Nowadays I like to listen to Dylan’s old protest songs. Something about them suits a current need, with commercial radio so jingly and dead and Dylan himself doing the music for Victoria’s Secret lingerie ads. He must be proud of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”; since the song came out in 1964 he has included it on a greatest-hits CD (Biograph) and on a live-concert CD. The song is also part of his touring repertoire, an exposure that has brought it many listeners in recent years. On the long and sad list of victims of racial violence, from Emmett Till to Amadou Diallo, most names are forgotten after the news moves on. Dylan’s poetry has caused Hattie Carroll’s name, and the sorrow and true lonesomeness of her death, to stick in some people’s minds.
Dylan describes Hattie Carroll as a 51-year-old maid who waited on tables, took out garbage, emptied ashtrays, and “never sat once at the head of the table.” He mentions that she had borne 10 children. Of Zantzinger, he says,
William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years, Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
As I listened, I noticed the tense of that verb. “Hattie Carroll” was perhaps Dylan’s most journalistic song, nearly contemporary with the events it chronicles. Hattie Carroll died on February 9, Zantzinger went to jail on September 15, and Dylan recorded the song in New York City on October 23, all in 1963. The immediacy of that “owns” got me wondering about the actual event, and about its consequences working themselves out through time.
Zantzinger said, “I don’t have to take that kind of shit off a nigger,” and struck Carroll on the shoulder with the cane. Soon after, she collapsed and was taken to the hospital.
For example, William Zantzinger: What happened to him? Does he own that farm today? Zantzinger is, it turns out, an amazing guy. In the semirural part of Maryland where he still lives, many people know his name. If you mention him to someone in real estate, the antiques business, the legal profession, or law enforcement, you get a reaction. People don’t want to talk about him, or they do, or they want their names left out of it, or they shake their heads and laugh; they never have to be told who he is. Many say he’s a wonderful person, always polite and smiling, a good friend. Because Dylan’s song made him a “story,” in the news sense, reporters come to Charles County, Maryland, every so often to see what Zantzinger is up to now. They are usually surprised, as I was, that he is hard to summarize.