by Leila Taylor
The need to name the dead, to put a body in the ground marked with stone, is necessary for the continuation of memory, of presence, and of humanity. And the right to memorialization, to who goes in the ground, has long been determined by who owns that ground. When walking through a row of headstones, I am aware that the space in front of each marker is that particular person’s place — the physical space of the body in the box taken up in this 3x8 foot rectangular area. But these public artworks mourn deaths that are not just personal loses, but are the result of systemic violence and social injustice, loses that effect whole communities.8
Black men are ten times more likely to be murdered than white men in America, and fourteen times more likely to die from guns.9 The deaths of Black men are blazed upon social media with more and more frequency, creating a visual deluge of crime scenes, witness videos taken on cell phones, school photos, casual snapshots of victims, and television interviews of outraged neighbors, community leaders, and activists demanding justice for the victim, accountability for the guilty, and gun control legislation. The private individual loss has a second public-facing identity that becomes a political statement and a bereavement for the whole, not just the one.
Say Her Name
I remember watching Roots on a little black-and-white TV in our kitchen. The mini-series, based on Alex Haley’s search for his lineage, told the epic story of an African American family, starting from West Africa in 1750 to post-Civil War Tennessee. I was five at the time and the only part I can remember is the scene in which the overseer commands another slave to whip a young LeVar Burton until he accepts his new name, the one given to him by his masters: Toby. It is a relentlessly violent scene, and the crowd of slaves watching flinch at every crack. Burton dangles limply with his hands tied above, sweating, naked from the waist up. His eyes are closed with exhaustion as he gasps in between lashes, “My name is Kunta. Kunta Kinte.” When he can’t take anymore and responds with “Toby,” he is cut down. The Black faces in the crowd behind him bow their heads in disappointment, demoralized by the choice between the death of the body and the death of identity.
In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass recalls seeing his Aunt Hester whipped and renders the scene in dramatic, gory detail:
Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d——d b——h, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over.
This offensive language is edited out (I’m assuming “damned bitch”), denying the master his power to name her, to brand her in this way. We are told her name is Aunt Hester, but he doesn’t give Colonel Lloyd the satisfaction of repeating his insult, refusing to defame her further.
It’s the most basic technique of humanization, but an effective one. The “X” of Malcolm X is not only a refusal of the master’s lineage, but a kinship with the scores of lost souls whose names were never known. To take away the name is to revoke personhood. Frankenstein was the doctor, his monster is nameless.
In the protests and marches of the Black Lives Matter movement you’ll hear the call-and-response cries — signs and hashtags to “say his name” and “say her name.” The protest song, “Hell You Talmbout,” by Janelle Monáe, is a running list of names of men and women killed by police brutality and state-sanctioned vigilantism:
Sandra Bland: say her name!
Sandra Bland: say her name!
Sandra Bland: say her name!
Sandra Bland: won’t you say her name?
Say her name, say her name, say her name, won’t you say her name?10
To be “woke” is to see through the veil, and the phrase has become part of the social justice lexicon. Social consciousness makes the hazy translucency of the past transparent and in focus. While being “awake” signifies an unveiled awareness, Sharpe observes that a “wake” is also a vigil held for the dead. “Living in the wake means living in and with terror[…] Black people become the carriers of terror.” The privilege of non-Blackness is the ability to keep the curtain closed without ramification, to choose to see one point of view without the other. The normality of the spectacle of Black death makes it even easier to ignore as just part of our media landscape. I came into work one morning, a bit sad, angry, and shook up after watching Philando Castile die. The video, which went viral, shows a police officer shooting into a car and a split screen of a woman in the driver’s seat capturing the incident on her phone. Castile is slumped over, moaning, with his hand on this side, and there is a massive bright blood stain on his white t-shirt. The caption on the screen translates his girlfriend’s words: “Oh my god, please don’t tell me he’s dead.” A co-worker asked me how I was and I said, “Not great.” She asked why and I was a bit taken aback. It seemed obvious to me, it was everywhere, and of course I would be upset. Who wouldn’t be? But she had no idea what I was referring to. That morning, I laid in bed, my thumb swiping down and down and down past the videos of dying black bodies and weeping mothers repeated again and again as they were shared over and over, past another #name in my Twitter feed, another Rest in Power and another name to add to the list of names to say. My non-Black friends and colleagues remained oblivious, cooing over kittens sitting on dogs while I just watched an innocent man get murdered on Facebook, again. While we were staring at the same screens and looking out of the same window, I felt as though the curtains were only drawn back on my side.
Artist Kehinde Wiley’s painting, The Virgin Martyr St. Cecilia, is inspired by the 1599 sculpture of the same name by Stefano Maderno: a likeness of the body of Cecilia found in her tomb incorrupt and in this same position. Wiley depicts a young Black man lying on the ground; his head is turned away from us and his arms are stretched out awkwardly underneath him. His hair is braided back in corn rows and he wears a bright orange hoodie, grey jeans and trainers. There is a pattern of pink flowers that surround him. Everything about the pose suggests a body that has fallen and never moved; it is a pose suggesting a sudden death, not a languorous repose. It is a pose that is seen more on the streets under flashing red-and-blue lights than in an artist’s studio, and one expects to see a pool of red flow onto the white flower strewn cloth. It is a grand romantic image — a glorious depiction of an undignified death.
