A Story with Water

Tonight I finished Emma Langdon Roche’s Historic Sketches of the South (1916). Roche’s position toward her subject—slavery in Alabama—is doubtless problematic. On the one hand, she shows surprising sympathy and respect for the survivors of the Clotilde, the last slave ship to come to America, and yet she also goes to great pains to note the complicity of Northern colonists and the English in the American slave trade (“In fact the English, including therein the colonists of New England, became more extensively engaged in the [slave] traffic than all other slave-trading European nations combined” p.8) and suggests throughout the book that slaves conditions and opportunities improved greatly in their contact with whites.

The book nonetheless offers up valuable stories of Tarkars brought to Mobile on the Clotilde–repeatedly emphasizing how they longed to return home. Roche rarely addresses and never satisfactorily resolves the contradiction between her claims that the Tarkars have benefited from their forced immigration to America and their undying wish to return home. Following their wishes, she uses their Tarkar names rather than their American names (for instance, Kazoola rather than Cudjoe Lewis), as the Tarkars hope that through her book “these names might drift back to their native home, where some might remember them” (121), but she always returns to their gratitude to God whenever the subject comes up. Roche merely claims that Kazoola and the others, however much they might want to return home, are grateful that they were able to stay together and form a community and that they are very proud of their conversions to Christianity. She seems to suggest that their gratitude for having survived the Middle Passage and being able to maintain their own community in Africa Town balances their sorrow at having been captured, transported to a foreign land, and been enslaved.  In a late chapter in which Roche relates a number of small stories and parables by Kazoola, she includes a remarkable passage about Kazoola’s first encounter with the sea that ends with Kazoola’s thanking God:

Though Kazoola has an intense longing for home, he regards his advent to America as a part of the goodness of God and enjoys telling how after Foster [captain of the Clotilde] had bought him at Whydah, he was sold by one of Dahomey’s men and hidden under the white house. Urged by an innate curiosity about the mechanism of things, he stole from his hiding-place and climbed upon the stockade fence; “I hear the noise of the sea on shore, an’ I wanta see what maka dat noise, an’ how dat water worka—how it fell on shore an’ went back again. I saw some of my people in a little boat and I holler to them. Then Foster spied me, an’ he say, ‘Oh hee! Oh hee!’ an’ pulla me down. An’ I was the last to go. Supposy I been lef’ behind–what become of Kazoola? Or supposy de ship turna over, an’ de sharks eat us. Oh Lor’! God is good!” (114-115).

What an arresting story: “I hear the noise of the sea on shore, an’ I wanta see what maka dat noise, an’ how dat water worka—how it fell on shore an’ went back again.”

How that water works. That is a place to write from.

Odds and ends

I’m simultaneously reading bunches of books, which hopefully accounts for why I’m so slow to finish any one. For the past couple of days, I’ve been alternating between Ravi Howard’s Like Trees, Walking and the selected transcripts of the civil trial brought on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Howard’s novel mixes the factual and the fictional. At center is a family of fictional undertakers charged with caring for the body of Michael Donald. The book is meticulously researched, and doubtless I’m reading much of the same material that Howard consulted. At times, shifting between Like Trees, Walking and the court transcripts and reading mostly at night, I forget where I read what. Among my reading last night was the brief testimony of Donald’s aunt who was only a couple of years older than Donald. She set the family scene so clearly that today I wondered whether my memories of it had been formed by Howard’s novel or her testimony.

Here, briefly, is what I remember. That Friday night, Michael Donald watched a basketball game, probably a University of South Alabama game, at the home of his aunt and her mother. After it was over, he went out for a pack of cigarettes but never came home, and the family worried about him most of the night because it wasn’t like him to stay out all night, much less when they expected him back within a few minutes.

The next morning while his aunt’s mother was making a cake for a niece, they got a call from Donald’s grandmother. The aunt, who was, I think, in another room, heard her mother answer the phone and almost immediately gasp or cry out. She said she knew instantly it had to do with Michael because they’d been worried about him all night, and his failure to return when he was expected was so out of character.

