How a Video Game Taught Me About Chain Gangs
A 3-minute song led me — a non-American — to understand more about a painful period in American history
When I first played Warframe, I never expected to learn anything, much less about chain gangs. That’s because Warframe’s core gameplay looks like the love child of Dynasty Warriors and Prince of Persia. You parkour-dash across levels like a ninja, shooting enemies in the face or dicing them to pieces. Not exactly educational material.
My first introduction to chain gangs came through Fortuna, an open-world expansion introduced to Warframe in late 2018. Preceding this expansion was a launch trailer that had a haunting track that sounded like something in between Russian martial music and industrial synth.
Hear it for yourself:
“We All Lift Together” is Fortuna’s main thematic song. And it quickly became my new earworm. I caught myself humming it whilst doing mundane work, like washing the dishes or checking my emails.
I wasn’t the only one that resonated with the song. Talented fans and artists got to work, creating 10-hour loops of it, an acoustic cover, an orchestral rendition, and a rather epic metal arrangement. Something about “We All Lift Together ” buries itself deep into the obsessed-ridden recesses of your mind.
Maybe it’s the song’s steady beats. The clang of metal on metal and pneumatic hisses that invoke a sense of industrial productivity. The happy whistling that’s at odds with the morose vocals. The sense of uniformity that borders on the edge of dignified hopelessness.
During his presentation at Tennocon 2018 (the annual Warframe conference), Steve Sinclair, Creative Director of Digital Extremes called the tune a ‘chain-gang’ song.
It was the first time I’ve heard the term. What is a chain-gang? Why do they have a song? Why were they an inspiration for Fortuna? Indirectly, Warframe had piqued my curiosity, so I got to searching.
Introduced in Georgia during the early 1900s, chain gangs killed two birds with one stone. It was envisioned as the next-step in penal punishment, one that would succeed convict leasing as capital punishment.
In reality, the chain gang system allowed the state to freely — and legally — conscript prisoners to construct critical transportation infrastructure, drain marshland, and work quarries or mines.
As they toiled under the hot sun, prisoners came to rely on simple tunes and rhythms to coordinate the pace of their labor. These became the chain gang song. Every beat became the strike of the heavy hammer or pickaxe, every lull became time given to recover between strikes.
But the power and purpose of chain gang songs transcended beyond team coordination. It was the medium that African-American prisoners chose to channel their pain and suffering; emotions that manifested themselves via the monosyllabic chanting of words and thumping of tools at work.
And these words spoke of their damned fate and the unfairness they faced, simply because of the pigmentation of their skin. Most of them suddenly found themselves a slave once again, due to the 13th Amendment that made involuntary servitude legal within the US penitentiary system.
The chain gang song became the only way these men could release the pent up rage and hopelessness welling deep within their souls. As I listen to some preserved chain gang songs, I can’t help but feel a little shaken inside.
Going back to Warframe, it’s easy to see why Digital Extremes drew inspiration from chain gang songs when penning “We All Lift Together”. The song is sung by the Solaris people — indentured workers to one of the game’s factions. And they sing it while shifting levers, hauling crates and hammering equipment.
Is it proper for Digital Extremes to appropriate such a painful slice of African-American history, even when this was done in a time before racial tensions ran high? I don’t know. Only my Black brothers can be the judge of that.
What I do know is this: The song — and by extension the game — brought to light a portion of American or Black history that myself, an outsider to the culture, would never know. It piqued my interest enough to read, understand, and process the history behind it.
And now I know. Wedged deep in my brain is a fresh perspective of the enduring struggle of all Blacks in America. Now, whenever someone says that the country was built on the backs of Black people, I have a deeper appreciation and understanding of such a statement.
I can tell them that, brother, I’m with you. We all want the world to be a more understanding and tolerant place, where we look at the depth of character rather than the hue of skin.
