Moreover, for all the violence, her black people are not victims. They are casualties or among the fallen, but not powerless, because her images comprise an army of the unlikely, those grotesques and comics that white people invented in the effort to persuade themselves—and black people as well—that black people were only fit for servitude and that they were incapable of and uninterested in revolt. Walker turns against whiteness what white people invented. Those funny faces have come back to kill Massa. They aren’t so funny anymore, and Walker’s work in the Sikkema Jenkins exhibition has a wild, retaliatory air.
Some of the new works are very large, and you wonder where she could have found such huge sheets of paper. They are not cartoons (in spite of the title of that portrait of a black woman in head scarf and earrings); they don’t feel as though she means to suggest a studio of preparatory drawings. Black and white, ink and collage on paper, is the finished state. Most of the black figures in these new works are not in silhouette. She has shades of black and gray, hints of yellow, blue, and red, and sometimes there are backgrounds of brown. Walker is a superb draftsman. In the towering Christ’s Entry into Journalism, dozens and dozens of figures spiral out from the center. The black figures—heads, torsos, running men, women in hats—seem to come from different eras and circumstances of black representation, here satire, there ethnography, folklore, over there the black leader, black sports figure, or black singer, and those lips look like they came from Disney’s Jungle Book film, or her neck has that Jazz Age fashion magazine vibe.
I have heard viewers compare Christ’s Entry into Journalism to James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888), in the Getty Museum, and Benjamin Robert Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem (1820), in the Athenaeum of Ohio, and maybe so—if the point is that the reactions of spectators depicted in the painting are intended to affirm the reality of the Messiah. In Walker’s painting, the figures swirl around the center: a riot cop, maybe white, is about to bring a chicken leg down on a masked creature; a naked black man who resembles a harlequin has a sword by his side; behind him a Confederate soldier is wielding a dagger. White men rape or sport erections; a white woman brandishes an umbrella; a James Brown–like singer does a move with a microphone; a devil is stealing away a partially mummified black man in a tie; a flapper, not necessarily white, carries on a platter the head of a black youth in a hoodie. But it’s not certain which black figure at the center is the Christ figure: the black man kneeling in chains—the long echo of the design Josiah Wedgwood created for an antislavery medallion in 1787—or the naked black woman being borne away, or even the dark black woman (mannequin?) with her arm raised in valediction, or an equally dark black man immediately behind her with what looks like a protest sign.
The Pool Party of Sardanapalus (after Delacroix, Kienholz), also very big, has an Assyrian king floating in his cloud, detached from the violence around him. Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) is sexy; the concubines are nude, and the men killing them are seminude. In Walker’s revision, a naked black man is being stabbed by a white woman in a corset; a white man has his hands on a black man from behind and appears to be urging him to stab the naked black figure in front of him. But the center of Walker’s dynamic composition is a white man’s foot and the ropes around it. You follow the lines out in three different directions to black women in bikinis pulling firmly. Then you find the white man, most of his clothes off, being held down by black women and disemboweled. A naked white man lies with his face in a pool of blood; a black woman in a beach cap berates a white man’s back with a heavy branch. It’s not clear what is going on between the interracial couple at the top; at the opposite end a black youth in a do-rag rests on an elbow and smokes what you hope is reefer, but the whole is fearsomely kinetic, and Walker tells us in the title that she also had in mind something like Ed Kienholz’s sculpture of a policeman beating a black rioter.
Violence is a secret held by swamps in works such as Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit) or Spooks. Dead bodies are to be violated in Paradox of the Negro Burial Ground, Initiates with Desecrated Body, and The (Private) Memorial Garden of Grandison Harris, a work done in oil stick, ink, and paper collage on linen that refers to the slave trained by the Georgia Medical College to rob graves. Some of the paintings seem to portray how old and tired American racism has become: the rebel flags are as tattered as the laundress is tired, the branches have no leaves, whites and blacks are shoeless, stuck in backcountry folklore. It’s hard to read the expression on the face of a black woman who is washing—rather harshly, it seems—the back of a white woman in A Piece of Furniture for Jean Leon Gerome. The article of furniture must be the sculpture of a black head on which the white woman sits. Walker’s response to, say, Gérôme’s Moorish Bath (1870), in which a black woman seems solicitous of a hunched-over white woman, may lie in the aggression with which the black woman in her drawing washes the white woman.
Walker’s titles set the mood, but they also set you up, and the texts of her catalogs can be intimidating in their pretended didacticism. A medium-size work done in ink and collage, Scraps, is one of the images that linger in the mind long after you have seen it. Walker shows a naked young black girl in a bonnet, with a small ax raised in her left hand. She is making off with the large head of a white man. She might even be skipping. This isn’t Judith; it’s a demented Topsy in her festival of gore. Slavery drove both the slaver and the enslaved mad and itself was a form of madness. It’s the look Walker puts in the little girl’s eyes. Racial history has broken free and is running amok. But even this work has a strange elegance. Walker is not an exorcist, is not trying to be therapeutic. It is the way she fills up her spaces. With Walker you feel that everything is placed with delicacy and each gesture conveys so much.
