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

Summer Reading Summed Up

So already, about ten days ago, I noticed that the well-watered world--it's been a very rainy July in New England--was awash in the pinks, purples, blues, and whites of blooming Rose of Sharon. Midsummer was here, July was fast passing, and no blog yet. Years ago, I promised myself to blog at least once a month.

What had I been doing instead of blogging? Mostly reading and rereading. That realization gave me an idea. So before July is in the books, here's a blog post about the books I've been reading and am still hoping to read while summer lasts.

In the rereading category are Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and Alan Lew's This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation. 

I chose Dickens' novel because Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which I'm anticipating reading later this summer, alludes to it. Given the vagueness of my junior high school memories of David and the whole Dickensian crew, I decided a reread was in order--and it's been great to read the novel as an adult: like so many adolescent readers, I didn't trust myself to know when writers were being mocking or satirical.

Then there was the practical aspect of choosing David Copperfield, since I didn't anticipate wanting to underline passages or write notes in the margins: I could put it on my glow-screen Nook and read it late at night or early in the morning without putting on a light--an especially good thing when you're sleeping in a small cabin in the shadows of the eaves or trying to keep a low profile while being a guest in someone else's house.

As far as the Alan Lew book is concerned, let's just say that I'm one of the people to whom Norman Fischer refers in his foreward to the paperback version of the book: "For many, reading This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared on an annual basis during the Yomim Noraim (Days of Awe) constitutes the cornerstone of spiritual practice" (xi).* Tisha B'Av was last Wednesday. I didn't fast, but I reread the chapter of the book entitled "I Turned, the Walls Came Down, and There I Was: Tisha B'Av."

In the "new reading" department have been three mysterious books of poetry: Carl Phillips' Pulitzer Prize-winning Then the War (I hadn't known of Phillips before his prize was announced), Eruv by Eryn Green (which I've owned for several years but had never read), and On the Surface of Silence: The Last Poems of Lea Goldberg, translated by Rachel Tzvia Back. I first encountered Goldberg's poetry in the margin of the Jewish memorial service printed in my Siddur Lev Shalem prayerbook earlier this year.

I have a lot more reading of the poems in these books to do before I can say more about them to other people, but I do find them mesmerizing--or is it arresting? I can't tell if I'm more consoled or disturbed by them, but I also feel they're speaking true.

Interestingly, Carl Phillips wrote the forward to Eryn Green's collection, and it reads like a whole separate and worthy work of literature to me, even though its purpose is primarily to provide an important way in to Green's poems on the first reading of them. Likewise, Back's essay entitled "Toward the 'Whole Fragment': An Introduction to Lea Goldberg's Last Poems" is thought-provoking in a door-opening way that both makes Goldberg's poems more meaningful and moves beyond them. Fragments, borders, margins, mergings, separations, things that fall apart--so much love and yearning in the poems of all three books, all filtered through the sensibilities and shaped by the particular life experiences of these poets and their champions.

Finally, for the "rest of summer" reading. Robert Cormier's Fade will be up next: I learned about it from good friends in Orono, Maine during a discussion about French-Canadian and Acadian history and culture, and about the family history of one of those friends in particular. Next up will be the assigned reading for my book group's August meeting, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper. Then, before I forget too much about David Copperfield  again, I'll turn to Demon Copperhead. 

 

As for Kathe Mueller Slonim's Escape from Dachau, it will probably have to wait until fall since I plan to lend it to friends who visited Dachau just recently. 

 

I have roughly a hundred pages left of David Copperfield, so Fade is coming up fast. But so too are slightly lower temperatures and easing humidity--perfect weather for walking, checking out neighborhood flowers, and reading outdoors. Or not reading outdoors. I'm glad only one of the books I'm planning to read in August has to be read by a certain date.

 

So already, what are you reading?

* Fischer, N. (2018). Foreward. In Lew, A. This is real and you are completely unprepared: The days of awe as a journey of transformation (xi-xiv), Little, Brown and Company.

Soon After the Summer Solstice

So already, summer's here, and I've been keeping my eye on it--its trees, its flowers, its birds, its light and skies. In terms of the birds, I've been watching hawks like a hawk. In terms of trees, it's been Japanese lilacs.

I've also been keeping my nose on summer. As I write this, I'm sitting next to my living room window breathing in the fragrance of the humid, warm, alternatingly blue and gray morning just beyond it. Sweet, but not too sweet.

 

In truth, some of the hawks I've been watching are actually other kinds of raptors. Of late, I've been enraptured by raptors. 

 

First, there are the local hawks, the marsh hawks (or northern harriers, as they are often known) that often don't move even when I walk pretty close to them on the paths in and around the Black's Creek salt marsh. Then, there are the "at the field at our cabin" hawks, the Cooper's hawks that sweep by us at eye level as they jet from some clump of low branches or shrubs at the edge of the field to another right next to our cabin, and the buzzards and vultures (which actually aren't hawks) that soar above our field and our neighbor's, eyeing their next meal. The hunt is always on. As I said when I posted in May, "In the Midst of Life We Are in Death."

