The Message, page 2
It was clear that such power must serve something beyond my amusement—that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence I saw around me, that beauty must be joined to politics, that style possessed must meet struggle demanded:
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other. On the one hand there stood slavery, a stern reality glaring frightfully upon us, with the blood of millions in its polluted skirts, terrible to behold, greedily devouring our hard earnings and feeding himself upon our flesh. Here was the evil from which to escape.
On the other hand, far away, back in the hazy distance where all forms seemed but shadows under the flickering light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-capped mountain, stood a doubtful freedom, half frozen, and beckoning us to her icy domain.
This is Frederick Douglass breathing life into the abstract dyad of slavery and freedom—particularly the latter. Slavery is obviously evil. But to pursue the “good,” the enslaved must forsake the very real land of their birth for a dream and maybe a nightmare—an “icy domain” that looms “in the hazy distance” under “flickering light…half frozen.” Douglass’s freedom is not banners or anthems, but terror that he nonetheless embraced. The contrast—the bright good of freedom in principle, set against the dark unknown reality—evokes the cliché “the devil you know.” But Douglass’s chiaroscuro of language illuminates the truth buried in the cliché so that we are drawn closer to a distant experience, and Douglass is thus not a stock character called “slave,” but a human like us. To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act. For Black writers it has been so often employed that it amounts to a tradition—one that I returned to that summer in Virginia with you.
I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen. And what I see is this: a figure standing at the edge of a sprawling forest tasked with mapping that forest with such precision that anyone who sees the map will feel themselves transported into the territory. The figure can see the snowy peaks in the distance and might conjure some theories as to what lies between them and those peaks—pine trees, foothills, a ravine with a stream running through it. The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t know any of this beforehand. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.
A world made clear—that is what I felt at seven years old when the true face of football clarified before me. Freed from the biased curation of powerful parties, I now directly saw the sport’s terrible price. I am writing in the wake of #MeToo, which was, among everything else, a movement birthed by words. For it is one thing to sketch a world where “sexual assault is a problem in the workplace” and quite another to detail Manhattan offices with rape doors, or star anchors ambushing assistants on vacation, or actors who claim to be “male feminists” but leave a trail of abuse behind them. What I remember in reading the investigative pieces on these cases is how all the activist and academic jargon—all the talk of “patriarchy” and “rape culture” and “male privilege”—became solid and embodied in a way that did not just leave me convinced but implicated me. It was not news to me that I was privileged, as a man, but I now felt that privilege with new horror. I thought about my own career and understood that whatever its challenges, a rape button did not rank among them. And that is the world made clear:
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.
Audre Lorde was writing about poetry, but I think her words apply across all arenas of writing. You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, “You’re doing it wrong.” But we are not them, and the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.
The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me. But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this—to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.
When we last spoke it was the Fall semester, almost two years ago. During a light moment, I promised you that I would submit my own essay for the next workshop. You were giddy, in no small part, to turn my own lessons against me—to point out where I was vague, verbose, or just lazy. But when the semester ended, I had produced no essay. It seems I was still that middling student from thirty years ago. But the essay was real—so real that I have not seen you since. I’ve been traveling—Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine. But I’m home now, and with me I bring my belated assignment—notes on language and politics, on the forest, on writing. I’ve addressed these notes directly to you, though I confess that I am thinking of young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.
II.
On Pharaohs
WHEN i stepped off the stage i knew i was home
had been here before had been away
roaming the cold climate of my mind where
winter and summer hold the same temperature
of need.
and I held up my hands. face. cut by the northern
winds and blood oozed forth kissed the place
of my birth and the sun and sea gather round
my offering and we were one as night is surely day
when you truly understand the need one has for the other.
a green smell rigid as morning
stretched like a young maiden ’cross the land
and I tasting a new geography took off my shoes
let my feet grow in the new dance of growth
and the dance was new and my thighs
burning like chords
left a trail for others to follow when
they returned home as all must surely do to make
past future tense.
