The Devil of Perfectionism

So already, when a word comes up in multiple places in a short period of time, I pay attention to it. Last week, I read the word "perfectionism" in three different places, all of which warned people away from it.

 

In my experience, perfectionists invariably want something good, and want to do something good. What separates them from others similarly motivated is their belief that doing everything right, that doing every little thing "excellently" and to the highest standards, is the best path toward their cherished aspirations. 

 

Being perfectionists, they're often both comforted and intimidated* by the word "best." They're often accustomed to doing things very, very well, and they fall back on the old habit of striving to meet high individual standards when they don't know what else to do in pursuit of their goals.

The irony is that according to what I read, pursuing perfection is precisely what gets in their way. Too much attention to doing things perfectly often blinds them to other possible if less "certain" ways of working toward their goals. Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves listening more to others, thinking more about  others (as opposed to the idea of others); writing really rough, really terrible rough drafts; or wondering at length what the neighborhood crows have been cawing about all morning.** Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves in less self-inflicted pain, even if there's other pain to be felt.

So what kinds of problems and challenges make us nervous and uncertain enough to fuel our perfectionist tendencies? pull us out of our comfort zones? proclaim to us that we're not fully in charge? make us feel stupid and small, even lost--and sometimes, dangerous and harmful?

I wasn't surprised that Julia Cameron talked about perfectionism as counterproductive in Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity:

In light of all of this, I am not sure where we got the idea that in order to be 'real' artists we had to do things perfectly. The minute we see the world 'perfect' . . . , spontaneity goes out the window. . . . . (78) ***

When the goal is creating art, regardless of the type of art, we absolutely need to play and to experiment--and need to appreciate that "Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly" (79). In fact, creating bad art is generally believed to be a prerequisite for making good art. And the good news is that bad art, generally kept out of sight and earshot of others, usually doesn't harm them.

 

The next place I saw a take-down of perfectionism was in Rabbi Daniel Klein's column on the Hebrew College website. In "Elul: Beginning the Journey Home," Klein encourages his Jewish readers to examine their customary approaches to "teshuvah (repentance/returning)," often understood exclusively as "the process of reflection on and assessment of our actions and direction in life, making amends for misdeeds, and striving to live better lives."**** Having recently read in "a contemporary Hasidic book on spiritual practice" that "proposes that the core of teshuvah is not the self-assessment elements that lead to behavioral changes," Klein reveals that he is focusing his teshuvah efforts this year on "living with and in response to the God we find within ourselves and, of course, everyone we encounter"--and encouraging us to consider doing the same.

 

Not that how to do that feels obvious to all Jews. But relegating self-assessment to a secondary position makes being Jewish less intimidating during the annual High Holiday season of God's "judgment."***** The good news, according to the book Klein read, is that “'The Holy Blessed One does not require perfection, rather that we strive to serve with all our might….'" When it comes to teshuvah, the combination of sincere, effortful striving and loving intent atones, brings us closer to God, even when it doesn't yield "results." 

And that's the purpose of teshuvah: "reconnection to our unconditionally loving Source."  The key word is "unconditionally"--not conditioned on our achieving certain behavioral standards--which is not to say that we shouldn't strive and that we won't feel "regret for and sadness about our misdeeds." But perfectionism misses the point.

It misses the point in schools, too, where education--students' learning itself, students' coming to trust in their capacities to learn--cannot transpire outside of the relationships among teachers and students, each of whom bring with them each day the realities of their "traditional" positions in schools and society. And it misses the point in schools in which primarily BIPOC****** (black, indigenous, and people color) student groups, historically systemically deprived of the same quality of education as their white peers, are taught by white teachers.

 

I mention this because the third place I saw a critique of perfectionism was in From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity, co-edited by Chris Emdin and sam seidel. Unlike so many educator critics who pick up their pens to call out the failures of school policies, political leaders, and other educators, the educators whose essays appear in this book put themselves under the interrogator's spotlight and share personal painful, discouraging educator moments. These moments led them to understand that their commitment to social justice and educational equality, especially as pursued by questing after mastery of their teaching craft--teaching perfection--could not make their whiteness a neutral reality for their students or themselves.

 

In the book's first essay*******, Maya Park discusses how, as a first-year teacher, she came to view "my imperfections as a teacher as inseparable from my racism," which led her to embrace perfectionism as "my tool against racism" (4). After a particularly disturbing and probably harmful interaction with a student, she concluded that "To pursue perfection was to dehumanize us both" (6). Needless to say, she needed to try something different; and she did.

