Kevin Young - The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness

The Grey Album __________________

Other Books by Kevin Young

POETRY

Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels

Dear Darkness

For the Confederate Dead

Black Maria

Jelly Roll: A Blues

To Repel Ghosts

Most Way Home

EDITOR

Best American Poetry 2011

The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

Jazz Poems

John Berryman: Selected Poems

Blues Poems

Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers

Copyright 2012 by Kevin Young

Text and image permission acknowledgments begin on page 409.

This publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota general fund and its art and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-55597-607-1

Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-042-0

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2012

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011944858

Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover art: Jennie C. Jones, from the Breathless Series. Audiotape pressed under glass, 2010. Courtesy of the artist.

This book is for

COLSON WHITEHEAD

my brother

And you keep writingall it takes is it, grit and motherwitand a good strong tendency towards lying (in the Negro sense of the term).

RALPH ELLISON TO ALBERT MURRAY

January 24, 1950

Zora, George Thomas informed me, you come to de right place if lies is what you want. Ahm gointer lie up a nation.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Mules and Men

Storying: animal tales; the spirituals as codes for runaway slaves; runaway slaves themselves; maroons; the blues code of life, tragic and comic, laughing to keep from crying; nothing but a good man feeling bad; nothing but a bad woman feeling good. Sell the Shadow to support the Substance.

Frederick Douglass finding a root to defeat his master; High John de Conquer; learning to write on the sly; writing yourself free passes to leave the plantation; Henry Box Brown mailing himself to freedom; Phillis Wheatleys letters to Obour, a code to her poems; pretending to be an owner and traveling north with your husband disguised as a slave; writing letters from the South that pretend to be from the North, so no one will look for you; freeing oneself from the fact of slavery with the fiction of song; the River Jordan is really the Ohio; slaves composing poems for money to buy their freedom; basket names; Dave the Slaves pottery and poetry. Elsewhere.

Langston Hughess autobiography; novels by slaves that arent really but barely masked autobiography; The Bondwomans Narrative; masks and modernity; jungle music; the primitivism of Picasso and the Picassoesque qualities of primitivism; Zora Neale Hurston pretending shes a bootlegger to record (bootleg) the lies of her neighbors; the blues singer, the numbers writer, the rootworker, and the conjure woman.

Not the Confederate bill; nor the contraband of slaves; passing, sometimes; sometimes The Blue-Tailed Fly; not Sally Hemmings but the story of Sally Hemmings and her descendants we always knew bout; Clotel; or, The Presidents Daughter; not Strom Thurmond but his black daughter wed heard of for years, mm-hmm, told you so.

Richard Wright forging his own library card hed have a white man sign so he could check out books; The Lost Zoo; Giovannis Room; Anne Spencers garden; Louis Armstrongs solos; his letters; his collages; bebops borrowings; Salt Peanuts; Rent-a-Beatnik; Abomunism; the hesitation pitch; The Hesitation Blues; fake books; dreambooks; Omeros; hoodoo, neo or no; Miles Davis kicking smack; Krazy Kat; SAMO; draft dodging; Vibration Cooking; highlife; Otis Redding covering Satisfaction; Aretha Franklin covering Otis Reddings Respect so that everyone thinks of her even before Otis; A-Tisket A-Tasket; the whistling in Sittin on the Dock of the Bay; scatting; the human beatbox; the lindy hop; hip-hop from 1983 to 1993; De La Souls Three Feet High and Rising; Black Star Line; Black Ark; Lucille Cliftons spirit writing; Curtis Live!; SAMO IS DEAD; De La Soul Is Dead; Hip Hop Is Dead; Charlie Parker Lives.

The Payback. The Groove. The Crazy Blues. Not the Rolling Stones; not Rock N Roll Nigger but Jimi Hendrix playing the National Anthem on his guitar; yearning; wordlessness; deep desire; Deep Deuce; artist Adrian Pipers card reading I am black to give to those who say racist things not suspecting she is; Adrian Piper dressing as a man and recording the reactions; Adrian Pipers self-portrait with her Negro features exaggerated; trickeration; the rope-a-dope; the put-on; Basquiats drawings of money as conjure, cause then he made it; bling, sometimes; WIT; UFO by ESG; Afronauts; Afro wigs; The Wig; Richard Pryors Mudbone; his deciding not to use the word nigger again. A Feast of Scraps. Nigerian money scams.

The Exquisite; The Silver Surfer; Dick Gregorys dollars; Thelonious Monks stamps; Bob Kaufmans silence, started after Kennedy was shot, only ending at the announcement of the end of the Vietnam War; his silence broken by declaiming T. S. Eliots Murder in the Cathedral mashed up with his own poem All the Ships That Never Sailed; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire; Girl You Know Its True; Angelas Mixtape; Orpheus in the Bronx; Drexciya, the underwater utopia; We Can Dance Underwater and Not Get Wet; The Robot; wildstyle; to frink, to clown, to krump; getting crunk. Mingering Mike, who invented mingering and then did it, painting and drawing his own Fake records and selling millions in his own bedroom;

and, selling snowballs on the street.