Folkcal Fraim 9
The Black Man in the Flagged Mirror / New York City / TSE / 2011
Uncle Tom’s Camera
More than a decade ago a slightly younger Black poet (who had previously attended “Race Fearlessness,” a summer community writing workshop I taught in the Columbia Heights section of Washington, D.C.) mentioned on social media that I was now taking pictures of White People. He said pictures (not photographs), people (not folks), TSE (not Thomas, Sayers, or Tom). Although I consider myself a folk photographer not a people picture taker or a cameraman, I was neither bothered nor surprised by the comment. In fact, a few years later that same poet would refer to me as the Photo Laureate of Washington. Catchy but not true, however slightly clever the hybrid coinage. Looking back, I see how my name popping up in his daily feed and hovering above images of random White People, might have caused him to, well, as we say in the Black Literary Tradition, signify (a rhetorical strategy where one speaks indirectly to achieve a more layered, nuanced and hidden meaning) and sound the alarm that once again, a section of the modified racial sky above the modified racial mountain was falling. After all, they were my White People, not his, my captures, not the community’s. And one might say that the Race Fearlessness I had been preaching in poems, workshops and lectures had, without permission or announcement, switched apparatus from poetry to photography, from one choice of weapons to another––if I might riff, for a moment, on the National Parks system that is Gordon. Don’t be naive: one needs a park system. If one is to properly work the Tradition, one needs to know what happened in and to the vast caves of railroads, rivers and buildings, the ones (now) designated historic and mostly (now) closed off to the public. Replace the word park with poetry if you like because it requires more than just say-so to create one’s own environment. It requires creative weaponry, an uncompromising aesthetic opposition. One must be willing to oppose all aspects of bank mentality business art and remain attuned to the changing dynamics of organic practices of art––emotionally, mentally and physically––or run the unprotected risk of becoming just another masked Marxist (lowercase m for minion) metaphor maker. And like so many writers of color (with non-trauma induced alter egos), Tom and I were ancestor’d and grandfathered into the soft Black Art-xist business of being Black, Black Aesthetic Black but not necessarily of fully Black Arts Movement Black––a watered down version––more like Identity Politics Black (to properly locate the ever balding magic of such a practice), a kind of (gentle) Blackness of Equality equal only to Whites, educated and uneducated, who also have no power but who also have poems. I wasn’t the Blackest and I wasn’t the lightest (aka brightest), but I had, early on, marked myself Big B Black in the arena of (third wave lens) Race Man capable of accomplishing anything I wanted to accomplish and I began a part of this project by surrounding myself with others who had also set out to practice and prove that Blackness was more than a reactionary secretary to the pleasing physiognomy of immortal African glory as well as more than a monolithic victim whose back was seared by the Wall Street ten-point number system that eventually became social security. And nothing was more frustrating, during this period, than Black Folk, specifically Black writers, who did not embrace the community-urge-necessity to share their Whites with other Black writers. Over the years, Tom has known and confronted many such Coloreds of Compromise. Being always with camera, he has frequently assigned to them, vocally, the photographic moniker: halftone failures. Some have even had the nerve to hide and to hoard their Whites in private pantries where they act the HTIC (Head Token in Charge), until the arts resources (that might have been available to a wider range of Blacks) are exhausted or they, themselves, are exhausted by a reliance on the resources as they produce and repackage (in tenor and tone) a lifetime of the same work, the same cage, again and again. The Black Experience. Is there anything more (Black) past tense than ex? My Whites, not his. My Post Black visual bargaining chips (yeah that buckshot shot buck bullshit), the absentee spoils of Obama era emancipation anticipation, the trending skin of deception of he who reneged in Presidential spades by cutting hearts while holding a handful of hearts, (our) black hearts, face down on the grand chessboard of a folding, church basement card table. Books made but the whole deck ablaze, little joker lit as a literary abolitionist at a Black Literary bonfire, jockey statue frozen in a pose, blood-red painted jacket and helmet, both scuffed from being recreationally dragged through town behind a pickup truck. The scene is set. From this point on, when I am speaking from the eye, I will refer to Tom as “I” and when I am speaking from the inside of that well-read cabin, I will refer to Tom as Tom. No doubt the narratives, like chem trails, will crisscross then overlay as they dissolve. Single, double and triple exposures, the astral travel exhaust of writing, simultaneously, about whatever settles on the surface of the skin, the settlements beneath the surface of the skin, and the stages of feeling between those realms of meaning.