 

In a later essay, Adam Seidel also explores the temptation to resort to perfectionism, even when it doesn't seem like the best response to a perceived problem, because what a better response might be seems vague and potentially self-incriminating. Seidel describes a moment in a summer staff meeting when, instead of trying to make sense of some disturbing data about the college graduation rates of their former students, the teacher group recommitted to their usual approach to preparing their students for success in college: "we are going to have to work harder to make sure our lessons are vigorously prepped and practiced, our school systems and expectations are tight, and we build a culture that celebrates academic achievement" (128).********* In a nutshell, they said to themselves, "Let's get even better at what we're always trying to do better rather than even think about doing something really different."

"The Man Who Swallowed a Bird" by Scott Ketcham

But Seidel recognizes the problem with this: "we
were working to turn passion into a pathology--one that builds on a foundational belief that 'better is good enough' or more specifically that 'better than is social justice,'" which he comes to understand "in the context of white supremacy" (129). In light of this realization, Seidel changes his behavior in his own classroom: "on my best days, I shifted my practices, hovering above my interactions with students, listening with a closer ear to my language an how power and whiteness were held between us" (129).

But he doesn't quite know how to lead his staff to the same realization and to co-created shifts in practice that might lead to "true" educational quality and social justice. Toward the end of the essay, he explains, "I wasn't confident enough to try and be wrong. The stakes feel obvious now, and I'd like to think I would do things differently if I could go back, but whiteness and power and perfectionism were holding me back" (130).

Adam is my former student (as is his brother sam), and it pains me to read about his "shame and fear" (130). But I so admire his courage in "going public" with his story of coming up short and regretting it in retrospect. And I also know that his sharing of his story, along with his analysis of what was operating inside of and around him, and his feelings about it then and now, is an act of leadership that encourages the rest of us to be brave enough to stumble into this difficult problem space with others and be as genuine and unguarded as we can be. Again, perfectionism is not the answer, and when it becomes the comfortable fallback when we don't know what else to do, it uses up the valuable time and energy that could be devoted to a critical problem.

One of the biggest problems with perfectionism is that it's too often accompanied not just by disappointment, but by crushing self-loathing.********* There's work to be done--whether it's the work of making art, doing teshuvah, or doing right by one's students. Self-critique must necessarily be part of that work at some point. But this is where Julia Cameron again comes to the rescue, often reminding her readers to "Be gentle with yourself while you grow accustomed to your new mental and emotional terrain" (Cameron, 141). In my experience, the devil retreats when the pressure to be perfect dwindles, then disappears. After that happens, the real work can be done, even if it takes a while, is often discouraging, and almost always refuses to conform to a linear path.

 

* Illustrations and quotations about perfectionism accompanying the following: MacNaughton, W. (2024, April 14.) On perfectionism. DrawTogether with WendyMac. https://club.drawtogether.studio/p/on-perfectionism-69a

** Photo included within the following blog: Petrak, C. (2014, March 4). A murder of crows. Tails of birding . . . and things with wings. http://tailsofbirding.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-murder-of-crows.html

*** Cameron, J. (2003). Walking in this world: The practical art of creativity. Penguin Random House.

**** Klein, D. (2024, September 1). Elul: Beginning the journey home. Hebrew College. https://hebrewcollege.edu/blog/elul-beginning-the-journey-home/

***** Original drawing accompanying Green, E.C. (2021, March 5). The triumph of teshuva. Times of Israel. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-triumph-of-teshuva/

*(6) Screenshot of photograph included in the following: Chatterji, R., Campbell, N., & Quirk, A. (2021). Closing advanced coursework equity gaps for all students. Cap20: The center for American progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/closing-advanced-coursework-equity-gaps-students/

*(7) Park, M. (2024). Can we water ourselves and our students at the same time? In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 3-11). Beacon Press. 

*(8) Seidel, A. (2024). Much like all of the last. In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 125-130). Beacon Press. 

*(9) Photo accompanying the following: Sheryl. (n.d.) Say goodbye to perfectionism, and unleash your creative genius. thecreativelife. https://thecreativelife.net/goodbye-to-perfectionism/

Dog Days Reflections--Or What I Read This Summer

So already, first of all, the word "reflections" in the title of this blog is somewhat misleading: I haven't been reflective AT ALL this month. Recently I bought the birthday card shown in the adjacent photo to put aside for the November birthday of a dog-loving friend. All month long, I've been more like the dog on the right--jumping up and looking out and changing my mind about what I'm seeing--than like the philosophical, "looking inward" dog on the left. Consequently, this blog is not profound.

 

Second of all, the phrase "Dog Days" in this blog's title is also somewhat disingenuous. This year I completely forgot about the Dog Days, that time of year when "the Sun occupies the same region of the sky as Sirius, the brightest star visible from any part of Earth . . . [that's] part of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog."*  

 

I suspect that if I'd been out at our cabin sometime between July 3 and August 11, I would have been aware of them: In rural upstate New York, it's hard to avoid seeing constellations in the night-time sky. 

