I don’t know what explains Botham Jean nor Atatiana Jefferson, killed in their own homes, save some perverted act of fire prevention. I don’t know how else to think about the killing of Walter Scott, save that an agent of the state had considered him an offense to God. I don’t know if there is a better way of explaining the police publicly torturing a man on a bright city street. I have not yet watched George Floyd’s murder in its entirety, but I have seen enough of the genre to know the belief in black people as disaster, as calamity, as a Great Fire upon the city, has not yet waned. Once a people become a “calamity,” all means of dealing with them are acceptable. The implications of this equation are haunting. The centerpiece of this bracing work is “True Stories About the Great Fire,” a poem inspired by the belief among white Chicagoans that the first Great Migration to the city was “the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire” of 1871, which took hundreds of lives and burned out the heart of the city. The doom of a black boy is told to the rhythm of a jump rope. The thoughts of trains carrying black people north are conjured up. The voices of house-keepers and stockyard hands are summoned. Ewing published 1919, a volume that channels her city’s Red Summer into blues.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |