Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  We talk into the night about a lot of things. A first-generation U.S. Bajun, she shares with me her plan to have dual citizenship, from the U.S. which she automatically has, and from Barbados also. I’m profoundly pleased for her, and for us, for whenever a Br’er Rabbit slip-the-yoke operation can be achieved, it puts another plank underfoot at home base.

  I ride the elevator, thinking about people I’ve known growing up (not that all these years aren’t my formative years) who worked tirelessly to maintain a deep connection with the briar patch and its ways of being. No matter where they journeyed in the world or what kinds of bribes they were offered to become amnesiacs, they knew their real vocation was to build home base, sanctuaries, where black people can stand upright, exhale, and figure out what to do about the latest attack. And so they kept faith with the church of their childhood, or the UNIA or Father Divine movement (both alive and well in Philly, by the by), or the family farm in Alabama, or the homestead in the Islands, sending money, cement, clothing, books, lumber, weapons, certain that home base is not where you may work or go to school, but where the folks are who named you daughter, daddy, mama, doctor, son, brother, sister, partner, dahlin’, chile.

  I rinse my ravaged mouth out with warm salt water and hit the keyboard. As my young friend said, the issue is rip-off. Invisibility is not a readily graspable concept for a generation that grew up on MTV, Cosby, Oprah, Spike Lee, Colin Powell, and black folks on soaps, quiz shows, and the nightly news. Not only are black folks ostensibly participating—so what the hell does invisibility mean?—but what is generally recognized at home and abroad as “American” is usually black. A hundred movies come to mind, but not their titles, sorry. For instance, the one about two lost young Euro-Ams who find themselves in what they think is a time warp, the terrain woefully fiftyish, but discover that they’ve landed in a Soviet spy school, in an American village erected for the purpose of training infiltrators to pass as “American.” The two are enlisted to update and authenticate the place and the curriculum. Everything they present as “American”—music, speech, gesture, style—is immediately identifiable, certainly to any black spectator, as black.

  As for alienation, or as Dr. Du Bois limned it in numerous texts, double-consciousness and double vision, people coming of age in a period hallmarked by all-up-in-your-face hip-hop and an assertive pluralism/multicultural-ism as well don’t see barriers as a policy as old as Cortez, as deadly as COINTELPRO, as seductive as the Chris Columbus hype chugging down the pike, and more solid than the Berlin Wall, given the system’s monstrous ability to absorb, co-opt, deny, marginalize, deflect, defuse, or silence.

  I don’t know what goes on in classrooms these days, but in informal settings the advice of the Invisible Man’s granddaddy, “Undermine ’em with grins,” is inexplicable Tomism. The paradoxical paradigm of the Liberty paint factory episode in Ellison’s novel, the necessity of mixing in black to concoct pure white, is just a literary joke thought up by some old-timey guy on an equally old-timey typewriter. The three aspects of alienation as traditionally experienced and understood by my elders, my age group, and the generation that came of age in the sixties—alienation from the African past (and present—Was there ever an American airline with direct flights to the motherland?), alienation from U.S. economic and political power, alienation from the self as wholly participating in history—don’t register as immediately relevant.

  I spend a fitful night fashioning questions to raise with myself in the morning. What characterizes this moment? There’s a drive on to supplant “mainstream” with “multicultural” in the national consciousness, and that drive has been sparked by the emancipatory impulse, blackness, which has been the enduring model for other down-pressed sectors in the U.S. and elsewhere. A repositioning of people of color (POCs) closer to the center of the national narrative results from, reflects, and effects a reframing of questions regarding identity, belonging, community. “Syncretism,” “creolization,” “hybridization” are crowding “assimilation,” “alienation,” “ambivalence” out of the forum of ideas. A revolution in thought is going on, I’m telling myself, drifting off. Modes of inquiry are being redevised, conceptual systems overturned, new knowledges emerging, while I thrash about in tangled sheets, too groggy to turn off the TV.