 

But I was in Quincy, living through the final weeks of my kitchen remodel, and then the period of kitchen resettlement, which included not only putting my old kitchen things into their new kitchen places, but eliminating the evidence of the weeks of construction--not so much ashes to ashes, as dust to dust. My mind was ping-ponging, ricocheting between "there or there?" 

 

It was exciting and fun, but it made it hard to settle myself down and be Sirius (okay, bad pun) about writing: the space in my kitchen had taken over the space in my mind. 

 

But seeing out was not just about looking out of windows and noticing squirrels that were really leaves. Or looking into new kitchen cabinets and wondering what object really would be better in a different spot. It also meant looking outside of myself and away from my morning pages (I've been doing Julia Cameron's Walking in This World course this summer, as I mentioned in my July post) and into books. Once I started reading other people's writing, I kept reading. It felt good.

 

Once I'd finished reading Sarah Hurwitz's Here All Along, I picked up Queen Bess by Maria Vetrano. Vetrano's literary agent is one of my former Marblehead High School students** who recently fulfilled a long-held professional dream by founding Green Light Literary + Media, LLC, which she owns and operates. I was honored to receive an advance copy from her, and I loved it. As the Simon & Schuster website explains, "Self-made billionaire Dakota Wynfred is convinced that the only way to save American democracy is by putting the last Tudor Queen in the Oval Office." The book is scheduled for release on October 15. 

 

Just as I was wrapping up Queen Bess, a very different book came to my attention, one co-edited by one of my former Cambridge Rindge and Latin Pilot School students***, and containing chapters written by several others of them.**** I haven't finished all of From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity--of course, I began by reading chapters written by "the Cambridge kids"--but already I'm thinking thoughts I haven't thought before, and remembering moments as a teacher when I wish I'd done better or accidentally did well. As one of my former Cambridge bosses***** has said on a number of occasions, "I am always learning from my former students." I am looking forward to reading this book in its entirety and continuing to learn.

Days after the official end of the Dog Days and the arrival of White Folks, my husband Scott and I headed out to our very low-tech cabin, where I tend to do my best reading. Given our quarter-mile walk to the cabin from the road, we think hard about what books to bring since bringing them means hauling them. I brought four books--a work of fiction, a work of non-fiction, and two books of poetry, all of which I read: immersion is so much easier in a place without alerts, notifications, and a beckoning television screen.

 

The first of the books I read was written by a former CRLS colleague****** and published in 2002. Who Will Say Kaddish? A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland combines autobiography, history, and on-the-ground inquiry centered around the questions of who is really Jewish and how (and when) Jews choose to identify themselves to themselves and others, Jewish and non-Jewish--questions that persist in 2024 in America, Israel, and elsewhere. Since Scott read the book, too, we had lots to discuss.

The two poetry books I read were perfect reads for rural Berlin. The late Rebecca Elson was an astronomer who wouldn't have overlooked the Dog Days. According to A Responsibility to Awe's back cover, she viewed poetry as "a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it." 

 

My poetry reading group hoped that reading Kathleen Jamie's The Overhaul would let us experience the landscape and people encountered recently by one of our members on her trip to Scotland and northern England.

The fourth and final of my cabin reads was James by Percival Everett. I saved it for last because I was so curious about it. First, because I know The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so well, having taught it to six years' worth of Marblehead High School white ninth-graders (hardly the same experience as being a white teacher teaching it in "the hood"), ******* I was curious to see what parts of Twain's work Everett would maintain and how. I was also curious what he would add to the narrative because Huck and Jim aren't always together in Twain's book.

Second, I was curious because I'd recently read Everett's The Trees, a history-based novel that managed to be really funny and deadly serious as it dealt with the topics of systemic racism and white supremacy. Would Everett manage that same mesmerizing balance here? The Trees is great, and must-read for anyone who'll never forget Emmett Till, whose body was discovered sixty-nine years ago today.

And James is great, too--funny, terrifying, disgusting, depressing, deadly serious, deeply touching, inspirational. I can't do it justice in one short paragraph. But I can talk about my first impressions briefly. Over the years, I've read a number of novels about the experience of enslaved Americans that made important lasting impressions on my mind, heart, and imagination--most recently Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend. But James layered other sensibilities and possibilities of enslaved experience onto the images I'd accumulated and ideas I'd developed. 

As I read, I found myself using the word "grotesque" to describe many of the manifestations of the institution of slavery that I encountered in the book--and language is very important in the story. Like other grotesque things, slavery was twisted--and therefore twisting of almost anything and anyone it touched. Ironies abound in this novel--and the people in the novel who've become blinded to them, willfully or not, become grotesque. If these grotesque people are white, they become especially dangerous and deadly.

