The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness

Jean Genet, “Introduction,” Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (London: Jonathan Cape and Penguin, 1970), 21; Lucille Clifton, The Book of Light (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1993), 25; Duke Ellington, “We, Too, Sing ‘America’” (1941), The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). William Carlos Williams, Asphodel and Other Love Poems (New York: New Directions, 1994), 18–19; Robert O’Meally, Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 389.

HOW NOT TO BE A SLAVE

1. Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), xi.

2. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Dis and Dat: Dialect and the Descent,” in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 191–92.

3. Brent Staples, “To Be a Slave in Brooklyn,” New York Times, 24 June 2001. Staples describes archaeologists’ discovery of a slave cosmogram in the attic of the Lott house in Brooklyn, “the first known slave dwelling in what would become New York City”:

They pulled up the floorboards in the chimney room and found five corncobs arranged in what appeared to be a cross or star shape. New Yorkers renovating old houses may have encountered such things and discarded them. But to experienced eyes, they are more than just debris. The cross formed by cobs suggests a cosmogram, a symbol known to anthopologists as a West African depiction of the cosmos. One line represents the boundary between the living and the dead and the other the path of power that connects these worlds. Archaelogists studying slave quarters in the Deep South have typically found African ritual items buried near fireplaces, which slaves viewed as the way spirits entered or left the house…. Scholars have typically argued that West African spiritual life was confined to the Deep South, where slave populations were large enough to sustain their rituals. But the Lott house shows that African religious practices survived, not just in the Deep South and in the border states, but here in New York City.

4. John Noble Wilford, “Slave Artifacts Under the Hearth,” New York Times, 27 August 1996. Interestingly, the writings of Frederick Douglass have aided in such excavations, due to the accuracy of his descriptions of plantation life in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. John Noble Wilford, “An Abolitionist Leads the Way in Unearthing of Slaves’ Past,” New York Times, 5 September 2006. See also James Deetz, Small Things Forgotten: The Archeology of Early American Life, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1996).

5. Robert Harris Jr. cites this familiar saying in a review of a book on slavery. Robert L. Harris Jr., African American Review 29, no. 3 (Fall 1995). Harris starts with a useful reminder: “The question of how much control slaves had over their interior lives is still a matter of debate. As chattel, slaves were property and subject to the complete authority of their owners. But slavery, unlike concentration camps, asylums, or penitentiaries, was never a total institution in which slaveholders governed every moment of the slaves’ lives. Although slaves had almost no legal rights, they secured from planters some customary rights. Those customs and practices provided slaves with a degree of autonomy and control over their lives that insulated them against complete dependency on slaveholders” (510). Such lack of complete control should in no way be confused with chattel slavery being in any way mild; rather, it is a measure of the slaves’ resistance and ingenuity. Harris in fact goes on to relate, interestingly, how even a nursing child was a means of a slave woman’s resisting sexual advances. Rebellion is everywhere, and daily.

6. It is worth noting that often the black author wasn’t the same as a black slave; instead “slave narratives” are usually written by a “free” ex-slave or at least an “unbound” fugitive slave. It is tempting to say that since William Wells Brown (the first African American novelist), black authors quite literally are both fugitive, ex-slave narrators. However, this fails to note the ways in which Wheatley, Horton, even Dave the Slave and the “black and unknown bards” who created the spirituals all invented systems of survival and crafted their work while still in bondage.

8. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act, 53.

9. Harriet Wilson (“Our Nig”). Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). The Bondswoman’s Narrative. We can thank Henry Louis Gates for authenticating the black authors and helping to publish and republish both of these important early works. Harriet Jacobs (Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Penguin, 1987). The authentication of this narrative by Jean Fagan Yellin is necessary to consider its current and past readings.

10. Jacobs is not alone in this—her fellow slave Harriet, this one Wilson, pseudo- and eponymously signs her name “Our Nig.” With that signing, Wilson signifies on ideas of possession and of naming as name-calling. Such “Signifyin(g)” is defined most theoretically by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Signifiying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For a brief summary of the concept, consult pages 64–76. Ralph Ellison defines signifying as “meaning, in the unwritten dictionary of American Negro usage, ‘rhetorical understatements.’” Ralph Ellison, “Blues People,” in The Collected Essays, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 281.

11. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Gates, The Classic Slave Narratives, 305.

12. William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 274–75.

15. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Phillis Wheatley on Trial,” The New Yorker, January 2003.

16. As William Andrews indicates, however bluntly, “She takes the power that comes from the point of a pen to project an alter ego in freedom up North, not a lunatic self raging in rebellion in a psychic attic.” Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, 259. Andrews here of course is signifying, however unfairly, on several of the white women writers discussed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

17. Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), xiii.

18. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life, in Gates, Classic Slave Narratives, 307.

19. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Norton, 2001), 104.

21. John F. Callahan, ed., Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 9.

22. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 95. Emphasis in the original.

25. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” (1928; repr., Folklore, Memoirs, & Other Writings, New York: Library of America, 1995), 826–829. Michael North discusses this in his chapter on Hurston in Dialects of Modernism.

26. See Carla Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

27. We may also consider Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), about the naming of a town founded by blacks by a corporate namer, in the end deciding to name it (spoiler alert!) not “Freedom” but “Struggle.”

28. James Baldwin, “Introduction: The Price of the Ticket,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), x.

30. Douglass, “The Last Flogging,” in My Bondage and My Freedom, ed. John Stauffer (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 133. This chapter revisits what is found in “chapter 9” of his previous Narrative of the Life.

31. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, chapter 10, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 426. Douglass has three distinct, and overlapping autobiographies. I will chiefly refer to the iconic first one, with the fascinating second one for contrast.

30. Thanks to Robert O’Meally’s “Introduction” to the twenty-second edition of the Narrative for directing me to this text, though I could not locate Morrison’s gloss of the scene mentioned there (nor a piece called “Rootedness” that’s subtitled “The Ancestor in Afro-American Fiction”). Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers, 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor Books, 1984), 343.

33. Robert O’Meally, “Introduction,” Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003), xxviii.

34. In this it echoes Charles Chestnutt’s description of “conjure,” which appears as a parenthetical in Houston A. Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): “(… in [Chestnutt’s] correspondence, the word ‘conjure’ is always in quotes, protected as a tricky or transformative sign—masked)” (47).

35. Douglass, Narrative of the Life, chapter 9, in Gates and McKay, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 426.

36. Ibid., 422. The last stanza of the following Negro folk rhyme expresses much the same sentiment about a “master” (here “Mosser”):

Mosser is six foot one way, an’ free foot tudder;

An’ he weigh five hunderd pound.

Britches cut so big dat dey don’t suit de tailor,

An’ dey don’t meet half way ’round.

Mosser’s coat come back to a claw-hammer p’int.

(Speak sof’ or his Bloodhound’ll bite us.)

His long white stockin’s mighty clean an’ nice,

But a liddle mo’ holier dan righteous.

Thomas Talley, Negro Folk Rhymes, ed. Charles K. White, expanded ed. (1922; repr., Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 35. See also Paul Arnett, “Root Sculpture: Tornadoes Inside Eggs,” in Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South. Volume 1: The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2000). Arnett’s history of root sculpture and rootwork helps describe the way that “in the nineteenth century, when beliefs in African spiritual systems were more overt, roots and conjure participated in slave life in often political ways as a means of challenging oppression” (130).

37. Douglass, Narrative of a Life, in Gates and McKay, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 427–28.

40. Zora Neale Hurston, “High John de Conquer,” The American Mercury Reader (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1944), 106. Emphasis added.

41. Paul Arnett, “Root Sculpture”: “Secrecy and invulnerability were among the hallmarks of conjure’s specific antebellum incarnation, and set the tone for future applications of conjure to the American challenges of blackness” (130). Albert Murray, OmniAmericans: Black Experience & American Culture (1970; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1990). The fuller phrase, “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology” courses thoughout Murray’s book.

43. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (1905; repr., New York: Avon, 1972), 43.

45. Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 5.

46. LeRoi Jones, Black Magic: Poems 1961–1967 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 116. Steele’s chapter title is in turn quoting critic Robert Stoller.

47. In its very ambiguity, or shall we say indeterminancy, the fetish differs from the stereotype, which as critic James Snead has noted in another context, remains excessively fixed. I explore this further in my essay on Kara Walker: Kevin Young, “Triangular Trade: Coloring, Remarking, and Narrative in the Writings of Kara Walker,” in Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007).

48. Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1985), 181. Emphasis added.

51. I have pulled from the body of the book a long point about “cultural castration” and the fetish, and not just because it seems too theoretical. In the spirit of the shadow book I include it here:

Where the fetish, then, is for a black creator and keeper of tradition a sign of power, for the white viewer it is often a sign of powerlessness.

The authority that the black viewer or carrier or creator of the fetish achieves is much like that of the counterfeit, as I’ve mentioned; what the white viewer notices all too often is not black authority but the lack of white authority. Nothing can save you; “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoodoo you”: we are rendered powerless against the fetish’s power. In this way, the fetish represents blackness disembodied, an authorless black text that seems anonymous (or pseudonymous), and dangerously so. We aren’t sure who made the black mask in front of us, or even what tribe: we know only its power, the hands that made it, the face that once wore it (and wore its surface down as it wears us down). We are both transfixed and transported: fetish is pure synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole of unholy blackness.

This is the anxiety at the dark heart of the fetish—not the anxiety of castration from a biologically male perspective, but of emasculation from a cultural one. The fetish seems the virile thing, and a stand-in for the thing itself. No wonder what gets fetishized is often black sexuality, male and female, to stave off fear and satisfy curiosity. The anxiety the fetish fights yet fits might be called cultural castration instead of an anxiety of influence; or, to take it out of the sexual realm (a realm staked as male by Freud and then Harold Bloom), fetish represents and reinforces the anxiety over black influence. Instead of honoring the tradition on view, this white gaze at fetish (and looking away) cannot easily be resolved: simply put, there is no tradition to fit oneself into, feel connected to in the way a black viewer might, and the white viewer averts the eyes. Look away, Look away, Look away, Dixieland.

But the fetish does not just reenact a feeling of white “lack” of authority; it also addresses this anxiety by focusing instead on black “authenticity.” Just as the fetish is a far more ambiguous view than a stereotype—which is stable, fixed, natural, “the way things are”—the fetish is not the only way black folks can be viewed by whites. I view the fetish as a more complex reaction than stereotype—though the latter can cover up the former; that is, stereotypes can contain a desire, a fetish, which the stereotype fights.

Who hasn’t seen the typing of a big black buck (or a big black mama), and looked under the hood, to see it driven by a wish unfulfilled?

This may be an inversion of the popular view that the stereotype of black oversexuality leads to fetishizing it; I am saying here that the stereotype, in its negative or mocking assertion, is actually a way of dealing with desire or fetish for blackness. We can see this in the fiction of Margaret B. Seltzer, known as Margaret B. Jones, in her false memoir—just as with Picasso (though without his artistry), the fetish is employed to escape whiteness while simultaneously enforcing it. In this it may be no different than the means to which Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot used the Uncle Remus tales and dialect, as Michael North notes, to distance themselves from a dominant, all-too-proper literary language, while also retaining their proper English in a pinch.

I want to stress here that if not plenty then many whites have looked objectively at black totemic (and textual) power and not seen simply “object.” I want to be clear that the fetish makes up a cultural gaze and not an individual one (though culture can be made up of these selfsame individuals). Many have seen black subjective power and found it inspiring or fruitful, without resorting to making it a thing craved, consumed, made contemptible, but most of all, covered up. There are a host of other examples of white reactions to and enthusiasms for black cultural productions, notably jazz. Some of these we examine in this book.

The careful reader will notice that I am interested throughout this book in black culture as American culture. However, I don’t believe that these two things are contradictory, warring in one body, but rather redundant: blackness is Americanness. The question is not, How white is black culture?—a concern that comes to a head in many aspects of Black Arts of the 1960s—but How black is American culture?

