ALSO BY CHRISTINA SHARPE

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

Copyright © 2023 Christina Sharpe

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2023 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

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Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

This page constitute a continuation of the copyright page.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Title: Ordinary notes / Christina Sharpe.

Names: Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220239215 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220239304 | ISBN 9781039000582 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781039000599 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC E185.86 .S53 2023 | DDC 305.896/073—dc23

Text design: Jennifer Griffiths, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Jennifer Griffiths

Cover image courtesy of the author

a_prh_6.0_143160873_c0_r1

Ida Wright Sharpe

Once again. And always.

and when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours.[1]

TONI MORRISON

NOTE[2]

VERB: to notice or observe with care; to notice, observe, and related senses.

TRANSITIVE VERB: to take notice of; to consider or study carefully; to pay attention to; to mark.

NOUN: a symbol, character, or mark used in writing, printing, etc.

NOUN: a brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts written down as an aid to memory.

NOUN: tone, call, sound; a particular quality or tone that reflects or expresses a mood or attitude.

VERB: to make, or have the effect of, a note.

NOUN: a single tone of definite pitch made by a musical instrument or the human voice.

i. a brief record of facts; thoughts written down as an aid to memory

There’s time enough, but none to spare.[3]

CHARLES CHESNUTT

NOTE 1

There are all kinds of ordinary notes: there are unreservedly antiblack notes; there are notes that attempt, but fail, to undo antiblack logics; then there are notes that refuse altogether to accede to those logics that simultaneously de/re/ and unhuman Black people. These Black notes may land in silence or a tone, a sound, a pitch, a record, or an observation made with care; these notes might just reach you across distance, time, and space and with them you may be “held, and held.”[4]

NOTE 2

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved it is Hi Man with his “‘Hiiii!’ at dawn and the ‘Hoooo!’ when evening came”[5] who takes on the responsibility to interrupt the particular violence of the daily morning rapes—the armed whitemen’s demand for fellatio from one or some or all of the blackmen[6] who make up that prison gang in Alfred, Georgia. Hi Man’s daily calls are an interruption, not an end. His morning calls redirect the violence of rape to the violence of other captive labor. To be a blackman and to arrive on the line another morning is to have lived with and through all of these violences.

Put another way, Hi Man’s calls do not immediately change the fact of his imprisonment or their own, but they do change the atmosphere. His held note establishes a connection among the men. When the deluge comes that almost kills the blackmen, underground in the mud and water, in their cages-cum-graves, locked there by the whitemen who hold the keys, the trust and care established through Hi Man’s ordinary note provide the means through which Paul D and the forty-five other men held not only in chattel slavery but also in a prison labor camp, grab on to those one thousand feet of hand-forged chain, hold on to each other, plunge into, up, and out through the mud, and escape that prison/grave/ship in Alfred, Georgia.

With that note they are held.

NOTE 3

“The past, or more accurately, pastness,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot tells us, “is a position.”[7] Several years ago, when we were in Erlangen, Germany, R and I went to the Nazi Documentation Center and Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg. By the time we left, after watching the films and viewing the installations and the displays of photographs, books, racist games, and more, we were convinced that depending on where one stood, this memorialization would actually attract people to Nazi-ism. The objects function as memorabilia, a memorialization not of the wounded, but of the perpetrator.

We observed the other people at the Center; some of their faces were filled with admiration for the brutalities of white nationhood and the heraldic call of white supremacy; they were lit with an emotion that was neither horror at the perpetrators nor sympathy for the victims. The visual and sonic repetitions in the Documentation Center may now be, or may have always been, incapable of doing the work of “never again” that in their installation they were intended to do.

We saw in them not the condemnation of the Nazis but their glorification; these displays enter a present in which “in no way can we identify the past as past.”[8]

NOTE 4

You are going to have to fight

In the Style section of the New York Times, on Saturday, January 19, 2019, Shaquille Heath’s article “The Other Talk” appears as part of the “Rites of Passage” series. In this instance, “The Other Talk” is the conversation that Black parents have with their Black children about antiblack racism.

Heath recalls a conversation with her usually reticent father in which he gives her a language and a frame by which she can make sense of experiences that she has already had. She is thirteen years old. He tells her, “You are going to have to work 10 times harder than white people…You are going to have to fight to be treated equal. Even to be treated fairly. And when you do, you will still lose. And when you win, they will call you the N-word…They will try to make it impossible for you to succeed, and when you do, they will try to undermine your success. They will make fun of your nose, and your hair and the way that you laugh, in order to defeat you. You can’t let them. You just have to keep going harder.”[9]

This talk is a detailed set of Black notes about structural antiblack racism, white supremacy, and the afterlives of slavery.

Heath recalls when in “elementary school…we learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. My teacher told us how back then black people couldn’t drink at the same water fountains as white people, and I sat in agony as all of my white-skinned peers peeked over the tops of their textbooks looking at me—the only black kid in a sea of white. Later, as we left to go out to recess, I stopped at the water fountain to get a drink, and then watched as the white girl after me used her sleeve to wipe the fountain before taking a drink herself.”

Heath’s recollection reveals the way that the lessons that an institution imagines it is imparting—or the ones that we imagine the institution imagining it is imparting—like racism is bad or look how far we’ve come—is not the only, or even, perhaps, the primary, lesson or note to take hold. The imagination of whiteness is also at work, undoing the lesson, restructuring, and constantly renewing antiblack racism.

These ordinary notes multiply.

NOTE 5

In my memory there are two photographs. The first one is of a whiteboy shouting. His mouth and face are contorted by what looks like hatred. I don’t remember if the target of that hatred was also in the photo; what I remember is his face and, vaguely, a dog. The photograph was in a book, part of a photo essay about love overcoming hate, and from the text and context, it’s clear that the whiteboy is angry about Black people.

The second photo might also have been in the book, I don’t now know for certain.

From the age of eight or nine until the book disappeared when I was around eleven, I would sometimes open it and look at that first photo. There was something about that face that I wanted, thought I needed, to understand. Cloth-bound, hardback, and deep green, the book came from an evangelical Catholic meeting I attended when I spent the weekend with a family named Deckhouse. The organizers of the meeting distributed the book to the overwhelmingly white congregants to instill in them the sinfulness and ugliness of racial and religious hatred. I did not need this lesson.

But most of what I remember about that book revolves around the photo of that whiteboy. His face is an open-mouthed rictus of hatred. I felt I knew it. It reminds me, now, of a young man in a photograph of white supremacists marching on the campus of the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017; reminds me, now, of the white supremacists who stormed the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.

The second photograph is famous. When I saw it, I felt that I knew what it was to be the girl at the center of it, so alone and surrounded by hate. I knew her fear. I thought that I saw, on the level of her body, her shock or stunnedness in the face of such hatred. It was a kind of composure that I could not imagine summoning. I felt the force of that photograph molecularly.

The girl in the second photograph is Elizabeth Eckford.

Of course, I didn’t know her fear. I knew my own. My fear was next to hers. I wasn’t desegregating Little Rock Central High School. I wasn’t on the receiving end of death threats. I wasn’t surrounded by a mob threatening to lynch me and screaming “Send that ‘██████’ back to the jungle,” “Go home, ██████! Go back to Africa!”[10] while I searched for the eight other Black students whom I was supposed to meet and walk with. I wasn’t that stoic. But I heard ████████ almost every day for six years at St. Katharine of Siena. And, except for the two years when my brother Christopher also attended, I was the only Black person in my almost all-white Catholic elementary school.

NOTE 6

I find the first photograph completely by chance.[11]

It is not exactly as I have described it. There is no dog. There is a belt.

But as soon as I see it, I know it is the photograph from that green, fabric-covered book.

It is the boy’s open mouth.

It is that belt wrapped around his hand.

It is that rage.

Seeing it again, I am hit with a force of recognition so strong it produces nausea.

The caption reads: “Youngsters jeer as moving men tote possessions of the Horace Baker family up the steps of their new home in the formerly all-white Delmar Village development here 8/30. The Negro family finally gained entrance to their new home after two days of demonstrations by whites.”

The photograph was taken August 30, 1963, in Folcroft, Pennsylvania, two years before I was born and sixteen miles from where my family lived in a Black neighborhood in the majority-white suburb of Wayne, Pennsylvania.

The boy with the belt wrapped around his hand. I faced that whiteboy almost every day.

So much hatred in that photograph and they are called “Youngsters,” as if those ecstasies of racial hatred and the stolid confidences of white supremacist violence are simply them practicing their rituals of passage.

NOTE 7

Why nausea when I was faced, once again, with that whiteboy with the belt wrapped around his hand?

There was a whiteboy named ████████████, whose face I also studied.

One afternoon, after I got off the school bus, ████████████ put down the window and called my name.

When I turned around, he spat in my face and called me a ██████. The epithet was familiar, and it did its usual wounding work, but the spit? That was new. I was stunned.

Just as, or right after, this happened, my father walked to his car, which was parked in the driveway. He worked the evening shift as a mail sorter at the main US post office at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.

I looked at my father. Had he seen what happened? He must have seen me in my distress.

What actually happened afterwards has gone missing in shock.

In my memory: my father saw, but he and I never spoke of it. In my memory, we were mutually shamed by it and, somehow, also mutually sympathetic to each other’s untenable position. Mine, for it having been done to me; my father’s, for having been witness to it.

NOTE 8

The photo text reads: “Negroes move into all-white neighborhood—Horace Baker, 26-year-old Negro, wearing checkered shirt, and his wife, Sara, 26, at left, pause at door of their new home in all-white neighborhood at Folcroft, Pa., today as they move in despite a storm [of] protests and demonstrations from white residents. They moved in under State Police protection after several hundred persons blocked the street, hurled eggs, rocks and staged a street sit-down.”

In the photograph in which the Bakers are on the front steps of their house they are surrounded by what appear to be reasonable whitemen smiling or looking concerned. There are two priests, one with his back to the photographer, and the other one has his head tilted to one side, hands in his pockets. To their right and behind them is the gathering white crowd: a man with his hands cupped to his mouth caught in mid-yell, more whitemen and whitewomen smilingly approaching, white people exiting their front doors.

Those whitemen on the steps with the Bakers also signify violence; they are the reasonable face of the mob that “swelled to 1500” people.[12]

They are like Mr. Lindner, the whiteman representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association who arrives at the Youngers’ apartment in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun. He comes to their door with a check in his hand, money for the Youngers not to occupy their new home. Mr. Lindner arrives as the so-called reasonable face of the antiblack, white supremacist violence that appeared in the newspaper headlines as “Negroes firebombed.”

Almost thirty years after Raisin’s Broadway debut, Amiri Baraka reassessed his original dismissal of some of the concerns at the heart of the play. He wrote:

We thought her play “middle class” in that its focus seemed to be on “moving in white folks’ neighborhoods,” when most blacks were just trying to pay their rent in ghetto shacks…. Lorraine Hansberry’s play, though it seems “conservative” in form and content to the radical petite bourgeoisie, is the accurate telling and stunning vision of the real struggle. The concerns I once dismissed as “middle class”—of buying a house and moving into “white folks’ neighborhood”—actually reflect the essence of black will to defeat segregation, discrimination and oppression. The Younger family is our common ghetto Fanny Lou Hamers, Malcolm X’s and Angela Davises, etc. And their burden surely will be lifted or one day it certainly will explode.[13]

There is the violence of the baying crowd and there is the violence of reasonableness, each part necessary to maintain something called an all-white neighborhood. The Bakers “faced three years of constant terroristic harassment and racial violence while raising their two children.”[14] In 1966 they sold the house and moved to the Mt. Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia.[15]

NOTE 9

A reporter named Benjamin Fine, who witnessed Elizabeth Eckford being terrorized, said this: “This little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves.”[16]

Fine calls Eckford, “This little girl, this tender little thing.”

Which of the white people who witnessed and participated in my abuse thought that?

NOTE 10

My mother was observant. I had left the almost all-white Catholic elementary school and had spent seventh grade in a public junior high school that had a small number of Black students. She took me aside one day when I was in the eighth grade because she saw that after an outing or a party or gathering at the house of a white friend I would come home upset.

She knew that my white peers and friends would soon start dating.

She told me that the group of friends that I had made were kind and well-meaning and this group of girls were good friends to me, that they cared for me as much as I cared for them.

She asked me questions, she listened to what I said and to what I did not say, and then she told me something that she was afraid would hurt me but that she wanted and needed me to hear.

She said that with the onset of dating in their lives she was concerned that I would either be left out or be included in ways that I would not want to be.

She said that she wanted, needed, me to know this. She told me that she thought, from the things that I had told her, that I was not unaware of what she said but she wanted me to have the knowledge I needed to make a choice. She wanted me to know that I had choices.

This telling set into motion a series of events that fundamentally changed me.

My mother wanted me to build a life that was nourishing and Black.

My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions.

She spared me tremendous pain.

This Black note changed the course of my life.

NOTE 11

A dictionary suggests itself.

NOTE 12

Letters to the Editor: ‘Slips of the Tongue,’ Week after Week

APRIL 19, 1967

NOTE 13

Letters to the Editor: Deep-seated Bias

December 20, 1986

If anyone has seriously been entertaining doubts that deep-seated prejudice is alive and thriving in the United States, he has only to read the Dec. 9 front page article in The Inquirer concerning the 14-year-old girl who was a rape victim to disabuse himself of this naive notion. Here we have a situation cast in the classic mold of the pre-civil Rights era. A white female is raped (by a white male whom she knows) but, when describing her assailant, she does not describe a bogus white male but chooses to describe her attacker as a nonexistent black male. How sad that this 14-year-old child apparently instinctively chose a member (albeit a fictitious one) of another race to be her victim.

Ida Wright Sharpe

Wayne

NOTE 14

Letters to the Editor: Racist Asides

March 02, 1992

While I sympathize with Jack Smith’s son who was given a traffic ticket because of the flashing lights on his car (after all, are they any more distracting than the vanity plates that one tries to read in passing?), I am more concerned about the gratuitous comments made by Mr. Smith.

His remark that the car “looked as if it had just rolled out of the barrio” is blatantly racist, as is his question about the lights being “overly…Latino.” Is one to believe, as Jack Smith apparently does, that on the Main Line only Spanish-speaking individuals drive cars that have anything other than the names of universities and yacht clubs embellishing the rear windows?

I don’t know how long Jack Smith has been a resident of Wayne, but I have lived here for over 38 years and can assure him that 90 percent of the individuals whom I have seen over the years getting in and out of highly decorated vehicles have been white males of assorted ages.

In the meantime, he needs to work on his racist assumptions about the other kids on the Main Line; some of them—many of them in fact—are not white and none of them deserves to be pigeon-holed and disparaged by people like Jack Smith.

Ida Wright Sharpe

Wayne

NOTE 15

A note arrives unbidden and without apology; September 21, 2019

Dear Dr. Sharpe,

It has been over 40 years, and this message is long overdue. My ██████████████ is in a PhD program at ██████████████████████ and has been reading In the Wake. ███ reached out to me because ███ thought I would really appreciate and enjoy it, especially because ███ noticed so many connections to schools I attended and worked for over the years. I was so proud to tell ███ we were once classmates. As you probably know, my years in grade school were incredibly unhappy, and I just wanted to let you know that you and ████ were the only two in the class who made it bearable for me. I observed so many similar problems when I was ████████ at █████████████████████, and that is why I made the decision to leave this year. I felt like I was giving up on the school and so many students, but there are so many pervasive issues in that community, and I was sorry to see there was no appetite to make any changes.

I know we had our own adolescent issues many years ago, but I wanted to thank you for your friendship during a very lonely time in my life, and for the impact you have had on my ████████.

Warm and best regards,

███████████████████████

NOTE 16

And three days later, another note arrives

Dear Christina,

You probably don’t remember me, but you have been on my mind and I finally decided to try to find you. I am ███████████████████████████ and we went to school together. I am back living in ████████ after many years outside of the area and drive by your old house frequently, reminding me of you and your Mom. Having seen people from high school that haven’t changed made me wonder about the people I was really interested in, and you are one of them. I see my high school self as such a small part of what I am now, and am glad that I have rich life experiences.

I don’t know if you are ever back in the Philadelphia area, but would be interested to see you again and hear more about your life. Google is a wonderful tool, but only tells part of the story. From reading about your writing and teaching, I think you would be interested in a friend of mine from █████████████, ██████████████████████████ and ███ latest book. If you know ███, even better.

Wishing you a wonderful day, and hope our paths cross in the future.

█████████████████████

NOTE 17

Unwritten and unsent

Dear ██████

So much rehabilitated and reconstructed into that goodness and perpetual innocence that whiteness extends.

██████████████████████████████████████

████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

Christina Sharpe

ii. to make, or have the effect of, a note

The archive is meaningful in its context, it is not “truth,” it belongs to an entire social environment.[17]

FRANÇOISE VERGÈS

NOTE 18

I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations, over centuries.[18] I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.

NOTE 19

Whitney Plantation, formerly Habitation Haydel, December 17, 2017, Wallace, Louisiana

On the day that I went to the Whitney Plantation, John Cummings, the man who financed the site, was there. It was cold and rainy and as people gathered inside to wait for the tour to begin, Mr. Cummings spoke to some of them. I was not part of the group, but I could hear his remarks. Among his assurances to the white visitors (and it was white visitors to whom he was speaking) was that slavery was not their fault—that none of them was alive during chattel slavery, that some of them may have been immigrants or children of immigrants who arrived after chattel slavery’s official end; that they were not responsible for the violence of slavery.

How does entanglement work here? And for whom? To whom? From whom?

Among the things that first compelled my visit to the Whitney Plantation are the sculptures of enslaved children. The beautiful sculptures are the work of the artist Woodrow Nash. The children wear washed blue and brick overalls, pinafores, and hats. They are positioned singly and in standing or sitting groups in multiple areas of the plantation, with the largest number of them gathered in the Antioch Baptist Church. The children are attentive to what is happening at the front of the church. The church, which was built in 1867 by freedpeople, was not originally part of Habitation Haydel but was donated by the congregation of First Antioch Baptist Church of Paulina, Louisiana, and moved there.

The children are made to stand as an entry point into the past—as a point of empathy. The statues seem to work both with and against the docent’s narratives that foreground the lives of the enslaved and their ceaseless work on the plantation. The docent who was our guide spoke eloquently about the people enslaved there, 356 of them. The docent spoke about the grown women and men enslaved there who were worked to, and then past, exhaustion. Men and women who, she told us, resisted their enslavement in large and small ways. As the docent spoke extensively about the brutalities of working cane and the women and men who endured this, I wondered about the curatorial decision to absent adult figures from the grounds and the buildings; a void opened, a palpable absence.

Much of the plantation focuses on the children, their lives in slavery, and how often and how young they died. Were these child sculptures meant to provide instruction in how to see Black children who had been subjected to unrelenting violence? Was this an attempt to transfer this lesson to the present? Perhaps this was an easier task than seeing all Black people, everywhere/anywhere, as human? In order to move visitors, those child statues cannot appear as Frederick Douglass describes himself and the other enslaved children in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or in My Bondage and My Freedom—nearly naked, soiled, abused, and malnourished. Douglass writes:

The allowance of the slave children was given to their mothers, or the old women having the care of them. The children unable to work in the field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year. When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance-day. Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked, might be seen at all seasons of the year.[19]

To move visitors, these sculptures could not be adults. The curatorial decision had followed the affective principles that coalesce around Black presence, in which adults won’t generate sympathy in the past as they don’t into this future. Adults are reminders of the stakes, the culpability, the debt, the entanglements, and the ongoing brutality of slavery’s afterlives.

I watched the other visitors—who on that day were primarily white—ignore the guide, who was trying to get us to leave the church, which was just the first stop on the tour. They were entranced. They crowded around the sculptures of the children in order to have their pictures taken with them. Who will stand in the midst of those children, and not denounce slavery? But what of its afterlives, its wake? This is, I think, what Michel-Rolph Trouillot points to as the inauthentic relation to The Past, when he writes: “What is obscene [here] is not a relation to The Past, but the dishonesty of that relation as it would happen in our present. The trivialization of slavery—and of the suffering it caused—inheres in that present. The ‘past’ fails to stay in the past.[20] This is a past that is sectioned off from the present in which to “condemn slavery alone is the easy way out.” He continues, “What needs to be denounced here to restore authenticity is much less slavery than the racist present within which representations of slavery are produced.”[21]

The “past” fails to stay in the past.

NOTE 20

“As we begin to show this brutality”

When Henry Louis Gates Jr. interviews Bryan Stevenson, civil rights lawyer, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author of Just Mercy, for the documentary Reconstruction, he asks: “We haven’t been able to change the narrative about slavery. What makes you optimistic that we can change the narrative about lynching?”[22]

Stevenson responds:

“I think that narrative is going to change as we begin to show this brutality. We haven’t created spaces in America that motivate people when they go through it to say, never again, to racial violence and racial hierarchy and that for me is the reason why things like the memorial, and museums like this that are direct in presenting this legacy and violence of lynching become necessary. I want us to tell the truth about our history not because I want to punish America, I want to liberate us but we can’t get to liberation if we don’t acknowledge what we’ve done.”

This particular brutality has been shown repeatedly. It circulates with regularity. How does one inhabit the “never again” and ask that a population “come to terms with” such ongoing terror and quotidian atrocity? How does one come to terms with a brutal imagination by engaging and representing (over and over again) the materialization of that imagination?

To stand in Gates’s and Stevenson’s “I,” “we,” “us,” and “our” requires a certain innocence and belief in, as well as a commitment to, reforming the nation. Entering this space, one is asked to assume a certain position; asked to embrace memorial narratives that offer Black suffering as a pathway to knowledge, national and “racial” healing, reparation, and reconciliation; asked to embrace a narrative that acknowledges violence only to frame it as anomalous and intermittent and not foundational and ever-present.

“We” are not approaching healing; nor should “we” be reconciled. As Frank B. Wilderson III reminds us, “Shared experiences in the realm of the social do not necessarily index shared positions in the realm of the structural.”[23]

NOTE 21

A question of “we”

On April 25, 2017, at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, Claudia Rankine spoke first. She briefly introduced a video essay made by herself and her husband, the filmmaker John Lucas.

The film was Situation 8 and it is assembled from footage of multiple murders and beatings of Black people in the US, from Walter Scott running away, to Marlene Pinnock on the side of the road, to John Crawford shopping in Walmart, to Tamir Rice playing at the playground, to Diamond Reynolds filming the aftermath of the murder of her partner Philando Castile—and the inventory of the violated and the murdered continues.

Rankine is the film’s narrator. She speaks about trust and what everyday encounters in the world require of “us.”

Between us, between strangers, our civic contract states we will act in each other’s best interests for no other reason than that we are here together.

The alliance we pledge is to one another. Assurance is taken. Can I trust you? Assurance is taken. Different from and similar to each other.

The film dropped into the room like a bomb. The audience gasped. Many of us looked away.

A part of the audience was stunned, shell-shocked, after the video finished playing. I had to stop watching. I had refused to watch those murders as they circulated almost endlessly on the internet and as they were replayed on the news as I waited in airports, in doctor’s offices, in corner stores, on subway platforms, on Twitter. And here I was, stuck in a room while they were being played one after another. To be forced, always, to face the probability of your death.

Rankine insisted on an “us” and a “we” who needed to watch and sit in this violence, in this death—in our deaths—and it was an undifferentiated we, a distributed we.

When the film was finished Rankine returned to the podium to read a letter that she had received from a Black woman professor, speaking for herself but also for other Black women, graduate students, and activists in response to Rankine’s talk and screening of Situation 8 in Montreal, Canada, at Concordia University. She did not name the author.

The author of the letter wrote to say that she did not share her thoughts with Rankine at the time of the screening because she did not want to disrespect another Black woman whose work she admired and who was one of few Black women speakers at the university that year. In fact, a Black woman speaking at the university was rare enough for any appearance to constitute an event. The author of the letter wrote that she was upset that Rankine showed this film and these murders and that she did so with no real warning. She was upset that Rankine had not considered the effect that the screening of this violence would have on the Black people in the audience, and she wanted to express these concerns respectfully to Professor Rankine.

Many of us in the audience were perplexed about why Rankine read the letter. We were perplexed about what work the reading of the letter was supposed to do. Was it supposed to forestall criticism? Was it to insist on that undifferentiated we? It was around the time of the Whitney Biennial and the Dana Schutz painting of Emmett Till, and Rankine seemed to be positioning Situation 8 and Schutz’s Open Casket as encountering the same kinds of unwarranted critique.

In the face of the murders of Black people, murders that endlessly repeat, how can one presume, still, that there is an “us” and a “we” that are in something together? This register assumes that “we” are all in the world in the same way, that we experience suffering on the same plain, that we can be “repaired” in the same way, that the structures, the architectures of violence and of affect, reach us in the same ways.

This evening stays with me.

The architectures of violence fracture we; affect does not reach us in the same ways.

NOTE 22

March 28, 2017

Dear Claudia,

I am grateful for our meeting a few Fridays ago in Montreal, grateful to have been able to sit directly in front of you and listen to your words. I spent time the week before you arrived re-reading some of your work and so, it was a gift to sit a few feet away from you as you read. Thank you, again, for coming to Montreal.

On Saturday morning, I woke up thinking of our brief conversation at dinner and my friend, Prince Carmen Jones, who you had asked me about as we ate. On Saturday morning, I awoke to grief—a grief that has returned rudimentarily over the last two decades when his name comes out of my mouth and I describe him. As you know, he was a beautiful man, beloved, exceptional. I also shared with you that he had been my lover. In that, my grief felt particularly pronounced Saturday morning: I awoke thinking of his sweet body, his dead body, my son’s body.

On Friday night, I wanted to ask you about your film, but never found the right moment. You mentioned it briefly in the car during our transit to the restaurant, but I was in the back seat, and I wanted you to see my eyes when I asked my question. The Concordia venue felt too impersonal, too white, and my heart was still racing during the question and answer period. At dinner, you were tired, and I respect the end of day and its fatigue like no other. So, although you cannot see my eyes, I will ask the question that sits with me still.

Do you consider the impact your film will have on Black people in the room before you show it?

Montreal is a small city for Black academics, and after you read, we converged at the front of the room, finding each other for comfort, as is so often the case in this city. After we hugged and exchanged pleasantries, a friend asked how I was feeling. “Angry. I feel angry,” I said, and so it began. We all felt angry. We all wished we had not heard the film, because, although none of us could not bear to watch it, we all knew every breath, every word, every name, every clip by heart and by skin. One time had been enough to never forget, and watching them (hearing them) successively, spliced together as a long Black death made no new revelations. It compelled no new understandings, forced no new action. It renewed traumas. And in my case, it caused a numb ringing that began in my head, raced my pulse, and closed off your words. Was there something you said about trust, trust, trust repeatedly over those clips? Did I hear that correctly?

We do live in a world of trigger warnings and graphic violence advisories. Yet, our Black death compels, I believe, new warnings of clear and certain description. Should I have run out of the room? Shouldn’t we all have? We did not. We did not because we simply had no idea what was coming and then, because we felt too much terror to move. I also want you to know that we did not leave the room because you are a Black woman and such a rarity in this town, that to leave would signify an intolerable disrespect even amongst us. We felt so grateful to have you with us, and at the end, sadly certain that the film was not for us. Could never be for us.

There is so much more to say, but I will stop here. I want to respect the restraints on your time and know that, in this fashion, there is no conversation to be had, but only a one-way response. I hope you will describe the film to your audiences before you show it in the future. Please let us know that the film streams together, in uninterrupted fashion, the recorded police killings of all those Black men and women we know—name them—and that the film is x minutes long. Let us know that we will see Philando Castile and hear Diamond’s daughter, Dae’Anna, speaking to calm her mother in the back seat after Philando has been shot in the front. Some of us have never before watched that video in full for good reason: It compels no new understandings, but rather reifies a violence many of us have lived with through our fathers, our uncles, our beloveds and in our homes for a lifetime.

Or, perhaps, consider not showing the film at all.

With appreciation,

Rachel Zellars

NOTE 23

The architecture of the memorial stages encounter.

Spectacle is not repair.

NOTE 24

Where are the responses to the “political arithmetic”[24] in the present by which Black children around the globe continue to be subjected to every form of violence? This arithmetic takes various forms and is reflective of what K’eguro Macharia calls geo-histories—it knows no national boundaries. It is the calculus by which a Black six-year-old girl in Mississauga, Ontario, is handcuffed by police; a twelve-year-old Tamir Rice playing by himself with a toy gun in a Cleveland, Ohio, playground is shot dead by police within twelve seconds of their arriving; Ella Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old Black girl who lived in London off the South Circular Road becomes, through her mother’s fight, the first person to have air pollution listed as cause of death on her death certificate; and Shukri Abdi, a twelve-year-old girl recently arrived in London from Somalia, is bullied for a month and found drowned in a river. It is the calculus of an email that vacates apology for a whiteness always presumed to be innocent. It is the calculus by which in the space of weeks in January and February 2021, police in Rochester, New York, handcuff and pepper-spray a nine-year-old and then pepper-spray a three-year-old Black girlchild. “Historical authenticity,” writes Trouillot, “resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-a-vis the present as it re-presents that past.”[25]

NOTE 25

Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.

NOTE 26

Of course, there are Black people who go to memorials and museums who do not experience them as I have described them. For many Black visitors there is something that approaches reckoning there—that such memorials exist is some recompense, some acknowledgement of harm. Some attempt at repair.

A recitation of new prayers:

My God my bright abyss into which all my longing will not go once more I come to the edge of all I know and believing nothing believe in this

most of us seek a just containment

some pillars

some strictures

amid the freedom to guide us

and in the end some ash scattered or a pine casket

most of us seek a just containment

who can blame us

…

we wanted to be alive long

enough to bear witness[26]

Asiya Wadud

NOTE 27

I am still thinking on this

I have come to Birmingham with my friend P. Even before we arrive at the Legacy Museum: From Slavery to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Alabama, we know that it is an instructional space. The lessons begin with a quotation on the side of the building from Maya Angelou’s 1993 poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” written for the inauguration of the US President: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” On the front of the building are a number of large-format color, colorized and black-and-white photographs: among them, teenagers packed into a courtroom, all but one of them wearing an orange jumpsuit with the word JUVENILE printed on the back; Black girls and boys being blasted with firehoses; and, directly over the door, a colorized triptych of the 1893 spectacle lynching of seventeen-year-old Henry Smith in Paris, Texas.[27]

Perhaps because one cannot take photographs inside the museum, many visitors take pictures in front of the entrance—they mark their visit with an “I was here.” Those historical photographs on the building’s exterior that are of tremendous white violence and white supremacist pleasure, like that lynching of Henry Smith in which ten thousand people participated, circulate yet again in twenty-first-century images, in caches on cell phones, and on social media. How many more lookings? “[A]ll them beatings and killings wasn’t nothing but sex circuses, and all them white peoples, mens, womens, and childrens crowding around to see…”[28]

When Black people were lynched in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, the other Black residents of that community were the ones who came to claim, attend to, and bury the body. These other visibly Black people, who were fully meant to internalize the lessons and the terror of the lynching, were not usually present at the scene of the crime. I write “visibly Black” here because former NAACP head Walter White, among others, passed into the category of white in order to witness and report on those awful scenes.

It is rare, I think, to find a living Black person photographed in the crowds of these awful spectacles. In the all-too-numerous lynching photographs that I have seen, I can think of only one instance. In that photograph, I am startled to see a Black woman who, but for her arm and a sliver of her side, is mostly out of the frame. Her clothing looks like a uniform—maybe she has been brought to this lynching in order to take care of some of the white children in the crowd? I cannot fathom her terror in the face of the crowd’s “murderous appetite”[29] and I don’t have the desire or the stomach to search for this photograph in order to fill in more detail.

But the questions that I return to are: What might it mean, or do, or make, for these particular and specific images to circulate now—with Black people in groups (maybe) smiling while a lynching plays out, in a color triptych, over our heads? What do these new private and social media collections of aestheticized lynching (that colorization, that restaging as triptych), with ourselves in attendance, do or make? We leave with a memento of what experience? We look back on our collections of what experience? What work are we marking? What entanglement? What is the instruction here? And in what?

I am still thinking on this.

NOTE 28

Legacy Museum, December 28, 2018, Montgomery, Alabama: “Slavery is the next thing to hell.”

Down a short, darkened ramp into the museum and directly in front of you is a quotation from Harriet Tubman: “slavery is the next thing to hell.” You hear singing and a child crying out, “Mama, Mama.” On your right are a series of five barred and padlocked cells in which holograms of actors perform scenes from narratives of enslaved people.

Most of the holograms are activated when you stand in front of them. Like the one in which an enslaved woman who is searching for her two children urgently addresses the person standing before her: “You’re not the buyer,” she says. “Can you help me? Have you seen my children?”

