Sound

We see a young man on the edge of an orange fishing boat, casual, playful, and carefree. We hear the sound of the ocean as his auditory accompaniment, and this feels correct. We watch as he moves with the ocean waves, sometimes rising to stand on the edge of the boat, sometimes toppling over into the water. When he falls, he does so playfully, rebounding quickly to return to the top of the vessel. He is long and lean, with sun-blessed dark brown skin. His hair is an auburn, blond, brown mix that tells you he is familiar with the warm outdoors. Ashes is a fisherman from Grenada, making his living on the water. He is twenty-five years old in the film. He will never be older than this. Steve McQueen’s short film, Ashes, is a video installation showing footage on two sides of a freestanding screen that sways between two temporal spaces (2002/2015) in order to memorialize a life cut short.

Ashes finds a stash of drugs on the beach one day and he thinks his future is secure. The drug dealers track him down and he returns their drugs to them. He is then killed by the dealers. McQueen finds out about Ashes’s murder years later and provides him with a burial plot and tomb. The second side of the video diptych takes place in the cemetery, where the tomb is constructed that will hold Ashes’s remains. In the video, the young man’s friends are in the process of that construction.

In what constitutes an accidental elegy, McQueen traveled to Grenada in 2002 with the intention of filming Carib’s Leap, which chronicles the mass suicide event in the seventeenth century when forty Caribs leapt into the sea to escape French troops. While scouting locations for Carib’s Leap, McQueen took a significant amount of B-roll, including images of Ashes in his comfortable surroundings. On grainy Super 8 film, we get to see Ashes in all of his youthful vitality. He is a compelling cinematic figure and he knows it. On the water or in it climbing his way back out, Ashes commands the viewer’s attention. His laughter is our laughter, his joy our joy. We see him, then, in the full embodiment of the life he has before him. The film allows us to linger there, in the center of that life. Debuting at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Ashes traverses themes of movement, migration, colonization, haunted histories, and diasporic connection to underscore the intimacy between the viewer and the subject. It is a film steeped in the emotive extension of sound: waves crashing against the boat, the clanging of chisels against granite. The sound of goats and dogs in the distance. The narrative memory of a friend now gone. “Ashes is a good guy,” his friend states in a voiceover from the film, “a brilliant guy on the ocean.”1 This charismatic, industrious adventurer brims with certain futurity in the film, as if his brilliance will forever be evident, forever be present. In its presentation at the ICA Boston in 2017, viewers were offered a still image poster from the film with Ashes sitting serenely on top of the boat, his back turned away from us, but not for long.

Accidental elegies abound in black culture, from Michael S. Harper’s book Dear John, Dear Coltrane,2 to Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film Black Panther, where Chadwick Boseman’s character is killed and resurrected on-screen, while Boseman performed this role knowing he was dying of terminal cancer, and that his off-screen death would be final.3 The film, then, like Harper’s collection of poetry, provides a lament for the dead who were still among the living but ended up encased in their artistic afterlives through the work of others.

My relationship to cinema is like this, frozen in time and also forward in time. Each moment I have been invested in cinema, it has been because the film reminds me of photography, retains something of its nature, its relationship with stillness. With Ashes, it is the opposite. Ashes, the still image, seems as though it is somehow moving, swaying back and forth with the rhythm of his body, and the rhythm of the ocean. If it were a song it might be a lullaby, softly intoning and imploring one to sleep. There is something soothing about the scene. Something that restores a sense of calm amidst a chaotic world. Sound animates emotion through memorial practices that focus on aural registers. Waves on a seashore, the recognition of the sound a beloved’s voice from a distance, melodies retrieved after they have been forgotten, and even the sound of silence in a space of contemplation. This chapter moves between sight and sound to memorialize those moments of sonic retrieval, where grief is swaddled in the sound of release.

In Lucille Clifton’s poem “blessing the boats,” she writes:

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that 4

Ronald Reagan announced a military invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983.5 “This part of the story is history,” Dionne Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return. “The coup took place, the Americans invaded. That was the end of the socialist path in Grenada and the English-speaking Caribbean.”6 McQueen’s juxtaposition of Ashes in life and his resting place after death has the effect of sonically clashing, lullaby against a cacophony of movement, invasion, rupture, turmoil and afterlife. Black elegies are thus suffused with memorial traces that are geographical, historical, juridical, and cultural. This gives them a more expansive reach, and I am interested in the sonic arc of this visual production.

These (Mournful) Shores

For a site installation at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, artist Jennie C. Jones creates These (Mournful) Shores, an aeolian harp extending the boundary of the granite wall overlooking a reflecting pool. Aeolian harp structures make impressive public art since so much depends on the capacity of the wind to provide an auditory assist. Jones’s installation haunts the archive of the institute, whose holding strength is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art. Where, Jones seems to ask, does one go to ponder the relationship of the transatlantic slave trade within these walls? Where is the sound of the Middle Passage in this archive? A string instrument with origins in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, the harp is one of the oldest musical instruments still in existence today. The extent of its reach as a global instrument is particularly compelling in Jones’s hands. As the Clark Art Institute archive makes clear, there is an alternate conversation to have regarding western art history and European history, particularly when the traumatic events of the Atlantic slave trade are brought to bear on this archive.

