Three Poems of Lynching
Robert Hayden Night, Death, Mississippi 1 A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs — One of them, I bet — and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then and him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off. Time was. A cry? A cry all right. He hawks and spits, fevered as by groinfire. Have us a bottle, Boy and me — he’s earned him a bottle — when he gets home. 2 Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don’t know why you want him dead. O night, rawhead and bloodybones night You kids fetch Paw some water now so’s he can wash that blood off him, she said. O night betrayed by darkness not its own ******************************************************************** Claude McKay The Lynching His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven. His father, by the cruelest way of pain, Had bidden him to his bosom once again; The awful sin remained still unforgiven. All night a bright and solitary star (Perchance the one that ever guided him, Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim) Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char. Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view The ghastly body swaying in the sun The women thronged to look, but never a one Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue; And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee. ****************************************************** Paul Laurence Dunbar The Haunted Oak PRAY why are you so bare, so bare, Oh, bough of the old oak-tree; And why, when I go through the shade you throw, Runs a shudder over me? My leaves were green as the best, I trow, And sap ran free in my veins, But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird A guiltless victim’s pains. I bent me down to hear his sigh; I shook with his gurgling moan, And I trembled sore when they rode away, And left him here alone. They’d charged him with the old, old crime, And set him fast in jail: Oh, why does the dog howl all night long, And why does the night wind wail? He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath, And he raised his hand to the sky; But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear, And the steady tread drew nigh. Who is it rides by night, by night, Over the moonlit road? And what is the spur that keeps the pace, What is the galling goad? And now they beat at the prison door, “Ho, keeper, do not stay! We are friends of him whom you hold within, And we fain would take him away “From those who ride fast on our heels With mind to do him wrong; They have no care for his innocence, And the rope they bear is long.” They have fooled the jailer with lying words, They have fooled the man with lies; The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn, And the great door open flies. Now they have taken him from the jail, And hard and fast they ride, And the leader laughs low down in his throat, As they halt my trunk beside. Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black, And the doctor one of white, And the minister, with his oldest son, Was curiously bedight. Oh, foolish man, why weep you now? ‘Tis but a little space, And the time will come when these shall dread The mem’ry of your face. I feel the rope against my bark, And the weight of him in my grain, I feel in the throe of his final woe The touch of my own last pain. And never more shall leaves come forth On the bough that bears the ban; I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead, From the curse of a guiltless man. And ever the judge rides by, rides by, And goes to hunt the deer, And ever another rides his soul In the guise of a mortal fear. And ever the man he rides me hard, And never a night stays he; For I feel his curse as a haunted bough, On the trunk of a haunted tree. *********************************************************** adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Darkness & Emancipation: Talking to Juliet Mitchell
Sunit Singh On November 23, 2010, Sunit Singh conducted an interview with psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell at Jesus College in Cambridge. Although Professor Mitchell’s rehabilitation of Freud is well chronicled, the attempt in “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966)[1] to rescue the core content of the Marxist tradition—its emphasis on emancipation—remains unexplored. What follows is an edited version of the interview. Sunit Singh: The sociologist C. Wright Mills, in an open letter to the editors of New Left Review in 1960, exhorted the still inchoate “New Left” to reclaim an ideological space for socialism over the chorus of liberal commentators proclaiming “the end of ideology”—the idea that there are no more antagonistic contradictions within capitalist society. Post-Marxist rhetoric, as Mills identified, was expressive of the disillusionment with the Old Left, which was itself weakest on the historical agencies of structural change or the so-called subjective factor. Yet, if the Old Left was wedded to a Victorian labor metaphysic, Mills forewarned, the New Left threatened to forsake the “utopianism” of the Left in its search for a new revolutionary subject.[2] How sensitive were later members of the editorial board of the New Left Review, after Perry Anderson took over from Stuart Hall in 1962, to such injunctions? And to what extent was the project of socialism implicit in “Women: The Longest Revolution” (hereafter referred to as WLR)? Five decades on, where does that project presently stand? What happened to “socialism”? Juliet Mitchell: I came into direct contact with the New Left Review earlier than the mid-60s, partly through other work I was involved in. I was also a student in Oxford, where we were the originating group of the New Left. Perry [Anderson] and I married in 1962 and lived in London, although I worked in Leeds. The north of England, with Dorothy and Edward Thompson in nearby Halifax, was a centre for the older New Left. Back then I was planning to write a book, which never saw the light of day, on women in England. It was a historical sociological treatment of the subject. We were driving to meet up with friends and colleagues who ran Lelio Basso’s new journal in Rome when the manuscript was stolen with