I sometimes find myself remembering the great Sphinx of white sugar that Kara Walker built three years ago in an unused, emptied-out sugar refinery in Brooklyn along the East River: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The refinery was enormous, the walls streaked with sugar. In the distance, the large figure of a Mammy rested in her Egyptian pose, a bandanna on her head. The small basket-carrying boys made of dark red molasses who attended her were melting in the summer heat, folding over onto the floor. The large and roving crowd was quiet, as if under a spell. People took photographs of themselves standing between her creamy-looking arms.
The Harlem Renaissance journalist J. A. Rogers said that before the Sphinx lost her face she was a black woman. He cited the writings of an eighteenth-century traveler, the Comte de Volney, as his source. Everyone thought he was crazy. Kara Walker didn’t need either source, and as you walked around the rear of the Mammy figure, maybe expecting a big fig leaf or a blank, neutral area, there were the folds of a huge vulva. It was beautiful that Walker had not lost her nerve.
2017
VII
LOOKING AT SELMA
On November 18, 1964, not long before Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) took over responsibility for the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, J. Edgar Hoover, closet case and cross-dresser, told a group of women journalists visiting FBI headquarters that he considered King “the most notorious liar in the country.”
The following day King issued a statement saying that perhaps Hoover had become overwhelmed by the burdens of his office. He sent Hoover a lengthy telegram of reproach, in which he reiterated his criticisms of the bureau, including its inability to secure convictions for crimes against civil rights workers and its failure to make arrests for the tragic deaths of four girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 or the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. King observed that the FBI worked too closely with local law enforcement in the South on other criminal matters to have t
he necessary detachment in cases in which the rights and safety of Negro citizens were threatened by those same law enforcement officers.
The day after King sent his telegram, Hoover’s assistant director composed a letter pretending to be from a black person with knowledge of King’s extramarital affairs: “King, look into your heart. You know you are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes.… You are no clergyman and you know it. I repeat you are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. You could not believe in God and act as you do.” The letter hinted that King ought to kill himself.
Stanley Levison, a Jewish businessman and former Communist Party USA member, had been in King’s inner circle and would soon be again, which to Hoover made King a possible tool of the Soviets. It was on such grounds that Hoover had pressured Attorney General Robert Kennedy to authorize wiretaps on King’s home and the SCLC offices in Atlanta during the Kennedy administration. Expanded FBI surveillance included bugging King’s hotel rooms. Hoover was irate when King received the Nobel Peace Prize. His assistant director had an FBI agent mail from Miami the above letter to King, along with a tape of King’s sexual escapades in a Washington, D.C., hotel.
No mention of dirty tricks was made in Washington at the December 1 meeting King had with Hoover to try to settle the “liar” controversy. Before he left for Europe a few days later, King commended the FBI for making arrests in the murders of the three freedom riders in Mississippi. The package containing the FBI tape and letter sat around the SCLC offices until January 5, 1965, when it was passed on to King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, as routine mail. Dr. King and the four black advisers who listened to the tape with him knew where it had really come from: the FBI. It told them just how extensive the surveillance was and what the FBI might have on King. They were out to break him, to break his spirit, a depressed King said. He also blamed himself.
In Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Council (1986), David J. Garrow writes that Mrs. King dismissed the tape, calling it mumbo jumbo from which she could not get much. Garrow quotes Mrs. King as saying:
During our whole marriage we never had one single serious discussion about either of us being involved with another person.… If I ever had any suspicions … I never would have even mentioned them to Martin. I just wouldn’t have burdened him with anything so trivial.… All that other business just didn’t have a place in the very high-level relationship we enjoyed.
In the film Selma (2014), directed by Ava DuVernay, Mrs. King (Carmen Ejogo), hurt yet composed, endures the tape alone with her husband (David Oyelowo). The audience at the AMC Magic Johnson Harlem theater where I saw the film laughed when King says, “It’s not me,” and his wife responds, “I know. I know what you sound like.” Mrs. King—“Corrie” in the film—goes on to tell her husband that she’s gotten used to the anonymous phone calls, some even describing to her how her children will be killed, but she has not gotten used to the closeness of death. It creates for her a heavy fog. She is on her feet and wants to ask him one thing, and she wants the truth, because she is not a fool. Does he love her? Yes. Did he love any of the others? The pause before he answers is long, and the camera is close on his face. No.
He has acknowledged his offense, but his remorse is part of a twenty-first-century pietistic portrait of a great man of the twentieth century. Moved by a letter from her contrite husband, Corrie joins him in Selma at the end of the film for the last march to Montgomery. Not yet will any biopic of King show him cavorting in a hotel room, any more than it would deal with Garrow’s contention that one of King’s affairs was serious. And King won’t say, as he is supposed to have said, “Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.”