Affective Activism
It is amazing how something so brilliant can come out of such a mediocre building, but Paisley Park, the former recording studio and offices for Prince, in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, resembles nothing but a generic corporate building. It’s a sprawling complex of gleaming white geometry that seems designed to be purposefully innocuous. Once inside, we relinquished our cell phones and were led to the atrium to start the tour. Surrounding us was the balcony of the second floor, the ceiling painted in a Nineties trompe l’oeil of a blue sky with puffy clouds. On a small platform attached to the second-floor balcony was a scale model of the building which looked even more generic at that size. It seemed an odd place to put it — something you’d usually find in a plexiglass box in the lobby. After a brief introduction to what we could expect on the tour, the guide then pointed up towards the scale model, revealing that it contained Prince’s cremains. There was a resounding gasp, as none of us were prepared for that bit of information, and we bowed our heads in a moment of silence. Then I heard the burst of a gasp behind me and turned slightly to see a middle-aged Black man emit a loud guttural sob. He began openly weeping and one of the employees came over, put her arm around him and handed him a box of Kleenex. I glanced behind me, hoping to catch his eye, give him a solemn nod of solidarity and empathy, but he never saw me.
Crying is featured a
lot in Jordan Peele’s Get Out; in fact two of the most iconic scenes in the film are close-ups of Black faces struggling to fight back tears. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is visiting the family of his wealthy white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) at their large house in upstate New York. Feeling isolated and alone, he seeks connections with the few Black people he sees, such as the staff, but something’s not quite right with them. The mutual nod of recognition you do when you see a Brother or a Sister isn’t returned and they seem disturbingly content in their subservience. Someone keeps unplugging his cell phone and when he asks Georgina (Betty Gabriel), the housekeeper, about it, she brushes it off. Not wanting to get her in trouble with the boss, he says, “All I know is sometimes, if there’s too many white folks, I get nervous, you know.” Georgina’s normally fixed grin falters slightly and she strains to keep the smile in place. She repeats “Oh, no. No-no-no-no-no-no,” while a tear eases its way down her cheek, forcing its way through.
In the pivotal scene, Chris finds himself surreptitiously hypnotized by Rose’s mother (Catherine Keener) under the guise of helping him to quit smoking. She hones in on his memory of his mother dying when he was a child and his inability to save her. His body is fixed to the chair, unable to move, and he strains to look away from her steady gaze as his tears are forced from him. In this psychic invasion, his personal anguish is turned against him. He shakes his head and as the tears run down his face his consciousness is repressed deep into a black void called, “the sunken place.” With his mind, spirit, memory and identity (whatever you want to call it) buried deep, his body is free to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Wealthy white people will use his Black body for its youth, virility, strength, and health. (Hence the particular affront to smoking. Some old, rich white man is going to be using him, so he better be in good condition.) We learn that Georgina, the Black maid, is really Rose’s grandmother using the body of a younger Black woman as a vessel to keep on living, cooking, and taking care of her family — immortality through bodily possession. The Black body has value, the Black mind is disposable. As with Georgina, her tears are the last remaining bits of herself spilling out of the body as proof that she still exists.
Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve been kidnapped, that people who looked like you, who spoke your language, captured you and delivered you to people who did not look like you and did not speak your language. Maybe your wife or husband, your son or daughter, your best friend or your neighbor were captured too, but you end up in separate places. You are forced into the hull of a ship chained next to people, packed together. You don’t know how long you’ll be there, but eventually you get used to the stench of shit and piss and vomit in the sweltering heat. Despite all this, despite the hunger and the thirst, despite the diseases that spread from one to another, despite being kept chained next to the corpse of someone who succumbed, you don’t throw yourself overboard in an attempt to kill yourself. After months, you finally land in a country you’ve never been to, are herded and examined like livestock, collared around the neck to a pole connected to six or so others like you, and made to march. Imagine you’re nauseous or on your period or have a migraine. You’re probably in shock. I hope you’d be in shock. The last thing you’d feel like doing is smiling and dancing, but when that journey brought them to the auction block, that is exactly what they were meant to do, to perform contentment in an act of salesmanship. I can imagine grins frozen in terrified rigor or repressed rage, eyes wet with tears or dulled from exhaustion. Black bodies are denied the humanity of emotivity. The cliché of the stoic Black man that never smiles, that suppresses laughter, is a conditioned response to centuries of cooning, buffoonery, and benevolent subservience.
In Kehinde Wiley’s video piece Smile, there is a grid of young Black men shot from the neck up, in front of a white backdrop. Facing the camera, they are asked to smile and then to hold that smile for an hour. First, the smiles are relaxed and natural (neither the Angry Black Man nor the Uncle Tom). However, after a while, the forced smiling starts to take its toll. The muscle strain begins to show, the jaws become taught. The eyes betray the smile, and something closer to despair slips through.
