Hideous Draft

Her room is a blind island in the house, whose sound and breath shuttle forth in the shared air, the air of her room pungent, hung heavy with the greasy disinfected smell of her long dying, half a decade’s static marathon, the bed a last siege, the beige plastic bed rails a hospice palisade. From her lookout, the small television on the dresser is a distant shoreline, peels of repeat game-show laughter and applause wash in waves. This is your life, Irene Mahalia Dickson Cornelson. The eternal newlyweds of decades past are flickering prophets of young love’s delighted ignorance. You have taken to telling everyone you love them. Not just family, but orderlies, technicians and now the hospice nurse and the man appraising the house for another mortgage. I sit with you through a thunderstorm. You fear a power outage will kill the oxygen. I ask you where the love for strangers comes from, and you tell me a story about how you didn’t always love everyone.

One night, Jesus laid it down in my heart in a dream. I was all in darkness, wasn’t nothing but empty darkness until he put before me the wrinkled face of an old black woman crying so pitiful and broken-hearted. I ain’t never seen nobody so broken-hearted—it cut right through me, made me broken-hearted too. I asked how come she hurt so much, what done happen to make her so sad. She told me her son had died, and then Jesus laid her pain in my heart like it was my own. I tell you, I woke up crying something fierce. No mamma should know the death of one of her babies. Jesus laid down it in my heart how all us mothers ain’t no different in our love, it’s the love we got that makes us the same, and after that I wasn’t prejudiced no more because Jesus laid it down in my heart. We’re all his children, and he told us we got to love one another.

Southern Women and Lynching

Can’t sleep. Heady achey.

Found a brief history of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching by Jessie Daniel Ames called “Southern Women and Lynching.” In 1930, southern women met at a conference “to discuss what Southern women could do to stop lynching.” Ames suggests that some white women were inspired to take up the cause against lynching “by an increasing awareness . . . of the claim of lynchers and mobsters that their lawless acts were necessary to the protection of women.”

Here are some highlights:

Consideration of the crimes of which the victims had been charged brought further enlightenment. Less than 29% of these two hundred and eleven persons were charged with crimes against white women. Then, what, asked the women, had the 79% [should read 71%] done? Offenses of some kind against white men, they were told.

Furthermore in every lynching investigated, some attention had been paid to the mobs as well as to the victims and the crimes. Women were present in some numbers at every lynching and not infrequently they participated. Some of the women were mothers with young children. These children, members of a future generation of lynchers, were balanced precariously on parents’ shoulders in order to have a better view. Young boys and girls were contributing their numbers to the mobs both as spectators and as leaders.

. . .

After many questions and some debate the conference came to the unanimous decision that the first and most necessary move on the part of white women was to repudiate lynching in unmistakable language as a protection to Southern women. Unless this idea of chivalry could be destroyed, lynchers would continue to use the name of women as an excuse for their crimes and a protection for themselves.

. . .

First, all the resources of the Council of the Association were to be directed toward the development and promotion of educational programs against lynching, leaving the field of political action to other groups.Second, emphasis at all times was to be placed on the repudiation of the claim that lynching is necessary to the protection of white women.

According to Ames, after six years, membership in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching had grown from twelve (12!) to over thirty-two thousand (32,000!). The group acted primarily through other groups they already belonged to–mostly churches. Local members were to keep the association informed of any lynchings that occurred and, “regardless of the nature of the crime allegedly committed by the victim of the mob, [to publicly condemn] the lynching, [and] request for a rigid investigation of the mob by state and county officials.” Furthermore, they urged local leaders, especially local sheriffs, to sign pledges against lynchings.

Ames closes by envisioning the end of lynchings:

The philosophy of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching is based on the belief that a continuous educational program, carried on day by day in the home, in the school, in the press, and in the church will end lynching by public demand.A year will come when Tuskegee Institute will report “NO LYNCHINGS DURING ^_____.” The actual year is the only thing about which Southern women are uncertain. But they believe that they will be able to name the year fairly accurately:

When a hundred thousand men and women pledge themselves in writing against lynching and agree to work against the crime publicly; When every sheriff in the South pledges to uphold his oath of office–to support the Constitution without fear of bodily harm–or When every sheriff of the South is pledged in writing to his constituents to prevent lynchings in his county; When every Grade A college in the South makes the discussion and study of lynchings a part of classroom assignments.

