1
“This story ain’t just about me.”
That’s Willie Dixon talking. He was a bassist, a blues legend, and an unofficial writer-in-residence during the heyday of Chicago-based Chess Records in the 1950s and ’60s. Despite prison stints as a young man, Dixon managed to steer clear of most of the pitfalls that brought down many of his gifted peers, thus remaining on the scene for enough years to prosper—or, at the very least, actually receive royalties from the truckload of hits he composed. As portrayed by Cedric the Entertainer, he’s the narrator of Cadillac Records, a 2008 film about the journey of African American music from Southern cotton fields to living rooms, jukeboxes, and concert halls around the world. Cedric speaks those words and plays Dixon as equal parts rascal, sage, and self-deprecating wizard. His delivery of Dixon’s lines brings to mind one of my favorites among Cedric’s comic creations: an assembly-line veteran who expertly diagnoses ailing cars while dangling a cigarette from his lip. (Such men were mainstays in the St. Louis neighborhoods where both Cedric and I grew up.)
Like Dixon says, the story is far from his alone. Other important musical figures receive significant screen time in the film, including brooding, brilliant Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright); broad-shouldered, barrel-chested Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker); and the hyper, dapper Chuck Berry (Mos Def). Adrien Brody holds his own as Leonard Chess, the label’s slick, hustling founder, and Beyoncé Knowles provides a melancholy turn as the charming, sexy, and deeply troubled Etta James. For me, the most riveting performance is that of Columbus Short as the mercurial, doomed harp prodigy, Little Walter.
More than any other form of music, songs created by African Americans have supplied the soundtrack to our nation’s rich, imperfect unwinding. Just how much we have contributed has often been a matter of dispute because we have seldom had a commensurate hand in shaping the chronicle of our own genius. Darnell Martin, writer and director of Cadillac Records, seizes the reins of that narrative by telling the story via Dixon’s wise, empathetic gaze. A seasoned observer and participant, Dixon offers commentary that suggests to the audience, “You may have heard other versions, but this is the way it all went down.” His account includes instances of exploitation, imitation, and outright theft; all themes that continue to resonate amid present-day debates about cultural appropriation and African American creativity.
* * *
Darnell Martin’s presence at the helm of Cadillac Records makes it a relative rarity among mainstream movies: a dramatic story about blackness, as it were, written and directed by an African American. While that fact is no guarantor of excellence, it increases the probability that blackness will occupy center stage instead of stagnating in the margins and the background. In Martin’s hands, blackness flourishes not only in the music of her main characters but also in the gestures and rituals of their everyday lives. It shines, for instance, when Muddy Waters pauses from his sidewalk strumming to look up into a nearby window, where Gabrielle Union’s breath-stopping beauty glows above him like a benevolent sun.
The director took artistic license here and there, as filmmakers often do. Phil Chess, Leonard’s brother and business partner, doesn’t exist in Martin’s telling, and Bo Diddley, another of the label’s famous musical pioneers, is similarly absent. These departures from the historical record are excusable (she was not making a documentary, after all) and become easier to overlook amid the film’s successful, respectful handling of the spirit-infused African American ethos. It’s a black thing, some might say, and she understands.
By ethos I mean the distilled experience of black life in all its myriad subtleties; a Jes Grew stew of sights, sounds, memories, movements, and emotions marinated in blues, swing, bop, soul, funk, gospel, and rap; a deep-blue blackness beyond category and bred in the bone, so high you can’t get over it, so wide you can’t get around it, so low you can’t get under it. So insurmountable, it would seem, that merely attempting to define it inevitably diminishes it. The fact that blackness can incorporate such things as technique, practice, and the conscious application of style while simultaneously transcending all those things makes it nearly impossible to pin down. As a result, it often infuses American life as more of a tantalizing abstraction than a concrete attribute, some intangible quality derived from black people’s history not on this continent but on this planet. Anyone who’s seen the Norfolk State marching band, a New Orleans second line, or three black girls turning double Dutch knows what I mean.
Ralph Ellison touched on it when he described singer Jimmy Rushing’s ability to give voice to “something which was very affirming of Negro life, feelings which you really couldn’t put into words.” When trying to wrap my vocabulary around blackness I find myself reduced to opaque mumbling. I want to say that I may not be able to describe exactly what blackness is but I know it when I see it. Or hear it. Or feel its irrepressible rhythm urging me to get on my good foot and dance my way out of my constrictions. Blackness as a timeless, undeniable force simmers at the heart of every African American story and, by extension, nearly every American saga. However, its tendency to elude description complicates our claims of ownership.
Complications become further entangled when culture gets converted to commerce, as Martin makes plain in Cadillac Records. The music that Willie Dixon and his colleagues create eventually finds listeners beyond black communities, where it’s popularized by effete British lads who thrill audiences worldwide with their watered-down versions. By then, the music is not so black. Or is it? Does it retain its indefinable essence in other settings?
Those are among the questions raised by “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” Alice Walker’s classic short story. Its protagonist, Gracie Mae Still, is a retired jook-joint singer who sells one of her tunes to a white talent manager and his Elvis-like protégé for one thousand dollars. Traynor, “with real dark white skin and a red pouting mouth,” becomes a huge star with his note-for-note cover version of Gracie’s composition. “If I’da closed my eyes, it could have been me,” Gracie recalls. “He had followed every turning of my voice, side streets, avenues, red lights, train crossings and all. It give me a chill.”
A year later, Traynor tells her he’s earning forty thousand dollars a day from his recording. But he’s uneasy, he admits, because “I don’t have the faintest notion what that song means.” As the years pass, Traynor, insecure and guilt-ridden, sends Gracie a multitude of presents, including a mink stole, a self-cleaning oven, a power tiller for her garden and, ultimately, a five-hundred-acre farm. Unlike his many admirers, Traynor understands that the performance that made him rich is but a pale imitation of the original. “They want what you got but they don’t want you,” he tells Gracie. “They want what I got only it ain’t mine. That’s what makes ’em so hungry for me when I sing. They getting the flavor of something but they ain’t getting the thing itself.”
In her homespun dialogue, the faux-sincerity of Gracie’s visitors and the trail of twisted treaties between the unpretentious blueswoman and the music manager, Walker offers up a plausible and compelling thumbnail portrait of the American experience. Her Gracie comes off as a woman who could have rivaled Big Mama Thornton, the iconic blues belter from whom Elvis liberally borrowed. Instead, Gracie opted for something resembling domestic tranquility. As she tells it, she grew tired of “singing in first one little low-life jook joint after another, making ten dollars a night for myself if I was lucky, and sometimes bringin’ home nothing but my life.”