With These (Mournful) Shores, sight and sound envelop the open air, offering a space of contemplation and redress for the enormity of loss accelerated through the Middle Passage. In the multiplicity of the “shores” in the title of the work, and the elongation of “mournful” therein, Jones sutures the violent occurrence of black Atlantic slavery with its archival dissonance, that which continues into the present with little resistance. An encounter with These (Mournful) Shores is an encounter with the ghosts of slavery, and the unresolved histories that are largely unknown to others. It is to wait for the sound of that engagement with history to summon you. It is to respond when one is called. “While it may seem an inherent contradiction in terms,” Tina Campt writes in Listening to Images, “sound need not be heard to be perceived.”7 The spectacular achievement of These (Mournful) Shores is the time it requires for visitors to hear anything at all when they approach the structure. You step up to the harp, examine the wood and the strings. Step back from it in order to widen your view, and you listen. For what the wind has to say, what the earth has deemed vital, and the atmosphere does the rest. “Sound can be listened to,” Campt continues, “and, in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt; it both touches and moves people.”8 These (Mournful) Shores is the boundless sonic saturation that places black grief at its center. It matters not whether visitors hear a sound that matches their expectations but rather whether the reservoir of trauma is able to silently “touch” and “move” people. And be present in its auditory absence.9 “Black folk died in mournful collectives and in disconcerting circumstances,” Karla FC Holloway writes. “We died in riots and rebellions, as victims of lynching, from executions, murders, police violence, suicides, and untreated or undertreated diseases. In such deaths, being black selected the victim into a macabre fraternity.”10 This fraternity, Jones seems to say, is not without its sonic register, its haptic presence.

In a conversation with Huey Copeland, Jones was asked about the relationship between abstraction in her work and the sonic. “I wish I had synesthesia, but I don’t,” Jones explains. “It’s strange that these different musical and painterly references end up together in my work, because listening is so often separate for me . . . I often refer to sound works as re-compositions, so in that sense it like reinterpreting.”11 Reinterpretations abound in These (Mournful) Shores, from references to European painterly traditions, to the haunting reverberations of slavery’s earthly remains. Jones is attuned to these frequencies, be they sonic, visual, or atmospheric, as they inhabit space.

W. E. B. Du Bois is most attentive to the vicissitudes of black grief in chapter 11 of The Souls of Black Folk, a section titled “Of the Passing of the First-Born.” Each previous section of The Souls of Black Folk seems to gesture toward the palpable space of mourning “Of the Passing” engenders. Here Du Bois is grieving the death of his first child, a son named Burghardt. The birth of his child fills him with a joy he could barely articulate fully. “And so we dreamed and loved and planned by fall and winter,” Du Bois writes, “and the full flush of the long Southern spring, till the hot winds rolled from the fetid Gulf, till the roses shivered and the still stern sun quivered its awful light over the hills of Atlanta. And then one night the little feet pattered wearily to the wee white bed, and the tiny hands trembled; and a warm flushed face tossed on the pillow, and we knew baby was sick.”12 Burghardt Du Bois died of diphtheria at eighteen months old. On the publication of The Souls of Black Folks a few years after Burghardt’s death, Du Bois’s sadness and shock were joined by the profound responsibility of articulating the depth of his loss. And it follows the text like a cloud-shaped shadow of grief that trails Du Bois everywhere. Of his child’s death, ten days after the onset of the illness, Du Bois writes, “No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood.”13 Du Bois’s only reprieve is knowing that Burghardt will not die of the thousand cuts of antiblackness blanketing the nation, where indifference and violence coalesce into something unspeakably inhumane but quintessentially American. “Black death and black dying have cut across and through decades and centuries,” writes Karla FC Holloway, “as if neither one matters more than the incoherent, associative presence of the other.”14 By encasing the fact of “black death and black dying” within his personal story, Du Bois allows his soul to commune with others who are similarly steeped in grief.

Du Bois structures the sonic life of The Souls of Black Folk through the sorrow songs that frame each section. Alexander Weheliye writes: “In the last chapter, Du Bois lists slave labor, spirituality, and musical production as the main donation of black subjects to U.S. culture and history, but still insists first and foremost on the sonic. . . . Not only does Du Bois project black music as the chief cultural nadir of the American nation, he also constructs—through and around the spirituals—an extended metaphor for black subjects’ role in American culture at large.”15 I remain interested in the different sonic frequencies deployed by black subjects whose aim is to mourn losses large and small in ways that honor what was lost.

Of Thee I Sing

In what is arguably one of the greatest renditions of the national anthem performed before a live audience, Whitney Houston (mezzo-soprano) emerges on-screen and offers the Super Bowl crowd in Tampa, Florida, her distinctive voice for just under three minutes. The year is 1991, and the United States is ten days into the Persian Gulf War. Race, sonic registers, and nationalism converge in this performance. It is unlike almost any other rendition then or since. And it has a referent. Houston said the only version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” she ever liked was Marvin Gaye’s 1983 performance at the NBA Finals at the Forum in Los Angeles, California.

Dark blue suit and sunglasses—reflective—Gaye is accompanied by drum beat and keyboard. The previous day’s rehearsal has many NBA executive types concerned. What does he think he is doing? “The mystery,” I. Augustus Durham writes of Marvin Gaye’s melancholic performances, “like the melody, still lingers on.”16 The performance is one-part gospel rendition, one part improvisation, and all R&B swagger and style. It’s worth exploring what Houston found so compelling, so beautiful, that she used it as a guidepost for her own performance at the Super Bowl eight years later.