Two holograms run continuously: in the first, three enslaved people sing (one woman, then a second woman, and then a man); in the other, two children, siblings, a girl and a boy, are looking for their mother. These holograms are at a right angle to each other. The separation of families was intrinsic to chattel slavery in the United States, and so the narratives of the woman looking for her children and the children looking for their mother may be related—that is, the woman may be their mother and they may be her children, but they also may not be.

As you stand before the hologram, activating the narrative in front of you, the singing, the periodic cries from the boy, “Mama, Mama,” and then his question, “Have you seen our mother?” over/underlays every narrative, punctuates every other experience.

The temporal and sonic layering of the narratives in this part of the museum has a variety of addresses—different yous are being hailed and summoned depending on who stands before those speakers.

This complex address reverberates throughout the museum, underscoring the difficulty of perspective, the difficulty of the Equal Justice Initiative’s mission to bear witness, to educate, and to motivate transformation.

NOTE 29

Trying to get it all down

On my second day at the Legacy Museum, I see a young Black man whom I’d seen there the day before. We greeted each other on the first day, in the way that, at least in the US, Black people often do. This day when I look at him, he speaks to me, and we acknowledge that we remember each other from the day before. We exchange names. I am holding a notebook. He says, “Trying to get it all down?” I laugh and say, “Yes.” Then I tell him that I no longer live in the US and that part of the reason I have come two days in a row is that I am writing about the memorial and museum. He is standing across from the installation that simulates a non-contact prison visit in which, separated by a glass partition, the visitor and the incarcerated person whom they have come to see each pick up a phone in order to speak. In the installation, the museumgoer picks up the phone and the video recording begins. The young man says to me, “You know, the best video is behind you.” He asks me if I’ve seen it. I say yes, I’ve seen them all, and then, because he waits, I describe the videos to him. I confuse the order at first but then I tell him that yes, I recall the video that he means. And I begin to describe it: I say, “There’s a young man in the video, he is the second speaker, his hair is cut close and has a part cut into it, and…” I hesitate before I finish the sentence. “And he looks like you.” The young man tells me that it is him. I ask him how long he’s worked at EJI—because he is wearing an EJI t-shirt like the other people who work in the museum. His name is █████████████████ and he tells me that he doesn’t work there but that he has come there every day since the museum opened in April 2018, to stand across from his video, and to watch people watching him. He tells me that he thought people didn’t care but that standing there he sees many people who are moved by his story.

This, he says, is his therapy.

NOTE 30

I think to say, but do not, that to look into other people’s faces for your therapy is a dangerous proposition.

NOTE 31

I should have told him. I should have tried to unburden him.

NOTE 32

The Language of the Whistle

On the other side of the installation with the young man who watches museum visitors watching the video of him is a video of Robert Caston.

When Mr. Caston was seventeen years old, he was sentenced to life in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the maximum-security prison called Angola built on the site of a former plantation.[30]

Once he arrived there, he recalls that he was sent “straight to the field, rain, cold weather, never too hot or too cold.”

Mr. Caston’s description reiterates the language of the slave narrative. Here is Frederick Douglass:

We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him.[31]

Mr. Caston continues:

“No field, then it’s the hole. And from the hole right back to the field.”

“You live your life from a whistle.”

“Whistle:

Wake you up.

Lock you up.

Send you to the field.”

“Whistle do everything in Angola, word of mouth don’t do nothing.”

“Each time a whistle is blown, you got to know what it’s for.”[32]

Mr. Caston spent more than forty-five years in Angola. His case was one of the first in which juveniles who had been sentenced to life in prison were released after the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision making life in prison illegal for children convicted of non-homicide crimes.

As I listen to Mr. Caston speak, I watch his body, how he looks at the viewer, how he holds his head and also his hands. It is only after the third viewing that I realize that he is missing several fingers on his right hand.

The language of the whistle at Angola echoes the language of the whip in chattel slavery, echoes in the language of the rifle in Alfred, Georgia, in Morrison’s Beloved. “All forty-six men woke to rifle shot. All forty-six.”[33]

NOTE 33

The man in the video to the left of Mr. Caston is Anthony Ray Hinton. Mr. Hinton is an exoneree from death row who was represented by Bryan Stevenson and the EJI.[34] Mr. Hinton spent twenty-eight years on death row in Alabama after he was found guilty of two murders that he did not commit. When he was arrested, Mr. Hinton declared his innocence to the arresting officers, to which they replied that they did not care; he would be convicted.

In the Guardian, Mr. Hinton writes, “I had to watch 54 men walk past to be executed. My cell was 30ft from the chamber and I could smell the burning flesh. There were 22 who took their own life.”[35] It took eighteen years for Bryan Stevenson and the EJI to successfully challenge the state’s evidence, for there to be a new trial, for the state of Alabama to overturn his conviction and drop all charges, and finally for Mr. Hinton to be released.

Mr. Hinton believes that he came within two years of his execution date.

Anthony Ray Hinton has been, to quote Colin Dayan, “held in the body of the state.”[36] His life has been turned into black matter, into chemistry, for the state’s past, present, and future white supremacist workings, its past and present and future alchemic practices.

NOTE 34

Built at the top of the hill in the Montgomery neighborhood of Cottage Hill, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is dedicated to the more than four thousand four hundred known victims of lynching in twelve states in the US. The names of the victims (or the word “unknown”) are inscribed on each of the eight hundred and five weathering steel monoliths—the font size of the names is larger or smaller depending on the number of Black people lynched in that county over the course of those seventy-three years. “The monoliths occupy the entirety of the large, covered structure, which is organized around an open square at its center.”[37] Six feet tall, the monoliths, as they are installed in the covered structure, begin at eye level with only a few millimeters of space between the monolith and the ground. As you walk through the installation, the ground begins to slope and the monoliths to rise until you are standing underneath scores of them. Other than turning around and heading back up the path, there is no way to exit the structure once you begin your descent: you are forced through—forced underneath hundreds of monoliths, forced past the wall markers with specific names and the specific terrors that those Black people and communities faced, forced past the steps that gesture to the stadium seating that was constructed for the white crowds who rushed, sometimes by the thousands, to be witness and participant in spectacle lynchings.

NOTE 35

In the graveyard, there are another eight hundred and five monoliths laid out like coffins, exact duplicates of the ones that are part of the permanent memorial. Each county in which a lynching took place is invited to research lynching in their communities and then enter into a process with the EJI in order to place the corresponding monolith in their community.

As far as I know, only one community has claimed a marker.

NOTE 36

National Memorial for Peace and Justice, December 28, 2018, Montgomery, Alabama

In the section of the memorial that is the graveyard, I am undone, thinking about family secrets, and wondering if/worrying that I might see a familial name on a monolith. I am wondering if, worrying that I might find someone I know here. Some member of my family; someone from the cache of fears and secrets that my family carried. A white woman approaches me tentatively. “Excuse me,” she says. We are walking in the same direction. She is crying. I don’t know at first that she is speaking to me, and I can’t imagine what she wants. I turn partially and reluctantly toward her. “Excuse me,” she says again, “I just want to say that I’m sorry”—and she gestures toward where the monoliths are laid out like coffins—

“I’m so sorry about all of this…”

I do not reply.

NOTE 37

New York City, February 8, 2019

We are a first—a panel of five Black people, two of whom are psychoanalysts, assembled for the third iteration of the Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s series University Forum on Racism in America. In my paper I relate that encounter with the white woman in the graveyard who apologizes…for all of this. In the question-and-answer period after our talks, several white women in the audience, which is almost entirely white and primarily analysts, ask me if I can say why I didn’t reply to her. They ask me if I will tell them what I would have said if I had replied. I give two answers. My first answer is no, I will not answer this question, because I think that my talk on the work of memorials in general, and on the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in particular, has already explicitly done this work. My second answer is that I will step into my role as a teacher and elaborate. I tell the white psychoanalysts that I do not reply to the woman at the memorial because I am at first unsure that she is speaking to me. And really, she isn’t. She is speaking into the space and in the direction of a Black person. But second, and more importantly, I do not reply to her because with her apology, she tries to hand me her sorrow and whatever else she is carrying, to super-add her burden to my own.

It is not mine to bear. I have my own sorrows.

NOTE 38

When I describe my visit to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice to my friend the professor and curator Andrea Fatona, she says that although she hasn’t yet been there, she imagines the relevance of Elizabeth Alexander’s 1994 essay “Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?: Reading the Rodney King Video(s).” In that essay Alexander shows the ways that Black suffering and the unremitting violence against Black people are (made) invisible and inaudible to many eyes and ears. That taped beating of Rodney King that was supposedly incontrovertible evidence of police brutality against him was manipulated in order to make King the aggressor. Black people faced, once again, how violence against us is so often not understood to be violence. We understood, once again, the many ways that we are forced to encounter anew both the violence and its refusal as violence.

Can you be Black and stand there?

NOTE 39

It made them feel proud

In “The Cruelty Is the Point,”[38] Adam Serwer, journalist and staff writer at the Atlantic, turns to the self-documentation of white communities who participated in lynchings. He notices the faces of the white crowds who are smiling or somber or interested or jubilant, but not disgusted, and who gathered in small and large groups, witness and participant to the murder and maiming of Black people. “Their names,” he writes, “have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.”

But they were not just white men in those lynching photos: there were white women also, white girls, and white boys, and they were smiling, sometimes somber, and sometimes rapturously attentive. The white children are holding each other’s hands, holding their parents’ hands, staring into the camera, one hand holding their other hand, or hands on hips, standing beside the white men and women, and standing beside, in front of, and underneath the bodies of Black men, women, and young people who had been brutalized before, during, and after death. Some of those white children may still be alive and the people who call them brother, wife, father, husband, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin, mother, grandmother, and grandfather have, with very few exceptions, chosen to remain silent in the face of the political and ethical demands of these photographs.[39]

Not lost to time. Hidden. Their names are not lost to time, they are hidden in time, hidden in the work of the US, hidden in towns, in cities, in consciousness, and in lies. They are hidden and enjoyed, loved, adorned, and breathed in like air.

NOTE 40

In Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, Cynthia Carr writes:

When I first learned that my grandfather had been a Klansman, I didn’t want to know more and I didn’t talk about it. The news wasn’t just shameful, it was frightening. It suggested that someone I loved wasn’t who I thought he was, that maybe I’d never really known him. Still, I felt that my sense of my grandfather couldn’t be all wrong. I didn’t just visit periodically for seventeen years; he lived the last year of his life at our house. He’d always been quiet, a homebody, never given to racial slurs. At least I never heard any, though I’m sure he shared the received ideas of other white men of his generation….

I was in my late twenties when I first came upon the lynching photo in a book: two black men in bloody tattered clothing hang from a tree, and below them stand the grinning, gloating, proud, and pleased white folks. I couldn’t believe that this was my Marion, the lynching referred to in my family, a tree I’d walked past as a child. I looked anxiously for my grandfather’s face in that photo. Didn’t find it. That was some relief. But he too had gone to the square that night. There’d been something you don’t want to see. Then laughter. And as I began to tell people this story, that was one detail I left out, because it shamed me: there was laughter….

So I lost my new friend when the art class ended, but even at that age I knew that something was wrong with this setup. So I moved to the next stage of racism—relating to black people as “those we have wronged.” That guilt would build another barrier.[40]

Similarly, Edward Ball writes of his great-great-grandfather in Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy:

It is not a distortion to say that Constant’s rampage 150 years ago helps, in some impossible-to-measure way, to clear space for the authority and comfort of whites living now—not just for me and for his 50 or 60 descendants, but for whites in general.

He continues, “I am an heir to Constant’s acts of terror. I do not deny it, and the bitter truth makes me sick at the stomach.”[41]

Before Carr and Ball there was Lillian Smith, who wrote Killers of the Dream—and with it explored hate’s geographies, how, to quote Patricia J. Williams, “hatred is learned in the context of love.”[42]

NOTE 41

Some of the lynching photographs in the gallery exhibition were from private collections. On the back of several of them was hair from the person or persons who had been lynched.

The collectors who lend these items stipulate that their names not be revealed. That their connection to these items remain submerged. But this precaution is beside the point—these items are, of course, intimately and completely connected to them—these items and the violence that they index and hold are the white person’s constitutive outside.

That this particular spectacular or quotidian violence remains largely external to white families in North America is part of what constitutes them as white.

Many white individuals and families own such items. They are not lost to time. They are hidden, held closely and largely in secret.[43] But the knowledges of violence and license that they make manifest are passed down as inheritance from one generation to the next.

The constitutive outside is a supertonic note, that “second degree of a diatonic scale, one step above the tonic”[44] in which one note of this composition is Black death, the other white life, white license, white claim. Those notes set in motion the baying composition of the lynch mob.

In the face of this knowledge, I hear a silence. Then there is a threnody.

NOTE 42

A lamentation

In Leon Golub’s painting Threnody II (1987), four women appear, caught in a dance, active in their postures of grief, prayer, and mourning. In Jacob Lawrence’s painting Although the Negro was used to lynching, he found this an opportune time for him to leave where one had occurred (1940–41), a woman is desolate, slumped over at one end of a table, while at the other end an empty bowl with a spoon in it sits, abandoned.

NOTE 43

We are called to different things

What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background? What if their project was to identify them and their families and to link their present circumstances to the before of those photographs and the after? That is, what if the work was to draw a line or to map new or continued wealth, accumulation of property and status, access to education and health to those mass murders—a Legacy of Lynching Participants database—that would join the past and the present in the same ways that the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project laid bare the “slave owners”—their strategies of accumulation of wealth and power, evasion and disavowal, that have continued into the present.

The demand is uneven. We are called to different things.

What if white visitors to a memorial to the victims of lynching were met with the enlarged photographs of faces of those white people who were participant in and witness to that terror then and now?

What if they had to face themselves?

Might that not be a different endeavor? Might that not hit a different note?

NOTE 44

As you exit the covered structure that is the main part of the memorial at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and before you arrive at the monoliths that constitute the graveyard, you must walk past a quotation from Beloved that comes from the sermon Baby Suggs delivers in the Clearing.

And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.[45]

That quotation from Beloved is an invitation and an exhortation addressed specifically to Black people.

It is instruction on what to remember and, in the remembering, it is a note on how to live in the afterlife of slavery,[46] in the afterlife of lynching,[47] and in the wake.[48]

This part of the memorial is explicitly and unequivocally addressed to Black people.

It is a threshold space that transitions Black visitors from the surround of our terror to the space of our mourning.

“The frame of the doorway is the only space of true existence.”[49]

NOTE 45

“Let the dead bury their dead”[50]

THRESHOLD, NOUN: a: the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced, as in has a high threshold for pain; b: a level, point, or value above which something is true or will take place and below which it is not or will not.[51]

The graveyard where the white woman spoke to me and gestured…is also for us.

P and I walk through the graveyard, together and apart, and look at all of the names of the dead, those who may be our individual and particular dead but who are most certainly our collective dead.

Horizontal and vertical, the monoliths overwhelm. I feel the air leave my chest.

Mourning can be interrupted; gravestones can be overturned.

That quotation from Beloved at the threshold is a space to catch one’s breath; it arrives as a black note only for us.

When the white woman stops me in the graveyard it feels like desecration.

NOTE 46

For white visitors, the sheer number and weight of the monoliths, the cascade of names, and the bleed of the weathering steel are meant to be the threshold, that phenomena that manifests another condition.[52] They are meant to move the white visitor from guilt (the hanging monoliths) to grief (the graveyard).

That formulation—that movement from guilt to grief—is one that I borrow from Katrina Browne’s reflection in her documentary about her family’s involvement and complicity with silence in terms of both the accumulation of the family’s wealth and the often undiscussed and undisclosed Northern involvement in the Slave Trade. In Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, Browne says that once she began to come to terms with the ways that she is implicated in contemporary Black suffering, her desire to make things right propelled her movement from personal guilt (which may be a position of distance, a position of non-implication, but may also be one of complicity) to grief (a position of relation, one of entanglement).[53]

NOTE 47

Gesture

Every time I think of that encounter with the white woman who addressed me in the graveyard of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, I think of “Dialogue,” in Charlotte Delbo’s None of Us Will Return.

Here is Delbo:

“You’re French?”

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

She has no F on her chest. A star.

“From where?”

“Paris.”

“You’ve been here a long time?”

“Five weeks.”

“I’ve been here sixteen days.”

“That’s already a long time, I know.”

“Five weeks…How can it be?”

“Just like this.”

“And you think we can survive this.”

She is begging.

“We’ve got to try.”

“For you, perhaps there’s hope, but for us…?”

She points to my striped jacket and then to her coat, a coat much too big, much too dirty, much too tattered.

“Oh, come on, it’s the same odds for both of us.”

“For us, there’s no hope.”

She gestures with her hand, mimics rising smoke.

“We’ve got to keep up our courage.”

“Why bother…Why keep on struggling when all of us are to…”

The gesture of her hand completes her sentence. Rising smoke.

“No, we’ve got to keep on struggling.”

“How can we hope to get out of here. How will anyone ever get out of here. It would be better to throw ourselves on the barbed wire immediately.”

What can one say to her? She’s small, frail. And I can’t even convince myself. All argument is senseless. I’m struggling against my reason. One struggles against all reason.

The chimney smokes. The sky is low. Smoke sweeps across the camp weighing upon us and enveloping us with the odor of burning flesh.[54]

The gesture. The bodily grammar. The occupation of the same space and yet…certain death for one—extermination in the gas chamber—and the possibility of physical survival for the other.

What words can fill these spaces of brutal differentiation?

NOTE 48

Antidote

On my first day at the memorial, I saw a Black couple and their almost two-year-old baby girl. I greeted them and then I watched them as I and they made a way through the space. The little girl sang and laughed. She was so filled with joy that it felt, at first, incongruous. But my encounter with her full-of-lifeness, her exuberant, so-far-uncrushed being was an antidote to the hanging monoliths’ crushing weight.

iii. Can I live?

To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction—a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art.[55]

DIONNE BRAND

NOTE 49

“Can I live?”

Saidiya Hartman expands the registers of what can be thought, imagined, declared in relation to Black life. To read her work is to get a sense of the breadth of the hold, the barracoon, and the prison and to glimpse and expand your knowing of what might escape that enclosure and confinement and at what cost, and what might be made in it and in spite of it. It is to witness how life happens. To apprehend how living happens and is made by those who refuse to wear someone else’s manufactured shame, and who are determined to live free precisely because everything is at stake.

“Can I live?” is the unasked and ever-present question that appears in the final sentence of “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum”—the first chapter of Hartman’s magisterial Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.

Can I live? is a question that resounds in my thinking; it resounds in my writing of this book.

Hartman’s singular and collective girls and women, her chorus, and her swarm, think and live in the space of, move against and through, antiblack worlds. What emerges in relation to that crucial question are multiple practices and philosophies of living.

Hartman tells us, in her “A Note on Method”: “The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world must be otherwise.”[56]

NOTE 50

In Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, when Jessica Marie Johnson writes, “These African women, children, and men would map with their feet, arms, and legs the indeterminacy at the heart of the census rolls, as they moved between homes and outposts, traveling by land and water,”[57] I can’t help but think of the distances traveled by Marie Ursule, a protagonist of Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon. Marie Ursule, held in slavery on an estate in Trinidad, is punished for her part in plotting a revolt by having the tips of her ears cut off and being forced to wear, for two years, a ten-pound ball chained to her ankle. After the weight is removed, Marie Ursule walks with a limp, her leg drags, and still, she covers considerable distances at night in order to gather curare to fulfill the destruction of the slaveowners, in order to send her daughter Bola, her one vanity, into a space that is something like freedom. In their act of mass suicide, Marie Ursule holds her comrades, the women and men who together make up the Convoi Sans Peur, comforts them, steels them, in their last ragged breaths.

The terrible price that is slavery, that is torture, that is living while those you struggle alongside die, is both extracted from Marie Ursule and given. “This is but a drink of water,” she says, “to what I have already suffered.”[58]

Marie Ursule wants to pass her daughter Bola into a radical freedom, one that she will not live to experience fully but that she has held the space open to imagine and to bring into being. After this they should—as in the ruttier in Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return—“owe, own nothing.”[59] This price Marie Ursule has paid, they have paid, is enough to cover all debt, for her daughter and all the generations that come after her.

Despite the all-but-disappearance of so many of these women from historical records, they measured the latitude and the longitude of this place, the places where they were, their confinement, and, also, their possibility.

The women in Johnson’s Wicked Flesh and Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon lived in a whole range of practices of freedom. They embodied the knowledge that in every moment not everything could be claimed by them, but neither could everything be claimed from them.

NOTE 51

Beauty is a Method

Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.[60]

SAIDIYA HARTMAN

Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.[61]

TONI CADE BAMBARA

vessel:

a container (such as a cask, bottle, kettle, cup, or bowl) for holding something

a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused

a watercraft bigger than a rowboat; especially: ship

a tube or canal (such as an artery) in which a body fluid is contained and conveyed or circulated

a conducting tube in the xylem of a vascular plant formed by the fusion and loss of end walls of a series of cells[62]

More than flesh, a body—your “beat and beating heart.”[63]

I’ve been thinking about what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.

We lived in a town that used and hated and feared its Black population. I grew up in Wayne, Pennsylvania, at a four-way intersection: rich white folks in three directions and a small Black neighborhood in the other. One bright, sunny summer day when I was eight or nine or ten years old, police from at least two townships, but I think three, descended on and laid siege to my neighborhood. Multiple police cars blocked our streets because a white woman had reported that she saw a Black man driving a station wagon through the center of Wayne with a shotgun visible in the back. The Black man was named Chicki Carter—and he was really a boy, seventeen or eighteen years old. He was a friend of my brother Stephen. The rifle was a rake, part of the set of tools that Chicki used for the yardwork he was doing that summer in order to earn money. We gathered in our front yards, on the sidewalks, and in the road; we ran after the police cars; and we witnessed and insisted loudly that Chicki had done nothing wrong. That day, at least, although there was harm done, it was not immediately fatal harm.

Knowing that every day that I left the house, many of the people whom I encountered did not think me precious and showed me so, my mother gave me space to be precious—as in vulnerable, as in cherished. It is through her that I first learned that beauty is a practice, that beauty is a method, and that a vessel is also “a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused.” Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America was my mother’s book. My brother Stephen gave it to her. There is an inscription in it, as there is in every book that we gave each other: Happy Birthday, To Mommy, Love Stephen, 3/2/70.

In the pages of the book is a list on a worn slip of paper. The top of the list is faded from the sun and disintegrating. The list is in my mother’s fast cursive—the writing she used when she was making notes to and for herself. My mother’s handwriting for the world was meticulous (as in the note to me in the first edition of Beloved that she gave me on my twenty-third birthday). In rebellion against the nuns at West Catholic Girls’ who tried to control every aspect of her school life, my mother had created her own beautifully ornate script. This particular list is written on the back of a form that she recycled from her job in human resources at Sears, Roebuck and Co., a sheet of light-blue paper that she tore into strips to use as bookmarks: a lifelong habit instilled in a child of the Depression—use everything, waste nothing.

The list:

Before the Mayflower ($3.95)

Malcolm X: The Man and His Time ($5.95)

*The Negro Handbook ($8.95)

A Pictorial History of the Negro in America ($4.95)

What Manner of Man ($4.95)

This Child’s Gonna Live ($4.95)

*Contemporary Art in Africa ($7.25)

Black Political Power in America ($6.95)

Black Power U.S.A. ($5.95)

The White Problem ($6.95)

Confrontation: Black and White ($6.95)

To Be Young Gifted and Black (Lorraine Hansberry) ($6.95)

Black in White America ($5.95)

The bookmark marks the beginning of the chapter “Esther” from Jean Toomer’s Cane.

I was a vessel for all of my mother’s ambitions for me—ambitions that found their own shapes.

My mother made me a purple gingham dress with purple and lilac and blue appliqué tulips. She tried, over many summers, to teach me how to sew: needlepoint, appliqué, cross-stitch, slip stitch. She failed. We failed together. She had a beautiful old pedal-operated Singer sewing machine and when you opened the shallow drawers that ran along the top you found that they were filled with brightly colored and differently weighted needlepoint yarn. I used to love to look at them. I would arrange and disarrange them, stack her thimbles, disturb her order.

When she was dying, my mother still made Christmas ornaments by hand. Unpacking after a move, it was a shock to re-encounter the red felt hearts with the straight pins holding them together, the black felt globe with its own arrangement of pins—the ordinary flat-headed pins, the round red and white and brown heads. My mother’s love of symmetry: even the bent pins have a place. It was a shock to encounter them again—the way that beauty shocks. But more. What is beauty made of? Attentiveness whenever possible to a kind of aesthetic that escaped violence whenever possible—even if it is only the perfect arrangement of pins.

I continue to think about beauty and its knowledges.

I learned to see in my mother’s house. I learned how not to see in my mother’s house. How to limit my sight to the things that could be controlled. I learned to see in discrete angles, planes, plots. If the ceiling was falling down and you couldn’t do anything about it, what you could do was grow and arrange peonies and tulips and zinnias; cut forsythia and mock orange to bring inside.

My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words. She gave me every Black book that she could find and, in her practice, birthdays always included gifts for the body, gifts for the mind, and gifts for the soul. The mind and the soul came together in books: novels, poetry, short stories, history, art. One of those books was Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters in which Bambara, in the dedication, thanks her mother, “who in 1948, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen floor, mopped around me.” In that dedication, I saw something that my mother would do; I saw something that she had done. My mother gave me space to dream. For whole days at a time, she left me with and to words, curled up in a living room windowsill, uninterrupted in my reading and imagining other worlds.

Some books I read while sitting in that windowsill:

The Collected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar

The People Could Fly

Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America

Jane Eyre

Bright April

The Life of Ida B. Wells: The Woman Who Killed Judge Lynch

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Little Women

Song of Solomon

The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

That window was my loophole of retreat—two feet deep, three feet wide, four feet high—my small public/private place from which I began to imagine myself into another world. The house was an old farmhouse, built in 1804, and there were no right angles in it—everything was on a slope. The windowsill I sat in looked out onto the backyard. In summer that meant cherries and quince, crabapple, greengage plum, four peony bushes, a huge weeping willow that had been struck by lightning, and beyond that the road called Radnor Street Road. There was also a vegetable garden where we grew tomatoes, corn, collard and mustard greens, turnips, kale, carrots, several varieties of lettuce, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, sweet and hot peppers, and more. In the winter, you could see the house behind the fruit trees where Chico and Joey lived. Sometimes the house was cold, and then my mother’s stacks of newspapers became fireplace logs. And though this was a sign that there was no money for oil, there was an art to making my mother’s neat paper logs: roll the paper, tuck one edge in, roll a little more, tuck the other edge. That way they wouldn’t come undone. That way we wouldn’t come undone.

Beauty is a method:

reading in the windowsill

running after the police

a list on a slip of paper in a book

the arrangement of pins in cloth

the ability to make firewood out of newspaper

This attentiveness to a Black aesthetic made me: moved me from the windowsill to the world.

NOTE 52

Ma’am

MA’AM: A person addressed as “ma’am”; a married woman; a woman schoolteacher (U.S.). Now rare.[64]

Sethe, in Beloved, is lost in the few memories that she has of her mother before she was tortured and hanged for her part in a revolt on the plantation where they were before Sethe was sold to the Garners and Sweet Home.

What Sethe remembers:

a back turned away from her in a field;

“a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin”;[65]

the shape of a hat;

a language whose words and meaning she can no longer understand;

that she is named after the Black man, the one her mother put her arms around;

that if you don’t recognize a face, you look for the mark.

Sethe’s mother’s knowledge and the knowledge of the other Ma’ams, abducted Africans forced over on those slave ships with names like Antelope and The Phillis and Formiga and those born into slavery on these “New World” grounds, counters the racist ledger-knowledge of the whiteman called Schoolteacher.

NOTE 53

A friend scolds me. He tells me that I am sentimental about death. I feel like I’ve been hit by a cudgel. After this I am unbalanced. For days, weeks, and even now I wonder what this could possibly mean. What am I supposed to learn from this?

NOTE 54

I leave notes to myself on Post-its, in the drafts folder of multiple email accounts, in text files named Remember.

They are a brief record of facts.

Remember this person means you harm.

Remember…

Remember…

NOTE 55

We move to a new neighborhood. K tells me, “We can’t live there like white people.”

I know exactly what she means. Don’t be a tourist or participant in or indifferent to suffering.

Still, I make a note to myself: “Remember,” it says.

NOTE 56

I am annoyed by the phrase Black excellence. It doesn’t do the affirming work that many people who deploy it imagine that it does. Zakiyyah Iman Jackson gets it precisely right when she tells me that “Black excellence” is the answer to a racist question.[66]

NOTE 57

In the machine of kinship

“Slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship”[67] is a concise articulation of the ways that chattel slavery’s logics, laws, and relations continue to animate the present. Transatlantic chattel slavery’s domestic relations solidified and severed relations by making kin in one direction, and in the other, property that could be passed between and among those kin.

In the days after the 2016 US elections, I sat with a number of colleagues. They were good people, all well-meaning, and we were gathered in the spirit that there was much to do and that we were committed to the doing. Some of my Black colleagues were organizing around ways to protect their children from the racist attacks that they were facing in schools. Some of my white colleagues were doing similar work while others were struggling, in this moment, to figure out if this was the time to speak to their white kin about white supremacy and if so, how. They spoke this fear into the same ether as their Black co-workers, friends, and colleagues. They wondered, should they be silent, or should they broach the election and its aftermath with people in their lives who occupied different points of view, who voted differently, who apprehended the world in ways that my white colleagues self-reported as deeply antithetical or inimical to their own. They acknowledged that the lives of people (not them) were at stake. And yet they equivocated. They half spoke, they unspoke, they decided not to speak. They made peace. And with those equivocations, they reconstituted and re-enfleshed that ghost of a past that is not yet past.

This note repeats into our present.

NOTE 58

Who’s on the Shore; Who’s on the Boat

There’s no short or easy answer to the question: “Who gets to tell the story of the African Diaspora?” Likewise, there is no short or easy way to assuage the anxieties about telling a story right. Any attempt to address either must attend to power.

I’m not arguing that there are wrong stories or wrong ways to tell them. Stories in and of themselves aren’t right or wrong. Who writes, how one writes—as in from what subject position—and what one writes matters. It matters because while films, novels, plays, and poems are works of imagination and are not collapsible into the narrowly political, all work arises out of particular spaces/places/needs/and times, all works are produced and received within a context, all works are political. The how, who, when, and why of what stories are published and become bestsellers and what films are made and circulated and go on to win prizes matters because they are, to quote the Nigerian novelist and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “really dependent on power.” Certainly, the power of publishing, financing, and distribution, but also of course representational power, the power of stories to shape realities—to shape how we see each other and ourselves.

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe spoke forcefully about narratives of power and the power of narrative when he outlined his experience of reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in 1950s Nigeria, in schools modeled on British public schools.

To set the scene of the novel: Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s text, is in the party sailing in the boat up the Congo River. When Marlow views the Africans on the shore he explains: “The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings…They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces.”[68]

The power of this representation of Africanness as well as those in other “African” novels by white authors, and their position in the curriculum in the absence of other representations, meant that, for Achebe, “[he] did not see [him]self as an African to begin with. [He] took sides with the white men against the savages. “In other words,” he writes, “I went through my first level of schooling thinking I was of the party of the white man…”[69]

But Achebe comes to realize that he is not in the boat with Marlow sailing up the Congo River, he is on the shore with “prehistoric man.” He writes, “I was not on Marlow’s boat steaming up the Congo in Heart of Darkness; rather, I was one of those unattractive beings jumping up and down on the riverbank, making horrid faces…The day I figured this out was when I said no, when I realized that stories are not always innocent; that they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you.”[70]

Conrad is in the boat; Achebe is on the shore.

Of course, those Africans standing on the bank of the Congo River in Conrad’s novel had entirely different stories to tell, stories where their actions are at the center of the narrative and entirely comprehensible, stories in which the genocidal actions of the whites are also readable if, from a different point of view, incomprehensible in their absolute greed and venality.

Those Congolese people would have told stories that were in excess of a catalog of violence enacted on them. They would have told, written, and spoken not just of their terrible deaths and colonial violence but also of the lives that they lived in the midst of extreme brutality. They would have told of marriage, beauty, joy, births, deaths, of armed resistance, of work stoppages, and other ways that old and young, women, men, and children resisted Belgian colonial rule, forced labor, collective punishment, unremitting cruelty, and massive and ongoing catastrophic expropriation of wealth.

