Roll of the Dice: Black Cowboys

“God bless Mommy. God bless Nanny. God, don’t punish me because I’m black.”

 

“Do they same prayer every night?” I ask their mother after she has tucked them in and closed their door. “Every night,” she answers.

 

“I wish that I could help them to get out of here,” says Mrs. Washington.

 

–Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

In 1995, author/educator/activist Jonathan Kozol published his award-winning, eye-opening, and heartbreaking book, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.

Kozol’s book took readers inside the poorest congressional district in the United States: the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, where almost one-third of its residents live in poverty and the median income is only $21,000 annually.

Mott Haven is also one of the most racially segregated neighborhoods in America: over 98% of its residents are people of color.

Amazing Grace unflinchingly reveals the non-stop assault of daily life on the residents of Mott Haven, examining social ills, tracing their causes and interrelations, and challenging popular myths about what keeps people anchored in poverty. The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996 for its contributions to the understanding of racism and human diversity.

But Kozol’s book is more than just a sociological treatise. It’s also a sensitive and re-humanizing introduction to a real-life cast that struggles to survive and provide the best life possible for the ones they love.

If Amazing Grace has central characters, they would be the Washington family: Alice, the matriarch, and her children and grandchildren who already show signs of the terrible toll exacted by institutional racism.

Married at 25, Alice was the victim of domestic abuse. After leaving her husband while in her thirties during the early days of the AIDS crisis, she learned she had contracted HIV from him. She’d always believed he’d at least been faithful to her. Now suffering from AIDS, her devoted son David, a high school senior, tends to her needs while Alice simply wishes her family could make the escape she couldn’t and can’t.

Amazing Grace made a lasting impression on its readers, one of whom was Bruce Springsteen.

Kozol’s book came out just as Bruce launched his tour in support of The Ghost of Tom Joad, and he likely read it along the early legs of the tour. Bruce was particularly moved by Alice and David’s mother-son relationship, and he found inspiration from it during late-night hotel room songwriting sessions.

By marrying Kozol’s themes with the Western  setting of his most recent material, Bruce created “Black Cowboys,” a bleak tale of the price of urban poverty and the power of a mother’s love, but with a redemptive ending that Kozol’s non-fiction was unable to provide.

After the tour ended in 1997, Bruce recorded several of the songs he’d written mid-tour–and then put them aside, his instincts telling him not to repeat himself so quickly. Whether “Black Cowboys” was one of those songs is something I’ve never seen or heard directly confirmed, but given its provenance and Bruce’s Joad-era vocal style, I think it’s highly likely.

In any event, when selecting songs for his 2005 Devils & Dust album (which did include several songs Bruce had written and recorded during that period), “Black Cowboys” was among the ones that made the cut.

Enhanced or re-recorded with a more lush palette and expansive soundstage than the Joad collection, “Black Cowboys” evokes a more cinematic experience compared to Joad’s campfire ambiance.

In “Black Cowboys,” Raney Williams proxies for David Washington; his mother Lynette stands in for Alice. Bruce sets his song in the same Mott Haven neighborhood where the Washingtons lived, employing imagery drawn directly from the book.

Raney Williams’ playground was the Mott Haven streets
Where he ran past melted candles and flower wreaths
Names and photos of young black faces
Whose death and blood consecrated these places

Raney’s mother said, “Raney stay at my side
For you are my blessing, you are my pride
It’s your love here that keeps my soul alive
I want you to come home from school and stay inside”

Bruce immediately establishes Raney’s fragile innocence. He is by no means sheltered–no one in Mott Haven ever could be–but the import of the photos of young faces vanished and gone doesn’t yet penetrate his worldview.

Raney’s mother understands though, and in a speech reminiscent of the one Bruce would write a few years later for the mother in “American Skin (41 Shots),” she begs her son to stay under her protection, unable to bear the thought of life without him

Raney lives in the aura of his mother’s love, thriving in his inner life if not his outer one.

Raney becomes fascinated with movies about the American West, whitewashed tales (like most American history books) scrubbed of references to Black cowboys and the roles they played. Recognizing the importance of having idols and role models who look like Raney, Lynette buys him books about the Black cowboys, stoking his dreams and hopes for as long as she can.

