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In memoriam
It is difficult forty years on to find language adequate to that occasion, that April 4.
We’ll spend this weekend hearing the attempts. We’ll be knitting nouns together as if in repeating them we could ever be reconciled to forty-year-old facts, that the nouns can settle us, make us at home, among the furnishings of persons, places and things. We’ll be knitting together proper nouns: Martin, Ralph, Memphis. We’ll be knitting together plain, ordinary ones: gun, blood, balcony. We’ll even try knitting in some abstract ones, less sure of their footing: violence, loss, martyrdom.
That April 4, in Ithaca, New York, it was a scream that spoke the whole truth, the contralto scream of the woman right in front of me, played out against the silence of the crowd as she fled. It was a tangled knot, that scream, a knot of disbelief, anger, rage, fear, worse. You heard it all in that scream.
At the same moment, as it turned out, in Indianapolis, Indiana, another scream, played out against a crowd less silent, a chorus: a basso groan, deep-throated, uttered under the weight of the same tangled knot. You heard it all, too, in that groan.
The whole truth and nothing but may not be in the words at all; it may be between them, behind them, under them. The whole truth and nothing but is work best given to poets.
In matters of race and class in America, we have so subjected the poet Langston Hughes’s phrase “a dream deferred” to historical and political analysis that we risk not coming to know the full truth of it, the full weight of it, the full meaning of it. Hughes wanted us to know where the dream lived, and listen, listen to its "rumble" there, "underneath":
Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a --
You think
It's a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a --
What did I say?
Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!
-- Langston Hughes, Dream Boogie (1951)
Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence
We’ll spend this weekend hearing the attempts. We’ll be knitting nouns together as if in repeating them we could ever be reconciled to forty-year-old facts, that the nouns can settle us, make us at home, among the furnishings of persons, places and things. We’ll be knitting together proper nouns: Martin, Ralph, Memphis. We’ll be knitting together plain, ordinary ones: gun, blood, balcony. We’ll even try knitting in some abstract ones, less sure of their footing: violence, loss, martyrdom.
That April 4, in Ithaca, New York, it was a scream that spoke the whole truth, the contralto scream of the woman right in front of me, played out against the silence of the crowd as she fled. It was a tangled knot, that scream, a knot of disbelief, anger, rage, fear, worse. You heard it all in that scream.
At the same moment, as it turned out, in Indianapolis, Indiana, another scream, played out against a crowd less silent, a chorus: a basso groan, deep-throated, uttered under the weight of the same tangled knot. You heard it all, too, in that groan.
The whole truth and nothing but may not be in the words at all; it may be between them, behind them, under them. The whole truth and nothing but is work best given to poets.
In matters of race and class in America, we have so subjected the poet Langston Hughes’s phrase “a dream deferred” to historical and political analysis that we risk not coming to know the full truth of it, the full weight of it, the full meaning of it. Hughes wanted us to know where the dream lived, and listen, listen to its "rumble" there, "underneath":
Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You'll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a --
You think
It's a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain't you heard
something underneath
like a --
What did I say?
Sure,
I'm happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!
-- Langston Hughes, Dream Boogie (1951)
Posted by
G.E. “Skip” Lawrence
posted by The Phoenix Files at
1:48 PM
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