So I missed the Dog Days this year. And introspection was much less pressing than inspection--of my new kitchen by the city electrical, plumbing, and building inspectors. I may not have looked inward much this summer, but I did do a lot of looking outward and through--specifically through the eyes of the writers whose books I read this past month. I enjoyed it and was enriched by it. And if you've made it this far, thank you for reading!

* Farmers' Almanac Staff. (2024, June 7). What are the Dog Days of summer? Farmers' Almanac. https://www.farmersalmanac.com/why-are-they-called-dog-days-of-summer

** That would be you, Maura Phelan.

*** That would be you, Sam Seidel.

**** Those would be you, Adam Weinstock, Adam Seidel, and Eli Tucker-Raymond.  

***** That would be you, Ray Shurtleff.

*(6) That would be you, Larry Mayer. I'm proud to be your writing partner: I learned so much from your book about how to intertwine autobiographical narrative, non-autobiographical narrative, and exposition. And your questions linger in my mind.

*(7) I stopped teaching Twain's book when I got to Cambridge when the only African-American student in one of my classes told me how difficult it was for her to have her white classmates respond to the racism in Huck's world only intellectually. I wish I'd had some of the professional learning opportunities my younger colleagues have had recently to help them become more responsive teachers of literature that elicits strong difficult emotions in our students. I still believe that Huckleberry Finn, is a great book, an American must-read and must-discuss. But that doesn't mean one must read it before the age of 18.

*(8) “Good Smells: A Memoir of A Lifelong Pursuit” by Clancy – image copyright Sue Clancy 2019. Image accompanying and screen shot from Clancy, S. (2019, February 13) reading and books in art. sue clancy -- artist. https://sueclancy.com/2019/02/13/reading-and-books-in-art/comment-page-1/

On Emmett Till, "Till," and Gwendolyn Brooks

So already, today is the anniversary of the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi sixty-eight years ago--the second anniversary of his death since the passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. On the night of August 28,* Till was kidnapped, tortured, killed, and then disposed of in the Tallahatchie River, where he was found by a fisherman three days later.** On September 3, Mamie Till demanded that his casket remain open for the viewing in his hometown of Chicago: "'Let the people see what they did to my boy!'"*

 

Ever late to the movie theater, I saw "Till"*** just a few weeks ago, and was humbled and awed by Mamie Till's emotional journey and steadfastness of purpose, and Danielle Deadwyler's portrayal of them: while thoroughly submerged in a mother's profound grief, Mamie Till navigated forward, making one brave, principled decision after another so that Emmett's death would not be in vain, so that it would unmask and foreground the unconscionable race-based violence and injustice baked into the American system and too easily unseen or ignored by most white people. 

 

Though the movie vividly dramatizes how Mamie Till's choices jump-started and intensified civil rights efforts,**** it never lets us forget that Mamie Till is Emmett's heartbroken mother. In its beautiful final scene, after weeks in the national spotlight, she stands in her son's bedroom and envisions a sunny Emmett standing opposite her with his signature hat upon his head, and returns his smile with all the love, joy, and grief in her heart.

 

Some months ago, my poetry-reading group turned our attention to Gwendolyn Brooks' poems: we'd just read Joy Harjo's golden shovel poem "An American Sunrise," and a few of us were unfamiliar with "We Real Cool." Both it and "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" appear in Brooks' third collection of poems, The Bean Eaters, published in 1960.

 

The poem's "Mississippi Mother"***** is Carolyn Bryant, whose accusations led to Emmett Till's being beaten and murdered by her husband and brother-in-law. Two weeks before our scheduled discussion, Carolyn Bryant Donham****** died, triggering a media rehashing of her varying accounts of Till's actions in her Money, Mississippi general store where they came face-to-face. So there was a lot of easily available background material for our group to read as we prepared to discuss The Bean Eaters, including the The New York Times article entitled "Carolyn Bryant Donham Dies at 88; Her Words Doomed Emmett Till" that detailed the changes in Bryant Donham's story.

 

By the time Bryant Donham sought out Duke University historian Timothy B. Tyson to share her side of the story in 2008, she was already unclear about the details: "'Honestly, I just don’t remember. It was 50 years ago.'”******* What she could recall--and I suspect this is what she really wanted to share with Tyson--was that she had never felt Till deserved what had happened to him, even though she bore so much responsibility for it: “'Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,'" she told Tyson.*******

So who and what was she? How did this woman who entitled her unpublished memoir "More Than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham”******* define herself? Who or what contributed to making her that twenty-one-year-old accident-just-waiting-to-happen from the perspective of a teenage black boy about whom so many were ready to believe the worst? What did she want and feel entitled to? 