Revisiting Gracie Mae decades after Walker introduced her, I thought not of Big Mama Thornton but of Vera Hall. Born in Sumpter County, Alabama, in 1902, she lived a mostly obscure life as a domestic worker, although she was known throughout her community as a talented singer. Her noteworthy ability to remember gospel and blues songs she had heard little more than once eventually provided an invaluable resource to ethnomusicologists who set out during the 1930s to record black Southern music. On the recordings, Hall’s voice sounds husky and clear at the same time; a hum runs through her vocals, and her singing conveys a lived-in quality that suggests heft and wisdom. In some tunes, like “Boll Weevil Holler” and “Wild Ox Moan,” she adheres to her upper range, showing off a twang that nearly matches a strummed guitar string. These days she is best known for “Trouble So Hard,” in which she shows off an abundance of that soulful ingredient that nonblack people often rely on to add accent to their music, like a blend of secret herbs and spices that makes chicken finger-licking good. Think Merry Clayton on “Gimme Shelter,” Chaka Khan lending animation to Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love,” the countless gospel choirs blessing everything from Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” to Billy Joel’s “The River of Dreams.” In the video version of the latter, Joel cavorts stiffly like a low-rent Blues Brother, singing about his search for something “taken out of his soul.” The all-black choir, garbed in church robes, helps him mourn “something somebody stole.”
The scene makes me think of Amiri Baraka’s poem “In the Tradition” in which he exposes the nation’s cultural heritage as woefully deficient without the contributions of black people. “Where is your American music?” he taunts, declaring that “nigger music” might be all there is. Perhaps, he suggests, country and western music could save white America from “looking like saps before the world.”
Merry Clayton and others, celebrated for their session work, were paid for their contributions. In contrast, Hall’s version of “Trouble So Hard” was plucked from the archives by a white techno musician named Moby, retitled “Natural Blues,” and used to form the basis of a commercial hit in 2000. He also licensed it for use in an ad campaign for blue jeans. By then, Hall was long dead, and no descendants were contacted for permission or consultation.
Vera Hall didn’t live to see her brilliance line other people’s pockets, but Chuck Berry saw it unfold right before his eyes. In Darnell Martin’s framing of the scene in Cadillac Records, Berry discovers the Beach Boys singing “Surfin’ USA,” a nearly note-for-note rip-off of his “Sweet Little Sixteen,” just as police are coming to arrest him on morality charges. In real life, he sued the California band in 1963, winning the publishing rights and, three years later, formal songwriting credit. Like Berry, Willie Dixon knew how to take his complaints to court. In 1972, he sued Led Zeppelin over two songs on their second album, II. He won hefty settlements from the band, and later successfully sued Chess Records for back royalties.
As Cadillac Records tells it, Leonard Chess handed out keys to luxury cars to his musicians instead of their rightful compensation. The one exception in the film is Howlin’ Wolf, who sticks with his battered truck and declines cash advances, refusing to “borrow against the store.” Cadillacs, once the symbol of American aspiration, also function symbolically in “Nineteen Fifty-Five.” One Christmas morning, Gracie Mae goes outside and discovers yet another token of Traynor’s gratitude, a brand-new “gold-grilled white Cadillac.” She enjoys the gift but never lets its shininess distract her from more practical concerns. The same can’t be said for Muddy Waters, who allows the sight of a new car to make him forget—temporarily—Chess’s mismanagement of his earnings. As Waters, Jeffrey Wright illustrates the mesmerizing power of the car when he wordlessly circles the first one Chess gives him, beaming in admiration. Not for nothing does Chuck Berry’s 1973 Eldorado convertible sit on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture.
Cadillacs turn up, too, in Dreamgirls, a thinly veiled musical retelling of the Motown story. Label founder Curtis Taylor contends that the new sound rising from black urban communities could be made to seem as desirable as gleaming chrome and whitewall tires. It’s almost as if he’s read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in which the protagonist walks through a black neighborhood in Denver, “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” Where beatniks and hipsters saw blackness as an aphrodisiac, Curtis sees a business opportunity. He sings, “If the big white man can make us think we need his Cadillac to make us feel as good as him, we can make him think he needs our music to make him feel as good as us.” In an example of what we might call a mega-meta-mash-up, a black character makes this pronouncement about white characters in a fictional musical narrative inspired by real-life black people but written, composed, and directed by white people. Unlike Willie Dixon, Curtis Taylor doesn’t possess the narrator’s power to edit and shape the story. The Dreamgirls creative team gets it right, though, when their production shows Curtis’s gritty, soulful paean to Cadillacs bleached and repackaged as a vanilla-scented parody of street-corner harmony.
Others’ tendency to poach—and profit—from blackness is what makes its celebrants so watchful and suspicious. I am far less fretful, partly because my own creative practices borrow so freely from cultural traditions to which I enjoy no obvious connection. My influences and inept emulations are often painfully obvious to me, and in the event they are not so clear to observers, I try to give credit where it’s due. Unlike that of Vera Hall or Walker’s fictional heroine, my output is unlikely to command huge sums for anyone desperate enough to imitate me. Even so, I understand that to compare the transgressions (if you can call them that) of the marginalized to those of the imitative majority is to construct a false equivalency. More is at stake, and the record of theft, distortion, and dishonest revision is too real, too malignant and durable, to casually dismiss.
2
At the turn of the twentieth century, W. E. B. DuBois joined Frederick Douglass, Maria W. Stewart, and other pioneering black thinkers in declaring himself a coauthor of the collective American story. In The Souls of Black Folk, he claimed the Western canon as his birthright. It had been enriched, after all, via the plunder of black culture as well as black bodies. “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not,” he contended. Some sixty years later, Ellison, while clinging tenaciously to blackness, also insisted on the right to keep company with storytellers of his own choosing, including Freud, Malraux, and Gertrude Stein. Like the bluesman Willie Dixon, both writers asserted the right of African Americans to relate the story of black creativity according to their own terms. At the same time, they pushed against the gates of the canon, the white, mostly male center of American culture. Its guardians borrowed freely from the wellspring of black creativity while keeping its originators outside the barriers. In such circumstances, borrowing often looks more like stealing.
Ellison was chafing against white critics like Irving Howe, who championed Richard Wright as the spiritual and intellectual godfather of “appropriate” African American fiction. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Wright had urged each black writer to create work that “would do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.” Ellison had little tolerance for such prescriptions, insisting instead that novels were “ritualistic and ceremonial at their core” and should “arise out of an impulse to celebrate human life.” In some respects, this was an old dispute. Wright issued his blueprint in 1937, just nine years after Langston Hughes had staked a claim for his generation’s creative independence in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In “The World and the Jug,” Ellison argued that white people couldn’t tell black artists what to do; Hughes, in his “Racial Mountain” essay, had asserted that not even black people could tell black artists what to do. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” he memorably declared. “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either.”
Both essays were volleys in the early modern phase of narrative combat, and both men were engaged in a fight over critical aspects of the black story, including who gets to tell it and what the rules are. In his memoir, The Big Sea, Hughes recalled his early days in Harlem as “a period when white writers wrote about Negroes more successfully (commercially speaking) than Negroes did about themselves.” He also cited critics who condemned “certain Negro writers” who “ceased to write to amuse themselves and began to write to amuse and entertain white people.” Although terms and phrases like “appropriation” and “selling out” were not yet in vogue, Hughes, Wright, and Ellison’s salvos suggest that concerns about such issues seldom faded in black literary circles, even as the decades unfolded.