Drink more river or the muscle cramps gonna come, gonna come like slave-code dipped in promissory knowledge, frequently in the legs, all the way from the gut of February in bed at night, Black History Month, the burning estuary of Liberation Capitalism, Februarius, the Roman month named from the Latin term februum which means purification, pure creative living and an even purer creative leaving no weighty isms in the way of the singing. Black History Month used to be Black Magic by Black People (ask any Black body: she hoodoo yo hair should also do yo healthcare) but now it’s White Magic by Black People, all hired to fill the ark with as many followers as the frame will allow, all forever posed in the hi$torical prism of self-imagery, the reverser of the price of rights. Sometimes da Skin Game is just a game show for show off. It cures nothing, neither stop nor dot size of the spherical aberration, nothing like the broadcloth of Crispus when his death (not his life) is included. February, being the lionheart of the months of monarchs, I beg of thee to continue shouting your poorly photographed politics of race shamanism with the other months although those changing moon and star owners are all out of numerical order. Word bribe, I do, of thee (sweetly) not to punish me for telling the entire plantation that March is the original first month and the true Mas’rpiece of the year. February, you are the last month of the year. October, the eighth. December, the tenth. Dozing like 28 Zen Liza leaps from one side of the Ohio River to the other, Yo Feb, you are a 12 and will always be a twelve, the calendar’s trembling benefactress––fleur de lis out of style, palm-leaf gone wild. At public watering holes, February, you swim and pee last, or you do not swim in pee at all. You are old, cold and suffering from beginning with F. Your hairline has already begun the sojourn back to the bald, comet state of sperm, Sir February, and yet the moist royalty in the air steeps as you litho and dims as you ebb. These my White Folks, February, not yours. They do not belong to any nonsensical inventory of guilt or beam of shif’less etceteras, but perhaps I will share them with you for the soul thoughts of cotton money, why, because it gets unhealthy and too damn inhumane to keep carrying them (from warehouse to warehouse) in bellows minus the balls, heels and toes that give proper form to Sambo’s boots. February, with or without a Soho lender with a fetish for lens-lap, the blindside of the body cannot avoid crowded safe houses, adversarial forces aside. Nostril need not exhale dem spirits dat the ear inhaled to make citizens. That’s a nice annual cameo, February, but the attachment looks like a submarine periscope attached to a horseshoe crab camera. Your liquor license better be fat Feb. ‘Bruh(uary), can you change the rest of the calendar to make the other months sin less? Hurry fo’ I bake you in the oven with Juneteenth. Who is your bestie, February, some Quaker Methodist Dystopian Methhead in beast mode––I hope it be not the young Black Poet who called me a Nigger at dinner in front of White Folks after his reading at The University of San Francisco. Didn’t nobody say nothing (to him) but me Cap’n. One of his poems had so many Niggers in it, the whole Jesuit Chapel palm-whipped its hymn books into an apostolic ruckus, the poet’s intended spell of disempowerment as misunderstood as a frolickin’ Free State in dark-field illumination. Not a Cracker in a couplet of Honkey hidden hurt for the Ofays of Office Hours just a Nigger Souffle in the guise of a creative self-deprecating Jungle Bunny beatdown then like a typical photoelectric pincushion, baby boy tried to race frame the Visiting Patsy with some soggy young professor swing time hair optical flare, but Tom had been warmed about da arrogance dat cometh way back when he was an undergraduate, so I checked him (on it) then my camera, like a lil’ cultural ambulance chasing bitch, took his likeness, snap flash snap, against my wishes. Fainting hark ye’s and bright boys all over the Mission and beyond Haight-Ashbury, so I stopped one slap and slam, body slam, short of moving the magenta contact screen into the liberty position. Inside myself begging and pleading wit’ myself, bowie-knife just itchin’ for a new wound of identity but young Metaphor Mandingo ovah here, well, he was just-a auditioning fo’ dem academics like a syncopated cakewalk in fiddle pine. Coat pulling, dime dropping. No spook by the door bigger than Thomas, the nappy and native doubter, who used to think he was bigger than Tom but that was before he read all about how Bigger Thomas was never read his mirage of Mirandas nor did he ever hear (through the grapevine grouping of originals) about the trials of Tom Ass Clarence, his namesake predecessor, the stratagem of all mettlesome robes…if not a guiding member of his tonal range of purpose.
No Black poet accomplishes anything on the mainstream Academic Ark unless he or she has been loaned, not to one but to a few White Folks. The longer the poet can be held (on loan) is determined by the angle of generosity (and offers of opportunity) of the loaner and that (alone) determines the length of the relevancy of the poet. Relevancy, like the timing and lightning strike of talent, comes in waves, waves of being in favor, the kind of favorite that rides a trend and is careful to only disturb the past racial offenses not present ones. The racial loan system is a snake eating its own fan club, one that eventually dies from having divided the self into too many likeable cuisines. Shy cameras take shy photographs and safe Blacks shy away from race fearlessness. Black or White operated, most cameras that are used as critics were once chimeras and would like to be chimeras again. Loan your camera, not your aesthetic, to a White friend and it will also serve him. It will not return to you with the cultural knowledge of having been handled by a member of a different race. Cameras are only, mechanically, prejudiced by their handlers. Before there were Influencers, there was aesthetics and aesthetes. Cameras are not magic flutes that nearly come to life when lifted to a human face or mouth. Shutters do not shout, “Excalibur!” between exposures. Just as there are types of Blacks, there are types of Race poems and before you can be Black, color film Black, in a poem, you must be ready to be “kiss my ass” focused in the real world not the world of black and white poems. Poetry is not limited to worlds; poems are. Tom has been breaking the law again––reading, writing, touring and taking photographs, a few one-man exhibitions in Europe. Did Harriet bestow? He has never felt freer, so many slow growers gone. Saw the trophy and taboo trope of his own name on a blacklist and kept working so as not to join those who edit things out, the Eugenicists of social agenda, the ones who (like the books they purchase but never read) spend a lot of money on camera equipment they never use and don’t need. Tom’s camera has shown signs of the same old chaperone. No phone or campus to perform-a-form but folks still find ways, “Oh! Susanna” mini-series ways, to inquire about Tom’s Whites, the ones with the most experience at putting out fires, infinite lawn fires, are always requested first by the rulers of the darkness of this world.
