Where he goes the space follows him. If the man left his seat before Union Station you would simply be a person in a seat on the train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat when where why the space won’t lose its meaning.
You imagine if the man spoke to you he would say, it’s okay, I’m okay, you don’t need to sit here. You don’t need to sit and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through. A tunnel.
All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?
The soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who? You erase that thought. And it might be too late for that.
It might forever be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man, the window, the tiled tunnel, its slick darkness. Occasionally, a white light flickers by like a displaced sound.
From across the aisle tracks room harbor world a woman asks a man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats. She wishes to sit with her daughter or son. You hear but you don’t hear. You can’t see.
It’s then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family.
November 23, 2012 / In Memory of Jordan Russell Davis
February 15, 2014 / The Justice System
VII
Some years there exists a wanting to escape—
you, floating above your certain ache—
still the ache coexists.
Call that the immanent you—
You are you even before you
grow into understanding you
are not anyone, worthless,
not worth you.
Even as your own weight insists
you are here, fighting off
the weight of nonexistence.
And still this life parts your lids, you see
you seeing your extending hand
as a falling wave—
I they he she we you turn
only to discover
the encounter
to be alien to this place.
Wait.
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
The opening, between you and you, occupied,
zoned for an encounter,
given the histories of you and you—
And always, who is this you?
The start of you, each day,
a presence already—
Hey you—
Slipping down burying the you buried within. You are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day.
The outside comes in—
Then you, hey you—
Overheard in the moonlight.
Overcome in the moonlight.
Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you hear this—what happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half concerns you. He is speaking of the legionnaires in Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail and you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze—
The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half concerns you. It’s not yours. Not yours only.
And still a world begins its furious erasure—
Who do you think you are, saying I to me?
You nothing.
You nobody.
You.
A body in the world drowns in it—
Hey you—
All our fevered history won’t instill insight,
won’t turn a body conscious,
won’t make that look
in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing
to solve
even as each moment is an answer.
Don’t say I if it means so little,
holds the little forming no one.
You are not sick, you are injured—
you ache for the rest of life.
How to care for the injured body,
the kind of body that can’t hold
And where is the safest place when that place
must be someplace other than in the body?
Even now your voice entangles this mouth
whose words are here as pulse, strumming
shut out, shut in, shut up—
You cannot say—
A body translates its you—
you there, hey you
even as it loses the location of its mouth.
When you lay your body in the body
entered as if skin and bone were public places,
when you lay your body in the body
entered as if you’re the ground you walk on,
you know no memory should live
in these memories
becoming the body of you.
You slow all existence down with your call
detectable only as sky. The night’s yawn
absorbs you as you lie down at the wrong angle
to the sun ready already to let go of your hand.
Wait with me
though the waiting, wait up,
might take until nothing whatsoever was done.
To be left, not alone, the only wish—
to call you out, to call out you.
Who shouted, you? You
shouted you, you the murmur in the air, you sometimes sounding like you, you sometimes saying you,
go nowhere,
be no one but you first—
Nobody notices, only you’ve known,
you’re not sick, not crazy,
not angry, not sad—
It’s just this, you’re injured.
Everything shaded everything darkened everything shadowed
is the stripped is the struck—
is the trace
is the aftertaste.
I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done, was also done, was never done—
The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much
to you—
When the waitress hands your friend the card she took from you, you laugh and ask what else her privilege gets her? Oh, my perfect life, she answers. Then you both are laughing so hard, everyone in the restaurant smiles.
Closed to traffic, the previously unexpressive street fills with small bodies. One father, having let go of his child’s hand, stands on the steps of a building and watches. You can’t tell which child is his, though you follow his gaze. It seems to belong to all the children as it envelops their play. You were about to enter your building, but do not want to leave the scope of his vigilance.
July 13, 2013
A friend writes of the numbing effects of humming and it returns you to your own sigh. It’s no longer audible. You’ve grown into it. Some call it aging—an internalized liquid smoke blurring ordinary ache.
Just this morning another, What did he say?
Come on, get back in the car. Your partner wants to face off with a mouth and who knows what handheld objects the other vehicle carries.
Trayvon Martin’s name sounds from the car radio a dozen times each half hour. You pull your love back into the seat because though no one seems to be chasing you, the justice system has other plans.
Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.
Despite the air-conditioning you pull the button back and the window slides down into its door-sleeve. A breeze touches your cheek. As something should.
What feels more than feeling? You are afraid there is something you are missing, something obvious. A feeling that feelings might be irrelevant if they point to one’s irrelevance pulls at you.
Do feelings lose their feeling if they speak to a lack of feeling? Can feelings be a hazard, a warning sign, a disturban
ce, distaste, the disgrace? Don’t feel like you are mistaken. It’s not that (Is it not that?) you are oversensitive or misunderstanding.
You know feelings destabilize since everyone you ask is laughing that kind of close-the-gap laughter: all the ha-ha’s wanting uninterrupted views. Don’t be ridiculous. None of the other black friends feel that way and how you feel is how you feel even if what you perceive isn’t tied to what is …
What is?
And so it goes until the vista includes only displacement of feeling back into the body, which gave birth to the feelings that don’t sit comfortably inside the communal.
You smile dumbly at the world because you are still feeling if only the feeling could be known and this brings on the moment you recognize as desire.