Frank Yerby, an African American writing during the same period, interests me because he maneuvered around those two land mines to claim his own narrow—and lucrative—patch of turf. He published his debut novel in 1946, the same year Muddy Waters plugged in his amp at the Chess brothers’ studio. Ellison and James Baldwin had yet to publish their first titles, but Wright’s career was already three books deep. “I was not at all influenced by him as a writer, except perhaps negatively,” Yerby later recalled. “I liked, admired his earlier books; but if they influenced me at all, it was to confirm my growing suspicion that the race problem was not a theme for me.” He was further convinced by the failure of his first manuscript, rejected by publishers looking either for racial stereotypes or the next Richard Wright. Frustrated, Yerby took an unusual step. Starting with The Foxes of Harrow, he wrote novels that focused primarily on white characters. Although never a critical darling, he attracted a willing—and white—audience among the masses. Over a forty-year period, he produced more than thirty novels and, astonishingly, sold more than sixty million copies worldwide. The New York Times described him as “one of the most popular writers in the United States in the 1940’s and 50’s.” His abundant sales to a primarily white readership enabled a comfortable life in France and Spain, where he died in 1992.
Although not quite bodice-rippers, many of Yerby’s novels have more in common with Margaret Mitchell than with any of his African American contemporaries. Scoundrels challenge rascals to duels. Women compete for men’s affection while weeping copiously. Some of them shed “great tears” that spill over “incredibly long lashes, gleaming like diamond drops in the candle flame”; others have eyes that “swam with tears that caught the light like jewels.” Costumes and finery are minutely detailed. And there are sighs, lots of sighs. The wind sighs. Willows sigh. Women sigh, when they aren’t weeping.
The Foxes of Harrow traces the adventures of Stephen Fox, an Irish gambler who lands in New Orleans in 1825, quickly amasses a fortune and a vast estate, and wins the hand of the most eligible belle in the Crescent City. While Fox and his family cavort and conspire in the foreground, people of the African diaspora populate the backdrop, with “brutes,” “ragged blacks,” mulattos, and quadroons occasionally emerging as plot devices or comic relief. Aside from the “light yellow” beauties, they are described in consistently unflattering terms. Black people are routinely debased not just in the dialogue of the white characters actively oppressing them but also in the omniscient narration, to such an extent that one may occasionally suspect that Yerby is a self-hating Negro.
The pivotal exception is Tante Caleen. First among Stephen Fox’s “nearly fifteen hundred” enslaved human beings, she comes closest to what we might consider a fully realized black character. Her importance is hinted at during Yerby’s well-written prologue in which she is the only figure among his sizable cast to be mentioned by name. Suspected of having voodoo powers, Caleen is a veteran trickster, cultivating whites’ grudging respect while manipulating their fear and distrust of African spirituality. In possession of a seemingly boundless knowledge of herbs and elixirs, she is often called upon to heal white people after their doctors have failed to ease their suffering. Lest we grow too attached to Caleen, Yerby regularly reminds us that she is as physically unattractive as the other dark-skinned black people in the novel, with a face resembling “a grotesque death mask out of Africa” and “yellow, fanglike teeth” that gleam dully.
Out of many passages likely to dishearten African American readers, the most deflating one takes place when Caleen exploits a secret, intuitive method of communication among the enslaved to bring about a change of critical importance.
“I sing a song, me, out in the kitchen house,” she explains. “Maîtresse hear me sing it a hundred time, but tonight I sing it different, just one sound different; hold one word a little too long, maybe. Cook, her hear me sing it. She hear that one word held too long. She go outside to empty water and she sing it too, her.”
In this way, the song goes from mouth to mouth until Negroes “from every plantation in fifty miles” gather “in the black bayous when the moon is dark.” But Caleen and the others don’t employ their black girl magic in the pursuit of liberation. Instead, they direct their energy toward helping a lovelorn white woman regain her slaveholding husband’s affection. The scene would be almost unbearable if Yerby hadn’t already revealed that Caleen is the central figure in a family history of uprising and resistance.
Yerby lets us know that the face Caleen presents to her white oppressors is, as Paul Laurence Dunbar would put it, a mask that grins and lies. Her forbearance and apparent selflessness are part of an elaborate ruse conducted with an all-important goal in mind. “We can’t win by fightin’, us. They too strong,” she advises her son. “We got to be clever like a swamp fox.… You learn. Learn to read and write and figger. But keep your mouth shut. Learn everything white man knows.… Someday freedom come.”
When reading Foxes with Caleen’s story uppermost in mind, I can easily imagine a different novel simmering in its depths: an epic saga in which African American characters love and struggle while Caleen leads readers through the labyrinthine complexities of blackness in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Despite Yerby’s disavowals, I’m not entirely convinced that he wasn’t indeed perpetrating a bit of narrative sleight of hand, that my alternate vision wasn’t part of his grand design. Was he subverting a predictable tale of white pluck and ambition by planting a potentially explosive story of black resistance within it? Even if not, his novel certainly reflects the tensions surrounding culture and influence percolating at the time of its creation. And, while Yerby kept his distance from Wright’s considerable shadow, his methods align comfortably with DuBois’s insistence on inclusion and Hughes’s assertion of independence. Yerby’s parsing of American mythology, though overlong and uneven, argues that the story of the United States is not solely the province of whites. It belongs to anyone who dares to tell it.
In subsequent novels, Yerby continues to focus on ambitious, white Americans who rise to the height of society via fortitude, charm, and judicious coupling. In his fifth novel, A Woman Called Fancy, Fancy Williamson, like Stephen Fox before her, blows into town (in this case, Augusta, Georgia), with little to her name besides her wits and good looks. After having fled the South Carolina hills to escape an arranged marriage, she is determined to walk down the aisle arm in arm with a gentleman. On its most obvious level, the novel is about a difficult romance between the uncouth Fancy and Court Brantley, the least degenerate member of a genteel family fallen into disrepute. On another level, it’s a story of class conflict among whites, with black characters playing a smaller part than they did in Foxes. The wealthy whites (landowners, mill operators, and turpentine merchants) exploit the poor whites mercilessly, only occasionally using black people as a buffer. One mill owner, the novel’s most conscientious capitalist, observes, “What in hellfire would happen to those pine-barren crackers if they didn’t have the blacks to look down on? They’d go crazy—or revolt; because even European serfs don’t live any worse than they do. Having the Negro to feel superior to kind of makes it up to them.”
Yerby’s white characters converse often about black people’s alleged inferiority and rationalize their abuse of them. In contrast, he gives his African American characters far less voice or agency than they demonstrated in Foxes. Although the main action in Fancy takes place from 1880 to 1894, the Negroes in Augusta seem to have fewer resources and exhibit less resistance than they did before the Southern Rebellion. Reconstruction has come and gone, returning black people to the clutches of their former enslavers. Convict leasing has again bound them to the land, but Court wants no part of it. “It is slavery,” he tells Fancy. “Hell, it’s worse. In slavery times, a good Negro was a valuable possession. You fed and clothed and petted him like a good horse. But who gives a damn what happens to these chain-gang niggers? Kill ’em off, work ’em, starve ’em, beat ’em to death. There’re always more.”
Court’s attitude is representative of white characters’ views in Fancy; when they condemn the exploitation of black people, they do so mostly from an economic perspective emphasizing profits and losses, not as a result of moral indignation or concern for the human rights of the Negroes in their midst. Such passages remind me that a black writer is behind the scenes, seizing and contradicting narratives that had been mostly used to promote the national fantasy of American exceptionalism.