Not exactly a calculator but a camera in the bedroom is usually like a gun that goes off in the third act, a lot of shades of babies made as a result of the protest, the intimate tech talk between lovers of historically opposing races. These are the things of dog-eared ‘cism to stop and consider if you have thought about breaking certain cultural laws as much as Tom has. How much proportional circular slide rule, how much pure grammatical running and interracial late-night range of sensitivity can those outside of this frame handle? See me, I mean Tom, and Harriet, motor-driven in the post physical act of reduction, no angular variation of equipment intensity, physical love energy-low, sitting on the porch with my mother. Both enjoying coffee, both being enjoyed by cigarettes. The summer mosquitoes (and their bloody tints) typing around Tom’s ankles and bare feet, his uncle heat. Ok, my Harriet wasn’t all the way White just half the way White. Mixed, a mulatto with runaway roots in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, not too privileged and not too punished, the field within the big house variety, black-eyed Susan’s behind her trials, summer in her smile. The flowing cape of escape, satin instead of cotton, the curtain that calls a northern belle south. I never heard her say the N Word, not once, but when she called her hip babymaker a Jackass, it was like shooting the secondary negative in the back of the head a second time. No airbrushing, no masking, no opaquing. Slopes of diffraction, a phenom. Mom talking to the next-door neighbor about his elephant-eared plants, when my young niece comes out of the house and says, “Uncle Tom, can I see your camera?” Duotone laughter, the highlighting method, from both women, my mother and my lover. “Don’t say Tom, baby, say Thomas, Uncle Thomas,” my mom said. “Tell her why Tom.” Time for porch step school. Me explaining how, through time, a heroic figure became something of a perpetual stereotype, type of stereo, the double hearsay of a slur. And because “…upon a time” was never “once,” I’ve embellished the story with the survival flourishes of the oral tradition so that she will laugh and feel included in the narrative. When I said, “Topsy,” she said, “I know her” and when I said, “Mammy,” she said, “Ain’t that a bad word, Uncle Thomas?” Me explaining cameras by using her face. “Blink your eyes fast.” I tell her. “Now blink them (again) but slower. One speed allows you to see and focus farther, the other to focus on what’s right in front of you. These numbers on the top of the camera control that. The bigger the number that faster the blink.” Cigarette-lit Harriet, grinning like a mos’ high yellow spy and agreeing with everything mom says, a good sign for now. A third coffee cup between them doubled as a muddy ashtray and when Harriet got up to go to the bathroom, mom leaned forward toward the weightlessness of her own smoke, the exhaled letters failing to make her full name in the July air, bit by bit of the breath of her lifting upward toward an eventual heaven. My favorite writers are smokers, atmospherically. Harriet behind the screen door, confident, slender. Quick photo of my mother backing away from a puff––hair pulled back, whole body framed, facing North yet pretending not to notice freedom’s offer, White world-worry free. Niece near the edge of her mini lesson from Uncle Tom on Uncle Tom, looking through the camera from the end of the lens, and wondering how Kentuck, like a tadpole, lost its y. “Wait Uncle Tom,” Tom tells me and I tell Tom, “Wait until she is older to tell her that the Egyptians were afraid of the sea, that eating and drinking from real bling––copper and silver––enriches the blood, and possibly changes the chemical composition of the body. Wait until after she is fed-up with all systems of color, including the way the same flags that demand our allegiance also hide their allegiances to something or territory hidden from us. “Let’s go to Canada, Uncle Tom-homas, oops.”