52. Baldwin, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” in The Price of the Ticket, 172. Originally published in the New York Times Book Review, 25 January 1959, and first collected in Nobody Knows My Name.

53. Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Dutchman, scene 2. Reprinted in Gates and McKay, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

54. James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” in The Price of the Ticket, 127. Originally printed in Harper’s magazine, November 1955, and first collected in Notes of a Native Son.

58. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell: Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell Drawn from Things Heard and Seen (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation, 2000), 264. Swedenborg notes “the interior sight in which [Africans] excel” after describing what he calls the interior and the exterior man in a passage that might serve as another vision of storying: “Internal men are like those who live in the second or third story of a house or palace, the walls of which are continuous windows of clearest glass, who look round about upon the city in its whole extent, and recognize every cottage in it; while external men are like those who live in the lowest story, the windows of which are parchment, who cannot even see a single street outside of the house, but only what is within it, and this only by the light of a candle or of the fire.” Emanuel Swedenborg, The True Christain Religion (Philadelphis: J.B. Lippincott & Company, 1879), 1094–95.

59. “Usefulness” is discussed widely in Swedenborgian literature. As Swedenborgian thinker Wilson Van Dusen describes, “Swedenborg’s ‘use’ means essentially spiritual function” applied to whatever task is at hand. In doing so, “the basic attitude of uses is a respectful search. Devotion would be a better word here.” Wilson Van Dusen, Usefulness: A Way of Personal and Spiritual Growth (West Chester, PA: The Swedenborg Foundation, n.d.), 2. Thanks to Randall Burkett for his thoughts on Swedenborg and Africa.

60. Richard Wright, “Introduction: How Bigger Was Born,” Native Son (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998), 433. As the book’s acknowledgments indicate, “How Bigger Was Born” appears in the 1 June 1940 issue of Saturday Review of Literature and was reprinted later that year by Harper & Brothers.

61. Julia Wright, “Introduction,” Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World (New York: Arcade, 1998), viii.

63. Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 100.

CHORUS ONE: STEAL AWAY

1. Bert Williams, “The Comic Side of Trouble,” American magazine, January 1918. Reprinted in Gerald Early, ed., Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Content from Polemics to Pulpit, volume 2, (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1993), 3–9. The first Williams paraphrase I’ve heard for years as a folk saying, including from my Aunt Tuddie; the exact quote reads, “In truth, I have never been able to discover that there was anything disgraceful in being a colored man. But I have often found it inconvenient—in America.” Likewise, Williams’s other saying is usually repeated as “Comedy is when you fall down; tragedy is when I do.” Both folk sayings are fair, if rough, approximations of what he did actually say, and I’ve paraphrased one and exactly quoted the written version of the other to indicate their continued presence in the folk and literary tradition.

2. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 692.

3. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928), in Gates and McKay, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1031.

4. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Gates and McKay, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 694.

6. Zora Neale Hurston, “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 870. Originally published in Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology in 1934.

7. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, in Gates and McKay, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 695.

8. Frances Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

9. The italics, found in the original, seem an important part of Wheatley’s naming and equalization of names—yet the italics are dropped in The Norton Anthology of American Literature (3rd ed., vol. 1), 729, arguably changing the meaning. The meaning of “black as Cain” is also irrevocably fixed in a footnote to mean “I.e. theological errors, since Africa was unconverted.” My restored text, complete with British spelling, comes from Wheatley’s original 1773 Poems. This version may be most easily found in The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, ed. Michael Harper and Anthony Walton (New York: Vintage, 2000), 14. Gates himself dismisses the important questions this poem raises by terming it simply juvenilia.

10. I am thinking here of several of Robert Lowell’s most celebrated poems, which we will discuss later in the Pound chapter, including “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” and “In the Cage,” whose Negroes are clearly symbols of madness, sin, or worse. Even as late as 1974, Jonathan Raban, editor of Lowell’s Selected Poems, would state that “there is a strong Manichean strain in Lowell’s imagination (the heresy of the Manichees lay basically in their belief that the world was a battleground for the equally matched forces of darkness and light), and his Negroes are prone to display the mark of Cain.” Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection, ed. Jonathan Raban (London: Faber & Faber, 1974). Emphasis added.

11. Ellison, “Blues People,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 255–56.

12. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings (1870; repr., New York: Penguin, 2002). Especially relevant is the “Negro Spirituals” chapter.

13. Ostensibly Wheatley’s trip was for her often-ill health—the sea mists seemed to help, as accounts place her as much healthier in accompanying the family’s son (and Wheatley’s future “master”) to England. In “A Farewell to America,” Wheatley herself writes: “Lo! Health appears! celestial dame! / Complacent and serene, / with Hebe’s mantle o’er her Frame, / With soul-delighting mein,” this in contrast with a previous stanza, which states, “We sweep the liquid plain, / And with astonis’d eyes explore / The wide-extended main.” In Britannia itself, Wheatley was to meet a powerful woman, for whom the word “patron” is used, but might not accurately indicate her need for female help, financial and royal. Interestingly, Wheatley’s trip was cut short by the illness of her “mistress,” in a kind of doubling: Wheatley’s improving health means her mistress’s failing health; we can see the ways in which Wheatley serves as a kind of dark double, what Gilbert and Gubar might call the monster abroad, let loose, to her mistress’s “angel in the house.” See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), chapter 1. There’s also an interesting take on Independence in Rita Dove’s limited edition “Lady Liberty Among Us,” a gorgeous, fine-press production that features a Statue of Liberty with a brown visage.

14. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003): “In 1770, when she was about seventeen, she immortalized the Boston Massacre in her poem, ‘On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March, 1770’” (20).

16. Joan Sherman, ed., The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 56.

17. “Contraband” was the name given to black runaways housed in camps during the Civil War by the Union: “In addition to the black serviceman and the southern slave laborer, there was yet a third role played by the black man during the war years—that of ‘contraband of war.’ The term was applied to the fugitive slaves who fled by the thousands to the Union army lines, were settled in contraband camps, and placed under the supervision of federal forces. So much confusion resulted from the government’s handling of the contrabands that various private elements among the whites organized themselves to assist the refugees.” Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 206. The contraband camps were also where Colonel Higginson recorded his impressions that led to Army Life in a Black Regiment and an important article in the Atlantic Monthly that includes information on the Negro spirituals. See ibid., 207. While in some regards an attempt by the Union to prevent returning runaways to slavery, such a term still left the fugitives as property. Contraband could be said to occupy a “border state” between free and refugee—a state Horton at times occupies.

18. Here, editor Joan Sherman’s otherwise thoughtful introduction seems to go astray, suggesting that these weekend movements amounted to liberty: “it seems certain that [Horton’s] bondage was relatively mild, since he enjoyed much freedom of movement begining in about 1817.” Black Bard, 3.

22. Ellison, Collected Essays, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 458.

23. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1962), 159. Quoted in James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (1972; repr., Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999).

24. Hole, Celebrity Skin, “Awful.” While I sure don’t mind some good old-fashioned pastiche, the title of the Hole song may be too accurate.

25. One need only watch, say, Shirley Temple films of the 1930s such as The Little Colonel to see the ways in which the spirituals serve entertainment purposes for the whites onscreen (and arguably off), rather than the transformative art of the slave singers. Or a whole host of black church-as-entertainment and rolling that’s far less holy than rockin’—including The Blues Brothers desecration to more present-day descendants.

26. John Storm Roberts, Black Music of Two Worlds (New York: Praeger, 1972). This actual and factual doubleness can at times lead to overreading or overreaching, as in the myth of “freedom quilts,” whose revelations as escape routes for slaves have now been widely discredited by scholars. The fact of many of the patterns starting long after slavery, and lack of supporting evidence for claims most fully made by the book Hidden in Plain Sight: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 1999), would indicate that the quilts were less escape routes than a kind of compelling, if inaccurate, escapism at best and simple tourism at worst. Consult World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States, ed. Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice, (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2010), especially the entry on quilts, for a discussion of the controversy and valuable overviews of the slave’s material culture. For an in-depth dissection of the freedom quilt myth, read Leigh Fellner, “Betsy Ross Redux: The Underground Railroad ‘Quilt Code,’” available online at ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com.

27. Such a countertradition, it should be noted, may even be found among black creators: the song “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny” was written by James Bland, the black composer of over seven hundred songs (not all of them minstrelsy). Bland was called “The World’s Greatest Minstrel Man” and “The Idol of the Music Halls,” and his “songs were sung by all the minstrels—black and white—by college students, and by the American people in their homes and on the streets. Most of them did not even know that they were singing songs written by a black man. The big white stars of minstrelsy for whom he wrote often published their songs under their own names.” Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 238. While a common practice, the appropriation of the song “Ole Virginny” by white musicians as their own—its status as authorless contraband—we might say is part and parcel of Ole Virginny. As a false memory, “Ole Virginny” is a sentiment seemingly without a source (and I have left it as such in the body of this book). The song was later adopted as the official state song of Virginia in 1940, Eileen Southern notes: “Few realized that it was the composition of a Negro minstrel who sang his way into the hearts of the public during the turn of the century.” The lyrics were modified slightly—not to remove the reference to “that’s where this old darkey’s heart am long’d to go” (which apparently was in place until 1997 when the song was retired)—but to properly call it “Virginia.” This name change alone would seem to indicate the distinction between Virginia the place and Virginny the idea.

28. “As Constance Rourke has made us aware, the action of the early minstrel show—with its Negro-derived choreography, its ringing of banjos and rattling of bones, its voices cackling jokes in pseudo-Negro dialect, with its nonsense songs, its bright costumes and sweating performers—constituted a ritual of exorcism. Other white cultures had their gollywogs and blackamoors but the fact of Negro slavery went to the moral heart of the American social drama, and here the Negro was too real for easy fantasy, too serious to be dealt with in anything less than a national art.” Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,”in Shadow and Act, 48.

29. Greg Tate, “Are You Free or Are You a Mystery?” Ellen Gallagher, Coral Cities. Catalog to accompany exhibition at Tate Liverpool (2007), 20. Speaking of runaways, “Their maroon imaginations demanded more room to breathe and to conceive. Nor should we be amazed that they would cloak their New Jerusalems in masks and mysteries and riddle them with arcane, esoteric concepts and conceits while simultaneously militarizing their profiles.”

30. This verse is inscribed on a jar made in 1857, a few years before Emancipation, by Dave the Slave. Contrast this latter effort’s verse with his earlier 1840 one: “Dave belongs to Mr. Miles / wher the oven bakes and the pot biles” [sic]. Jill Beute Koverman, ed., I made this Jar… : The Life and Works of the Enslaved African-American Potter, Dave (Columbia: McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, 1998), 38. Whether boiling over or filled with bile, Dave’s wondering about his “relations” seems a crucial moment in his development and craft. For a placing of Dave’s poetry among early African American verse, including his contemporary George Moses Horton, consult the catalog’s essay by James A. Miller, “Dave the Potter and the Origins of African-American Poetry,” 53–62.

BROKEN TONGUE

1. For further discussion of the daguerreotype as a function of black representation, see my essay on Kara Walker, “Triangular Trade: Coloring, Remarking, and Narrative in the Writings of Kara Walker,” in Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007).

2. Written in 1905, “Nobody” was recorded by Williams in 1906 on Columbia Records and can be listened to at www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/2004_03/sources/ex1_nobodyrecord.shtml. The website also tells us that “the original 1905 published version contained eleven verses, only two of which are heard on the 1906 recording (which also has two verses not in the published version).” Also consult “Nobody” on Johnny Cash, American III: Solitary Man (2000).