It’s easier to purchase a person if you’re taught that they like being slaves, that they are relieved to have finally been captured and have the chance to live and die under someone else’s control. Slaves were supposed to be happier when they were put to work — like a working dog, they’re more content when they are doing what they were bred to do. It’s a twisted marketing tool, selling the lie that the slave’s spectrum of emotions is shorter and simpler than that of white people. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.” In other words, Black people didn’t feel sorrow, or if they did, it didn’t last very long.
The key methodology of supremacy is establishing that Blacks don’t feel the same way whites feel. The erasure of interiority and emotive policing reassured slave owners that what they were doing was not inhumane because Black people weren’t quite human. They didn’t have the same range of affect, therefore, empathy becomes irrelevant. Saidiya V. Hartman quotes a nineteenth-century witness to a coffle: “Given that the poor negro slave is naturally a cheerful laughing animal, and even when driven through the wilderness in chains, if he is well fed and kindly treated, is seldom melancholy.”
The refusal to “step-lively” in the commodification of emotions is an act of resistance, to be, as Eva Tettenborn puts it, Purposefully Melancholic. To be visibly in despair, to weep or wail, to let tears fall and mouths droop, to stare into the middle distance in still silence, subverts the perception of the nature of Blackness as being compliantly cheerful. In this way mourning becomes an affective activism.11 There is a danger in the overexposure of the bereaved Black person — the repetition and frequency becoming numbing, and negating the purpose, which is to evoke empathy and humanity12— but if the image of the weeping Black mother is part of the visual language of Black protest, none have had the impact of Emmett Till’s mother.
In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Black boy from Chicago, was visiting his great-uncle Mose Wright in Money, Mississippi in the heart of Jim Crow country. Emmett was an extroverted kid from the city, so before he left his mother sat him down and told him how to behave in the south: “If you see a white woman coming down the street, you get off the sidewalk and drop your head, don’t even look at her.”
Despite his mother’s warnings, after buying two cents’ worth of candy at the grocery store, Emmett (allegedly) whistled at a white woman. Four days later, her husband and his half-brother broke into Emmett’s great-uncle’s home in the middle of the night, dragged him from his bed by gunpoint and took him away in their truck. They beat him beyond recognition, shot him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River, where he was found three days later with a cotton-gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.
Beyond recognition is a nice way of putting it. It suggests that the person still looks like a person, just someone different. Emmett’s face was decimated and the only things recognizably human were his nose and mouth, both of which did not seem to be in the right place. That image next to the photo of his huge brown eyes and chubby cheeks makes it seem unfathomable that any sane human being could do this to a child. But to his assailants Emmett was never a child.
Mamie Till’s decision to show the mutilated body of her son, as it was left, without reconstruction, without makeup, was a political act of resistance. She insisted on an open casket funeral saying, “Let the people see what I have seen.” A glass top was added, allowing Emmett to be seen while protecting the mourners from the odor of decay. News of the lynching spread, and fifty thousand people came to pay tribute. Tens of thousands more saw the photographs of Emmett’s face in Jet, a popular magazine for and by Black people, and later that image would become a call to action for the Civil Righ
ts Movement. Almost as significant as the photo of Emmett is the photograph of Mamie. She is leaning over the casket, eyes squeezed painfully closed, with her mouth in a tight grimace. Her right hand is lightly touching the casket, but her left is clenching her stomach. Everything about her posture suggests physical pain as if she’s been kicked in the gut.
Emmett Till’s casket is on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington D.C. It is easily one of the most emotionally charged pieces in the museum’s collection and the story of its acquisition takes a rather morbid path.
In 2005, the casket was exhumed as part of a renewed investigation into his death, and the body of Emmett Till was re-interred in a different casket. Then, in July 2009, the manager of Burr Oak Cemetery in Chicago was charged with digging up bodies, dumping them somewhere else, and then reselling the plots. Emmett’s grave wasn’t disturbed, but during the investigation his original glass-topped casket was found rotting in a dilapidated storage shed. The casket was donated to the Smithsonian Institution where it remained in storage and unseen until 24 September 2016, opening day of the NMAAHC, and since then thousands of people have lined up to pay their respects, again.
The elegiac weight of the object is evident in the design of the display. Some exhibits are tagged with a black sign and a red border reading, “Images outlined in red may not be suitable for younger or sensitive viewers.” This museum of Black history is peppered with them, and there is one in front of the Emmett Till exhibit. It’s a slow passage to the casket, giving you time to work your way up to it. Just before the room with the casket, is a display of the article in Jet magazine and the images and words of his mother in large script letters on the wall. You’re led into an antechamber with a video of a documentary before you reach the final space containing the casket. The room is purposefully neutral with low lighting and subtle wood tones, designed with the “superstitious respect and veneration for the trace.” 13 The casket is raised on two levels of platforms and visitors file past one by one, pausing for a moment before continuing on to the next exhibit or taking a seat in front of the display for a moment — a strange simulacrum of the funeral experience, a funeral for a phantom.