A flashback from the back of the class photograph where, lacking pedigree, Normal School Tom feels judged and pressured by the oligarchs of obligation, and an insurmountable distance from the cultural achievements of the light brown and dark brown faces of athletes, entertainers, inventors and politicians that have been placed, as inspiration, above the classroom blackboard. Staring down, they might as well be replacements for the biblical figures of Sunday School. Staring up, Tom and his classmates might as well be contestants on a mandatory gameshow where the goal is to become useful members of a dream team in the heavens of everlasting book-learning. In search of attention and purposely trying to parole the class, a boy cranks the handle of the silver, industrial pencil sharpener as if determined to rewind a stubborn roll of film through one of Solomon’s cameras for the first time. Their advantage is literacy, race and language; thus, the Color Line, print and cursive, along the raised, green gallows of the English alphabet. The thin cardboard headshots were more like cartoons than photographs, something to aspire to, the spiritual animation of success. “Were they real, did they ever really exist?” Tom wonders, “these wonders of the minority world,” because they look so clean, so spiffy, spotless and pore less, like the people our parents left us at home to work for––if they were fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to work for Money Blacks, the same people who had “parlors” in their homes which were houses and not apartments stacked like reusable shoe boxes, up the ladder where people owned cameras, big cameras, and dressed up to have their portraits taken by Addison Scurlock in Washington, D.C. and James Van Der Zee in Harlem. Those people, everything about them seemed private while everything about us seemed public especially in school where we all used the laboratory (not the bathroom), needed a hall pass to move throughout the building and had recess in a big ‘ol wide open concrete pit while our teachers whispered and smoked hoping the red, rubber dodge ball of hopium didn’t tag one of them to a life sentence of discipling hard-headed poor kids, knuckleheads like us. Even the sound of the camera-flashy, police bell between classes was a certain type of dungeon programming. “Officer Friendly,” is what they told us to call him when he came to our school in his perfect uniform, electric traffic light as a prop, warning us about the dangers of truancy, and to take pictures with us. Not me, I felt sorry for the camera for having to work for these mini versions of the government, the public school system and the city. Boys and girls together, woodshop and home economics. The plan was set, planned like parenthood. Boys and girls competing, the honor roll and sports. My parents did not know any of the people who knew any people who knew the people whose photographs floated above the consonants and vowels of the school blackboard. There is not one family portrait of us, no indication of vertical social acceptance or pursuit. We belonged to the affordable category of poorly processed drugstore pictures and sometimes the rare color Polaroid, the most disposable Image World square ever to slide out of a plastic, horizontal slit. Deciding between it and a microscope for Christmas was impossible so I got a bike, an aqua “Free Spirit” from Sears and Roebuck, a ten speed. Ram horned handlebars, legs spinning backwards aways from the future. Never taught to keep White Folks to myself, never, but (like keepers) they kept finding me and looking in on my progress even as I hid (with the weepers) in an all-Black High School, named for a poet, in an all-Black neighborhood name for a general of the Civil War. This is what Tom bought to the table, a hollow island with a coastline of integrity from the chalk dust catcher below the blackboard where the nitty gritty of real lore lives.
When Tom and Harriet (whom he would later and affectionately call Beechie Stowe and Bee Stow) met for the first time in the physical, she was reading the back of a Blues album in a Wrecka Stow (Blue Arrow Records) on Waterloo Road in Cleveland, Ohio. [Sidenote solo: toilets, also known in France as loos, did not contain water before Sunday, June 18, 1815, the date of the famous battle.] Real Blues not Bar band Blues. Pop the rag, tobacco leaf wrinkled fingers, harmonica hands, shoeshine Blues. A runagate wasn’t familiar with the album, but the cover photograph caught the street corner cornea of my optical axis, my desire for downhome picture taking like a time gon’ by when I used to smell like I slept in a darkroom sink where photographs are born. Birthplace of memories, like Black skin, non-susceptible to cracking, well, not the ones impervious to the slimy temperature of photo solutions: Miss Julie, Magilla and Pimp; just a few of the folks I met in Drew, Mississippi, camera-welcomers, all rural and comfortable living close to the ground, all human trees becoming coal. In their village circle of just hanging out, off the clock, not only was every age group represented, but they all interacted with each other––every dynamic of survival: sweet, playful and tough. In situations like this the camera could easily be viewed as being on some Mister Charlie in blackface type vibe, but Tom had a wonderful escort, Soul Sister #1, Our Lady Ann of the Nette, a Holy Well, to help him make lens-kin. We photographed an elder eating a beehive, pulling it apart with his hands. A shirtless, charismatic brother in cornrows (straight back) who said he just got out the joint. The Sista who kept teasing Magilla about his lips had the most pregnant belly I’d ever seen, worlds within worlds within worlds, one that put 3-D to shame. The sun hit Pimp’s silver grillz making his whole, treasure chest of a mouth, sparkle like a proud boat of singing saints. A little girl, maybe 4 years old, lifted one of my cameras like a caught fish and paraded it around a large, cast-iron bell. In her small, tan hands, the camera rang as the bell took pictures. Back in Blue Arrow, I must have looked dumb and numb-in-a-stare, a wandering mind going nowhere, glued to a sticky, two-sided pest strip of mixed emotions from a previous life––one side of the strip for admiration, the other for caution.