3. The quote is William Dean Howells’s from his review of Majors and Minors first appearing in Harper’s Weekly, 27 June 1896. Howells’s review was edited and appeared in the introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life where it has made quite an impact, as I discuss at length in the rest of this chapter. The review’s quote might be easily found in Gene Jarrett, “‘Entirely Black Verse from Him Would Succeed,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 59 no. 4 (2005), 496.

4. George W. Boswell, “The Neutral Tone as a Function of Folk-song Text,” Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 2 (1970), 127. The article also recognizes the modal qualities of folksong; and led me to Milton Metfessel whose Phonophotography in Folk Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928) is a fascinating document.

5. Will Marion Cook, “Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk” (1944) Theatre Arts (September 1947), 61–65; both quotations are from 61. The lead in Clorindy was ultimately performed by Ernest Hogan, comedian with Black Patti’s Troubadours, who wrote the unfortunately titled “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” A biography of Cook, Swing Along, has just appeared.

7. Ibid., 63–64. To get Hogan to a first practice, Cook engages in a bit of storying: “Hogan, my comedian, could not be reached because, unless he was working (and sometimes even then), he stayed up all night carousing. Consequently he slept all day. Just to play safe, I sent him a note in care of his landlady. ‘We were booked!’ I exclaimed. That was probably the most beautiful lie I ever told” (63). Such “booking” is another form of storying.

8. I’ve not seen Dunbar use the language of “coon” and “darkey” much, if at all, in the poems. It would seem a song phenomenon, indicative of other pressures beyond the page. “On Emancipation Day.” Words by Paul Laurence Dunbar, music by Will Marion Cook (New York: Harry Von Tilzer Music Pub. Co., 1902). This and other of Dunbar’s sheet music may be found on the Library of Congress website. Thanks to Brown University’s Sheet Music Collection, The John Hay Library, for providing the originals for these online sources.

9. This important all-black “whiteface” musical is chronicled in this review in the New York Times, 16 April 1898:

Paul Dunbar, the Negro boy [sic] poet, who announced the other day that he was about to collaborate with James Whitcomb Riley and write a comic opera for Negro actors, has been anticipated. At the Third Avenue Theatre this week Cole and Johnson’s select company of colored actors is appearing in “A Trip to Coontown” and the plot of the piece bears quite a resemblance to the story which Mr. Dunbar had laid out for his comic opera. This, mind you, is no charge of plagiarism, for the idea of the scallawag who poses himself for a prince was very popular in those days before Mr. Dunbar was born. At the Third Ave., however, the idea has been used to fine advantage and the result is one of the most artistic farce comedy shows that New York has seen in a long time…. There is many a white comedian who could sit at the feet of these Negro actors and learn a thing or two. For instance, Bob Cole, who plays Willie Wayside, the tramp, and in a white make-up which makes it almost impossible to guess his particular tint, is quite the equal as a comedian of either Dan Daly or Walter Jones, while he has more distinction than either of them and is funnier than Ward and Vokes. He showed last night that he is capable of playing any white part far better than most Negro comedians play black ones… The mere fact that this performance is given entirely by Negro performers would make it interesting in itself. But the excellence of the performance raises it far above any such level. Their lightness of foot, and distinction with which they carry themselves, place these artists high above the average whiteface comedy level.

Quoted in Henry T. Simpson, The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865–1910 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1988), 149–51. There is also here a contemporary illustration of Cole in whiteface as Willie Wayside (150). I don’t know of Dunbar’s ever collaborating with Riley, the white dialect “Hoosier Poet” most famous for his “Little Orphant Annie.” But the notion does suggest something of Bernstein’s praise of dialect.

10. After offering a command performance on 20 June 1903 for King Edward at Windsor Castle, Williams & Walker’s company for In Dahomey was invited back for a birthday matinee performance for “Prince Eddy, the King’s Grandson” at Buckingham Palace. A special cable to New York American (dated 23 June 1903) indicates that for the occasion, “Walker sang ‘The Castle on the Nile.’ Williams sang ‘I’m a Jonah Man.’ Aida Overton Walker did a solo dance, and the company sang a chorus after a cakewalk.” We cannot be sure if “Darktown Is Out Tonight” was performed at the castle, though I would guess it likely the chorus sang at Buckingham Palace. We do have Williams saying, “It was the first time I had appeared in the presence of royalty. The King looks like a jolly good fellow. I hope we entertained the royal family as much as they entertained us.” The Ghost Walks, 297–98.

11. Letter from Charles Chesnutt to Walter Hines Page, 1898. Quoted in Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 42. Baker’s entire book-length essay provides an interesting counterpoint here: his sense of “mastery of form” and “deformation” could be another way of looking at some of these questions, including the place of oratory and even blackface in black culture; however, Baker himself dismisses Dunbar as neither mastering nor deforming mastery: “Anyone with Dunbar’s background who did not realize the guile and game of minstrelsy for what they were, who could in fact whine that the most powerful literary critic of his era had done him ‘harm’ by praising and ensuring the publication and sale of his dialect poetry—any black writer of this stamp had to be naive, politically innocent, or simply ‘spoiled’” (40).

12. Margaret Seltzer [as Margaret B. Jones], Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival (New York: Riverhead, 2008). It may be enough to quote some dialect:

I didn’t let his words sting me; I expected it. Really, I didn’t’ know much about making [drug] deliveries, except that it paid beter than selling weed. I took a step closer to him and looked right at him. That’s what my brothers had taught me. Always make people take you sereiously. “What you mean, homie? I’m perfect. Who would ever suspect me?”

This would seem a confession on its own of Seltzer’s lying. It is followed by “dialect” that Seltzer’s introduction makes clear is integral for her faux memoir (“Please do not confuse the use of slang and my replacing c’s with k’s as ignorance or stupidity”—I suppose she means of the fake speakers, not her own, who after all is supposedly representing black speech she seems ignorant of):

He thought about it for a minute, then laughed again. “Aiight, sho nuff, you right. Ima take a chance on you. You meet me here tomorrow morning befo skool. You go ta skool, right?”

“Sometimes.” I shrugged my shoulders and gave him a half smile. He laughed again. The high school graduation rate, though it varies somewhat from neighborhood to neighborhood, in South Central, hovers somewhere around fifty percent. (3)

The mix of statistics, framing devices, and fictions—all poorly modeled, I might add—meet in her dialect of “replacement,” forming exactly the larger frame that Dunbar and the counterfeit fight against.

13. Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 93. “Gwine” or “gwinter” surprisingly comes in for praise from Gates, who claims it is profound. See Gates, “Dis and Dat: Dialect and the Descent,” Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 167–95.

14. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984), 13.

15. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, compilers, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson, 1867), xxiv–xxv. Reprinted by Dover Publications, 1995.

16. George Steiner, originally in After Babel. Reprinted in “On Liars and Lying,” special issue of Salmagundi, no. 25 (Spring 1975), [5].

17. W. D. Howells, “Introduction,” Lyrics of a Lowly Life (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1897), xix. Reprinted in The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead, Company, 1913), ix. Emphasis added.

18. The quote continues: “It was moving from a purely African form to a form which was African but which was adapted to the new environment and adapted to the cultural imperative of the European languages. And it was influencing the way in which the English, French, Dutch, and Spaniards spoke their own languages. So there was a very complex process taking place, which is now beginning to surface in our literature.” Brathwaite, History of the Voice, 7–8.

19. Houston Baker’s writing about the African American use of “standard” might be a defense not just of McKay but also of Dunbar, despite his critique of the latter: “Now [Alain] Locke—and, indeed, the entire Harlem movement—has often been criticized severely for its advocacy of the standard. Yet is seems that such criticism proceeds somewhat in ignorance of the full discursive field marking Afro-American national possibilities. For we may not enjoy or find courageous models of derring-do in the masking that characterizes formal mastery, but we certainly cannot minimize its significant and strategic presence in our history. Furthermore, such masking carries subtle resonances and effects that cannot even be perceived (much less evaluated) by the person who begins with the notion that recognizably standard form automatically disqualifies a work as an authentic and valuable Afro-American national production. Analysis is in fact foreclosed by a first assumption of failure.” Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 86.

20. Songs of Jamaica is pictured and discussed in my catalog “Democratic Vistas”: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library (Atlanta: Emory University, 2008).

21. William J. Maxwell, ed., Complete Poems: Claude McKay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 311. The Complete Poems sadly does not include the Songs of Jamaica, those set to music.

22. Harlem Shadows (1922). “Author’s Word,” reprinted in McKay, Complete Poems, 314. McKay continues:

The speech of my childhood and early youth was the Jamaica Negro dialect, the native variant of English, which still preserves a few words of African origin, and which is more difficult of understanding than the American Negro dialect. But the language we wrote and read in school was England’s English. Our text books then, before the advent of the American and Jamaican readers and our teachers, too, were all English-made. The native teachers of the elementary schools were tutored by men and women of British import. I quite remember making up verses in the dialect and in English for our moonlight ring dances and for our school parties. Of our purely native songs the jammas (field and road), shay-shays (yard and booth), wakes (post-mortem), Anancy tales (transplanted African folk lore), and revivals (religious) are all singularly punctuated by meter and rhyme. And nearly all my own poetic thought has always run naturally into these regular forms. (314)

Note the double meaning in “British import” given his own colonial status; and the “difficult of understanding” that may be all the more purposeful.

23. Gene Jarrett, “‘Entirely Black Verse,’” 503. Jarrett continues: “Let us be clear about how realism can be racial. Realism is generally a ‘pseudo-objective version of reality,’ according to Raymond Williams, ‘a version that will be found to depend, finally, on a particular phase of history or on a particular set of relationships.’ Racial realism likewise suggests that racialism arbitrates the accuracy or truth of cultural representations of the African Diaspora. The cultural pervasion of minstrelsy across the United States connected racialism and realism in such a way that a hybrid cultural genre, minstrel realism, formed and defined its own racial verisimilitude through the exploits of minstrelsy to romanticize or sentimentalize race” (503). See also Henry B. Wonham, Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

24. The black poem/photo-essay, from Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life to Amiri Baraka’s In Our Terribleness, is a topic worthy of further investigation than I can give here—a shadow book of sorts, to this one—but may address the ways in which the poems or often poetic language that accompany the photos are another instance of storying.

25. James Weldon Johnson, “Preface,” The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). Quoted from Gates and McKay, Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed., 902.

26. While I enjoy the cleaned-up version of this song, its second stanza originally ran:

I jumped on board de Telegraph,

And floated down de riber,

De electric spark it magnified,

And killed five hundred nigger.

De bulgine bust, de horse run off,

I really thought I’d die,

I shut my eyes to hold my breat,

Susannah don’t you cry.

Swaggering Farmers and Susannah Don’t You Cry (Durham [England]: Walker, Printer, ca. 1850). Broadside, collection of the author.

27. Malcolm Bradbury notes: “In literary and artistic matters, the America of the early twentieth century was still dominated by the Genteel Tradition, the lineage of Bryant, Longfellow and Lowell, by Mark Twain and Howells, provincialism and ‘innocence’…” Bradbury relates that the sense and shock of the new, while brewing in Europe, were relatively silent on our shores at the end of the century when Dunbar was writing; I would add that we are also in the midst of the postbellum, of Southern “Redemption” and rolling back of the clock for African Americans, politically and socially. Bradbury, “The American Risorgimento,” in The Penguin History of Literature: American Literature since 1900, vol. 9, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (London: Penguin, 1993), 3. Charles Bernstein offers another reading of the fin de siècle, as referenced below.

28. See Wonham, Playing the Races: “According to this logic, the art of caricature is ethically and aesthetically incompatible with American realism, as Howells insisted, and yet in practice these purportedly antithetical categories of representation remain intimately related, as a glance through Harris’s Uncle Remus collections will confirm beyond a doubt. One reason for this curious overlap of representational practices may be that, for all their theoretical antipathy, realism and caricature pursue strikingly similar aesthetic aims. Indeed, both programs understand their function in terms of ‘penetration’ and ‘exposure,’ and both claim a unique capacity to lay bare the ‘essence’ of the human subject” (9).