I don’t know what to do with this. So much of the testimony that I’ve read has dealt with the planning of the lynching, why they waited until that Friday (not just for the verdict on the Josephus Anderson case, but for Bennie Jack Hays to close on property that he was selling on Herndon Avenue), who provided the rope, and so forth, that this domestic scene of a young man spending his Friday night visiting family is so tender it’s unnerving.

The aunt describes the same clothes I’ve already seen itemized in the coroner’s report. Here, they are brand new purchases from a recently cashed income tax refund—white sneakers, blue jeans, a new jacket. Here, I see them as pristine, neatly-cared for, not as items logged into evidence— not muddied, not bloodied, but tidy. I imagine the cake baking as not only a way to care for family, for the niece who’d suffered the stroke and who the cake was for ostensibly, but also as a nervous charm to occupy a worried mind. I see not only the young man who worked for the Mobile Press Register and was attending classes at Bishop State, but the family he spent his Friday nights with, the family who worried about him into the night and morning.

I think it is this domesticity that overlaps with my reading of the Howard novel that quite brilliantly focuses on the family and community response to the murder more than macabre details of the crime and its motives (at least as far as I’ve gotten into the book). Which is not to say that Howard swerves from horror of the crime—the book is honest and forthright, especially in the scenes in which the narrator Roy, his father, and his grandfather prepare Donald’s body for viewing—but that Howard captures the impact the tragedy might have had not just on individuals, but on whole families. It fleshes out that world of family and community only hinted at in the small portions of family testimony in the transcripts.

I don’t see myself in competition with Howard (I’d lose!), but rather I see my project as a complement, a supplement. It’s these family scenes that I’m most fearful of appropriating. Which isn’t to say that I plan on neglecting them altogether, but I see one of the benefits of a collection of poems is a focus that is scatter-shot and fractured. I’ve been toying with the idea of having, smack-dab in the middle of the book, a page of silence to mark the voice that was silence and can not now be adequately spoken for (not by me, for sure). But I am also drawn to tell the stories of the murderers, not to glorify them or apologize for them—nothing could do that, and the more I read about them the more I’m horrified—but to suggest perhaps how mundane the path to horror is.

And that’s what gets me: the subtle chain of escalations from a backwards thought or vague bigotry into a calculated, group-planned and -executed cold-blooded murder of a random man pulled off the street.