everything else from our car. I had a bit of a break before I returned to “women.” WLR came in the mid-60s. The timing of the gap and the reluctance to re-do what I had done led to a considerable change in the way I looked at the issue. This relates to your question about C. Wright Mills and ideology. I think when we took over from Stuart Hall the distinction of what separated us from the preceding group was the conviction of the importance of theory over or out of empiricism. So was I aware that in my use of “ideology” in WLR I was also picking up on C. Wright Mills’s sense of utopianism? Well, “yes and no” would be my answer. For C. Wright Mills, “ideology” read “theory.” However, it was exactly this shift that opened up the importance of ideology. But while reading and admiring C. Wright Mills, our quest led us directly to Althusser’s work. We were in what Thompson later criticized as Sartrean “treetopism” We met with the equipe of Les Temps Modernes in the early 60s. De Beauvoir, with her brilliant depiction and analysis of the oppression of women, at that stage saw any politics of feminism as a trap. Instead she took the classical Marx/Engels line that the condition of women depends on the future of labor in the world. Together with Gérard Horst, who wrote under the name André Gorz, we had a cultural project in London, which, in addition to the magazine, we hoped to share with them. We didn’t want to be imitative, but nevertheless wanted to be engaged with particularly French New Left struggles. The Algerian War was, of course, terribly important. We were urgent for an end to the British isolationism with which the anti-theoretical stance was associated. Then in 1962 some of us went to the celebrations for Ben Bella in Algiers. With Gisele Halimi and Djamila Boupacha this was a background to the left women’s movement that was shortly to emerge. There was also the issue of our relationship to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. That is the background to WLR. And, “no,” in the sense that when I use Althusser, as I do in WLR, it may seem as though I am also picking up on C. Wright Mills’s assertion of the importance of ideology, but really the stress on ideology had more to do with the search for a new theoretical direction that was linked to contemporary French thought. What Althusser offered me through his re-definition of the nature and place of ideology is the overwhelming and now obvious point that sexual difference is lived in the head. I have never been a member of a party or a church or sect, growing up as I had in an anarchist environment, but I worked actively within the New Left, and then in the women’s movement, before training and practicing as a psychoanalyst. I have had to be pretty “utopian,” as an underpinning to my “optimism of the will,” first about class antagonism, then about women, then about Marxism as dialectical and historical materialism and, ironically, nowadays with the new versions of empiricism, about the theory of psychoanalysis. SS: Your answer hints at the ways in which the New Left saw itself as new, as against the Maoists, other feminists, and presumably also in relation to the Trotskyists. You were critical of these other tendencies. A pithy passage from Women’s Estate reads, feminist consciousness is “the equivalent of national chauvinism among Third World nations or economism among working-class organizations,” that on its own it “will not naturally develop into socialism nor should it.”[3] Furthermore: “The gray timelessness of Trotskyism is only to be matched by the eternal chameleonism of Western
Of Wafers, Lozenges, Essence & Magnetic Powders
Dr Velpeau’s Magnetic Love Powders WANTED! An industrious and strictly honest man in each County in the State to take orders by samples for Velpeau’s Magnetic Agents. Salary first year $800, and small commission, payable monthly. For full particulars address Dr. M. Velpeau, 422½ Broadway, N. Y., sending stamp. Source: The Sauk County Standard, (Baraboo, Wisconsin) 18 July 1855 —————————————————————————————– This advert might not leap out from the thousands of similar mid-19th-century US ads seeking salesmen for books, farming equipment, store goods etc., but the product behind it is quite unusual. If the industrious and strictly honest man wrote for particulars, the reply wouldn’t tell him much about the job. Instead, it would ask him to send $2 for a sample of the product. Only on the arrival of the sample would he discover that he was expected to sell Dr Velpeau’s Magnetic Love Powders. At this point, most industrious and strictly honest men probably put the episode down to experience and went to look for a more reputable and less embarrassing business opportunity. The particulars sent with the sample claimed: These powders, properly administered, are warranted irrespective of age, circumstances or personal appearance, to win them the love or unchanging affections of any one they may desire of the opposite sex. The enamoured person had to work out a way of getting the object of their affections to eat the powder, and then wait in anxious lovelorn anticipation until absolutely nothing happened. As one newspaper joked: Only think of it! For two dollars, any enterprising young man – no matter if he is as poor as an editor, and as ugly as a baboon, can through the instrumentality of these powders, make himself “lord” of the most charming lass of “sweet sixteen” to be found within the limits of our friend’s agency, which comprises four counties! Velpeau’s real name was J C Merrill – perhaps the pseudonym was an attempt to associate the powders with famous French surgeon Alfred Velpeau – and according to the New York Times, his scheme attracted up to 40 letters per day. In late 1855, angry (and still single) customers began writing to the Mayor of New York to complain about ‘Velpeau’. Merrill was arrested for fraud but released when he promised to discontinue business and return the complainants’ money. Six weeks later, however, he was still selling the powders and pocketing the cash, so he was arrested again, charged with defrauding a variety of people, and locked up. As for the spurned lovers, they presumably had to find another way of attaining their goal – the obvious solution being to