There is something bluesy in Gaye’s rendition that Houston is eager to recapture, a kind of sonic high and low that mourns even as it celebrates and glimmers with the possibility of freedom. This, I believe, is why Houston and Gaye both extend the note on the word “free,” signaling that this is work not yet done but work that must be done. Amiri Baraka writes that “it is impossible to say how old the blues is,” and this atemporality haunts black musical performance. “It is native American music,” Baraka continues. “Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.”17 Is it possible, in the improvisatory space between an elongated captivity and a relatively short freedom, to represent a desire not yet fulfilled? Robert Hayden’s poem “Frederick Douglass” presents this conundrum of freedom as a temporal ellipsis, rather than a period.

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing. 18

With a repetition of “when,” and “this,” Hayden offers Douglass as a central figure of the nation in its pursuit of freedom and belonging. If there is no final destination for this “freedom” then all that Douglass fought for, his successes and failures, belong to the nation as well. Because if freedom is “needful to man as air/usable as earth,” any refusal, national or cultural, is an investment in human erasure. It says the country traffics in images of inclusion that will never be fully incorporated, never real, and that this is the great irony of the United States. Its rhetoric of freedom is embedded in the reality of unfreedom.

What did Gaye know, when he sauntered, casually, to the stadium floor in his suit and aviator sunglasses, about what was to come? For him? For us? What did he sense in the moment, in the moments that followed, about redemption? Forgiveness. Mercy. Time. What did he carry on that day that we could and could not see? How can there be an elegy without clearly discernible loss? Marvin Gaye’s stunning 1983 rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Los Angeles was filled with the somber undertones of grief. In its purest R&B deliverance, Gaye’s version recuperates Baldwin’s “ironic tenacity” of sonic release.19 To take the national anthem and loosen its war tones, replacing them with the singular voice of collective ecstasy, and all the while deceptively presenting the song as an upbeat groove meant to signal the collective vibration of those in need responding to the call that will get them home. “I want to walk down the street under the new trees in Detroit, and tell Marvin I understand,” the poet Vievee Francis writes in “Marvin Gaye: Sugar.” Francis continues, “To let his daddy go. / That—trouble don’t last unless you hold on to it. / But that’s not true. / Trouble is always. / He knew that. / You know that.”20 Francis marks Gaye’s spectacular emergence into the archive of musical exceptionality that he embodied. Stalked by demons and by death, the soft voice meeting the softer face collides into a temporal abyss that failed to measure the possibility of his brilliance without also claiming the right to subsume him entirely. Marvin Gaye will die, murdered by his father a little over a year after this performance of the national anthem. His soulful plea during his NBA All-Star Game performance will follow him beyond death, and into the reservoir of meaning highlighted by his profound absence. Francis’s poem “Marvin Gaye: Mercy” trails the avenue of meaning left in the inscrutable act that precipitated his end—that the man to whom Gaye owed his life and his name (Gaye is named after his father) would be the one to take that life from him. Francis writes:

How can there be an elegy without clearly discernible loss?

Take Marvin Gaye. His father had no mercy. Paranoia does that. Mercy is spat like spinach between the teeth. It slips out in a pee stream. Those without it lose it by adulthood. Flatline. It is replaced by a thin-lipped smile of rage. And with mercy goes empathy. But Marvin wanted mercy so badly from a man who didn’t have it to give, as if all he once had now rested in Marvin. Who wouldn’t be jealous? To see your better self. To hear all that beauty wafting out of every car window sweet as cigarette smoke. I don’t trust those who don’t like the smell. Orthodoxy. That was the gun in his daddy’s hand. It said don’t this and don’t that and the only goodness is to wither on your own vine. But how could a man in the flowering of his life, so much abundance, let it go? He needed. He lost. Lost to the one always praying who should have repented, whose sins (if there are sins) were all there to be seen as that bullet that set aside flesh. I imagine it differently. It soothes me to do so. Marvin spent in his father’s arms after a cruel night. Envy replaced by pride in the son. His own wintry pride displaced by . . . love. See, even you can’t stand such sentiment. So how much harder was it for Mr. Gaye on his high horse. Stomping down the seed. 21

From “His father had no mercy,” the speaker vessels through Gaye’s personal familial conundrum as the center of gravity in a house of patriarchal refusal. “Who wouldn’t be jealous?,” Francis wrote. “To see your better self. To hear all that beauty wafting out of every car window sweet as cigarette smoke.” And just as quickly as smoke wafting up and out of a room with many windows, the residue of the scent remains. The speaker reimagines the death scene “differently” from the known account. “It soothes me to do so.” We are then offered an image of Gaye “spent in his father’s arms after a cruel night. Envy replaced by pride in the son.” If only a momentary reprieve, we take it. Because it allows for the temporary retrieval of this soft-voiced icon gone too soon and all too violently.

Marvin Gaye does something distinctive in this All-Star performance, so subtle and yet so very profound. You might miss it if you don’t listen to the song multiple times. Gaye’s musical performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” takes Shana Redmond’s definition of black anthems as its centerpiece. She writes, “Music is a participatory enterprise that requires certain performative knowledges in order for its political and movement aims to be realized.”22 While Gaye may not have been making an explicit political statement by performing this song in this way, he nonetheless understood the power that the combination of his voice and the national anthem would have on his intended audience. He was not wrong about this effect. I wonder, then, if attending to the visual apparatus of American flag imagery, while also listening to its sonic frequencies, can tell us something about the sight and the sound of a possible freedom, that which has yet to arrive? If we consider the ubiquity of the American flag, its mandates and motifs, the way it signifies on itself as a measure of the U.S. nation state, what might we uncover about blackness and its boundary markers? Gaye’s rendition alters the lyric “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,” to the hauntingly possessive “O say does my star-spangled banner yet wave.” An intentional choice that references the way African Americans have existed on the margins of full citizenship.