The smell of boiled peanuts, its roadside gravity, should be the soundtrack for all interracial odysseys, particularly the ones from North to South that don’t involve biased badges attached to doleful sheriffs. Harriet and I, I and Tom, Tom and Harriet, were driving from Columbia, South Carolina to Athens, Georgia by way of Augusta, when we passed a handmade sign on the side of a road that said, in large eye-catching letters, “Redneck Air Fresheners.” Wow, whoa, increased developing time, non-typical light or crayon drawing trap? An arrow, reminiscent of a light meter’s needle, pointed toward a smaller perpendicular opening on the left-hand side of the road. “Hair, did you see that shit? I’m turning around. What-the heathenish revival is a Redneck Air Freshener?” Less than twenty yards down the narrow road, the smell changed into the smoke and caught-vapors that follow the burning raw flesh of a tree whose funeral home I could not name, something skinned and scanned, its clandestine nature intensified, only to be outright rejected by the iodine-cyanide reducers in the Georgia air. Like an image-reverser, I watched our backs in the rear-view mirror. What an ignorant racial landscape move it was to drive down this road, thinking only of feeding my camera. I may have been “in the tradition” of being my brother’s keeper, but something had caused me to forget who I was and where I was. Had I grown too skin-comfortable next to Harriet, too blinded by our charade of fairness? The difficulty of producing typical types of percentage magnification that won’t damage a poor critter’s soul. We all know what happened to Ned in the film version of Ernest J. Gaines’ novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Albert’s shotgun, double barrel ass White ignorance eliminating the overalls of Black excellence, shot twice, just to prevent the building of a non-Normal School. It was that kind of road, like Fela Kuti said, the “He Miss Road” I probably should have avoided but I was Tom, genuine negro and self-made maverick, anti-hero and gang leader all rolled into one stereo fight tree yo! On celluloid, I shared my signature stair dance with the little colonel in a very familiar temple, the bottoms of our wide fringe zone emulsion feet merely steps, merely toes taps ahead of a cultural federal court order. A melanin-chameleon for the camera, I changed my race and sat in a rocker next to Ella and sang “Sunny,” earthly anatomy worship, a song in praise of the blood we once placed over our doors for protection. Rejecting the crossroads between trick daddy and trickster felt good but it felt even better to be with someone, someone with naked fists, when going to meet The Man even if that someone was partially The Man’s daughter, her half scorn of her own pink toes in tow right behind the echo of a day’s work.
Who dat, a White man, with an outdoor (but not outdated) portable oven-grill hybrid and stacks of sticks––shaved, pinkish, perhaps cedar, about fifteen to a bundle, bound by twine? Wonder how much he want for that; gotta count my money but I can’t turn my back. Chalky face didn’t say a word so I said, “What’s that amazing smell, Redneck Air Freshener, can I hold one?” And we both laughed, his more contained than mine. “Let me have two bundles!” We are documenting our trip from Up North to Athens; can I take your photograph holding the Air Freshener in front of your sign?” “Sure can.” Cue an overlay of umbra and penumbra eclipses caused by quick and successive mental flashes; cue a dose of post fear memory: Joe Wood and double diffuser, no limit Angstrom Unit of his essay, “The Yellow Negro,” not to mention, but I will, the various angles of the incidence of his disappearance. Hiking. Longmire, Mt. Rainer National Park. To do some bird watching, soul somewhere bound in a prayer-book, never recovered. So easy to vanish when you are brilliant. I’d rather be black and blue invisible (forever) than to be discovered in shredded flesh. Rainstorm, the 16 tons company store kind, forced us to the side of the road. Something in the mist chose the exact spot where we stopped, something we could feel trying to be free. And when the rain stopped, there was an abandoned shack (or was it a cabin, a long cabin) bluesy in its architectural desire to resist renovation but trapped in the beginnings of being forced into someone else’s idea of modernity. A narrow rectangle with five square openings topped with a triangle turned to the side. The square openings looked like viewfinders. A pane of glass leaning against the front of the longish, empty camera waiting to become a protective place for an eye, my eye, and waiting for the cabin to become a camera, my camera. The clouds went back to being white, holding their places of prejudice in blue, and the sun lit the age of the skin of the grass, green as the first year of learning tree adolescence. Newt Winger’s voice, above a pond, in the dreamy distance. We walked through the structure, kissed in its refractions and rust, twisted in and out of each other’s hugs like photo shoot wrestling. Because it had just taken a shower, the wood smelled naked. One of us headbutt a spider web, spider in the hair but I didn’t say nothing. Filter less, my astigmatism intensified and then like an additional hint of extra sight, the eye-gift, it tingled. One last photograph of the cabin before getting back into our little white car, the superficial sarcasm of irony imitating the surrendering sympathy of rain. Grassroots (by saxophonist Darius Jones) is where the image permanently resides, where it withereth and fadeth like a raggedy ol’ former place of worship, variation on theme of a buried ark. “This is how we met,” she said. “This is how we keep meeting,” I said, “archetype-hunting,” despite Ralph Ellison’s warning. Madame de Thoux, a Thot? The damn Redneck Air Fresheners did not work in Brooklyn; seems someone on that little dirt road had seen us coming just in time to change the joke and slip the yoke.