Fifty years after Achebe’s realization, and one hundred years after Conrad wrote his novel, Adichie gave a talk called “The Danger of a Single Story” in which she warns against the single story, the single representation, the single interpretive lens. She outlines the ways that seeing people and nations through the lens of a single story is actually a way of not seeing that maintains, upholds, and reproduces power relations and racial, class, sex, and national hierarchies. She talks as well about her evolution as a reader and writer of fiction. Adichie remembers her education in Nigeria and reading novels written by (white) American and (white) British writers. She remembers writing stories in which all of her characters were white with blue eyes because “she wrote exactly the kind of stories she was reading.” Until she read Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye she didn’t think that “girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.” For Adichie, “the discovery of African writers…saved [her] from having a single story of what books are.”[71]

Adichie then goes on to tell a story about her first college roommate in the US:

I was nineteen…My American roommate was shocked by me…. What struck me was this: she had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals.[72]

Her roommate is in the boat; Adichie is on the shore.

Adichie’s roommate’s projections and misperceptions were and were not particular to her Nigerian-ness, were and were not just a reaction to her (recently) being from Africa. Perhaps her roommate had not only a single story of Africa, but a single story of blackness as catastrophe, self-inflicted, utterly beyond reason. Because much of the story her roommate had absorbed about “Africa”—as Adichie says, “incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves, and waiting to be saved”[73]—is also, with exceptions that prove the rule, the story constructed and produced of blackness everywhere in the Americas and elsewhere.

We only have to think of the coverage of any disaster and how it shifts depending on where it occurs. Think as well of how blackness appeared in the films Monster’s Ball and Precious. Since its release in 2009, lots of people have talked about Precious—and many of those conversations have turned into arguments. Given that stories are not innocent, what work is Precious doing out in the world? What kind of consciousness is being shaped? Whose? And how?

Precious has important stories to tell about mothers and daughters, about incest and the public schools that fail many, many students, about the terrible price that the “welfare-to-work program” exacted on families and individuals, about the power of the word, the power of writing, the power of belief and imagination. How does it tell them? How do we understand them? How does it make them live on screen and then live out in the world? One reviewer wrote, “This isn’t Bastard out of Carolina, with a cute little girl suffering while we rise up in indignation. The movie allows us moments of judging Precious.”[74]

Who’s on the boat here; and who’s on the shore?

Despite many people calling it an uplifting and inspirational film, it produces an all-too-familiar story that positions some people in the boat and others on the shore. Such that Lynn Hirschberg can write in the New York Times that “the audience’s initial rejection of Precious, even repulsion at the sight of her, slowly gives way to a kind of identification.” It seems unimaginable to Hirschberg that different audiences would react to Precious in ways that aren’t centered around rejection, initial or otherwise, or repulsion. Likewise, her qualified “kind of identification” makes impossible something like shared ground. This is not a question of positive representation; it is a question of power and angle of vision. It is a question of how the film’s director, Lee Daniels, sees Precious (and the actor who plays her),[75] not that she is seen. Some of this seeing indexes an absence of tenderness; it reveals a profound lack of care.

Many of us have had the experience of reading a text or watching a film only to be brought up short. Many of us have been in the position of thinking we’re in the boat only to find ourselves on the shore.

I’m not arguing for some facile idea of “positive images,” though such a desire, not mine, certainly does index power. I am arguing for reading and watching critically, acknowledging the desire to see Black lives in all their complexity, and knowing the complex representational terrains in which we move and on which we struggle.

NOTE 59

“We try to get through this unworthy life”

After her husband and father-in-law were shot to death, a woman from southern Mexico fled with her children to the US border. When she was interviewed in the camp where she and several thousand other migrating people have been forced to live for months, she said: “That is why we wait. We try to get through this unworthy life. And we try to resist for our children’s sake.”[76]

Here are the unlivable worlds that are being imagined, materialized, exported, and compounded.

Here are the imaginative and material practices of resisting and refusing those unlivable worlds, insisting livable relations into being.

NOTE 60

May 10, 2011

In 2011, there were several stories in the New York Times about a white supremacist named Jeff Hall. Hall was in his thirties, the father of five children, and the leader of one branch of a neo-Nazi movement based in Riverside, in southern California. Hall had recently been awarded custody of his ten-year-old son and one daughter by a previous marriage. Then Hall’s ten-year-old son shot him to death while he was lying on the sofa in their living room. The headline read, “Neo-Nazi Father Is Killed; Son, 10, Steeped in Beliefs, Is Accused.” The article tells us that Hall was the leader of the “National Socialist Movement, the nation’s largest neo-Nazi party, whose message stands in surreal juxtaposition to the suburban, workaday trappings of many of its members.”[77] (The New York Times also calls Hall a “rising force,” while an article in another paper calls him a “rising star” of the neo-Nazi movement.)[78] But these things are not in a relation of juxtaposition, “surreal” or otherwise, and the assumption that they are related in such a way is rooted partly in the refusal to account for white supremacy and antiblackness, and partly in the desire to leave whiteness itself intact, to preserve white relationships, white sociality.

Daily and with deliberation, newspapers constitute whiteness as innocence, in ways that hide and forgive their own interests in the preservation and distribution of white supremacy. Whiteness as a political project that sorts oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable. Many in the media float white supremacy as if it is in a fixing solution—deploying it, exonerating it from its lethal work with “the exonerative tense.”[79] That grammar of “mistakes were made” is one in which terrible acts are committed and yet no one is assigned responsibility for them.

NOTE 61

May 10, 2011

Julie Platner, a white woman photojournalist, twenty-eight years old at the time, spent several months with Hall, his family, and the neo-Nazi group. Following the murder, she was interviewed in the New York Times. Even after her time with the Halls, even after the son murdered his father, Platner continued to categorize Jeff Hall as a “good father.” She said, “I do believe in most ways they were good parents, despite the indoctrination of their children.”

What can that possibly mean? How can a “good father” or “good parent” be a neo-Nazi, and vice-versa? How can a parent be “good” who raises children in that noxious atmosphere, in that ecology, in that weather of hate? The title is “A Family Tragedy in a Neo-Nazi Home.” But the tragedy, or tragedies, is not, or not only, the murder in the home by the child who kills, the tragedy is the fact of the neo-Nazi home. Platner said, “I’m trying to give human voice to people that most of society sees as monsters. I’m interested in truth at the end of the day.”

In an all-too-familiar pattern, the piece continues, “While covering the 2008 presidential campaign, Ms. Platner found herself growing interested in the large number of disaffected white people whom she encountered. ‘I think that since Obama was elected president, it’s a little more acceptable to be outwardly racist,’ she said. ‘To explore that, I felt compelled to explore the extreme version of the story in a human way. I was interested in who they were and what they did. I think that they are pushed to the edge; almost like a white gang type of thing. They build a community. A lot of them are marginalized by society. Many are working-class people who have been hurt by the economic downturn.’ ” The working class is once again imagined as only and always white. One lie is in that framing. Another is in the statement that “most of society” views these white people as monsters. In reality, these white people are always extended grace—and the grammar of the profoundly human. They are the human.

NOTE 62

This grammar of the good is the same one that names J. Marion Sims and Francis Galton “fathers” of gynecology and eugenics, respectively. Sims, who tortured many enslaved women—among them Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy, to call just three of these women by their names—by performing multiple surgeries on them as he experimented for a way to cure vaginal fistulas. It goes without saying that these women were unable to consent. Sims carried out these surgeries without the use of readily available anesthesia. Then there is Francis Galton, the man who named his racist theory of intelligence “eugenics” and after whom buildings were named at University College London.[80] Good men. Fathers.

NOTE 63

March 16, 2021

This is the logic that allows a speech like this to be made in the aftermath of a mass murder: “He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,”[81] the sheriff said about █████████████████, a white twenty-one-year-old man who is accused of killing eight people, almost all of whom were Asian and women. ████ murdered six Asian women across the sites of three separate spas in the Atlanta area in an act of white supremacist terror.

The white supremacist is extended the grammar of the human.

NOTE 64

Our joint project

On December 17, 2012, Christy Wampole, a white woman, a professor of French and Italian at Princeton University, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, “Guns and the Decline of the Young Man.” The titular young man is white, and when Wampole published this opinion, it was three days after ████████’s December 14, 2012, massacre of twenty-six people, twenty of whom were children between the ages of six and seven, in Newtown, Connecticut, in the United States. Wampole wrote, “They were once our heroes, our young and shining fathers, our sweet brothers, our tireless athletes, our fearless warriors, the brains of our institutions, the makers of our wares, the movers of our world.” She continued, “I would argue that maleness and whiteness are commodities in decline. And while those of us who are not male or white have enjoyed some benefits from their decline, the sort of violence and murder that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary will continue to occur if we do not find a way to carry them along with us in our successes rather than leaving them behind.”[82]

Imagine writing this after those murders of twenty first-grade children.

Imagine inhabiting such melancholy for an ascendant white supremacy.

Imagine such certainty that this is to be our joint project, and that its continuance, and not its destruction, is for our good.

NOTE 65

There are moments that catch you and never leave.

I am eighteen years old. My friends and I have walked from the campus of the University of Pennsylvania (36th and Locust) in West Philadelphia to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant on 8th and Arch in Center City, Philadelphia. There are five of us. Two of us went to high school together and reconnected the summer after our first year of university. It is dark. We are almost at the restaurant and across the road from us there is an underpass that leads to the highway.

A car passes. A white man is driving, and a white woman sits in the passenger seat with her face pressed against the window. When I look into the car, I see that she is crying. The look on her face is one of complete terror. Before I can write down a license plate number they are gone.

Her face returns to me. It has been over thirty years.

A year later, when I see the two women and two children on the corner in North Philadelphia, I open the door of a still-moving car to try to help. My friend stops me.

The women (one older, one younger) are screaming, the children are crying. There is a man with them who has grabbed hold of the slightly built younger woman. He is picking her up and repeatedly slamming her face-first onto the sidewalk.

I can’t forget them, either.

NOTE 66

April 25, 2015; A language of hands

A mixed group, but mostly Black people, are marching to Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland, to protest the police murder of twenty-five-year-old Baltimorean Freddie Gray on April 12, 2015. They are met by a group of “white baseball fans” who respond to the first group’s rage, grief, and “boisterous demand,” their chants of “No Justice, No Peace,” with chants of “We don’t care. We don’t care.”[83]

The photographer Devin Allen captures all of this—if not in the images of those particular uncaring people, in the very fact of the absence of care, the devastation apparent in the background but not the foreground of so many of his photographs. Devin Allen is from Baltimore. He is not an outsider or uplifter and what he foregrounds is community. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor reminds us in her foreword to A Beautiful Ghetto, Allen’s 2017 book of Baltimore photographs, that “Black life is not only about hardship, it is also about poetry, play, celebration, curiosity, tradition and what some have referred to as the ‘beautiful struggle.’”[84] Through Allen’s eye we see Baltimore as a place where Black people make a life in beauty and in struggle. Leigh Raiford writes, “photography in the service of African American social movements [is] the site of a threefold struggle through and for the Black body, the black eye, and black memory.”[85]

In Allen’s photographs we see, in Saidiya Hartman’s words, the “relay of looks and the pangs of desire that unsettle their captions and hint at the possibility of a life bigger than poverty, at the tumult and upheaval that can’t be arrested by the camera.”[86] “I like deep, deep contrasts,” Allen says. “They kept whitening my images and I’m like, ‘No!’ You can’t go wrong with more Black. Black is something I wanted to make beautiful in this book so I crushed them. I wanted to make them pop.”[87]

You can trace a language of hands, and touch, through Allen’s images—a hand touching the Freddie Gray memorial, hands in hair, hands holding signs, hands wrapped around heads, hands touching each other.

NOTE 67

My mother said: “Don’t write about me.”

I am in Pittsburgh, a part of a small convening of Black writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and scholars. One of us is remembering his mother, mourning her passing, and recalling her life and the ways that she “handed him.” (As Hortense Spillers writes toward the end of her immensely important essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” “The African-American male has been touched, therefore, by the mother, handed by her in ways that he cannot escape, and in ways that the white American male is allowed to temporize by a fatherly reprieve.”[88]) This writer, teacher, editor, scholar had spent the last ten days of his mother’s life with her. He tells us that she repeated to him, a Black gay man, that he should “write about [her] one day.”

My mother used to tell me stories of her childhood. She told me about being in foster care, about her friends, two sisters, Iolanta and Myrtle, who died as teens, one after the other, alone and in pain, because their mother refused them visitors. My mother told me that each day after school at a designated time they would speak to each other through a second-floor window, until even that became impossible.

My mother was psychic. She told me that when she was a child, she acted as a medium in the seances that her spiritualist mother and stepfather held in Philadelphia. She told me these stories and many more. I was her eager audience.

When I think now on my mother’s “Don’t write about me,” I wonder if it signaled her recognition of the difficulty of narrating a life. It is a statement that conjures for me that moment in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun when Mama stops Beneatha’s condemnation of Brother with a look and an instruction: “when you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right.”[89]

When C reads a draft of this note she writes in the margin, “Your mother was also—and I can’t stress this enough—a writer of impeccable style. So maybe, this instruction aligns with a deep shared knowing.”

NOTE 68

A running list

Bright April. I read and reread this book. They were Black and lived in Philadelphia. Their father was a mailman. April Bright was a Brownie and so was I. It is on an outing with her troop that April is subject to racism from a little white girl. I loved this book for the ways that it spoke, with care and beauty, to difficult and joyful parts of my life.

Bread and Jam for Frances and Bedtime for Frances. My mother and I read these books together. I ate bread and jam like Frances and made a special hiding place under the dining room table.

The Secret Garden and A Little Princess.

The Shaping Room.

The Long Winter and Little House on the Prairie, but most of the nine Little House books in the set that I cherished.

The Wind in the Willows. I did not like it.

Little Women—I read it at least thirteen times. My mother hated it.

A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I loved Charles Wallace, but I felt like Meg.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Sounder—these books made me weep, they made me afraid, and at the same time they gave me courage.

Nomusa and Seven Grandmothers. My mother searched for dolls that were Black. She found the Sasha dolls. I had three of them. I named one of my dolls Nomusa after the main character. The other two I named Emily and David. Writing this, I remember their comforting smell.

Zeely. The People Could Fly. M. C. Higgins, the Great. The Planet of Junior Brown. The House of Dies Drear.

The Paddington books. I loved them and I read and reread them. I thought that when Paddington said that he could not rest on his laurels that meant that he could not rest on his backside.

Watership Down. I read and reread the stories of Fiver, Hazel, Bigwig, and the rest of the rabbits who made up the warren.

The Borrowers. I read but did not really like these books.

The Cat Ate My Gymsuit. I completely misremembered this book, although I loved it, reread it, and L and I made our own hand-printed and illustrated version of it.

Light a Single Candle. This book and the sequel, Gift of Gold.

My mother’s violet jelly and how long it took my brother Christopher and me to collect enough violets from our yard and the acres of land across the street where there were pheasants and foxes before they cut down the trees and built a development. So much gathering so that my mother could make three small jars of the most delicate-looking and -tasting jelly imaginable.

Bubbling Brown Sugar. My mother took me to see the musical at the Shubert Theater on Broad Street in Center City, Philadelphia.

Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. I read and reread them. I read Sense and Sensibility and Wuthering Heights only once. I did not like the former’s story and the latter novel scared me.

Alvin Ailey. My mother took me to see them perform whenever she was able to save enough money.

Porgy and Bess. Another musical that my mother and I saw at the Shubert Theater.

Stevie Wonder at the Valley Forge Music Fair. A gift for my thirteenth birthday. There was a woman in the audience who I thought was remarkably beautiful. She had a shaved head—and she wore a black-and-white dress with a black-and-white crownless hat. She looked sharp. She was the second bald woman I’d ever seen—my cousin Alice Jean, called Genie, had also been bald. I turned to my mother and told her, “When I’m older I’m going to shave my head.”

Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in The Wiz, also at the Valley Forge Music Fair.

The Gap Band and the Sylvers—the first concert I went to, when I was twelve years old. I was in seventh grade. My brother Van Buren took me and my friend Linda Johnson to the concert. It was on a school night.

Chipped beef on toast. I thought it was gross.

I cut the hair of every doll that my mother gave me.

The anger and sadness when I finally understood that in Little Town on the Prairie Pa plays the bones in blackface at the minstrel show that the community stages, all in good fun.

Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays. I have loved this book since college, when Leah Gardiner told me to read it. It is one of the books whose form informs this one.

My mother’s sayings: “I don’t chew my cabbage twice.” Meaning, Don’t ask me to repeat myself. “I have had a sufficiency of plenty; any more would be an abundance.”

NOTE 69

Open any book that my mother and I gifted each other, or that she gifted any of her children, or that we gifted her and each other, and you will find an inscription.

We had an elaborate language of book giving.

NOTE 70

There was a period after my father died when I would become hysterical if my mother was late coming home. Fifteen minutes or one hour, the length of time didn’t matter.

My mother would have to remember to call me before she left work to tell me what errands she had to run and how long she would be. And if she took any longer than she estimated or if she forgot to tell me, the panic would begin. I would repeat to myself or to Christopher or Stephen, if they were there: She’s not coming home. She got into an accident. She would have called.

This happened for months. I was twelve years old.

In the living room, I would sit in the windowsill that faced the street, and from which I could look for her car coming down Radnor Street Road before she turned onto Upper Gulph.

Or, I would sit at the window in her bedroom watching for her light-blue Honda Civic hatchback to turn the corner.

That gave me time to try to calm down before she walked through the front door.

I didn’t want her to know the full extent of my worry or to see how frantic I was.

I think that one of my brothers must have told her because when they witnessed my uncontrollable sobbing and my insistence that something bad had happened to her, they were alarmed and unable to comfort me.

I don’t remember what finally assuaged me. I don’t recall how or when this panic stopped.

NOTE 71

As Narrative

I tell D and KB the story about my fears of my mother dying and my frantic crying in the window.

D says: “That’s a beautiful story.”

KB is incredulous and defensive. “She’s telling us about her trauma!” she says.

“Yes,” D replies, “and it’s a wonderful story.”

KB snaps back, “As narrative.”

We look at each other and then we laugh.

NOTE 72

After my mother died when I was thirty-two, I had a recurring dream, the only part of which I can remember is sticky buns with currants. The buns were made by Amish women and every Saturday morning my mother would drive to the farmers’ market in Wayne in order to buy some.

I had that dream for years. Until—on a trip to Philadelphia for my Uncle Bob’s seventy-seventh birthday, from Boston where I was living and teaching—I bought some of those buns and took them to the cemetery.

I put them on my mother’s grave, and I visited for a while with her. After that the dreams stopped.

Some notes arrive from the grave. Some sweets appease the living.

NOTE 73

The note that begins the book

Following the publication of In the Wake, many people asked me about the process of writing an academic book that speaks to and beyond the academy. More specifically, people wanted to know about the form, and also about the first chapter, “The Wake,” which begins in the register of the autobiographical with my recounting the deaths, in close succession, of three members of my immediate family between May 2013 and February 2014. It was an ethical decision to include them because while I was reading and writing and thinking about Black people being murdered and about what we make in the face of all that structural violence, I was in the midst of so much personal loss. I thought that this loss also needed to be on the page explicitly, not just implicitly in the ways that, whether one admits it or not, one is oriented to one’s work from the location of the body and all that that may mean.

It is the note that begins that book.

NOTE 74

A revision, a sound, a correction, an addition

Rereading “The Wake,” preparing for a talk, I arrive at this sentence: “In 1994 the Philadelphia police murdered my cousin Robert…”[90]

And suddenly it hits me with some force that, while Robert was in fact my cousin’s name, it was not what we called him. He was Bobby, and because he was a generation older than me, I always called him Cousin Bobby.

The addition of the word cousin was a gesture of intimacy and respect; it was the sound of relation, not estrangement.

NOTE 75

What I remember is this:

Five of us traveled from Wayne and Berwyn to the annual College Fair at the Civic Center in West Philadelphia, not far from the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, the school that I would attend for my undergraduate degree.

As we walked back to 30th Street Station to take the R5, “the Paoli Local,” back to the suburbs, a very tall Black man crossed the street and began to walk alongside, but not especially close to us. He was talking to himself, gesturing, but paying us no mind. He was wearing a dark coat that was covered in safety pins with keys hanging from them.

One of my friends began to act nervous, and another made a joke about the man whose presence I had registered but not focused on. I turned to look at him. That is when I recognized him. I told K: “Don’t make fun of him, that’s my Cousin Bobby.”

I wonder, now, if Cousin Bobby walked those particular streets around the University of Pennsylvania because it was there, when he was a sophomore in college, that he was first diagnosed with schizophrenia.

NOTE 76

I have been here before.

NOTE 77

My mother once wrote a heartbreaking letter on my behalf.

I won’t reproduce it.

But it exists. In me and in the world.

iv. to consider or study carefully

I’ve thought a lot over the years about the astonishing gift double consciousness is; the ability to be alien to oneself is a good thing not a bad thing, to be cherished rather than mourned.[91]

RUTH WILSON GILMORE

NOTE 78

Nothing without labor

When I was thirteen, a white couple who owned an antique shop up the road from me offered me a summer job.

The shop was at the corner of Upper Gulph Road and Henry Avenue. Before it was an antique store it was a corner grocery, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hobson for many years until Mrs. Hobson died and Mr. Hobson had a stroke and was no longer able to run it. We didn’t miss Mr. Hobson. He was mean, and he disliked most of the Black people who were his primary customers. His children sold the store to a Korean family named Kim. Their daughter Miyoung and I became friends. I would visit her at the store, and we would sit behind the cash register at the front or the deli counter at the back and read books or play cashier. Mrs. Kim would make us ramen with egg and green onion in it, and when the shop wasn’t busy she taught me how to say good morning, good afternoon, good evening, my name is… and to write hangul. The Kims sold the shop to an Italian couple when I was still in elementary school. In a strange forgetting, I cannot recall this couple’s names. My mother and I used to visit regularly: they had beautiful jewelry, antique yellow and rose gold opal rings that my sister Ida Marie loved; beautiful carved wooden chairs that my mother would yearn for and, later, buy on layaway. I have one of those chairs now. A three-legged library chair with a decorative scroll on the backrest that reads sine labora nihil. Nothing without labor.

My brother Stephen and I saw a Cream of Wheat advertisement there. It was big. Poster-sized and mounted for display. In it a Black man wearing a chef’s hat and a black bow tie with red polka dots holds a slate that reads: “Maybe Cream of Wheat ain’t got no vitamines. I don’t know what them things is. If they’s bugs they ain’t none in Cream of Wheat but she’s sho good to eat and cheap. Costs bout 1c fo’ a great big dish.—Rastus.” We were offended and we told the owners so; afterwards, between us, the phrase “if they’s bugs” became shorthand for some white people’s brutal imaginations.

During the previous two summers, I had volunteered in the children’s section at the Tredyffrin Public Library. But as much as I loved books and reading, I disliked working in the library. I hated the shrill squeal-like hum of the alarm system that I could hear most places in the building but that none of the adults could—it was outside the register of their perception.

It was a Sunday when the Italian shop owners asked my mother if she thought that I would like a job. They said: “It will be an ‘internship.’ We will pay her, and she will learn about the antique business.” They had no children; or their children were grown and uninterested in the business. “She’s smart,” they said, “and well-spoken.” I knew that my bookishness was made to stand in contrast to the other young Black people who came into the store and whom the owners always suspected of trying to steal the penny candy.

I needed a summer job, so I accepted their offer. We arranged that the woman would pick me up at my house the following day. I lived at the corner; they lived about half a mile down the road in a new development.

On that sunny Monday morning in mid-June while my mother was at work, the woman picked me up. She had said that we would go to estate sales that day. But she was not dressed; she had on her nightgown and her feet were in slippers. As she drove, she told me that we were going to her house. I was eager but confused. (Why would she pick me up and still be in her nightclothes?) I ask: “Where is the sale?” and “What days will I work in the store?”

“Well, first,” she says, “in the mornings you will bring me breakfast in bed and then do some light housework.”

Stunned into speech I reply: “It seems like you want a maid—I am not the one; please take me home.”

They saw all of my brightness and they wanted to own it. Like furniture. Like an appliance.

NOTE 79

On Open Casket, Whitney Museum of American Art, April 16, 2017

Part of the work of white supremacy and antiblackness is to mire us in the same conversations, at the same junctures, in reference to our lives; the very lives which those forces seek to control, occupy, own, use, and ultimately destroy. As a major point of contestation—in the arenas of representation and imagination—art is not immune to those forces of white supremacy and antiblackness. Far from it. This is the regime we live in, and its effects are made to be felt through all kinds of systems: most visibly, in policing and mass criminalization; less observably, but no less potently, in education and art.

The argument over representation, circulation, violence, and consumption gets knotted up, bogged down, and derailed over the question of “censorship.” Polemic is not censorship and representation in art is an arena of confrontation and conflict for Black people. Art is argument.

Visuality is not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being, and any so-called neutral position is a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such.

It is a useful fiction, but it is only a fiction, to insist that art lies beyond critique. And intention aside, among the things that art may do is produce and reproduce pain; art can be cruel interpretation or malevolent intervention.

What if we proceed as if all of the knowledge that Black people have produced about the representations of Black bodies and Black people in Euro-America’s imagination actually mattered? What if this work actually shifted how one talks about that work?

Not everyone meets and stands before those devastating photos of Emmett Till in innocence, in a before-knowledge of their existence, a before of the brutalities they reveal. When Mamie Till Bradley insists that those photographs be published it is because she wants to make clear what those white people did to her fourteen-year-old son.

Till Bradley said, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” And her act said: Look at what they did to my son. This is my son. Look at what they did to him. With the publication of those terrible photographs in Jet magazine we saw Mamie Till Bradley’s insistence that the brutal violence that Emmett was subjected to be seen, that it be unobscured. Mamie Till Bradley wanted to make that real violence real; make it visible and irrefutable. And that thing—white supremacy, violent abduction, murder—that Mamie Till Bradley wanted to make absolutely clear is abstracted in Schutz’s painting Open Casket, and in the artist’s defense of the work. Dana Schutz has made unobscured violence abstract.

In her painting, Schutz assumes an intimate relation to brutality and its aftermath. Viewers are also put in intimate relation to it. Are those the same intimate relations? And are they the same across race, sex, gender, space, and time? What does Open Casket call forth? What is its relation to the brutalized body of the Black person? These are questions that can and should be asked. These are questions that can and should be answered.

The viewer’s relation to the brutalized-to-death Black person in Open Casket is not the same relation that appears in Henry Taylor’s painting of Philando Castile, THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! in which the viewer is in the car with Mr. Castile; placed in the position, in fact, of Diamond Reynolds or her daughter, witnessing his assassination and knowing that they might be next. The proximity of that “we” that knows that “we” may be next is distinct from the “we” that doesn’t. That matters.

That knowledge of fungibility produces another relation, a knowledge of what has been done, that it should never have happened, and that it does not bear certain kinds of repetition or obfuscation.

NOTE 80

A moment of pure tenderness

I am in the shops at Columbus Circle in Manhattan on the up escalator and the woman and the girl are on the down escalator. The girl is about twelve, the woman in her late forties. The girl is two steps in front of the woman and as the girl looks back and up at her, the woman reaches out and touches her face.

The look on the woman’s face and the way that their bodies settle into the afterlife of this touch makes it seem to me that what I have witnessed is a moment of pure tenderness.

All of my desires to see my mother again lodge there.

I am on the Bloor Street line in Toronto heading home from teaching. It’s a November day, midafternoon and unseasonably warm.

The train is stopped at Finch West station. When I look out of the window, I see a little girl around eight or nine years old. She is walking with a woman and a boy who appears to be slightly older than she. The girl leans forward as she walks, and the strap of her school bag is slung across her forehead, the bag hangs down her back.

This tenderness in what I have seen.

NOTE 81

D says the image of the ocean is lodged in her, coming from Guayaguayare at the southernmost tip of Trinidad.

Coming from the northwest corner of a four-way intersection in Wayne, Pennsylvania, I wonder what image is lodged in me.

NOTE 82

I always feel something on this date, a lingering trace, a disturbance that is not not sadness.

What I feel are the texture and the sound, the elongation of that day and those that followed.

That was the feel of Sundays for years after that particular Sunday morning in October 1977 when I woke to my father’s death and the sound of my mother crying.

NOTE 83

I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.

NOTE 84

That is, that is not

That is cement. That is a sidewalk. That is not an unarmed teenager with nothing but Skittles trying to get home. That was someone who used the availability of dangerous items, from his fist to the concrete, to cause great bodily injury.[92]

I was watching the news and I heard one of the commentators say, there were the Biden supporters having their celebration and then the Trump supporters having their protest…and they are conflicting, and they have the right to be here.

Not one time when we were marching for George Floyd did those people on the mainstream news say we had the right to be there.[93]

In the world between Man and not Man appears the powerful specter of blackness in which not Man can both weaponize sidewalks and disinherit them.

NOTE 85

A memory that is not mine returns to me.

NOTE 86

My mother always said, “I had a strange childhood.” She did. In different ways, I did too. Her parents were spiritualists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and my mother was a medium at their seances. She was afraid of this gift of sight. It never sat easy with her.

I am the youngest of six children, my oldest siblings were old enough to be my parents, my parents were the age of my friends’ and classmates’ grandparents. I grew up between generations, between times.

NOTE 87

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868, he died in 1963.

Aimé Césaire was born in 1913, he died in 2008.

Anna Julia Cooper was born in 1858, she died in 1965.

Fountain Hughes was born in 1848, he died in 1957.

Mammy Prater was born in 1805, she died sometime after her photograph was taken in 1920.

Mary Church Terrell was born in 1863, she died in 1954.

Sojourner Truth was born in 1797, she died in 1883.

Harriet Tubman was born in 1822/1823, she died in 1913.

What those people knew. To live so long, across and in time.

My father was born in 1911.

My mother was born in 1923.

The proximity startles me. So close to slavery that when my father was two, Harriet Tubman was still alive. Time collapses in on itself; it is not linear; it is a boomerang.

NOTE 88

In People Who Led to My Plays, Adrienne Kennedy writes about a teacher who thinks that she reads too much.

Miss Bell:

A fourth-grade teacher. She told my mother I would have a “nervous breakdown” if I didn’t stop trying to be the best in everything in class. My mother said I had to stop reading so much; I had to go outside and play. She made me sit on the front porch and refused to let me take my Katy Did books with me. I heard my mother tell my father what Miss Bell said as they disappeared into the kitchen. When my father came out of the kitchen he smiled at me and asked me if I would like to go for a drive in the car (my favorite thing) and buy some ice cream. I could get Neapolitan (strawberry, chocolate, vanilla), my favorite kind. Naturally I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown was.[94]

A similar thing happened to me. When I was ten, I developed stomach problems that were so bad I couldn’t stand up straight. I couldn’t eat. My mother took me to our family doctor who examined me and asked me questions.

At the end of the visit, he said that I should put down the books and go outside and play. “Read less,” he said, “play more.”

My mother was furious. She was convinced that Dr. Foster (who replaced Dr. Preston, a kind man who, until retiring two years previously, had been my pediatrician since I was born) would never tell a white child to read less.

How could I explain to him that my stomach pains were not the result of too many books but of too much of the everyday racism that I experienced? Books were not the cause of the harm; they helped mitigate its effects.

NOTE 89

I was nineteen when I finally asked my mother why she and my father kept me at St. Katharine’s despite the racism, the abuse, my ulcer, and the days that she would let me stay home from school because it was all too much.

“Don’t you remember?” she said. “You told us you could handle it.”

“I was a child,” I said. “Why would you listen to me?”

NOTE 90

When we were in elementary school our mother blessed me and each of my siblings with the sign of the cross every day before we left the house. She wanted to protect us.

The touch of her hands and the sound of her voice carried us through the day.

NOTE 91

I wonder if my brilliant mother, with her love of stories and storytelling, her tremendous creativity and large imagination, simply could not quite imagine her particular life being of interest to anyone apart from the two of us and the intimacy that we created between storyteller and listener. (She told beautiful stories, sad stories, stories of another life that I could not know, and she had, as she always said, a childhood that was “strange and lonely.”) Maybe she did not believe that her life could be sounded with a note of care. Such is the damage that antiblackness, domestic and state violence, and other abuses can wreak on the self.

I want to think care as “an antidote to violence.”[95] I want to think care in the register that Bonnie Honig outlines when she tells us that to care is “to cultivate anticipation of another world and to live now dedicated to the task of turning this world into a better one.”[96]

But it occurred to me only recently and very suddenly that when she said, “Don’t write about me,” my mother named me, her daughter, co-lover of words, a Black queer girl, now Black queer woman, a writer. A designation, writer, that I would only very recently claim both for myself and for my mother. In fact, when I think of my mother and her love for me, I think of her love of reading and writing that she gifted me. “More words she has left”[97] me.

NOTE 92

April 10, 2017; Is this you?

I am about to teach my afternoon class when I receive a text from T with a photograph. A shot in the dark, Christina. But is this you? Martha’s Vineyard circa 1990?

