Old Books

Old Books Beckon

 

When bell hooks suggested that e-books can be “disappeared” by touching a button, my attention went into overdrive.  Holding a real book in one’s hands is neither a luxury nor a sign of being pre-historic. Holding a real book is a desperate act of holding on to what is passing.

I enjoy buying and reading and re-reading old books.  The materiality of the book counts for something and accounts for something else.  Among my recent purchases at the Amistad Research Center book sale  are a first-edition of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944); The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot in 1919 (1922; rpt. Arno Press, 1968); George Washington Williams’ History of the Negro Race in America 1619-1880 and eleven books by Chester Himes. Nor could I resist buying copies of Freedomways, Black World, Black Theater #5 (1971), and a few rare issues of Umbra and Nkombo.

Embracing a person you have not seen or spoken with for fifty years induces a shock of joy; embracing an old book conjures a shock of odd recognition: antiquity is more real than the modernity of four seconds ago.

In the realm of African American literature, old books retard cultural amnesia which desires to assassinate black intellect.  One reads old books to refresh memory or to acquire new memories.  Old books are sturdy tools for thinking through contemporary issues.  One reads old books in order to write, or to discover why, in the words of Himes, one continues “to live in a society where death has always been preferable to oppression.”  The skin privilege of being African American is tough; those who have it resist social death. Old books and old time religion also help. If writing well was good enough for George Washington Williams, a former enslaved person, it should be good enough for me.

The Amistad sale was a godsend.  I have more old books to inspire new words. Moreover, Amistad at Tulane University is a small version of the special collections at Howard, Yale, and Emory.  It is the repository of the papers of Countee Cullen, Fannie Lou Hamer, Tom Dent, Hale Woodruff and Chester Himes. Having books once possessed by Amistad is an invitation to return there to do work with old papers, the parents of old books.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      November 11, 2013      

 

 

Gordon Parks

Gordon Parks: Photography and Intervention

The "Gordon Parks: Making of an Argument" exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art provides a fine lesson about the art of photography and socially conscious discursive interventions. The argument in question refers to "Harlem Gang Leader," Life, November 1, 1948, pages 97-104, 106. The article was based on Parks' photographs of Leonard "Red" Jackson and members of the Midtowners gang, but the text was written by unnamed Life editors. There is a delicate tension between the text and the many photographs Parks shot over a period of four weeks.

Kalamu ya Salaam has suggested that photography is “writing with light,” and as such it demands use of visual literacy that parallels the print literacy we apply in analysis of traditional texts. “Harlem Gang Leader” illustrates that the art of “reading” in 1948 was as complex as it is in 2013.

The exhibit provides a rare opportunity to study photographs as narrative devices. The story of how the article was constructed by Life editors and how they may have altered Parks' intentions by omitting some of the more "humanizing" photographs is fascinating. This article as text plus images may inspire us to reconsider how stories about gang violence can be angled to manipulate public opinion about causes and effects.  It is impossible to know what Parks actually intended in 1948, but he does provide strong clues in Chapter 9 of Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990).  Those clues may awaken greater interest in Ralph Ellison’s 1948 essay “Harlem is Nowhere, ” which merits comparison with Richard Wright’s novella Rite of Passage and his article “Psychiatry Comes to Harlem,” Free World 12 (September 1946): 49-51.  These narratives by Parks, Wright and Ellison are touchstones for measuring how far narrative has progressed or regressed as an intervention focused on young people and the American love affair with violence.

The photographic component of “Harlem Gang Leader is a noteworthy example of how art intervenes in bringing a deeply rooted urban problem to national attention.  Viewing the photographs used by the Life editors, those they rejected, and the marked-up contact sheets, one can engage in sustained study of how a narrative is complicated by a combination of the visual and the verbal. One can read “Harlem Gang Leader” online by accessing the Life Magazine archive, 1936 to 1972.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.       November 11, 2013