group of girls eager to identify with her escape? In the words of the song, love forecloses freedom.
Returning to Nicholson, you will find that the path from the reformatory leads to a different education, set in a brothel but conducted by Victrola: Holiday runs errands for the local madam so she can listen to her recording of Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” (27). Nicholson notes that Holiday herself particularly favored this anecdote, recounting it in her autobiography and multiple interviews, and though the juxtaposition with the reformatory is his own, it seems clear she meant it as a fable or origin myth of her own education. Its central elements include the setting, extravagant beauty defying disreputable poverty, the aesthetic experience of wonder, and a lesson in technique: Armstrong’s scat singing outstrips the impoverished meaning-making capacity of words.19
So if there is a model, a place of identification, a way out, it appears where the music outruns words. This is what there might be, for those who love the music, for poor black girls caught in uplift’s cruel embrace, for everyone not yet free, if you are willing to risk reading too much into stories made of other stories, old lies, cultivated memories, and half-forgotten desires. It should be a relief to know, as Farah Griffin admits in her book on Holiday, that you cannot “escape positing [your] own version of Lady Day,” and you should not “want to escape doing so” (6), because it is Holiday herself who escapes from behind all the tales. For myself, I prefer to recall the girl who demanded her mother get her out of that prison they called a school, and the struggling young woman who found a way to do so. Sadie died young, too, six years older than her daughter would, according to Nicholson’s careful accounting, or the same age, according to the sly voice of the autobiography: “Mom got to be thirty-eight when I was twenty-five. She would never have more than four candles on her birthday cake. So she was only thirty-eight when she died. I’m going to do the same thing. She never cared what calendars said, and neither do I” (125).20
no-way out
If the love of wayward mothers and daughters is to elude reformation, it must be prepared to face an accounting with violence, for the love of uplift is jealous and claims the violence as its prerogative. Even so, uplift’s love finds firmer ground when it attempts to intercede between dark fathers and their sons.
As with Kong, whose continuing fame, as well as proof of cultural relevance, relies on a series of remakes, following an underlying logic: he is reincarnated, every few decades, when new cinematic technologies succumb to vertiginous fantasies of a lost, primal embodiment. More forgettable are all the films, cartoons, texts, and products that follow the mercenary logic of the sequel—derivative efforts to extract diminishing revenue from the canon of the original and its remakes. The first in this line was hustled out in months by the original producers: “I don’t care what you make,” Merian Cooper recalled telling his partner, Ernest Schoedsack; “anything made called Son of Kong will make money” (qtd. in Vaz 249).
What they made, it happens, was a comedy, cobbled around the flimsy premise of a racist joke: Kong’s son is white. Though still a monstrous ape, he is drastically diminished in size, entirely white in color, and selflessly devoted to the service of Carl Denham, who has fled New York in the aftermath of the first film. Having dragged his father in chains to his doom, Denham discovers mild feelings of obligation to “little Kong,” who returns the sentiment in spades, giving his life to save his master in Skull Island’s climactic destruction. The film reads as imperialism’s affectionate self-parody: white love’s chuckling acknowledgment of its comical, loyal offspring.
Though Kong’s son deserves a thorough consideration of his own, as a footnote to his father’s story, Son of Kong merely confirms his entrapment, securing one dubious line of escape: the benevolence of uplift and the spectacle of conquest turn out to require the same sacrifice. That is, despite his long afterlife as a fictional celebrity, bigger than any vehicle paying his way, Kong remains trapped between the logic of the remake, which continually reenacts his lynching under a gauzy veil of color-blindness, and the logic of the sequel, which reimagines him as a pet—two manifestations of the same violence. Is there no way out for Kong?
Well, why should anyone care? Isn’t Kong a figure for everything antiracism seeks to abolish? Isn’t the task to get beyond Kong and the white supremacist regime that gave him birth?
In a gesture both damning and profoundly generous, the eponymous cycle of poems in Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination responds to the case of Susan Smith, a white South Carolina woman who drowned her two young sons in 1994, by recovering a voice for the imaginary black male kidnapper Smith invented to take the blame. Like the infamous speakers who observe him in several intervening poems, including “Uncle Tom” and “Uncle Ben,” this “black man pour[ed] from a / White woman’s head” (27) is granted an autonomous consciousness without agency in the material world. The opening poem, “How I Got Born,” establishes that autonomy as a kind of limbo existence from which Smith summons him—“an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion,” to recite the Nathaniel Mackey epigraph to Fred Moten’s In the Break. This fabricated black man is confined to Smith’s body, though he shares neither her face nor her skin, making him both “a black man” and “a mother” (16), a fantasy with real effects, materialized by her fear and desire: “Everything she says about me is true” (6).
The empirical fixity of this truth does not protect Smith as her story unravels, so the cycle tracks his inexorable reabsorption into the body of her character, as it is inscribed in law and public scandal. The final poem, “Birthing,” intersperses his voice among fragments of her actual confession, concluding with his incarnation into their body in the moment she reenters the world after watching the car bearing her children disappear into the lake. In an astonishing act of witness, Eady’s poem keeps faith with all of Smith’s victims—the drowned children, the African American community onto which she mustered the full force of the police power—even as he finds the only possible way to empathize with the murderer herself. For the black man she has invented to take the blame, who is no one if not Smith herself, is the only one who can stand with her as she stares out from the shore.
What the poem is proposing may be as simple as this: it is the task given to a certain line of poetry to stand on the shore, to be the only one standing with this woman, even as she murders her children, even as she surrenders herself to the movement of an overwhelming violence that bursts from her solitary act out into the long-remembered floodways of the civilized world. The poem neither redeems nor excuses; it does not ask if Smith was herself a victim, nor comment on the intimate violence and sexual abuse known to have marked her upbringing. Whatever it is in Smith that has been formed by the violence, in this poem, is that which she surrenders to the violence to place herself on its lee side, the side of mastery, and with it she surrenders her status as a mother and her agency and responsibility as the murderer of her children. It is this surrendered self that her imagination identifies as black. And so what the poem is also proposing is as simple as this: here too is a way blackness is birthed into the world.
To imagine you can properly segregate the blackness that poured from Smith’s head from that of the people who bore the violence she unleashed—justice’s extension across the darkness, the long arm of the law—is to disavow the everyday lived experience of blackness. But if the truth did come out, for once, why concern yourself with this white woman’s racist fantasies? Can’t you draw a line between this criminal and the community she so recklessly slandered and endangered? You may, the poem replies, but what would that line say if he could speak?
The truth came out, and the criminal was identified as a white woman named Susan Smith, but the poem also witnesses the moment when antiracism is once again seized by the ongoing hatred of blackness. Under a post–civil rights racial order, hegemonic antiracism requires figures such as Smith, who justify the reproduction of whiteness, and lesser forms of racial privilege, by embodying everything the enlightened and civilized love to hate: that bred-in, inbred intellectual and moral deficiency, pitiable but requiring correction unto death, that agency of violence calling an overwhelming violence onto itself as justice. We know it when we see it, goes the protocol. We don’t call its name in polite company. We just call the police. What the poem allows you to see is that the blackness that poured from Smith’s head—in the act of explanation, subsequent to the murder,