The star-shaped father can’t see it, but the uncle in the camera can––one head, two faces, looking opposite ways, an entity not yet fully comfortable with its current soul-physical agreement longing for its former host vehicle, a kind of vague (territorial) terror, using blinds to cut out the stray reflections. My Beecher Stowe was of this stock, this dilemma, which is why, talking driftwood say, she went overboard in her exegesis of the long-blessed minute between, shall we say, Root Races––one being from the air of thought, the other from the dirt of behavior. A MapQuest of wavelengths and nutrients like a list of the military patents used to insert old technology into the public sector. Stop promisin’ me Negro Hood Heaven and a bag of chips, bloodhounds (like plaques of plaque) in the enemy’s habitual grin. And always an Alvin Boyd Kuhn book or two in the glove compartment, suffocating a Moorish blacksmith like different trees providing different oxygens. Don’t get me right of wrong. Don’t make a loving human lens out to be a mean greedy male Legree. My Bee Stow was brilliant, but her happy yellow cake mix ass knew too many things she wasn’t supposed to know, pre “…and darkness was over the face of the deep…” things, always navigating places, socially, where a fallen-fucka with mud flood credentials and golden days a-dawning gray in his ‘fro wasn’t allowed. Told me every time I said, “Harriet,” she heard “Hair Riot” and that was probably the best time to climb, like a burst of groaning purple penguins, into her deep buggy jiver. Told me, feet first, to the back of my face that she’d known rivers, said she had a new feeling that we could feel the revolution together, all three of us––her, me and the Tom she created from me as a result of me having read about the beginning and end of Tom. All the fruit was gone so all we had left was strange veggies, swamp puree. “Get in Lorraine (your $1 Volvo) and meet me in West Virginia. Load up the memory cards, the film rolls and bring a baddass pair of boots too tough for gator bites, yeah right, gonna need at least two cameras with strong straps, extra batteries, and bring that novel, The Catacombs, about that Sista in Rome employed as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s handmaids on the set of Cleopatra. I want to breath her in, respirate that spirit, while you Noah that thang through Chicken Little’s low riding, crying sky.” Would have taken a camera as big and round as the moon to give anyone a real sense of the five feet of water above Old White, the historic golf course at the Greenbriar, in White Sulphur Springs. The locals say it was a “rain bomb,” a Jupiter-sized water balloon hemorrhaging between the geographic shoulder blades like a hammer with razor-sharp wings, that it hit the Elk River like the results of a white face positioned too close to the camera’s flash, thus the gigantic splash, the dramatic Cain-raiser that caused the sloppy land grab photomontage of Clendenin, Clay, Richwood and Rainelle.
The woods, hills and mounds of West Virginia are filled with many aboriginals, real human family portraits (from a time before studios, frames and the red coat invasion), the original sons and daughters of Abraham (or so they say) waiting to prove real patriotism. In “The Imagination as Cover Story / The Cover Story as Influential Text,” a class I taught at the University of Montana (and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), a student said, “I have a newborn son and by the time he is four years old, he will know how to use a gun.” Tom unlearned his distrust of mossy mercy seats and so much more about the White America beneath academic America during his semester in Missoula as the Richard Hugo Fellow in Creative Writing, much of which he took with him (without a heart’s complaint) into the triggering towns of West Virginia. Blink rate: Camera around neck, camera hanging from shoulder. Very round, not fat, muscular round, Boss Hoggish man with arm tattoos (that I did not recognize but Tom did) sitting in something that looked like a skeletal jeep or a NASA buggy made for apocalyptic lumber work. Swamp stubble, shreds of nature in need of a bonnet trimmer, wrinkled metal, shoes, muddy furniture, flags hanging from trees––an X with stars fueling it; same blue X, red background, same white stars moving through the X painted on the hood of a car. Nothing to do but walk next to (not behind) Harriet, who I am sure was already scribbling whip-raising descriptions in her head where both the panther and lash lived on opposite sides of the same street. Iffin’ I was to surrender to a panic attack, now would be a fine time to be brewed by an ornery and righteous one. Is there a George Shelby up-in-dis-here-camp or someone to take away the pain of being called a lazy DoDo after a whippin’? Hard stares of all ages softened by a young boy’s curiosity, “Are you a photographer?” “Yes.” “I want to be a photographer.” “Well how about I take your picture and then I show you how to take mine?” “Oh cool?” Like buddies in a Hollywood film, Ritchie and I turned to dad. Dad nods. My photograph of him: Ritchie on a truck, lean forward, snap. Lean back, snap, relaxing in front of a Confederate flag, two more snaps and the feeling of being outnumbered. His photograph of me: an urban curve of a figure, camera raised to face, and camera raised like a barbell, a bit of a buccaneer’s beard, long sleeve shirt rolled to the elbows, journalist energy, Peace Corps disguise. Blink rate: Pews, being carried like bodies, from the liquefaction that is now the church floor. Outside, where the mess is even greater, a serpent hose promises another layer to cover the layer already covering the underworld. This rain bomb has made a hard sky of the ground. Blink rate. Through a window, the photographer’s sniper’s nest of holiness where a small cross, made larger by foreground, frames a young man for the shot. The young man seems to care about the cross, his eyes protecting it from the photographer sniper. Blink rate: This family had a store, a mother and her six children, one in the stroller. They all look like they were born no more than two years apart, finger paint mud streaks on the faces of the two mischievous ones. Oh, the mother is pregnant! The photograph says pregnancy is a fountain of youth. Blink rate: a rainy night, highway wet. JEEP Cherokee, a lonely shanty boathouse in a photograph taken by Roland L. Freeman, moving through New Orleans into Mississippi. Tom behind the wheel. Harriet, in tastemaker mode, a soulful passenger of the Big Hair Tribe. Out of somewhere comes Sterling Brown’s Riverbank Blues, “A man git his feet set in the sticky mudbank, /A man get dis yellow water in his blood,” Out of nowhere comes sliding off the southern road, Beecher Stowe’s head against the passenger seat windshield. One of Tom’s hands on the wheel, the other arm across her body to lessen the impact. No colorful shock of impact-bleed between the images, no blood, nice legs longer than rest stops, no broken bones. The night her name was Knight, not even a headache. Lower half of car surrounded by water. Out of a novel comes two White cops, flashlights shining down into the ditch, not a star with a law degree in the sky. One flat tire, A-frame bent. Swinging camera, body weight, neck, “Baby, let’s heal in a motel in Mississippi, get up early tomorrow, see the town, annoy folks with pictures!” Blink rate: Spirits rising from the smoldering heap that was once a house, small flames fighting being left behind and licking up through the pyramidal debris, a regular person in very regular clothes with a face like an underdog, sensitive and filled with loss, moves toward us. Harriet whips up a soft aristocratic welcoming. His tragic story contains flight. The rain came. The river came. The wind came. The house exploded. His wife was thrown into a tree where she burned to death, and we have arrived just as the family is gathering to erect a wooden cross and pray around the tree. Tom is invited to photograph the moment but chooses, out of respect, to stay on the outside of the circle, wondering if he was given a camera in life to watch others or to watch himself for others, the angle of being an outlier, the perspective Tom longs to but no longer belongs.