T is at Lyle Ashton Harris’s studio when he sees a photograph on the wall and thinks that he recognizes me. Lyle cannot remember who the women are.

It is me and my girlfriend L. Lyle took our picture at the nude beach on Martha’s Vineyard. He told us that he would send it to us.

When Lyle walked past that day with his camera and stopped to speak, I knew who he was. I was in graduate school at the time, and I had seen his photographs, most recently, on the cover of Transition 58, the issue in which Adrian Piper’s “Passing for White, Passing for Black” was published.

Lyle never sent the photograph.

When T sends the text with photo in it, it is the first time that I see it.

This note arrives after twenty-five years.

It arrives just before the photograph goes to print in Ashton Harris’s Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs.

NOTE 93

Thinking Juxtapositionally

Kara Walker is a visual artist born in 1969 in whose work, for many viewers, all blackwoman bodies become one; in the racist imaginary there is no singular black body.

Marina Abramović is an artist born in 1946 who uses her singular body, “her own body as the subject, object, and medium of her work.”[98]

One staring white face and then another.

You stand in line for hours to have the chance to sit across from Marina Abramović (The Artist Is Present) and you weep.

You stand in line for hours to see Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. You wait to enter the soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar refinery—this place that links you to sugar’s pleasures and histories and presents of slavery, indentured labor, colonialism, imperialism, death, and displacement—and you cut up.

NOTE 94

Encounter

What we must prepare for every single time we leave the house.

some damage I had expected, but no one

expects the violence of glances, of offices,

of walkways and train stations, of bathroom mirrors

especially, the vicious telephones, the coarseness of

daylight, the brusque decisions of air,

the casual homicides of dresses[99]

The unexpected and the ordinary.

NOTE 95

Film, Montreux, Switzerland, July 3, 1976

At the Montreux Jazz festival, Nina Simone plays the piano and sings in front of a fire-orange background. From that evening, there are two songs that Ms. Simone sings that I have watched and listened to and taught with again and again: “Feelings” and “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” In both of these songs, Ms. Simone is bending the notes toward and past freedom; she improvises, she tells us that she already knows how it feels to be free. Almost one hundred and twenty-five years after Frederick Douglass’s July 5, 1852, speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Nina Simone also knows that individual freedom—all freedom being inextricably, inexorably, definitionally tied to unfreedom—is still not enough. We can hear that in and under the songs’ lyrics, in and under the notes she sings and plays.

But Black liberation? Now, that might be another thing altogether, and Nina was singing us there.

NOTE 96

Tate Modern, London, England, March 22, 2018

I meet a friend at the Tate Modern. Y is an art historian, a writer, and a teacher from South Africa who lives and works in London.

We’ve known each other for several years, but we are meeting in person for the first time.

We go to see the Joan Jonas exhibition that had been at the Venice Biennale, and we walk through the other galleries and then we decide to get a coffee at the café.

It is sunny in there and crowded, but I see a table emptying and I head toward it.

I pass a young Black woman clearing the tables and I pause in order to speak to her. “Hello,” I say, and, “How are you today?”

When she doesn’t respond I look at her and speak again. “Good afternoon,” I say, “how are you today?”

The young woman stops. She looks at me and then she asks me if I am speaking to her.

I say, “Yes,” and that I was asking how she was.

She says, “I have been working here for months and you are the first person who has ever spoken to me to ask me how I am doing. I want to thank you for that. For seeing me and asking about me.”

“You must be kidding me,” I say although I know that she is not kidding, and I am also not surprised. We are at the Tate Modern. I have seen very few Black people. It is always like this.

I say, “I see you.”

She says, “I know.”

I say, “We see each other.”

She says, “Yes. We do.”

This exchange reverberated throughout that day and the days that followed.

NOTE 97

There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.

These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.

These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.

NOTE 98

The Blackmen in the Square, Venice, Campo Santa Margherita

JUNE 12, 2019, 5:53 P.M.

It was late afternoon on a hot and humid Venice day. The three of us were walking through the Campo Santa Margherita when we saw him.

He was shirtless and kneeling on a raised platform, like a pedestal or a cistern. He was wearing only shorts and he was holding something in his mouth. I’ve called them shorts but they were more like swim trunks, brown, blousy, and very short, with a string at the waist tied into a bow. In the center of the raised platform that he knelt on was a metal grate and in his mouth was a partially eaten and browning banana.

We were stunned at his appearance there. We stopped and looked at him, we looked at each other. We were concerned. More than concerned. We were alarmed. That grate he knelt on would have absorbed all of the day’s heat and his knees were unprotected. He was unprotected.

We wanted to shield him. We gestured at him; we almost ran toward him. We asked him, “Are you okay?” “Is this a protest?” we asked him frantically. We stood there and looked at him until he met and briefly held our eyes.

He met our eyes in order to reassure us. He looked so pained. I did not know what this kindness had cost him. He gave us a single almost imperceptible nod and then he returned to his concentration. He returned to the discipline and attention of his terrible ritual.

I swore, afterwards, that I had seen him there two years before, but D said no. I tell C that when I saw him kneeling there on that hot grate it is as if I see him there always.

JUNE 12, 2019, 4:30 P.M.

Earlier in the day on Calle Contarini Corfù we met a man who hailed us. “Sister,” he said, “I am in hell.”

NOTE 99

Between verticality and the subterranean.

“You may die a brutal death / the brutality being the happenstance.”[100]

NOTE 100

I am in a car in London. It is late, the flight was delayed leaving Boston, and it has been a long night. I am heading from Heathrow to New Cross because later that week I will give a keynote at the Slavery and its Afterlives: Blackness, Representation, Social Justice, Vision conference at Goldsmiths University of London.

There are about forty-five minutes to go when the driver gets a call. When he listens to the message, he tells me that he needs to stop the ride. I ask why. I object. I tell him that it’s late and that I am tired and still very far from my destination.

He says that his friend, who is also driving, has been in an accident and needs his help. I am reluctant at first and disbelieving. I am a woman alone, at night, in a part of London I do not know.

We briefly go back and forth until at last I say, “Sir. How can I say no? You tell me your friend is in need.” I ask him to just drop me at a place where there is some shelter—it has started to rain—and some people. He leaves me outside a bar.

I promise him that I will not give him a bad rating on this terrible car service app and he thanks me.

I say, “It’s fine.” And then I say, “Are we not human, can we not speak?”[101] It is those lines from Verso 58.1 in The Blue Clerk that run through my mind and push my indecision to a yes about whether or not I should get out of the car.

The driver who picks me up from outside the bar is kind. It is almost eleven p.m. and I have not eaten. I wonder aloud if anything will be open when I get to my destination. The man makes several recommendations and then he offers to stop and wait for me so that I might get some food. I thank him for his kindness.

“Are we not human, can we not speak?”

NOTE 101

What is collected at “the end of breathing”?[102]

NOTE 102

I have collected lines (and they have collected me).

“What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch and dandelions….” (Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha)

“Sth, I know that woman.” (Toni Morrison, Jazz)

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” (Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters)

“He was a lover of silence, taster of solitude. A mineral of motionless patiences. Inexhaustible bamboo.” (Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man)

“I was not sorry when my brother died.” (Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions)

“It seemed almost incidental that he was African.” (Bessie Head, A Question of Power)

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)

“What I’d like to hear about, the reporter starts in, is the time you and that little boy…and I silence him again with a turn of my head, thinking to myself that this is supposed to be an interview about the war and my service in it, from the day I enlisted despite being almost a score years too old, having several mouths to feed, and running a tavern under my own name a grasshopper’s jump from the riverfront, to the day we were sent by wagon and train down to Brazos de Santiago, where we launched the fight that ended on that spring day, ten years ago, along the Rio Grande on the meadows of Palmito Ranch, which, we learned later from a scout we captured from the other side, was the final battle in the first great war for our freedom, or between the states as they like to call it these days, so I ain’t about to devote a minute to those sense-defying events of forty years before.” (John Keene, Counternarratives)

“Know this: being frozen in the lake is another kind of life.” (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies)

“ ‘Mr. Blakey?’ the small white man asked.” (Walter Mosley, The Man in My Basement)

“Learn it all, girl, until what you’ve left behind is a / brilliant Black.” (Joy Priest, Horsepower: Poems)

“Growing up was like falling into a hole.” (Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina)

“ ‘I mean Sir, I don’t mean to kind of harass you or anything,’ pressed the student, ‘but did the Egyptians who built the pyramids, you know, the Pharaohs and all, were they African?’ / ‘My dear young man,’ said the visiting professor, ‘to give you the decent answer your anxiety demands, I would have to tell you a detailed history of the African continent. And to do that, I shall have to speak every day, twenty-four hours a day, for at least three thousand years. And I don’t mean to be rude to you or anything, but who has that kind of time?’ ” (Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy)

“go on / go on, the brilliant future doesn’t wait.” (Dionne Brand, Ossuaries)

“Bulawayo is not a city for idleness. The idea is to live within the cracks. Unnoticed and unnoticeable, offering every service but with the capacity to vanish when the task required is accomplished. So the black people learn how to move through the city with speed and due attention, to bow their heads down and slide past walls, to walk without making the shadow more pronounced than the body or the body clearer than the shadow. It means leaning against some masking reality—they lean on walls, on lies, on music. One can always be swallowed by a song.” (Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning: A Novel)

“I had my recurring dream last night.” (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower)

“I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.” (Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye)

“It brought it all back to me.” (Andrea Levy, Small Island)

“Within the context shaped by a musket barrel, is there any ethical responsibility besides silence, resistance and cunning?” (John Keene, Counternarratives)

NOTE 103

Elizabeth Eckford is carrying two books: a notebook and another book.

Which books would have been enough armor?

NOTE 104

The note that sutures

At Amiri Baraka’s funeral service, livestreamed from Newark Symphony Hall, there were a beautiful number and range of people who came forward to speak. Poets like jessica Care moore and Sonia Sanchez, musicians such as Saul Williams, activists, and, of course, Ras Baraka. I was struck by the musical performances and their testament to Baraka’s profound influence in the world, in Newark, and on Newark in the world. I remember very well the sound of people speaking (how they sounded as well as what they said), the activists who got up to speak, and maybe, most of all, the sounds of Savion Glover’s dance for Baraka. Savion Glover performed a tap dance and in that dance was the sound of everything—mourning and joy and presence—it was all there. It was completely gorgeous and moving and life-giving. Baraka’s funeral was somewhere in the back of my mind, disturbing my mind as I watched the funeral for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine Black people murdered in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Of course, Reverend Pinckney’s service was religious, and Baraka’s was secular; I knew why Barack Obama delivered the so-called eulogy for Rev. Pinckney’s funeral and I say so-called eulogy because it wasn’t a eulogy, it was a political speech. But he should not have delivered that speech. He should have stayed in the audience, greeted the family, comforted them, and listened. When he took the stage, he gave the same one-note performance that he always gives when it comes to Black people. It’s the note that sutures Black suffering to romance and redemption. The note of a more perfect union, the note of unhearable Black suffering. The note of the romance of empire. I didn’t want to watch, but I was compelled to watch the funeral, to watch that eulogy—there was this moment as I watched his face that looked as if he was deciding what he was going to do next and then it became clear to me that, oh my god, he’s going to sing. And that line from Invisible Man kept going through my head, “the brother does not sing!”[103] because I could and couldn’t believe Obama was actually going to do that. And then, of course, when he sings it’s the opposite of Glover’s tapping. He had to sing “Amazing Grace” because “Amazing Grace” is precisely that unhearable Black suffering. It’s precisely that song of romance and redemption because we know John Newton’s history. We know that he keeps working on the slave ships after his conversion and it’s only later that he writes “Amazing Grace.”

The Venice Biennale in 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor, was themed “All the World’s Futures.” It was my first time in Italy, and given the crossings, drownings, and near drownings in the Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere, I was aware that Venice is a deeply fraught space as much as it is also a beautiful space.

One day D and I decided not to go to either of the two main exhibition sites—the Arsenale or the Giardini—but to some of the other exhibition spaces. Since it is prohibitively expensive for countries to be in the main exhibition spaces, many pavilions are off-site. We saw a sign for the “Scotland + Venice” pavilion and decided to go there. Once we entered, we saw that the theme of the Pavilion was “The Slave’s Lament” and we were, to say the least, trepidatious. The artist is a white Scottish man named Graham Fagen and the exhibition covered four rooms. In one room there was a four-screen installation featuring Ghetto Priest, the reggae artist, and three members of the Scottish Ensemble; three instruments playing and then Ghetto Priest’s singing the Robert Burns poem “The Slave’s Lament.” The program explained that:

Fagen draws our attention to an episode in Burns’ life. In 1786 Robbie Burns books a passage to Jamaica to escape economic and other pressures and accepts the position of slave overseer. At the last moment news arrives that his recently published first work has been well-received and so he changes his mind and the journey is seemingly forgotten, or perhaps not quite. He writes “The Slave’s Lament,” 1792, the poet’s only work that empathizes with the appalling hurt of the displaced, the trafficked and the enslaved. A beautiful lyric written over 200 years ago with a narrative that remains entirely contemporary as we think of current tragedies unfolding on borders and hinterland locations.

You may think of Burns as a man who was, at some point, involved with abolitionism, but Burns’ intention meets John Newton’s. Newton makes his living on slave ships and is well integrated into the economy of slavery. Burns is about to become an overseer on a plantation until he gets good news about the reception of his book and abandons the contract. Fagen says, “‘The Slave’s Lament’ isn’t a song with a beginning, middle and end—the version is endless so [I’ve] been understanding it as a kind of formal sonic landscape.” Slavery was the note, it was the weather, that conditioned everything.

Thinking of the sonic landscape of Savion Glover’s dance and the sonic landscape of Barack Obama’s singing at Rev. Pinckney’s funeral, it occurs to me that people must actively and continually allow that song to escape its genesis in order to offer it in such circumstances: the murder of six Black women and three Black men in Mother Emanuel AME.

To sing “Amazing Grace” is to mispronounce the song. It is to insist on a romance of salvation in which the grace is for Newton. The grace is not for us. It is to misunderstand the genesis and the subject of the song and its violence. The song has long elided its origins and attached itself to the fascia of Black spirituality. When we sing this, who is the wretch? Who was lost? Who was found? Who is in need of redemption? “Amazing Grace” is about Newton’s journey; it has nothing to do with the horrors and terrors of slavery for the enslaved.[104]

NOTE 105

Can’t Forget, Can’t Remember

The police brought ██████████ a meal from Burger King after he fired seventy rounds and brutally assassinated nine people in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Men and women who had sat with him and held him with kindness. Three women survived this massacre: Felicia Sanders, her granddaughter, and Polly Sheppard.

The others did not.

The Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney, 41;

Cynthia Graham Hurd, 54;

Susie J. Jackson, 87;

DePayne Vontrease Middleton Doctor, 49;

Tywanza Kibwe Diop Sanders, 26;

The Reverend Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74;

The Reverend Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45;

Myra Singleton Quarles Thompson, 59; and

Ethel Lance, 70.

I cannot forget the ones who survived. I cannot forget the ones who were murdered.

I cannot forget that the police brought their murderer food.

“████████████████████████████████ told the Charlotte Observer that when ████ complained he was hungry, ████ went to a nearby Burger King and bought the ███████ mass murderer a meal while he was in custody.”[105]

I remember the work Can’t Forget, Can’t Remember (1999) by the white South African artist Sue Williamson, in which she centers one of the few times during testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when the victim and the accused address each other.

The torturer denies his work, he says that he remembers taking the man he is accused of torturing for a meal of KFC. He insists to the court and to his victim that “the two of us…really became quite close.”[106]

Ashley Forbes, the man who has been tortured, provides the context for this night outing. He says that he had been beaten, tortured; that his face was bruised and swollen. He says that he was moved from the police precinct to disguise this fact. He asks the torturer, “Do you remember saying to me that…um…that you…are able to treat me like an animal or like a human being?”[107]

The torturer insists that he cannot remember.

The tortured insists that he cannot forget.

NOTE 106

You do not have to save the things that kill you.

NOTE 107

“[We, Black people,] are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.”[108]

That other knowing, that other note, is one that we might call regard.

v. Lucida

In the context of such enormous structural violence, how was it possible to imagine that a beautiful life is possible? Even more unthinkable was the idea that one might create it, not in the future, but now.[109]

SAIDIYA HARTMAN, INTERVIEW WITH RIZVANA BRADLEY

NOTE 108

The camera lucida is an optical device meant to aid the accurate drawing of objects, through the process of superimposition. With this device the artist sees both the object and their hand, thereby allowing them to trace more accurately what they see.

The camera lucida is a portable tool for rendering life on paper.[110]

NOTE 109

What would a camera lucida of the Black maternal look like? What would it trace? What optical device would more accurately reveal her hand? In what well-lit room would her texture be revealed, what pane of glass make lucid the reflection?

NOTE 110

It begins with a photograph. It is uncanny because my mother doesn’t (yet) look like my mother. And my grandmother, whom I never met, looks almost exactly like who my mother will become.

NOTE 111

These particular photographs are of my mother’s face, her hands, her books, her needlework; my camera lucida is saturated with my seeing and my mother’s care in the noise of structural precarity.

NOTE 112

Ordinary

ADJECTIVE: belonging to the regular or usual order or course of things; having a place in a fixed or regulated sequence; occurring in the course of regular custom or practice; normal; customary; usual.

ADJECTIVE: of language, usage, discourse, etc.: that most commonly found or attested; everyday, non-technical.

ADVERB: ordinarily; in an ordinary manner; according to, or as a matter of, regular practice.

NOUN: an ordinary thing or person; something of usual or commonplace character. With the: that which is ordinary, usual, or to be expected; ordinary people or things as a class.

NOUN: the ordinary or usual condition, course, or degree of something; the normal state of health, etc.; a customary or usual way of doing things.

NOUN: ordinary time (Military): a pace of marching slower than double time.[111]

NOTE 113

Her work and her name

Philadelphia, the first third of the twentieth century. Ward 20, Block 106 and Ward 34, Block 48. None of this is invented.[112]

It is 1922. My grandmother Ida Mae Ricketts is pregnant. She was born in Philadelphia on December 25, 1884, and she died in Wayne on December 22, 1962, three years before I was born. Ida Mae Ricketts had a seventh-grade education and she loved Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems, though she would not have loved what he had to say about women like her and how she chose to live. In The Negroes of the Tenderloin, Dunbar wrote that their “seeming liberty…blossom[ed] noxiously into license.”[113] In 1922, my grandmother is thirty-eight years old, unmarried, and pregnant with my mother.

I went looking for her, for them, again in the archives of our provisional appearance. Those archives that suspend and defer Black life in ways that would make our living tangential to some other living, not ours.

I find traces of them in the Fifteenth Census of the United States, taken in 1930.

Willis, Joseph, Head, M, Negro, 52, Occupation, Janitor, Insurance Company.

Willis, Ida, Wife, F, Negro, 46, Occupation, None.

Willis, Ida, Daughter, F, Negro, 7, Occupation, None.

I find them again in the 1940 census.

Willis, Ida Mae, Head, F, Negro, 55, Widowed, Occupation, Cleaner, Girard Life Insurance Company.

Wright, Ida Mae, Daughter, F, Negro, 17, Occupation, None.

Joseph Willis died between the time of the 1930 and 1940 censuses and my grandmother’s occupation, which in 1930 was recorded as none, was now Cleaner, Girard Life Insurance Company.

In 1930 my mother’s surname was recorded as Willis—the same as her mother and stepfather; in 1940 it was recorded as Wright.

These changes do not mean that my grandmother did not perform paid work in 1930 or that in 1930 my mother’s surname was not Wright. They may only mean that her work and her name were not captured by the census takers.

NOTE 114

It is 1928. In the photograph my mother is five years old, and she is dressed for Halloween. The photographer was her stepfather. It is my mother’s hands in the photograph that constitute what Roland Barthes called the punctum—that detail, “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”[114]

NOTE 115

In that Halloween photograph of my mother and her mother, my grandmother has been interrupted. Her husband Joseph has called her away from cleaning or cooking or sewing in order to have their picture taken. She would have told him that she wasn’t presentable: that she was busy; that she was wearing her housedress; that her hair was a mess. But he would have persisted, my mother said, calling her by his nickname for her, cajoling her, and my grandmother would relent, step away from her work, and come and sit before his camera.

There is a visual echo, some correspondence, between my mother’s hands, her headdress and wig, the hand-pinked grosgrain ribbon that edges the deep v-front of her dress, her long beaded necklace, and then the pattern of what look like mended tears in the skirt of her mother’s dress.

My grandmother sewed the costume that my mother is wearing.

There is more than one detail in that photograph that compels and arrests me. There is more than one detail that produces in me a feeling of great tenderness.

My mother’s hands are one; the holes in my grandmother’s dress are another. Her shoes another still.

NOTE 116

How do they arrest me?

There is something in me like wonder that they existed against the period in which this photograph was taken. Existed against race riots, lynchings, segregation, little or no work, poor housing, the prison, and every other form of violence and privation.

They are managing to come through and I measure their presence as a surprise even as I exist. My mother survives to become my mother. Then, I arrive.

NOTE 117

My mother’s hands were elegant even as a child—the same elegance that I remark on in our future time and that she laughingly shrugs off, even though she knows this to be true and even as she loves her hands—what they make, the shapes they trace in the air when she speaks, and then again when she is still and listening.

“Her hand leafs through the grained air.”[115]

NOTE 118

An Eruption of Tenderness

In that photograph from 1928, my grandmother’s clothing, hair, and facial expression signal some exhaustion, but her body, alert to the expectations of photography, assumes a particular position that might be called feminine. Though she does not look directly at the camera, her legs are together and slightly angled, her ankles crossed, elegant.

My grandmother appears here in one of the only ways that I know her. She, whom I met primarily through my mother’s stories of her in which she came to life.

My mother’s eyes are serious and searching. Too serious for the occasion of the photo, which is Halloween.

The somber look on her face pierces me.

So, too, do the wig and the crown that she wears. Her hands.

My mother leans into her mother’s body; one hand rests on her mother’s thigh, uncertain, testing her weight.

The darned holes in my grandmother’s dress hobble the appearance of her knees.

NOTE 119

On encountering the Halloween photograph of my mother and grandmother, Barthes could only misread it.

He would misread it as he misreads James VanDerZee’s portrait of his “maternal aunts and uncle—Mattie, Estelle, and David Osterhout,”[116] taken two years before my grandfather takes that photo of my grandmother and mother. This misreading would be evident in the tone as well as in the words.

Barthes describes VanDerZee’s 1926 photograph as an attempt, in the way it frames its Black American subjects, to display respectability and what Barthes terms “an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man’s attributes.” Barthes is not moved by this “interesting spectacle,” but he is taken by the details of the dress of the younger woman in the photograph, whom he calls “the solacing Mammy.” What, in his words, “pricks” him is her belt and how it is worn and her “strapped pumps”—that he identifies as dated fashion. “This particular punctum,” he says, arouses “almost a kind of tenderness” in him.[117]

Even as he deploys its knowledges, Barthes refuses to know, at the level of consciousness, that it is the ordered hierarchy of the plantation that conditions all his seeing. The words and phrases accumulate, they compound: “White Man’s attributes,” “spectacle,” “strange to say,” the “ ‘solacing Mammy,’ ” “almost a kind of tenderness.”

In what register would a Black family describe their sister/mother/daughter/aunt with the phrase “the solacing mammy”? To imagine her as solacing is to read her arms as if they were extended or inviting, not behind her back “like a schoolgirl.”

Who is Barthes’s “docile cultural subject”? A docile cultural subject of Barthes’s time (and our own) is and must be bracketed by race, place, class, aesthetics. What is that cultural subject prone to seeing or docile in the face of? What is that subject cultured to un/seeing?

And then there are what Barthes calls their “White Man’s attributes.” How would he imagine that the Osterhouts would otherwise look or dress? His parenthetical note about their “naïveté” works to expose exactly the way that Barthes’s “docile cultural subject” becomes one through the immersion in the racist logics of coloniality. It is coloniality that subtends Barthes’s unseeing.[118]

His “explanation of the studium is laden with a paternal racism that readers are asked to ignore in pursuit of that which really interests him, the punctum. He calls upon the studium as if it is apparent, transparent, as if this lovely formal portrait could not be read in any other way, as if all readers would share his bemused reaction to the image and its subjects.”[119]

When I read Barthes’s description of that photograph’s studium, it is his studium, it is his cultural field that harnesses Black women to the labor of whiteness. Not mine. His look. Not a look or the look.

NOTE 120

For Barthes, “every photograph is…a memorial.”[120]

Is this why his unseeing conditions every part of Camera Lucida?

To collapse into mask all that one might read in (or in spite of) how Richard Avedon photographs William Casby’s face is telling.

In Barthes’ description of Avedon’s photo, he states that, since photography of human faces can really only show a series of masks, making, in his words, “a face into the product of a society,” William Casby’s portrait becomes a mask containing the essence of slavery, laid bare.[121]

A whole history of photography is lodged in this photograph. The punctum is time.

When Barthes reproduces that Avedon photograph of William Casby, Casby becomes synecdoche.

NOTE 121

Published in 1955, The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a beautiful and whimsical collaboration of text and photograph between the poet Langston Hughes and the photographer Roy DeCarava.

Opening this small book on Harlem, it is clear that both Hughes and DeCarava understood what it meant to narrate a life as a measure of its own living. They saw and were struck by a set of possible lives in relation, in place, in stillness, motion, contemplation, sadness, and joy. Black life appears in its own flight, not as an addendum to someone else’s living. There is humor here, there is intention here, there is hard work, hard love, and breath here. There is the body flooded with the self: play is here, and so are past, present, and future time and all of their ambition.

Not mask. Fabulation.

In The Sweet Flypaper of Life, the Black life is the beautiful life.

NOTE 122

So, what’s the difference

Fred Moten writes about Mamie Till Bradley’s decision to publish in Jet magazine those terrible photographs that are evidence of what was done to her son.

So what’s the difference between the son’s inability to reproduce the photograph of his dead mother and the mother’s insistence on the reproduction of the photograph of her dead son? The difference has to do with distinguishable stances toward universality, with what the discovery of a performance or a photograph has to do with universality, with the meaningful and illusory difference and relation between Performance and Performativity, the Photograph and Photography.[122]

The difference might just be a question of sound, of vibration, of the blackness of the note. It just might be a question of the source and echo and reach into the present of Mamie Till Bradley’s “anguished cry.”

NOTE 123

In Camera Lucida, written shortly after the death of Roland Barthes’s mother and in the midst of his mourning, he reads a set of familial and historical photographs, and he constructs what he imagines to be a universal taxonomy of the photograph.

For Barthes:

the operator is the photographer

the spectator, the viewer of the photograph

the studium is a photograph within its cultural world; that which seems to lend and convey meaning

the punctum is subjective and personal—it is that not-predetermined aspect of a photograph that has an effect on the viewer

Barthes reads photography through a photograph he finds of his mother that was taken when she is five years old. That photograph Barthes calls the “Winter Garden Photograph,” and he describes how he finds the essence of all photography in this one picture. He decides, therefore, to use this photo—which, as he says, is the “only one that assuredly exists for me”—as the source from which all other ideas about Photography will arise. He goes on to say that he cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph for the reader because it truly exists solely for him, and its wound is his alone. In the eyes of any other viewer, it would be one of innumerable “ordinary” photographs, of interest only for its studium: its time period, clothes, and so on.[123]

But there is no universal taxonomy and “[w]ith respect to practices of looking, there is a deep-seated dialectic, if you will, between racism and photography.”[124] Many of Barthes’s photographic examples are of Black people, and some of them arrive from colonial archives, but the one that he returns to is that 1926 family photograph of the Osterhouts taken by James VanDerZee. Barthes writes, “In order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.”[125]

Barthes’s survey of blackness (and Black people) is a gaze and not a look; and within that gaze are all of the ordering structures of white supremacy, such that he performs a misnaming and mis-seeing in which that necklace around VanDerZee’s aunt’s neck becomes a gold chain. This substitutive logic in which a pearl necklace becomes a gold chain turns VanDerZee’s aunt into “mammy” and marks the work of unseeing VanDerZee’s aunt and blackness and how that not-seeing is the condition by which Barthes comes to (not) see himself—to insert his look as universal.

NOTE 124

Barthes would never consider the word elegance in relation to that photo of James VanDerZee’s family. Or mine.

He would never consider nor see the beautiful, elegant life as deeply Black. But elegance is not the province of leisure or the domain of wealth; it is not fashion; it is the persistence of style.

He could never imagine nor see the sapeurs of Brazzaville and Kinshasa.

NOTE 125

Roy DeCarava’s The Sound I Saw, a book of photographs and text, is filled with everything. DeCarava works blackness and photography from a place that is deeply knowing about the tyranny of photography, and where all around him that tyranny is obvious.

He manages to give us shadow and light, texture, and vibration. He shows blackness in all of its shade and depth and glow, in all of its “lush tonalities.”[126]

The Black figures in his photographs appear as if they are lit from within—they direct his photographs with their gesture, their look, their deep concentration—in whatever elegance, charm and gesture, in whatever living, they are in.

DeCarava’s look, close or at a distance, does not seem to intrude. It is always tender, an invitation to tarry, interested and filled with regard.

Dawoud Bey also has this look, which is part of a genre of Black looking. We see it in the series of twenty-five large-scale portraits that comprise his Night Coming Tenderly, Black. This set of photographs, like Untitled #4 (Leaves and Porch), reference but do not contain the body. They are filled, instead, with the afterimage of those enslaved people who passed by there on their way to something like freedom. Filled with the presence of the Black people who walked or ran or hid nearby those trees, that water, this structure. Just as I can see the labor of the musicians or the coal seller and hear the laughter of the children in DeCarava’s photographs, I can hear the breathing in these photographs. I can see those ghosted figures even as these photos might appear to some other gaze as altogether emptied of the body. I can see the light in these photos so filled with Black flight.

NOTE 126

One Sunday morning after church, my mother meets some acquaintances. They are a white, older married couple. Happy to see my mother, they also ask after me. They want to know how and where I am, since it has been many years since they have seen me. My mother tells them that I am in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell University where I have just begun my second year in a PhD program.

They beam. And then they say: “Her mammy must be so proud of her.”

My mother barely skips a beat: “Her mother is very proud of her,” she says. And then she turns and walks away.

This is how the docile cultural subject is made, through a violence material, metaphorical, continuing, and ordinary, perhaps couched as interest, care, or tenderness, and displaced onto others.

When my mother calls and tells me this story we laugh until we are crying.

NOTE 127

In Montgomery, Alabama, at the Legacy Museum, I watch as people enter the picture booth to have their photograph taken. They must take their photo, choose a background image, and then enter an email address in order to send it to themselves.

Several people go through this process. Each one chooses the background of jars that hold soil that has been gathered with care from the sites where Black people were lynched.

A young white woman enters the booth. She takes her picture, then she looks at the possible choices: the front of the museum, the jars of soil, the wall of racist signs. Twice she makes a choice, and then deletes the photo. She goes through this process three times.

On the third try she leaves the booth, her photo remains up on the screen, and she tells the people waiting in line, “Never mind, please just delete it.”

Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle and her eventual refusal, feels appropriate to the weight of this history.

NOTE 128

Barthes writes that there are multiple punctums and that one is time.

NOTE 129

In the original French, the subtitle of Camera Lucida translates to “A Note on Photography.”

NOTE 130

The ordinary note of that Halloween photograph is also extraordinary, because it is my mother as a child.

It is the ordinary note of a mother’s love for her daughter, evidenced in the way they lean into each other, evidenced in the making and the sitting.

Their hands—.

NOTE 131

After my mother died on January 19, 1998, I wondered what words I would use and how I would find my way to them. When people called to offer their condolences, they’d say, “we heard that your mother passed” and “we are so sorry.” I thought, that’s how people speak about death who are far from it. People who have never watched someone they love die a painful death. Those people said that someone passed. But if passed was a euphemism meant to soften death that softening couldn’t have been for me. I knew passed was too inactive, too easy, too subdued. Passed skirted the hard work of dying. My mother didn’t pass. She struggled and her death was not easy on anyone. Least of all on her. So, what would be the right word? What word would capture the mix of resistance, suffering, will, dignity, reserve, love, regard, and more that was my mother’s dying? And what word would capture the difficulty and the privilege of sitting with my mother as she died?

NOTE 132

My mother never met George Wright, her biological father, a painter who was several years younger than her mother. I understood from her that he and his parents were of a different class—which could mean they had more education and better jobs or simply that they had stable housing and steady work. They offered to raise my mother on the condition that her mother surrender her rights and forgo all contact.

My grandmother said no. Everything that no required of her is registered in her face in that 1928 photograph, but in that no was also a determination to live and, perhaps, the promise of a different kind of affiliation.