 

Last Wednesday, the summer solstice*, I was surprised to see this last type of raptor--not a usual site in marshy yet urban Quincy--when I took an afternoon walk. So here's my account of that solstice walk and the thoughts it conjured.

Two hours after the solstice moment, I walked out on the most perfect summer afternoon: bluest blue skies, cumulus clouds at the distant horizon, seasonal warmth tempered by a subtle sea-breeze, and no humidity: not a drop of moisture to coalesce with others to create even the thinnest milky veil to soften the day’s crisp edges and hues.

So fragrant was the air on the first tree-lined street down which I headed that my eye was drawn to the ivory blossom clusters overhead. Never before had I noticed the delicate fineness of the multitudes of tiny blossoms that together formed each of canopy’s many-flowered fists. Each individual blossom seemed rendered in pen and ink, the pen tipped with the thinnest of nibs.

What were these trees, I wondered. I snapped a picture of one of them and a few of its blossom clusters, hoping my cellphone would do what it often does when I photograph a bird: ask if I wanted to know what kind it was. But my phone acted only as a camera and offered no assistance.

Suddenly, the faintest whiff of something too sweet distracted me from my olfactory reverie—so briefly that I paid it no mind, though I noticed it.

One house ahead, two men stood next a Department of Conservation and Recreation truck. Synchronicity, I thought: the world gives you what you need. For sure, one of them would know about the trees. So I approached and asked.

“Let’s stroll down to that tree so I can have a good look,” one of the men said. And so we did. “Japanese lilac, I think,” he said. “If not, some not-so-common kind of dogwood.” [My laptop later confirmed his first answer.]

Not the first lilacs I’d seen that weren’t purple. I thanked him, and continued on, passing other Japanese lilac trees, breathing them in, glorying in the afternoon’s summer riches.

And suddenly, another brief, cloyingly sweet whiff of—perhaps decay? Where was it coming from? I glanced upward and observed the telltale rust on the edges of two flower clumps.

And isn’t it like this every June—that even on the longest day, when none of summer’s long days have been squandered, when the possibility of life and bliss seems infinite, Nature tosses out some subtle reminder that life and death are ever linked and that summer is just one season in an endless cycle?

Later, as I walked the final leg of my walk, a fleeting shadow on the shimmering grass of the salt marsh pulled my eye upward: above, a turkey vulture soared high, circled, drifted, and swooped. And isn’t it like this on every walk—that Nature, often graceful and pleasing to the eye, reminds us that Nature feeds and thrives on Nature?

* Summer Solstice 2019. Contemporary abstract painting by Jen Gray. Inspired by the sunrise and sunset on the summer solstice 2019. All images copyright 2017-2019 Jen Gray, GrayBirds.org. All rights reserved. Available for purchase on Pixels: https://pixels.com/featured/summer-solstice-2019-jen-gray.html.

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/

Reading Baldwin on A Milestone Birthday

So already, the other day when Joan Soble: So Already . . . A Blog About Moving Forward, Paying Attention, & Staying Connected turned ten years old, I was reading the final essays in James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son. 

It was my friend Berhan Duncan's and my April visit to "God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin" at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College that had sent me searching for Notes of a Native Son a couple of months ago. At the height of the pandemic, at Berhan's urging, I'd read Baldwin's Another Country; as the pandemic loosened its grip, we'd both read Giovanni's Room. Since we'd been reading and talking Baldwin for a while, we were keen to make the pilgrimage to Amherst.

While we were driving west on that brisk Tuesday, Berhan expressed some anxiety and apprehension: what if the exhibit got Baldwin wrong? what if it failed to convey his complexity, insight, and purpose and vision as a writer? what if it reduced him in order to make him more palatable and digestible for museum-goers interested in learning and appreciating something but not necessarily in being deeply, authentically confronted and engaged--which Baldwin's work generally demands?

The museum was practically empty when Berhan and I arrived, and it largely stayed that way: except for a student studying in comfortable chair in a far corner of one of the exhibit rooms, we generally had the whole Baldwin exhibit to ourselves. 

It featured artistic renderings of Baldwin and his contemporaries as well as works by other African-American artists conveying African-American experience. In one photo, Baldwin encountered a sculpture of of himself.

 

Berhan and I looked separately and silently until we came back together in the large room featuring Glenn Ligon's huge, highly textured black painting entitled "Stranger."

After a few minutes of standing next to each other just looking, Berhan said to me, "This is it. This is what I think I hoped for." (I think I captured the spirit of what Berhan said, but he also can't remember what he said verbatim.)

We sat down on the bench opposite the painting, alternating between looking silently and softly commenting, occasionally getting up to move closer to the painting to examine its texture or identify words featured--or maybe embedded--in it. Periodically, we paused to express how grateful we were that that we had the space and the bench all to ourselves for so long. 