An urge arises, Man of Sorrow, to repeatedly resist using the camera’s screen compensating glass as servant and boxcar hobo hobby, prized butler or default petrified titan. Good riddance to the forbidden water fountains, executor’s sale of Negroes and tranquil evenings of old habits governed by superstition, the devil of a worry that originates from insensible body memory. Ignore, an online eye gots to, the fatal magnetism of the familiar because, if for no other reason, the old patterns are often laced with the creative conformity of “Sell Him” safeness, the behavioral auto pilot only interested in blackened reproductions of the spirit. A spirit reproduced too many times fades in energy, no sauce, each copy a little less like source. A reproduced spirit is a script, a superabundance lacquered in guideline and forked over dollars. No change. Rigid lanes of Race also operate this way, noiselessly in inferiority, running down the public run of it, skeered of the cadets dressed like shore dancers. The two it used to take to tango have become one, one no longer hidden hive, needle tech, humanity’s last non-neutral test card. I see you Tom, chased by inequality while in pursuit of its twin, its Lord of Glory: equality. A psychological horror, the “slings and arrows” (of difference) between the elite and a thoroughbred slave. I see you, covering the copy board with white paper and turning on lamps; not a fan of the falsehood that says reality comes in through the eyes. It does not. It does not come in at all. The lie of poetic morality begins within; in Tom’s case with the umbilical neckerchief, the mother who withheld the father. He who triggers is a gun and he who can be triggered is a son of a gun. Geometric aspects, progressions and transits. What if the coming phoenix is a female hillbilly with a shaved head, bun in the oven, holding a stainless-steel rifle, one leg bent, foot on a stack of books, old books that make you sneeze vision drizzle. Bring it! This country has a birth chart. This country has an abortion chart. A Pluto return. The segregationists all think there’s a paradise on the horizon. The integrationist, a parasite. A lot mo violence, a lot mo violence. If there is a mob to join, let’s hope only the savviest modes of resistance are betrayable by servitude. Once considered savages, we have now made the noble transition to the position of protector of the dullard’s right to remain civilized. Blink rate: After seeing Tom and Harriet together in the Republic of Cambridge, a future educator with a famous Blues singer father and a White mother pulled Tom’s coat, “If you play in the snow, you’ll catch a cold.” Tongue in cheek, cheek in profile. Tom wanted a photo bulge. Harriet, a baby bump. Reproduce or breakup, each an easy rebellion. The snow warning reminded Tom of the infamous, “Do not go too fast,” an utterance that he could not simply cover with a tissue because the last thing he wanted was to become one of the loose dark ends on a yellowing page of the twentieth century.