Most of my photographs of my mother when she was a child were taken by her stepfather, Mr. Willis, who was a spiritualist, a self-taught amateur photographer, and former merchant seaman, and who arrived in my grandmother’s life some time before my mother returned, when she was four years old, from foster care into the care of her mother.

NOTE 133

The way my mother is holding her hands: cupped, fingers not quite touching.

Where did she learn that?

NOTE 134

I share the Halloween photograph with KM, who writes: “And you can see in your grandmother’s photo with your mother, in the fold of her legs, the crossing of the ankle, that elegance of ‘sit for’ emerges.”[127]

To sit for his camera. Which is to say, to sit in his loving look.

The elegance there emerges through the grammars of a body in front of a camera.

My grandmother’s crossed ankles. Those strapped pumps.

NOTE 135

There is a photograph of my grandmother when she is a young woman, around twenty-five years of age. She is outside, seated sideways on a hard-backed chair, and she is wearing a pleated skirt and overblouse made from a dark material. The blouse has a white shawl collar and elaborate white cuffs, each with a single button. Around her neck is what looks like a beaded necklace and on her feet are slim, heeled boots. Her hair is side parted, arranged in an ear-length curly bob with part pulled back into a bun. My grandmother looks directly at the camera, her forefinger touches her mouth, and there is a hint of a smile there. Her other hand is in her lap, two fingers are extended, the others are bent. On the chair beside her is a piece of paper, just visible. In this photograph, my grandmother doesn’t seem to have been taken off guard. This time it appears as if she is composing herself.

NOTE 136

When my mother told me about finding the photograph that is the mate of the one reproduced here, she described her shock at the fact of the photo and then at the ring that was on her mother’s finger.

She had seen so little evidence of her mother’s early life that she wanted a narrative to wrap the photos in. She asked her mother about that ring because, as far as she knew, her mother’s marriage to Joseph Willis was his second but her first. (The 1930 census says otherwise—it records my grandmother’s age at her first marriage as twenty-five.) All that my mother knew was that her mother was forced to leave her parents’ house at the age of eleven. That she never spoke to her mother (Elizabeth) again but that she maintained some contact with one sister (Nora) and her father (Milton). What did, what could, a Black girlchild, a minor figure,[128] do to survive on her own in Philadelphia in 1895? What could be done to her? There were things, my mother said, that her mother simply refused to divulge about her life. My grandmother said that some things do not bear repeating. She said they are too hard.

NOTE 137

I wanted to work through those relations that are passed on and that we are passed into. Relations that I would come to describe as monstrous intimacies.

NOTE 138

In response to a question about his approach to beauty in his work, the artist Glenn Ligon replies:

I agree that the question of beauty is a charged one for people of color. Beauty is a force that is seemingly outside of culture—which in the end it very well may be—but the discussion around beauty is often used as a way to preempt any debates about exclusion or marginality or privilege or any of the topics that had some currency in the art world of the late eighties and early nineties. Now it’s like “just show up for the banquet, bring a gift for the host, and shut up.” I think it’s fine for artists to bring flowers, and I love flowers as much as the next person, but sometimes you have to hold your flowers like a weapon.[129]

With beauty, something is always at stake.

NOTE 139

In a photograph from 1927, my mother sits on the edge of a table. A US flag is planted in her hands. The flag is in focus, but the enormous, beautiful white bow in her hair is blurred—as if there is a part of her that is always in motion.

NOTE 140

My mother always said, “Your grandmother would have loved you.”

NOTE 141

When my mother was in foster care the people with whom she stayed served her a burned and greasy possum leg. As she told the story she could recall its smell and texture and the congealing grease. She said that she couldn’t eat it; that she tried, but she simply couldn’t, because it made her nauseous. The people served it to her over the course of several meals. Each time they put it before her, she could not eat it. They berated her, this foster child who had the temerity to refuse to eat what she was given, even when what was given was inedible. Who did she think she was, this daughter of an unwed woman, this “illegitimate child,” behaving as if she was too good to eat what was put before her?

NOTE 142

It was important to my mother that she, that we, know the proper names for things.

NOTE 143

When V and I arrived at my sister’s house it was already too late.

I called my mother after teaching and she said, “Christina, where are you?” and “Come.”

I had always admired my mother’s hands. What she made with them; how she used them. They were…articulate.

When I would praise their beauty, she would demur. She would say that they were too big, or that they were too veined, and that they were too un-delicate to be beautiful, but I also know that she believed that they had grace and a language of their own.

That she knew this was clear by the way that she held them, the ways that she gestured, and the beautifully ornate silver and turquoise rings and bracelet that she wore on those occasions when she wore jewelry.

For years I told her that I wanted to photograph her hands. She conceded that they were…interesting.

It was too late by the time we got there.

We were too late to photograph the beautiful aliveness of my mother’s hands.

NOTE 144

I used to think that if I started crying, I would never stop. That if I allowed myself to cry, the weeping would never end.

NOTE 145

One summer, for several weeks in 1978, my mother woke me up singing Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.”

She must have thought I needed this.

She must have thought that there was something that needed shoring up or warding off.

NOTE 146

But maybe I’ve had it wrong all of this time.

My mother told me that when she was seventeen, she asked her mother not to leave her.

She surprised her mother by telling her that she knew that she was thinking of killing herself. That was in 1940, the year that Joseph Willis died.

Maybe my mother was reminding herself of that moment. Maybe my mother was remembering her mother, whose death, she told me, she had never recovered from. Maybe my mother was reminding herself to stay.

NOTE 147

On fathers and funerals

In Fierce Attachments Vivian Gornick writes, “There were other moments at the funeral worthy of permanent record—my brother passed out, I looked so long into the coffin that I had to be pulled away…”[130]

At my father’s funeral, I did not want to approach the coffin that held his body. I had told my mother this ahead of time; I had already seen my father dead.

Against my mother’s wishes and instructions, one aunt or another shuttled me to the open casket and told me to say goodbye to my father.

It was overwhelming. Vertiginous. I couldn’t get away fast enough.

NOTE 148

Sunday, October 11, 2020

I always feel a particular sadness on or around this date, and eventually it hits me why.

Sometimes I arrive at the knowledge obliquely. This year I found myself thinking that I am the same age that my mother was when my father died. Then I had a new thought, one that I had never thought before—and it was my age in relation to my father’s age.

This year, I am also the same age that my father was when I was born.

I do not miss my father, but that sadness remains, that particular sadness that marks the day that he died.

NOTE 149

I think that the past is rushing in/back/toward me. I am now the age my mother was when my father died. I am the age she was when she looked the oldest that she ever did until the cancer and then the chemo killed her.

I am reckoning with the photographs of my mother and grandmother. Reckoning again with the fact that my life is not my mother’s life, that my life has in most measurable ways been far easier than my mother’s life and that sometimes the divergence feels like betrayal.

ND is thinking with me. She asks, What do I love that won’t let me rest?

NOTE 150

Maybe I ought to return my mother to her own opacity; allow some description to fall away.

Maybe there is just too much that I do not know.

I can only use my own powers of observation. I can only use my own belated, partial understanding.

I can only extend my deep regard.

NOTE 151

Dieffenbachia, or a small precaution, seemingly unnecessary

I am reading Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive when I come across this:

I kept only a few of her books, a heavy belt made of bullets, and a single plant she had loved—a dieffenbachia. Throughout my childhood it had been my responsibility to tend it, every week, dusting and misting the upper leaves and snipping the browned lower ones. Be careful when you handle it, my mother warned. A small precaution, seemingly unnecessary, but there is a toxin in the sap of the dieffenbachia; it oozes from the leaves and the stems where they are cut. Dumb cane, the plant is called, because it can cause a temporary inability to speak.[131]

It feels so familiar it takes me a few beats to recognize why.

There was always dieffenbachia in our house. My mother worked, for many years, in the garden department at Sears, Roebuck and Company. When the managers would throw away plants, she would take them out of the trash and put them aside to bring home, or she would take a cutting that she would later bring home and put in a Dixie cup or in the sawed-off bottom half of a 32-ounce or 64-ounce plastic Canada Dry ginger ale bottle. She would fill that with water, set it on the kitchen windowsill, and wait for it to take root.

My mother was always wonderful with outdoor plants, but from one season to the next, some of the indoor plants that she rescued would not survive.

My mother was a maker and keeper of lists and inventories.

Names of plants Latinate and common.

Philodendron.

Forsythia, family Oleaceae.

Azalea, family Ericaceae.

More lists. Names of things. Titles and prices of books. Plans. Designs.

Some of the lists my mother made were written on the back of advertising cardstock from the Doncaster clothing line. I have no idea how my mother came to be a distributor of these clothes and to show the designs in our home to well-off white women, but I can see the suits, dresses, and coats hanging on the clothes rack. I can recall their rich textures and patterns, their substantial weight, and their fine silk linings.[132]

The fronts of the Doncaster cards were illustrated with drawings of white women wearing that season’s fashions, and their blank backs became hand-drawn mini crossword puzzles to stretch my vocabulary and imagination.

NOTE 152

My mother called them our Salons or Sunday Teas.

On those Sundays we read and sang together.

She could not afford to take all of us to the theater or to the ballet.

We had our Sunday teas.

My mother would bake a cake, usually a pound cake or a two-spice Bundt cake, and she would make a pot of cambric tea.

Just writing the words cambric tea brings back the color of the tea, the smell of vanilla, the sound of the spoon in the teacups—not china—we didn’t have china. That taste approximated grown-ness.

Each of us would memorize a short piece, often a poem but maybe a part of a short story or sections of a speech by a Black writer whom we would not have encountered in our majority-white, private, public, and Catholic suburban schools.

There was:

Frederick Douglass: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Gwendolyn Brooks: “We Real Cool,” “kitchenette building,” “The Children of the Poor.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar: “Little Brown Baby,” “When Malindy Sings,” “We Wear the Mask.”

Langston Hughes: “Dreams,” “Tired,” “Harlem (What happens to a dream deferred?),” “I, Too,” “Mother to Son.”

The feeling of those Sundays remains in me. The feeling of performing with and for each other dressed in our Sunday church clothes, standing in front of the television in the living room to recite our pieces, and feeling accomplished and loved.

Those hours were magical. They were like time snatched out of time.

The reading life, the beauty-filled one, was central to the livable internal life my mother tried to carve out for us and to equip us to make for ourselves.

NOTE 153

My mother and I used to sing together. Sometimes my brother Christopher and sister Annette would join us, but often it would be just us two.

We would take The Fireside Book of Children’s Songs out of the bookcase and sit on the sofa together. Or we would sit together in the chair that we had where the two of us could squeeze in together, and we would sing. That was my favorite—to sit with my mother in a chair meant for one.

Good Morning to You. Kookaburra. There Was an Old Woman (Who Lived in a Shoe). Mister Frog Went A-Courting. Little White Duck. Oats, Peas, Beans, and Barley Grow. The Old Grey Hen. John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. Put Your Finger in the Air.

I can see and feel the book—the yellow fabric of the hardcover with its illustration of a kneeling man with bright-red cheeks, wearing a straw boater, a bolero jacket, red bow tie, and patterned trousers and playing a guitar.[133]

These memories are some of the sweetest from an at times intensely lonely and unhappy childhood.

NOTE 154

There was a time when I would answer people’s questions largely with quotations from plays, novels, poems, and nonfiction works. What I wanted to say had already been said and said better than I could have hoped to say it myself.

NOTE 155

I thought of my father the other day and I cried for the first time since the immediate aftermath of his death almost forty years ago.

My father, Van Buren Sharpe Jr., was born in 1911. Throughout my childhood he worked as a mail sorter at the US Post Office at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Some summers he also worked as a chef at a restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland.

My father had a stroke when I was eight years old. The right side of his body was affected. So was his speech. He had to relearn speech and writing.

He had a second and fatal stroke when I was almost twelve years old. (I always get this wrong. I always write and say that I am ten. In my mind I am ten years old when my father died. Is this the mathematics of trauma?)

My father’s own terrors, his rage at what he suffered under white supremacy, filled the house and fueled his rage at my mother and us.

But before then, or before I became fully conscious of, witness and subject to that rage, my father would take me with him on his visits to friends and family in West Philadelphia and in Germantown and Mt. Airy. We would visit an elderly woman whom he affectionately called Old Folks and whose bedroom dresser was covered with beautiful perfume bottles and strong ointments.

We would visit Wolfie and his wife Alice, who appear with my mother and father in this photo dated January 21, 1950.

We would visit my Uncle Carl and Aunt Willene. My Uncle Carlwood worked as a porter. In April 1954 he appeared on the cover of the Pennsy, the magazine of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.

NOTE 156

After my mother died, I felt off-kilter. Torqued. Listed to one side or the other.

It was as if I’d lost my center of gravity.

NOTE 157

I was immobilized for long periods after my mother died.

I would teach and then come home to lie in bed on my right side.

I was extremely thin; I was barely present in the world.

Until, one day in the shower, I noticed a strange spot on my hip.

I had lain so long, so relentlessly, in one spot that I had developed a bedsore. That hole shocked me back into a kind of life.

NOTE 158

October 31, 2020, 8:11 p.m.

I am reading Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, taking a break from anything directly related to my writing or teaching. In the novel, there are strange things happening in a house; the past is making itself felt and coming back with a vengeance.

I check my email and a past, not my own, has come back.

Christina,

My name is █████ Wheatley ████████ and your mother and I were good friends during our x-ray training at Philadelphia General Hospital. We were pregnant together (my first) and I was so honored when she gave Stephen my maiden name.

I have been going through photos, sorting for my five children, and found a darling photo of Stephen at three months. I would be happy to mail it to you or one of your siblings.

In searching his name, I sadly came upon his obituary and a list of siblings. I had no idea Ida had three more children after Stephen. We kept in touch with new babies and at Christmas. I stopped receiving cards from your mother years ago and assumed she had moved. I should have been more diligent in following up. She was a friend and mentor and I regret not being in touch.

If you are not interested in following up on this, I understand.

█████

NOTE 159

A woman gets in touch with me. I have never met her and her only trace in my life is that my beloved brother’s middle name was her maiden name. This woman, now quite elderly, did not know that I existed. She had no idea that my mother had three more children until she came across the obituary of my brother Stephen Wheatley Sharpe. In the obituary I am listed as one of Stephen’s three surviving siblings.

NOTE 160

Dear ██████████████,

What a wondrous letter. Thank you so much for being in touch with me. I don’t know what to say.

My mother died in 1998. Stephen died six years ago. Your note arrives…out of the blue and as soon as I read the first sentence, I knew who you were from your maiden name.

I am stunned. Thrilled.

I would like to know more. How did you find me? I would like to be in touch.

Christina

NOTE 161

November 4, 2020, 7:01 p.m.

Dear Christina,

Your “Beauty is a Method” took my breath away; I could feel your mother, envision the ways she would imbue beauty and love of books in all of you, create places and spaces to escape through books, to dream, to aspire.

I was only at your home in Wayne once. Your mother invited me for a weekend. I only have vague impressions of the house as being warm and inviting and what I would have expected of Ida’s home. But I have vivid memories of the garden! My mother’s best friend married a berry farmer, so we spent a week or more in Hammonton, New Jersey every summer. I loved being in the country and picking wildflowers for the table. Growing up in a rowhouse in Kensington, I only knew small cement backyards. Your mother’s garden was a revelation—so much green so close to the city! She lovingly showed and named each plant and shrub.

I shared a bed with Ida Marie and she sweetly told me she would try to stay on her side of the bed. I assured her I would be fine, as I grew up sharing a bed with my TWO older sisters! And we did do just fine.

███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████-█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

We never talked about racism. There were always several black children in my public school classes and some were good friends, but with the exception of my friend Annette, we never played after school. I was so naive. I wasn’t aware of prejudice until Junior High when my Polish or Italian friends told me their parents wouldn’t let them date anyone outside of their ethnicity or religion. Perhaps because my parents were a mixed marriage (Catholic and Protestant), they never ever demeaned anyone. Without ever saying it, we were raised by the “love your neighbor/do unto others” rule. Philadelphia was and is a racist city. I am grateful my parents never taught us to hate. Perhaps I should write a memoir about them! I could never write so eloquently as you have!

Questions: How old would Ida Marie and Van Buren have been in 1951–52?

What kind of cancer did your mother have? █████████████████████████████

Did she live to know of yours and Christopher’s accomplishments?

Thank you for sharing your beautiful memoir.

█████

NOTE 162

November 6, 2020, 9:31 a.m.

Dear █████,

I cannot tell you how moving this is. You describe a mother who had a life in the world, friends who came to visit—these are things that I did not experience with her while my father was alive.

It gives me great joy to hear of this life from someone who knew her.

The garden! The vegetable one in the back, flowers and mint at the side and flowers in front. Those are the gardens of my childhood.

My mother made joy. She worked hard at it.

In 1951 Ida Marie would have been seven and Van Buren six.

How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking? How old were you when you and my mother were in training together?

My mother got to see me get my PhD and my first job (which I got before I finished).

Christopher had finished law school but was not yet working as a public defender.

Warmly,

Christina

NOTE 163

I am struck by things I did not know (and had not thought about not knowing).

Share a bed with my sister? Spend the weekend?

It had been so long since I had a conversation about my mother with someone whom she called a friend.

When my father was alive there was no time that I can recall my mother ever having her friends come to visit, let alone a friend coming to spend a weekend. This life of my mother that I knew absolutely nothing about arrived as a gift as I was working on this book.

My mother was a very private person. I do not now know whether her privacy was by choice or circumstance.

I do know that what I learn in this exchange is just some small part of my mother’s life.

Those other parts of her life about which I know next to nothing: I have tried to enter with grace and imagine with tenderness or I have left them alone. I owe my mother that. Regard.

vi. preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness

NOTE 164

Untranslatable blackness

There is a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for several years. Not a solo project, but one that D and I envisioned as collective and that we thought to call “The Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness.” Our imagined Dictionary was inspired by a real one: the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin.

Here is a description of that published book:

This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages—English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.[134]

As we read and skimmed the entries, we observed that many of the definitions could not, did not, or might not stand if the word or concept was thought from Black. That is, not only did blackness not appear among the “important philosophical…and political terms” to be defined or discussed, neither did Black philosophers (so no Negritude, Creolité, Fanon, Glissant, Aimé or Suzanne Césaire, no Du Bois, no double consciousness). But many of the entries that did appear would need to be rethought or unthought if one considered blackness and Black people. If one began from Black, what would an entry on civilization, or claim, or archive or memory or life look like? How would it sound?

NOTE 165

Untranslatable blackness

“To speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating…”[135]

“Every writer is a writer in politics. The only question is what or whose politics?”[136]

In 2016, Jalada Africa undertook an ambitious and unprecedented translation project. Following Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and beginning with a story written by him in Gikuyu, they would translate that story into as many African and other languages as they could.

The story has so far been translated into ninety-seven languages.[137]

In 1986, when Ngũgĩ wrote of translation in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, he asked why a text couldn’t be translated from one African language into another, from, say, Gikuyu into Hausa or Twi and then into English or French. He asked why translation always moved from a European language into an African or Asian language.

NOTE 166

Grace

“Grace. Is Grace, Yes. And I take it, quiet, quiet, like thiefing sugar.”[138]

“[T]he only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”[139]

To mark the end of a particularly difficult year and as a wish for the new one, we wrote one word in the cards we mailed to friends in December 2020.

The word was Grace.

The wish was for the density of Black grace[140] as wayfinding in the midst of the long catastrophe.

NOTE 167

Breathing

Breathing is the beginning. It is, for us, a first and final movement. In it, we find the prototype of all method, without which: nothing. Breathing, thus, is the foregrounding of all concept—its precursor and first condition, its resolution. Before and after language, and of all that comes and goes unuttered, it is that block of text in the negative space of the page, noticed from the corner of the eye. A premium in these times. Dear. Dearer still. It is how, through the movement of space, life is able to consider itself—and we, by holding it, are able to grasp a finitude that cannot otherwise be grasped, a meaning that cannot be held. Breathing is life delivered as soliloquy, but which echoes the vast chorus. A quiet—often rushed, sometimes heavy, sometimes as labored as a horizon, sometimes as rattled as stone in a half-emptied chest. But there, in the persistent “come hither” and “go forth” of its unseen stillness, is the microscopy of intention that—after bursting into the ether and settling to engulf the heart—begins again.

KEVIN ADONIS BROWNE

NOTE 168

Nausea

In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. It was not that I was finding febrile coordinates in the world. I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other…and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea….[141]

That condition in which blackness is affected and responds to the sickness of the world—that nausea—is a vertiginous response to acts against one’s person. This is a fact of blackness.

NOTE 169

Tender

When Claudia Tate interviewed Gayl Jones for Black American Literature Forum she asked, “Do you have any theories about the human condition which you dramatize in your work?”

To which Jones replied: “I think what comes out in my work, in those particular novels [Corregidora and Eva’s Man] is an emphasis on brutality. But I think that something else is also suggested in them…namely the alternative to brutality, which is tenderness. Although the main focus…is on the blues relationships or relationships involving brutality, there seems to be a growing understanding, working itself out especially in Corregidora, of what is required in order to be genuinely tender…. Perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is.”[142]

the girl who wrote on the chalkboard

the boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea

the girl who was by herself and surrounded by hate

the young woman who was asleep in her bed

the young woman who drove the wrong way and the babygirl who survived this

the man who cried for his mother

the girl who took the video of the man who cried for his mother

the other girl, the cousin of the first girl, who also witnessed this

the boy who was skipping away

the woman convulsed with mourning and the woman who warned them not to take her picture

the girl who told her mother that she would take care of her

the boy who had only just arrived at the gazebo to play

the girl who was sound asleep in her grandmother’s living room

the girl to whose forehead someone taped the word ship

the woman who questioned why she was being stopped

the woman pulled over with her three young children in the car

the woman who knocked on a door and asked for help

the boy who was walking down the street

the woman whose two little sons were swept away in a flood, the door to their safety barred

the man who was running down the street

the boy who was playing music in his car with his friends

the boy whose mother was anxious when he did not return home

the woman who fell

the girl who called for help

the man who said, “I can’t breathe”

the young man accused of shoplifting and his mother whose heart was broken

the man who said, “I’m scared”

the girls, sisters, whose bones became lessons

the girl who said, “I am a child.”

NOTE 170

Stillness

“Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.”[143]

Stillness has an anagrammatical life for Black people. In Beloved, Sethe is heavily pregnant, “walking on two feet meant for standing still…still, near a kettle; still, at the churn; still, at the tub and ironing board.”[144]

But when Sethe encounters Amy Denver, it is not her movement that alerts her to Amy’s presence, but her standing still—where that stillness is not one of continued, durational labor. We find out soon after that Amy has worked off her mother’s indenture and is headed to Boston to buy velvet. But at this point in the text, it is the rich juxtaposition of Sethe’s stillness and Amy’s that drives the meaning home. Amy’s stillness is filled with the smell of unwashed hair, and Sethe thinks, it must surely precede violence, in the form of another whiteboy with mossy teeth. Sethe is determined to be like a snake and devour him from the feet up.

Beloved started me thinking about stillness and its anagrammatical life for Black people. Started me thinking about Black. Still. Life.

NOTE 171

Abstraction

We are in New York from Toronto and S has invited us to her house for dinner and talk. There are six of us—five of us are professors and of that five, two are poets, one of us is a jazz singer, two of us are writers and professors of literature, and one of us is a painter.

We are talking about the books and projects that we are working on or that we have just finished. We are talking about the painter’s show at the Drawing Center, where she and I had a public conversation earlier in the week. We are talking about Black life. We are talking about abstraction. The painter is describing her hypershapes and her work at the Wynter-Wells School. She is trying to describe the architecture of the hold.

She asks us this question: “How many corners are there in this room?”

We are stumped and respond with numbers so low they make no sense. We say four, six, twelve, even as we know the question is more complicated, and the number of corners much higher. When we stop guessing, the painter begins to point out all of the corners—she points to windows, to where walls meet floors, to carpets, and to doors.

The painter was trying to get us to engage with the deep study of the enslaved in relation to the line of a board or the curve of a chain, the plane and arc and edge of a hoe. She was trying to get us to recognize captive time and study and to begin from there. She wanted us to image what an enslaved person might see in the hold or the garret, in the field or the kitchen. She said, think of a circle.

The painter was Torkwase Dyson, and what she said as we talked before our conversation that February Saturday hovers over much of what I think; she said, “the shape makes the Black.”

This was a theoretical distillation that was wide and deep and stunning in its long reverberations.

“[T]race becomes vocabulary.”[145]

There are two structures by Dyson, both titled The Latitude and the Longitude of this Place. The dimensions of one piece are taken from the wooden crate in which Henry “Box” Brown mailed himself to “freedom.” That crate was three feet long by two feet, eight inches deep by two feet wide. Briefly, the tension in Dyson’s piece—the tensions of Dyson’s piece—get at something about tight, enclosing spaces, something constraint and pull. The pull between harm and safety; between prosperity and dispossession. The other structure is of Harriet Jacobs’s Loophole of Retreat. Both tether past and present, its circulation, its wake, and expose how that shows up in form and in the production of space. What are the angles and dimensions of Black freedom? What is a Black/African sustaining architecture? Where are those coordinates on a map? How do we break them? Make them?

Dyson works in a vocabulary of shape that attempts to attend to what the or a Black person sees and experiences; a language that acknowledges and takes its cues from the natural world. When Dyson observes that “the shape makes the Black” I understand her to be saying that if “blackness” is made on the coffle and in the ship, then it is the line of the coffle in that walk from one location in the interior to another and then on to the littoral, that circle around the neck, the curve of the hull, the plane of the rough board, and the porthole that contribute to that making of (captive) blackness. And if shape makes, it can also unmake; it can liberate as well as confine.

Black Compositional Thought is black abstraction in pursuit of Black life.

NOTE 172

Unbuilding

A building whose racialized enclosure has been dismantled, whose function to weather away Black life has been repurposed, whose toxic air and waters have been cleaned by unwavering community resistance to be dumping grounds for capitalist refuse. To construct homeplaces where friends and kin can be folk who taste the sweet promise in every bite of grandmama’s recipe for molasses bread.

MABEL O. WILSON

NOTE 173

Spectacle

“We arrived spectacular”[146]

Professor and scholar of photography John Edwin Mason tweeted: “what would photojournalism & documentary photography look like—now and in the past—if the photographer’s right to take someone’s image were balanced by that person’s right to say No?” He continued, “The photographer’s right to take has been & is rooted in a connection to power—cultural, economic, political. The poor, the marginalized, & the oppressed have never had a parallel right to refuse to have their image taken because they lack & have lacked that connection to power.”[147]

In Boston, the photographer takes pictures of a woman in deep mourning. He writes, “Reporters were not welcome…The woman did not give us her name because she is angry about the coverage of the story, and she says the family is angry, too…I photographed a woman screaming in agony as she ran from the church steps. Her friend, holding an umbrella over her head, shouted at me: ‘Don’t take her picture! Don’t do it!’”[148]

The photographer took a series of photos anyway. The newspaper published them.

The young man, who is really a boy, is seventeen and he stays in a makeshift camp in Calais, France. Without papers, he has been stuck in this in-between space for five months, harassed by police, evicted, unable to make a living, and unable to complete his journey to England where he hopes to study computer science.

He tells his story to the reporter for Al Jazeera, and he tells the photographer, “I prefer not to have photos of my clothes today because they’re very dirty, and I don’t have shoes.”[149] It is the end of December and very cold. The photographer takes photos anyway, and the newspaper publishes two of them. One of ████████ outside his tent from the knees up and one just a close-up of his bare feet.

Spectacle is the right to capture, to capture what is deemed abjection, and the right to publish it. Spectacle is a relation of power. It has a long life and a big sound. The photographer doesn’t just see the thing but also amplifies it, doubles and trebles it. And with each appearance of blackness their spectacles are summoned.

NOTE 174

Liquidity

What kind of expansion can a painting hold? Can it bring into our senses how encounters become scale and refusals textured? Becoming and being black is movement, state change, evolution, quanta, and distance.

Black distance is a form of knowledge indelibly tied to liquid. We know who we are as a discontinuous expansion of blue black. What are the spatial dependencies of curvilinear liberation? How does distance influence compositions made from an ocean rising?

The cantilever of black sensoria is the whole ethos: a mark, a line, an enclosure, an edge. Freedom is composing a painting with precarity that keeps blackness close, over, across and under the edge of being.

TORKWASE DYSON

NOTE 175

Tenderness

Tenderness might just be a gesture, it might just be a look, a Black look, some regard, relayed between people in peril.

NOTE 176

Archive

A complete catalogue of coloniality; a file, a list, a book, an enumeration usually consistent with coloniality, containing information where Black life may limn through but not be deemed as subject of the information; libraries where these are held; a compendium usually fissured, listings of events, seams from which Black life must be extracted, extrapolated; interpretations of events managed by colonial practices; such interpretations where Black life is re-presented as minor or missing, or tangential or subordinated; a resource of, and for, curations of coloniality; a cartulary of original documents relating to the genesis, legal and moral rights of modernity’s Black life captured in the white custodial; a chronicle, usually concerned with Black life but missing Black life, usually but not exclusively, beginning in 1492, but not limited exclusively.

DIONNE BRAND

NOTE 177

Breathing

BREATHING, COLLECTIVE NOUN: a multitude of Black persons gathered; a breathing.

NOTE 178

Property

Property: Something that should be collectively owned. An orientation to life; an ethic of collective care.

The enclosure of the commons; monarchical domination; European global expansion; theft of Indigenous lands, genocide and near genocide; theft of African bodies, enslavement; primitive capitalism; the invention of the Americas; modern global capitalism.

Police, prisons, carceral logics and practices, criminal punishment; unequal distribution of resources; premature deaths; insurance and banking; private property, real estate; wealth; billionaires; late modern capitalism, its logics, and practices—technological fetishism.

RINALDO WALCOTT

NOTE 179

Refusal

Refusal is the shorthand for what can’t be named within the conceptual field of the enclosure. It expresses our unwillingness to be conscripted to man’s project or world. It is easier to index than to describe. All of the gestures bent on eluding the imposed terms of order and value—the me and the mine, the propertied earth. The vision of us in the clearing best conveys it.

SAIDIYA HARTMAN

NOTE 180

Translation

Akin to Black life, to translate is to draw life out of death, to carry sound out of silence, to attune to and share the howl in the whisper and the hush in the shriek.

JOHN KEENE

NOTE 181

Regard

If it is possible

On the threshold of want

A young laundress, an exhausted drudge, a clothesline muse, and reckless dreamer

to regard rather than vilify.[150]

Regard is a habit of care. It is appreciation and esteem. It is the right of repair.

NOTE 182

Time

Or think of Matana Roberts’s “Pieces of We” in which there are several and multiple hallways of sound as if in different places/times at once; or her “Glass” that begins as if from far off through a shell, then as if shattered, and it is solid and liquid at the same time, then her saxophone is querulous or pulling itself away, so you are no longer in any relation you thought that you were in. By way of its indefinite and continuous and recursive duration, so blackness is a project to inhabit all time; to redeem time; as in claim time back from capital. Also, to count back events, as in to recount events as they happened; to strive against inertia.

DIONNE BRAND

NOTE 183

Hand

That haptic register——

“my gran told me when you do things with your hands, it heals you in places lower than where you cry from. Them deep spaces.”

DIMPLES, IN KEISHA RAE WITHERSPOON’S SHORT FILM T.

At the Malick Sidibé show I took photographs of all of the hands. They weren’t necessarily or even usually the focal point of the photographs, but I noticed them. They were so present. And as I observed them in over two hundred photographs, a whole expressive language of gesture emerged. In these photographs one could glimpse all of the meanings and significations of hands in Black Diasporic life.

NOTE 184

Gaze

A set of viewing relations that refuses to reduce individuals to the status of objects to be consumed. A practice of looking that bears witness to the simultaneous precarity and possibility of Black life. Neither looking at nor seeing through the perspective of Black people, a Black gaze renders our relationship to blackness in an antiblack world palpable, in ways that require us to reckon with our distance from or intimacy with the disposability of Black bodies. A Black gaze challenges us to embrace the affective labor of grappling with uncomfortable gaps between proximity and protectedness and in doing so, opens up the possibility of a future lived otherwise.

TINA CAMPT

NOTE 185

Memory

There is a book that I cannot find in any library, but I have a distinct visual and haptic memory of it, a synesthetic memory of its smell and size, its color, texture, and weight. The book’s cover was lavender and on it was an illustration of a photograph of a young Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The book retold, for a young audience, the story of Wells-Barnett’s hard work and successful antilynching campaigns. This book filled me with pride and terror.

So much of Black life and work and resistance goes missing. Black people work to hold all of this information in our heads, oftentimes unbolstered by institutions, oftentimes against such institutions’ purposeful forgetting. We have to function as a living library: as an institution.