29. This assessment comes from Robert B. Stepto in his important “I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives,” The Slave’s Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 225–41.

30. Dunbar’s first book actually does not contain as many dialect poems—at least black dialect poems—as one might expect. Johnson said he was more a poet in the vein of Riley in this book. Dunbar’s fiction, by many accounts, remains committed to melodrama, and is out of bounds of our discussion; but note that Dunbar wrote fiction about a white family both as a way of avoiding these questions, and possibly, addressing or seeking the popular.

31. For a discussion of the troubling nature of Harris’s Uncle Remus, consult Alice Walker—who came from Eatonton, Georgia, the same town as Harris. Walker, “The Dummy in the Window: Joel Chandler Harris and the Invention of Uncle Remus,” Living by the Word: Essays (New York: Mariner Books, 1989).

32. Quotations from Dunbar, “Blue,” “Compensation,” and “A Death Song,” in Complete Poems, 416, 256, and 228–29

33. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 11.

34. Rita Dove, “Elevator Man, 1949,” in New American Poets of the ’90s, ed. Jack Elliott Myers and Roger Weingarten (Boston: David R. Godine, 1991), 63–64. The protagonist gets his revenge on the segregated success of his colleagues “by letting out all the stops, / jostling them up and down / the scale of his bitterness / until they emerge queasy, rubbing / the backs of their necks, / feeling absolved and somehow / in need of a drink.”

35. Natasha Trethewey, “Speculation, 1939,” in Domestic Work (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2000), 14.

37. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 97. Emphasis in the original.

38. Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” in Complete Poems, 112–13. Continuing his critique of Dunbar, Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance quotes this same passage, describing it thus: “The poem rolls through solemn, Christian meters with the breast-forward stoicism of William Ernest Henley’s Invictus: ‘In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud.’ Rather than recognize that the black soul’s eternal indebtedness is a result of white guile, the speaker accepts an indebtedness to ‘guile’ as a force—not unlike a cosmic spirit making life bearable—that enables stoicism. In other words, it is as though Dunbar’s speaker plays the masking game without an awareness of its status as a game. It seems that he does not adopt masking as self-conscious gamesmanship in opposition to the game white America has run on him. And he surely does not have as one of his goals the general progress of the Afro-American populace” (39). Surely this is a lot for any one poem to bear—what’s more, it seems to reemphasize my point about Dunbar’s lack of personal language; Baker seems to wish Dunbar and his speaker (a “we,” after all) were one and the same.

39. William Dean Howells, “Introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life,” in Complete Poems, viii–ix.

40. Dunbar, “An Ante-bellum Sermon,” in Joggin Erlong (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1906), 73–81.

41. Henry Louis Gates reminds us of this fact in Signifying Monkey. Rita Dove, “Canary,” in Grace Notes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 64.

42. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 107.

43. Ibid. Emphasis added. Later, Bernstein puts it thisaway: “The Island English verse tradition is only one of many streams feeding non-Island English poetry, and for many contemporary poets it has little or no importance, and need have none. But then even Island English is a misnomer since there is no one imperial standard for all the English-speaking people of England, with its dozens of dialects, much less for all of Britain and Ireland. (By imperial I mean a single, imposed standard for correctness of speaking or writing or thinking or knowing; I mean a unitary cultural canon, an artifice denying its artificiality).” Ibid., 117–18.

46. See Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (Athens: University of Georia Press, 1990), for information about William Carlos Williams.

47. Ralph Ellison quoted by James Alan McPherson, “Gravitas,” in A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 130–31. Emphasis added.

CHORUS TWO: IT DON’T MEAN A THING

1. Fredric Jameson. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” in Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 11.

2. See my introduction to Kevin Young, ed., Blues Poems (New York: Everyman’s Pocket Poets, 2003).

3. Taken from Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924). Questions of proper dating and periodization swirl around the Harlem Renaissance, usually with political implications, both large and small. In her terrific Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Cheryl Wall effectively argues that ending the Renaissance in 1932 is not just a question of accuracy but bias: if we don’t expand either the start or end, we leave out many of the important works by Hurston and other women writers. Others say by not dating the Renaissance earlier than the 1920s, we miss the connectedness to what might be called the New Negro movement that can even be seen before the turn of the century. In his Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Houston Baker opens with a discussion of Woolf’s quote, countering it by establishing “the commencement of Afro-American modernism” to September 18, 1895, and “Washington’s delivery of the opening address at the Negro exhibit of the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition.” Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15.

4. Just as I have not provided here an endpoint of modernism, I do not provide one for the Harlem Renaissance—in part to provide for a broader inclusiveness and avoid problems of periodization (see previous note). For a description of the Opportunity parties (and a good gossipy overview), consult Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995).

5. For a look at some of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance’s publishing history and visual impact, consult Kevin Young, “Democratic Vistas”: Exploring the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library (Atlanta: Emory University, 2008). Note that I have retained Hurston’s spelling of “Niggerati” with one t, as the term is supposedly her coinage. However, in his fine book on Richard Bruce Nugent, Thomas H. Wirth notes that he adopts “the spelling of Niggeratti used by Nugent (and by Thurman in Infants of the Spring). That spelling self-consciously emphasizes the ‘ratty’ aspects of the group and is consistent with Nugent’s pronunciation. Langston Hughes, however, spelled the word ‘Niggerati’ in his autobiography, The Big Sea. Hughes’s version renders the irony more genteel.” Thomas H. Wirth, ed., Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 273 n. 7.

6. Peter Brooker, ed., “Editor’s Preface,” Modernism/Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992), xi. I have had some debates about whether “Anglo” here means “white, English speaking” (as the dictionary and current usage would have it) or merely British, but at best this is badly worded, at worst poorly considered. Why not say “British”? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems white critics often refer to “Anglo” to mean “British”; African American and Afro-British writers often use it to indicate “white” or “white American.” Anglo, of course, means something entirely different in a Chicano/a context.

7. Thomas McEvilley, FUSION: West African Artists at the Venice Biennale. The Museum for African Art (New York). (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1993), 10–11. The catalog goes on to view history in four phases of identity: “the pre-Modern period”; “the colonial or modernist period, [where] the idea of cultural identity became a weapon or strategy used by the colonizers both to buttress their own power and to undermine the will and self-confidence of the colonized”; a third stage in which “the colonized not only negated the identity of the colonizers, but also redirected their attention to their own, perhaps abandoned, certainly altered identity. This is the phase of resistance, which leads to the end of colonialism. In Africa it is reflected in the Négritude movement”; and lastly “a fourth stage” whose artists are “secure in their sense of identity, formed by whatever blends of African and European influences, they want to get beyond questions of identity and difference and to move into the future” (11). Such a development has interesting if too simple contrasts to the four sections and phases of this study.

8. Stephen Vincent Benét, “American Names,” in Poems and Ballads 1915–1930 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1931).

9. T. Bowyer Campbell, Black Sadie (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1928), front inside flap of a very deco, if clumsy and stereotypical, cover by Jack Perkins. I must confess the text seems more of the same; the book starts: “Black Sadie’s father was hanged several months before she was born. Lightfoot Mose died on the gallows for raping an old white woman. He descried her one evening in her cowshed milking her cow.” Downhill from there.

10. Michael North notes the ways Eliot, in Sweeney and in other poems, uses the Negro image. See The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Such a placelessness is different from the rootlessness found in the blues—where the blues provide a grim hope, a stoic yet funny resistance, Eliot provides us with a mask in which death and despair meet, blackface meeting a death mask, a literal cenotaph that is our and his modern hero’s fate.

11. Recently an advertisement for the reality show Survivor Gambon advertised “In Exotic Africa—Earth’s Last Eden—Temptation is Everywhere.” Only in the West would televised starvation be part of entertainment, and living in Africa be about mere “survival” that provides a path to riches.

12. With Douglas, his silhouettes form a kind of mask, a visual ritual often literally perched between Jungle and skyscraper, nature and modernity. Caroline Goeser describes Douglas’s “in-betweenist” strategy: “Douglas developed a new American primitivism, which became his multifaceted strategy to complicate the ways in which Euro-Americans had codified such categories as civilization to exclude black America. By collapsing the Western polarity between the civilized primitivist and the ‘savage’ primitive, he subversively held a role as both primitivist and primitive. In his graphic art, primitivism no longer constituted a longing for what was outside civilization or what had been lost. It connoted instead that black Americans could contribute to modern American culture by reconnecting the primitive and civilized, the past and present, from a strategically interstitial position as a welcome ‘compound of the old and new.’” Caroline Goeser, Picturing the New Negro: Harlem Renaissance Print Culture and Modern Black Identity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 25.

13. American Heritage College Dictionary, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 736.

14. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), 59. This passage has been reworked in the revised edition of Different Mirror, where it appears on page 50. I have retained the version I first encountered in Takaki’s first edition.

15. Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 17–18.

16. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 179.

17. Black thought contested such notions by seeing the States, chiefly Southern, as Eden after the Fall, Greene notes. J. Lee Greene, Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel’s First Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). The first chapter is particularly useful for the history of the Garden and Wilderness concepts. For a contrast and deepening with the black notion of wilderness, consult Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness.

20. Ibid., 105. Deleuze and Guattari writing on “becoming” could be talking about Goude’s view of Jones instead: “Of course, the child, the woman, the black have memories; but the Memory that collects those memories is still a virile majoritarian agency treating them as ‘childhood memories,’ as conjugal, or colonial memories. It is possible to operate by establishing a conjunction or collocation of contiguous points rather than a relation between distant points: you would then have phantasies rather than memories. For example, a woman can have a female point alongside a male point, and a man a male point alongside a female one. The constitution of these hybrids, however, does not take us very far in the direction of a true becoming (for example, bisexuality, as the psychoanalysts note, in no way precludes the prevalence of the masculine or the majority of the ‘phallus’).” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 293. This conjugation continues in Goude’s imagined photos of Jones’s “brother,” a twin identical to her except for a giant phallus.

21. “Wild Things” series accessed on Goude’s homepage: www.jeanpaulgoude.com, 4 August 2010. It apparently also ran in Harper’s Bazaar in 2009.

22. Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Interview,” conducted by Demosthenes Davvetas. Originally appeared in New Art International (Lugano), no. 3, October–November 1988. Reprinted in Basquiat (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 1999), lxiii. I love the switch of pronouns from “we” to “you” here, indicative of community and memory’s shifts and acceptances.

24. Randall K. Burkett, Garveyism as a Religious Movement: The Institutionalization of a Black Civil Religion (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press and American Theological Library Association, 1978), xii.

25. Houston Baker, quoting Professor Robert Hill, Modernism, 96. Dixon too helps us see Harlem as part of “the black writer’s use of memory”: “By calling themselves to remember Africa and/or the racial past, black Americans are actually re-membering, as in repopulating broad continuities within the African diaspora. This movement is nonlinear, and it disrupts our notions of chronology. If history were mere chronology, some might see Africa as the beginning of race consciousness—and racial origin—rather than the culmination or fulfillment of ancestry.” Dixon, “The Black Writer’s Use of Memory,” in A Melvin Dixon Critical Reader, ed. Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 59.

30. With Black Sadie we do see modernity’s fetishization of blackness—and that this fetishization is a crucial part of modernism (“Her story is modern, elemental, compelling”) and of history (despite the story being called “hers”). More important, notice how the fetish is used to establish white authenticity, and in turn, authority: the author was “brought up on a Southern plantation,” so he knows what he’s talking about. The power of his authority comes from his proximity to blackness. The fetishization, then, of an elemental blackness has a purpose: to make the whiteness both clearer and the blackness more containable. Keep ’em down on the plantation where he was raised! And also, to empower the white writer himself, to make his “negro novel” part of the Harlem vogue, both in publicity and plausibility.