 

Whenever I look at the widely circulated courtroom photo********* in which Bryant Donham leans with her eyes closed against her husband's shoulder, I always feel like I'm looking at a scene in a movie. Perhaps she was genuinely overwhelmed by the situation her inconsistent accounts had precipitated but that was now far beyond her control. But I can't help thinking that as the winner of two beauty pageants, she knew something about how to present herself to an audience in order to achieve a particular effect.

 

No doubt Gwendolyn Brooks saw this photo and the others that featured Bryant Donham's children, as if to suggest that Emmett Till had posed a threat an entire family: why else would two small children have even been present and photographed in a courtroom during their father's murder trial?  Gwendolyn Brooks might have easily simply despised Bryant Donham for her lethal, inconsistent accusations packaged in feminine meekness that made her a sympathetic victim in the eyes of so many. But Brooks looked harder and further not only to understand how Carolyn Bryant Donham might have come to play her role in history, but to suggest what would her life might be like once the trial was over. What would have motivated a twenty-one-year-old Mississippi white woman, a former beauty queen and current mother of two who worked behind the counter of rural general store, to double down on the most disturbing of her uncertain claims? How did her hazily remembered encounter with Emmett go from being something she and her sister-in-law initially sought to hide from her husband to something she was willing to testify to in a courtroom, as if to justify her husband's actions?

Brooks explores these questions by writing a narrative poem set in the Bryant home around the breakfast hour the day after Roy Bryant's acquittal. And just to say, Mamie Till did not live in the Bronzeville section of Chicago; Gwendolyn Brooks, also a mother of two, did.

 

What we learn at the start of "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" is that the Mississippi Mother********* has imagined her story of the past few months as following the pattern of the romantic ballads she read in school but admits to not having fully understood: the "milk white maid" is rescued from the "Dark Villain" by the "Fine Prince" to live in "The Happiness-Ever-After." Standing at her stove the day after her husband's acquittal, she muses on the exhilaration she'd felt during the past weeks: "it had been like a/ Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood./ A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches." So during the last weeks, bloodshed had been an essential ingredient in her feeling excited and alive.

But something's wrong, now that the events are over. She burns the bacon she's cooking as she wrestles with the problem, then identifies it: the Dark Villain was too young and innocent to merit being being slain by the Fine Prince.

The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified
When the Dark Villain was a blackish child
Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty,
And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder
Of its infant softness.*(10)

. . .

It occurred to her that there may have been something
Ridiculous in the picture of the Fine Prince
Rushing (rich with the breadth and height and
Mature solidness whose lack, in the Dark Villain, was impressing her,
Confronting her more and more as this first day after the trial
And acquittal wore on) rushing
With his heavy companion to hack down (unhorsed)
That little foe.
So much had happened, she could not remember now what that foe had done
Against her, or if anything had been done.
The one thing in the world that she did know and knew
With terrifying clarity was that her composition
Had disintegrated. That, although the pattern prevailed, 
The breaks were everywhere *(10)

So how long can the Mississippi Mother play the part of the rescued milk white maid once she knows that the ballad story has a major flaw that might make her husband more bully than hero, even in the eyes of the men who shared his politics and allegiances? With no time to figure this out before she has to call him to breakfast, she embraces her two-time beauty queen default, fixes her hair, and applies lipstick: "It was necessary/ To be more beautiful than ever" because sometimes she fancied he looked at her as though/ Measuring her. As if he considered, Had she been worth It?"

 

Oh, the power of the capitalized, two-letter word "It"! Had it cost him too much to rescue his damsel in distress, and what exactly had it cost him? The Mississippi Mother imagines that what her husband might have seen, heard, and felt while murdering and disposing of the too young Dark Villain might have permanently disturbed his peace:

 . . . the cramped cries, the little stirring bravado,
The gradual dulling of those Negro eyes,
The sudden, overwhelming little-boyness in that barn?*(11)
Whatever she might feel or half-feel, . . .. He must never conclude
That she had not been worth It.

Once they're sitting at the table, things go from bad to worse. The morning papers' "meddling headlines" elicit the Fine Prince's racist, anti-Northern rage--and his easy relationship with murder:

What he'd like to do, he explained, was kill them all.
The time lost. The unwanted fame.
Still, it had been fun to show those intruders
A thing or two. To show that snappy-eyed mother,
That sassy, Northern, brown-black—

One thing both husband and wife share is the belief that in the right circumstances, violence and bloodshed are fun; maybe she is worrying too much about his having been disturbed by murdering a fourteen-year-old.

 

And then that violence strikes home. When one of their children throws a molasses jar at the other, and "The Fine Prince leaned across the table and slapped/ The small and smiling criminal," "She could think only of blood." This time, there's no mention of fun;  any ballad comparisons are supplanted by allusions to Macbeth, in which "blood will have blood" (III.4.151), especially when the blood of the innocent has been shed.

