Michelle D. Commander - Avidly Reads Passages

Avidly Reads

General Editors: Sarah Mesle and Sarah Blackwood

A series of short books about how culture makes us feel.

Avidly Reads Theory

Jordan Alexander Stein

Avidly Reads Making Out

Kathryn Bond Stockton

Avidly Reads Board Games

Eric Thurm

Avidly Reads Passages

Michelle D. Commander

Michelle D. Commander

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2021 by New York University

All rights reserved

Lucille Clifton,i am accused of tending to the past from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright 1991 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org.

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Cataloging in Publication Data is available from the publisher.

ISBN 9781479806164 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781479806171 (paperback)

ISBN 9781479806133 consumer ebook)

ISBN 9781479806188 (library ebook)

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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i am accused of tending to the past

as if i made it,

as if i sculpted it

with my own hands. i did not.

this past was waiting for me

when i came,

a monstrous unnamed baby,

and i with my mothers itch

took it to breast

and named it

History.

she is more human now,

learning languages everyday,

remembering faces, names and dates.

when she is strong enough to travel

on her own, beware, she will.

Lucille Clifton, i am accused of tending to the past

On a summer trip home in the early 2000s, I stopped at a gas station in Brunswick, Georgia. I plugged the nozzle into the gas tank and turned to walk toward the store. A sudden, loud growl from the engine of an ancient pickup truck caught my ear, and I paused to watch as an enormous Confederate flag, extending the length of the trucks bed, billowed in the air.

Instinctively, I pivoted to stick closer to my car. As the driver pulled up to a neighboring pump between the store and me, I calculated my options. Could I dodge him if I moved quickly enough toward the entrance? The middle-aged white man slumped out of his truck while, seconds too late to avoid his path, I advanced. I had tried to slow my pace to the door, but the man held it for me, allowing me to enter before him. He asked, How are you doing, maam, his comportment steeped in a kind of feigned southern gentility that contrasted with, but certainly did not absolve him of, the scene that he had created by hoisting from his vehicle the most prominent symbol of southern racism, white supremacist and nationalist bigotry, and contempt for Black life and breath. I was only able to muster an obligatory, Thanks. Fine and you? in response, but I did not await an answer. I rushed into the restroom instead.

Back on the road, I realized that just as I did not truly care how the man was feeling though I asked, he too might not have been sincere in his politeness, only addressing me to test whether his spectacle and good old boy performance had moved me in some way. As painful as it is to admit, his performance did affect me, did partially constrain me. I did not freeze completely during the momentary interaction; but my heart palpitated, and a sudden tingle trickled up the back of my neck and down the length of my arms, besetting me with panic about what might have happened if I did not retreat.

As an African American native of the South, my fear of these interactions compels me to drive sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly through certain towns. Of course, I also travel through the world with the joy and calm that come along with holiday retreats from the pressures of everyday life. More often, though, a sense that one ought to be hypervigilant often accompanies African Americans as we negotiate the expanse of sky, highway, and sea, endeavoring to get from one place to another. As Christina Sharpe notes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being about the very real trepidation, dehumanization, and lack of care that haunts Black people in the afterlife of slavery, Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased (15).

Its not just the one man at the gas station who moves me, restricts me. The legacy of white supremacy in its many relentless forms torments and dispossesses Black people and seeks to keep us in our places. Its persistence prompts me to reflect on the question of whether the Souths (and Americas) sordid entanglements with racism and its perpetually renovated restrictions on Black movement will forever suffuse the fascinatingly beautiful and grotesque landscape in which I grew and thus cannot help but love.

Avidly Reads Passages ruminates on this enduring aspect of slaverys complex aftermath. It does so through engagements with my familial histories and a wealth of other relevant cultural materials. Long before I gained the affective language to describe the ways that my family, other people of African descent, and I experienced the limitations of and possibilities for our mobility, I very much understood the inherent precariousness attached to many of our movements. This book considers how the promises of literal and figurative flight above and across the United States contentious social and political terrains continue to pique and sustain the Black imagination.

I retell this history using my beloved home of Lower Richland County, South Carolina, as a point of return and focus. My personal accounts are complemented by a range of evidences: narratives of slavery, travel accounts, major events in civil rights history, and genealogy to account for the history of Black passages in new and, hopefully, resonant ways.

The slave ship compelled the inauguration of African American identity against these turbulent shores, and so that is the mode of transport with which I begin. Each chapter focuses on the rise of subsequent forms of transportthe train, the automobile, the busthat became crucial to the development of American culture, sense of upward mobility, and ascent into particular kinds of modernity. And I place these forms alongside other passages: a range of laws passed over the course of more than two centuries that regulate and control the movements of African Americans.

But like the complicated history of the African American experience writ large, my chapters are not always temporally or narratively linear. For my enslaved family, travel was alternately an incredible cruelty and a longed-for possibility; where they lived could be a prison or a haven. You will find in my chapters different kinds of transportation meeting each other unexpectedly: swamps enabling the freedom that trains could not, for instance, or ships (military ones, this time) indirectly enabling automobiles. But this is because, in the southern Black history I tell, progress is uneven, and our passages are too.