Raney’d do his work and put his books away
There was a channel showed a Western movie every day
Lynette brought him home books on the black cowboys of the Oklahoma range
The Seminole scouts that fought the tribes of the Great Plains

Summer come and the days grew long
Raney always had his mother’s smile to depend on
Along the street of stray bullets he made his way
To the warmth of her arms at the end of each day

On a diet of Westerns, books, warm summer days, and his mother’s devotion, Raney grows and matures, navigating and surviving the threats the street throws at him daily. The song’s backing track is lush and warm like summer here, similar to the idyllic flashback at the heart of “Reno.”

But now the song takes a turn. An ominous bass layer enters as summer turns to fall in a passage we might think serves only as transition if not for the biblical reference to Ezekiel’s vision.

Come the fall the rain flooded these homes
Here in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones
It fell hard and dark to the ground
It fell without a sound

In the Bible, Ezekiel is commanded by God to speak to a valley of dead, dry bones, and to promise the bones that new life for them is coming. By reference, Bruce implies that Mott Haven (or at least Raney’s experience of it) is that valley of dry bones, with Lynette’s love the divine source that promises escape and redemption.

But now the rain falls, and the valley is flooded, signifying that the flame of hope has been extinguished. Sure enough, Lynette’s attention is now divided. She becomes romantically involved with a new man, a hard man who makes his living dealing drugs on the street, hiding his goods and proceeds beneath the kitchen sink.

Lynette falls victim to the allure and easy access to the drugs. She becomes addicted (“lost in the days”), and grows haunted, distant and withdrawn. In a poignant but clever flourish, Bruce writes that Lynette’s smile is “dusted away,” a reference to the powdered drugs.

Lynette took up with a man whose business was the boulevard
Whose smile was fixed in a face that was never off guard
In the pipes ‘neath the kitchen sink his secrets he kept
In the day behind drawn curtains in Lynette’s bedroom he slept

Then she got lost in the days
The smile Raney depended on dusted away
The arms that held him were no more his home
He lay at night his head pressed to her chest listening to the ghost in her bones

Raney longs for his mother’s love and presence, and his devotion is unshaken. But Lynette is only a shell of the woman she once was. She’s failed her son.

So Raney honors his mother the best way he knows how: he follows the dreams she inspired and fed when she was at her best.

In the kitchen Raney slipped his hand between the pipes
From a brown bag pulled five hundred dollar bills and stuck it in his coat side
Stood in the dark at his mother’s bed
Brushed her hair and kissed her eyes

In the twilight Raney walked to the station along streets of stone
Through Pennsylvania and Ohio his train drifted on
Through the small towns of Indiana the big train crept
As he lay his head back on the seat and slept

He awoke and the towns gave way to muddy fields of green
Corn and cotton and an endless nothing in between
Over the rutted hills of Oklahoma the red sun slipped and was gone
The moon rose and stripped the earth to its bone

Using the hidden proceeds from the drugs that robbed him of his mother, Raney buys a train ticket, heads west and never looks back.

It would be an easy cliché for Bruce to end the song at the dawn of a new day, but he takes a more subtle route instead. Raney rouses from his weary sleep at twilight, the sun setting on his old life and the moon rising to stave off darkness and wash the landscape in a pale, dim light.

As the train (always a symbol in Springsteen’s work) carries Raney through the night, an endless expanse lies before him to the horizon. It’s at this point, as a clack-clack percussion enters the song, that we realize that Bruce has constructed the entire backing track to a train’s rhythm. We’ve been riding along with Raney in his escape since the song’s first measures. He hasn’t quite escaped Mott Haven’s gravitational pull yet, but we inherently sense that he will, thanks to the backing track, which reaches full bloom in the outro.

The American West of Raney’s books and movies beckons, and while we know the reality won’t match his imagination, that’s not what matters. His vision gives him a destination to seek and the determination to pursue it.

In the end, through the power of her love and the dreams she instilled in her son when he was young and she was true, Lynette was able to do for Raney what Alice wished she could do for her children and grandchildren: help them get out of Mott Haven.

Black Cowboys
Recorded: 1997-2004
Released: Devils & Dust (2005)
First performed: April 21, 2005 (Asbury Park, NJ)
Last performed: October 30, 2005 (Boston, MA)

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