  It drones on about Maxwell, the publishing baron who allegedly went over the side of his private yacht at two in the morning. All commentary reduced to the binary, as is typical of thought in the “West”: suicide or homicide? I smirk in my sleep, sure that Maxwell used a proxy corpse and is alive and chortling in, say, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Jim Jones, no doubt, is operating, courtesy of the CIA’s answer to the Witness Relocation Program.

  Still half-asleep, I rummage around in dualisms which keep the country locked into delusional thinking. The Two-Worlds obsession, for example: Euro-Ams not the only book reviewers that run the caught-between-two-worlds number into the ground when discussing works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and other POCs, or rather, when reducing complex narrative dramas by POCs to a formula that keeps White World as a prominent/given/eternal factor in the discussion. Two-Worlds functions in the cultural arena the way Two-Races or the Black-and-White routine functions in the sociopolitical arena. It’s a bribe contract in which Amero-Africans assist in the invisibilization of Native Americans and Chicanos in return for the slot as the “indigenous,” the former slaves who were there at the beginning of the great enterprise called America.

  The limits of binary opposition were in evidence in a manuscript I’d been reading on the way to the dentist’s office. Articles that called Black cinema “oppositional cinema” to Hollywood totally ignored practitioners operating in the independent circuit, and focused instead on Spike Lee, Matty Rich, John Singleton, Joe Vasquez, and Mario Van Peebles—filmmakers who take, rather than oppose, Hollywood as their model of filmmaking. The articles reminded me of the way the establishment press during the so-called Spanish-American War labeled the gung-ho, shoot-’em-up, Manifest-Destiny-without-limits proponents as imperialists, and the let’s-move-in-in-the-name-of-hemispheric-hegemony proponents as anti-imperialists. Meanwhile, only the Black press was calling for a genuine help-liberate-then-cooperate-not-dominate anti-imperialism. All that is to say, there are at least three schools of Black filmmaking in the U.S.: that which produces within the existing protocol of the entertainment industry and may or may not include a critique (Fred Williamson, for example); that which uses enshrined genres and practices but disrupts them in order to release a suppressed voice (Spike Lee, for example, who freed up the B-boy voice in his presentations, not to be confused with interrogations, offering a critique of U.S. society but not rising above its retrograde mindset re women and homosexuals in order to produce a vision); and that which does not use H’wood as its point of departure, but is deliberate and self-conscious in its commitment to building a socially responsible cinema, fashioning cinematic equivalents for our sociopolitical/cultural specificity and offering transformation dramas (Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Larry Clark, and other insurgents of “La Rebellion,” who, in the late sixties, drafted a declaration of independence in the overturning of the UCLA film school curriculum).

  The limits of binary thinking are spooky enough, I’m thinking, as the birds begin, but what are the prospects for sound sense in the immediate future now that conglomerates have escalated their purchase on the national mind? Since the 1989 publication of the Chomsky-Herman tome and the fall 1991 issues of Media Fair, which drew a scary enough picture of media control by white men of wealth, the noose has tightened. And today seventeen corporations own more than 50 percent of U.S. media—textbook companies, newspapers, magazines, TV stations, radio stations, publishing houses, film-production companies. And computerization makes it all the easier to expunge from available reference material those figures, movements, and lessons of the past that remind us that radicalism is also a part of the U.S. tradition. Without models, how does any citizen break
out of the basic dualism that permeates social, educational, political, economic, cultural, and intimate life in this country? I refer to the demonic model abridged below:

  We are ordained You are damned

  We make history You make dinner

  We speak You listen

  We are rational You are superstitious, childlike (as in minor)

  We are autonomous and evolved You are shiftless, unhinged, underdeveloped, primitive, savage, dependent, criminal, a menace to public safety, are needy wards and clients but are not necessarily deserving

  We live center stage, the true heroes (and sometimes heroines) You belong in the wings or behind the scrim providing the background music

  We are pure, noble, upright You are backward, fallen, tainted, shady, crafty, wily, dark, enigmatic, sly, treacherous, polluted, deviant, dangerous, and pathological