From my first inklings of this project, I’ve known that I want to play with implicating myself, the culture, and my readers. I’ve known that I want to avoid the easy demonization of the perpetrators as so monstrous as to be deviants utterly unlike me or my readers or people we all may know. I want to suggest that we’re all capable of the subtle deviations that amplified could make any of us deviants. Not that we must police ourselves for any deviation from the norm or from political correctness—these “deviants” were ultimately disciplined to adhere closely to a strict hierarchy and unified ideology—but that I think we must always question ourselves and realize that relatively small untruths or backwards ideas left to grow and fester can have real, flesh and blood consequences.

~~~

This weekend I had a heated argument with a much-loved family member about race relations. As a Southerner who grew up hearing things as a child that I now find repugnant as an adult and who knows good people who admittedly hold prejudices but strive to not act on them, I’ve struggled to figure out a balance between what I guess Christians might call loving the sinner and hating the sin. I do believe, and maybe this is backwards, and maybe it’s a rationalization, that there are different shades and levels of racism, that racism isn’t, forgive the unavoidable pun, black and white, but is subtly nuanced and all the more insidious because of it. What is a racist? Is it something you say, do, or are? Does a single slur or off-color joke make its teller a racist? What about a Freudian slip? Is a racist someone who actively pursues a racist agenda? Can someone be a racist and not know it? Is it then something like a cultural inflection? Is the very idea of a “racist” itself an essentialist category? Is racism something like Foucault’s notion of power: is it an institution? does it flow through individuals based on their position (and thus explain how particular groups can both identify as the victims of racism on the one hand and on the other perpetrate racism against another group)?

All I know is that no matter how tired of it we might be, race is an issue that is not done with us. I suspect the easy answers, the easy delineations, the very desire to be done with race and pretend we’ve moved on is a deflection. I suspect that to truly open one’s self to questioning this category that is perhaps the defining category of America, whether as mixing pot or colonized or colonizer, is to risk questioning our conception of America and of ourselves as Americans (which makes me wonder why racism is so often linked to a particular kind of patriotism). Everything could fall apart. Everything we think we know about ourselves could fall apart. But how can we know who we are if we don’t understand how we can hate?

The Shape of Things to Come

I’ve spent the better part of the day trying out different methods for recording my ideas for shaping the manuscript—yes, the manuscript I’ve only barely started to write. I’ve played with XMind, Zoomorama, and Prezi and looked at other online and desktop tools for mindmapping and visualizing data. At the end of the day, I have one XMind chart and a stack of 4×6 cards.

While XMind is great for keeping track of the various elements I want to write about and how they’re connected, the note cards work well for notes on the kinds of poems I want to write. I’ve got a stack of fifty—enough to represent the pages of a slim manuscript. I’m using them both to plot out the structure of the book and to serve as individual poem assignments, which I’ve always found helpful come drafting time. Right now, I’m just listing topics and notes about the kind of tone I might want to try for. Just broad sketches, so I know where I’m going and so I have a place to jot down poem ideas as they come without impeding the flow of writing. I find the magnitude of this project so large and intimidating, I don’t know where to start or how to focus because I feel like I should write about everything at once. This is a way to force me to slow down and focus without neglecting the desire to be inclusive.

I also want either a six-foot cork board or a homemade white board where I can plot out notes for the collection, including something like three separate but related timelines that I can hang poems from my various themes on so I can play with their relationships. I very much like the idea of something material that I can just pick up and restick somewhere else. That, alas, will have to wait.

On my last night in Cincinnati

For someone who so poorly plans trips, I have had a visit with friends, profs, and poets that has been both productive and invigorating—not to mention warm and nurturing. Friends have generously welcomed me into their homes and seen to my feeding—even while writing papers for conferences or helping run one while simultaneous playing host. Professors have listened to me ramble about my project and told me that my rambles are ready for recording, commiserated about the peculiar negotiations of career and life, and pointed me in critical directions I was to blind to see I was heading into anyway. I feel, as I write this before heading out for a last round of drinks with my closest friends in Cincinnati, invigorated and excited about my life, my colleagues, and my work—a feeling that was all too often muted during my coursework and exams.

This excitement remains tempered with what I’m coming to see as a necessary anxiety. Sure, I’m an anxious character by nature, and I almost certainly rely too much on authority for validation (which accounts more than a little for so many of my years of graduate study), but I think especially for this project that I’ve undertaken that this anxiety is constantly urging me to see my project beyond myself. Every time I feel I’ve found some detail or perspective that begs to be in the book, I also feel a sense of guilt with my fascination and excitement about my subject. I’ve found stories that I feel must be told and retold, must be worked through again and again, and while I recognize that they are compelling stories, I think it is crucial that I always remember that there are real people and real families, real heartbreak and real sin behind these stories. How do I speak the sin and not take part in it? How do I recover the voices of the dead for whom there is scant account and that mostly written by the aggressors—aggressors who are my ancestors? How can I both write about and respect the bodies of the dead? How do I consider the lives of the aggressors and the perpetrators of vile acts without rationalizing or apologizing for them? How can I assume the authority to write what I feel I must?

Beth Ash says, by way of Gayatri Spivak, that I can’t but I have to anyway.

I also suspect that this anxiety that I feel must in some form or another be shared by documentary poets and writers who draw from history. I suspect that documentary poetry, with its urge to quote and cite, is itself a mechanism shaped by the anxiety of authority and the anxiety of responsibility felt toward the subject.

History itself must be anxious. History without anxiety is mere ideology. Anxious history prickles self-consciously at its currents of ideologies—the currents that not only flow through but constitute it, as any history altogether devoid of ideology is a but mute corpse. I must practice a resurrectionist art and remember that whatever good I do I am only a thief and the voice that animates is neither mine nor that of the dead.