I think there’s work left to do. Having taught college English off and on for a decade, I think most folks in “Grade A colleges” feel too uncomfortable, too scared of the topic to approach it honestly and fully in a public discussion, and as long as we are unable to have a civil discussion, we guarantee for ourselves future problems. I think we fear that to talk about these things at all will bring about instantaneous racial conflict. Is civility between the races (how quaint and backwards that sounds), then, so superficial that it requires for its continuance a mutual pretense that history doesn’t exist? Well, some progress that is.

“We who?” I find myself asking myself. I know that discussions are happening publicly, but I’m not sure how willing undergraduate college students (and their instructors) are to have these conversations in the classroom, and I do think that’s problematic.

I’ll connect this to Harry Reid, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the ladies of the View another day. Man, somebody needs to write a paper about the ladies of the View. And maybe connect it to the Daily Show. I think the thesis would be something like pop culture holding official culture account, which, since it’s not a complete clause, is a pretty shitty thesis. Did I mention I’m head-achey and can’t sleep?

Yet Another Scary Alabama Document: Day 2 of the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention

I’m just gonna throw some quotations at you from the main dude presiding over the 1901 constitutional convention, the “honorable” John B. Knox. The 1901 constitution still in effect in Alabama. While certain unsavory bits are no longer enforced, Knox’s comments say a whole lot about the spirit of the document whose purpose was to formally institutionalize white supremacy. I am not kidding, that’s what Knox himself says in no uncertain terms. The proceedings are available at the website for the Alabama State Senate. All of the below comes from Knox’s introductory speech on Day 2 of the convention. Warning: the following is likely to be upsetting and offensive.

And what is it that we want to do? Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.

This is our problem, and we should be permitted to deal with it, unobstructed by outside influences, with a sense of our responsibilities as citizens and our duty to posterity.

. . . .

THE ATTITUDE OF THE SOUTHERN MAN TOWARDS
THE NEGRO

The Southern man knows the negro, and the negro knows him. The only conflict which has, or is ever likely to arise, springs from the effort of ill-advised friends in the North to confer upon him, without previous training or preparation, places of power and responsibility, for which he is wholly unfitted, either by capacity or experience.

When it comes, however, to dealing with the negro, in domestic service, or in a business way, the Southerner is infinitely more indulgent to him than his Northern compatriot.

There came to us a well authenticated story from Kentucky, of an old darkey, who, after the war, influenced by the delusion that the only friends the negro had were in the North, wandered up into Illinois, hoping to find an easy fortune. But here he soon found that while the people had much to say to him about the evils of slavery, and the destiny of his race, every one with whom he did business held him to a strict accountability. Trained, as he was, to the slow movement of the mule in the Southern cornfield and the cotton patch, he could not handle the complicated machinery, or keep pace with the quicker methods of farming in the West, and so he was soon cast adrift. When he asked for help he was told to go to work, and so he wandered, foot-sore and weary, back through Indiana and Ohio until he reached again the old Southern plantation in Kentucky. Finding the planter comfortably seated upon his veranda, the old darkey approached, hat in hand, and asked for something to eat.

“Why, you damned black rascal, what are you stopping here for? Go into the kitchen and tell the cook to give you something to eat.”

“Before God, Master,” the old darkey said, grinning from ear to ear, “them’s the sweetest wordy I’se heard since I left old Dixie.”

The old man was home at last. He was among people who understood him, and whom he understood.

WHITE SUPREMACY BY LAW

But if we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law–not by force or fraud. If you teach your boy that it is right to buy a vote, it is an easy step for him to learn to use money to bribe or corrupt officials or trustees of any class. If you teach your boy that it is right to steal votes, it is an easy step for him to believe that it is right to steal whatever he may need or greatly desire. The results of such an influence will enter every branch of society, it will reach your bank cashiers, and affect positions of trust in every department; it will ultimately enter your courts, and affect the administrations of justice.

. . . .