Sonia Sanchez, “Rebirth”
The other day, as I was packing for my trip to Dakar, my mother texted me a copy of one of her old sketches. This seemed appropriate, in that the sketch gave me a moment to reflect on why this long-deferred trip so weighed on me and how that long deferral related to some of my earliest notions of imagination and art. It’s true that I grew up in a house of words—articles, books, lyrics. And it’s true that writing took hold of me young and held me in its orbit, but there were many moons pulling at the tides of my mind. My father kept a modest and motley collection of revolutionary art—pencil sketches of pharaohs, afro-absurdist sculptures, Harlem Hellfighters captured in lithograph. In almost every house we ever lived in, he built a display of Wheaties boxes, potato chip packages, and bags of cookies, unopened, much as a toy collector might keep an original Barbie or a vintage G.I. Joe. These too were works of revolutionary art, because all these packages featured Black people, and none of them in the shuffling and shucking style that so plagued my parents’ youth.
As for my mother, I think, in some other life she would have been an artist. She is a graceful dancer. She loves music. I see her now as she was then, in her short natural and thick glasses, pushing her silver Volkswagen Rabbit down Liberty Heights, tapping the wheel and singing to the Pointer Sisters: “Well, Romeo and Juliet / Samson and Delilah / baby you can bet…” I heard it all in that car or on the turntables at home—Prince, Nina Simone, Carmen McRae, the Platters, the Drifters, John Coltrane, Jerry Butler, Taj Mahal, Joan Armatrading. My mother has an innate sense for craft, too. I have warm memories of the two of us at the kitchen table with Scotch Tape, index cards, scissors, Elmer’s paste, and wire hangers, all in service of science fair tri-folds, art class collages, or dioramas of history. She took up drawing for a while, and I would find her sketch pads scattered throughout the house. And now, all these years later, she’d found a forgotten one, too—and in it a portrait of my father, sitting sideways in a chair, his legs crossed, a fisherman’s cap on his head and a book in his hand. At the top of the sketch there was a handwritten caption—“Daddy reads all the time”—and another at the bottom—“Daddy says he reads to learn.” The captions were mine.
My father thinks he can fix the date of the sketch’s creation. It is long before your time—1978. He is five years out of the Black Panther Party, and it is now clear that the revolution will not be televised, because the revolution will not be happening at all. We live in a row house up on Park Heights, which my parents rent by the week, and making that weekly rent is the hardest thing they will ever do. My father has worked all kinds of jobs—training guard dogs, handling bags at the airport, and now, down at the docks, unloading salt boats. But this day, the day of the portrait, he has been told that there has been some sort of misunderstanding with the union and he will not be paid. He comes home with the weight of it all upon him. He is thirty-two, and maybe now he can feel the dread that strikes you at that age—a realization that the years really can slip away, like all those dreams of revolution, without leaving a trace. And his response to all that weight is incredible: He picks up a book. Daddy says he reads to learn. But what was Daddy trying to learn?
I think if he tried to describe the forces shaping his life, my father would see his own actions first: his credits, his mistakes. But if he widened the aperture to the world around him, he would see that some people’s credits earned them more, and their mistakes cost them less. And those people who took more and paid less lived in a world of iniquitous wealth, while his own people lived in a world of terrifying want. And what my father would have also seen is that he was confronted not just by the yawning chasm between wealth and want, but by the stories that sought to inscribe that chasm as natural. He would have pointed to the arsenal of histories, essays, novels, ethnographies, teleplays, treatments, and monographs, which were not white supremacy itself but its syllabus, its corpus, its canon.
The weight of my first trip to Africa—the many years it took me to actually go—is directly tied to that canon and to the work of its luminaries, men like Josiah Nott, a nineteenth-century anthropologist, epidemiologist, and student of civilization. Nott was also a slaveholder, which meant that he profited from the trade and labor of the people he enslaved and then profited again by his chosen field of study. “My Niggerology, so far from harming me at home, has made me a greater man than I ever expected to be,” Nott wrote to his mentor, the anthropologist Samuel Morton, in 1847. “I am the big gun of the profession here.” That profession had but one aim—assembling all the knowledge Nott could summon to prove we were inferior and thus fit for enslavement.
It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.