As in Foxes, black people are suspected of possessing supernatural qualities. Unlike the magical Negroes of that book, these characters must work their enchantments without drums, rituals, or whispered incantations. The chief conjurer is a version of Tante Caleen, essentially repackaged here as Old Maud, an “old scarecrow, old as the hills, and black as original sin.” On first meeting, Maud quickly intuits that Fancy is in love with Court Brantley but has not yet won his heart. “Listen to me, chile,” she cautions. “Don’t let him get too close beforehand—not even ’cause you loves him and he wants to—or maybe ’cause you wants to. Marry him, lil’ Miss Fancygal! Make him stand up in front of the preacher man. Git him hooked legal—then give him hell!” As for Fancy’s rival, whom Court may be visiting, she tells her to “go right in that house and pull him out—yank out some of that yaller hair whilest you’s at it. Snatch her bald-headed—teach her some respect—go on, lil’ Miss Fancygal, go fight for your man!”
Like Tante Caleen, Maud has extraordinary insight into the complexities of romance and the ways of white folk. But she possesses little of Caleen’s dignity or self-possession, qualities rarely reflected in black characters in Fancy.
By the time Yerby turned to fiction, featuring a predominantly black cast, his best writing days were behind him. In The Dahomean, published in 1971, he gives free rein to his weakness for purple prose. He saddles an epic historical saga set in a West African kingdom with even more of the fluttery clichés found in his earlier novels. In Yerby’s nineteenth-century Dahomey, young women have faces of “smoothly oval nightshade,” “soft, velvety, night-black cheeks,” and yes, “long, sweeping lashes.” Nyasanu, his hero, is “a young lion with a heart more tender than a maid’s.” Scoundrels challenge rascals to duels. Women compete for men’s affection while weeping copiously, and metaphors are driven home with mind-numbing repetitiveness. Agbale, Nyasanu’s first wife, is described as a “tiny, exquisite, night-black girl.” In case readers have failed to properly appreciate her loveliness, Yerby has Nyasanu remind us. He describes his bride as “my little black woman, more beautiful than the night.” He goes on to explain, “Night is the time of love. And the color of night is black, which is the color of beauty.” It’s almost as if he was promised a cash bonus for each time he used “night” in the book.
In time, Nyasanu acquires additional wives, providing some of the most stomach-churning scenes in a novel with no shortage of such passages. After Nyasanu shows his wives that he is “capable of administering a husbandly beating when necessary,” they grow to love and respect him even more. One wife says to him, “D’you know the first time in my life I’ve been truly happy? When you were beating me. When I realized that—that I meant so much to you that you’d kill me before letting me be another’s easy woman. That you cared.”
Nausea-inducing speeches of that sort—combined with clunky, circuitous prose—burden the novel so much that it inevitably sinks under its own weight. A plethora of foreign terms and exposition disguised as dialogue don’t help Yerby’s cause either, disrupting the narrative rhythm whenever he manages to establish it. In a “note to the reader” preceding the novel, he makes much of his “laborious” research. His toiling in the archives results too often in notebook dumping that dampens rather than sustains reader interest. Consequently, he strays far from his intended mission, which, after years of brazenly reimagining whiteness, is to set the record straight about Africa. He writes, “The purpose of The Dahomean, apart from the only legitimate purpose of any novel, entertaining the reader, is admittedly to correct so far as it is possible, the Anglo-Saxon reader’s historical perspective.”
Yerby’s embrace of such a didactic strategy must have ultimately disappointed him. Ten years after The Dahomean, he would again insist that addressing racial issues in fiction was “an artistic dead end.” In 1971, however, he may have been reentering the battle over the black narrative and reaching out to black readers, both of which he had abandoned long ago.
3
Or Yerby may have been reacting to writers like William Styron. Four years before The Dahomean, Styron had published The Confessions of Nat Turner. He had won acclaim in white literary circles for his debut novel Lie Down in Darkness but had attracted little comment beyond that hermetic, self-serving subculture. Confessions, his fourth book, earned him brief, sizzling infamy in the considerably smaller world of African American letters. It is an essentially plotless novel about one of the most notorious plots in American history, Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. There is no suspense because we all know the story will end with Turner’s capture and imminent execution. Perhaps desperate to seize and hold readers’ attention, Styron settles for the easy option of lurid melodrama.
“I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events,” he notes in his foreword, “yet I trust remaining within the bounds of what meager enlightenment history has left us about the institution of slavery.… Perhaps the reader will wish to draw a moral from this narrative, but it has been my intention to try to re-create a man and his era, and to produce a work that is less an ‘historical novel’ in conventional terms than a meditation on history.”
Setting aside his ill-informed suggestion that the practice of human bondage in the United States has been meagerly documented, it is worth noting that Styron incorporates several relevant terms that we might call buzzwords: narrative, imagination, and intention. Of course one wants to allow Styron and other artists free rein in their works of imagination, although it is fair to wonder about the role of research and field work in creating paintings, books, etc., purportedly based on or inspired by the struggles of real people. Has the author ever interacted with black people in a genuine fashion—beyond the one or two he claims as “friends”? Reading Confessions, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that Styron is more familiar with the abject sufferers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin than with living, breathing black human beings.
His intentions notwithstanding, it would be more accurate to describe his novel as a meditation on imagination, not history; he based it on the real-life Turner’s “confession” as obtained by Thomas Gray. Styron concedes in his 1993 afterword that the slender pamphlet “from the first word … poses serious questions of veracity.” This is an understatement, to say the least. Never has a confession of a crime, given privately by an African American while in legal custody, posed any other kind of question. Styron appears to offer a cursory nod to the tradition of doctored confessions here and there in his text. He has Thomas Gray say to Nat, for example, “This ain’t supposed to represent your exact words as you said them to me. Naturally in a court confession there’s got to be a kind of, uh, dignity of style.” In Gray’s unsolicited and unreliable editing of Turner’s story, Styron provides a persuasive metaphor for narrative combat at its most insidious: a white man putting words in a black man’s mouth.
Despite acknowledging his own doubts about Gray’s report, Styron referred to it often during his defense against black critics who challenged the quality of his novel. In his attempt to use history to justify his appropriation of an iconic African American narrative, Styron returned repeatedly to a transcript that is likely more fancy than fact.
As for Styron’s mission to re-create Turner, he has produced not a man but a cartoon. In his critique of the novel, African American author Lerone Bennett Jr. accused Styron of waging literary war on Turner’s image, “substituting an impotent, cowardly, irresolute creature of his own imagination for the real black man who killed or ordered killed real white people for real historical reasons.” Styron attributes Turner’s motives to psychosexual obsessions with white women instead of a desire to set black people free and punish their enslavers. And, while we have no genuine knowledge of Turner’s actual thoughts and conversations, the dialogue Styron burdens him with is nonetheless staggering to behold. A small but indicative sampling:
It seemed rather that my black shit-eating people were surely like flies, God’s mindless outcasts, lacking even that will to destroy by their own hand their unending anguish.…
Yet I will say this, without which you cannot understand the central madness of nigger existence: beat a nigger, starve him leave him wallowing in his own shit, and he will be yours for life. Awe him by some unforeseen hint of philanthropy, tickle him with the idea of hope, and he will want to slice your throat.…
I can see around me a score of faces popeyed with black nigger incredulity, jaws agape, delicious shudders of fright coursing through their bodies as they murmur soft Amens, nervously cracking their knuckles and making silent vows of eternal obedience.
