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BOOK REVIEW | MOVIES | BLACK HISTORY

Stagger Lee and the ‘Erasure’ of

Middle-Class African Americans
What better time than Black History Month to talk about Jeffrey
Wright’s hit movie ‘American Fiction’ and the very bad nigga at the
center of the story.

Andrew Jazprose Hill · Follow

Published in Momentum · 6 min read · Feb 5, 2024

4.2K 64
 Photo of Actor Jeffrey Wright by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

S tagger Lee shot Billy. He shot that poor boy so bad that the bullet went right
through Billy and broke the bartender’s glass.

The year is 1958. I am 10 years old, leaning against the floor-standing

woodgrain radio whose music has set my entire household in motion.

The man on the radio is Lloyd Price, and he is singing about a legendary
figure, the seriously bad nigga known as Stagger Lee. We don’t know that this
song is based on a real-life figure from the late 19th and early 20th-century,
whose name was Lee Shelton — defined online as an American criminal.

And we don’t care.

For us, ‘Stagger Lee’ is a song. It is music. And it’s dance.

My mother, who has been dead 10 years as I write this, is still a honey-hued
beauty in her thirties in 1958. When that song begins to play, she flies from
the kitchen, turns up the volume, claps her hands — and begins to dance.

She grabs whichever of us kids is closest and does the jitterbug. My mother is
a contest-winning dancer and has always loved to dance. We will learn years
later that some of our ancestry on her side of the family may stem from
members of a dance troupe that emigrated from France to Louisiana before
Napoleon sold it to Thomas Jefferson in 1803.

But in 1958 there is no ancestry.com, 23andme, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to

help us find our roots. There is only the music. There is only the dance.

And as that music fills the three-bedroom house my parents purchased on

Atlanta’s Mozley Place in 1952, we do not care that the song we are dancing to
is about a murder.

Meanwhile, Stagger Lee lives on —

as legends often do. Music has granted him immortality. He’s right up there
with Bad-Bad Leroy Brown and good ole John…

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Written by Andrew Jazprose Hill Follow

2.9K Followers · Writer for Momentum

I like good books, and I cannot lie. My Diaries on Substack discuss art, culture, and
race with a mindful eye.
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