  We are truly human You are grotesques, beasts, pets, raisins, Venus flytraps, dolls, vixens, gorillas, chicks, kittens, utensils

  We were born to rule You were born to serve

  We own everything Even you are merely on loan to yourself through our largess

  We are the dicks You are the pussies

  We are entitled You are obliged

  I slap the alarm clock quiet and roll over, pondering my own journey out of the lockup. Pens crack under me, paper rustles. When in doubt, hew close to the autobiographical bone, I instruct myself. But my own breakout(s) from the lockup where Black/woman/cultural worker in the binary scheme is a shapeless drama with casts of thousands that won’t adhere to any outline I devise. I opt instead for a faux family portrait to narrate what I can’t essay.

  II SPLIT VISION AND AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

  José Feliciano is on the radio singing “Ohhh beautiful for spacious skies.” Everyone holds still, alert to meaning in each stressed note, breath, and strum. Elbows on the table, Aunt Clara studies the pattern of kernels in her corn on the cob as Feliciano builds, reining in his passion then unleashing it. Cousin Claude, the barbecue fork his baton, stands on tiptoe to hit the high notes. “America, America” comes out in preposterous falsetto, but nobody laughs or complains. Fragments of the tune, raspy and off-key, snag in the throat of Granddaddy Daniels. He leaves off singing to say that nobody lets loose on “America” like Aretha or Ray Charles. It takes a blood to render the complex of longing, irony, and insistence that characterizes our angular relationship to this country.

  The song over, Cousin Claude forgets he came indoors to take orders; he drifts around the living room while the burgers burn out back. Aunt Clara makes pulp of her corn on the cob; the attack has less to do with food, more with what a hunger the song has stirred up. Granddaddy Daniels clears his throat, spits phlegm into a hanky, then makes a big production out of folding the paper and backing it to the crossword puzzle. The youngsters on the floor doing homework lean in the old man’s direction. Clearing the throat is usually a prelude to storytelling, but his pencil point keeps piercing the newsprint, a signal that he’s not in a storying mood about, say, why he never rises when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung at the stadium, but will shush everybody and strain forward when a “cullid person” is doing the hell out of “America, the Beautiful.” Eventually he bobs his head up and down and says that the Latino brother kicked much butt.

  Cousin Claude waltzes into the kitchen and dances one of the Moten sisters away from the chopping board. He’s humming the last few lines of the song, his lips tucked in and “brotherhood” growling in the throat, then ricocheting off the roof of his mouth, the final notes thin and trailing out to sea as, the dance over, he bows and heads through the door. The Moten twins, “healthy” women who cook in their black slips and stockinged feet, resume arguing about whether or not hard-boiled eggs are going into the potato salad this day, goddamnit.

  Cousin Claude goes down the back steps one at a time like a child. He ponders aloud the mystery and history of Africans in the U.S. The elders, squinched together on the back-porch glider, call out, “Shut up,” “Preach,” or “Your food’s on fire, Sugah,” depending on how worked up they wish to get on the subject. When the call-and-response reaches a pitch, drowning out the DJ on the radio overhead in the kitchen window, Cousin Claude tries, without success, to lure the elders into a discussion of his childhood days when the household wars between the Danielses and the Motens threatened to split the family up and drive all the children crazy.

  WAR ONE: ASSIMILATION VS. TRANSFORMATION

  It was Great-Aunt Zala, a Daniels, who would shake us awake when Mr. Paul came calling. We’d scramble up and brace ourselves against each other in order to reach our assigned-by-age positions on the horsehair couch that my daddy, a Moten, went and bought anyway during the 1930s Don’t-Buy-Where-You-Can’t-Work campaign in Harlem. Legs stuck out, heels hooked in the welting that edged the cushions, we’d manage not to yawn, suck our thumbs, or otherwise disgrace ourselves in front of a race man or race woman, who always seemed to come in the night to do their talking.