I feel a sense of my weakness, my smallness, my defenselessness, my niggerness invading me like a wind to the marrow of my bones.
Turner offers these reflections when he’s not masturbating while dreaming of white women. During his weekly self-pleasuring sessions in a storage shed, “it was always a nameless white girl between whose legs I envisioned myself—a young girl with golden curls” with “her lips half open and whispering.” Other sources of his fantasies do indeed have names. They include Miss Emmeline, for whom he “yearned with a kind of raw hunger,” and Margaret Whitehead: “I could throw her down and spread her young white legs and stick myself in her until belly met belly and shoot inside her in warm milky spurts of desecration.” Who talks like that? Probably not an enslaved African American in nineteenth-century Virginia. Nat longs to kill Margaret, “to snap that white, slender, throbbing young neck” as much as he’d like to do other things with her. Reading about Turner’s tormented and volatile fascination, I half expected him to carve out Margaret’s liver and have sex with it. As if anticipating his audience’s concerns, he assures us that his craven lust is far from unique; it’s a form of distorted passion that comes with the skin. “In later life,” he tells us, “I learned that such an infatuation for a beautiful white mistress on the part of a black boy was not at all uncommon, despite the possibility of danger.” Well, then, that explains it.
As for Styron’s renderings of black women, calling them cartoons would be uncharitable—to cartoons. On those rare occasions when he bothers to mention them, they appear in Turner’s memories as wanton playthings of easy virtue. The one black woman he fantasizes about is nothing like the quasivirginal white princesses that usually stir his loins. He describes the girl as “a plump doxy, every nigger boy’s Saturday piece.” Similarly, he speaks derisively of “the available and willing little black girls” who could be “taken” during “some quick stolen instant at the edge of a cornfield” or “lured behind a shed.” If there is a black woman or girl worthy of dignified treatment in all of Southampton County, Styron’s Turner has never seen her.
Most appalling of all is Turner’s mother, whom he witnesses being transported to heights of glorious ecstasy as a white rapist brutally assaults her on a kitchen table. The scene combines absurdity and horror and leaves behind a lingering distaste. At the book’s end, we are left to wonder if Styron can—or even desires to—compose a black female character of texture and dimension.
Turner’s frenzied preoccupation with white women often swells to such proportions that it drowns out all other thoughts, including any notion of escape or freedom. The prospect of manumission renders him utterly perplexed. “A free man,” he reflects. “Never in a nigger boy’s head was there such wild sudden confusion.” Styron piles on the injuries and insults throughout, upping the yuck factor as he proceeds. In one scenario, a white sadist named Nathaniel Francis forces a dimwitted enslaved man to have sex with a dog. In another, he makes two slaves engage in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Each of these acts takes place in front of an audience. Forced bestiality, dominance, and submission—the scenes unfold like pages from an S&M novel in which the masochists have no safe words. It’s not hard to imagine Styron drooling over his sheets of yellow legal paper as he feverishly scribbled, shuddering from every burst of emotion that comes from writing nigger more than 240 times.
Because Styron never claimed to be attempting satire, we are obliged to take seriously the idea that he took his novel seriously. In the accidental farce that emerges, the fictional Turner often speaks as if he expects that no black person will ever get to read his confession. The same is true of his creator, who seems to have written the novel solely with a white audience in mind and hadn’t genuinely considered that black people would read it. James Baldwin, Styron fondly recalls in his foreword, encouraged him to overcome his hesitations and “take on the persona of Nat Turner and write as if from within this black man’s skin.” To ward off the hailstorm of denunciation from African Americans that descended soon after the novel’s publication, Styron resorted to a variation on a classic defense, declaring, in essence, “Some of my best friends are Baldwin.” For his part, Baldwin remained steadfast, standing by Styron with mostly nondescript pronouncements such as “No one can tell a writer what he should write” (true) and “Styron is probing something very dangerous, deep and painful in the national psyche” (also true).
The eminent historian John Hope Franklin endorsed the novel, but other black admirers were hard to find. In an afterword to the 1993 edition, Styron mentions the warm reception he received at a historically black college, but I wonder if any members of the faculty or administration had actually peered between the book’s covers. If they had, they probably noted some of the ways in which the novel could be seen as awkwardly conversant with works by black novelists such as Wright and essayists like Baldwin.
For instance, in Styron’s Confessions, an enslaved man named Hark is persecuted after stumbling upon two white boys engaged in mutual masturbation, causing Nat to ponder what he considered an uncorrectable condition: “White people really see nothing of a Negro in his private activity, while a Negro, who must walk miles out of his path to avoid seeing everything white people do, has often to suffer for even the most guileless part of his ubiquitous presence by being called a spy and a snooping black scoundrel.” The passage recalls Wright’s recollections in Black Boy of working as a bellboy in a Southern hotel:
I grew used to seeing the white prostitutes naked upon their beds, sitting nude about their rooms, and I learned new modes of behavior, new rules in how to live the Jim Crow life. It was presumed that we black boys took their nakedness for granted, that it startled us no more than a blue vase or a red rug. Our presence awoke in them no sense of shame whatever, for we blacks were not considered human anyway. If they were alone, I would steal sidelong glances at them. But if they were receiving men, not a flicker of my eyelids would show.
Another Styron passage seems influenced by this scene in Black Boy at the optical lens shop where Wright had been hired:
But one day Reynolds called me to his machine.
“Richard, how long is your thing?” he asked me.
“What thing?” I asked.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “The thing the bull uses on the cow.”
I turned away from him; I had heard that whites regarded Negroes as animals in sex matters and his words made me angry.
“I heard that a nigger can stick his prick in the ground and spin around on it like a top,” he said, chuckling. “I’d like to see you do that. I’d give you a dime, if you did it.”
In a similar scene in Confessions, twenty-year-old Nat is being transported to his new home by Reverend Eppes, the man to whose keeping he has been entrusted.
“Tell me something, boy,” he said finally, the reedy voice suddenly strained, hesitant yet fraught with some terrible decision. “I hear tell a nigger boy’s got an unusual big pecker on him. That right, boy?”
When Nat doesn’t reply, Reverend Eppes persists. “You know what I hear tell, boy? I hear tell your average nigger boy’s got a member on him inch or so longer’n ordinary. That right, boy?”
Styron’s practice of echo and revision recalls Langston Hughes’s observations about white writers quoted earlier in this essay, along with his 1940 poem, “Note on Commercial Theatre.” In it, a black blues artist complains that whites have “mixed” and “fixed” his creations “so they don’t sound like me.” Not much later, Styron appears to challenge an oft-quoted observation of his friend Baldwin. Four years earlier, the fiery prophet had famously declared in Time magazine, “To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.” Styron’s Turner offers a far more reassuring take on the same subject. “An exquisitely sharpened hatred for the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor,” he says. “Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro’s soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere.” Granted, hate and rage are not necessarily the same thing. Still, Styron’s Turner seems determined to minimize the possibility of black resentment.