31. Langston Hughes, “Songs Called the Blues,” Phylon 2, no. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1941), 143–45.

32. Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, 17 May 1925, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, ed. Emily Bernard (New York: Vintage, 2002), 12.

33. Bessie Smith, composer and singer, “Backwater Blues,” transcribed by Angela Davis in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1999). Reprinted in Young, Blues Poems, 72–73.

34. See Hazel Carby, “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert O’Meally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 474.

35. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 1. We may also read this alongside Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

36. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd ed. Henry Louis Gates and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 694.

38. One recent critic noting the relation of the minstrel show to The Waste Land amazingly manages to discuss it while avoiding race altogether.

39. Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz,” Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 69. Originally published in Saturday Review, 18 July 1962, and collected in Shadow and Act.

40. For Ellison, this connection continues in recognizing “the poetry of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes had a connection with the larger body of American poetry…. Given the racial stereotypes Negroes must learn to recognize the elements of their own cultural contribution as they appear in elements of the larger American culture.” “Ralph Ellison’s Territorial Vantage,” in Living with Music, 29. Interview originally conducted by Ron Welburn in 1976. In another essay, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” Ellison describes how “Wuthering Heights had caused me an agony of unexpressible emotion, and the same was true of Jude the Obscure, but The Waste Land seized my mind. I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understanding. Somehow its rhythms were often closer to those of jazz than were those of the Negro poets, and even though I could not understand then, its range of allusion was as mixed and as varied as that of Louis Armstrong.” The Collected Essays, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 203.

41. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984), 30.

42. Ibid., 30–31. Brathwaite’s terrific point appears in the footnote to the sentence cited above.

43. This transcription, done by Adam Gussow, can be found with several other blues songs, in Young, Blues Poems.

44. Richard Pryor has an ironic reading on the idea of “crazy,” not only through his own album That Nigger’s Crazy, but also through a monologue as recorded in a painting by Glenn Ligon, Beautiful Black Men (1995):

In my neighborhood there used to be some beautiful black men that would come through the neighborhood dressed in African shit you know, really nice shit, you know, and they’d be “Peace. Love. Black is beautiful. Remember the essence of life. We are people of the universe. Life is beautiful.”

My parents go “That nigger’s crazy.”

Glenn Ligon—Some Changes, curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Thelma Golden (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at Harbourfront Centre, 2005).

45. These can be seen in my own small collection, and the large collections at Indiana University’s Lilly Library; some of the “blues” sheet music graced the printed hardcover case of my third book, Jelly Roll: A Blues (New York: Knopf, 2003). Such borrowed blues may be symbolized by “High Society Blues” (1930), lyrics by Joseph McCarthy and music by James F. Hanley, that I have the sheet music for—it apparently was also a “William Fox Musical Movietone.” The song’s chorus seems unintentionally telling of the larger “society” and its attitude toward the cover: I guess we’ve got what they can’t use / We’ve sort o’ got those high society blues.

46. Quoted in Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), vi–vii. A contemporary novel, Strange Brother by Blair Niles (New York: Horace Liveright, 1931), starts with the description of a singer doing “Creole Love Call”—its title rendered without quotes, as if it is less a song than a state of being. This book, which explores a white male (who the flap copy calls “an intermediate man”) attracted to Harlem and the black men there, is an important and interesting novel worthy of further study. Thanks to A. B. Christa Schwarz’s Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) for calling attention to the novel.

48. Harvey G. Cohen writes of Ellington’s negotiation of the world of the Cotton Club, discussing “longtime Ellington drummer and friend” Sonny Greer: “Greer remembered that George Gershwin coined the term ‘jungle music’ to describe the Cotton Club–era music of the Ellington orchestra. According to Greer, Gershwin and Paul Whiteman used to be ‘in awe of the things Duke used to do, so they were sitting up at the Cotton Club and George Gershwin said to Paul, I know what that is, that’s jungle music. And it stuck with us… but… they would never say that [to members of the Ellington band because] they were scared to offend a guy’s feelings.’ Barney Bigard, Ellington’s famous clarinetist, recalled that Gershwin wanted to collaborate with Ellington as ‘a partner’ on songwriting while the band was at the Cotton Club, but Ellington refused the offer.” Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 55.

“IF YOU CAN’T READ, RUN ANYHOW!”

1. This, despite the fact that there has emerged a “Topeka School of Poetry,” including me, Ben Lerner, Ed Skoog, Eric McHenry, and most recently, Gary Jackson—all publishing and writing from their origins in the Kansas capital.

2. Langston Hughes, “Too Blue,” in Kevin Young, ed., Blues Poems (New York: Everyman’s Pocket Poets, 2003), 25.

3. Arnold Rampersad, “Introduction,” Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), xvii. Even a contemporary review of The Big Sea takes up this theme of Hughes’s surface simplicity: “Engrossing as the book is in event and illuminating as commentary, ‘The Big Sea’ is essentially an individual evocation of life, in sentiment response and penetrating clarity; and it is as literature, thus, that it is to be read, in all its vivid complexity of situation and simplicity of phrase.” Katherine Woods, “A Negro Intellectual Tells His Life Story,” New York Times, 25 August 1940. Emphasis added.

5. See Rampersad on “Goodbye Christ,” The Life of Langston Hughes, volume 1, 252–54.

6. See Hughes’s “That Boy LeRoi” for a cheeky response from Hughes about Baraka.

8. A variation on this phrase is found in Keith E. Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986): “These writers reject the Black Arts notion that blackness and humanity are fixed, clearly definable qualities. Instead, identity becomes a process, a continual creation partly in negation of those forces that deny individuality and self-determination and partly in affirmation of the disorderly, vital history they see as the black experience. Thus, the black self in recent fiction grows out of a negative dialectics in making an identity from this tension. It must be understood that ‘negative’ here implies neither that the self or the culture is somehow a poor imitation of white society nor that either is a simplistic reaction to that society…. Moreover, that negation constitutes an affirmation to the extent that black culture rejects dehumanization” (5). Emphasis in the original.

9. Houston Baker Jr., “Caliban’s Triple Play,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 394.

10. Seamus Heaney, “Sounding Auden,” The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 110.

11. Cornelius Eady describes Johnson’s possible emotions in a terrific poem, “Jack Johnson Does the Eagle Rock,” Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008), 102–3. (Originally appeared in Eady, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, 1986.)

12. Houston Baker’s Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (1972; repr., Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990) also reminds us of what he calls the “repudiation” involved in black folklore (10–14).

13. Discussed by Plimpton in the documentary When We Were Kings, about the Ali–Foreman fight Ali dubbed “The Rumble in the Jungle.” Together with the technique he used to win, the “rope-a-dope,” such sayings may qualify as another kind of Ali’s poetry, and of storying.

14. This is unlike Auden, who arguably overemphasized truth, as Seamus Heaney discusses in his 1987 London Review of Books essay “Sounding Auden.” Reprinted in Heaney, The Government of the Tongue.

17. Heaney continues “she usually limited herself to a note that would not have disturbed the discreet undersong of conversation between strangers breakfasting at a seaside hotel.” Heaney, “Government of the Tongue,” 101. Hughes replaces the seaside hotel with a Tempest, and Caliban’s undersong for the café, yet manages to sound notes equally subtle—both in the sense of musical and written notes.

19. Let us be reminded that blackness was traditionally thought of as negative (often literally) and even by African Americans; this fact goes a long way to further explaining the black notion of “negation as affirmation” traced by critic Keith Byerman, prefiguring the 1960s adoption of the term “Black” itself.

20. Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions, 1972), 28.

22. Ibid., 51. This refusal is an interesting contrast to the letters, where Hughes recounts playing at “passing” with Richard Bruce Nugent. Consult Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, ed. Emily Bernard (New York: Vintage, 2002), which has this exchange from Hughes on 24 June 1925, writing to Van Vechten:

I’ve met a couple of interesting fellows about my own age,—one a pianist and the other an artist, and we have been amusing ourselves going downtown to the white theatres “passing” for South Americans and walking up Fourteenth Street barefooted on warm evenings for the express purpose of shocking the natives. The artist boy has had some of his sketches taken by Harper’s Bazaar. They are not at all Negro but very good for one who has had so little training. I’d like to have you meet him. He has some amusing ideas for a Negro ballet and some clever ideas for short stories if he weren’t too lazy to write them. Like myself—But I am going to try to do the book because you want me to. (22)

23. For a print version of Baldwin’s critiques consider his damning review of the Selected Poems of Langston Hughes:

Every time I read Langston Hughes I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts—and depressed that he has done so little with them. … There are poems which almost succeed but which do not succeed, poems which take refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity in order to avoid the very difficult simplicity of the experience!

Baldwin, “Sermons and Blues,” New York Times, 29 March 1959. Needless to say, Baldwin’s idea of simplicity I find neither permanent nor “fake” in Hughes—unless it is the fruitful fakery of storying.

24. The phrase “absence of direct reproach” is taken from Pound’s own footnote to “The Jeweled Stair’s Grievance,” and might be thought of as one definition of modernism. Indeed, Pound’s poem itself could be said to be related to the subtle protest of Hughes’s own “Mother to Son” with its refrain of “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

25. Ralph Ellison, Collected Essays, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 368.

27. For two contrasting, black-authored views on the numbers writer, consult Julian Mayfield and Etheridge Knight in Gerald Early, ed., Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Content from Polemics to Pulpit (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1992). Knight’s “The Poor Pay More, Even for Their Dreams” in particular is forceful in its assertion of the dream deferring even the numbers “racket” provides: “The benefits to a black community from a numbers operation is a mouse’s tit compared to the elephant’s udder suckled by the syndicate and politicians. And, perhaps some scholar on the collective dream of an oppressed people could explain to those who argue for the numbers operation why it is that three of the constantly played combinations are 6-6-60, 5-10-15, and 2-19-29, which, according to the dream books, are respectively sexual intercourse, clear water, and money. And also why the two most often played combinations of all are: 3-6-9 and 7-11-44. The former is shit; the latter is blood” (150).

CHORUS THREE: UGLY BEAUTY

1. Amiri Baraka (as LeRoi Jones), “The Modern Scene,” Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963), 212–13. One of the problems with Baraka’s otherwise brilliant book is found in its familiar subtitle: America wasn’t always or everywhere “white.” Rather than the weight of sociology critiqued by Ellison’s famous review of the book, it may be that this is its limitation. Baraka himself has provided a kind of footnote that says as much about his book’s limits, quoted in “Chorus Four: Planet Rock.”

2. Othering is a useful word Mackey uses to describe both black invention and the hindering of that imagination: “Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a norm against which otherness is measured, meted out, marginalized. My focus is the practice of the former by people subjected to the latter.” Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993; repr., Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 265.

3. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 17.

4. “Conceptually, not much separates jazz from the (post)modernist avant-garde,” critic Craig Werner observes. “Both harbor a fierce desire to make it new, to shatter the idols of the marketplace, to explore the deepest recesses of human experience.” Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 135.

5. Cornel West, “On Afro-American Music: From Bebop to Rap,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 475.

6. Donald Allen, ed., “Preface,” The New American Poetry (New York: Grove, 1960), xi. The difference in focus, between bebop (“modern jazz”) as Afro-American by West, and “American” by Allen, is instructive.

7. A phrase suggested by any number of sources. See Peter Brooker’s 1992 anthology Modernism/Postmodernism and West’s interview in it (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1992). Several of these postmodern starting points are suggested by David Perkins’s fine two-volume A History of Modern Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, 1987).

8. Quoted by Susan Gubar in her crucial Poetry after Auschwitz: “the 1949 judgment of Theodor Adorno was taken to be as axiomatic as the biblical commandment against graven images: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Even as the word ‘poetry’ expanded and contracted in meaning—it was understood to signify any and all forms of representation, poetry as a genre, or aesthetic work about the Shoah—the sentence sometimes was taken to be an admonition (beware of writing poetry), sometimes a directive (poetry ought not be written), sometimes simply a diagnosis (poetry cannot be written).” Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 4.

9. Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 833–34.

10. I first heard this idea in a paper presented at a Callaloo conference in Cuba in 2001. Reprinted in Edwards, “Rendez-vous in Rhythm,” Connect 1 (Fall 2000): 183–90. Thanks to Prof. Edwards for this article.

11. The phrase “hornlike” comes from Albert Murray: “Charlie Christian, 1919–42, who attained world prominence during his two years (1939–41) as a sideman with Benny Goodman, the so-called King of Swing, was an instrumentalist who not only mastered all of the soulful nuances of traditional blues-idiom statement but also made of the guitar a hornlike solo vehicle with orchestral rank equivalent to the trumpet, the trombone, and the saxophone. Christian was born in Texas, grew up in the Oklahoma City of the Blue Devils and, like Lester Young and Charlie Parker, was a product of the territory dance circuit and Kansas City style after-hours jam sessions. His best-known records include Solo Flight, Air Mail Special, Blues in B, Seven Come Eleven, A Smooth One, and Till Tom Special.” Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: De Capo, 1976), 207. For a fuller treatment of Christian, consult A Biography of Charlie Christian, Jazz Guitar’s King of Swing by Wayne E. Goins and the inestimable Craig R. McKinney (Lampeter, UK, and Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2005).

12. The recent discourses on cool are too many to name, but would include Dick Pountain and David Robins, Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (London: Reaktion, 2000), and Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde (New York: Free Press, 2001). In a useful preface MacAdams nicely traces other meanings and mentions of cool.

13. A recent catalog traces West Coast cool more broadly. See Elizabeth Armstrong’s Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury (Newport Beach, CA, and New York: Orange County Museum of Art/Prestel Publishing, 2007).

14. Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz” (1964), in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 223. Note how Ellison’s words echo yet importantly alter—one could say burlesque—the difficulties James Weldon Johnson spoke of with dialect’s full stops: pathos and humor.

16. Larkin, All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–1971, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 22–23. The quote continues: “My own theory is that it [modernism] is related to an imbalance between the two tensions from which art springs: these are the tension between the artist and his material, and between the artist and his audience, and that in the last seventy-five years or so the second of these has slackened or even perished. In consequence the artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage.” Note that Larkin does not mean the jazz of Armstrong and Kid Ory and Jelly Roll Morton as that is roughly contemporaneous with literary modernism, as I argue earlier. He means the postwar products typically called “modern jazz,” which he sees as commiserating with the whole of modernism, before and after the war.

18. Ibid., 24. You could say Larkin and Ellison are not far apart in their view of the shift in entertainment after the way, and the ways “hating” the audience had become part of the bebop audience’s experience and even expectation. But Ellison doesn’t write of this as the same kind of fault that Larkin does.

19. Ellison, “On Bird,” 226. See Brent Hayes Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” Critical Inquiry 28, no.3 (Spring 2002): 618–49, for an unpacking of the meaning of “mugging” by Armstrong and others in the jazz tradition, and its relation to scat.

20. For more on asymmetry and the connections between modern and African American culture, see my essay “Visiting St. Elizabeths: Ezra Pound, Impersonation, and the Mask of the Modern Artist,” in Ezra Pound and African American Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, 185–204 (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2001).

21. Armstrong caught such flak over being King of the Zulus, a real local honor, he swore never to be buried in New Orleans, a request summarily denied. For a discussion of the meanings of King Zulu, consult Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues; for a poetic riff, consult my “King Zulu” in To Repel Ghosts, based on a painting by Basquiat. Indeed, Murray’s caption for a photograph of Satchmo serves as an epigraph to the poem-sequence. Young, “King Zulu,” To Repel Ghosts: The Remix (New York: Knopf, 2005), 159.

23. Blue Monday means not only the Monday before Lent but also according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “a Monday spent in dissipation by workmen.” It is also a term that courses throughout blues and jazz compositions.

25. The phrase “picaresque saint” is taken by Ellison from R. W. B. Lewis in his discussion of contemporary novels. Ellison, “On Bird,” 228.

27. Despite the dedication Ellison was notoriously nasty about Hughes, who had helped early on, later in his life—pretending even not to recall being the dedicatee of Hughes’s book. Consult Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ellison for his subject’s treatment of other writers.

29. “Sunday by the Combination” and “Casualty,” in Langston Hughes, Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 259.

30. Yusef Komunyakaa, “To Have Danced with Death,” Dien Cai Dau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 46. The poem ends:

I wanted him to walk ahead,

to disappear through glass,

to be consumed by music

that might move him like Sandman Sims,

but he merely rocked on his good leg

like a bleak & soundless bell.

32. Gwendolyn Brooks, “kitchenette building,” in A Street in Bronzeville (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), 2.

33. Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 118. Adam Gussow mentions this quote in the context of his study of violence in the blues, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago: Univesity of chicago Press, 2002), 7.

34. Edwards, “Louis Armstrong and the Syntax of Scat,” 618. As Edwards indicates, rejecting other parallels, “In this complex metaphorical mix, the Armstrong scat aesthetic is equally a strategy of catharsis and physical (erotic) regulation…. It is something more akin to James Joyce’s identification of creativity with excretion—or, as he calls it, ‘chamber music’” (632). We may also think of Stein’s notion of Alice B. Toklas having a “cow,” a code recently revealed to mean a bowel movement. See Kay Turner, ed., Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

35. Zora Neale Hurston, “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals” (1934), in Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings, 872. Emphasis added.

36. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 132. This quote also appears as part of the epigraph for my first book, Most Way Home (1995).

38. See also Thomas Brothers, ed., Louis Armstrong, in His Own Words: Selected Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Brothers also suggests similar: “I will leave for others the task of analyzing Armstrong’s syntax and his use of African-American dialect. But I would like to suggest that there is something similar about the flow of many jazz solos, in which phrases may routinely lack a firm ending point, and the verbal flow that Armstrong cultivates with his dashes and ellipses. It would be interesting to look for literary antecedents that Armstrong may have known. The dash is occasionally used in combination with comma and with period, forming what Nicholson Baker dubs ‘dash-hybrids’ in a discussion of nineteenth-century styles of punctuation” (xxiii). For the artwork, see Steven Brower, Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong (New York: Abrams, 2009).

39. A sample “translation,” itself a recasting of an ode first rendered in more “standard” English:

Aliter

Ole Brer Rabbit watchin’ his feet,

Rabbit net’s got the pheasant beat;

When I was young and a-startin’ life

I kept away from trouble an’ strife

But then, as life went on,

Did I meet trouble?

Aye, my son;

Wish I could sleep till life was done.

Ezra Pound, The Confucian Odes: The Classic Anthology Defined by Confucius (New York: New Directions, 1959), 5.

40. MacAdams, Birth of the Cool, 38. MacAdams continues with another well-known anecdote: “One night, in September 1941 he was conducting the band but facing the audience, and somebody hit the back of his conk with a spitwad. Calloway accused Gillespie of the deed, precipating a fight that ended with Gillespie pulling a carpet cutter out of his trumpet case and stabbing Calloway in the butt. Calloway took ten stitches and Gillespie was out of there” (38).

41. Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 1.

42. For more on Pound’s often racial impersonation, consult Young, “Visiting St. Elizabeths.”

43. I’ve not seen them till only recently, and only in the bookstore. But they both are in Italian, which raises some interesting questions about language and Pound—who translated Canto 72, included in recent editions.

44. Canto 74/434. Pound’s engagement with black folks and symbolic darkness may be said to have occurred earlier. For The Cantos begin not just with Odysseus but with a reference to the “Kimmerian lands,” not necessarily a view of hell, but one of darkness. I have always been fascinated by the “dark lands” Odysseus visits and avoids—Kimmeria seems in some crucial ways a metaphor for blackness itself, for an unnamed nation that falls somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis, as it were. Canto 1 also navigates the start of Pound’s attempt at epic, one for which the notion of hiding is crucial—the journey is one of escape, of close calls, and concealment. The destination may be paradise. Or the darkness Pound evokes yet tries like Odysseus to avoid.

45. This isn’t merely a function of its being a persona, as other poems don’t use it. In Lowell’s “The Banker’s Daughter,” which appears just two poems earlier in the Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), Marie de Medici speaks without quotation marks.

46. Robert Lowell, “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich” (1959), in Collected Poems, 118.

47. Pound–Hughes correspondence is found in Paideuma: Journal of Pound Studies (Fall 2001). Reprinted in Coyle, Ezra Pound and African American Modernism.

48. Till is “mythologically associated with Zeus’s ram, whose golden fleece Jason and the Argonauts hunted in the kingdom of Colchis.” Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (New York: New Directions, 2003), 122, footnote 74.171–73. This edition, while not where I first encountered the poem, is invaluable for its introduction and notes, which synthesize the criticism surrounding the poem. The notes also identify Louis Till as the father of Emmett Till, confirming a fact I am thankful to the Library of America’s Geoffrey O’Brien for bringing to my attention.

49. For more on the lynching photograph, consult Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000).

50. Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Free Press, 2001), 19.

53. Clarence Major, Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York: Penguin, 1994), 164. The full implications of the black mask might be seen on the definition of “face” on the same page: “a stranger, especially an unknown white person.”

55. The Oxford English Dictionary has two relevant definitions of refuge: one, dating from 1822, “An establishment providing accommodation, and typically some supervision, for people who have been discharged from prison. Also: a similar institution for homeless people, young offenders, etc.” and another of more recent vintage, “An establishment offering protection to women who have suffered or are considered likely to suffer domestic violence; a women’s shelter”(3rd ed., September 2009; online version March 2011).

BROKEN GIRAFFE

1. “A Conversation with Kevin Young,” Indiana Review 23, no. 1 (Spring 2001).

2. An unholy hybrid, barely black and awfully modern, jazz could even be dispraised by someone otherwise sympathetic to black culture, like Waldo Frank:

Jazz is not so much a folk music—like the Negro spirituals—as a folk accent in music. It expresses well a mass response to our world of piston rods, cylinders and mechanized laws…. Jazz expresses a personal maladjustment to this world, righted by sheer and shrewd compliance. And this, doubtless, is why the races at once most flexible and most maladjusted—the Negro and the Jew—give the best jazz masters. Since the rhythm of our age is not transfigured in jazz, as in truly creative art, but is assimilated, the elements of the age itself which we may disapprove will appear also in jazz. In other words, a folk art—being so largely an art of reaction and of assimilation—will contain the faults of the adult minorities that rule the folk, as well as the pristine virtues of the people.

Waldo Frank, In the American Jungle (1925–1936) (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 122–23.

While Frank praises elsewhere the broader “American jungle,” here he can’t bring himself to see the “rhythm of the age” in jazz the way that Hughes did—that “the rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm, honey”—or at least not to see this rhythm as a good thing. Instead, more noise than music, jazz provides further evidence of society’s decay, embodied in the idea of the Negro (with a bit of Jew thrown in for good measure). Mechanized and flexible, passive and maladjusted, jazz is worse off for its assimilation—rather than transfiguration—of modern life. The corrupt origins of jazz, which extend to the unclear lineage of the very word “jazz,” are troubling.

This view, inadvertently or not, echoes how the Nazi party in Germany before the war labeled what it called “degenerate art and music,” making such depravity’s mascot a stereotypical black figure with a yellow star on his chest, a gypsy earring, and a saxophone almost as big as his lips. And while Frank, mentor to Jean Toomer, passed for black when they traveled the South, Frank’s clearly black no longer. (Some may say neither was Toomer, but Toomer’s works—even his later works—say otherwise.) Though Waldo’s is largely a view of culture largely in opposition to Nazism, both share a view of culture dependent on purity that neither jazz nor I share.

3. Bob Kaufman, “Jail Poems,” in Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (New York: New Directions, 1971), 56, 60, 61.