Ross Gay’s 2015 poem “A Small Needful Fact” extends Hayden’s poetic concerns in his elegy for Frederick Douglass to that of Eric Garner, who is famous for very different reasons than Douglass.

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe. 23

“A Small Needful Fact” begins: “Is that Eric Garner worked / for some time for the Parks and Rec. / Horticultural Department,” and ends with the line “for us to breathe.” Gay joins Garner’s life and his death with the natural environment that could not save him from an unnatural end. With the repetition of the adverb “perhaps” lingering between two lines, Gay allows Garner’s stifled possibility to hang in the air like the breath taken from him in a filmed attack where a police officer choked him until he expired. With his short elegiac offering Gay links Garner’s profession to the oxygen-dispersing plants that “in all likelihood, / continue to grow, continue / to do what such plants do” in a manner that befits the one (Garner) for whom there should have been an escape from external harm. Along with the repetition of “perhaps,” there are the coordinating words that stitch together the hope that Garner’s life intimated for the rest of us: “perhaps . . . some . . . continue . . .”

The relationship between blackness, grief, and what perhaps may continue is beautifully explored in Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones. Esch, our fifteen-year-old protagonist, guides the reader through the odyssey of an impending storm approaching the gulf region: a hurricane named Katrina. Esch lives with her father and three brothers on ancestral land they refer to as “the Pit.” The siblings are each steeped in mourning, having lost their mother years earlier when she died after giving birth to Esch’s youngest brother Junior. The Pit stands as a forcefield against the coming storm, even as it has been slowly decimated from without over time. “My mama’s mother, Mother Lizbeth and her daddy, Papa Joseph, originally owned all this land: around fifteen acres in all,” Esch tells us.

It was Papa Joseph nicknamed it all the Pit, Papa Joseph who let the white men he work with dig for clay that they used to lay the foundation for houses, let them excavate the side of a hill in a clearing near the back of the property where he used to plant corn for feed. Papa Joseph let them take all the dirt they wanted until their digging had created a cliff over a dry lake in the backyard, and the small stream that had run around and down the hill had diverted and pooled into the dry lake, making it into a pond. . . . Mama, the only baby still living out of the eight that Mother Lizbeth had borne, died when having Junior. 24

Amid this landscape of generational demise, Esch finds herself newly pregnant with no maternal reference point to help her navigate her impending motherhood. Salvage the Bones places nature and nurture in communion and in conflict as the Pit is presented as the neglected landscape that nevertheless provides some protection from the storm. Rooted in the security of this fragile home, even as the hurricane threatens displacement, Esch and her family navigate their collective interiority while their bodies exist mostly outdoors.

In this way, Esch and her brothers stand in solidarity with the land they know best, and the legacy from which they hail. They also listen for the soft undertones in each other. The whispers that say stop, rest, breathe, and watch out for grief. For it is grief that takes over the family like a storm with no sound, sneaking up on them in moments of peacefulness or disarray.

I am most interested in fissures of engagement where it seems a conversation about nationhood, race, and belonging is happening whether or not it is explicitly stated, offering a rendering or a reading not possible elsewhere. I’m eager to think through the meaning and the measure of “my star-spangled banner” as the group of people most frequently removed from its protective enclosure use the national anthem to lay claim to the country. Though this is not always a thing that registers cleanly, not always given the space the image or the song demands, it is a way through the scaffolded refusals performed by the state. And it is here, in a juxtaposition of race and nation, that new possible futures can be forged by sound.

I want to pause here, in the looping return of Marvin Gaye’s spectacular NBA All-Star Game performance so that we can truly consider his offering. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not usually the favored anthem for black Americans. That honor goes to “America,” formally titled “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” The difference is minor but important. Instead of what is essentially a battle song of war (written by Francis Scott Key during the War of 1812), black Americans preferred the gentler patriotism of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” It is perhaps more easily assimilated into the history of African Americans, perhaps more poignant, less bold, but I would argue that the evolution of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” when black performers offer their talents to the song, is one way of envisioning the futurity of that which is beyond nation.

In 2010 the Carolina Chocolate Drops released their Grammy Award-winning album Genuine Negro Jig. The title track is a dreamy swaying instrumental piece that defies categorization. It is not properly located in one genre of musical production and it is not properly a jig: Hands, feet, fiddle, and bones. Those are the instruments involved in making this song. So much of the body is necessary for the cadence of “Snowden’s Jig.” It’s heart pulse, mournful, joyous, subdued and ecstatic, organizes the circular motif of the song. Not a dirge, but not a jig either. “Fiddlers in the south,” writes Matthew D. Morrison, “developed their idiosyncratic style performing for mostly black gatherings on plantations, or in segregated settings in parts of the country.”25 With the task of returning folk music to the black folk who created it, the Carolina Chocolate Drops endeavor to follow the example set by black musicians who performed with collective intention.

The band, then composed of Justin Robinson, Rhiannan Giddens, and Dom Flemons had placed the song in their repertoire when they were approached by Howard and Judith Sacks, authors of the book Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem. The Sackses tell the band about the Snowdens, an African American family of musicians from rural Ohio, performing in the mid-nineteenth century. Their neighbor, Dan Emmett, is one of America’s earliest white minstrel performers, made famous for one song in particular: “Dixie.” The eldest Snowden brothers, Ben and Lew, lived into the twentieth century (Emmett died in 1904). The Snowden brothers’ gravestone reads, “Taught ‘Dixie’ to Dan Emmett.” Way Up North in Dixie is the painstakingly researched story of the Snowdens and the circulation of their creative work. They composed and performed music and also traded songs with other musicians. It’s clear that Emmett was able to copyright at least some of the Snowdens’ music as his own, including “Dixie.” I’m interested in the space between misapprehension and mimicry in a sonic/spatial realm. “Snowden’s Jig” is the elegiac throughline that I want to offer in this book—a sonic reckoning that opens onto one possible resolution to the problem of race and its violent investments. One way to mourn what has been lost and what may not be recognizable as loss.

