p. 270, in Appendix One of the University of South Carolina Press edition, does not show the prison warden as appearing in the photo of the original International Publishers' pamphlet, "On the Chain Gang." That this is the same photo is apparent on closer examination. Given the position of other subjects in the photo, the likely explanation is that the warden's image was superimposed on the original negative for the pamphlet, while the untouched picture appeared in the book. This sleight of hand is a small but pointed example of the propaganda wars behind the scenes of its basic subject. But this political context does not detract from the social realism, accuracy or literary merit of this book: the prisoner in the photograph was being brutally, whipped as shown in the original, no matter the later editing.

The novel's dialogue is written in somewhat contrived dialect transliteration, and while somewhat annoying for the modern reader it does lend a certain tangy naturalism to the text. Worth a look by students of the time, place, and "forgotten" American literature.

APPENDIX:
email received upon initial posting --
“Your review could not be posted.
Thanks for submitting a customer review on Amazon. Your review could not be posted to the website in its current form. While we appreciate your time and comments, reviews must adhere to the following guidelines:
http://www.amazon.com/review-guidelines”

Even though said offensive content is posted on the book’s page as part of the title! Amazon, you are a collection of spineless white pseudo-liberal cowards.

[Michael C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A chilling account of the exploitation of Black people in the 1st half of the 20th century. The cruelty and inhumanity that was so widespread has been glossed over in the sanitized version of American history that has been approved for the public education of our youth.
This is the result of a brave and very skillful journalist's efforts to discover and confront the horrors that were so prevalent. What he encountered surely affected him for the rest of his life.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing resource on what chain gangs were like, incestuous rural governance, black southern experience in New South, and cracker governance.