The justification for whatever manipulation of the ballot that has occurred in this State has been the menace of negro domination. After the war, by force of Federal bayonets, the negro was placed in control of every branch of our Government. Inspired and aided by unscrupulous white men, he wasted money, created debts, increased taxes until it threatened to amount to confiscation of our property. While in power, and within a few years, he increased our State debt from a nominal figure to nearly thirty million dollars. The right of revolution is always left to every people. Being prostrated by the effects of war, and unable to take up arms in their own defense, in some portions of this State, white men, greatly in the minority, it is said, resorted to strategemused their greater intellect to overcome the greater number of their black opponents. If so such a course might be warranted when considered as the right of revolution, and as an act of necessity for self-preservation. But a people cannot always live in a state of revolution. The time comes, when, if they would be free, happy and contented people, they must return to a Constitutional form of government, where law and order prevail, and where every citizen stands ready to stake his life and his honor to maintain it.

. . . .

Mississippi is the pioneer State in this movement. In addition to the payment of a poll tax, there it is provided that only those can vote who have been duly registered, and only those can register who can read, or understand when read to them, any clause in the Constitution. The decision as to who are sufficiently intelligent to meet the requirements of the understanding clause is exclusively in the hands of the registrars.

. . . .

It is contended in defense of this provision, that while, in effect, it will exclude the great mass of ignorant negro voters it does not, in terms, exclude them, and applies generally to all classes of voters, without reference to their race, color or previous condition of servitude; that all negroes who were voters prior to January 1st, 1867, of whom, it is claimed, there were quite a number, could vote, and the descendants, whether slaves or not, of these free negroes were entitled to vote, and that these were quite numerous. And on the other hand, that white people born in other countries–emigrants, who cannot read and write, could not vote, nor could white people who were unable to vote in the State in which they lived prior to 1867, unless they were able to read and write. If it be said that this exception permits many more white people to vote than negroes, the answer was that this would be equally true of any proper qualifications which might be proposed. It would be true of an educational qualification, and it would be true of a property qualification, the validity of which has never been questioned.

These provisions are justified in law and in morals, because it is said that the negro is not discriminated against on account of his race, but on account of his intellectual and moral condition. There is a difference, it is claimed with great force, between the uneducated white man and the ignorant negro. There is in the white man an inherited capacity for government, which is wholly wanting in the negro. Before the art of reading and writing was known, the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon had established an orderly system of government, the basis in fact of the one under which we now live. That the negro on the other hand, is descended from a race lowest in intelligence and moral preceptitions of all the races of men. As was remarked by the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Williams vs. Mississippi (170 U.S. 213), quoting the Supreme Court of Mississippi: “Restrained by the Federal Constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the Convention discriminates against its characteristics and the offense to which its criminal members are prone.”

Is your blood boiling? Mine is.

I am glad that the website for the Alabama State Senate makes available to the public the 1901 constitution, Alabama’s sixth, as well the proceedings (though it would be helpful if amendments were dated). I do wish, however, that there were more momentum behind the Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform. If you’re interested, you can find out more at the group’s Facebook group.

The Perversion of the Past

Last night I stumbled upon a record of lynchings in Alabama from 1871 to 1920, compiled for the Alabama Department of Archives and History by the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute on AlabamaMosaic.

As documents go, this one is incredibly moving. It merely lists the lynchings in Alabama from 1871 to 1920 by date and includes victims’ race, supposed crime, and location. The great bulk of the victims were black males and the most common crimes were murder and rape. Periodically whites and women appear and the less common “crimes” include mistaken identity, frightening women and children, incest, barn burning, and mule poisoning. That so many of the victims are listed as “name unknown” and that among the crimes listed is “mistaken identity” captures the irrational wrath and hatred that sparked spontaneous, ill-informed, and ill-judged retribution. That more than a couple of those lynched were listed as being released on bail hints at the complicity of law enforcement who released prisoners they likely knew to be in danger. Not that I ever thought lynching was innocuous or an innocent bygone of history, but something about the mundane details captured in this document—or the details that escaped the document because they failed to be recorded, details as seemingly significant as the name of the lynched, the nature of his or her supposed crime, or even the location of the lynching—makes it all the more real, all the more poignant.