About slave spirituals, or sorrow songs, written and arranged by enslaved men and women on U.S. plantation sites, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart.”26 To be black and “weary at heart” over racial violence is to exist in a vortex of visibility that has no resolution, offering the residue of black pain to an indifferent public. Grief, in its immediate and repetitive public presentation, is a burden that black subjects bear while the world watches, rarely intervening. I want to think about the enclosure of possibility engendered by a phenomenon Robert Burns Stepto refers to as a discourse of distrust. He writes,

I . . . raise questions about the adequacies of the “social models” for reader-response literary analysis, especially since they do not seem to be, in Du Bois’s terms, ‘frank and fair’ about the American “race rituals” that invariably affect American acts of reading. . . . In other words, storytelling narratives create “interpretive communities” in which authors, texts, and readers collectively assert that telling and hearing may be occasioned by written tales and the distinctions between telling and writing, on the one hand, and hearing and reading, on the other, are far more profound than they are usually determined to be in those interpretive groupings constituted by other types of fictive narrative. 27

Here Stepto is most interested in the space between fiction and storytelling that black writers negotiate with the understanding that misinterpretation and indifference will greet them. I want to extend this discourse into the sonic and the visual, so that we may explore the expansive range of black cultural production held within a circle of loss.

As with most arcs of investigation I find myself thinking about slavery’s memory in contemporary articulations of grief. Black subjects have been in, but not of, the elegy as it currently operates via the literary canon. How then to figure the immensity of loss when the expression of mourning is curtailed? I’m trying to think about sites in the United States that harm in the absence of an acknowledgment of black pain. Specifically, I’m interested in the way plantation weddings highlight the incoherence of a producible black elegy. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “it’s the place where the car hit the tree and your mother and brother died . . . but it’s just a regular street for everyone else.”28 Except in this case this street is a space of celebration for others. A place where joy allows a particular demographic to dance on the literal graves of the people never meant to find peace. And so to lament the dead is a difficult endeavor when black subjects are presumed to be perpetually offered for use.

Oak Alley Plantation

A disembodied voice speaks in the first person, inviting visitors to Oak Alley Plantation, outside New Orleans, Louisiana. Located on the west bank of the Mississippi, Oak Alley is a former working sugarcane plantation dating back to the early nineteenth century. Known for the twenty-eight oak trees lining the pathway of the Greek Revival big house, Oak Alley makes for a scenic view, particularly if that view is absented of the enslaved labor force sustaining and extending its wealth and grandeur. Oak Alley is tethered to a romantic view of the Antebellum South. Plantation tours usually minimize their own connection to the enslavement of African Americans, but Oak Alley’s minimizing is nonexistent (they have reconstructed slave cabins that look like quaint guest houses and it has the largest gift store I have seen on a plantation tour). Slavery without slaves.

As a site of tourism devoid of the visuality of terror, the imagined subject is a consistent enclosure of whiteness folding in around itself. The Nottoway Plantation, located between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in Louisiana, is a 53,000-square-foot slave mansion that was completed in 1859. We might consider the normative structures that allow weddings to take place on slave plantations but leave no room for the participants to grapple with the weight of history when that history doesn’t immediately bring these repetitive acts of violence to bear on the site. We could talk about haunting—both the ghosts of slavery and slavery’s discursive afterlives. Are they able to be imagined as well? How is whiteness configured here as a commodity and client base? (In other words, who is duplicating wealth while also providing a spatial incentive for racial fantasies of hegemonic power?) If, as is claimed on many an online forum, people choose these wedding venues for the beauty and opulence of the space and not for the imagined enslavement of others, why are these weddings so white? (Also: “plantation” is always in the name of these venues.) How does the site change when black subjects enter the frame? What are the questions that can be asked/answered? What unknowable thing can be known? Maybe the task is for us to think deeply through this archive for what it can tell us about the history of slavery in the United States, the place of the Confederacy in our current national debates, and the continual refusal of full citizenship that black Americans experience in the land of their birth. If we were to stroll through these ruins, as Faith Smith directs us, where might we go?

Michelle Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven opens its first section with one word: Ruinate. This particularized Jamaican colloquialism is precisely what Cliff wants to privilege as she begins her novel with the merging of natural, national, and imperialist forces facilitating the cultural “ruination” of a people. As the novel opens, a group of revolutionary soldiers (“true soldiers, though no government had ordered them into battle”) return to the rural part of the land to tame it and to take it back for the people brought to it by strangers. Distrustful of a built environment even if they are descended from those who built it, “they slept and ate outside, leaving the house to the bats and scorpions and lizards who now possessed it.”29 The ruin of the landscape will not allow the sounds of modernity and industrialization to rule; no plantation weddings with smiling white guests can be sustained in a space forged with the definite defensiveness of foliaged encroachment.