Every day your mouth opens and receives the kiss the world offers, which seals you shut though you are feeling sick to your stomach about the beginning of the feeling that was born from understanding and now stumbles around in you—the go-along-to-get-along tongue pushing your tongue aside. Yes, and your mouth is full up and the feeling is still tottering—
“The subject of so many films is the protection of the victim, and I think, I don’t give a damn about those things. It’s not the job of films to nurse people. With what’s happening in the chemistry of love, I don’t want to be a nurse or a doctor, I just want to be an observer.”
As a child, Claire Denis wished to be a nurse; she is no longer a child. Years have passed and so soon we love this world, so soon we are willing to coexist with dust in our eyes.
And, of course, you want the days to add up to something more than you came in out of the sun and drank the potable water of your developed world—
yes, and because words hang in the air like pollen, the throat closes. You hack away.
That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmaneuvered years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping.
That’s the bruise the ice in the heart was meant to ice.
To arrive like this every day for it to be like this to have so many memories and no other memory than these for as long as they can be remembered to remember this.
Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce—
a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.
I can hear the even breathing that creates passages to dreams. And yes, I want to interrupt to tell him her us you me I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.
Tell me a story, he says, wrapping his arms around me.
Yesterday, I begin, I was waiting in the car for time to pass. A woman pulled in and started to park her car facing mine. Our eyes met and what passed passed as quickly as the look away. She backed up and parked on the other side of the lot. I could have followed her to worry my question but I had to go, I was expected on court, I grabbed my racket.
The sunrise is slow and cloudy, dragging the light in, but barely.
Did you win? he asks.
It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson.
Images
Page 6
Michael David Murphy
Title: Jim Crow Rd.
Date: 2008
Credit: Michael David Murphy
Page 19
Kate Clark
Title: Little Girl, 2008
infant caribou hide, foam, clay, pins, thread, rubber eyes
15 × 28 × 19 inches
Page 23
Hennessy Youngman
Screen grab from ART THOUGHTZ: How to Be a Successful Black Artist
Courtesy of Jayson Musson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L_NnX8oj-g
Page 33
Nick Cave
Title: Soundsuits
Photo by James Prinz
Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Page 37
Title: Tennis-Brazil-Wozniacki-Exhibition
Date: December 7, 2012
Collection: AFP
Credit: AFP/Getty Images
Page 41
Title: Untitled (Rutgers women’s basketball team)
Date photographed: April 10, 2007
Credit: MIKE SEGAR/Reuters/Corbis
Pages 52–53
Glenn Ligon
Title: Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), 1990–91
oilstick and gesso on panel
80 × 30 inches
Page 74
Mel Chin
Title: VOLUME X No. 5 Black Angel
The Funk and Wag from A to Z, 2012, excised printed pages from The Universal Standard Encyclopedia, 1953–56, by Wilfred Funk, Inc., archival water-based glue, paper 524 collages, each varies from 8 × 11 inches to 17 × 23 inches.
Image courtesy of Mel Chin
Description: A popular, vintage encyclopedia is processed to represent contradictory layers and logic of personal and public information. The images have been extracted from all twenty-five volumes of a 1953–56 Funk & Wagnall Encyclopedia and reconfigured as collages, unleashing the potentiality of images trapped by historical context. New political and psychological associations emerge in the black-and-white presentation that covers the walls.
Pages 86–87
Toyin Odutola
Title: Uncertain, yet Reserved. (Adeola. Abuja Airport, Nigeria.), 2012
pen ink and acrylic ink on board
20 × 30 inches
29½ × 39½ × 1½ inches framed
Page 91
Hulton Archives
Title: Public Lynching
Date: August 30, 1930
Credit: Getty Images
(Image alteration with permission: John Lucas)
Pages 96–97
John Lucas
Title: Male II & I, 1996
gelatin silver prints and found objects
72 × 60 inches
Pages 102–103
Carrie Mae Weems
Title: Blue Black Boy, 1997
From the series “Colored People”
silver print with text on mat
30 × 30 inches
Pages 110–111
Glenn Ligon
Title: Untitled (speech/crowd) #2, 2000
silkscreen, coal dust, oilstick, glue on paper
40 × 54 inches
(101.6 × 137.2 cm)
Page 119
Radcliffe Bailey
Title: Cerebral Caverns, 2011
wood, glass, and 30 plaster heads
97 × 100 × 60 inches
Pages 122–128
John Lucas
ABC NEWS IMAGE
Page 147
Wangechi Mutu
Title: Sleeping Heads, 2006
mixed media, collage on Mylar; “wounded wall”: punctured latex
Set of 8: Approx. 17 × 22 inches
(43.2 × 55.9 cm) each.
Wall installation done on site.
Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter
Los Angeles Projects
The Pinnell Collection
Page 160
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Title: The Slave Ship, circa 1840
oil on canvas
© Burstein Collection/CORBIS
Page 161
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Detail of Fish Attacking Slave from The Slave Ship
© Burstein Collection/CORBIS
Works Referenced
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Laurel-Dell, 1962.
——. Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial Press, 1963.
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
s, an American Slave. 1845. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1992.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
——. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1965.
Hammons, David. Concerto in Black and Blue (mixed media), 2002.
Lee, Kevin. http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/spectacularly-intimate-an-interview-with-claire-denis. Published on April 2, 2009.
Lowell, Robert. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959.
——. For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993.
Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Youngman, Hennessy/Musson, Jayson