Just as God lives the lives in the life of God, God knows these are dangerous times and despite the sinking paleness waiting on the extra thickening doorsteps of life, all Toms ‘bout to be armed, ‘bout to get real radically stupid, ‘bout to refuse decoration then go all 2nd Amendment Mason Dixon Dixie whistlin’ ballistic. Trapped in an ending and in desperate need of a beginning, the powers that be are now the powers that were. On the horizon, their digital demise. Auction block in black and white, buyers in panchromatic color. Nearly all the prominent White men in the crowd are recognizable even without their cone-shaped lens hoods. “Please,” cried someone in a mismatched cap and gown eclipsed by aperture, “please block the wet magnifiers caused by the dents in our collective identity and toss a child of God a smooth miracle rather than the usual jumpy prayer. How about a grease pencil, rubber gloves and an etching needle?” Sensitivity of material: The night sun jes’ lowly enough, jes’ long enough for a lit torch to self-hurl through infinite pity, religious affiliation used to identify membership, strength so deceitful another flammable Lucky Lucy Dream Book earns passport through the window of lawful trade. Current mare of burden, call her Scripture, about to discover that Tom is not the rider who purchased her, hooved her with the luckiest of shoe silver this side of the lifeless evening paper; that he is jes’ a channeler back from the dead with a Colt 45 Long Camera on some inner gallop theft and don’ stole her away from a nice condo-stable of golden hay, a talking pig, a rat rocking a red templar’s cross and a spider who communicates in the protein-silk act of upper room, barn tech; and, by Black golly, we be on our way to the not-so hetero ghetto briar patch where everything thing is block busting and removes skin like tar, same as dem community demons who work da screens fo’ da enemy, the ones who drive-by in the high blood pressure of sirens. Black Fire, a witness. Bad temper water, a baptism, swirling in incandescent carbon. All the darkie chasing squires cursed by complexions too fair to express deep-etch rage because the unspoiled emotional territory of photographic vengeance is now an algorithmic landscape of Woke sound bites, tweets and low buffoonery mic checks all minus the earlier disadvantages of carried off property. Rustlers and hustlers beware! About Harriet’s past: the photographs were faked, and the witnesses were real. About Tom’s future: the witnesses were faked, and the photographs were real. Between their complexions, there was every shade of compatibility, except that time (due to all dem folks in the darkroom yelling, “Make it darker. It’s got to be punchy. Print that joint a shade lighter.”), he didn’t tell her the Evangeline truth…how the whole time they were together, from first draft to date of publication, and she was writing him into a misunderstood and notorious heroic existence and using his thousand shadows of Sundays to make an anti-slavery atrocity, Tom was carrying (in his parchment billfold) a copy of “Saturday Off,” a photograph of a woman taken by Eudora Welty in Jackson, Mississippi sometime in the 1930s. “Papa Daddy,” “Papa Daddy,” “Papa Daddy” in stereo (in his imagination) in both ears, and her looking directly at him and only him, barefoot and bent like she was his real twin tray of jubilee, his flower of creation, his brown morning after the dove hung a rainbow above the reboot of bondage, her whip for love not for killing Tuskegee skeeters.
No longer a Space Trader from the bottom of the well of faces, Tom refused to go (any damn where) lightly nor was he ever successfully bribed into having a meal with the triffids at Tiffany’s, the aggressive plants in the honeypot could not photosynthesize his archival prints and secrets. According to the mainstream media’s carousel slide tray, Blacks were doing all the shooting in the 90s and Blacks are the only ones being shot today. That’s a lot of Black shooters, click, and forgotten dead Black photographers, flash. All the time he spent with Harriet (being as he was, creatively, from Harriet), as far as he could foretell, his Bee Stow didn’t make one mention of neither camera nor photograph until the end of chapter XV, a damn daguerreotype at that. Maybe she got Th Ugly Underwear Blues ‘cuz he winked at that bony Peace Studies Zombie but lied and said something was in his eye. Maybe that’s why, to get back at Tom, she made the mulatto say Mr. Ellis “tuk sick” in Chapter XXXI. Full of broom jumpers, fables and follies, Racial Bagman of the Fuhgeddaboudit Order, February, thou art a Henry Box Brown, a magician, a mesmerist, wooden crate bound from Virginia to Philadelphia to a proper life with a proper ending in Toronto. Freedom Box Feb, you married English Jane but left first wife, Black Nancy in Slavery. Racism being faster than reason, the whole post office negro body in the mail story is block chain fishy even for those who repent by immediately biting coins for Mas’r. Tony Hoagland, writing about Tom’s moment of alchemical transformation from Inkslinger to Sayers writes, “They’ll never get him back in the box, and that’s a good thing.” Male opinions and their mistresses got mad, reel to reel mad when Tom sided with Hoagland in the great gray poetry, “naïve about Race,” tennis match. As a result, a lot of Blacks and Whites were stolen away by Tom to greener pastures after having their pictures taken then given back to them for the fee of artistic freedom. So many bodies caught like camera cases on Tom’s Kodak Brownie, legal and illegal, so many backlit, torch lit lynchins'. Sometimes, lost in the piracy that leads to privilege, the White overseers, purchasers of eye hiders, don’t even notice him. A reflection of a Black man in a mirror near a White woman outside a public library. Message: the sun needs shades. And then, BAM, there he is moving through the beeswaxed ropes of history, corncake stung, and not exactly what I would call comfortable in purchased skin, the look on his face reminiscent of the time he pressed his ear against the belly dancer’s antebellum pregnant account book and heard a Nordic tar baby reassuring field-hands, “Eighteen sixty-five; I would play that number!” Mount him, in the habit of infantry, in a pivotal frame observing the wickedness of stolen leisure like an incarnation of fear and sword sliced flesh, merchandise made memorial just in time for the public viewing of any White body but John Brown’s body, a stray ghost-walker with a ghostly gun” aimed at the star north of the North Star, the celestial emergency most worthy of divine spark, a fire alarm in the armor of emancipation imagery, the end of Tom, the victim of a ripe revolver, cut down by one of those knights who makes contact, nightly, with sheets, white sheets, a “fust rate” defender of any number of Mas’rs virtue signaling descendants. Old photographs, embalmed ones, don’t lie, do they? Here’s one of Bee Stow weeping and being comforted by the ghost of Sir Francis Ronalds. Old inventors, knighted ones, don’t die, do they? “Did they have to shoot him?” “Yes.” “But why, My Lord, why?” “Because my dear Harriet, your Tom was caught in the act of burning one of my limited-edition tripods on a lawn. Like a little Photoshop of horrors, seems he thought it was a cross.”
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.