CENTENNIALS
Thanks to the troublesome "magic" of instant communication
which informs us about what happened
prior to its spatial and temporal manifestations, we might welcome the rest and recuperation that a
centennial can offer. Yet, remembering
and reassessing what happened one
hundred years ago can only make going
from the new frying pan to an old skillet a paradoxical exercise in hopeful
despair.
Consider this year's Margaret Walker Centennial, the
shuttling between the strengthening message of "For My People" and
the agony-laden news of "Jackson State, May 15, 1970." Implacable,
absurdly hungry Death triumphs over the godless trinity of class, race, and
gender in the twenty-first century. Rereading Walker is to suffer knowing our
young are "Not rich with gold but priceless truths of life and death, of/
giving self and sharing love for this is all there is." Lives of all colors matter, with or without hash
tags, dog tags, car tags or tags period.
Margaret Walker was one of many poet/bridges between the oral traditions
of the enslaved Africans and Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper and the multiethnic break beat voices of 2015. All, including refugees straight out of Syria,
Palestine and Iraq, are compelled to
voice and revoice Walker's closing
stanza from "Jackson State...":
Now all may see their faces in a marble monument, and
walk
this plaza where they died in vain; but we will not
forget,
for nothing is the same; never ever be the same
since
that blue-reddened night.
The specific "where" in the stanza is Lynch
Street (named for John R. Lynch not for
an obscene verb). The name bleeds,
however, in the fates of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas (1916) and Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi (1955); it
casts a lurid gloom on daily violence and death in the streets of the United
States of America, in the global landscape.
Death must be proud of how effective it is in making our remembering of
the past an uncanny projection of our futures as it clobbers John Donne's Holy
Sonnet X: "Death be not proud."
After December 31, 2015, centennials may provide hours of
hope and ancestral celebration for some African Americans and twelve months of
anguish for others. We can use what is
left of free will to select angles of vision and revision. 2016 is time for remembering Alice Childress, John Oliver Killens,
Frank Yerby, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the founding of the Association
for the Study of Negro Life and History.
The population of ancestors to remember will be increased in 2017 by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ossie Davis,
Thelonius Monk, Jacob Lawrence, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, Lena
Horne, Bruce McMarion Wright, and Ella Fitzgerald. I beg the unnamed and forgotten to pardon my
lack of omniscience.
The spiritual centennial locus for 2017 shall be near
Ferguson and its hypertension-inviting conditions --- East St. Louis, July 1917,
replete with democratic American hatred,
riot, and death. There people will be
saturated with music, visual art, theatre, and poetry yoked the prose
of Killens and Yerby from 2016. People
will recall how jazz swept the United States in 1917; that Freud published "Introduction
to Psychoanalysis" and only 38 Negroes were lynched; that migration was in motion as the Original
Dixieland Jass Band made the first jazz recordings for somebody's Jazz Age, and F. W. Mott proposed a theory of shell
shock to account for the odd behaviors of some WWI soldiers.
If we are lucky, we may be renewed and empowered from observing centennials. May!!.
As with all things influenced by time and the emotional gravity of moon and sun, absolutely nothing is guaranteed.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. September 4, 2015