Who was the unnamed man lynched for miscegenation on July 25, 1889? What were so many men accused of doing that is now only recorded as “charged with being a desperado”? What of “Roxie Elliot, colored (woman) charge not given” or “Eliza Lowe, Ella Williams, William Williams and Willis Lowe, colored, charged with incendiarism” or “The Four Savage Brothers, white, charged with being outlaws” and the three men named Sims—all lynched on the 26th and 27th of December, 1891 in Choctaw County, or “John Brownlee, colored, charged with political activity” or ” Manuel Dunegan, colored, to prevent giving evidence” or Zeb. Colley, Mary Deane, John Rattler, Martha Green, and Alice Green, all charged with murder in Greenville in April, 1895, or “Eden Williams, white, charged with incest” in Mantua or “Hollinshead, white, charged with turning state’s evidence” or “John Hayden, colored, mistaken for another” or Louis and John Bonner, both “colored, charge–for giving evidence against ‘White Caps’”? Behind each fragmented line’s date, location, victim, and crime is a story of human tragedy.

So many are unnamed. Few, if any, received trials—even unfair ones. Every year between 1882 and 1920, there were lynchings—plural—except for 1916, in which only one is recorded. Between 1892 and 1897, there were at least ten and as many as seventeen per year. 1901 and 1907 saw a dozen and eleven, respectively. In all, as many as 273 lynchings are accounted for in this document.

The document is dated February 21, 1921. It does not reckon lynchings after 1920, but they did not end.

The only indication of the pure brutality of the lynchings is the two-paragraph description of presumably typical lynchings “in slavery days.”

In May, 1835, two Negroes were burned to death near Mobile, for “most barbarously murdering” two children. The murderers had their trial, the result of which is given in the following paragraph taken from a Mobile paper: “As the court pronounced the only sentence known to the law — the smothered flame broke forth. The laws of the country had never conceived that crimes could be perpetrated with such peculiar circumstances of barbarity, and had therefore provided no adequate punishment. Their lives were justly forfeited to the laws of the country, but the peculiar circumstances demanded that the ordinary punishment should be departed from — they were seized, taken to the place where they had perpetrated the act, and burned to death.” Cutler, “Lynch Law.” p. 108.

In 1855, a Negro who had raped and murdered a young girl was brought before the Sumter County superior court in regular session. “When the case was called for trial a motion for change of venue to the county of Greene was granted. This so exasperated the citizens of Sumter (many of whom were favor of summary punishment at the outset) that a large number of them collected on the 23d. ult., took him out of prison, chained him to a stake on the very spot where the murder was committed, and in the presence of two or three thousand Negroes and a large number of white people, burned him alive.” –Phillips, “American Negro Slavery.” pp 462-463.

Perversion. There is something deeply perverse about this whole form of “punishment”–the instant gratification of “summary punishment,” the near total absence of legal institutions, the anonymous crowd of citizens as executioners, the festival atmosphere that often accompanied the lynchings. There is both the anarchy of the mob and the overzealous application of a strict moral code that must stamp out any perceived threat immediately, brutally, and without any deliberation.

Perversion. The spectacular and intimate displays of violence visited upon bodies and the communal participation and performance go beyond mere execution to something like ritual fetish. The deaths were tortuous and horrific, the audiences large, close, participatory.

I wonder what lessons the children, white and black, took from these gatherings—about their parents, about crime and punishment, about deliberation, about being in the herd or being trampled by it, about not being heard. I wonder about the white hypocrisy of performing with mastery the very brutality projected upon the black other. I wonder at the legacy of lynching, even as the memory fades from popular memory. I have no answers.

feeling mournful

I’ve been in a rare fit of melancholia for a week or so, flitting among numbness, raw sorrow, and a general aching pressure that sits on top of everything. Perfect internal weather for remembering the dead. So it’s hardly surprising that after a lovely skate today in perfect 77° weather, I sat to watch the sun skirt the horizon so its beams only hit the tops of the longleaf pines at the Loxley Municipal Park and thought of Nicole. Something about being still after skating hard enough to feel the familiar pressure of my heart beating against my ribcage made the world seem clearer, sharper, not just an obstacle course to move through, navigating this or that potential pitfall.  The tall trees’ small swayings, a squirrel’s frenetic, explosive maneuvers, the distant moaning buzz of the season’s last grass being cut, and the tell-tale sent of that cut grass, browning pine straw, and dirt underneath, drying from last night’s rain each made itself present, prominent in my perception. When had I last felt the full presence of such a landscape–this combination of longleaf pines on mown winter grass, this autumnal angle of sunlight, this scent of iron-rich earth?