Like Wright and Baldwin, Styron convincingly exposes white neuroses and hypocrisies. The historical record assisted all three writers in this regard (including the well-documented obsession with black sexuality and the tendency of lynch mobs to practice genital mutilation). In contrast, the behavior of the fictional Turner and his fellow captives seems to have sprung entirely from Styron’s imagination, with little correspondence to be found in actual histories of life under enslavement.
Styron’s “liberties” prompted several black thinkers to join John Henrik Clarke in compiling an essay collection, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. It could just have easily been called Why Styron Sucks. Most of the essayists remark on the fictional Turner’s inexplicable obsession with white women, while the absence of black women characters who aren’t whores almost completely escapes comment. Clarke and company frequently question Styron’s motives, knowledge of African American culture, and command of history. An element of recoil animates all the essays, with many of them exuding an almost palpable sense of disgust. This is understandable: Reading the novel the first time, I felt as if I was peeking at a blackface party through a frat-house window. Reading it again produced the same sensation.
A visceral response to Styron’s manipulations might induce some readers to concentrate on his objective and state of mind while overlooking important questions of craft. And craft, inevitably, is where he falls short. The undisciplined fecundity of his prose buries Turner’s voice and personality under obscuring layers of verbiage. Styron seldom settles for one or two modifiers when a half dozen will do. The flat, rhythmless sentences often seem out of place in an exploration of cultural space where rhythm—of speech, song, and gesture—was a vital resource for enslaved captives trying to get through the day. This lack strains credulity even when one is willing to suspend disbelief to engage the requirements of a fictional narrative. As Vincent Harding points out in his essay, “You’ve Taken My Nat and Gone,” “The religious music of Afro-Americans never enters as a major structural element of the novel as one would expect if such a work had been done by an Ellison, a Baldwin, or a Wright.” Styron, who earned more than a million dollars from the novel, became that rare usurper of black cultural history who left music relatively untouched, ignoring the art form traditionally most vulnerable to poaching for profit.
Unsurprisingly, white reviewers reacted quite differently to The Confessions of Nat Turner. They praised the book in the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the New York Times, Vogue, Newsweek, Partisan Review, and Dissent, among others. Could so many critics have gotten it wrong? Apparently. Mike Thelwell, writing in Ten Black Writers Respond, noted, “If this book is important, it is so not because it tells much about Negro experience during slavery but because of the manner in which it demonstrates the persistence of white southern myths, racial stereotypes, and literary clichés even in the best intentioned and most enlightened minds. Their largely uncritical acceptance in literary circles shows us how far we still have to go.”
Like the clueless crowds who adore Alice Walker’s hapless antihero in “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” Styron’s boosters exalted a pale approximation of a story of black struggle. They got neither the flavor nor the thing itself.
4
Appropriation was once associated with unprincipled borrowing from a minority population’s art or culture, or shameless imitations that pretended to be the original. Nowadays, in discussions among African Americans, it seems to refer more often to a borrowing of black experience (and most often, black pain) in which the very act of borrowing, with or without attribution, is a form of inexcusable disrespect. Making money from culture acquired under questionable circumstances just adds insult to injury, affirming the oft-expressed complaint that black culture matters but black lives don’t. Within that context, Nat Turner’s uprising remains a significant source of pride and sadness among African Americans; pride in his courage and his commitment to secure liberation by any means necessary, and sadness stemming from the hundreds of black people that suffered abuse and violent death as a result of his actions. Long before William Styron shared his cursory impressions of Turner’s rebellion with his fawning readership, Turner had achieved and maintained folk hero status among black people. He was, in the words of African American critic Albert Murray, “a magnificent forefather enshrined in the National Pantheon beside the greatest heroes of the Republic.”
In the mid-twentieth century, Emmett Till attained a similarly mythical status. Jesus, they say, rose after three days. Emmett did too. After his abductors tortured and killed him, they tied a seventy-pound cotton gin fan around what was left of his neck. Wanting no one to know how much he’d suffered for the sins of his nation, they tossed his remains into the Tallahatchie River. No doubt his were not the only bones there. Find any ground where black people toiled in the Jim Crow South, any body of water that bore witness to their labors, sift the soil, dredge the depths, and you are bound to find some bones. Consecrate those bones, the poet Henry Dumas had urged. Dumas, black bard, son of the rural South, envisioned the bones—“big bones and little bones, parts of bones, chips, tid-bits, skulls, fingers and everything”—hauled up and handled like “babies or somethin’ precious.”
But most of those bones are stuck in the earth, working their way deeper into time. Not Emmett’s. They still had flesh upon them and they rose to the surface, where things done in the dark are brought to light.
Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, would not allow a closed casket after the body was brought to the North. What’s more, she permitted a photographer from Jet magazine to photograph the corpse. Anyone who’s seen the resulting image is likely to remember it. It may not hit you at first. You might think you’re looking at a geological survey, a star-charred chunk of meteor, or a satellite image of a distant planet. But then you notice a hint of nostrils, a trace of lips perched illogically atop the ruin, or you see a photograph of Emmett helpfully juxtaposed, see him in the robust beauty of youth, the softness still apparent on the face of the boy becoming a man. Adulthood was right around the corner but Emmett never got there. Mamie Till wanted us to know why he didn’t.
* * *
When she arranged his battered remains in an open casket, more than fifty thousand black Chicagoans lined up to view the body. Today, Till’s casket, exhumed in 2004 when a grand jury reopened his case, sits on display in the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture.
* * *
Five floors above the casket, Behold Thy Son hangs on a wall. David Driskell’s oil painting, rendered in subtle variations of copper and bronze, is a poignant portrait of Mamie Till holding the body of her only son, Emmett. At forty inches by thirty inches, it’s roughly the dimensions of a bath towel. Many critics have noted the religious overtones of the painting, including its title (taken from the Bible, John 19:26), its suggestion of stained glass, and the robed mother supporting Till’s body. The young man’s arms are fully extended, echoing Christ splayed on the cross. Ambiguity pervades the scene: The woman could be helping the youth to stand or preparing his body for burial. His face, though distorted, doesn’t closely resemble Till’s, and the body’s wounds are muted and indistinct. We know the figure is Till because Driskell has suggested as much; otherwise, it could be anyone from Jesus to an anonymous mother’s son. The vagueness is meant to connect Till’s death to notions of universal loss and suffering. (While shared trauma simmers at the core of much African American art, it would be a mistake to overestimate its centrality. It’s important to note that collective pain coexists in the same space with many other elements, including joy, music, and sheer indomitability.)
Till’s desecrated body washed up in the Tallahatchie River on August 31, 1955. Weeks later, Driskell and his family moved south so he could take a teaching job at Talladega College. By then, details of the young boy’s murder had reached black communities across the country. The wounds were still fresh when the artist put brush to canvas. (In addition to the painting, Driskell produced two small sketches, Behold Thy Son I and Behold Thy Son II, which placed the Till figure in an open casket.) “This crime awakened in most African Americans a sense of rage that helped prepare us for the revolutionary journey we would eventually take,” he has said. Part of that journey took place in jazz, experimental theater, and visual arts, where Driskell’s painting played a seminal role. Although he was “well aware of the power of social commentary art and its use to stir the consciousness of a people,” he quickly moved away from it in his painting. Because of Behold Thy Son, he said, “I kind of got it out of my system.” While Driskell’s efforts at issue-oriented art were ending, those of others were about to begin. It’s not difficult to connect Driskell’s work to the politically conscious artist collectives that followed in the next decade, including the Spiral Group in New York and AfriCobra in Chicago.