Cliff negotiates the import of the soldiers’ linkages—land to body—as a tethering of generational purpose. Her protagonist in the novel, the light-skinned Clare Savage, embodies both the ascendant fluidity of her white ancestors (clarity), as well as the perceived barbarisms of those formerly possessed by them as slaves (savagery). As she returns to the ruin to claim it as her own (it is her grandmother’s property), she marks the space of ruin as one that also buries its own history to create another in its place.30 Hegemony, in all of its varied creativity is at the center of Cliff’s literary concerns, and she uses the land as landscape, as the controlling and controlled feature of postcolonial identity. “Ruins may establish that there has been some break from the past,” Smith writes, “and that something valuable should be preserved from that past.”31 Past, present, and possible future await the warriors headed toward their collective destiny in No Telephone to Heaven, and their bodies represent the shape this destiny will take.

Intending to supplant self-possession with a history of external ownership, land and body merge in the narrative as the group moves through the mountainside by truck. Modernity glides through the foliage of the past, bringing its inhabitants along for the ride. They journey up and through the landscape of their dispossession as the country they want to save, Jamaica, becomes more politically bereft, more invested in tourism than trade, and less resistant to appropriation by external forces. They are looking for renewal in the past. Resurrection in the land of the living.

Clare represents the embodiment of this absorption, and the hybridity of her lineage with its concomitant shame-inducing visual resonance is something she hopes to ameliorate with her participation in the group. Having “taken her place on this truck, alongside people who easily could have hated her,” she hopes to use her grandmother’s property as a gesture of collective struggle, the symbolic register of a tormented cultural identity, her own. The property thus tethers Clare to the ruins of the past, her compatriots, and their purposeful resistance. Cliff writes:

It took the soldiers months to clear enough bush to have land enough to plant. At first they used machetes, fixing themselves in a line against the green, the incredibly alive green, swinging their blades in unison, sometimes singing songs they remembered from the grandmothers and grandfathers who had swung their own blades once in the canefields. Some passing the blades to their children, and grandchildren. The music made another human sound, combining with the human sound of metal against green, serving notice on the animals that the invaders were here to stay. 32

Sonic conflation manages to merge laboring bodies across disparate historical moments, as the descendants of enslaved Africans perform the body rituals of slavery’s remains “in unison” and cognizant of the “metal against green” that informs their surroundings. “We should recognize that our history is made up of different ruins,” writes Giuliana Bruno. She shares Cliff’s interest in the afterlife of empire, its movements and modulations, and the body landscapes it leaves behind.33 The return of these descendants is supposed to signify upon the land what was lost and who has been lost, and this is a clashing of word and image that places black sound at the center. No Telephone to Heaven endeavors to enact this demarcation as one that is encumbered by slavery’s remains. And so the characters in the text glide between interior and exterior spaces, searching for a connection that might render their fragmentation less fractured. They are ambivalent about belonging since they remain compartmentalized and burdened with imposed multiplicities.34 Comfort here inhabits the space of the ruin, where at least it is acknowledged that something significant, painful, and profound has taken place. The sonic features of these landscapes may whisper or they may wail, but in one way or another they endeavor to be heard.

“The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence,” Hartman writes in “Venus in Two Acts.” She continues, “This violence determines, regulates, and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power.”35 Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the oldest plantations in the United States. Though it was a working rice-growing plantation, it is known for its gardens—the first public gardens in the United States—and the imagery reflects this. “By the 1690s South Carolina had codified the most violent denial of the enslaved’s rights and legal standing,” Lauret Savoy writes. “It soon became the only mainland colony with a Black majority, most on low-country rice plantations.”36 When visiting Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, what you are supposed to feel is enveloped in glorious nature and its ethereal qualities. Visually, the couples who have their weddings take place there do not need to consider the enslaved, since they would have no visual proximity to what this might look like, or how it might sound. Does the landscape have a sonic register that signals the devastation it has cloaked?

Or does a repetition of oak trees with Spanish moss offer visitors the splendor of the wedding event without the messy sight of the plantation fields or the plantation mansion? It probably depends on whom you ask.

Elsewhere, I have written about this kind of visual dissonance, exemplified by Thomas Jefferson’s beloved plantation Monticello, where the actual labor and trauma of slavery cannot be fully visualized. Instead, visitors to Monticello, where hundreds of men, women, and children labored with little reprieve, are treated to an accidental capitalist endeavor, one in which Jefferson was said to “loathe” to participate. Plantation mansions aesthetically display the violent architecture of slavery as a joyful white endeavor, one that can be revisited time and time again as a multigenerational site of desired reflection. Far from being a space of shame or revulsion, for these visitors the plantation is the pull—the promise of racial hierarchy rendered visible. I am interested in the disruption of architecture that corporeality affords. I wonder if attending to sonic encroachments on space can have a similar effect?

“Snowden’s Jig” haunts like the figure Carrie Mae Weems embodies as she makes her way across Louisiana plantation sites in her 2003 series The Louisiana Project. The use of music to cloak grief is a way to refuse transience, to elongate a communion between the living and the dead. In an auditory keepsake, those who mourn and those who are mourned exist in space and time best able to resist co-opting by others. In my reading of “Snowden’s Jig,” Dan Emmett, like many of his minstrel-performing contemporaries, mimics without understanding what he hears. A jig. Where there is an expression of pain Thomas Jefferson notes what he imagines as its brevity. Its short life cycle. Of black subjects, Jefferson declared that “their griefs are transient” in his Notes on the State of Virginia.37 Our contemporary refusal to redress slavery’s devastation is a forward progression of this idea. That there has been no harm done. No people harmed in the during or the after of transatlantic slavery. This is the exceptional merit of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother. It bridges the space between the living and the dead, between grief and resistance, between home and elsewhere. “So much of black intramural life and social and political work,” Christina Sharpe writes, “is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures.”38 A discourse of distrust regulates the parameters of black cultural production so that a malleable existence can come into being. I wonder about the places where slavery dwells in the imagination but not in its productive deployment. Places that whisper “slavery here, too” but scream white denial. A visuality of indifference that needs auditory unpacking. We are, perhaps, used to moving through so many spaces avoiding slavery’s memory while reproducing its traumas. These monuments to slavery still stand. Some have been reconstructed and imagined anew, so that a contemporary generation is allowed to experience an immersive engagement with slavery’s nostalgia. In the context of the United States there is a peculiar kind of dissonance surrounding this racial construction that contributes to the violence it metes out.