NOTE 186

Elegance

This elegance is coral. Imagine: we collaborate with beauty. Imagine: we protract the drama of how we appear in the world. Imagine: enjoyment in as many ways as would satisfy the whole of us present. Contrasted with the harmful world, we are coral: in the experience of our survival is a lean, a walk, a lilt, a calamitous phrase turned inside-out, a hat tipped diagonal on the head, a perpetual riff in any major key, a procession with flowers and dried fronds down any minor road, the life of land and water transmuted to the get-up-and-go of a roadside (dis)agreement…All of our renewed power to refuse the concentric senses of the ruinous. The sweetly ordinary remarks of our bodies tarrying for careful and carefree living. Reminders of our desires. Of what can come hard with grace. Elegance is a curation of insistences where no interest remines subjugation. Imagine: concentrated sensibility for pleasure despite terror.

CANISIA LUBRIN

NOTE 187

Abolition

Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.

Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.[151]

Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.[152]

NOTE 188

Terra: Terror: Terroir

You enter a place. Stick out the tip of your tongue. Taste what lingers. The sense that something happens here, as Rinaldo Walcott insists about Black Canada. Tense strains the smash of terra : terror : terroir. What lingers is here : now and now : here, a tug that times and untimes. You are thrown into a past that is a future tense. Tongue strains. What flavors place, what place flavors.

Relation is made here. Rock to soil, soil to sweat, sweat to water, water to microbes, microbes to memory, memory to work. Ghost to ghost. Ghost as what lingers. A haunting flavor. It used to taste like.

· · ·

“You would have starved,” my aunts say, when I tell them I don’t eat particular meals. “You would have starved under colonialism, in those work camps.”

Njahi is the traditional Kikuyu bean. It produces the most beautiful purple flowers—bumblebees love the flowers. The bean is pretty, black with a white edge where it clings to the pod. It is a hardy bean, a perennial bean. Plant it once and you’ll never need to plant it again. The roots travel deep, anchor firmly in the soil. It is harvested as a dry bean.

Like most other beans, njahi responds best when it’s soaked before cooking. Unlike most other beans, njahi does not become silky soft: the outer coat never melts and the inside flesh never breaks into a soft paste. Unlike many other beans, njahi does not take flavor well. It will not meld with cumin or garlic or chili or ginger or brown sugar or coriander or turmeric or black pepper or cinnamon or cardamom. It remains stubbornly itself. Earthy. Gritty. It tastes stubbornly of earth and mineral. If survival has a range of flavors, njahi must be one of them.

This stubborn, perennial, flavorsome food was survival food for my mother’s generation, those who lived under the terror of colonial rule. Njahi preceded the terror. Njahi persisted during the terror. Njahi lives in the afters of that terror.

In the afters of that terror, some swore they would never again eat survival food. Others, like my mother, held on to memories that preceded the terror. Perhaps njahi’s deep, perennial roots anchored a different kind of memory.

Njahi is food offered to mothers with newborns. It is a food that celebrates new life. This ritual precedes the terror. It survives the terror. Take this food, eat it, let it nurture and welcome.

Still, knowing all of this, I cannot stand the taste of njahi.

· · ·

An account of tasting notes

The first people hired to work the land did not sing. They worked slowly. The harvest was mean. The beans were tiny. No amount of boiling would soften them. The grains were bitter. No amount of washing or cooking could erase their bitterness. The greens would not tenderize. Our stomachs were distended with humors we could not name, let alone cure. They said ghosts flavored everything.

The next people hired to work the land chanted longing. Winds swept newly sown seeds. Floods drowned those that dared to remain. Rot was harvested. Bowels loosened and mercy was prayed for. The sad ghosts had left, they said. These were the angry ghosts.

And, still another group were hired to work the land. They had been tested for song and smile. Searched so they did not carry curses onto the land. Baptized so the ghosts would not speak to and through them. Their songs re-enchanted the land, brought long-buried seeds to the surface, and the land remembered relation.

· · ·

Permeate

It is said that the scientists who work for food corporations develop methods to make plants resistant to disease, resistant to weather conditions, resistant to travel conditions, resistant to stray pollinations. The fruits are larger. The colors more vibrant. Their ability to travel enhanced. These are plants bred to resist terroir. They are not to absorb the place and history and work we call flavor. We eat these foods and say they taste of nothing.

Njahi tastes like too much. It refuses to yield. It insists on itself. Unlike other beans, it has not traveled well to other parts of the world. It has not been absorbed into and transformed by other cuisines. It persists as another way of being and knowing. Now, I let it grow and flower and drop its seed, and wait for the joy of bumblebees.

I cannot taste survival as my mother could, the joy of knowing that to eat is to live another day, and to live another day is to pursue freedom. I work her memories into the earth, and listen for what the earth tells me.

K’EGURO MACHARIA

NOTE 189

Life

Irreducible to neither mere survival nor sheer resistance, Black life is the praxis of insisting and persisting, even—and maybe even especially—when the death that precedes and awaits you appears preferable.

BIKO MANDELA GRAY

Life is the place where love comes through.

ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS

Black life often entails finding beauty in the (im)possible and the possible in the (un)real.

JOHN KEENE

Life is the possibility that remains—a heart that will not stop loving, a glimpse of something beautiful even in the midst of grief and dying—propelling us forward. The ability to see, to hurt, to feel, but also to dream, to move, to sit still, to exist in relation and not possession, to be.

ANDREA DAVIS

Even still, in the Black, precarious seams of this early twenty-first century, we cannot stop making a fuss about freedom, the total meaning of our lives; where imagined or real, our measures would exceed any rupture in colonial time, angle our brief-long movements toward life: and yet, and yet, we cannot stop making a total freedom.

CANISIA LUBRIN

Precarious; in a state of constant danger; balancing a state of constant danger; the construction of a way of moving through unremitting danger; the building of other functions to anticipate the accelerations and decelerations of danger. Precarity as an unchanging factor in a state of social being; the experience of accelerations and decelerations of a state of constant danger; the way of moving along the construction and reconstruction of a line of peril; the ability to predict though not always prevent the proximity of effects of this line of peril; the knowledge that one might fall off the edge.

DIONNE BRAND

The Black life form is the mark of differentiation within the species that Europe’s partial understanding of species life has termed human. The Black life form both highlights Europe’s partial view and simultaneously is the antagonist of Europe’s definition of the human, framed by the violence of the imposition and exceeding the imposition by continually (re)inventing what life might be and can be.

RINALDO WALCOTT

Life is a loving practice, the practice of loving. Life is the bridge between past wisdoms and imagined futures. Life, like love, is a rhizome—or perhaps an entanglement—of try. Life is relation and revelation. Life lays itself on / creates / treads the line between here and there.

PHOEBE BOSWELL

Perseverant acts of imagining, desiring, improvising, observing, and communing. Continuously creating. Black life: Building in boundlessness; Keep on keeping on outside and anew of what was*is*will be (given and granted).

BELINDA KAZEEM-KAMINSKI

Black life is both infinite possibilities and being in between a rock and a hard space; it’s knowing how to soar while always being asked to step and fetch it. It’s walking forward while constantly looking backwards. Black life is navigating the contradictions while taking guarded breaths.

KIMBERLY NICHELE BROWN

Life is the infinite arrival, the unabashed motive of all breath, the how and the why and the what for of all movement, the end to which all meaning is derived and is meant to return.

KEVIN ADONIS BROWNE

Life: more than individual existence: it is what we Black people give to, make for, and orchestrate with each other.

ASHANTÉ REESE

Life is the song, death is the bassline—festooned in sweat and grief, we keep dancing.

SAVANNAH SHANGE

Black life is rebellion. It is the ultimate contradiction to the isms destroying humanity: colonialism, racism, capitalism. It is the affirmation of possibility through collective, ancestral, radical joy.

LORGIA GARCÍA PEÑA

Black life is study, being held, holding on, breath and soul.

ADIA BENTON

An unending beat. It is here now, later. And after too. Wrapped around itself.

ALEXANDRA BELL

What remains of the remains; the afterlife of sodium, dirt, ashes; the possibility of touch, of your hand in mine; the ethics of dust; the Black still life of soil.

CHRISTINA SHARPE

vii. a tone of definite pitch

NOTE 190

A positioning tool

It is July 2020, many long months into the pandemic, and in the US already over 100,000 people have died.

My friend S and her family are in Western Massachusetts. S tells me that she is working in her garden when a young whiteman approaches her. He is clearly lost. He wants directions. But white supremacy is gyrocompass. White supremacy is GPS. Whiteness is property. So first, he asks her if the house belongs to her.

NOTE 191

It is hard, sometimes, to step into the world when you know, really know, the viciousness of white people.

NOTE 192

Impossible citizens of the ill world

A friend asks: “How are you?”

I say I don’t know. I say that I am trying to figure out, trying to make sense of what new words/worlds are being put into place. Even as I must focus on particular events—police murders, monuments to white supremacy finally coming down, ongoing mass protest, death from the virus, the threat of mass evictions—I am also trying to pull back that focus, to try to understand, more broadly, what is being contested fiercely and what is being imagined differently in this time.

I am struggling to concentrate. So much is in the air, so much is at stake. I tell my friend that this shifting focus has left me feeling fuzzy around the edges, indefinite and suspended. I feel light and insubstantial, heavy and grief-filled, and hopeful—although the hope is provisional and waning, while the grief seems definite and ongoing.

My friend tells me that my first cluster of adjectives (fuzzy, indefinite, suspended) makes them think of clouds and my frequent photos of clouds.

I started taking those cloud and sky photos to remind myself to breathe, to look up and out. The clouds make my friend think of that, too, but also about how clouds hold and release.

Hold and release; word-world.

This is a time that feels like multiple times being lived at once. I’ve lived part of these last several months alongside a part of the past, which means that places, objects, people have been insistently returning to me, sometimes in dreams—waking and sleeping—and more rarely in nightmares.

Some of what returns are things I once thought I would never forget. But now, as they replay in my dreams, I recognize I’ve forgotten what I, at some earlier time, thought would always be right there, on the surface of things, on the skin, touchable and tender. Dream and return.

In the midst of all of this feeling, I’ve been sitting with Canisia Lubrin’s shattering poem The Dyzgraphxst. Lubrin works with, and at, what survives Transatlantic slavery, that disaster of modernity, and its ongoing effects. She writes the poem, she says in the book’s dedication, “for the impossible citizens of the ill world.” Living in this ill world, this impossible citizen is holding her book close.

In the book’s title, the I in The Dyzgraphxst is replaced by the superscripted x. In the poem, when that I appears, it signifies a self that is diffuse and choral, singular and collective. This I refuses the ways Black people are written by those who make and profit from the ill world. This I collects and gathers; it is lifted with all that “lift” carries with it—distance and movement and theft and light and possibility.

I keep returning to “Dream #5” in “Act III: Ain’t I Épistémè?…elsewhere called the transaction of dream and return.” It opens:

If I could just leave the old things to their trembling

If I could leave you to your monuments, too. No innocence

I’ve known the sharp world and it is imagined and gerund

big enough for all of us…

I return to Lubrin’s “If”s—those conditional conjunctions—and to what they might hold and release, and to the hard knowing beside them: “No innocence” for those who make, as well as for those who meet, the “sharp world.” In Lubrin’s hands, this knowing is twofold: the sharp world is material and imagined, and there are multiple ways to see it and to be in it. The perspective of the poem’s subject is multiple; it is the I that knows itself to be “more than one way to see / the word-world.”

“Dream #5” opens me to the force of our collective imagining (“gerund”) as the material and metaphorical monuments to white supremacy are falling. Still, there’s a difference between a word and a world: A word might hold you close when the world does not, gerund; it might measure the distance between what is and what might be. Open to this old/new word/world that was always there and that was “big enough for all of us.”

In the midst of all of the sacrifices (and the sacrificed)—and all that is being made and unmade by masses of Black, young, queer, trans, and disabled people organizing and gathering in order to insist a habitable wor(l)d into being—I come back to “Dream #5.” And by the time I land in its final line—“How rude of me to force you on the thing that springs blood”—some suspension breaks, some clarity returns. I have been gathered.

My breath has been taken away, then given back.[153]

NOTE 193

I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s new and widely praised novel Klara and the Sun.

It is Ishiguro’s usual restrained prose—his usual, mostly finely observed, concerns.

I am reading and there are no clear markers of race until page fifty-nine, where I encounter the black-skinned woman who “reached forward and began to lead the food blending woman away.”[154]

The one woman is black-skinned, the other woman is doing food blending. And because food blending appears without a hyphen, this act of blending presumably does not define the woman whom Klara is observing at this labor.

“Then a black-skinned lady with large earrings passed between us, and when she’d gone, the Father’s back was turned once more.”[155]

And then, “a large black-skinned man…”[156]

Being versus doing. Who is black-skinned? No other people are described this way. How is this a descriptor?

Then I remember the appearance of George near the end of Never Let Me Go—“You glanced at George, the big Nigerian man pushing me.”[157]

Ishiguro’s vast imagination utterly falters when it encounters blackness. And he is not alone.

Such are the plot notes in the register of our plasticization.[158]

NOTE 194

I read a best-selling new novel by a young white woman. I force myself to finish it because perhaps it is necessary to witness, again, the effortless and unremarked-upon cannibalization of Black life.

The ordinary notes of our use and erasure.

NOTE 195

Each one has a cost

When I was a graduate student, I developed a gesture that was, for all intents and purposes, self-strangulation. As I talked, my hands would move to my throat, my thumbs meeting at my larynx, my eight fingers touching behind my neck.

Besides the fact of doing this, what astounds me now is that before that afternoon when M asked me, “Why are you strangling yourself?” I was not conscious that I was doing it.

Her incredulous question stopped me in the moment, but it took months of vigilant attention to the placement of my hands to undo the gesture completely.

To develop a gesture like that. I was strangling words before they even left my throat.

Speech and speechlessness; each one has a cost.

NOTE 196

John is a pig

That involuntary and unconscious gesture of self-strangulation emerged after a series of events in graduate school.

The famous deconstructionist says: “Christina, if I say John is a pig, that doesn’t really mean that John is a pig. That’s called a metaphor.”

H puts his hand on my shoulder; I have started to rise from my seat. Instead, I remain seated, and say, “I know what a metaphor is. That’s not what I asked. I asked M to repeat what she said.”

After this, the famous deconstructionist insists that I rise and give my presentation on Barbara Johnson’s “Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God” from the front of the seminar room. (The presenter before me gave hers from her seat. I do not recall a single thing about the rest of that class.)

At a gathering of faculty and graduate students, the wife of the famous deconstructionist, a Romanticist who is famous in her own right, assures me that it is “so good that you could come to Cornell to study down-home literature.”

“What’s down-home literature?” I say. “That’s not what I do.”

In another class, the famous Americanist announces that he is changing the syllabus and we will no longer read Charles Chesnutt’s The Wife of His Youth. After all, he says, “Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives is the best Negro writing of the first quarter of the twentieth century.”

Chesnutt was the only Black writer on the syllabus.

I drop the class.

The famous deconstructionist is lecturing. “Imagine,” he says, “the poverty of not having read James Joyce’s Ulysses.”

I raise my hand and reply: “Imagine the poverty of not having read Bessie Head’s A Question of Power.”

He does not know who Bessie Head is.

The new Director of Graduate Studies, a famous British feminist psychoanalytic literary scholar, tells me that a class I want to take is “too theoretical for me.”

“Too theoretical?” I say. “What does that mean?” I know what is beneath her words, but still I want her to say it.

I do not register for the class.

Later, I will tell her that I am leaving Ithaca to return to Philadelphia. I say that I will leave with or without the funding that will allow me to complete the PhD. I tell her that I am willing to take a terminal MA. There have been many protests, many meetings, many demands for curricular and other changes, yet she asks, in apparent sincerity: “Why are you so unhappy? Why are the Black students so unhappy here?” I respond: “Ask the white students why they are so happy. In their replies lie the answers to your question.”

Such things happen too many times to recount. I live through the steady onslaught of these occurrences.

NOTE 197

An early version of the acknowledgements for Monstrous Intimacies contained this sentence: “To JC and CC for making possible my negation of their negation.”

NOTE 198

Some things I remember but they no longer live on the surface of my days.

NOTE 199

Not one moment of joy

A woman named Sakue Shimohira is interviewed in Steven Okazaki’s documentary White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ms. Shimohira is one of the survivors of the US bombing of the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Now an elderly woman, she speaks with the interviewer about the aftermath of that bombing. She speaks about the explosion that threw her across the room and knocked her unconscious. She recounts awakening to the horror of a figure who had been incinerated and recognizing, by the gold tooth, that that figure was her mother. She tells the interviewer that she and her older sister were the only members of her family who survived—she was ten, her sister fourteen. They joined with other children who were orphaned, and they tried their best to survive in the chaos and despair of the aftermath of that nuclear bomb.

Ms. Shimohira says that after several months her sister committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a speeding train. Soon after that she, too, went and stood on those train tracks. But as the train approached, she jumped off. She says that her life from then to now has not contained one moment of joy, but still she has held on to life. She realized, she says, that “there are two kinds of courage, the courage to die and the courage to live. My sister had the courage to die. I chose the courage to live.”[159]

Had.

Chose.

NOTE 200

Do you feel safe?

Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document attends to the forces within and against which Black women live. The film begins with Shirley Ann Lee singing “How Can I Lose” followed by Joseline Hernandez saying “What the fuck. Can I live? Can I live? Can I fucking live?”

The I’s of “How Can I Lose” and “Can I live” connect the strands of the film. Those I’s connect the archival footage to the Black girls, teens, and women whom Gary interviews on 116th Street in Harlem and asks: “Do you feel safe?” “Do you feel safe in your body and in general, in the world?” These are questions that most of the teenagers and younger women answer with “No,” while the older women tend to say “Yes,” and attribute that safety to their faith in God. Although even they, when pushed by Gary, note the conditions of their unsafety.

There’s a moment when Gary is interviewing an older woman from Guyana, and they are interrupted by three teenage boys. Gary admonishes them: “What’s wrong with you?” she says, and “There’s an elder here.” But the older woman looks after the boys, unfazed, and says, “You know how the young people are.” Both she and Gary are right and this moment holds so much of the big heart of The Giverny Document—as it brings together the complexities of safety, understanding, regard, and demand.

Also central to the film is Diamond Reynolds’s recording of the murder of her partner Philando Castile—her scream; her concern for his life and her daughter. Gary does not show Castile’s murder. Instead, we see Reynolds, the police, and blue bars that appear over leaves; we see abstract shapes and plant matter, recalling the films of Stan Brakhage.

Then there is footage of Nina Simone at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, about to sing “Feelings” and interrupting her performance to say, “Goddamn. What a shame to have to write a song like that…I’m not making fun of the man but, I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that.” And with that Simone changes the entire meaning of the song.

The Giverny Document is a beautiful film and, as Dionne Brand tells us, “Beauty is not uncomplicated…beauty is the ability to see everything; to confront everything.”

Gary’s meditation on the profound question “Do you feel safe?” is her intentional and painstaking layering of image and sound, a layering that makes tangible her hand—that makes tangible the ways in which this project is shaped through and through with humor and love, with a visual and sonic Black aesthetic of care that is subtended by regard. Gary’s work performs “and when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours.”

NOTE 201

Richmond, California, 1942

For Saidiya

It’s a sunny day. The photograph is full of pattern and detail—clouds, telephone and electrical poles, and wires. A woman stands in front of a café window. She looks good: poised and confident. She has a smile on her face, one that has reached her eyes. It’s not a big smile, but it gives this viewer a hint of held pleasure, amusement, satisfaction, possibility. Under the photograph, which appeared in a Fortune magazine article titled “Richmond Took a Beating: From Civic Chaos Came Ships for War and Some Hope for the Future,” is the caption, “It was never like this back home.”[160] The article notes that “about 14,000 Negroes live in Richmond where fewer than 400 lived before.”[161]

The woman stands in front of lettering on the plate-glass window of the Richmond Cafe on MacDonald Avenue, her face obscuring all but the beginning and the end of the c and a in “cafe.” Because of the play of light and shadow, the words on the storefront window appear twice, so that their promise of coffee and food is emphatic. “Good Coffee, Good Coffee” and “Quality Food, Quality Food.” The woman also appears partly doubly reflected in the window. Is this her possibility, reflected and reflected again? It is 1942, and she has traveled far for just this promise.

She wears a fur hat and jacket, a floral print skirt, a long, beaded necklace tied into a knot that rests in the center of her chest, a crew-neck blouse with long, gathered sleeves, a woolen vest. The jacket is draped over her shoulders, and she clutches a purse under her left arm in such a way that shows her bracelet and the gathers of the blouse. Her shoes are open-toed suede high-heels with a crosshatch pattern. There is a bit of stray paper on the ground by her feet, but she hasn’t moved it away. Why should she? She is dressed for a day out. A day in which she can enjoy herself. Maybe she’ll go into the café, have a cup of good coffee and a plate of quality food. It isn’t perfect here—Black folks are still discriminated against; there’s bad housing, bad schools, rough treatment. Yet maybe here she needn’t fear being turned away by a sign or a look or a law that announces, “We don’t serve your kind here. Move on.” Maybe here the smile will stay in her eyes and on her face, it might even turn into a laugh. Maybe later she’ll go to the “Free War Show” advertised in the window. Maybe she has found a place where she, and the other Black women who came to Richmond in the war years, can live.[162]

NOTE 202

A Kind of Fury

There was a time when I read and reread Lydia Davis’s short story collection Break it Down and her novel The End of the Story.

At the center of The End of the Story is a writer, a woman writing a novel after and about the end of a relationship between a woman in her mid-thirties and a man in his early twenties. The novel is closely, obsessively observed and its pieces arranged and rearranged. The narrator goes back over events to try to make sense of life and then to process the writing of a novel based loosely or closely on the events that transpired in that life.

When I was an assistant professor, Davis came to read in my department. Afterwards, I told her that I’d read those two books more than once. I said I admired their rigor and form and the clarity of her language, that I admired what she could do with a short story and a line and the feeling that her condensation and her repetition produced. “This may sound strange,” I continued, “but I read The End of the Story at a very difficult time, and I found its obsessions comforting.”

In most senses of the word there is nothing particularly “comforting” about the novel, but then comfort does not only mean the cessation of discomfort, it does not only mean something that soothes or salves. She looked at me—curiously—and then she thanked me. Maybe she was just being kind when she said that she didn’t find my remark strange at all. Or maybe she understood that the kind of comfort I meant was that those books were full of complicated feelings and the resolve to live in them.

I found that same quality of comfort, like worrying a wound, in several other books that I read at that point in my life. In each one there is someone or someones who are not at ease.

In Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted To a character who appears in more than one story arrives one evening, with her friends, at a garden that has been overtaken by aphids. They are carrying bags filled with ladybugs that they plan to release. She thinks, “I could not fully see what lay about me, but still I knew it was there, abundant, breathing, and calm.”[163]

In Lynne Tillman’s No Lease on Life the narrator, a proofreader and obsessive observer, is on edge in a city (New York) that is on edge.

In Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia,[164] her resolutely unsentimental novel about gay men and lesbians trying to care for each other, and hold each other’s stories, in the midst of the wreckage and death from AIDS, the fury and distress reached me, as did the work about what and how lives are destroyed and remembered; how given family can wound and made family can hold.

In Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories it was the wisdom of the just-turned-eleven child narrator in the story “Eleven” who says,

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one….

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.[165]

And then there is Cisneros’s final story “Bien Pretty,” in which the narrator, a woman who is divided between living her life and watching herself live it, locates something like peace in the miracle of the ordinary grackle (urracas) and the radical potential of the present. Watching the sun set she observes,

And every bird in the universe chittering, jabbering, clucking, chirruping, squawking, gurgling, going crazy because God-bless-it another day has ended, as if it never had yesterday and never will again tomorrow. Just because it’s today, today. With no thought of the future or past. Today. Hurray. Hurray![166]

Each book held an underlying sadness, some bit of despair.

Each book also held wonder and a kind of fury.

Each book produced in me the feeling that I needed to feel.

NOTE 203

A feeling you wanted or needed to feel

On July 30, 2020, I asked the question on Twitter: What book or books produced a feeling you wanted or needed to feel?

Many people responded.

Recently I’ve gone back to The Yellow House quite a lot, The Color Purple, and A Map to the Door of No Return, which I experience deeper still now that I have taught it. (Ashanté Reese)

Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal, June Jordan’s Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (Alicia Lochard)

Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux. I was 19 & incurably, madly in love, sick with love. I traveled with this book, I slept with this book. It gave me the language of my madness (maybe disclosed too much on here). English translation: A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. (Sirma Bilge)

Dionne Brand, Love Enough (Ben)

Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (Felicia Denaud)

Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End “gave me form for the utter formlessness and trespass of grief, so needfully plotless; dispossessive” (Claire Schwartz)

June Jordan’s essays, so many, but especially Civil Wars, they kept me sane and seen in college. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. (Gabrielle Foreman)

I had to think about this for a minute, but Cruising Utopia. There was something so hopeful about it, which is so rare. (L. M. Davis)

Sula by Morrison. I felt the kind of calm clarity that comes from accepting responsibility (Biko Mandela Gray)

Most recently, Savannah Shange’s Progressive Dystopia. If any of my writing ever makes others FEEL even just a semblance of what this book made me feel, then I’ve made it. (Hector @chimehistorian)

Yours (@Reinanawrites)

Lose Your Mother Saidiya Hartman and The Blue Clerk and Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor and One Day I’ll Write About this Place by Binyavanga Wainaina. All helped to orientate me & make me feel real. (Otoniya Okot-Bitek)

In The Wake, Lose Your Mother (Saidiya), Home / God Help The Child (Toni), Children of Blood and Bone / Virtue and Vengeance (T. Anansi Wilson)

Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, John Keene, Annotations, Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies, M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (K’eguro Macharia)

Sister Outsider—(the uses of anger, the transformation of silence, and the interview with Adrienne), Parable of the Sower: I am interested in rebellion especially against religion, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being: WHEW, Torn by Justin Lee: A Christian mode of validating my (rainbow) (@sultrywaves)

The Book of Delights, Ross Gay right on time and just when I needed it most (Ada Ciganlija)

Seeing this list makes me feel like I need a different reading practice right now. But Diving into the Wreck is one, In the Wake is another. (Adia Benton)

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde every time. (Christen Smith)

Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk and A Map to the Door of No Return. (Yvette Greslé)

Stephen Best, None Like Us; Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet (Paul Daniel Sii)

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz really hit for me, served as a bit of a mirror and a universe to work in/through. It was the right book for the right time. Notes of a Native Son gets a shoutout b/c the sentences felt absolutely electric to me (Logan Cotton)

Entered a flow state? Frank O’Hara’s collected poems, A. R. Ammons’ Glare, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. Criticism is harder—In the Wake, Black Jacobins, Another Kind of Love, Mixed Feelings, Empty Houses. (Claire Jarvis)

Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside: Stories (Erica Violet Lee)

@azemezi’s Freshwater and many of the other books on this thread including yours @hystericalblkns (Matthew D. Morrison)

A Map to the Door of No Return. I remember you gifting it to me. It holds me every time I return to it (Jameelah Imani Morris)

Yours. Nick Estes’ Our History is the Future. Judith Butler’s Precarious Lives. All of Sebald. A lot of Lydia Davis. Susan Howe’s That This, Anne Carson’s Nox, Brandon Shimoda A Grave on the Wall…awe, sorrow, shame/rage, gratitude, something like salt, resolve, from all these. (Julie Carr)

I was reading a romance novel during one of my many nights of insomnia a few weeks ago & something a character said gave me a breakthrough on something my therapist had been trying to get me to reckon with for months. I had a breakdown in the moment but then the healing started. (Tennille N. Allen)

Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings; Anne Garréta’s Sphinx; Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats; Timothy Liu’s Vox Angelica; Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. (Travis Chi Wing Lau)

This time of year, for pedagogical purpose and possibilities: bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Parker J. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach (Kelly Baker Joseph)

Watership Down, Coming Through Slaughter (Jennifer Cotard)

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat—her memoir helped me cope with my grief after losing my father. (Well-Read Black Girl)

Thirteen Cents by K. Sello Duiker (Biko Rising)

Assata’s autobiography made me feel seen and gave me courage as I transitioned to natural hair. Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed gave me a true sense of wonder where I could see myself as the main character. Your book In the Wake made me see my grief made visible in language form. A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand resonates with my relationship to ancestry and the gaps that exist there. Poetics of Relation by Édouard Glissant expands the language I have struggled with in describing the work I am interested in engaging with. (Ariel Renee Jackson)

The Temple of My Familiar (Jasmine Johnson)

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi hit me hard in the most necessary way (Mary @silkbonnet)

Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (Sanchari Sur)

The Lonely Letters by @ashoncrawley, Evidence of Being by Darius Bost, Heavy by @KieseLaymon, Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman, Brother to Brother by Essex Hemphill, In the Wake by @hystericalblkns (Cornelius Augustus)

Sag Harbor; needed that summertime, pre-Internet feeling (Nyasha Junior)

Nervous Conditions; stuff by Cixous; Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave; Myung Mi Kim’s work, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott (ArchiMedi)

Reading Sula by Toni Morrison was the picture of women, desire, and freedom I needed to come out (Amaryah S. Armstrong)

Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov; Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (Yesenia Barragan)

Beloved—Toni Morrison, Heavy: An American Memoir—@KieseLaymon, Wayward Lives—Saidiya Hartman, Sula—Toni Morrison, In the Wake—@hystericalblkns (Fernanda Sousa)

Harryette Mullen, Sleeping With the Dictionary. every time i opened it new poems seemed to appear between the existing ones. a narrow book but it felt inexhaustible, irrepressible (Kaie Kellough)

I don’t know if Antonin Artaud (my gateway was a Sontag reference to the le pèse-nerfs, but i can’t pick out a “book”) produced a feeling i wanted but did not need, or needed but did not want. or both, or neither. i guess i felt and feel less alone and more terrified. (long-legged socialist @mini_mia)

Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders by @AbregoLeisy Was teaching book and Guatemalan student spoke up about how they got choked up reading it and thinking bout their own fam experience. And it clicked for me, too. My mom was transnat’l parent (Polemicist @PalmTreesnGz)

Listening to Images by Tina Campt and Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma (Brian Muraya)

No Archive Will Restore You by Julietta Singh (Hannah E. Quinn)

Most recent one was Sans Souci by Dionne Brand (Spencer Julien)

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, it seared through me and made me alive to words again. The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand, such float and fierceness. Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto, on a plane ride blue and strange. These surface for now amidst so many. (Sarah Ahmad)

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being-you, The Fishermen-Chigodzi Obioma, Undoing Border Imperialism-Harsha Walia, Americanah-Chimamanda, And Our faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos-John Berger (@Blessol)[167]

NOTE 204

There are many books that produced in me a feeling I needed or wanted to feel. Some of them are books that I love (Head, Brand, Morrison), and others are not (Lessing). But love is beside the point. What these books share is that they produced in me the feeling that I needed.

The Golden Notebook (with its politics and longing)

The Four-Gated City (with its madness that had a logic you could summon and live in)

Love Enough (with its gift of this naming sentence: “You collect sadness.”)

Song of Solomon (with the wonder of Pilate and her declarative “And she was loved.”)

A Question of Power (with its madness that had a logic and also an ethics)

NOTE 205

In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes that “[b]ooks leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.”[168]

Books—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoir, biography, mysteries, plays—have always helped me locate myself, tethered me, helped me to make sense of the world and to act in it. I know that books have saved me. By which I mean that books always give me a place to land in difficult times. They show me Black worlds of making and possibility.

NOTE 206

Some notes threaten to take over the entire book.

NOTE 207

When I show M my copy of Beloved, he is delighted. “That,” he says, “is a well-loved, well-read book.”

Months later, he mails me an article, “My Most Precious and Worthless Book,” in which Homi Bhabha writes about his tattered copy of Beloved. He says that the essay reminds him of my “wondrous copy.”

NOTE 208

In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes that poetry is “the skeleton architecture of our lives…. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”[169]

We predicate our hopes and dreams.

The grammar of a possible life made in the sounding of it. The work of words—opening into possibility.

NOTE 209

The poet Mona Lisa Saloy says, “Poetry is human history. Poetry is, yes, intellectual. Yes, a report. But it is imaginative. It is more than what’s real. It’s reality and reality multiplied and felt so deeply.”[170]

Imagination is the engine of internal life for Black people. It is an engine of Black life.

NOTE 210

The Long Winter

“Laura loved the beautiful world.”

The Long Winter was the only one of the Little House on the Prairie books that I really loved. There was the racism of the other books: Ma’s hatred of “Indians,” Pa in blackface playing the bones. If such scenes were in this book, I do not remember them. The Long Winter soothed me when things were materially hard. I read it so many times. It got me through many cold days and nights. Endurance, ingenuity, reading, and laughter. That book made me feel stronger.