She did not speak. When the Hand
Came down and away, and she could look at her child,
At her baby-child,
She could think only of blood.
Surely her baby's cheek
Had disappeared, and in its place, surely,
Hung a heaviness, a lengthening red, a red that had no end.
She shook her had. It was not true, of course.
It was not true at all. The
Child's face was as always, the
Color of the paste in her paste-jar. 

She stays silent, but recognizes "one of the new Somethings—/ The fear,/ Tying her as with iron." The old ballad archetypes are completely broken as evidenced by the milk white maid's imagining herself tied and weighted down, as Emmett Till was.

 

The Fine Prince completes his metamorphosis into the Dark Villain on the final page of the poem. He grabs her and kisses her, but his "wet and red" mouth, from her perspective, is only more blood. Though she's repulsed, she remains controlled:

He whispered something to her, did the Fine Prince, something
About love, something about love and night and intention.
She heard no hoof-beat of the horse and saw no flash of the shining steel.

He pulled her face around to meet
His, and there it was, close close,
For the first time in all those days and nights.
His mouth, wet and red,
So very, very, very red,
Closed over hers.

Then a sickness heaved within her. The courtroom Coca-Cola,
The courtroom beer and hate and sweat and drone,
Pushed like a wall against her. She wanted to bear it.
But his mouth would not go away and neither would the
Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman's eyes.

She did not scream.
She stood there.
But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,
And its perfume enclasped them—big,
Bigger than all magnolias.

The "Decapitated exclamation points" in Mamie Till's eyes--I saw them in Danielle Deadwyler's eyes in the movie when they registered Mamie Till's knowledge that Bryant Donham was lying during her testimony in the courtroom. While Mamie Till could believe that her son might have transgressed some Mississippi white-black behavioral boundary, she knew he would never have touched or propositioned a white woman. At this point, she knows definitively there will be no justice in that Mississippi court room. Any bond between these two mothers will have to exist in Donham Bryant's mind alone.

 

The poem's final scene testifies that Bryant Donham has done it again: orchestrated a brutish response she doesn't want, or at least claims not to want. This time, she's deliberately made herself as physically attractive to her husband as possible--but without having anticipated her husband's violent response to their misbehaving child moments before he responds. As readers, we join her in hating Roy Bryant for his brute forcefulness--but our sympathy for her is short-lived. We've seen this same miscalculation before. Yes, perhaps from her perspective, things got out of hand in the Emmett Till situation, but she helped them get that way--all so the "maid mild" could feel "the breath go fast"--and maybe so she and her husband could hold their heads high among their white Mississippi neighbors who'd read the same ballads in high school. We know that she's made her bed and now must face lying in it.

 

The poem ends with three strange lines that anticipate The Bean Eaters' next poem, "The  Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till," which I believe may have been written in the voice of the Mississippi Mother, who's no poet--but who believes in the power of ballads:

The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till

    (after the murder,

    after the burial)

Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing;

       the tint of pulled taffy.

She sits in a red room,

       drinking black coffee.

she kisses her killed boy.

       And she is sorry.

Chaos in windy grays

       through a red prairie*(12)

It's the predominance of red, the insufficiency of the word "sorry" to express all that Mamie Till must be feeling, and the poem's attention to Emmett's mother's appearance that makes me attribute these words to the Mississippi Mother. But thus far, I can't find anyone other readers who agree with me. The Poetry Foundation's commentary on the poem assures me that Gwendolyn Brooks wrote both it and the Mississippi Mother poem to "reflect, and implicitly critique, American society’s tendency to value white experience more than black—at lethal cost."*(12)

 

That same Poetry Foundation article then provides a link to Patricia Smith's Golden Shovel poem called "Black, Poured Directly into the Wound" which "using the quatrain as its source poem, . . . focuses squarely on Mamie Till’s thoughts and feelings."*(12) I read that magnificent poem for the first time only yesterday, and link it here to give you the chance to end your reading of my blog today with more thoughts of Mamie and Emmett Till than of Carolyn Bryant Donham.*(13) 

I will always be grateful to Gwendolyn Brooks*(14) for walking in the shoes of the person who not only handed the gun to the murderer, but made sure it was good and loaded, despite her claims that she never wanted anyone to die. It's imperative that we try to walk in the shoes of those we shrink from instinctively so as never to forget that they are products of times and places, which in no way absolves them of personal responsibility for their actions, especially those for which others pay the ultimate price. Poetry helps hold them accountable without negating their humanity.