We talked about Ligon's use of coal dust, the challenge of reading the language in the painting (and not knowing how much language there was and how much we needed to look for it), the painting's size, the way the painting was lit and how that lighting contributed to how its blackness shimmered, and the fact that coal pressed hard enough becomes diamond. 

As we left the museum, we realized neither of us had read Notes of Native Son*, which contained the essay "Stranger in the Village" from which some of the quotations in the painting were drawn. So as we headed toward the center of town to eat really good hamburgers and French fries before heading home, I knew I needed to read more--more by James Baldwin and more about Glenn Ligon.

 

I didn't read "Stranger in the Village" right away: recently, I've been reading collections start to finish, my assumption being that the order of the pieces within them is deliberate and important. So I wouldn't be writing this post if I hadn't finally made it to "Stranger in the Village," the last essay in the collection, and then read it again.  

 

I still need to think about it, so for now, I'll simply share three quotations, one about language, Baldwin's medium, and two about the connection between the Swiss village where Baldwin lived as "the only one" and the America that "cannot" and "has not . . . admitted" his "human weight and complexity" (165).

Every legend, moreover, contains a residuum  of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. (170) 

The ideas on which American beliefs are based are not, though Americans often seem to think so, ideas which originated in America. They came out of Europe. And the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening the concept to include black men. (175)

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. (179)

No doubt these ideas spoke to Glenn Ligon, perhaps comforting him, perhaps electrifying him, most definitely inspiring him. Carly Berwick's article "Stranger in America"** discusses the Ligon's "Stranger "series,

begun in 1996 and accounting for nearly 200 works produced over 13 years. . . . Baldwin has particular resonance for Ligon, not only because he was also black and gay but because he emphasized the role of language in creating the “legends” (a Baldwin term) that we make of one another. “Stranger in the Village,” for instance, relates the author’s experience in a small Swiss hamlet, where children, struck by his novelty, touched his hair with fascination or ran after him shouting “Neger!” Baldwin ruminates on what it means to be perceived as black in the village and in America, writing, “The root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.” 

 

Some of the quotes taken from Baldwin’s essay are visible in the paintings . . . but most are not. The artist repeatedly stenciled the text in black oil stick, layering in coal dust. He proceeded in regular lines, from top to bottom. The letters rose from the surface and the text thickened until it was nearly illegible. Ligon has said he chose coal dust because he was looking for something with a literal weight. Catching the light and making the raised letters glint like gems, coal dust reminded him of Andy Warhol’s diamond dust. But coal can also be seen to have racial overtones, as in the phrase “coal black,” which in the early 20th century came to be used as a slur. 

Of course, when Berhan and I encountered this painting in Amherst, we'd read none of the above. 

On the morning after after I'd finished reading "Stranger in the Village" on a jam-packed rush-hour train on which we riders were pressed together so tightly for so long that I thought we might all become diamonds, I called Berhan.

"Berhan, I'm thinking about the Ligon painting at the museum in Amherst. I'm trying to remember what you said about why it was so right."

"I remember I felt that way, but I can't remember what I said about it," Berhan said.

"Can you tell me what you think you thought? Or think now?" I asked, and he did.

"Well, first of all, it's black on black, and that matters on a few levels. Also, it used words, and Baldwin used words--the exhibit needed to present him as a writer, and a writer with a mission. And it was hard to read--as Baldwin is. When you read Baldwin, you have to sit with him, and there keeps being more to think about. With the painting, you kept looking and you kept noticing and trying to read--but you kept seeing more and thinking more and feeling more." [Note: I'm majorly paraphrasing Berhan here, with his permission.]

Berhan's "sitting with it" comments made me think of that bench on which he and I had camped out in that gallery, trading observations and thoughts related to them. I wrote the following in my journal soon after our phone call: "There's no speed-reading of Baldwin; and by virtue of what is being described and generalized about, namely who we are as groups and individuals as we share the same space as other groups and individuals, we can't avoid thinking about ourselves--our actions, our attitudes, our assumptions--unless we're determined to. Which some people are."

But why, on my blog's tenth birthday, write about this exhibit, Baldwin and his essay, Ligon and his painting, and Berhan's and my great road trip "out west" to Amherst? 

 

Because this blog, over the last ten years, has been much about "sitting with"--sitting with a whole lot of ideas; places; extraordinary moments and important experiences; works of art; educational issues; books, articles, and poems; religious teachings and spiritual practices; and people who matter a great deal to me. This post represents a lot of these areas of attention and reflection.

 

It's been a pleasure and challenge to blog monthly in So Already, and I so appreciate that so many of you have read my blog from time to time--and some of you often. Thank you for your attention and encouragement over many years. Today's post is my 256th; #257 will be out by the end of July.

 

P.S. While I have your attention, I'd like to recommend a Baldwin essay I read yesterday for the first time: Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes. And just so you know, the last day of the exhibit is July 9, so you can still go visit it.

* Baldwin, J. (1955). Stranger in the village. Notes of a native son (pp. 163-179). Beacon Press.

** Berwick, Carly. (2011, April 23). Stranger in America. Art in America. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/glenn-ligon-62890/