NOTE 211

Before Beloved were Kindred and Corregidora, and after them At the Full and Change of the Moon. These books changed what I thought a novel that took slavery and the enslaved as its subject could do and how it could animate those enslaved people who did and did not survive its hold.

NOTE 212

I have the sense that many of the writers who are not Black, and whose work I have taught and found useful and interesting and moving, have not read the work of Black writers. I have the sense that apart from one Baldwin or one Morrison (Beloved), or maybe Jamaica Kincaid (Annie John) or Alexandre Dumas père or fils, most of these writers have not read at all, let alone read widely, the work of Black writers across the Diaspora—no Aidoo or Head or Philip or Brooks or Brand or Ellison or N’Diaye or Wright or Baraka or Lubrin or Wicomb or Walcott (Derek or Rinaldo) or Hartman or Césaire.

I have the sense that many of these writers who are not Black and whose writing I have taught and found moving imagine there is nothing that they can possibly learn from these Black writers and their work.

NOTE 213

Episode 362

Several years ago, I was listening to Episode 362 of This American Life,[171] a show that is very often revealing about the good white liberal fashion in which it unimagines and unmatters Black life. This particular episode, “Got You Pegged,” was about the “pitfalls of making snap judgments about others.” The segment that interested me is Act One, “The Fat Blue Line.” In it, during a live performance at the Moth, the storytelling venue in New York City, the novelist Richard Price recounts his experiences of going on “ride-alongs” with two white New York City cops while doing research for his novel Lush Life (2008). Price is clear in his narrative setup that when he rides with the police, he does not comment on their actions, nor does he engage them in debates. He is there, he says, “to bear witness and to see what I can do with it in my work.” TAL describes the scene in this way: “While riding in a patrol car to research a novel, crime writer Richard Price witnessed a misunderstanding that for many people is pretty much accepted as an upsetting fact of life.”

In the segment, Price relates the story of a thirty-year-old Black man (Cleve) with dreds who is riding a bike around midnight on the Lower East Side in Manhattan with a white boy (Noah), nine or ten years old, sitting on the crossbars. The police are suspicious; they stop Cleve, tell him to dismount the bike, ask him if he’s heard of helmets, and order him to produce ID. Then they separate him from Noah. At this point, Price tells us, the cops try to establish the nature of the relationship between the two; they are, in other words, trying to establish Noah’s un/safety and Cleve’s criminality.

This episode is emblematic of TAL. Running through many of the episodes is a persistent programmatic white noise that ensures certain Black notes are unable to register and to produce meaning for TAL’s largely white audience.

In 2008, New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg marked a dramatic increase in the number of police stops. The “upsetting fact of life” referenced by TAL is state racism and, more specifically, state racism as it manifests in the il/logic of stop-and-frisk. But far from being “pretty much accepted,” as TAL described it, stop-and-frisk in all of its forms (including Operation Clean Halls) has been, from the beginning, actively resisted on multiple fronts by those subjected to it. So, when TAL asserts this acceptance, it must be asserting white acceptance. In addition to the white supremacy and antiblackness of the police, another kind of disregard emerges in this episode, becoming clear if one listens to that note. That is, the note that reveals the ways in which white people position Black people with/in situations that display a total disregard for how Black life is surveilled and Black movement restricted. By “position” I mean arranging Black life as a sign of negation. It is a disregard that passes as liberal or progressive regard and intimacy but that reveals itself to be cleaved by a structural antagonism, a “structural prohibition…against whites being the allies of blacks due to this…‘species’ division between what it means to be a subject and what it means to be an object.”[172]

While one cop detains and questions Cleve, another questions Noah, who tells him that his mother sent Cleve to pick him up from a playdate. When Noah reveals during questioning that he spends time alone with Cleve at his apartment the cop fishes to see if Cleve is abusing Noah. Noah responds knowingly and viscerally. “Oh my God are you gonna arrest him?” he yells. “If you [bleeped-out expletives] arrest him again one more time just because he’s Black and I’m not, I’m going to kill myself. You came into my apartment and dragged him out because the crazy lady next door said that he was a rapist, you put him in handcuffs when he came to pick me up at school, you pulled him away from me at the street fair and made me wait for my mom, I swear to God I’m gonna lose my mind!” The cops call Noah’s mom, who confirms that he should be with Cleveland, but that doesn’t console Noah. “My mom says if I get any more nervous, I’m going to have to live with my father at Woodstock, you f——.” The audience laughs.

While the episode positions listeners to side with Cleve and Noah and not the police, what Noah’s speech reveals is police policy and the structural antagonism. When I used to listen to This American Life, so much of the show’s sound was at a pitch of white innocence that never deepened. Pretending depth, at least where Black people were concerned, it upheld the state of things. In this episode, what goes unremarked, in what becomes a kind of kitsch in the framework of This American Life, is racism made to seem like whimsy. The quotidian forms of violent Black subjectification remain vestigial, largely unheard, largely unrecognized, played for laughs.

NOTE 214

Vestigial

Think of the difference between the speech Barack Obama gave at the vigil after the Newtown, Connecticut, murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the speech he gave in Chicago, Illinois, at Hyde Park Academy, two months later, addressing the lack of a trauma center for young people on the South Side of Chicago. In Newtown, Obama’s refrain is that we must do everything we can to save every child. When he gets to Chicago, his refrain is that we might not be able to save every child.

Newtown, December 16, 2012:

…this job of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together…in that way, we come to realize that we bear responsibility for every child…. Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know they are loved, and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer’s no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change….

If there is even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that’s visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try. In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have?[173]

Chicago, February 15, 2013:

And those of you who worked with me, Reverend Love, you remember, it wasn’t easy. Progress didn’t come quickly. Sometimes I got so discouraged I thought about just giving up. But what kept me going was the belief that with enough determination and effort and persistence and perseverance, change is always possible; that we may not be able to help everybody, but if we help a few then that propels progress forward. We may not be able to save every child from gun violence, but if we save a few, that starts changing the atmosphere in our communities. [Applause.] We may not be able to get everybody a job right away, but if we get a few folks a job, then everybody starts feeling a little more hopeful and a little more encouraged. [Applause.] Neighborhood by neighborhood, one block by one block, one family at a time. We may not be able to save every child from gun violence, but if we save a few, that starts changing the atmosphere in our communities.

If we gather together what works, we can extend more ladders of opportunity for anybody who’s working to build a strong, middle-class life for themselves. Because in America, your destiny shouldn’t be determined by where you live, where you were born. It should be determined by how big you’re willing to dream, how much effort and sweat and tears you’re willing to put into realizing that dream.[174]

The appeal to the so-called universal from which we are excluded. What brutal arithmetics.

NOTE 215

Hysterical whiteness

Hysterical whiteness makes blackness the provoking agent of the mass hysteria that is the province of whiteness itself. It makes a seventy-six-year-old white man shoot Darius Simmons, a thirteen-year-old Black boy, in the chest and kill him in front of his screaming mother. Kill him in order to teach him a lesson.[175]

Hysterical whiteness is conquest pedagogy. Murder pedagogy.

NOTE 216

Hysterical whiteness

To the pale girl who ran up to my car in a Staten Island midnight with only a nightgown and bare feet, screaming and crying, “Lady, please help me oh please take me to the hospital, lady…”. Her voice was a mixture of overripe peaches and doorchimes; she was the age of my daughter, running along the woody curves of Van Duzer Street.

I stopped the car quickly, and leaned over to open the door. It was high summer. “Yes, yes, I’ll try to help you,” I said. “Get in.”

And when she saw my face in the streetlamp her own collapsed into terror.

“Oh no!” she wailed. “Not you!” Then whirled around and started to run again.

What could she have seen in my Black face that was worth holding onto such horror? Wasting me in the gulf between who I was and her vision of me. Left with no help.

I drove on.

In the rear-view mirror I saw the substance of her nightmare catch up with her at the corner—leather jacket and boots, male and white.[176]

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography

Toni Morrison’s Preface to Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) begins with her recounting how she was persuaded to read Marie Cardinal’s autobiographical novel The Words to Say It because, aside from personal recommendations, the title “spoke the full agenda and unequivocal goal of a novelist.” Playing in the Dark sent me to read Cardinal’s text, a work that revolves around her years of psychoanalysis in order to recover from the anxiety unloosed by her encounter with what she names “the Thing.” “The Thing” sent her running from a concert into the “street like someone possessed” and the anxiety that results from this encounter unfolds in a series of symptoms from suicidal ideation to catatonia.

As Morrison reads Cardinal’s text, a thought keeps “insisting itself”: “What was the…specular even spectacular scene that convinced her that she was in danger of collapse?”[177] It turns out, not surprisingly given its placement in Morrison’s text, that “the Thing” is a visual sonic blackness that, as Fred Moten would have it, “anarranges every line.”[178] Cardinal writes:

My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. I was nineteen or twenty. Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each note would be important and would contain within itself the essence of the whole…. The sounds of the trumpet sometimes piled up together, fusing a new musical base, a sort of matrix which gave birth to one precise, unique note, tracing a sound whose path was almost painful, so absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the nerves of those who followed it.[179]

Cardinal’s response to the composition’s “necessary” path is visceral. Armstrong and his notes send her running. At least part of the answer to “why” is anticipated in the white woman’s misplaced fear as articulated in the epigraph from Audre Lorde’s Zami. What Du Bois names “personal whiteness,”[180] and locates as an invention of the nineteenth century, is by definition hysterical—and therefore, those who claim to be in possession of it are possessed by it. Cardinal’s response to Armstrong’s improvisational Black sound allows one to probe and locate hysteria bodily, in relation to the responses of those who are “constituted as white,” or who occupy the space of whiteness in relation to those who are insistently and specifically raced as Black.

When some black notes arrive, they disrupt whiteness; they disarrange it.

NOTE 217

Cultures of surprise

A culture of surprise is:

a way of marking the ways that through the processes and politics of remembering and forgetting (history, narrative, lived experience, etc.) one (a person, group, nation, faction) is continually positioned as, or to be, “surprised” by events (traumatic or otherwise), instead of, for example, prepared, knowing, or aware;

a culture of refusal and disavowal, and the national as well as personal ability to maintain innocence in the face of knowledge and/or evidence to the contrary to be found in all aspects of juridical, social, economic, political, and everyday life;

one in which, through the processes and politics of remembering and forgetting (history, narrative, lived experience, etc.), one (a person, group, nation, faction) is continually positioned to be surprised by events, traumatic or otherwise, instead of, for example, prepared, knowing, aware of, or producing them.

· · ·

“The cultures of surprise” speak to the ways that a specific “we” forget and/or remember selectively. To speak of a culture of surprise from the position of the oppressed might be to recognize that one might have to forget, or at least perform forgetting, in order to survive. This forgetting is not naiveté.

The machinery of whiteness constantly deploys violence—and in a mirror-register, constantly manufactures wonder, surprise, and innocence in relation to that violence. That innocence-making machine rubs out violence at the very moment of its manufacture. Michel-Rolph Trouillot tells us, “Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.”[181]

NOTE 218

At this late stage

I am watching a famous writer and a famous theorist in conversation.

They are speaking about the writer’s new book. They are speaking about white people and whiteness.

The theorist, who has written books that upended and changed fields, loses words on whiteness; and in relation to blackness, they transport wonder to the conversation, but not depth.

I think about the theorist’s early and influential work and how different that work would have been had they, at the very least, considered the work of the Combahee River Collective, Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, Hortense Spillers, and Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí.

At this late stage, to still wonder. To still lose words.

NOTE 219

On March 11, 2021, Matt Rowan, an announcer for a high school basketball game, observes the young women on the Norman High School team kneeling as the US national anthem is played. Not realizing that his microphone is live Rowan says, “They’re kneeling? Fucking ███████. I hope Norman gets their ass kicked. Fuck them. I hope they lose. They’re gonna kneel like that? Hell no.”[182]

Later, Rowan initially denies that he is the person on the microphone. But then he issues the following statement:

I will state that I suffer Type 1 Diabetes and during the game my sugar was spiking. While not excusing my remarks, it is not unusual when my sugar spikes that I become disoriented and often say things that are not appropriate as well as hurtful. I do not believe that I would have made such horrible statements absent my sugar spiking.[183]

This is not disorientation; this is white supremacy as gyrocompass.

NOTE 220

Recently, I saw a photo of a water tower. I was cleaning out my email inbox and the water tower appeared in a message that had been marked as junk. In the photo, the water tower was leaning, and I immediately felt anxious. Then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years.

When I was a child there was a water tower up the street from me—midway to the top of Upper Gulph Road. The tower terrified me. Maybe someone had told me that these towers could fall over and sweep away all of the houses in their path. Maybe I had read a story or seen a film with this disaster as part of the plot; maybe toppling water towers were like quicksand was in the 1970s, an unlikely yet frequent plot point of terror.

For whatever reason, that water tower haunted my days back then, days that were already filled with disasters. My dreams were full of the impending disaster of a tower that would break open or fall over, and we would all die.

Seeing that tower in the email made me realize again that we do forget things that we think will never let go of us. There is, sometimes, relief.

This was the second time in as many months that I had faced something, and in facing it recalled that I had once thought not remembering it an impossibility. I had believed that I would never not live in its presence.

Each occurrence of a thing is not the same, either in velocity or force.

NOTE 221

George Floyd cried for his mother.

I thought at first that that harrowing and woeful sound did not reach █████████████.

But how could it not?

That sound carried through the whole world. It did reach them, and they simply were not moved by what they heard.

If I had made myself listen to that recording, Mr. Floyd’s pleas would never leave me. They would live in my bones. Just the description of them has done that. How much more the sound?

NOTE 222

There are people who can see something and know the source of it. They can point to it without reproducing the hurt of it.

There are others who settle all seeing there, in the wound.

In her foreword to Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” Alice Walker writes, “Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they also have the medicine.”[184]

NOTE 223

Tell Me the Truth

In 2011, V and I were at the Mark Bradford show at the ICA in Boston. It was Bradford’s first survey exhibition.

We walked through the rooms, some containing those large-scale aerial maps of cities articulating his attention to the afterlife of disaster and what remains. There were paintings like Scorched Earth, 2006 and Kryptonite, 2006 (the city after the rebellion in the wake of those four officers found “not guilty” in the beating of Rodney King), alongside other work, such as the footage of an ark that Bradford built for Prospect New Orleans, marking Hurricane Katrina.

As we moved through the galleries, I heard a sound, and I wondered what it was and where it was coming from. It was the sound of yearning; or more precisely, it produced in me a feeling of yearning.

It was a sound that sounded; it reverberated. You heard it before you knew what it was, before you reached the room next to the sound, before you entered the hallway—the passageway—that was papered all in black. That sound, it filled everything.

One of the docents, a former student, told me that on his walks through the show, he sometimes observed people in that installation. The installation was called Pinocchio Is on Fire and it was a passageway lined with over one hundred, three-foot-wide black rectangles within black rectangles that cover the entire room.

Bradford wrote that “the work as a whole presses time, abstracts time, and in some ways it abstracts and presses back and forth the body. I’m not after the fragmentation of the body but the abstracting of the idea of the body.”[185]

As we were about to enter the room, the docent told us that sometimes people hurried through the space, and sometimes they stopped and listened to the song. Some people hurried through that blackness—it was only a passage to something else. Others stood, lingering in it, still others were called to dance.

That sound in the passage was Nancy Wilson singing “Tell Me the Truth” (1963).

When I entered it, I was filled with the clarity and command of Wilson’s voice. That fullness of hers that was simultaneously a crispness.

The way that Nancy Wilson drew out a word and a note contained so much sureness; hers is a voice that, even as it pines, already knows that the beloved is too small; already knows that the one pining, and the world, is bigger than the beloved. Her voice is complex, it is sophisticated—she once called herself a “song stylist.”

Do you plan to forget me now?

Wilson’s elongated forget, the otherworldly, outerworldly sound of her deeply held note, made its own passage right through me.

Even now, to write about Wilson’s singing and Bradford’s work is to be transported.

NOTE 224

When the Black students arrive at the museum in Chicago, they are given instruction in decorum. What these lessons really are is threat, haranguing, and harassment. When the Black students enter the museum, they are not free to look and laugh and explore. These Black students have to keep their hands in their pockets or on the top of their heads. These children’s exploration of exhibits that are meant to spark curiosity is interdicted by the constant, policing reminders of where their hands should be.

So much energy expended disciplining Black children into the knowledge that museums are not for them, that this world is not for them. This is another manifestation of what the educator and curator La Tanya Autry tells us: Museums are not Neutral.

This is the coffle, the hold, and the chain gang.

NOTE 225

Indifference to the value

I can’t unsee Laquan McDonald’s murder. I can’t unsee anything. I can’t unhear anything.

Laquan McDonald was seventeen years old.

He was assassinated with sixteen bullets.

Sixteen officers (at least) were involved in the cover-up.[186]

████████ was also convicted of sixteen counts of aggravated battery, one for each bullet.[187]

Since the murder of Michael Brown, I have turned off the autoplay function on all of my devices.

So I am stunned when I open the Chicago Tribune on my desktop and the police assassination of Laquan McDonald plays before I can stop it.

I think of that poor boy skipping down the street. He has no idea what they are about to do to him. He is just skipping away.

“ ‘I can’t rejoice because this man is going to jail,’ McDonald’s uncle, the Rev. Marvin Hunter, said of the convicted. ‘I saw his wife and father. His wife and daughter didn’t pull the trigger. I could see the pain in these people. It bothered me that they couldn’t see the pain in us.’ ”[188]

“What ████████ saw ‘was a black boy walking down the street…having the audacity to ignore the police,’ [special prosecutor] McMahon said.”[189]

“ ‘It wasn’t the knife in Laquan’s hand that made the defendant kill him that night,’ a prosecutor, Jody Gleason, said during closing arguments. ‘It was his indifference to the value of Laquan’s life.’ ”[190]

NOTE 226

An awful grief

I am walking home from the gym when my brother texts me: I just had an awful grief come over me this morning while driving to work.

I text back. I know that feeling. Do you know why? Then I stop and call him.

Later, I think: Why did I ask why?

There are personal reasons and then there are political ones.

One of his oldest friends is dying and my brother is a soft man. “Every day you wake up and there’s something trying to break your heart.”[191]

There is, in other words, every possible reason to be overcome with an awful grief.

NOTE 227

It happened again. I thought of something and then I picked up the phone to call my mother or Stephen because I wanted to ask them if they’d read something or tell them about that something and laugh, but they are both dead.

After twenty-four years, after eight years, how is it still possible that I reach for the phone to call you?

NOTE 228

In the summer of 2020, for ten days and counting, and in the midst of a global pandemic disproportionately harming Black people, tens of thousands of Black people went into the streets to face the triple threats of COVID-19, the violence of care/no care if infected, and the always-present threat of police violence—police being already, itself, a name for violence. People remained in the streets demanding an end to policing and all the violence that it sustains and is sustained by it. Their coming together was a manifestation of the ideas that care is shared risk, and that abolition is a “synonym for love.”[192]

In the summer of 2020, some of the static monuments to global white supremacy were brought down. Over the course of a few days: a protestor broke the right hand off a statue of Louis XVI in Louisville, Kentucky; in Bristol, England, a crowd toppled Edward Colston and threw him into the River Avon; in Richmond, Virginia, a group of young people pulled down a monument to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America (this is just one example of Confederate monuments coming down—this action was repeated multiple times, in the same city and in multiple cities); in Brussels, Belgium, a crowd climbed on the statue of the genocidal King Léopold II and chanted their demand for “réparations.”[193]

NOTE 229

September 18, 2019

I am going through passport control at Pearson Airport in Toronto, Canada, on my way to the United States.

There is an elderly Black couple in line who are afraid they will miss their flight. The people in line ahead of them exchange places with them, allowing them to move up in the line. This quiet negotiation continues until a whiteman comes out from behind his desk with its glass partition, marked “supervisor.” He tells the employee, a Black woman, who is directing people toward each lane for inspection, that she must tell the couple that they must go back to their spot. The couple try to explain to the man that they are late and afraid that they will miss their plane. But the supervisor repeats his instruction and walks away and the Black woman tells the couple that they must return to their prior place in the line. They do so, but many of us in the line are grumbling, disbelieving. After all, we have willingly switched places with them. Then the whiteman, the supervisor, returns and addresses all of us. He says, “It is not your place to let people skip the line.” He says that if we continue to let people do this, he “will shut everything down.” He says, “No one will be processed, and you will all miss your flights.”

Though I shouldn’t be, I am astounded by the petty display of power and the cruelty.

how else to say, border,

and the militant consumption of everything,

the encampment of the airport…[194]

Border authoritarianism. The forced withdrawal and criminalization of any modicum of care.

NOTE 230

Youngsters

When my brother Christopher was twenty-two, he came home covered in blood.

This is what he told my mother and me about what had happened.

He had been driving in a car with a friend, drag racing. They were in Philadelphia, in Kensington, Fishtown, a section of the city that they didn’t know well; my brother and his white friend were from the suburbs.

The car they’d been drag racing alongside had led them into this unfamiliar neighborhood and then parked in such a way that the road was blocked. This other car sounded its horn and people came running out of their houses with baseball bats and boards, and planks with nails in them.

My brother and his friend were pulled out of their car. People began to beat my brother.

My brother managed to run to a house and ring the doorbell, but the people inside would not let him in. Someone called the police. And when the police came, one of the people who had beaten my brother with a nail-spiked board called my brother a ████████ and punched him in the face in front of the police. The police did nothing.

They let my brother leave but they did not arrest or detain any of the white people who had tried to kill him. There would be no charges laid against them.

When Christopher was finally almost home, in the town of Radnor, he was pulled over for speeding by the police. Despite seeing the blood and his very visible injuries, the police did not escort my brother to the hospital. They ran his plates and issued him a speeding ticket.

They refused to see his injury as injury. Or, they saw his injury and decided to inflict more.

I cannot remember exactly what happened then. I think my mother drove my brother to Bryn Mawr Hospital. I know he got many stitches and tetanus shots because of the nails in the boards.

We were all deeply shaken.

I won’t ask my brother to remember for this account—this work is mine. (He has told me this before. He is not wrong.)

My brother has those scars.

In June 2020, when I see reports and the images of white men with automatic weapons in Kensington, my memory of this time, never buried too deep, comes rushing back.

NOTE 231

But what on earth is whiteness, that one should so desire it? Then always, somehow, some way silently, but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!

Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such a dictum as this? Wave on wave, each of increasing virulence, is dashing the new religion of whiteness on our shores.

W. E. B. Du Bois [195]

The presence of white people summons the always-present threat of state violence against Black people. The white person, the white crowd, is deputized. White people “are not simply ‘protected’ by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police.”[196] Whiteness being a name for property and its violent protection.

NOTE 232

There is no set of years in which to be born Black and woman would not be met with violence.

NOTE 233

Like walking across a desert

I read in the Chicago Sun Times that when “Jacob Blake’s father visited him in the hospital Wednesday, he said his son—who was shot in the back by a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer over the weekend—was handcuffed to the bed…. Blake, 29, was shot more than a half-dozen times on Sunday and is paralyzed from the waist down.”[197]

Jacob Blake’s crime is surviving his attempted assassination by police. His crime is being Black and surviving.

Jacob Blake’s father said that when he was finally able to see his son, Jacob “ ‘looked and sounded like’ his son, and he’s alive. Seeing him in the hospital was like walking across a desert to find someone waiting with a glass of water, his father said.”

“ ‘It was a feeling I can’t describe.’ ”[198]

No word will do, no analogy is possible.

NOTE 234

Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.

I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.

NOTE 235

What is to be done with the remains and with the compelled photographs of the formerly enslaved, the remains of the Black person, those who, like Renty, like Delia, like Drana, like Jem, like Jack, like Fortune, like Delisha, like Tree, are held in life and then long after death? This question (what is to be done), this so-called dilemma, keeps being forced up to the surface by the relatives of the enslaved and the murdered.

On April 20, 2021, a story was published in the New York Times: “What Should Museums Do with the Bones of the Enslaved?”[199] It stated that the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds the Morton Cranial Collection of over 1300 skulls. Morton believed in polygenesis.

On April 21, 2021, a story appeared in the Billy Penn and disclosed that the remains of two children—fourteen-year-old Tree Africa and twelve-year-old Delisha Africa, who were murdered by Philadelphia police in 1985—were first held in a cardboard box at the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and then loaned to Princeton University and used in an online public anthropology course.[200] Their mother, Consuela Africa, was alive when this announcement was made and she had no idea that her daughters’ remains were intact, let alone that they were being held captive and used in this way. The children were part of the MOVE Organization, a Black Liberation movement based in Philadelphia and founded by John Africa. The members of MOVE live/d and work/ed multigenerationally and communally.

Time folded in on itself.

On May 13, 1985, the Philadelphia police fired thousands of rounds of ammunition and then dropped two bombs on the roof of the MOVE house at 6221 Osage Avenue knowing that the house was occupied and that there were flammables on the roof. The house was a row house in a predominantly Black neighborhood in West Philadelphia and it was filled with people. The police prevented the occupants of 6221 from escaping the fire. And they, and the fire department, let the fire burn. They murdered five children and six adults in the MOVE house, and they burned down an entire city block of sixty-one homes. Only two members of MOVE survived (is that the right word?) that act of state terror: Ramona Africa and thirteen-year-old Birdie Africa.

In the weeks before that Monday in May, events were clearly leading up to this. It was my second year of undergraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania and almost every day the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News featured front-page articles about MOVE. These articles were framed in terms of concern for the children in the house, because of “unsanitary conditions,” and rage that the MOVE members were “allowed” to live this way.

This was the buildup to the murders of at least eleven members of MOVE. The buildup to that terrible crime, the buildup to the incineration of eleven people. All of this was the buildup to the utter depravity of the holding, loaning, and use of the bones of two of the loved and murdered children.

Ephraim Asili’s 2020 film The Inheritance unkeeps[201] this history, as it maps and extends a set of relationships and community practices. The Inheritance is a film in which MOVE is central and in which Michael Africa, Debbie Africa, and Michael Africa Jr. appear and talk with love about their relationship and their community.

NOTE 236

The answer to these obscene questions? Return the bones. Return the photographs. Repatriate the statues. Empty the museums.

NOTE 237

Her name is Delisha. Her name is Tree. “They came from people; they came from people that came from people.”[202]

And they were loved.

NOTE 238

A beautiful noise

“Debbie Africa, with the assistance of another MOVE 9 member, Janet, was able to keep Mike Jr.’s birth a secret before it was made public during a court hearing. The baby was shown to all 63 inmates on the same cell block to confirm the baby’s birth and to safeguard his life.”[203]

“Debbie Africa got to spend three wonderful days with her baby son. She hid him under a sheet and when he cried, other jailed women would stand outside the cell and sing or cough to obscure the noise.”[204]

Debbie Africa gave birth to a son she named Michael Jr. and for three entire days the other women she was jailed with, all sixty-three, held her in their care with their made noise: first to cover her birth pains, and then to cover the baby’s vocalizing.

What care. What a beautiful noise.

With these notes they were held and held.

The chorus opens the way.[205]

NOTE 239

“There’s time enough, but none to spare” is the final sentence of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, a novel that Chesnutt published just three years after the events that are at the novel’s center. The Marrow of Tradition fictionalizes the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, riot/insurrection in which white militias murdered hundreds, even thousands, of Black people and drove out of the city all but three of the surviving Black residents. This antiblack violence was centered in Wilmington, but orchestrated attacks happened that day throughout much of North Carolina. The white insurrection was a violent response to real and perceived Black prosperity after the residents of the real Wilmington elected a biracial fusion government, in which “there were three blacks on the ten-member board of aldermen, the city’s most important elected body. Another black was a member of the powerful five-constituent board of audit and finance. Other public offices held by blacks included justice of the peace, deputy clerk of court, superintendent of streets, and even coroner. The city had two black fire departments and an all-black health board. To this list can be added a significant number of black policeman and, in federal patronage, the mail clerk and mail carriers.”[206]

Chesnutt’s novel, set in the fictional Wellington, North Carolina, is filled with the quotidian and extraordinary terrors that white people enacted and their enjoyment of them. It is also filled with the freedom dreams of Wellington’s Black residents. It is these dreams that so outrage the architects of the massacre (the Secret Nine in Wilmington and the “Big Three” in Chesnutt’s Wellington). Black dreams, Black breathing, Black freedom, Black laughter, and Black political and social participation.

The Marrow of Tradition is a novel that is relevant in this present time for all of those nations built on genocide, slavery, and histories of removal and driving out. The marrow of tradition, the substance of it, in Chesnutt’s novel is white supremacy and virulent antiblackness.

Among other things, The Marrow of Tradition shows us that Black freedom has always been the problem. It shows us that blackness was, blackness is, a status offense.[207]

NOTE 240

I am twelve years old and walking by myself to the Tredyffrin Public Library on suburban roads that are meant for driving not for walking. But it is only a quarter of a mile from my house to the library and I go there almost every day in the summer. On this bright morning, I am halfway there when a car filled with whiteboys drives by and calls me ████████. As the epithet leaves their mouths, they slow down, reach out through the open windows, and push me hard into the hedges that line the road.

This is the unsafety of “white spaces.” This is the violence of maintaining a space as white.

NOTE 241

Going into the center of Wayne with my mother to grocery shop or to the bookstore the Readers’ Forum, or into town to meet friends at the Five and Dime Store, the Gap, the Army and Navy Store, Brooks Stationery Shop, or Dairy Queen, we would pass the blackamoors who held pride of place on pedestals at the foot of the stairs leading up to a modest house on the corner of Radnor Street Road and Old Eagle School Road.

There were two statues. They were small, crouching, and they appeared to be children. They had painted blue shirts with a red pocket handkerchief, and white pants. They had shiny black faces, bright-red lips, and each held a lantern in one hand. I never knew the name of the people who lived in that house. But some Black person or persons from my neighborhood who had to pass by these statues regularly, as we did, would periodically dump buckets of white paint over them.

We loved to see it, my mother and I.

After a few weeks of living with the white paint, the owners of the property would paint the statues black again.

A few months would pass, and someone would again throw white paint on them.

One day my mother and I drove past, and those statues had been meticulously, and therefore permanently, painted white.

NOTE 242

I write these ordinary things to detail the everyday sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes.

NOTE 243

My brother Christopher knows that I have a practice I call beautyeveryday where I take photographs of flowers, trees, the light, clouds, the sky, moss, water, many things, in order to try to insist beauty into my head and into the world. I post some of them on Twitter.

He has started sending me photographs of the flowers and plants in his small, lush garden in Santa Clarita, California. These night-blooming cereuses are from there.

I share the photographs on Twitter and poet, translator, and novelist JK sends me Robert Hayden’s poem “The Night-Blooming Cereus.”

And so for nights

we waited, hoping to see

the heavy bud

break into flower.

…

the darkness

cloying with summoning

fragrance. We dropped

trivial tasks

and marveling

beheld at last the achieved

flower….

NOTE 244

At Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, on June 9, 2017, after an onstage conversation called “The Work of Words” between Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, and me, a young Black woman in the audience stood up and asked the most beautiful question.

Fern Ramoutar: “Hi. I want to return to a quote that you made, Dr. Sharpe, about how the weather is the total climate, and it is anti-Black. That just struck me because I think to be born Black is to know that weather intimately, and in some cases to know it exclusively. But the effect, whether intentional or not, of the work of your words, of all of your words, is to change the weather and to expand my capacity and, I think, the capacity of many black women—I can’t even speak for all of us, but I can speak for myself—to expand our capacity for survival. So, my question is, What is the weather that you’re working towards?…What is the world you’re working towards and what does freedom look like to each of you?”[208]

The room gasped and momentarily we fell silent with awe and gratitude at the sound this young woman had brought into the room. It was a question that she was the answer to.

NOTE 245

There is a deep and long tradition of Black arts ranging across continents and archipelagos attendant on the modern and its legacies of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Black artists across form and those whose only form is their lives are engaged in the knowledges produced by these legacies and contemporaneous tragedies. They have always performed, thought, lived, enacted a desire for freedom—they have always fought for and made spaces, imagined ways when there was no way. Every movement for Black liberation, every era of Black struggle, has been accompanied by its singers, its dancers, its poets, its storytellers, its musicians, its artists—its theorists of the possible world, its theorists of the imagined world. These are the tracks we work in—if we are lucky.

NOTE 246

What is required of us, now? In this long time of our undoing?

viii. to notice or observe with care

NOTE 247

What I saw:

The cartographers busy drawing and redrawing lines through violence.

Refusals of brutality.

Mutual aid feeding people in all of their hungers.

The strange miracle of rhubarb growing.

The look of the sky, changing and familiar, through the same door over the course of a year.