At the Whitney Plantation in Edgard, Louisiana, visitors participate in a materially embodied site-specific exploration of slavery. If “Snowden’s Jig” had a spatial component it might look like the Whitney Plantation site, where an acknowledgment of slavery’s human cost is central to the plantation’s presentation. Visitors traverse the space that includes a granite memorial and database of names of enslaved people in Louisiana.

Inside the relocated Antioch Baptist Church, artist Woodrow Nash’s representational sculptures of the children of the Whitney Plantation appear. Nowhere in the church can you turn away from slavery. Every attempt will have a three-dimensional embodied reminder that the system spared no one. From the Whitney Plantation website: “Thirty-nine children died on this plantation from 1823 to 1863, only six reaching the age of five. The level of this death toll can be better understood when one thinks of a house where a child dies every year. Some of the children, either on this site or elsewhere, died in tragic circumstances such as drowning, epidemics, being burned or hit by lightning.”39 Though not without its problems the Whitney Plantation attempts to account for the living and the dead in a spatial formation that privileges the mechanisms of loss for those who have been lost. It is a quiet space, meant for intentional contemplation and redress.

You cannot hold a wedding in this space.

When W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized the highs and lows of sorrow songs as the entry point of The Souls of Black Folk he was imploring the reader to hear with the eye and see with the ear. “Sensations appear out of place as decay’s beautiful disturbances,” Ren Ellis Neyra writes. “A hypersensitive synesthetic reading method is open to ‘vision’ appearing in our fingertips or a smell carrying a sound,” and this is how to voyage sensorially through black life.40 Further, Ellis Neyra posits, “freedom is not the opposite of slavery; freedom horizons slavery.”41 Du Bois might agree.

Lose Your Mother

We are immersed in the depths of grief, and utterly, wholly transformed after. Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother reconstructs those stages of grief so that they include communion as well as release. Her guideposts are personal, archival, geographical, and methodological. She moans, along with the wailers, prays alongside the sinners and the redeemed. Like Morrison’s Jazz, Lose Your Mother is an elegy with high notes and low undertones. And it exceeds the pace of its framework to reveal something new. Improvisatory and lucid, it reveals the wounds it understands as untreated. And it calls out the names of the dead. Dorcas? Dorcas. “It’s the place where the car hit the tree and your mother and brother died,” Hartman reminds us. “And your father survived but he becomes an alcoholic, so it’s like he’s dead too or worse. But it’s just a regular street for everyone else.”42 Antiblackness paves the road that exists as “just a regular street for everyone else,” ensuring that by land or by sea, the world is covering over the wounds of black folk, denying even the persistence of grief. Where does the grief go? Or in the words of Warsan Shire: “later that night/ I held an atlas in my lap / ran my fingers across the whole world / and whispered / where does it hurt? / it answered / everywhere / everywhere / everywhere.”43 Everywhere is the focal point of being black while grieving, and to do so in isolation, detached from community and kin, is to deepen the reservoir of devastation that drifts like flotsam from a nameless vessel. A ghost ship that peels off in moving increments to represent the dead. Hartman’s movement from first- to third-person narration gives the book its sway, its movement from singular to collective, that encompasses the heart of the Middle Passage. A route traversed together-alone in the marked catastrophe of captivity. “But there were no corpses I could tend in Elmina,” Hartman writes.

There were no bodies draped in fine cloth, or rum poured down the throat of the dead, or dirges sung around the laid out figure. No one had sent a message announcing the death of slaves with a pot of palm wine, or fired shots to notify their neighbors, or tied their wrists with amulets and packets of gold dust for the journey to the next world. No one did these things for them, or fasted, or held a wake for two nights with drumming and dancing. No one placed burial gifts alongside the corpse or whispered messages that were to be delivered to dead relatives in the land of ghosts.44

In the sonic resonance of no one is the atmospheric divide, corporally rendered. All those bodies passing through a space necessarily alter its components, its rifts and tide. Unnamed though they may be, the energy released into the earth will still exist. One, after another, and another will be counted, with or without names. “I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name,” the epigraph to Jazz reminds us.45 Hartman’s concerns culminate in chapter 7 of Lose Your Mother, a section called “The Dead Book.” Here, she outlines the failed repetitions on a slave vessel named Recovery, where a captive girl was murdered on a ship and “not even her name survived.”46 Understanding that fragments of the girl’s story do not constitute a whole, Hartman nonetheless offers us a way to read her into the archive of black grief. “Looking at the Atlantic,” Hartman laments, “I thought of the girl.”47 Conjuring all of the possibilities for retrieval, Hartman engages in an extension of her theorized “critical fabulation” in order to bring into existence more than just “a few lines from a musty trial transcript” that constitute “the entire story of the girl’s life.”48 Instead, Hartman’s elegiac disruption offers the mourner multiple opportunities to participate in the girl’s temporary resurrection, her collective reprieve. To bring her back from the dead, even temporarily, is to pull at the seams of the transatlantic slave trade, its routes and rhetorical dimensions, to unravel its violent gestural illogic. The girl killed on the Recovery is not the only one among its dead, but in using her story as a focal point of “The Dead Book,” Hartman is asking us not to avert our gaze this time, and to attend to the patterns of memorial conjuring that give way to the strictures of the historical record we have yet to fully grapple with.