In another park on the other side of the bay, I remember a February afternoon, warm until the sun began to lower. It was Nicole’s birthday, Valentine’s Day. I don’t remember the year. It was the first time I saw Japanese magnolias bloom, or the first time I saw them enough to notice them. That day they became my favorite trees. We had a picnic. Others were there. Craig, Monica, Steve, Kaely? I’m not sure. I only remember Nicole. She tried to teach me something like a dance. Palms facing but not touching, we mirrored each other in some ouija-like movement. I couldn’t tell, minute-to-minute, who led, who followed. Later, after the chill began to creep back, we folded the blanket we’d picnicked on together. It was another dance, the way the wind lifted the blanket like a belly-dancer’s veil. I remember, too, years later (I presume), after she and David had married and moved away, sitting on the dam and either writing to her or in the diary she’d given me. The still high water on my right, the crashing down water on my left. Nicole, Nicole who is gone and who knew and loved a part of me I often have a hard time holding on to.

+++

Tonight, I’ve been reading the closing arguments of the Beulah Mae Donald suit against the Klan and the various conspirators. Morris Dees is moving. So too, strangely, is Tiger Knowles who asks the jury to find him and the other defendants guilty. And here I find myself, back at the computer, googling the name of an unfamiliar Klansman (Tommy Rowe, the Klansman/FBI informant who rode in the car with the men who shot and killed Viola Luizzo in Selma and whose deposition had been read in Donald vs. the United Klans of America). Internet way leads onto internet way, and I read a profile of a woman, pictured holding a rainbow flag, daughter of a Klansman turned civil rights worker, whose son was beaten for being gay. And I think of Ky Clanton.

Twenty years on and there are great fuzzy gaps in my memory. How long did I know him? I remember a year’s worth of freshman homeroom conversations, but surely I knew him in middle school too. We were both outcasts, picked on miserably (though, thinking back, I must have had it easier). He was a willowy black boy with long fingers on delicate hands. His voice sounded like laughter–rising, falling, light and joyous–except in those whispered conversations. He told me how much to his own horror he found himself kissing older men and liking it, lifting his shirt to show me the rows of hickeys on the brown skin of his narrow chest left by a college boy. He hated how all those years he’d denied being gay to his tormentors, how he believed it, but now his mother would sneak into his room at night and sprinkle him with holy water to try to ward off his sexuality. What to do, what to do? He had problems bigger than any kid should have. The world seemed to hate him, his mother seemed to shun him, and he was lost. I can’t remember what I said to him, whether I gave him advice or comfort or just listened, except that we kept talking. That was his last year of high school. He was floundering and miserable and maybe starting to get into trouble. He found some kind of internship for high school students and moved to Key West. Before he left, he gave me a small stuffed rabbit with tremendous ears. I can’t remember anything about him giving it to me now. What he said, why he was giving it to me (except that he was leaving), whether I understood at the time, or if, as I commonly did, I only pretended to understand. Some time later, after he was gone, I was in my room looking at the stuffed rabbit, and I became suddenly frightened for Ky and did my best version of a prayer for his protection. Many months after that I found an obituary notice in the newspaper (though I never read the obituaries). I think I learned from a teacher that he’d been missing for nine days before his body was found floating in a canal in Key West (do they even have canals?) with blunt wounds to the head.

Through all of my moves I have kept the stuffed rabbit. Now I keep it in a bin of often used office supplies on a shelf near the folding table that passes for a desk. In Cincinnati it was in the same bin but inside the drawer to my night stand. I don’t remember where I had it in Columbus. Before that I think it stayed in a drawer of the mahogany dresser that was once my mother’s.

It is good to hold on to the gifts of the dead.

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 whom 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 silenced 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.

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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.

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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.