NOTE 248

This is a love letter to my mother.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To Dionne Brand who told me that these notes were a book, and then read every word of them.

To Saidiya Hartman who told me to write the harder thing.

To Kimberly Nichele Brown for the gift of a sustaining friendship that echoes through my days and never fails to make me smile.

To Rinaldo Walcott for gifts large and small and not limited to the feasts that sometimes arrive on the front bench.

To Canisia Lubrin for her eye, ear, and heart on these notes.

To Lynn Henry my editor at Knopf Canada, endless thanks for her extraordinary eye and mind and gentle hand, for her perfectly placed questions, and for asking me in the garden on one distanced August day in 2020, “What are you working on?”

To Eric Chinski my editor at FSG, endless thanks for his careful reading, clarifying suggestions, and for his thinking through the book in the midst of everything.

To the best readers I could ever hope for.

Dionne Brand

David Chariandy

Saidiya Hartman

Canisia Lubrin

K’eguro Macharia

Leslie Sanders

Rinaldo Walcott

To the people who let me text and DM them entire notes as they were being written (and rewritten).

Kevin Adonis Browne

Kimberly Nichele Brown

Torkwase Dyson

Saidiya Hartman

Canisia Lubrin

K’eguro Macharia

Rinaldo Walcott

To the people who answered my call, and so generously and beautifully wrote definitions toward the preliminary dictionary of untranslatable blackness.

Alexandra Bell

Adia Benton

Phoebe Boswell

Dionne Brand

Kevin Adonis Browne

Kimberly Nichele Brown

Tina Campt

Andrea Davis

Torkwase Dyson

Biko Mandela Gray

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Saidiya Hartman

Belinda Kazeem-Kaminski

John Keene

Canisia Lubrin

K’eguro Macharia

Lorgia García Peña

Ashanté Reese

Savannah Shange

Rinaldo Walcott

Mabel O. Wilson

To Christopher Sharpe who sends me photographs of the night blooming cereus and other flowers and birds in his small, perfect garden.

To Dianna McFadden for continuing to teach me about love and generosity.

To John Keene for sending me Robert Hayden’s “The Night-Blooming Cereus” after I shared photos of my brother’s cereus.

To Rachel Zellars who so generously allowed me to reproduce her letter.

To Natalie Diaz who sends beautiful letters and notes and who asks questions that unfold and unfold and unfold—.

To Torkwase Dyson for the gift of black compositional thought and the generous space of our ongoing collaborations.

To Emily Kiefaber for the gift of her memories of my mother; and for the gift of Stephen’s middle name.

To Cauleen Smith who answered my query with a “yes” and a beautiful painting of my mother’s hand. What can I say to this surpassing gift, Cauleen, except thank you, thank you, thank you.

To Jacqui Ko my agent at Wylie, for all of the work that she does on my behalf and for her careful reading.

To Kristi Murray at Wylie for all of the work that she also does on my behalf.

To Alba Ziegler-Bailey for all of the work that she did at Wylie on my behalf.

To Deborah Ghim for her insightful reading.

To the editors at Daunt Books, especially Željka Marošević, Sophie Missing and Marigold Atkey.

To the people and places where I shared some early parts of what became Ordinary Notes:

Gallery TPW

Syracuse University and Kevin Adonis Browne

Wesleyan University and Ashraf Rushdy

McGill University and Alanna Thain

To Tiffany Ates for the tremendous work that she did securing image permissions.

To Hilary Lo for the tremendous work that she did securing text permissions; that excel sheet was a work of art.

To Susan Burns and the entire Knopf Canada production team.

To the entire production teams at FSG and Daunt, especially Tara Sharma.

To Jennifer Griffiths for the beauty of her book design.

To Simone Leigh. I wrote the first iteration of ‘Beauty is a Method’ as part of The Loophole of Retreat conference celebrating her receipt of the Hugo Boss Award and Solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in 2019.

To the artists who have allowed me to reproduce their work. Gratitude is not enough, but I am especially grateful to Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Torkwase Dyson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Cauleen Smith, and Kara Walker.

To Paula Lee for her friendship and company on the trip to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Legacy Museum.

To Kimberly Hébert for her instructive love of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.

To M. NourbeSe Philip and Karla F. C. Holloway for their work that informed this book and the previous one.

To Farah Jasmine Griffin for sharing her father’s writing to her in books and for the profound work of Read Until You Understand.

To Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays, and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, for models of wayfinding.

To:

Andrea Davis

Thad Davis

Gigi Marks

Gee Ngugi

Abdi Osman

Deborah McDowell

Karen Sharpe

Migdalia Valdes

Ellyn Walker

Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Van Zimmerman

Thank you.

To those whom I may have forgotten to list by name, the omission is not intentional and I extend to you my thanks.

To all of the writers and artists and thinkers across the years whose work I have learned from; whose work has sustained and challenged and shaped me. Thank you is not enough.

To Alice Smith for the soundtrack to so many of my ordinary days.

I had many completely unexpected and charmed moments while I was writing this book. I am grateful for each and every one of them.

ENDNOTES

Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume Contemporary Fiction, 1987), 203.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

OED Online, s.v. “note” (n. 2, v. 2); Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “note” (trans. v. 1a).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969 [1901]), 329.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Dionne Brand, thirsty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002), 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Morrison, Beloved, 108.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

I borrow this from Beloved. Morrison knows fully the imbrication of racesexgender and so she writes whitemen and blackmen, just two examples, as nouns, there is no space between the noun (men) and the racial modifier.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Ibid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Shaquille Heath, “The Other Talk,” New York Times, January 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/style/the-talk-being-black-in-america.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

David Margolick, “Through a Lens, Darkly,” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Matt Delmot (@mattdelmont), Twitter, July 29, 2020, https://twitter.com/mattdelmont/status/1288628643980353537. “This is what it looked like in 1963 when Sarah and Horace Baker and their children tried to move into a house in Folcroft, PA, an all-white suburban area ten miles southwest of Philadelphia. White mobs sought to ‘protect their suburban way of life.’ ”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Kathy Boccella, “Racism in Delaware County: A Story of Hatred and Courage,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 26, 2013, https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/racism-delaware-county-the-hatred-and-the-courage/1975314/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Amiri Baraka, “ ‘Raisin in the Sun’s’ Enduring Season,” Washington Post, November 16, 1986, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1986/11/16/raisin-in-the-suns-enduring-season/941610fe-9612-4271-8367-145137f914bc/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

“Horace Baker” (obituary), https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/21148246/Horace-Baker.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

“Negroes to Quit a White Suburb,” New York Times, April 2, 1966, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/04/02/356166162.html?pageNumber=13.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Margolick, “Through a Lens, Darkly.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Françoise Vergès, “A Museum Without Objects,” in Iain Chambers, Alessandra De Angelis, Celeste Ianniciello, Mariangela Orabona, eds., The Postcolonial Museum: The Art of Memory and the Pressures of History (London and New York: Routledge, 2016 [Ashgate, 2014]), 32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

This framing is influenced by my reading and teaching Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon. In an interview/conversation with Rinaldo Walcott and Leslie Sanders about history and At the Full and Change of the Moon, Brand says the following: “…I know that what I’ve written is not a historical novel. It’s not historical fiction. First of all, it’s [history] a third of the book and I think it overwhelms, hopefully, the rest of the book. It penetrates the rest of the book, and it hovers over the rest of the book…. What I was interested in was those small acts that overpower centuries.” I was interested in small acts and determining hauntings.

“At the Full and Change of CanLit: An Interview,” Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers De La Femme, 22–26.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html, 10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 148.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Ibid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Henry Louis Gates Jr. interviewing Bryan Stevenson, Reconstruction (documentary film series), PBS, 2019, Part Two. Interview retrieved at https://twitter.com/HenryLouisGates/status/1117865171035119618.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 269.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 148.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Asiya Wadud, Syncope (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), 26, 34.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

“Henry Smith, 17, was lynched in Paris, Texas, in 1893, before a mob of 10,000 people.” The colorized photographic triptych of his lynching is installed on the front of the Legacy Museum.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Gayl Jones, Corregidora (New York: Beacon Press, 2019 [Random House, 1975]), 124.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

James Cameron, A Time of Terror: A Survivor’s Story (1982), qtd. in David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

“At 17, Robert Caston was sentenced to die in a Louisiana prison. He served more than 45 years before EJI won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case declaring juvenile mandatory life-without-parole sentences unconstitutional. The decision paved the way for almost 3,000 resentencing hearings across the country, including in Illinois. Caston was released in 2012 at age 64.” Pam Adams, “ ‘You all are my therapists.’ People who care,” Free Community Word, December 27, 2018, http://thecommunityword.com/online/blog/2018/12/27/you-all-are-my-therapists-people-who-care/. See also https://www.theroot.com/the-new-lynching-memorial-and-museum-forces-us-to-bear-1825529717.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

This is my transcription of Mr. Caston’s words in the video installed at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Transcribed on December 27 and December 28, 2018.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

I return to Beloved; it is a touchstone, a theoretical compass. This quotation is from p. 107 of the 1987 Plume edition (see Note 207, p. 298).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Mr. Stevenson’s work as a lawyer is deeply important. He is dedicated to overturning the death penalty and to the work of memory and repair.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Anthony Ray Hinton, “I Spent 28 Years on Death Row,” Guardian, October 21, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/21/28-years-on-death-row.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Colin Dayan, “Held in the Body of the State: Prisons and the Law,” in Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns, eds., History, Memory, and the Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 183–248.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

For more description of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice please see https://segd.org/national-memorial-peace-and-justice and https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Adam Serwer, “The Cruelty Is the Point,” Atlantic, October 3, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

My thinking here is indebted to Kimberly Juanita Brown. I have never forgotten the moment in a talk when Brown made the point that the relatives of the white people pictured in those lynching photographs may still be alive.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Cynthia Carr, Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America (New York: Crown, 2006), 4, 14, 22.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

“ ‘Life of a Klansman’ Tells Ugly Truths about America, Past and Present,” New York Times, August 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/books/review/life-of-a-klansman-edward-ball.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Much of Smith’s text explores this white learning and what must be unlearned. See Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W.W. Norton, 1949). See also Patricia J. Williams, “The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, edited by Wahneema Lubiano and Arnold Rampersad (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 253–63.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

I read an article in Vice in which the Black British artist Jade Montserrat details the alleged abuse she suffered at the hands of Anthony d’Offay. D’Offay is a collector and Tate Britain patron. The article details some of d’Offay’s collections. “She claims that he showed her his collection of slave-related pictures and paraphernalia at his upmarket London home and watched her shocked reactions to his images of lynchings, animal mutilations, pogroms in Russia, naked Black men, and even Hitler’s speeches.” The way that this list proceeds. Where the adverb “even” appears. Where the shocking emphasis lies. The deep complicity of the art world and the world of donors. See Chaminda Jayanetti, “The Tate ‘Banned’ a Black Artist after She Called Out an Art Dealer’s Sexual Abuse,” Vice, March 18, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxqx/tate-antho.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Google Arts and Culture, s.v. “supertonic,” https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/supertonic/m026x6k?hl=en [inactive].

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Morrison, Beloved, 88.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Autumn Womack, “Visuality, Surveillance, and the Afterlife of Slavery,” American Literary History, vol. 29, no. 1, 191–204.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001), 18.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Matthew 8:22, but I come to it from the Randall Kenan novel of the same name.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “threshold” (n. 3a, b).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

OED Online, s.v. “threshold” (n. 4c).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, produced and directed by Katrina Browne, tracesofthetrade.org.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Charlotte Delbo, trans. Rosette C. Lamont, Auschwitz and After (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 15–16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 18–19.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), xv.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 139.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1999), 21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 213. Brand writes: “An oral ruttier is a long poem containing navigational instructions that sailors learned by heart and recited from memory.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 60.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Toni Cade Bambara, “What It Is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow,” in Janet Sternburg, ed., The Writer on Her Work (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980), 153.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “vessel” (n.).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Morrison, Beloved, 88.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

OED Online, s.v. “ma’am” (n. 2).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Morrison, Beloved, 61.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson in a personal conversation.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Saidiya Hartman in conversation, qtd. in Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13.1 (2002), 15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Claremont, CA: Coyote Canyon Press, 2007 [Blackwood’s, 1899]), 48.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2009), 117.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Ibid., 118.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TEDGlobal, July 2009, 2:10–2:51, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Ibid., 4:11–5:13.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Ibid., 6:02–6:20.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Mary Pols, “Precious Review: Too Powerful for Tears,” TIME, November 16, 2009, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1935116,00.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

See the feature in the New York Times Magazine by Lynn Hirschberg “The Audacity of ‘Precious’ ” in which Daniels says: “Precious is so not Obama…. Precious is so not P.C. What I learned from doing the film is that even though I am black, I’m prejudiced. I’m prejudiced against people who are darker than me. When I was young, I went to a church where the lighter-skinned you were, the closer you sat to the altar. Anybody that’s heavy like Precious — I thought they were dirty and not very smart. Making this movie changed my heart. I’ll never look at a fat girl walking down the street the same way again.” https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/magazine/25precious-t.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Caitlin Dickerson, “Inside the Refugee Camp on America’s Doorstep,” New York Times, October 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/us/mexico-migrant-camp-asylum.html?smid=tw-share.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Jesse McKinley, “Neo-Nazi Father Is Killed; Son, 10, Steeped in Beliefs, Is Accused,” New York Times, May 10, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/11nazi.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

“White Supremacist Leader ‘Shot Dead at Home by His Young Son,’ ” Daily Mail, May 2, 2011, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1382775/White-supremacist-leader-Jeff-Hall-shot-dead-home-young-son.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Radley Balko, “The Curious Grammar of Police Shootings,” Washington Post, July 14, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/the-curious-grammar-of-police-shootings/. “It’s a way of describing a shooting without assigning responsibility,” writes Balko.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Galton endowed UCL with his personal collection and archive along with a bequest for the country’s first professorial Chair of Eugenics. “UCL Denames Buildings Named after Eugenicists,” June 19, 2020, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/jun/ucl-denames-buildings-named-after-eugenicists.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Knowles, “Captain Who Said Spa Shootings Suspect Had ‘Bad Day’ No Longer a Spokesman on Case, Official Says,” Washington Post, March 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/17/jay-baker-bad-day/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Christy Wampole, “Guns and the Decline of the Young Man,” The Stone (New York Times Opinionator), December 17, 2012, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/guns-and-the-decline-of-the-young-man/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

D. Watkins, “In Baltimore, We’re All Freddie Gray,” New York Times, April 28, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/opinion/in-baltimore-were-all-freddie-gray.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “The Boisterous Demand of Black Baltimore,” in Devin Allen, A Beautiful Ghetto (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), x.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Hartman, Wayward Lives, 21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

Tirhakah Love, “Lense on Baltimore: The Community Photo-Activism of Devin Allen,” Afropunk, September 15, 2017, https://afropunk.com/2017/09/lense-baltimore-community-photo-activism-devin-allen/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 228.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Signet, 1958), 125.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

Sharpe, In the Wake, 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

Ruth Wilson Gilmore in conversation with Paul Gilroy, University College London, June 7, 2020, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/racism-racialisation/transcript-conversation-ruth-wilson-gilmore.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Lauren Williams (quoting defense counsel Mark O’Mara), “Zimmerman Has Been Found Not Guilty. Now What?” Mother Jones, July 14, 2013, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/verdict-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman-not-guilty/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

Josh Myers (@ddhewty), Twitter, November 8, 2020, https://twitter.com/ddhewty/status/1325446775734480896.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Adrienne Kennedy, People Who Led to My Plays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 26.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

Bonnie Honig, “What White Supremacists Want,” Boston Review, September 25, 2017, https://bostonreview.net/articles/bonnie-honig-members-only-president/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

Ibid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

This is a thinking with Dionne Brand’s “Ruttier for the Marooned in Diaspora” (in A Map to the Door of No Return) in which we read: “Marooned, tenantless, deserted. Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is, wandered, wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut the door, derelict, relinquished, apart. More words she has left them.” A Map to the Door of No Return, 213.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

Wadud, Syncope, 32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2018), 228.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101

Ibid., 212.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 102

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books; 2nd edition, 1995 [1953]), 312.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 103

A version of this note appears in an interview with Selamawit Terrefe. “What Exceeds the Hold?: An Interview with Christina Sharpe” in Rhizomes 29 (2016), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/terrefe.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 104

Simon McCormack, “Cops Bought ████████ Burger King Hours after Charleston Shooting,” Huffington Post, December 6, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dylann-roof-burger-king_n_7645216.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 105

Mark Sanders, “Renegotiating Responsibility After Apartheid: Listening to Perpetrator Testimony,” American University Journal of Gender Social Policy and Law 10, no. 3 (2002): 589.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 106

Ashley Forbes reproduced in Sue Williamson’s Can’t Forget, Can’t Remember (1999).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 107

Sharpe, In the Wake, 15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 108

Rizvana Bradley, “Regard for One Another: A Conversation between Rizvana Bradley and Saidiya Hartman,” Los Angeles Review of Books, October 8, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/regard-for-one-another-a-conversation-between-rizvana-bradley-and-saidiya-hartman/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 109

“The Camera Lucida: A Brief History,” https://neolucida.com/history.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 110

OED Online, s.v. “ordinary” (adj. 2a, 2d, adv. 6b, B, n. C2); Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “ordinary” (n. 1).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 111

Hartman, Wayward Lives, xiv. About those Black women and girls who changed their worlds and ours and who Hartman re-animates she says, “all of the characters and events found in this book are real; none are invented.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 112

In Wayward Lives (p. 9), Hartman quotes Dunbar: “Dunbar lamented: If only they could be prevented from flocking to the city, ‘if the metropolis could vomit them back again to the South,’ the whole matter would adjust. Better for them and for us, the restrictions of the south, than a ‘seeming liberty which blossoms noxiously into license.’ ”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 113

Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 27.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 114

Brand, thirsty, 23.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 115

Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 27.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 116

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 43.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 117

Smith, At the Edge of Sight, 27.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 118

Ibid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 119

Brian Dillon, “Rereading: Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes,” Guardian, March 26, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 120

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 121

Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 206.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 122

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 73.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 123

Jonathan Beller, The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 100.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 124

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 53.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 125

This is the curator Sherry Turner DeCarava describing her husband’s work. Lovia Gyarkye, “On Roy DeCarava’s Centennial, Two Photo Books Document His Legacy,” New York Times, November 18, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/books/review/roy-de-carava-light-break-the-sound-i-saw-sherry-turner-decarava.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 126

K’eguro Macharia in a series of Direct Messages with the author.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 127

Hartman, Wayward Lives, xv. Writing about those Black women and girls who were “deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures,” Hartman “values and recognizes the revolutionary ideals that animated ordinary lives.” I borrow the phrase here, to name my grandmother as actor in her life and in the world.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 128

Glenn Ligon, Yourself in the World: Selected Writings and Interviews (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 105.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 129

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 66.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 130

Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 131

“The firm sold high-end women’s clothing and accessories online and via direct sales through a network of ‘consultants’ who sold goods out of their homes and at parties…The Doncaster firm started in 1931, as the Doncaster Collar and Shirt Co. in Rutherfordton, about 70 miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina.” From “Doncaster Clothing Firm Shuts Down after 87 Years,” Doncaster Free Press, March 7, 2018, https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/doncaster-clothing-firm-shuts-down-after-87-years-49244.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 132

See https://singbookswithemily.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/fireside_childrens_songs/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 133

Princeton University Press [website], “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691138701/dictionary-of-untranslatables.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 134

Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), xii.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 135

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1981), xvii.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 136

“Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,” Jalada, Translation Issue 01 (March 22, 2016), https://jaladaafrica.org/2016/03/22/jalada-translation-issue-01-ngugi-wa-thiongo/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 137

Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1997), 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 138

Morrison, Beloved, 88.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 139

Torkwase Dyson, speaking at Cartography : : Catastrophe (online event), April 30, 2021, https://www.thesojournerproject.org/sessions/catastrophe-cartography/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 140

Frantz Fanon, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 112.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 141

Claudia C. Tate, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Black American Literature Forum (vol. 13, no. 4), 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 142

Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2019), viii.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 143

Morrison, Beloved, 30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 144

Dionne Brand and Robert Enright, “Pressure on Verbal Matter: Dionne Brand and the Making of Language,” Border Crossings 155 (November 2020).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 145

Dionne Brand, Inventory (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 146

John Edwin Mason (@johnedwinmason), Twitter, December 28, 2020, republished at https://twunroll.com/article/1343717619157905410.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 147

“Boston Mourns for Simba Martin,” Hubbub: A WBUR news blog, October 5, 2010, http://archives.wbur.org/hubbub/page/60/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 148

Alexander Durie, “Refugees in France: ‘I Was in the Boat Yesterday, I Almost Died,’ ” Al Jazeera, December 23, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/23/we-all-get-scared-migrants-in-calais-face-fear-determination.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 149

Hartman, Wayward Lives, 59, 61, 62. These italicized phrases are drawn from “An Intimate History of Slavery and Freedom.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 150

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, quoted in Karis Clark, “Abolition Is,” The Michigan Daily, April 19, 2021, https://www.michigandaily.com/michigan-in-color/abolition-is/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 151

Saidiya Hartman asks, “Is abolition a synonym for love?” and “Is love a synonym for abolition?” in her essay “The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance,” BOMB Magazine, June 5, 2020, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance//. I have answered the question with a yes.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 152

This note is a lightly edited version of a piece that appeared in Jewish Currents, July 20, 2020.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 153

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2021), 170.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 154

Ibid., 188.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 155

Ibid., 241.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 156

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (New York: Vintage, 2005), 234.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 157

On plasticity and plasticization see Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World (New York: NYU Press, 2020).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 158

Steven Okazaki, dir., HBO Documentary Films, White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2007).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 159

Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, “Richmond Took a Beating: From Civic Chaos Came Ships for War and Some Hope for the Future,” Fortune 31, no. 2 (February 1945): 262–69.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 160

Ibid., 264.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 161

A version of this note was originally published in Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, Sarah Mesier, ed. (New York: MoMA, 2020), 96-97.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 162

Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 253.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 163

Sarah Schulman, Rat Bohemia (New York: Dutton Adult, 1995).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 164

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (New York: Random House, 1991), 16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 165

Ibid., 159.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 166

Each answer appears here with the permission of the author.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 167

Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 191.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 168

Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007 [1984]), 36–37.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 169

Mona Lisa Saloy, qtd. in Joshua Barajas, “How Poetry Helped These Hurricane Survivors Weather the Aftermath,” PBS Canvas, September 1, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/after-katrina-poets-wrote-our-trauma-until-it-was-numb.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 170

“Got You Pegged” (Episode 362), This American Life, August 22, 2008, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/362/got-you-pegged.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 171

Saidiya Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Saidiya Hartman Conducted by Frank B. Wilderson III,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 172

Barack Obama (speech), Interfaith Prayer Vigil Address at Newtown High School, delivered December 16, 2012, Newtown, Connecticut, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/barackobamanewtownvigilspeech.htm.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 173

Barack Obama (speech), Remarks at the Hyde Park Academy High School, delivered February 15, 2013, Chicago, Illinois, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-hyde-park-academy-high-school-chicago-illinois.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 174

Erik Ortiz and Sasha Goldstein, “Milwaukee Man, 76, Found Guilty of Intentional Homicide in 13-Year-Old Neighbor’s Shooting Death,” New York Daily News, July 17, 2013, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/trial-milwaukee-mom-recounts-shooting-son-13-article-1.1400993. “Attorneys for Spooner admit the man shot the black child, who was taking out the trash that May morning when confronted by his elderly white neighbor.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 175

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography (New York: Crossing Press, 1982), 5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 176

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), vi.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 177

Moten, In the Break, 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 178

Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It (Van Vactor & Goodheart, 1976), qtd. in Morrison, Playing in the Dark, vi–vii.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 179

W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2020 [1920]), https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4770-the-souls-of-white-folk.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 180

Trouillot, Silencing the Past, xix.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 181

Sweenie Saint-Vil, “Basketball Announcer Calls Players █████████ for Kneeling during the National Anthem,” Revolt, March 12, 2021, https://www.revolt.tv/2021/3/12/22327928/basketball-announcer-players-kneeling-national-anthem.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 182

Deon Osborne, “Racial Slur: Announcer Calls Kneeling High School Basketball Girls N-word,” Black Wall Street Times, March 12, 2021, https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2021/03/12/announcer-calls-high-school-basketball-girls-nggers-for-kneeling/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 183

Alice Walker, Foreword, in Nora Zeale Hurston, Barracoon (New York: Amistad, 2018), ix.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 184

Mark Bradford in conversation with Christopher Bedford, “The Evolution of Pinocchio Is on Fire,” wex blog (Wexler Center for the Arts), August 19, 2010, https://wexarts.org/blog/evolution-pinocchio-fire.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 185

Safia Samee Ali, “Inspector General Report Shows at Least 16 Officers Involved in Cover-Up of Laquan McDonald Shooting,” NBC News, October 9, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/inspector-general-report-shows-least-16-officers-involved-cover-laquan-n1064401.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 186

Don Babwin and Michael Tarm, “Chicago Verdict Comes 4 Years After Laquan McDonald’s Death,” CTV News, October 6, 2018, https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/chicago-verdict-comes-4-years-after-laquan-mcdonald-s-death-1.4124030.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 187

Ibid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 188

Ibid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 189

Mitch Smith and Julie Bosman, “Jason Van Dyke Sentenced to Nearly 7 Years for Murdering Laquan McDonald,” New York Times, January 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/us/jason-van-dyke-sentencing.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 190

Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon, 175.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 191

Hartman, Wayward Lives (see n. 150).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 192

This note appears here lightly edited from its first publication on June 17, 2020 in Thoughts of Liberation, https://canadianart.ca/features/thoughts-of-liberation/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 193

Brand, Inventory, 17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 194

Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 195

Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal,” Social Justice, 2003, Vol. 30, No. 2 (92), 18–27 (20).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 196

Clare Spaulding, “Jacob Blake Handcuffed to Hospital Bed, Father Says,” Chicago Sun Times, August 27, 2020, https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/8/27/21404463/jacob-blake-father-kenosha-police-shooting-hospital-bed-handcuffs?utm_campaign=chicago.suntimes&utm_content=entry&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 197

Ibid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 198

Jennifer Schuessler, “What Should Museums Do with the Bones of the Enslaved?” New York Times, April 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/20/arts/design/museums-bones-smithsonian.html.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 199

Maya Kassutto, “Remains of Children Killed in MOVE Bombing Sat in a Box at Penn Museum for Decades,” Billy Penn, April 21, 2021, https://billypenn.com/2021/04/21/move-bombing-penn-museum-bones-remains-princeton-africa/; and Colleen Flaherty, “A Mystery and a Scandal for Anthropology,” Inside Higher Ed, April 23, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/23/anthropological-mystery-involving-penn-and-princeton-scandal-too.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 200

In 2016, Torkwase Dyson had a show at Eyebeam called Unkeeping. To unkeep history is to approach it a different way, to ask different questions, to approach the perspectives of the enslaved and the terrorized. https://brooklynrail.org/2016/04/artseen/torkwase-dyson-unkeeping.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 201

Kassutto, “Remains of Children.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 202

Monica Moorehead, “Mike Africa Jr. Was ‘Born on the MOVE,’ ” posted at International Action Center, November 21, 2019, https://iacenter.org/2019/11/21/mike-africa-jr-was-born-on-the-move/. Debbie Africa gave birth to Michael Jr. on September 15, 1978.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 203

Ed Pilkington, “Born in a Cell: The Extraordinary Tale of the Black Liberation Orphan,” Guardian, July 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/31/debbie-sims-africa-mike-jr-black-liberation-orphan-move-nine-philadelphia.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 204

Hartman, Wayward Lives, 345.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 205

H. Leon Prather Sr., “We Have Taken a City: A Centennial Essay,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, edited by David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 206

Hartman, Wayward Lives, 243. Hartman writes that “Status offenses were critical to the remaking of a racist order in the aftermath of Emancipation and they accelerated the growing disparity between black and white rates of incarceration in northern cities at the beginning of the twentieth century…. Antiblack racism fundamentally shaped the development of ‘status criminality.’ In turn, status criminality was tethered ineradicably to blackness.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 207

“From The Work of Words: Dionne Brand, Christina Sharpe, & David Chariandy,” Capilano Review 3.34 (Winter 2018): 108.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 208

CREDITS

TEXT

6. “The Other Talk,” by Shaquille Heath, from The New York Times. © 2019 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

100. “A Family Tragedy in a Neo-Nazi Home,” by James Estrin and David W. Dunlap, from The New York Times. © 2011 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

This note. “Rivers” and “Gloss on A History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790-1825; Or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows,” by John Keene, from Counternarratives. Copyright © 2015 by John Keene. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

172, 178, 180, 183, 184. Excerpts from Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard. Translation copyright © 1981 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.

344. “The Night-Blooming Cereus,” by Robert Hayden, from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright © 1972 by Robert Hayden. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

VISUAL

16, 19, 30 (top and bottom), 42, 50, 52, 53, 56, 68, 74, 81, 110, 135, 136, 158, 173, 199, 203, 221, 226, 343, 352 (top and bottom), 353 (top and bottom), 354 (top and bottom), 355 (top and bottom), 356, 357, 360, 361. Photographs and images courtesy of the author.

83, 84 (top and bottom), 298, 302, 358. Photographs courtesy of Hilary Lo.

9(top). Corum, Samuel. Anadolu Agency. White Supremacists March with Torches in Charlottesville. August 11, 2017. Photograph. Courtesy of Getty Images.

9(bottom). Bettman. Black Students Integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. September 4, 1957. Photograph. Courtesy of Getty Images.

10. Young boys harassing the Horace Baker family, the first African American family to move into the all white Delmar Village neighborhood of Folcroft, Pennsylvania. August 30, 1963. Photographic print (gelatin silver). Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

13. Sara and Horace Baker Outside Folcroft House, 1963. August 31, 1963. Photograph. Courtesy of Associated Press.

64. Golub, Leon. Threnody II. 1987. Acrylic on linen. Alexander Harrison Fund/© Estate of Leon Golub/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

65. Lawrence, Jacob. Although the Negro was used to lynching, he found this an opportune time for him to leave where one had occurred. 1940-41. Tempera on gesso on composition board. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

78. Dyson, Torkwase. 2_41°54’34” N/ 87°37’44” W. 2018. Poplar, composite board, cotton cord, and graphite. 84 in. x 84 in. x 32 ft. 2018. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery and Graham Foundation. Photo: RCH.

122. Brewer, Edw. V. Cream of Wheat advertisement. Published in Needlecraft Magazine from 1921 to 1923. Painting. Retrieved from the New York Public Library.

138. Ashton Harris, Lyle. Picture from Today I Shall Judge Nothing That Occurs (2017). Gay’s Head, Martha’s Vineyard. Late 1980s. Photograph. Courtesy of Lyle Ashton Harris and Salon94.

140, 141. Anelli, Marco. Pictures from Marco Anelli: Portraits in the Presence of Marina Abramovic (2012). New York, NY. 2010. Photographs. Marco Anelli © 2010.

142. Walker, Kara. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. 2014. Polystyrene foam, sugar. Approx. 35.5 x 26 x 75.5 ft (10.8 x 7.9 x 23 m). Installation view: Domino Sugar Refinery. A project of Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY. 2014. Photo: Jason Wyche. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Sprüth Magers, Berlin.

143. Screengrab of social media post related to Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby installation at the former Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. May 24, 2014. Instagram post.

161 (top and bottom). Williamson, Sue (artist); Lindner Gander, Tracy (graphic designer). Stills from Can’t Forget, Can’t Remember. 1999. Interactive video projection. Used with permission.

187. Bey, Dawoud. Untitled #4 (Leaves and Porch). 2017. Photograph © Dawoud Bey, courtesy of Stephen Daiter Gallery.

222. Photo of Carlwood Sharpe on the cover of The Pennsy, Pennsylvania. April 1954. Courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

244. Dyson, Torkwase. View of Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School. 2018. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery and the Graham Foundation. Photo: RCH

245. Dyson, Torkwase. Selection from Tuning (Hypershape, 200-410). 2018. Gouache, ink, and pen on paper. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

321. Bradford, Mark. Pinocchio Is On Fire. 2010. Multimedia installation. © Mark Bradford. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

329 (top). Screengrab of white men with bats during Fishtown riots, from since-deleted YouTube video.

329 (bottom). Butler, Chad. Photograph in WHYY article. Philadelphia, PA. June 2, 2020. Courtesy of the photographer.

359. Smith, Cauleen. Cauleen Smith’s drawing of my mother’s hands holding Beloved. 2022. Gouache on paper. 12 x 9 in. Painting. Courtesy of the artist.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHRISTINA SHARPE is a writer, professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg, and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and the Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010).