Question 1

What does “Georgia skin” mean?

Accepted Answer

The gambling card game of the Black South — every card face up, every player betting his own card will outlast the rest — carried out of the turpentine and levee camps into the migration cities.

Question 2

Where does “Georgia skin” come from?

Accepted Answer

Georgia skin is a Black Southern game, and the record ties it specifically to the labor camps — turpentine, sawmill, levee and railroad — where Black men were paid in cash at intervals and had nowhere else to spend a night off. Zora Neale Hurston is the single best witness. On 18 June 1939, at the Federal Music Project office in Jacksonville, Florida, working under Herbert Halpert with Stetson Kennedy present, she recorded a spoken and sung account of the game as she had observed it at a Florida turpentine camp; the disc survives in the Library of Congress as part of Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections. She called it the favorite gambling game among the workers of the South. It reaches print in Black literature at about the same moment — Chester Himes has men playing Georgia skin in his story Pork Chop Paradise, dated 1938, and Dan Burley names it in the New York Amsterdam News on 21 July 1945 — and it appears in Black toast and folklore traditions collected by Roger D. Abrahams in Philadelphia in 1964. The game itself is older than the name. Peg Leg Howell, the Atlanta bluesman born in Eatonton, Georgia, cut Skin Game Blues for Columbia in 1929, singing about losing his money and his clothes at it. Two corrections. Georgia skin is a card game, not a dice game; at least one mid-century source describes it as a form of craps, which is wrong. And it is not a novelty of the 1980s, despite a commercially boxed Georgia Skin game sold in that decade; the boxed set is a late packaging of a game that Black Southerners had been playing for at least a century.