  Some of the grown-ups didn’t think children should be privy to conversations about the state of the race—our struggles, our prospects, our allies, our enemies. They kept us away from Speakers’ Corner, union halls, poetry readings, outdoor rallies, tenant meetings, and even our own basement, where longshoremen—“Negroes,” West Indians, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans—would meet to strategize against the bosses, landlords, merchants, union sellouts, cops, the FBI, the draft board, Immigration, Murder Incorporated, and other white forces in easy collusion when it came to keeping colored folks down.

  The less the children know, the easier it’ll be for them to fit in and make their way, seemed to be the thinking of half the household. They lobbied for lobotomy, in other words, convinced that ignorance was the prime prerequisite for assimilation, and assimilation the preferred path to progress. But Great-Aunt Zala went right on opening the door to Robeson, Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Rose Garner, J. A. Rogers, the Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, the dockworkers, and members of the Ida B. Wells clubs. The woman would just not let us sleep.

  WAR TWO: REPATRIATION VS. SELF-DETERMINATION

  Cousin Claude entered high school the year of the World’s Fair in New York. Grown, to hear him tell it, he had the right to join the Garveyites collecting signatures on a petition demanding reparations from the government and rematriation to the motherland. On April 24, 1939, the petition, signed by 2.5 million African souls, was introduced into Congress. Claude’s mother, Aunt Billy, let it be known that she wasn’t going no damn where on account of (a) she was part Narragansett on her father’s side, (b) she was grandchild of many an enslaved African whose labor had further purchased her place in this land, (c) what was the point in going over there when the thing to do was to fight the good fight over here and change the government’s policies that made life here and there and everywhere unbearable for colored people.

  By freeing up this country from the robber barons and their brethren in sheets, the argument went, we’d free up half the world. So the first thing was to work hard and develop a firm base here from which to challenge the state. Forget this place, was Uncle Charlie’s position; in Africa, we could build bigger armies with which to defeat colonialists and imperialists. Yeah, tell it to freedmen in Liberia slaving on Firestone’s plantations, Aunt Billy would say right back. The children were drawn into the debates. Posters made from board-of-education oaktag filled the halls of the brownstone: “Back to Africa vs. Self-Determination in the Black Belt and the Rest of the Planet.” Arguments waxed hot. Kinship loyalties frayed. Even after Congress tabled the bill and turned its attention to the war raging in Europe, there was no sleeping in that house.

  WAR THREE: SWING-VOTE POLITICS VS. INDEPENDENT FORMATIONS

  After what the black press called “Fighting the Two Hit-lerisms” at home and abroad, the Cold War chill set in, which we, in Harlem, experienced as heat—HUAC ushering in a new Inquisition. Patriotism against Hitler made the blacks-as-inferior line too blatant, as Gera
ld Home points out in his work on Du Bois, Black and Red. Blacks-as-subversives became the new line. We experienced a crackdown on thinkers, speakers, writers, organizers, and coalition builders. Independent thought was a threat to national security, the state mouthpieces said at the Smith Act trials.

  The household split into ever-shifting factions over the 1948 presidential election. Play ward politics for local spoils and concessions and never mind the “big picture” vs. hitch our collective wagon to the NAACP and bloc vote vs. Up the Party! and Down with HUAC! vs. build the American Labor Party and campaign for Henry Wallace vs. establish an independent black national party and to hell with all this switch-hitting that only keeps us locked into other people’s tournaments.

  An insomniac at twenty-two, Cousin Claude began reading everything he could get his hands on, haunting the Micheaux Liberation Memorial Bookstore on 125th street and Seventh Avenue and haunting us too, day and night. He took to quizzing his less-than-peers at the kitchen table: Did we know about Palmares, the sovereign nation self-emancipated Africans in Brazil created? Did we know about the maroon communities in the Sea Islands off the Georgia and Carolina coasts? Did we know that Oklahoma was going to come into the union as either an “Indian” state or a “Negro” state? Did we have any idea how stupid we were? If we weren’t going to improve our minds, would we kindly change our names?