~~~~

Though I haven’t written anything beyond this blog, the shape of the book is beginning to form in my head. Gone is the idea that I will dedicate equal sections to various historical instances or eras. Rather the main thread of the book will concern the “The Michael Donald Case.” I use quotes because something about “case” following the proper name feels coldly dismissive of the young man whose life was so violently, so needlessly cut short. Yet it would also feel wrong to say that the book is about Michael Donald himself. He of all people had no choice in the part he was forced to play in this tragedy. He of all people was never and will never be able to speak of it. But his name has become inextricable from the incident of his lynching and the resulting murder and civil cases. His name must be spoken, but it cannot be spoken for.

Instead I see something like an orchestral movement—the main theme built around the larger “The Michael Donald Case” but with a counter-theme—drawn from DeSoto and the Maubilla Indians through the Clotilde on up to Mobile’s more recent past—scattered throughout to reverberate against the main theme.

~~~~

Tomorrow I will drive to Mobile through what will be the remains of Hurricane Ida. I think a hurricane is a fitting image. There is the dead silence at the center of a storm so big it cannot have but one voice within its storm walls that can stretch a width that spans the length and width of Alabama or as it breaks up and spawns tornadoes, pushing north into the heartland of America. It will likely follow the Underground Railroad—the systems of rivers and navigable water ways—the trains of the old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio railroad—the Great Migration—right on up into the middle of America.

The Michael Donald Papers

I spent the afternoon in the basement of one of the University of South Alabama’s Springhill Campus buildings where their archives are stored in a suite that used to be the X-ray lab, as the campus seems to be a former hospital. It’s surprisingly cheerful for a place that must be located near a former morgue. There’s a huge wooden conference table, a small collection of books dedicated to Mobile history, bookshelves of boxed files of photographs, and at least for the first half hour I was there, a family from Michigan with thick Fargo-like accents on a genealogical vacation who cheerfully took pictures of each other getting pictures they’d ordered of their recently tracked down, long dead relatives.

As luck would have it Scotty Kirkland who put the Michael Donald papers together when he was conducting research for his masters thesis—which he defended earlier this week—was working in the archives and was a great help in advising me which articles and judgments I could get through Lexis Nexus and which I should have photocopied. I think I got most everything I need from the files—court transcripts, coroner’s report, newspaper clippings, and leads on articles and interviews—but I’ll likely be back to follow up or do more research or see what photos they might have in their massive collection. In the meantime, just the transcripts and the coroner’s report (which I’ve just read) are just over 300 pages, and that’s a good bit to get started on.

For the newspaper articles and other miscellaneous items—including the charter for the Mobile klavern of the KKK—I took pictures with my digital camera, as I only had enough money to photocopy the court transcripts, so that’s another 184 pages, including more than a few that are the first pages of articles I need to order through the interlibrary loan or the library’s databases.

As I took the pictures and nervously thumbed through the files, certain names kept popping up, asking for more attention. I saw Shaw High School—the high school I graduated from— mentioned several times and think maybe Henry Hays and Tiger Knowles went there too. One article takes its title from Donald’s sister (I think): “Michael never came home.” There are articles from this decade about the retirements of the coroner who said he never saw a more horrid crime and the judge who presided over the case and Morris Dees, one of the founders of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who represented Beulah Mae Donald in her civil suit against the Klan. And there are pictures of Mrs. Donald, seated at a courtroom pew with her daughter and then older and dressed for church. There is an article about the Hays family titled “Raised in Hate,” with old family snapshots when Henry and his brother Raymond were little and photos of Raymond now and Benny Jack Hays, the father who raised them in hate, beating at a WALA cameraman with his cane outside the courthouse. There is the slender column of Michael Donald’s obituary.