 

* Linder, D.O. (1995-2023). The Emmett Till murder case: chronology.  Famous Trials. https://famous-trials.com/emmetttill/1759-chronology 

** Screenshot of a photo of a front page of a newspaper article with the caption "A selection of text from the Aug. 31, 1955 edition of the Chicago Daily News, showing the first story to run in that paper about the discovery of Emmett Till’s body in a river in Mississippi." Kidnapped boy found slain. (1955, August 31). Chicago Sun Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/1955/8/31/23842064/emmett-till-news-kidnapped-boy-found-slain

*** Screenshot of photo on UK Universal Studios website: https://www.universalpictures.co.uk/micro/till

**** Still, when  I asked my father just a few months before he died in 2020 whether the White people he knew talked about Emmett Till's lynching and trial in 1955, he replied, "Not enough."

*(5) Getty Images Photograph accompanying the following article: Fox, M. (2023, April 27). Carolyn Bryant Dunham dies at 88; her words doomed Emmett Till. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/carolyn-bryant-donham-dead.html

*(6) Carolyn Bryant divorced her husband and remarried twice.  

*(7) Fox, M. (2023, April 27). Carolyn Bryant Dunham dies at 88; her words doomed Emmett Till. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/carolyn-bryant-donham-dead.html

*(8) Associated Press Photograph from 1955 accompanying the following article: Associated Press (2023, April 27). Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman at the center of the 1955 lynching of Black teen Emmett Till, has died. The Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/27/metro/carolyn-bryant-donham-woman-center-1955-lynching-black-teen-emmett-till-has-died/?camp=bg%3Abrief%3Arss%3Afeedly&rss_id=feedly_rss_brief&s_campaign=bostonglobe%3Asocialflow%3Atwitter&s_campaign=bostonglobe%3Asocialflow%3Afacebook&fbclid=IwAR2iQaagaKk_ZTzELnw-sal_Rz0FTqo-DcoQL0Y5HPuL1B_eRSP0-6cwKEU 

*(9) Screenshot of photo accompanying New York Times article.

*(10) Brooks, G. "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon." Saying His Name: Poems on Emmett Till curated by Terence Hayes. Poetry Society of America. https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/saying-his-name-1/saying-his-name

*(11) Duffy, C. (2018). The barn where Emmett Till was tortured and murdered [Photograph). ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-21/new-probe-into-emmett-till-murder-reopens-southern-wounds/10020712

*(12) Poetry Foundation. (2017, February 1). Golden shovels. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92342/golden-shovels

*(13) Screenshot of photo accompanying New York Times article.

*(14) Drawing by Tyrue "Slang" Jones called “Through the Words of Miss Brooks” accompanying Poetry Foundation. (2023). Gwendolyn Brooks: A Chicago Legacy. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92342/golden-shovels

Still Reading James Baldwin

So already, as you may know from my last blog post, I've been reading James Baldwin. As I was writing that post and thinking about what Baldwin's impact is on Americans and what I think it should be, I recalled that in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, there's a quotation from Baldwin high on the wall of its ascending multi-leveled history section.

That quotation appears below, highlighted and presented in the context of the paragraph in which it appears in his essay entitled "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes":

For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.**

 

At the conclusion of my last post, I included a link to "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes" and recommended it to those who hadn't read it. In so many ways, its wisdom and memory can help us understand--and address--our present-day situation: here we are in 2023 still grappling as a nation with the "questions" of what history is true and whether African Americans will have the same rights and privileges as white Americans. 

 

The essay, which seems so current, first appeared in The White Problem in America, a special edition of Ebony published in 1965 and published in 1966 in book form.

Since then, I've reread it and decided that it's too important, too thought-provoking, too useful in our present moment not to feature it. So in this blog, I am going to share some quotations that I think can speak importantly to a lot of readers, particularly to white readers. Perhaps some will be inspired to read the whole essay.

First, here's the opening paragraph in which Baldwin speaks about what he's often wondered about:

I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED, AND IT IS NOT A PLEASANT wonder, just what white Americans talk about with one another. I wonder this because they do not, after all, seem to find very much to say to me, and I concluded long ago that they found the color of my skin inhibitory. This color seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror, and a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they appear to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that, in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and yet, on the other hand, it seems all too likely.

The idea of reassurance that requires the obfuscation of reality seems especially worth considering seriously. Experiences of shame often induce people to change or veil the facts, never a sound long-term solution for nations or individual people.

 

A bit later, he lays out the possible inner struggles and debates of white people confronting  their dawning comprehension that the history they've embraced is at least partially inaccurate and self-serving:

This is the place in which, it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence. This incoherence is heard nowhere more plainly than in those stammering, terrified dialogues white Americans sometimes entertain with that black conscience, the black man in America. The nature of this stammering can be reduced to a plea: Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe or the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present on the middle passage. I am not responsible for the textile mills of Manchester, or the cotton fields of Mississippi. Besides, consider how the English, too, suffered in those mills and in those awful cities! I, also, despise the governors of Southern states and the sheriffs of Southern counties; and I also want your child to have a decent education and rise as high as his capabilities will permit. I have nothing against you, nothing. What have you got against me? What do you want? 

