Levee’s obsession with shoes represents his broader ideas about status, success, and wealth—particularly the idea that Black Americans must embrace modernity and abandon their historical roots if they want to prosper. When he buys flashy shoes with gambling money, the other musicians poke fun of him for wasting his cash on something so impractical. For them, shoes are just a necessity, as Cutler makes clear when he says, “Any man who takes a whole week’s pay and puts it on some shoes—you understand what I mean, what you walk around on the ground with—is a fool!” Levee, on the other hand, believes in the power of his fancy shoes to help him dance and play music well. “A man got to have some shoes to dance like this! You can’t dance like this with them clodhoppers Toledo got,” he says. His comment about Toledo’s shoes highlights the condescending view he takes of anyone he thinks is out of touch with the times—an idea that also hints at his disparaging thoughts about simplistic, traditional lifestyles, since the word “clodhopper” originally referred to fieldworkers who used to plow the land.
Similarly, he also suggests at one point that Toledo’s shoes make him look like a “sharecropper,” or an impoverished farmer toiling away on borrowed land. The history of sharecropping in the United States is interwoven with the country’s racist past, since wealthy white people continued to exploit Black laborers under this system in the aftermath of slavery. The fact that Levee calls Toledo a “sharecropper” just because of his practical shoes thus illustrates just how much significance he attaches to shoes in general. Whereas Toledo’s shoes symbolize (at least to Levee) that Toledo is stuck in the past and has yet to escape the oppressive yoke of racism in the United States, Levee’s own shoes symbolize his desire to leave behind his rural roots as a southern Black man and embrace all things modern.
Shoes Symbol Timeline in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
