Sheila Curran Bernard's "Bring Judgment Day"

Sheila Curran Bernard is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, author, and educator. The recipient of an NEH Public Scholars award, she is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Bernard applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Bring Judgment Day falls partway through chapter 4, “1918: The State of Texas vs. Walter Boyd.” Boyd is an alias assumed by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as the musician Lead Belly. Page 99 finds him incarcerated near DeKalb, Texas. At the top of the page is a brief excerpt of two work songs, both of which describe men dying in the field under the brutal conditions of the Texas prison farm system, in which prisoners—a disproportionate number of them Black men—labored under the threat of violence from white overseers. In May 1920, this page reports, Ledbetter was transferred to a larger prison, the Imperial State Prison Farm (also known as Sugarland) near Houston. We learn that he and others, shackled together in groups of about thirty, were likely brought there by a longtime transfer agent named Bud Russell, who shows up in some versions of a song for which Lead Belly is famous, “The Midnight Special”:

“Yonder come Bud Russell.”
“How in de worl’ do you know?”
“Tell him by his big hat
An’ his 44.

He walked into de jail-house
Wid a gang o’ chains in his han’s;
I heard him tell de captain,
‘I’m de transfer man.’”

Once a site of enslavement and later of convict leasing, the prison at Sugarland stretched out over more than five thousand acres. Arriving there in 1920, “Walter Boyd” – Lead Belly – had twenty-eight years left in his sentence. He was thirty-one years old.

Page 99 is only partially representative of the book as a whole. It finds Lead Belly caught up in a system designed, in part, to crush Black Americans, particularly those who, like Lead Belly, were independent and ambitious. We see his agency in the defiant lyrics of work songs, but this page doesn’t capture the portrait of him overall that emerges in the book. It also doesn’t give readers a sense of the book’s narrative framework, the six months, from 1934 to 1935, in which Lead Belly traveled and worked with white folklorist John Lomax. It was Lomax who introduced Lead Belly to national audiences, emphasizing his prison record and portraying the musician as inherently violent and untamed. The book refutes this portrait, replacing legend with fact drawn from oral histories, land and census records, prison records and more.

Visit Sheila Curran Bernard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue