Week 8 Readings and Responses

Response to "The Black and White Galaxie" by Afaa Michael Weaver

            “The Black and White Galaxie,” by Afaa Michael Weaver (formerly, and in this collection, known as Michael S. Weaver), is a poem that on its surface tells of a young man washing his uncle’s car, yet which meditates upon the nature of lessons passed from generation to generation within a family.  Using the vehicle as a vehicle, the speaker hints at the ways in which his Uncle Frank provides him with lessons about how a young black man should act and present himself to the world in order to avoid danger and misfortune.

            It is, of course, no accident, nor mere coincidence, that Uncle Frank’s car is black and white, nor that the car is a Galaxie.  The title of the poem itself presents us with this double image – we are speaking of a car, and yet we are not speaking of a car – we are talking about the world, about the whole galaxie and the ways in which black and white are a part of that entity. 

            From the start of the poem, we see that this car must be treated gently—the opening stanza is both delicate and somewhat sexual, and reads like a how-to guide on cleaning and seduction:

                        The rag was soft enough to caress her

                        but raise the dirt from her skin.

                        The soap was strong yet weak so

                        it wouldn’t make her complexion crack.

This anthropomorphizing of the poem’s subject—this vehicle—present from the first the idea of a labor of both love and great care (and brings to mind as well the objectification of women as objects to be “hailed.”)  The way in which Uncle Frank both leads and allows for freedom in this process hint at his method of instruction:

                        When he trusted me, he watched me

                        from afar.  Then he let me go alone,

                        having given me a tenet of his wisdom—

                        a black man gotta make his car shine.

This “tenet of wisdom” is to be followed by other similar tenets, some of which, on the surface, seem directed at teaching the young man how to court women and find success in the dating world.  The speaker writes, for example:

                        I checked to see if it was clean enough

                        to hail a woman’s aloof eyes and lips.

                        Uncle Frank told me what women wanted—

                        a black man gotta look like money.

It is clear, however, that Uncle Frank’s role, and the lesson that he wishes to confer upon this young man, is way more important, and way deeper, than a how-to guide on the seduction of women.  His lessons are an instruction in the ways that a “black man” must act in society, the ways in which he “gotta look,” the face that he must present before the world.  The first three lines of wisdom are in fact all concerned with how a “black man gotta look,” and not with how or who a black man should be.  In addition to the lines mentioned above, we also read that “a black man gotta wear suits and ties” as well.   These lessons, which impart a “wisdom” heavily dosed with materialism and the objectification of women, are perhaps not the wisest of lessons, and yet reflect a particular feeling of what it takes to be successful in society.

            It is in the final stanza that Uncle Frank’s lessons seem to achieve the weight with which they are imparted, for we read:

                        Uncle Frank threw in professionalism

                        to keep me out of Baltimore’s apocalypse—

                        a black man gotta wear suits and ties.

           

                        A black man gotta have a private world.

At this moment, the car achieves a much greater symbolism, for the car is not only the reflection on a “galaxie” populated by whites and blacks, but also a space—a physical and metaphorical space—in which a black man can “have a private world,” and exist on his own terms and within his own dreams and aspirations.  In this respect, the car becomes “an intimate space of hushed conversations.”  It is both the ways in which black men present themselves, as well as the possession of a place of private thoughts and actions, which will help them to stay “out of Baltimore’s apocalypse.”

            This concern for the ways in which knowledge is passed on within a family is a hallmark of Weaver’s poetry, as George Elliot Clarke points out in his review of Weaver’s collection of poems entitled Multitude. He writes, “For Weaver, it is not the archive that matters, but ancestry, not existentialism per se, but existence. Biblical in intent, he limns genealogies and the apocalypses of daily being.”  Seen in this way, we see that the speaker’s uncle, the “wise man” standing aside, allowing for freedom while giving direction, is providing a map for existence and a method to avoid the “apocalypses of daily being."   

             

Works Cited

Clarke, George Elliot.  Review of Multitudes: Poems Selected and New by Afaa Michael Weaver.  African American Review, Vol. 35. No. 3 (Autumn 2001), p.p. 494-497

Response to "Drowning" by Mary Bucci Bush

                The piece entitled “Drowning,” by Mary Bucci Bush, is in fact a chapter of the book Sweet Hope, a novel that depicts the lives of Italian and Black families working on a plantation in the southern United States in the early 1900’s.  As Bush discusses in a variety of places (her website included), the novel is based on her grandmother’s experiences at the Sunnyside Plantation, where black sharecroppers worked alongside Italians who had been tricked into working at positions as indentured servants (Bush).  In this particular excerpt, we read of how two young girls (an Italian girl, Isola, and an African American girl named Birdie) witness the brutal rape of a young African American woman at the hands of a white overseer. 