When I was a boy, back in Baltimore, it was never enough for some kid who wanted to steal your football, your Diamondback dirt bike, or your Sixers Starter jacket to just do it. A justification was needed: “Shorty, lemme see that football,” “Somebody stole my lil cousin bike just like that one,” “Ay yo, that look like my Starter.” Debating the expansive use of the verb “see,” investigating the veracity of an alleged younger cousin, or producing a receipt misses the point. The point, even at such a young age, was the suppression of the network of neurons that houses the soft, humane parts of us.
For men like Nott, who sought not to plunder toys or kicks but whole nations, the need was manifestly greater. It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his: the slave drivers and slave breakers, slave hunters and slave ship captains, lords and congressmen, kings and queens, priests, presidents, and everyday people with no real love for the slave but with human eyes and human ears nonetheless. For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be crafted and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all.
Josiah Nott looked out at the world and saw great land masses, and to each he assigned a race and to each race he pinned an exclusive ancestor whose descendants were fit to rule or be ruled. “The grand problem,” he wrote, “is that which involves the common origin of races; for upon [it] hang[s] not only certain religious dogmas, but the more practical question of the equality and perfectibility of races.”
The problem of “common origin” was the problem of “common humanity,” and common humanity invalidated the warrant for African enslavement. For if we were all descended from the same parent, why, then, was one branch made solely for enslavement? This want of a specific warrant to plunder specific humans is as old as “race” itself. In fact, it is the whole reason race was invented. Africans had to either be excised from humanity or cast into the lower reaches to justify their exploitation. But evidence for this banishment has been generally wanting, while proof of the contrary is everywhere around us.
In 1799, the French invaded Egypt and beheld the splendor of a civilization older than Greece or Rome. Egyptology was born, and became a sensation, rolling across Europe like a wave, crashing into America in the antebellum years, just as slavery was reaching its apex. Nott was enthralled with Ancient Egypt. His collaborator, George Gliddon, separately referred to it as “the origin of every art and science known in antiquity.” But Egypt was in Africa—that continent Niggerologists deemed a font of slaves—and this immediately raised uncomfortable questions. “It has been the fashion to quote the Sphinx, as an evidence of the Negro tendencies of ancient Egyptians,” Morton wrote to his protégé Nott. “They take his wig for woolly hair—and as the nose is off, of course it is flat. But even if the face (which I fully admit) has a strong African cast, it is an almost solitary example, against 10,000 that are not African.”
Nott and Gliddon dedicated their lives to clearing up any confusion about the racial composition of Egyptians. They authored the treatise Types of Mankind, which sought, among other things, to cleanse Ancient Egypt of any taint of Blackness. “For many centuries prior to the present,” the two wrote incredulously, “the Egyptians were reputed to be Negroes, and Egyptian civilization was believed to have descended the Nile from Ethiopia!” When the record failed to support a total absence of “Negroes” from Egypt, Nott and Gliddon put them where they needed them. “It must be conceded that Negroes, at no time within the reach even of monumental history, have inhabited any part of Egypt,” they wrote, “save as captives.” This was, quite literally, an incredible coincidence—a society some thousands of years gone, organized exactly in the same manner as Nott’s plantations. But for Nott, Black enslavement in Ancient Egypt was not just a coincidence, it was a warrant:
The monuments of Egypt prove, that Negro races have not, during 4000 years at least, been able to make one solitary step, in Negro-Land, from their savage state; the modern experience of the United States and the West Indies confirms the teachings of monuments and of history; and our remarks…hereinafter, seem to render fugacious all probability of a brighter future for these organically-inferior types.
Long after Nott and Gliddon were gone, the idea of a Black Egypt—which by their lights meant any Egypt with a meaningful unenslaved population that resembled the enslaved population of America—haunted their progeny. In 1896, the famed educator Samuel Train Dutton insisted that Indigenous Americans and Blacks were fit only for an education worthy of the “heathen and the savage” so that they could be prepared for a life of manual labor. Key to Dutton’s project was ensuring that schools teach “how the ancient Egyptians differed from the Negro, and why.” In 1928, Egyptologist Arthur Weigall devoted a chapter of his Personalities of Antiquity to the Pharaoh Piankhi, which he entitled “The Exploits of a Nigger King.”