Just before the scene of the Kings at home listening to the scurrilous letter on tape and to a few seconds of sex sounds, Lyndon Johnson (played by Tom Wilkinson), exasperated by King’s refusal to call off a Selma march, summons Hoover (Dylan Baker) to the Oval Office. Hoover reminds the president that they could easily eliminate King. But Johnson doesn’t want King dead, because he wants a moderate to lead the civil rights movement. Hoover then suggests that they concentrate on the wife, on weakening the bond between them. Does the historical evidence support this version of events, that Johnson had Hoover use the tape in order to bring King into line?
Since the release of Selma, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, and a black member of Johnson’s cabinet, Clifford Alexander, have said that an otherwise admirable film gets wrong the part Johnson played in those historic events. King was glad about LBJ’s landslide victory in 1964, although LBJ did not phone to congratulate him on being the youngest person to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Johnson avoided him until after the election. In Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1936–65 (1998), Taylor Branch tells us that Johnson pretty much sat out the “notorious liar” acrimony between Hoover and King, impassive at a meeting with other civil rights leaders who backed King. But Johnson did call King on January 15, 1965—on King’s birthday—by which time King was back in Selma.
Johnson had used his considerable legislative experience to push through Congress, as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Kennedy’s bill to desegregate public accommodations. In his 2002 meditation on King’s life, Marshall Frady says that at a White House meeting shortly after he succeeded Kennedy, Johnson had assured King and other civil rights leaders that he would make sure the public accommodations bill got passed. But “out of his compulsion to personally straw-boss the entire course of the country, Johnson somewhat dismayed King by discouraging any further demonstrations, insisting that his administration could now be counted on to secure the rights of African Americans in full.”
Johnson wanted a voting rights bill but was doubtful that Congress would pass another race bill so soon. He was sometimes as nervous as Kennedy had been that social legislation unpopular with whites would deliver the traditionally Democratic South to the Republicans. Yet he was determined to make his legacy as a Roosevelt Democrat.
A volatile figure, Johnson bristled when he thought King was giving the public the impression that he had easy access to the president, or that he was dictating the administration’s program: “Where the hell does he get off inviting himself to the White House?” he shouted when King came out of the Selma jail in February 1965 and announced his intention to fly to Washington to meet with LBJ.
King observed that Kennedy listened, where Johnson held forth. But the LBJ Presidential Library has made available the recording of Johnson’s conversation with King during that January 1965 phone call. It has the president saying that if King showed the very worst of voting rights oppression in the South and got it on TV, got it on the radio, got it in newspapers, “Pretty soon, the fellow that didn’t do anything but follow—drive a tractor, he’ll say, ‘Well that’s not right, that’s not fair.’” Johnson was describing the kind of moral pressure he needed from King to push the legislation. This represents a significant change in Johnson’s view of nonviolent resistance as a legitimate challenge to power, a matter the film does not address directly.
Studies of the FBI and its relationship with the civil rights movement note that people in the movement sometimes cooperated in their own surveillance.1 Andrew Young has said about those early days that the presence of FBI agents on the sidelines, taking notes and photos as civil rights workers got beaten up, nevertheless had a restraining influence on Southern law enforcement. The movement looked to the bureau as the federal agency in the field that might protect civil rights workers. Then, too, transparency was important to the movement. Young said that they would call up the FBI and the Justice Department to let everybody know where the demonstrations were going to be and why they were being held. King even spoke of the need to maintain a working relationship with the FBI.
These histories also show that because of J. Edgar Hoover the FBI’s efforts to know what was happening inside the movement turned into a battle to manipulate and undermine the movement. With
the permission of Bill Moyers, special assistant to the president, Hoover sent a monograph on “Communism and the Negro Movement” to officials within the Johnson administration. Hoover had joined the bureau in the Red Summer of 1919, when brutal race riots—whites attacking blacks whom they saw as competition for jobs—broke out across the country. The year 1919 saw also the Red Scare, during which thousands of Eastern European and Jewish radicals were deported. The campaign for social justice for blacks and the threat of communism were forever joined in Hoover’s mind; but by the time the FBI was compiling memoranda defending the bureau’s record against the accusations King made in his telegram of November 1964, fear of Communist infiltration in the civil rights movement had become a pretext for actions that betrayed Hoover’s fear of a black movement itself.
Civil rights leaders and administration officials knew about the existence of the sex tapes. Newspaper editors declined to publish the stories about King’s private life that Hoover’s FBI offered them. Hoover believed he had the power to replace King with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP as the most important black leader in America. Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach complained to Johnson about Hoover’s dossier and tactics, but Johnson did nothing. He could not afford to alienate the FBI director, saying that he’d rather have him “inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.”2 Hoover as much as Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, was an enemy of black liberation. Yet Hoover appears only once in Selma. Julian Bond has speculated that maybe DuVernay’s film needed a villain, a foil for King, but the question remains why Lyndon Johnson should be made the bad guy when—in this matter—he wasn’t, especially given the number of real villains on the side of white supremacy.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 35