This material is so much bigger than me, so much bigger than anything I’ve ever worked with, and it matters. It matters that in the Library of Congress online catalog only one book shows up under the subject heading of “Donald, Michael, 1961-1981″—a single book of fiction. There are masters theses at Auburn and now at the University of South Alabama, an information file at Michigan State University, court records in Lexus Nexus, a string of articles in the New York Times, a piece Ted Koppel did for the Discover Channel, but just one book and that of fiction. I should note that I’m hardly the only one interested in the Michael Donald papers. There are certainly other people who’ve requested them. And I’m sure too that I’m missing something, but this seems too damned big, too significant for there not to be more written about it in the eighteen years since that March morning. This has to be more than “news,” more than trials and judgments, more than a renamed street, more than a historical marker underneath a tree.

Here is what I can tell you about Michael Donald: The last thing he ate was an orange. All during his beating, strangulation, and hanging from a tree, the watch and chapstick in his jeans’ pocket never fell out. He wore black high top Converses and white jockey shorts. His organs were deep purple, “exquisitely congested” with blood. His heart weighed 350 grams.

My favorite pasture

This pasture on the road to Daphne (Hwy 64), the same road St. Adorka’s is on. I love this pasture, the rolling hills, the cows, the wood and wire fence, the way the road winds through this hilly part, all of it.

St. Adorka’s African Universal Church

In the years since my folks moved to Loxley, I’ve become fascinated with a little church on Highway 64, driving into Daphne. The small, white building is largely unremarkable except for large painting framed in rough stone brick that overlooks what might have once been a shallow pool. Only ever getting but a small glimpse of the painting and the church each time I pass, I decided to find out more about St. Adorka’s.

St. Adorka’s was founded by Laura Adorka Kofi (sometimes appears as Kofey, Koffey or Cofey). The online biographies that I have found, which all seem to be very close versions of one another, all say that she was an African princess from Ghanna who had visions that she was to come to American and encourage African Americans to return to Africa and better themselves and to establish economic ties between African and America. For a time she was associated with Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Agency, but for some reason she was shunned by or left the existing organizations she had been working with in order to found her own church, two branches of which still survive, one in Daphne, pictures above, and one near Jacksonville where an independent African-American settlement called Adorkaville was created. Mother Kofi, as she was known, was killed while preaching to a crowd on March 8, 1928, in Miami. According to one website, the Florida Times Union, a local newspaper, estimated that as many as 10,000 people attended her funeral.

As you can see, especially if you click the pictures to see the larger versions, the painting is very textured. In the couple-second glance I’d get driving by, I thought, in fact, that it wasn’t a painting on a canvas, but more of a mosaic or something like bas relief. I love her feet, how she looks like she could walk onto the platform or pool, and the seven stars and seven torches around her.

USA Archives!

Today I will visit the University of South Alabama Archives for the first time! I’m very excited. They’ve got some fantastic collections and are conveniently (for me anyway) located downtown on Springhill Avenue. I haven’t been on Springhill Avenue since I’ve been back, but it’s one of my favorite streets lined with Spanish moss-laden oaks as wide as Volkswagons, and all by itself Springhill Avenue is a little tour of architecture. Will update!

Southern Women Writers Conference; Rome, GA

I don’t even know what time I left Loxley, but it was late. Somehow, even with twenty minutes of stand-still traffic (an accident) and the temptation to marvel at the statue-still deer feeding on the Berry College green, I still made it to the Natasha Trethewey reading. My hands were trembling slightly from the nerves of the six-plus-hour drive when I slipped into one of the pews of the Berry College Chapel as Trethewey was being introduced. I geekily pulled out pencil and pad to take notes—a habit I mostly frown upon, but here couldn’t resist.

