Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents an excerpt from a article in Roots about the sinking of the Titanic, boxer Jack Johnson, and the fictional Black anti-hero Shine.
The content of this post is presented for historical and cultural purposes.
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Thanks to the author of this article and thanks to all those who are quoted in this article.
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ARTICLE EXCERPT
From https://www.theroot.com/was-a-black-man-on-the-titanic-1790899141 "Was a Black Man on the Titanic?" by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 12/02/13
When the Titanic went down on April 15, 1912, African Americans mourned for the dead, but not believing they included any of their own. As the story went, Jim Crow had unwittingly prevented the taking of black lives in a year otherwise marred by more than 60 lynchings on shore.
[...]
Assuming blacks had had no history with the Titanic, or in its sinking, African Americans did what they do best: they improvised one. After all, the sinking of the Titanic was the most sensationalized news story in a year that had also seen the Balkan states attack the Turkish empire, the Manchu dynasty in China fall and the election of Woodrow Wilson as United States president. “It was not only the multitude of victims that made the catastrophe so overwhelmingly sad,” the Washington Post said in its year-in-review on December 29, 1912, “but the character and importance of many of those who sank.”
Character and importance? Statements like this last one practically dared African Americans to insert themselves into the Titanic narrative. So, putting a black face on the absurd and unexpected consequences of Jim Crow laws, they claimed their own Jack Johnson. The most famous prize-fighter of the day, a black man who had clobbered “The Great White Hope” and been vilified for his three white wives, was supposed to have been on Titanic—and would have been, had the captain not spotted him at the door and barred him because he was black.
It didn’t matter that Johnson was actually in the U.S. when the Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, as Robert Weisbord chronicles in “Black American Perceptions of the Titanic Disaster” in the Winter 1994 edition of Journal of Popular Culture. Johnson fit the narrative black folks needed: He could have afforded the ticket, he was as famous as any other man on board, and he was black.
“Jack Johnson doesn’t have to fight to keep his name in the newspapers,” the Chicago Defender editorialized two bullets down from its Titanic news flash on April 20, 1912. “The reporters seem to be so eager for news that they chronicle every move he makes, private or otherwise. It must be great to be great.” Though still separate news stories that day, it didn’t take long for Jack Johnson and the Titanic to become one.
In fact, that very year Johnson found his way into a folk song made famous by the great bluesman Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly.” He called it “Titanic,” and in his “Last Sessions,” recorded in New York City in 1948, he explained how he and Blind Lemon Jefferson used to sing it differently depending on the color of the audience. But to Lead Belly, it was—at least he wanted us to believe it was—“the true story,” and he located it in time by adding, “It was the first song I learned to play on a 12-string guitar, 1912.” Here are the “controversial” lyrics (as sung, minus the repeats):
Jack Johnson wanted to get on board,
Captain he says, “I ain’t haulin’ no coal!”
Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well! …
(Jack Johnson so glad he didn’t get on there.)
When he heard about that mighty shock,
Mighta seen the man turn the Eagle Rock.
Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!
The key to Lead Belly’s legend was that it reinforced what many African Americans already felt: that even Jack Johnson—a fighter who, in 1912, represented the race like no other—had (or would have) been snubbed as just another piece of “coal,” so that he (and they) were justified in laughing last when the Titanic went down.
Shine and the Titanic
Perhaps even more popular was the figure of Shine, a legendary trickster troped on in signifying rituals such as the and toasts, running the gamut from the clean to the profane in black barbershops and clubs across America. “Shine,” as a name, may have started out as one of the many names white racists used to insult dark-complexioned black people, but in the legend that African Americans invented, he was a bad-ass hero. Shine wasn’t bounced like Jack Johnson from the Titanic’s passenger list like a piece of “coal,” but hired to shovel it way down in the ship’s boiler room.
Langston Hughes captured the oral tradition surrounding Shine in his piece for the Chicago Defender on July 18, 1953, noting that the Titanic was hot again with the release of a new Hollywood film (called Titanic, it starred Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck). In Hughes’ column, which he titled “When the Titanic Went Down Legend Says a Negro Was There,” he recalled how he’d been but a boy in Kansas in 1912 but “remember[ed] the old folks talking about it and how, ‘Thank God, there were no Negroes on that ship,’ since they drew the color line and the white folks wouldn’t let them ride, so they said.” But, Hughes quickly added, “folklore has it otherwise.
“For most of my adult life,” Hughes explained, “I have been hearing every now and then among the joke tellers, some long-rhymed version about the Negro who saved his life, not by jumping into a life-boat, with the women and children, but by swimming ashore.” And, “[l]ike all folk things,” Hughes wrote, “this story varies in the telling from place to place and person to person.” Which was why Hughes asked his readers to send him their versions. To melt the ice, Hughes printed what he’d already collected.
It was 1912 when the news got
around
That the great Titanic was going
down.
Shine came running up on deck
and told the Captain, “Please,
The water in the boiler room is
up to my knees.”
Captain said, “You better take
your black self back down there!
I got a hundred fifty pumps to
keep the boiler room clear.”
When he was up to his neck in water, however ...
Shine said, “Your words sound
happy and your words sound
true.
But this is one time your word
won’t do.
Because I don’t like chicken and
I don’t like ham—
And I don’t believe your pumps
are worth a damn.”
Swimming away, Shine refused to turn back for even the most lucrative offers from those on board, including the captain, who, by then, knew he’d been wrong.
When all them white folks went
to heaven
Shine was in Sugar Ray’s in Har-
lem drinking Seagrams Seven.
Hughes did a good job of giving the Shine toasts a bath for the Defender’s middle-class readers. For the authentic, canonical versions of the toast, check out the 10 that the folklorist Bruce Jackson collected in his 1974 book, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me. These are the classic X-rated renditions of the toast, especially one from Ellis Tom, that Jackson recorded on March 25, 1966.
The basic arc of Shine’s escape is similar in the various versions of the toasts that Jackson collected, but with lots of play in who on board the Titanic is doing the begging for Shine to save them, and what they offer Shine in return, ranging from sex to marriage to fabulous wealth. In Mack’s version, recorded in Jefferson City on June 24, 1964, for example, we see an allusion by the captain to the founder of the Rockefeller dynasty:
Shine jumped in the water and commenced to swim,
four thousand millionaires watchin’ him.
Captain say, “Shine, Shine, save poor me,
I’ll make you richer than old John D.”
Shine turned around and took another notion.
Say, “Captain, your money’s counterfeit in this big-assed ocean.”
Thanks to scholars such as Roger Abrahams, Bruce Jackson, and my departed friend, Larry Neal, Shine will always continue to live—and swim—on, and the toasts to him, Neal wrote in his afterword to the 1968 Black Fire: An Anthology of Black Writing (co-edited with Amiri Baraka), are “part of the private mythology of Black America. [The] symbolism is direct and profound. Shine is US.”
Tracing the Shine legend for the Washington Post, Dana Hull noted in the Dec. 20, 1997 edition how its “smug satisfaction that the Titanic—a symbol of white European arrogance and affluence—sank in its maiden voyage” flowed from the “irony that African Americans were not allowed to make the crossing—thus sparing their lives.” ...
-snip-
This article documents that a Black man - a well to do Haitian Black man Joseph Laroche was aboard the Titanic when it sank. Laroche was married to a White French woman. They and their two children were passengers on the Titanic (Mrs. Laroche was pregnant at that time). When the Titanic hit the iceberg, Joseph Laroche was able to get his family into a life boat, but he perished along with many other men.
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