become richer and better looking. **************************************** Mr. Crucifix Goss & Co. According to a correspondent of the Monthly Gazette of Health (vol 5 1825), the proprietor of Goss & Co was a former shop assistant going by the unlikely name of Mr Crucifix. While Mr Crucifix insisted that his company had genuine surgical credentials, it had a terrible reputation among the medical profession. The Medical Adviser and Guide to Health and Long Life, edited by Alexander Burnett, particularly had it in for him, mounting a sustained campaign against Goss & Co in 1824: Goss and Company! “Good God! Was there ever such a heap of filth and infamy as this swindling firm of straw! Was there ever such a cancer upon society – such an adroit and plausible system of rapacious plundering! ” The Adviser also remarked that the letters M R C did not stand for Member of the Royal College, but for MURDERING, ROBBING CHARLATAN. ”Domus et placens uxor.”—HOR. Thy house, and (in the cup of life, That honey-drop) thy pleasing wife. H A P P I N E S S “the gay to-morrow of the mind,” is ensured by marriage; ”the strictest tie of perpetual Friendship” is a gift from Heaven, cementing pleasure with reason, by which, says Johnson, we approach in some degree of association with celestial intelligence.” Previous, however, to entering into the hallowed obligation of marriage, it becomes an impressive duty not only to regulate the passions, but to cleanse the grosser nature from those impurities which the freedom of unrestricted pleasure may have entailed upon it. To the neglect of such attention, are attributable many of those hapless instances, which while they excite the commiseration of the beholder, should also impress him with the fear of self-reproach. Luxurious habits will effeminate the body—a residence in the tropics will too much relax the elastic fibre—but more especially does the premature infatuation of youth too frequently reduce the natural dignity into a state of inanition, from whence the agonized sufferer more than doubts the chance of relief. To all such, then, we address ourselves, offering hope–energy–muscular strength–facility; nor ought our advances to appear questionable, sanctioned as they are by the multiplied proofs of twenty-five years successful experience. The easy cares of married life are sometimes disturbed by the want of those blessings which twine the nuptial wreath—for the female habit is often constitutionally weak —yet it can be strengthened, and deficient energy improved into functional power. In every case of syphilitic intrusion, as well as in every relaxation of the generative economy, we pledge our reputation to cure speedily and permanently. Earnestly solicitous to expel the unfeeling empyric from the position so presumptuously taken by him, we deviate from general principles with less hesitation; and confident in our own honourable integrity as Members of the College of Surgeons, we invite sufferers of either sex, (especially those entering into matrimonial life) at once to our house, where daily attendance is given for personal consultation; and immediate answers are returned to country letters, which must minutely describe the case, and contain a remittance for advice and Medicine, which can be forwarded to any part of the world, however distant. No difficulty can occur, as the Medicine will be securely packed, and carefully protected from observation. GOSS & Co., (M.R.C. Surgeons). 7, Lancaster Place, Waterloo Bridge, Strand, London. *** Just
Tram-Traveller
Utpal Kumar Basu (translated by HUG) Some of the days my office would start early. Used to sit with work pretty much in the morning. By noon I would usually take a tram-car back home. Often I used to detect the wan, unwell but steadfast Samar Sen returning home too. He’s also a morning worker. I would spot a dank rexine bag that he carried along. Must be the papers of the Frontier magazine? Proofs, manuscripts, reams of letters? What else might he be carrying? Are there no poems—one or two surely? A scribbled draft, some acolyte seeking wisdom?—my imagination knew no bounds. Because Samar Sen is a poet. Though for the past 40 years he had not written any poetry. His interest in literature had thinned, but flowed underneath. A streak. He had chosen the genre of the political commentator to write and reflect. And his English prose style is vintage. Ah—a classical romantic—am I confusing tendencies? It won’t be an exaggeration to say that his Frontier was nurtured mostly by a readership that was not Bengali. I used to often encounter a walking myth in that second class tram-car. Those were times when it was not difficult to summon awe. My day would go well. When he counted the change while buying tickets—the many ashoka-stambhs, portraits of national leaders, an India robust and bustling with agricultural and industrial wealth—ah, how each of those coins would dance and dazzle. Every single one of those icons the poet had tirelessly pulled down, scorned, ridiculed all these years. I almost began to contemplate and hope fervently, that those coins would slip quietly through his fingers. But they didn’t—how surprising! Samarbabu lives in a rented place in South Calcutta. Last monsoon his ground floor apartment was awash—with water and flotsam. Since then he has gone upstairs, at the behest of the kind landlord. He has, don’t we know, refused all governmental aid, apartments and houses with no hesitancy. In his later life, sundry biochemical medicines would be his sole, faithful mates. Perhaps he didn’t have the wherewithal or didn’t opt for a costly treatment. It is an intractable pride that only a revolutionary can summon. Someone who engineered history and was a part of it. Not an academic. Not an activist. Had Samarbabu bowed down his head a little, smiled a wee bit—there would have been no dearth of garlands for him. Had he not raised that wan finger of his and cursed passionately, logically and incessantly–the many ills that irk and bother our social fabric—surely his finger would have exhibited some diamond-studded ring by now. But all he wanted, my poet, was to “Suffuse my dreams with the fragrance of the mahua-flower.” Utpal Kumar Basu is one of the leading poets of Bengal. adminhumanitiesunderground.org