                The title of the chapter—Drowning—is an especially apt place to begin in a discussion of the major theme of this piece.  As the chapter opens, we read of how the two girls, Isola and Birdie, are both shirking their responsibilities, attempting to get a glimpse of the corpse of a man that has drowned in the nearby lake.  While this specific death sets the background for the story, the theme of drowning is prevalent throughout.  We read for instance a description of the area (the Mississippi Delta), and see that water (and the dangers inherent in it) is everywhere:

Here, the water was wild.  One day it was quiet and sweet and low; the next day it was pulling down houses and carrying mules away, or it was crashing from the sky in sudden, terrifying thunder and lightning storms, or it was seeping into everything through the ground that wasn’t the solid ground it seemed to be; or like with the puddles in the bosc’ a lake would form overnight where there’d been only dry land before.  Even the air was full of water, humid, stifling in the summer.  You could choke just breathing it, Isola’s father said.  (139-140)

As we see, the danger of “drowning” is everywhere and omnipresent.  Even in the case of this man whom has drowned, the death is seen as somehow random, a strange and violent fate that perhaps could happen to anyone, for “Everybody went fishing in the lake, and swimming sometimes too, and they all crossed the lake on Primo’s ferry, or in the priest’s rowboat” (139).

                Drowning presents itself too as something to be experienced, played with, discovered by the young Isola and Birdie, as they (particularly Isola) work to discover the contours of their existence.  We see how the two young girls, having come upon a temporary pond in the woods that appears when there are big rains, accidentally catch a fish (it gets stuck in Isola’s skirt) and play with it out on land.  Watching the fish gasp, and attempting to give it some small amount of water in a makeshift pool that they have created, Isola contemplates the fish’s difficulties:

                “A fish drowns in air,” Birdie told Isola.

                Isola watched the fish, its mouth and gills opening and closing.  She had never thought of it that way.  She tried to imagine what it was like in the night for the black man whose boat had tipped over.  Did he work his mouth in the water the way the fish worked its mouth in the air? She took a deep breath, wondering what it would be like to have water come in and fill your lungs when you breathed.  She couldn’t understand how breathing could kill a fish.

                “A man drowns in water,” Isola said.  She laughed, then stopped.  (145-146)

                Drowning, however, is merely symptomatic of the larger problem—namely that life for these two girls is constantly filled with danger.  Like the man who has drowned in the lake, or the fish who has suddenly been plucked (accidentally) from its pool, death and misfortune and danger seem to lurk everywhere, and strike without warning the victim.  We see, for instance, how Birdie’s cousin Lecie Titus is raped by Mr. Horton, one of the boss’s men.  This a life in which snakes hide in the nesting boxes of chickens, men drown, women are raped, and people worry about the punishments of the boss.  Above all of these dangers lurks too the dangers of divine retribution, as Isola’s mother fears will happen to Isola when she tells her, “Get down there and pray before the devil takes you to go live with him for good” (137).  

                The fact that danger (and drowning as a prime example of said danger) seems so omnipresent is further stressed by the way in which not even the land itself can be trusted.  Water, when it comes, comes “from everywhere,” making even the most simple of propositions—that land is indeed land—something to be doubted.  For these newcomers (the Italians), as well as local sharecroppers, this is life –shifting, dangerous, and unpredictable:

The water came from everywhere.  The river swelled and once, came within inches of the top of the levee, powerful and deep and dangerous.  Puddles formed in the woods, the bosc’ her family called it, big puddles like ponds, and fish swam in the water, fish from nowhere.  The land itself turned into a patchwork of streams and ponds and puddles.  Even stepping on what looked like dry land became a risk: put your foot on a grassy spot and you might find yourself in water over your ankles.  (136)

                This blurring of distinctions between dry land and water works as a literary device in other ways as well, as do some of the other symbolic elements that we have mentioned above.  Just as even the land here is at times false, not to be trusted, boundary-less, so too are the distinctions made between people.  Birdie, we see, views herself as different from Isola (or at least declares that they, and their respective cultures are seen as different).  “You dumb or something?” she says, “White folks don’t shoot white folks.”  For Birdie, Isola belongs to the ruling class of “White folks,” though for Isola, this is not the case at all.  “But we’re not white . . . We’re Italian,” she says.  For Isola, whose family is in a terrible position of indentured servitude, distinctions between Italians and Blacks seem absurd, and not at all relevant to the situation.  For Birdie, however, the distinction between Black and White is, well, black and white, and she is unable or unwilling to see the ways in the which these distinctions can at times be blurred, made gray.  We see this viewpoint most clearly at the end of the story, when Birdie, upset by the rape that the two friends have just witnessed, turns on Isola in anger, insulting her and calling her a “Stupid Dago.”   

Works Cited
Bush, Maria Bucci.  Maria Bucci Bush. 2011. Web. 28 September 2013.