Driskell, born in 1931, would go on to become one of the most prominent painters, curators, and art scholars in the United States. He completed Behold Thy Son one year after Till’s murder—and twenty years before painter Dana Schutz was born.
In 2017, three of Schutz’s canvases were chosen for the Whitney Biennial. One of them, a fifty-three-by-thirty-nine-inch oil painting called Open Casket, uses the famous photograph of Till’s body lying in state as a point of departure. The formal wear and the swollen dimensions of the head quickly orient those viewers who have seen the image. A streak of red, reminiscent of blood, runs parallel to the shirt’s placket, which is punctuated by buttons that may remind some observers of bullet holes. The head is less grotesque than barely recognizable as such, its misshapen surfaces conveyed by broad brushstrokes and thick layers of brown paint. Unlike Driskell’s painting, the finality of Till’s life on Earth is emphasized via the decay of flesh; Schutz provides viewers no hint of solace through quasi-religious suggestions of resurrection, redemption, or the protective vision of an unseen god. She conceived of the painting as “evidence of something that really happened,” she explained to a reporter. “I wasn’t alive then, and it wasn’t taught in our history classes.” Like Styron before her, she perceived a blank space in the historical narrative and used her imagination with the intention of filling it. Also like Styron, she stumbled into a firestorm of outrage and recrimination.
During the public opening of the Biennial on March 17, 2017, an African American artist named Parker Bright stood directly in front of Open Casket. Wearing a shirt with “Black Death Spectacle” written on the back, he remained between viewers and the painting for several hours. Bright’s stance provided a hint of the furor to come; without saying a word, he had performed a bodacious public declaration, somewhat like yanking the mic from Taylor Swift at an award show. His position reminded me of similar, less dramatic debates that have frequently unfolded on social media. The desire to avoid seeing trauma has often played out in gripping Facebook threads in which black users have argued eloquently against the posting of video recordings of police shootings. Doing so compounds the horror, they contend, and it also provides lurid entertainment for white users titillated by the sight of broken blackness. The countless historical postcards of white men, women, and children grinning next to a pulverized, burned, and mutilated dark body prove that the latter is a real possibility. Even so, and despite the eloquence and passion of such arguments, I’ve never been persuaded to abide by them. I don’t begrudge others the right to disregard disturbing images, but I always want to see for myself, even at the risk of providing free diversion for gazers with sordid motives. The opportunity to witness fuels my awareness of my own precarious citizenship, informs my understanding of our police state and, at critical times, has strengthened my willingness to resist. I won’t insist that you look; neither should you demand that I don’t. The same applies to paintings. Bright appeared to be interfering not only with “the white gaze” but also all gazes. Suppose I had tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, brother.” Would he have stepped aside?
Hannah Black, another black artist, increased the heat via a Facebook posting to the Biennial’s curators. Among several salient observations about white supremacy, institutional racism, and antiblack violence, she called for the removal and destruction of Open Casket. She argued, “It is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun.” Schutz’s paintings don’t typically depict black people and they were selling from $90,000 to $400,000 each before she was chosen for the Whitney Biennial. What’s more, she has committed to never offering Open Casket for sale. In some cases, white artists have indeed appropriated black subjects for profit and increased fame, but it is difficult to make that argument here. According to Black, the sight of antiblack violence has seldom been “sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation.”
“Seldom” isn’t the same as “never”; occasionally exposure to injustice and brutality inspires an Abel Meeropol to compose “Strange Fruit” or motivates a Violet Liuzzo to leave her home and privilege behind to head down South and make the ultimate sacrifice. We should allow for that possibility, however slim it might be. The prospect of artists censoring other artists is more nauseating than having to suffer the output of creators whose reach exceeds their grasp. I would no sooner demand that Schutz destroy her canvas than I’d call for Lil Wayne to set fire to his recordings after spitting such egregious rhymes as “beat that pussy up like Emmett Till.” Artists need the space to fail as much as they need the raw materials from which they fashion their work. And, although I’m more drawn to Driskell’s interpretation of the Till tragedy, I hardly consider Schutz’s version a failure.
I don’t think Driskell’s painting is aesthetically superior to Schutz’s; to my eyes, they both are well done. Nor do I prefer Driskell’s painting because he’s black. It appeals to me because it encourages me to contemplate African Americans’ creative darkening of Judeo-Christian theology. I’m not referring to the early years of our captivity when Moses and Jesus were forced upon us but to the years that have followed, during which many of us continue to embrace a God-story that wasn’t ours to begin with. I’m not suggesting that our adoption is appropriation because it’s absent any power dynamics implicit in that process. I am suggesting that it is a form of voluntary assimilation; the political utility of endorsing the Jesus story is often apparent to me. I’m interested in ways that artists like Driskell subvert that story by making it explicitly black, by canonizing marginalized and brutally oppressed black citizens like Till and Turner. Like the historic Afro-Caribbean practice of converting Catholic saints into neo-African deities, paintings such as Behold Thy Son can equip black viewers with the psychic armor they need to withstand the challenges of the predatory, unyielding West.
Driskell’s painting leads me down corridors of intellectual inquiry that invariably challenge and surprise me. Much of my response to the work is what I’m projecting onto it from my own background and thought process, a kind of projection that’s beyond the artist’s control. It’s a way in which the art speaks—eloquently—for itself. That said, I am genuinely moved by Schutz’s painting, and no less so because she is white. It simply appeals to me for different reasons than Driskell’s does.
I believe it’s possible to defend Schutz’s project without underestimating the larger problem of institutional racism that keeps artists of color out of major museums and exhibitions. I share the anguish of many art lovers who despair that the conversation about Schutz seldom expanded to include the work of black women painters who’ve also responded to Till in their work. Lisa Whittington is among these, as is Melodye Benson Rosales, whose The End of Innocence is probably my favorite work in this category. Still, the argument for inclusion is more persuasive when one points to mediocre artists granted a spotlight that their work doesn’t merit. (This is also a problem in publishing, where catalogs and bookstore shelves are crammed with white-authored work of questionable quality.) The problem with sweeping generalizations is they risk excluding art and artists who should be inside, not out. Few critics seem to be saying that Schutz’s work is not good enough to be shown, which is a quite different argument from saying that her work is not appropriate.
5
Parallel Time, a memoir by Brent Staples, begins with a brilliant, chilling description of an autopsy photograph taken on February 13, 1984. Staples starts at the head (“squarish and overlarge”) and proceeds to the feet, each of which has a second toe that “curls softly in an extended arc and rises above the others.” In between, he describes the body’s injuries resulting from being shot six times with a large-caliber handgun. Staples doesn’t flinch, noting the enormous surgical wound that “runs the length of the abdomen, from the sternum all the way to the pubic mound,” resembling “a mouth whose lips are pouting and bloody.” The strength of his language notwithstanding, Staples’s narrative gathers considerable power when he moves from the clinical to the visceral.
