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Fairly straightforward question. There are a lot of slang terms for drugs in On the Road, but I was still rather startled by "snakejuice"
"Man, do you imagine what it would be like if we found a jazzjoint in these swamps, with great big black fellas moanin guitar blues and drinking snakejuice and makin signs at us?"
Searching for it just turns up a lot of nonsense about diet supplements. What is Kerouac referring to here, and why does he associate it with these unpleasant racial stereotypes?
“Snake juice” is whisky:
snake juice, n. slang (chiefly Australian) whisky; also loosely, any alcoholic drink.
Oxford English Dictionary.
Although the OED says “chiefly Australian”, my searches on Google Books and the Internet Archive found the earliest uses in the USA. In particular, the following two citations antedate the OED’s earliest (1900) citation:
But its redeeming feature is Esquire May and his little shop around the corner. The ’Squire is an expounder of law, moral virtue and distilled snake juice, and altogether is a jolly fellow.
The Field, 27 November 1875, p. 266. Chicago.
“Thet’s the stuff, dog-gone me ef ’t ain’t,—the reg’lar snake-medicine, boys, an’ it was rale thoughtful uv yer to brung it. Dog-my-cats ef I ain’t afeard I shall be snake-bit to-day ef I don’t hist in some of thet ther snake-juice plum-quick. Here ’s to ye, boys; may yer never be snake-bit!”
Frederick A. Ober (1887). The Knockabout Club in the Everglades, p. 185. Boston: Estes and Lauriat.
Eric Partridge suggested that “snake juice” might have been derived from earlier phrases linking alcoholic delirium with snakes:
snake-juice. Whiskey: Australian: from ca. 1890. C. J. Dennis. Ex see snakes.
see snakes. To have delirium tremens: U.S. anglicised as coll. ca. 1900. Earlier form: have or have got snakes in one’s boots remained U.S.
Eric Partridge (1923). A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 5th edition, p. 791. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
A couple of early appearances of these phrases:
Dick Weldon died of delirium tremens (or snakes in his boots).
The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, 1 October 1872, p. 631. London.
“He may also have delirium tremens, which means delirium with trembling of the limbs. Another name for this disease is mania à potu, or drinking mania, which you just now called ‘jim-jams.’ There are other popular names for it, such as ‘D.T.,’ ‘del. trem.,’ ‘seeing snakes,’ and ‘got ’em.’”
Thomas Wallace Knox (1890). Teetotaler Dick: His Adventures, Temptations and Triumphs, p. 119. New York: Ward & Drummond.
As for Kerouac’s use of “snakejuice” in On the Road, the word may have been adopted as an African-American dialect term, like “jazz” and “blues” (though I was unable to find any evidence of this), or perhaps the word was associated with remote or rural dialects, that the characters might have expected to hear in the swamps of east Texas. But most likely is that the swamps themselves suggested the snakes, which suggested the juice:
We were surrounded by a great forest of viny trees in which we could almost hear the slither of a million copperheads.
Jack Kerouac (1957). On the Road, p. 131. New York: New American Library.
According to by The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: J-Z edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor (Routledge, 2006), snakejuice refers to
strong liquor, especially of rough quality.
The dictionary gives Australia as the place where the term was first used, with the earliest recorded occurrence dating from 1890. But the meaning makes sense in the quote from Kerouac.
The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, edited by John Ayto and John Simpson (2010), gives the following meaning:
Alcoholic liquor, esp. inferior whisky.
This dictionary says the term is "mainly Australian" and also gives 1890 as the earliest date.
In many languages distilled spirits such as vodka have names such as "burning water" (Spanish) or "burning wine" (Scandinavian), the root of the English or German "brandy". Even the term "eau-de-vie" (French) and "spirit" denotes something very powerful. No doubt "snake juice" is a hyperbolic term for very strong liquor, suggests something evil or tempting (Biblical reference), and the term suits the setting.
Kerouac lived in a different time and place, undoubtedly "unpleasant racial stereotypes" were the norm then, but this need not be intentional here. "On the Road" is not an anthropological study, it contains a series of vignettes, sketches, impressions that reveal the excitement of being young and adventurous. Here the characters are entertaining the idea of being tourists, risking becoming unwelcome outsiders, and are amused by the potential reception upon "crashing the party".
Snakejuice, as mentioned by other answers, refers to whiskey. Whiskey and snakes are linked in this quote by W.C. Fields:
Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore, always carry a small snake.
Fields told this joke in the 1930s, 20 years before Kerouac wrote On the road. Still, the etymology described in other answers might be more probable.