 

But, on the same day, in another gathering, and in the most private chamber of his heart always, he, the white man, remains proud of that history for which he does not wish to pay, and from which, materially, he has profited so much. 

I've heard people say the things that Baldwin imagines them saying. In addition, I'm glad that Baldwin identifies pride as a factor in the resistance to the truth of history: a group's or family's dearly-held stories of achievement often become defining legends, though they seldom reflect only the efforts, actions, and characters of their members; histories are made and told in contexts.

 

I loved Baldwin's story a little later in the essay about marching to the Montgomery, Alabama Capitol in the company of Harry Belafonte, creating a need for angry, disapproving young white women to try to reconcile Belafonte the civil rights activist with Belafonte the handsome, popular entertainer.

I was next to Harry Belafonte. From upstairs office windows, white American secretaries were leaning out of windows, jeering and mocking, and using the ancient Roman sentence of death: thumbs down. Then they saw Harry, who is my very dear friend and a beautiful cat***, and who is also, in this most desperately schizophrenic of republics, a major, a reigning matinee idol. One does not need to be a student of Freud to understand what buried forces create a matinee idol, or what he represents to that public which batters down doors to watch him (one need only watch the rise and fall of American politicians. This is a sinister observation. And I mean it very seriously). The secretaries were legally white-it was on that basis that they lived their lives, from this principle that they took, collectively, their values; which is, as I have tried to indicate, an interesting spiritual condition. But they were also young. In that ghastly town, they were certainly lonely. They could only, after all, look forward to an alliance, by and by, with one of the jeering businessmen; their boyfriends could only look forward to becoming one of them. And they were also female, a word, which, in the context of the color curtain, has suffered the same fate as the word, “male” : it has become practically obscene. When the girls saw Harry Belafonte, a collision occurred in them so visible as to be at once hilarious and unutterably sad. At one moment, the thumbs were down, they were barricaded within their skins, at the next moment, those down turned thumbs flew to their mouths, their fingers pointed, their faces changed, and exactly like bobby-soxers, they oohed, and aahed and moaned. God knows what was happening in the minds and hearts of those girls. Perhaps they would like to be free. 

I wonder which the young women wanted more, to love Belafonte or to hate him. I wonder if they talked about it with one another.

Finally, the essay ends by making reference to the Henry James novel, The Ambassadors--and how often do you get to read about Harry Belafonte and Henry James in the same essay?

In Henry James’ novel The Ambassadors published not long before World War I, and not long before his death, he recounts the story of a middle-aged New Englander, assigned by his middle-aged bride-to-be-a widow-the task of rescuing from the flesh-pots of Paris her only son. She wants him to come home to take over the direction of the family factory. In the event, it is the middle-aged New Englander--The Ambassador--who is seduced, not so much by Paris, as by a new and less utilitarian view of life. He counsels the young man to “live. Live all you can. It is a mistake not to.” Which I translate as meaning “Trust life, and it will teach you, in joy and sorrow, all you need to know.” Jazz musicians know this. Those old men and women who waved and sang and wept as we marched in Montgomery know this. White Americans, in the main, do not know this. They are still trapped in that factory to which, in Henry James’ novel, the son returns. We never know what this factory produces, for James never tells us. He only conveys to us that the factory, at an unbelievable human expense, produces unnameable objects.

I have to wonder about the degree to which many Americans would bristle at the idea of being "trapped in that factory," especially by choice, due to their alleged penchant, according to Baldwin, to opt for profits and goods--"unnameable objects"--even when they could opt for "life" and freedom.

"Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes," with its various generalizations and examples, is bound to elicit a range of strong reactions in white readers--and I hope some of you will share your reactions below. As for my readers who are initially very uncomfortable with Baldwin's thoughts, I hope you will hang in there with this essay, perhaps reread it once or twice before coming to your final conclusions about its truth and its value to us as a society in which liberty and justice are not yet for all. Seeing reality is always the first step toward making the changes we claim we want to see.

* Screenshot of photograph accompanying James Baldwin (2023, June 15). Wikiquote. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Baldwin 

** Baldwin, J. (2016, August 23). Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes. Blackstate. https://blackstate.com/james-baldwin-unnameable-objects-unspeakable-crimes/ [Note: This essay was originally published in The White Problem in America, compiled by the editors of Ebony Magazine, and published by Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago in 1966.]

*** Photograph by Robert Abbott Sengstacke accompanying New York Review of Books article entitled "‘The Central Event of Our Past’: Still Murky" by Andrew Delbanco, published on February 9, 2012. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/02/09/central-event-our-past-still-murky/