“His feelings are mine as well,” he writes of the dead black man on the slab. “Cold: the sensation moves from my eyes to my shoulder blades to my bare ass as I feel him naked on the steel. I envision the reflex that would run through his body, hear the sharp breath he would draw when the steel met his skin. Below the familiar feet a drain awaits the blood that will flow from this autopsy.”
The feet are familiar to Staples because they belonged to his younger brother. He goes on to mention the “terse narrative summary” of the coroner’s report:
SKULL: Intact.
VERTEBRAE: Intact.
RIBS: Intact.
PELVIS: There is a chip fracture of the left pubic ramus, and there is also fracturing of the right pubic ramus. There is extensive fracturing of the left femur, and there is a through-and-through bullet wound of the right femur just below the hip joint.
The author effectively counters the report’s sterile account with gut reactions and personal memories that offer a glimpse of Blake Melvin Staples as he lived and breathed. He reminds us that official documents can seldom convey the full humanity of a person and may even undermine it. What’s more, Brent Staples demonstrates that scenes of black heartbreak can be turned into moments of reflection and illumination if handled with care. The risk of getting it wrong, a significant danger, even when the creative artist is African American, increases exponentially when the artist is not.
Across disciplines and centuries, black creators have shared a concern for what they regard as whites’ mishandling of—and preoccupation with—black tragedy. As commonly perceived, this unseemly obsession usually takes one of two forms. In the first, white audiences derive perverse pleasure from black misery. The novelist Chester Himes identified this kind of racially inflected trauma porn before there was a name for it. In his 1972 memoir, The Quality of Hurt, he wrote, “I have never heard the phrase ‘It’s a beautiful book’ applied to a book written by a black writer unless the black characters have suffered horribly. I have heard scores of white people say of Richard Wright’s books Native Son and Black Boy that they were ‘beautiful books.’ Of course this does not mean the same thing to me as it does to these white people. The suffering of others does not fill me with any spiritual satisfaction. Nor do I revel in the anguish of my fellow human beings. I am not uplifted by other people’s degradation.”
In the second instance, white artists ruthlessly pillage the African American experience in search of fodder for their creations. This was one of the many nerves Hannah Black struck in her condemnation of Open Casket. Artists who aren’t black, she argued, should “stop treating Black pain as raw material.” A year before Dana Schutz was charged with doing exactly that, a white conceptual poet named Kenneth Goldsmith floundered into a similar quagmire. On March 13, 2015, he stepped before an audience at Brown University and read a poem called “The Body of Michael Brown.”
Brown’s killing at the hands of a policeman named Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, remains a source of great agony in African American communities across the country. For many of us, it’s hard to hear his name without recalling his body lying on the ground for more than four hours, the police preventing his mother from going to him, the killer’s subsequent explanation that Brown “looked like a demon.” Like Emmett Till before him, Brown has become an unwitting martyr in the endless struggle against antiblack violence. As a result, any artistic response to his death that seems callous or unthinking risks aggravating injuries that aren’t remotely close to healing.
With a blown-up image of Brown’s graduation photograph onscreen behind him, Goldsmith read for thirty minutes from the young man’s autopsy report. About seventy-five people were present at the reading, and only a handful of them wrote about it afterward. Goldsmith asked the university to withhold the video recording of his performance from public view, so most of us know more about the controversy that followed than we do about the event itself. As news of Goldsmith’s presentation spread, he quickly drew fire from the literary community and especially writers of color. Roxane Gay called his performance “tacky.” The Mongrel Coalition against Gringpo, an anonymous collective of writers of color, accused Goldsmith of failing to “differentiate between White Supremacy and Poetry.”
In an article about the dustup, the New Yorker helpfully compared the poet’s stunt to Fidget, a previous work by Goldsmith in which he attempts to document every movement of his body from waking up at 10:00 a.m. to returning to sleep at 11:00 p.m. A good alternative title could be Way Too Much Time on My Hands. A typical passage reads like this: “Forefinger moves to nostril. Enters. Tip of finger probes ridge inside nostril. Shape of left nostril conforms to shape of finger. Shape of finger conforms to shape of left nostril.” Beats working, I suppose.
According to critic Marjorie Perloff, who has championed Goldsmith’s work, Fidget is “not literary invention but poésie verité, a documentary record of how it actually is when a person wakes up on a given morning.” In a letter to Perloff, Goldsmith explained it this way: “Every move was an observation of a body in a space, not my body in a space. There was to be no editorializing, no psychology, no emotion—just a body detached from a mind.” In that same letter, he wrote, “I was alone all day in my apartment and didn’t answer the phone, go on errands, etc. I just observed my body and spoke.”
As a result, I can’t help seeing the figure being observed in Fidget not just as a body but a white one, and I’m tempted to consider the two projects not as companion pieces but studies in dramatic contrast: On one side, a live white body moving through space according to its own impulses; on the other, a dark, inert body, fatally punished for daring to move through space as if it were white (i.e., walking in the middle of the street). In his defense of his Michael Brown piece, Goldsmith declined to connect it to Fidget. Instead, he placed it “in the tradition” of his book Seven American Deaths and Disasters. In the book he transcribes and edits news broadcasts from fateful events in recent US history, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. It is closer to “The Body of Michael Brown” in that both are revised texts made of words Goldsmith did not compose himself. He says that this method of “uncreative writing” enables him “to tell the truth in the strongest and clearest way possible.”
Some of the most pointed criticisms of Goldsmith challenged his use of the autopsy report as the basis of a literary exploration. That was the one aspect of his project that I found intriguing, since such a document presents a challenge not only because it confronts readers with their own mortality but also, in this case, because of the pain that still surrounds Brown’s death. Rereading the medical examiner’s words almost four years after their initial release, I felt as nauseous as when I first read them. When filtered through the sensibilities of a gifted writer, an autopsy can be used to “wring the marvelous from the terrible,” as Ellison would have it. The opening of Brent Staples’s memoir is one example. Another is Sapphire’s “Found Poem,” from her American Dreams collection. It switches dexterously from the abrupt matter-of-factness of the coroner’s language into a skillful use of repetition that dramatizes the violent consequences of a body beaten to death:
his shoulder shoulder shoulder blades
have similar similar similar cuts
where his attackers came down
on his back
Still another is Martín Espada’s “How We Could Have Lived or Died This Way.” The poet converts the bureaucratic prose of coroners’ reports into weaponized words accompanying the police shootings that leave unarmed black bodies sprawled on city streets:
I see the coroner nodding, the words he types in his report burrowing
into the skin like more bullets. I see the government investigations stacking,
words buzzing on the page, then suffocated as bees suffocate in a jar. I see
the next Black man, fleeing as the fugitive slave once fled the slave-catcher,
shot in the back for a broken tail light. I see the cop handcuff the corpse.
If reports of Goldsmith’s Brown University reading are accurate, his attempt at offering a poetic take on the autopsy report wasn’t wrong in itself; the error was his failure to transform it from a record of raw tragedy into poetry that informs and disturbs. If one dares to insert oneself into the ongoing narrative of white supremacy and police brutality, one needs to come prepared. Whether he possessed the necessary skill, knowledge, and imagination to enter the fray remains an open question.
But we are left to speculate. Goldsmith pulled the plug on his Michael Brown poem, and the university sealed any evidence that the poet had been there at all.
He had taken the body and gone.