In Sight, In Sound

In Amanda Russhell Wallace’s 2011 short film Mo(u)rning Tea, Extracted, the artist creates a meditation on black women’s grief using the solitary reference point of her own body, alongside lines of verse from Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. Kindred is placed alongside Corregidora so that Wallace’s artistic investments are most closely aligned with the memory of slavery as it impacts and imperils black women in the present. Under the performed mechanics of setting up and preparing tea within a domestic space, Wallace enacts a sight/sound dialectic in order to mourn those who have passed. Instead of presenting herself as a widow mourning the loss of her husband, Wallace instead represents the loss (and subsequent grieving) of black women’s acknowledged history under slavery as a layer of subterfuge that she must unpack with the practice of her deliberate embodiment. The artist is tethered to a corridor/hallway that splits the scene from the exteriority of the veiled figure in black, walking back and forth through the interior space, and the interiority of another figure, also played by Wallace. Nearly silhouetted against light and shadow as a voice-over lays out the parameters of loss and mourning stalking black female subjectivities, Wallace communes with the atmospheric enclosure of loss.49 The figure steps in and out of the frame as a haunting, gesturing toward the environment of grief that orients the film. Michael Boyce Gillespie writes, “The vast modalities of black art, of which cinema is a part, often suffer the analytic impropriety of marginality, selective blindness, and indifference to the discursivity of race and blackness as potentiality.”50 Mo(u)rning Tea, Extracted utilizes “blackness as potentiality” within a black feminist framework that centers a process of grieving within the interiority of the architecture of careful enclosures, those that allow the transmission of the sight and sound of mourning to fill interior space.

And thus, the two figures occupy the domicile at different moments, in light, and in shadow: one to articulate the lower frequencies of all that has been taken or lost, and the other to contextualize this loss as a series of movements in and out of the frame. Wallace imbues the domestic sphere with a slow, methodical rhythm and flow, the contours of which haunt the discourse of slavery in the United States and its afterlives. Each step is a gesture, toward the could-have-been that occupies slavery’s memory in an ambulatory refrain that encircles itself. The pace of the film is a modulation—parts of a whole—in communion with the present past of black dispossession.

Black Mary

It’s thirteen seconds before you see Alice Smith in Kahlil Joseph’s short film Black Mary. You hear her voice two seconds before you see her. It’s haunting, this entrance in the film by Smith, who is singer, spirit, and muse. Black Mary, commissioned by the Tate Museum, is an ode to the photographic oeuvre of Roy DeCarava and merges sound with deeply saturated images of black subjectivity. Smith is the focal point; she is the center of the text. It is her voice you follow. It is her world you enter. She sings a rendition of “I Put a Spell on You” and you are spellbound. The tone of the song betrays its lyrics. Or maybe it doesn’t. Made famous first by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Nina Simone, Smith’s remake is unlike any other that exists. It possesses all of the soul and the edge of other performances but is cognizant of the plead, the tortured possessive quest. The song winds like a road, curved and smooth, but devoid of destination. Blackness is the destination and the mood is full of collective grief. It is an insistent wail that goes on for six and a half minutes. The tempo is slowed as Smith’s four-octave vocal range glides in and out. A haunting. A love story. A prayer. A wail. An elegy. She is sparing with the lyrics, repeating words like “mine” and “I love you” until they are disaggregated from the form they once held and returned to their place of origin. Joseph’s use of Smith as the focal point in Black Mary is explained in this quote from a conversation the artist had with Arthur Jafa: “I have a pure obsession with Alice Smith. A lot of people do. When she sings, especially live, she goes places very few people I’ve ever seen can create . . . there’s a lot of pain and soul in her songs . . . it’s formed by everything (that’s happened in the last 400 years or so) . . . a kind of cry, it feels like a cry.”51 To represent 400 years of pain, in a voice that sounds like a cry, is to expand the framework of mourning so that it represents “the living and the dead,” to quote Toni Morrison. The slow-moving mix of imagery is punctuated by sound and anchored by Smith’s voice. Hilton Als writes of Kahlil Joseph, “A master of sound, he allows the dialogue and the music in his movies to drop out and then return at unexpected moments, creating a sometimes heart-stopping juxtaposition between what we hear and what we see. It’s as if Joseph’s visual world were a vinyl record, complete with scratches that make the needle skip, thereby changing the flow of things.”52 Joseph’s attentiveness to the vicissitudes of grief is evident in all his films, which have a mellow haunting quality to them. Black Mary is an engagement with our very present moment of blackness, of sight, of sound, and of mourning. Joseph has said that the title is to represent “Black Mary” as a protective force against police violence. From the enclosure of interior space Smith sings while swaying back and forth, captured repeatedly alone or among others. Joseph’s gaze lingers long and lovingly over the subjects in the film, guided by Smith’s musical performance. As quiet as it is thunderous, the mourning properties of Black Mary hover and drift; they are on streets, inside homes, and on the faces of black subjects Joseph wants you to see. To hear. To touch.