4. Kaufman, Solitudes, 10. This poem, one of Kaufman’s finest, is inexplicably left out of Cranial Guitar.

5. The quote continues: “When not African [the nickname] is likely to be an English word indicating something regarding the nature of the weather at the time of the child’s birth (such as Snow, Snowy, Storm, Rain, Freeze, Hightide); or the appearance, temperament, or health of the child (such as Ugly, Egghead, Frogeyes, Badboy, Sick, Laydead, Death, Bigboy, Bigchild, Lookdown, Mamma-sweet, Livefine); or the time of birth (such as Harvest, Evening, Night, October, Saturday); or some particular incident or object with which the child or his parents were associated at the time of the child’s birth or later (such as some superstition, or a place, person, animal, or plant). In many instances both the given-name and surname are African words. Some of my ex-slave informants explain this by saying that during slavery they used for their surname (which they called trimmin’) the surname of their owner. After slavery, many of them refused to use any longer the name of their former enslavers. Likewise, many former slaveholders refused to allow the freedmen to use their names. Thereupon, the former slaves chose their nickname for their surname and gave themselves another nickname. This also is frequently an African word.” Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 40.

6. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone-Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984), 13.

7. Hurston, “Shouting” (1934), in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 851–82.

10. Kaufman, The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978 (New York: New Directions, 1981), ix. See also “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture” by critic James Snead, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, 62–81 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

12. Afaa M. Weaver, “The Bop According to Afaa M. Weaver,” unpublished essay (Somerville, MA: 2 October 1997). Thanks to Sean Hill for providing this early important unpublished essay that circulated among the early Cave Canem fellows (and other black writers). Weaver’s manifesto opens with a bit of the bop’s inspiration:

In the second year of Cave Canem, many of us expressed a need to make manifest a new dimension, acknowledging all that has gone before, understanding our varying sense of the politic in Black poetry, not the least of which is that our very persistence as poets is a resistance to the dictating mind of racism and its economic and political constructs. In the beginning of our week at Mt. St. Alphonsus in nineteen ninety-seven, I set out to initiate the beginning of our collective effort to create new forms by making the first draft of a form I named “The Bop,” and I brought the first Bop poems to the workshop in raw draft, having since revised them extensively. The African-American poetic at Cave Canem is a collective effort, as there are other forms in development in the hands of other poets. Renee Moore is working on a form called “The Double Dutch,” and Stephanie Byrd is working on a form called tentatively “The Hot Comb,” as we are looking to be proactive on the subject of African women’s hair.

I am not entirely sure whether the other forms were created; certainly they haven’t had the effect that this crucial, African American form has had on contemporary poetics. As the phrase “In the second year of Cave Canem” suggests, soon we’ll be speaking of dates as ACC: After Cave Canem.

14. You could say that Kaufman’s even as orchestral as Ray Charles, or proves a kind of percussive group sound as John Cage’s prepared pianos—two innovators and rough contemporaries in music. Of course, Cage himself would compose using silence in his 433—if only to force us to realize, as a recent study of Cage has it, “no such thing as silence.” Consult David Hadju on Ray Charles in Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (New York: Da Capo, 2009) and Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 433 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

16. This was Neeli Cherkovski. I wrote a long, far more theoretical essay about Kaufman years back, never published, that serves as a shadow to this chapter. It may be worth excavating one day, though certainly not here.

18. James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 95.

19. Countee Cullen, “For a Lady I Know,” Color (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1925), 50.

CHORUS FOUR: MOANIN’

1. Craig Werner, A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race, and the Soul of America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 120.

3. Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 148. The classic example may be “The White House” to mean the presidency, which, no doubt, funk and recent events would dare to paint black.

4. J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), 386: “A figure of speech in which the name of an attribute or a thing is substituted for the thing itself. Common examples are ‘The Stage’ for the theatrical profession; ‘The Crown’ for the monarchy; ‘The Bench’ for the judiciary system; ‘Dante’ for his works.”

5. Aretha’s nickname. In it we hear, fascinatingly, the powerful chorus of her “Respect”: “Re, Re, Re, Re, Re, Re, Re, Re, Respect / just a little bit.”

6. Of course, in the hands of David Bowie and Mick Jagger—who said at the time of its recording, it was cynically done in one night—“Dancing in the Street” becomes a banal party anthem again. It is only with “Racing in the Street” by Bruce Springsteen, with its chorus that riffs off the original “Dancing,” that the power of the original sentiment, and desire for change, is fully realized.

7. At least according to VH-1. Aretha’s “Respect” was number three, as I recall.

8. This trait they share with the Beatles, who began also with Chuck Berry et al. The Stones’ focus on covers is often unacknowledged, at least by listeners unaware of their invariably black origins: I recall once playing Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” to my poetics class, and a woman in the front row (older and with kids) sang every word: afterward, she said she wasn’t aware that it was not by the Stones. (I myself was not aware it was covered by someone not Robert Johnson!) The argument that the Stones are exposing this music to others (i.e., whites) seems to me specious, and indeed, to reinscribe the need for a cover process, implying that black culture requires an interpreter (instead of the white audience requiring one). However, with British artists, such black origins are at least treated with reverence—though at times, with a romance reminiscent of Larkin’s view of jazz as better in its more “primitive,” earthy, prewar form.

9. I engage these issues more fully in my essay “Cover Song,” found in the retrospective catalog for the artist Sam Durant. Note that this is not merely a function of color but culture: Durant himself is white, but in his fearlessness indicates how comfortable he is with these ideas, even taking on the Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

10. Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 56–57.

11. Cornel West, “On Afro-American Music,” The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 476.

13. Important here is Thadious Davis’s notion of falsetto found in male soul singers, and her arguments about its particular resonance in black culture and what it does to questions of gender. Certainly there is irony in the fact that it takes a deep voice to render such a high-pitched holler. Davis’s critique, given as a paper at the centennial Langston Hughes conference at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas, 2001), is a crucial one that I hope sees print soon.

14. See Baraka, “Blues People Addendum,” in Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 27. It is unclear what date this piece is, but the essay the “Addendum” follows is dated “90/91.” Emphasis in original.

15. Soul is defined in many different forums. A good place to start is Soul, ed. Lee Rainwater (Chicago: Trans-action Books, 1970).

16. Mel Watkins, “The Lyrics of James Brown: Ain’t It Funky Now, or Money Won’t Change Your Licking Stick,” Amistad 2: Writings on Black History and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 23. We may also consult Zora Neale Hurston’s “Shouting,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1995).

19. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking; or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Quotations in text are from the 1992 Ballantine Books edition, 49. Those who might doubt the persistent problems of “Geechee” as a term may consult the current OED, which seems particularly tin-eared in defining the word: not only in the etymology, which the dictionary places from “the name of the Ogeechee River, Georgia” but I think is far more likely from the “Gissi” people; but also in the dated examples which help restrict it to what they call “a derogatory term for a black person of the southern United States.” To wit:

1926 National Geographic Sept. 278 Among the negroes living on the Ogeechee River a patois, developed in ante bellum days, has persisted. The origin of ‘Geechee’, as the patois is called, is explained by the fact that slaves employed on the old rice plantations were more or less isolated and rarely conversed with their white owners, with the result that their knowledge of English words was slight and the pronunciation of them was bizarre. The ‘Geechee’ negro speaks in a sort of staccato and always seems excited when talking.

1934 Webster’s New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang. Geechee. A dialect, originally of Negro slaves on the Ogeechee river, Georgia, formed of English and native African words. 2. One who speaks Geechee.

1940 E. Caldwell Trouble in July xiii. 208 He sounds like one of those Geechee niggers. That breed’ll do anything to keep them from working.

1945 New Yorker 8 Sept. 20/2 Creecy was a Geechee blacker than the soot in the fireplace.

Oxford English Dictionary, available online; or Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). The definition remains unchanged from 1987, or should we say from the 1945 quotation taken from the New Yorker.

22. Ibid., 6. See also the chapter “I Love… Bon Voyage Parties,” 119–25.

23. Zadie Smith. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 12–13.

25. After reading part of this chapter at the Southern Foodways Alliance in the keynote to the 2011 symposium on the Cultivated South, I was reminded of a couple other examples of white songs that mention food (rather than use it as metaphor, which is plentiful in all traditions), including Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya.” Still, the sheer number pales besides those in soul food and jazz, and this question still lingers, suggestive of other notions of plenty.

27. Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like without Blacks.” Originally appeared in Time, 6 April 1970. Reprinted in Going to the Territory (1986). The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 582.

INTERSTELLAR SPACE

1. Not everyone sees this in the same successful light as I do. In his monograph Electric Ladyland (New York: Continuum, 2004), John Perry describes Band of Gypsys: “In later years, after Jimi’s Band of Gypsys experiment foundered and left him drifting in a sea of excess freedom, [producer Chas] Chandler’s disciplined approach would again be sought, but in mid-1968 all Hendrix needed was space” (3). Perry’s emphasis in the original on space is a nice foreshadowing of our arguments for space as the dominant mode of the post-soul era.

2. For a good discussion of postfeminism (and the fallacy of post meaning “anti”) consult Sarah Gamble, ed., Dictionary of Feminism and Postfeminism (New York: Routledge, 1999). Gamble’s own separate chapter titled “Postfeminism” is particularly insightful.

3. “Putting Gertrude on the Mothership: An Interview with Thomas Sayers Ellis by Philip Metres (February 8, 2002).” Combo magazine, vol. 10 (Spring 2002): 42–53.

4. See my interview with Laylah Ali in Laylah Ali: Note Drawings (deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Mass., 2008) for her insight into the term post-black. Ali was included in Freestyle, a catalog for the exhibition of young black artists curated by Thelma Golden, who helped coin the term “post-black” in the catalog’s introduction. Interestingly, post-black was also resurrected in Touré’s cover review of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor: “Visible Young Man,” New York Times Book Review, 1 May 2009.

5. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), 13.

6. Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2–3.

7. Cornelius Eady, “The Supremes,” in Hardheaded Weather (New York: Putnam’s Sons/Penguin, 2008), 136.

8. Rita Dove, “Ö,” in The Yellow House on the Corner (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1989).

9. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Originally read as a paper in 1979. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–13.

10. Melvin Van Peebles, Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (New York: Bantam, 1973), 2–5. In 2008, the play underwent a revival in Harlem, celebrating its 1971 debut.

11. Perry, Electric Ladyland, 11. The whole book is a wonderful, sophisticated introduction to the heights of Hendrix’s artistry, as well as a firsthand witnessing of his live playing. Thanks to Perry for articulating some of the more technical aspects of what I had been hearing in Hendrix all along.

12. Susan Willis, Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 108.

13. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 64.

14. The latter song provides critic Farah Jasmine Griffin with ample example of the migration narrative. Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?” The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

15. Cornel West, “On Afro-American Music: From Bebop to Rap,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 478.

16. Piper’s “Notes on Funk I–IV” are some of the best writings on funk, based on her 1980s series of small- and large-group performances in which she taught participants funk dances and then music, recording their often strong reactions—many of which she describes usefully (and sensitively) not just in terms of racism but xenophobia. She also gets how fun funk is and that the result was “LISTENING by DANCING,” which I take up here. Adrian Piper, “Notes on Funk I–IV,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight. Volume I, Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968–1992 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 214.

17. Robert Hayden, “[American Journal],” in Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, 2nd ed., ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York: Liveright, 1996), 192–93.

18. Leslie Fiedler, “Cross the Border—Close the Gap” (1970), in A New Fiedler Reader (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1999), 287.

19. Any number of recent articles and exhibitions such as Alien Nation feature black takes on this idea of outer space.

20. Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic; Rock ’N’ Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ’N’ Roll, ed. Greil Marcus (New York: Knopf, 1987), 75.

21. See Brian Coleman, Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (New York: Villard, 2007), for a discussion of the case.

22. Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, 2nd ed. (1987; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23.