Trethewey is a gracious and graceful reader, generous with her audience and poised. She speaks, with seeming ease, of her family, race, the south, the Renaissance, paintings, and more without ever sounding painfully confessional or overly learned. I think that’s what I mean by her grace. I don’t know how she pulls it off, being so damned good, so smart and emotionally honest, all while seeming like she could offer you a cookie at any moment. She puts her audience at ease while she undoes them with her poems. And her voice! I love her voice and the familiar twang of her laugh. I’m smitten.

All but I think the first poem were from Native Guard, so in a sense I wasn’t “blown away” because they’re poems I’ve read many times and I wrote about more than a few of them in my poetry exam. I was already pre-blown-away. But I savored her commentary on the poems and the music of her reading. I often felt like head banging or singing along, but I resigned my joy to a modest foot tap.

I had no idea that “Pastoral” (a poem I call in my mind “The Fugitive Poets”) was supposed to be funny. She said it was full of inside Southern writer jokes (and yes, we get the Fugitives and Faulkner), but I thought they were more references than jokes. To me the poem is spooky and haunting and self-conscious and anxious. My experience with the south can’t be as complicated as Trethewey’s, but the poem still speaks to that part of me that has a hard time reconciling my love and disgust for my home. Maybe I take it too seriously. Maybe Trethewey’s saying it’s full of jokes downplays the anxieties of the poem (and to put her audience at ease, to say to these other Southern writers, Yes, I like the south, too). And I suppose the poem is full of the funny incongruities of dreams. And yet those incongruities, the juxtapositions and out of place-ness of it all are I think the heart of the poem—the difficult position of Southern black writers. She did say in the question and answer period that it is an attempt to write herself into Southern poetry, to resist the stereotype of black poets as urban or Northern or more black than southern. As wise New York-Ohioan Akhim Cabey once told me, “We’re all from the South, baby.” Ain’t that true!

—————-

Leaving the chapel, walking alone back to my car, I remembered the last time I was here. Or half remembered it. I came here at least once, maybe twice for forensics tournaments. I think maybe it was here that I placed—maybe the only time I ever placed. Whatever trophy I got would be in Reynolds Hall (if not utterly ditched). I definitely remember walking half-dead and hung over from the car to the building one morning with Alan (and everyone else). I think it was here that Chris Reeves shared his last menthol with me. Maybe this is where we partied with the boys from the all-male Christian academy, including a guy that looked like Lou Ferrigno (Me: “you look just like Lou Ferrigno”; Ro: “You know who else you look like? The Incredible Hulk!”). I don’t know. I think back, and there’s a chilly February rain where memories ought to be, maybe the scratch of a silk blouse catching on winter-rough elbows. There’s a feeling, a weight, like the air is heavier, like I am the girl who was here over a decade ago, but how much of her is really left?

An effort

Always the question: how to make poetry of this?

Here’s my quick effort at a found poem from Iberville’s journal.

–>

The 6th.

All morning there was no fog and no wind,
but the river swells with uprooted trees.
My brother, with the two canoes,
keeps to one side of the banks.
The trees, whose leaves are fat as hands,
rise higher with the ground as we go.
I have not yet noticed any walnut tree
or fruit tree, but shore side some patches
of blackberries are almost ripe enough to eat.
Yesterday we noticed an Indian had passed along.
A good many hanging vines have already bloomed.
I fired two canister shots from the swivel guns.

<–

The 6th.

All morning there was no fog and no wind,

and the river swells with uprooted trees.

My brother, with the two canoes,

keeps to one side of the banks.

The trees, whose leaves are fat as hands,

rise higher with the ground as we go.

I have not yet noticed any walnut tree

or fruit tree, but shore side some patches

of blackberries are almost ripe enough to eat.

Yesterday we noticed an Indian has passed along.

A good many hanging vines have already bloomed.

I fired two canister shots

from the swivel guns.