23. Don’t take my word for the brilliance of “Buddy”: consult Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists, “Hip Hop’s 25 Greatest Remixes,” where “Buddy” ranks number 10. Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, and Brent Rollins, Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 74. Note too that the collective sprung not just spiritually but literally from the example of Afrika Bambaataa, who first took Jungle Brothers under his wing.

24. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon made this statement during a panel discussion on “The Future of Southern Poetry” conducted at Emory University and moderated by me as part of the Poetry Society of America’s Centennial Celebration, 7 October 2010.

FINAL CHORUS: PLANET ROCK

1. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: Picador, 2005), 122.

3. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 125.

4. Dieter Lesage and Ina Wudtke, Black Sound White Cube (Vienna: Löcker, 2010), 29. This book provides a useful overview of these issues. Thanks to Jennie C. Jones for putting this book on my radar, and for her work’s incursions into this area. For a good example of scratching as percussion, consult “Fantastic Freaks at the Dixie” by DJ Theodore and other cuts on the Wild Style soundtrack.

5. Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk (New York: Penguin, 1997); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). See the “Lester Bangs” entry, Nicholas Rombes, A Cultural Dictionary of Punk, 1974–1982 (New York: Continuum, 2009), 20–22. See also, Lester Bangs, “The White Noise Supremacists” from 1979, reprinted in Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic, ed. Greil Marcus, 272–82 (New York: Vintage, 1988). Though I may disagree with his notion that New Wave was “sheer” or “white,” Simon Reynolds nicely summarizes Legs McNeil’s “segregationist” beliefs this way:

Factor in the sheer whiteness of New Wave music, and you had a situation where, for the first time since before the 1920s hot jazz era, white bohemians were disengaged from black culture. Not only that, but some of them were proud of this disengagement. Just a week before Bangs’ essay, Village Voice profiled Legs McNeil of Punk magazine. Writer Marc Jacobson discussed how McNeil and his cohorts consciously rejected the whole notion of the hipster as “white Negro” and dedicated themselves to celebrating all things, white, teenage and suburban. Years later, McNeil candidly discussed this segregationist aspect of punk in an interview with Jon Savage: “We were all white: there were no black people involved with this. In the sixties hippies always wanted to be black. We were going: ‘Fuck the Blues; fuck the black experience.’” McNeil believed that disco was the loathsome musical child of an unholy union of blacks and gays.

Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–1984 (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), 67.

8. For several of these meanings, consult Nicholas Rombes’s Cultural Dictionary of Punk. The entries “Punk, alternate meanings of” and “Punk rock is a put on” are especially cogent, and relevant to Rombes’s stated wish: “One of the goals of this book is to go back to that moment in time when the term ‘punk’ was unstable, ambiguous, loaded with so many suggestions” (199). Though he quotes Geneva Smitherman on “punk” in her Black Talk, he only quotes the first definition. Far more useful is Tavia Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory,” which relates how “the figure of the punk in Anglo-American culture is a venerable but mercurial one” but reads the “punk as African American slang for a gay man” to consider the intersection of queer theory and punk:

No source I consulted could definitively trace the origin of the word punk, but a representative etymology reports that “the word originated in British slang around the end of the 17th century when it was used to denote a whore and later a precursor to the modern rent boy.” Although this account does not preclude an African origin for the word, I read the evidence as indicating that punk’d emerges from within what Dick Hebdige has called “the frozen dialectic between black and white cultures,” that is, a word for which the memory of its English provenance has been surrogated by the imagination of a black resonance. Telltale evidence of this faux-African origin is the use of “eye dialect,” ungrammatical spellings indistinguishable in audible speech from grammatical ones (e.g., “punk’d” for “punked”). Such a graphic practice has characterized white transcriptions of black speech since slavery times, so MTV’s eye dialect notifies us that we are in the presence of what the novelist Toni Morrison has termed an “American Africanism.”

Tavia Nyong’o, “Punk’d Theory,” Social Text 23, nos. 3–4. (Fall–Winter 2005), 84–85.

9. See the New York Times Magazine, 25 July 2010, for a consideration of sissy bounce: Jonathan Dee, “New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap.”

10. “Contrivance” comes from American Heritage Dictionary. The fuller definition comes from Robert L. Chapman and Barbara Ann Kipfer, The Abridged Edition of the Dictionary of American Slang (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998).

13. Pras of the Fugees, quoted in Brian Coleman, Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (New York: Villard, 2007), ix.

14. Even this line from NWA’s “Gangsta Gangsta,” which admittedly deliberately plays with image and the idea of a role model—the ultimate synecdoche, that—is countered by the BDP sample in the chorus: It’s not about a salary it’s all about reality.

15. Such looping is inadvertently described by film critic Roger Ebert in his fascinating review of Synecdoche, New York: “Sometimes the most unlikely-seeming films will slot right into this groove of projection, strategy and coping, as they involve the achievement of our needs and desires. You could put Harold Ramis’ ‘Groundhog Day’ (1993) on the same double bill with ‘Synecdoche.’ Bill Murray plays a weatherman caught in a time loop. As I wrote at the time: ‘He is the only one who can remember what happened yesterday. That gives him a certain advantage. He can, for example, find out what a woman is looking for in a man, and then the ‘next’ day he can behave in exactly the right way to impress her.’ Not science fiction. How the world works. On ‘I Love Lucy,’ even ditzy Lucy understood this process. I will act as if I am the kind of woman Cary Grant would desire. We all live through ‘Groundhog Day,’ but it is less confusing for us because one day follows another. Or seems to.” Roger Ebert, “O Synecdoche, my Synecdoche!” From the blog Roger Ebert’s Journal at the Chicago Sun-Times website. Originally reviewed 10 November 2008. Accessible at blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/o_synecdoche_my_synecdoche.html. Emphasis added.

16. Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1990), 38–39. Emphasis in original.

18. “When I first heard the track for ‘Empire’ I was sure it would be a hit. It was gorgeous. My instinct was to dirty it up, to tell stories of the city’s gritty side, to use stories about hustling and getting hustled to add tension to the soaring beauty of the chorus. The same thing happened with another big hit, ‘A Hard Knock Life.’” Jay-Z, Decoded (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010), 130.

19. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 8–9. Emphasis added.

20. I lived on the West Coast then, and there was an independent radio station that regularly played hip-hop, including Ice Cube and Digital Underground’s “Freaks of the Industry,” a perfect example of a song whose raunchiness contains no “obscene” words. The radio station’s unfortunate demise at the hands of Clear Channel is recalled in Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.

21. While he mistakes the crossroads for a place of fertile individuality rather than of exit, transport, and last resort, DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid (a.k.a. Paul Miller) writes about collage and fragmentation:

A deep sense of fragmentation occurs in the mind of a Dj. When I came to Dj-ing, my surroundings—the dense spectrum of media grounded in advanced capitalism—seemed to have already constructed so many of my aspirations and desires for me; I felt like my nerves extended to all these images, sounds, other people—that all of them were extensions of myself, just as I was an extension of them…. By creating an analogical structure of sounds based on collage, with myself as the only common denominator, the sounds came to represent me.

No matter how much I travel, how much the global nomad, the troubadour, or the bard I become, this sonic collage becomes my identity. Blues musicians speak of “going to the crossroads”—that space where everyone could play the same song but flipped it every which way until it became “their own song.” In jazz, it’s the fluid process of “call and response” between the players of an ensemble. These are the predecessors of the mixing board metaphor for how we live and think in this age of information.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science (Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/The MIT Press, 2004), 23–24.

22. Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 47.

23. Jay-Z, Decoded: “Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh” (255).

24. Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. Dieter Lesage and Ina Wudtke, Black Sound White Cube, have an interesting take on 1989’s import in the art world, using Richard Powell’s exhibition from that year as a reification of the Blues Aesthetic.

25. Many recent articles have reconsidered the case, most prominently LynNell Hancock’s “Wolf Pack: The Press and the Central Park Jogger,” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2003, 38–42. The Village Voice also took close looks at the case, as in Sydney H. Schanberg, “A Journey through the Tangled Case of the Central Park Jogger: When Justice Is a Game,” 19 November 2002; and “Rivka Gewirtz Little’s ‘Rage Before Race’: How Feminists Faltered on the Central Park Jogger Case,” Village Voice, 15 October 2002. Also useful is Hancock’s sidebar, “False Confessions: How They Happen,” 40–41.

26. Both Schanberg and Hancock point this out; Hancock relates too that the case had real-world implications far from the young men, as “The case set the stage for the reinstatement of New York’s death penalty.”

28. W. Joseph Campbell, in Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), traces some key journalistic errors—including the crack baby phenomenon, “the epidemic that wasn’t” (132)—that still persist. Shockingly, while the crack baby controversy is well reported, the book manages to avoid race assiduously in its discussion of what clearly had, if not racial motivation, then racist implication.

29. The website Gawker.com has an interesting set of posts about “flash mobs” as a form of racist worry, revealing that the so-called mobs of Philly youth were actually started by “breakdance crews.” Fascinatingly, an image from one of their flyers advertises the group by the phrase “Wild ’N Out.”

31. Oddly Chang misrecords the “wildin’” lyric quite differently: as “I go wild and…” Both Adam Bradley and Andrew Dubois’s The Anthology of Rap (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) and I hear it as “wildin’.”

32. June Jordan, “More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about Vertical Rhythm.” In June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, ed. Lauren Muller (New York: Routledge, 1995), 38. Emphasis added.

33. Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Subway Art (1984; repr., New York: Owl Books, 2005). The definition appears on page 27, in a useful “Vocabulary” list, but many of the photographs illustrate the technique better than a description can. Of particular interest are the Two-man window-down wildstyle burner by Shy 147 and Kel, 1980 shown on pages 30–31.

34. Lester Bangs, “From Notes on PiL’s Metal Box, 1980,” in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, 315.

35. The RZA, with Chris Norris, The Wu-Tang Manual (New York: Riverhead Freestyle, 2005), 22.

36. A dialogue from “Can It Be All So Simple,” Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

38. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and revised ed. (New York: Little, Brown, 1998), 251 and 253. Emphasis added.

40. Raekwon’s “Simple” remix is an angry refutation of all that memory seeks to soothe in the original; though of course like the original it asks the ultimate question—Can it be all so simple?—it starts with a skit planning an assault that ends with a shooting. This is quite a contrast from the reminiscent stoop talk that starts out the first version on Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers.

41. Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 27.

42. “The distinction the criterion of sincerity wants us to make between a private feeling and its public expression—the distinction that enables us to judge the degree of their congruence—is no longer of any use, since the poet has chosen to regard his own feelings from the outside, as it were. He seems to suggest, in fact, not that the form for his feeling is artificial or inadequate (a perfectly conventional literary decorum), but that the feeling itself is as much a public thing, a construct, as its literary form.” Menand, ibid., 16.

43. Mayfield was always aware his song was a disguised prayer, as discussed in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

44. For more on the history of Gee’s Bend, and the mixed legacy of the New Deal efforts, consult The Quilts of Gee’s Bend: Masterpieces from a Lost Place (Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2002).

46. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010), 99. Shields quotes Brian Goedde, “Fake Fan,” Experience Music Project Annual Pop Conference.

47. John L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (1962), quoted in Arnett’s artwork, on view at Tate Britain, October 2010.

48. See Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabriel Alvarez, and Brent Rollins, Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999).

49. Fernando Pessoa, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, Poems of Fernando Pessoa (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 167.

50. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 24–25. Emphasis added.

52. Kelefa Sanneh, quoted in Bradley and Dubois, The Anthology of Rap, 128. Originally in “Rapping about Rapping: The Rise and Fall of a Hip-Hop Tradition,” This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project, ed. Eric Weisbard (Seattle: Experience Music Project, 2004), 224, 226.

55. Zora Neale Hurston, “High John de Conquer,” The American Mercury Reader (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press), 107.

Notes

THE SHADOW BOOK