Tag Archives: jeremy love

What We Don’t Plan For

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This post was supposed to be about Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad, the fictional graphic novel based on the true story of the pride of lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo after the initial bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003. Although that work has become freakishly and horrifyingly topical again, given the recent decision by the Obama administration to wage such a campaign against ISIS, my mind is elsewhere this week.

Last week, my students finished Jeremy Love’s brilliant Bayou Volume I, the story of African-American Lee Wagstaff and white Lily Westmoreland, two young friends negotiating the racial politics of 1933 Mississippi. The class was oddly silent for much of the second day, and when one of my (few) African-American students brought up a recent news item in our region, I knew I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t discuss it.

Our class takes place on the idyllic Wittenberg University campus in Springfield, Ohio. Just a little ways down the road, in Beavercreek, John Crawford III was shot to death by the police inside of a Wal-Mart. He was holding a toy pellet gun. Another customer had apparently called the police, claiming that a man was waving a gun around in the store in a threatening manner. After weeks of refusing to release the video for fear of tainting the grand jury, Attorney General Mike DeWine allowed the security footage to be released tonight, only hours after the grand jury declined to indict the officers. The video is horrific. Appalling. “Cold-blooded murder” is the most obvious phrase that pops to mind.

Of course, it was also precisely what I expected.

Last week, we didn’t have the grand jury decision, nor did we have the video. What we did have was one volume of a bizarre little comic that riffs off of Alice in Wonderland. By way of summary, the work opens with Lee by the bayou, preparing to jump in to tie a rope so as to haul up the lynched body of Billy Glass (a character meant to stand in for Emmett Till). Glass had been lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman, his body left in the water.
 

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While she is in the bayou, Lee sees a vision of Billy’s soul, and as we turn the pages, we realize that what we have seen is her memory of the incident, which she is recounting to Lily.
 

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Lily expresses curiosity about the appearance of the dead body (as opposed to Lee’s genuine fear) and even goes so far as to parrot her mother’s racist diatribe about Billy “deserving what he got.” Qiana Whitted’s close reading of this scene is exquisite, telling us that

What we hear, then, in Love’s visual rendering of Lily’s whistle interests me greatly, for those tiny eighth notes generate a tremendous sound. We hear echoes of anti-miscegenation panic, a fear that reverberates unease even as the conversation hastily resumes. We hear the sense of white privilege that attends Lily’s ability to whistle freely, carelessly one could argue, in spite of her naïveté as a child repeating her mother’s words. But I believe that what Love also wants us to hear in this sequence is the “wolf whistle” of a murdered black child, along with the memory of just how much that sound costs. Perhaps what resonates most deeply in the white girl’s whistle are the sounds that Billy (and Emmett) are no longer able to make, were never free to make at all.

Furthermore, the iconic rendering of their faces invites identification, but that identification remains ambivalent. They are both iconic, so neither is closed off. While the racism Lily spews certainly inclines the reader to retract any sympathetic engagement, she is also a child copying her mother’s words. We should all know better, but, the implication is that sometimes we don’t.

Later, Lily loses her locket in the bayou, and blames the loss on Lee, prompting Mrs. Westmoreland to demand Lee work to pay back the value of the locket, a demand to which Calvin, Lee’s father, promptly accedes because he doesn’t want to see his child “hurt over some white girl’s locket.”

While Lily would seem to be a bumbling villain at this point, she tries to go down to the bayou to find the locket and fix her relationship with Lee. She is eaten whole/kidnapped by a Cotton-Eyed Joe, a giant white man, while Lee watches, shaking in fear. As Lee runs away from the bayou in terror, a vision of lynched black bodies in the trees materializes, and she frantically runs through their feet.

Lee’s father is accused of the crime, although there is no evidence, and in a scuffle with the deputies, she is summarily knocked out by a white adult.

She journeys to the prison to see her father, who has been beaten mercilessly, where he tells her that her aunt will take care of her now, assuming that he will be lynched shortly. She decides to enter the bayou to find Lily and clear her father’s name. In this “through-the-looking-glass” moment, she enters a world in which racist caricatures are both personified and aggressive, and her only help is found in Bayou, a slave grown monstrous in his bondage, although he remains kind and fearful of the master.

She falls into one of Cotton-Eyed Joe’s traps immediately after reaching the land on the other side of the bayou, and while Bayou the character stitches her up, the spirit of Billy Glass tells her that she has very little time.

When I approach Bayou, the complexity of Love’s rendering of the racial landscape echoes not only America’s complicated and genocidal past, but also a present in which blacks are put in the unconscionable position of apologizing for history even while demanding justice. When we step through the bayou/looking-glass, we are stepping into America’s hysterical relationship to race, in which we must frequently repeat that it doesn’t matter now even when we encounter the most obvious evidence that it does.

Part of Bayou’s charm is feisty, spunky Lee, who insists that Bayou the character be courageous about his own life. We root for her, even though she is effectively a dead girl walking by the end of volume one. On the other hand, Love makes it clear again and again that Lee does not understand the limitations placed on her in the social structure, and she is hurt because of it. She is our heroine, but she is also before her time. While she may prevail in her quest to exonerate her father and to free Lily, we’ve already been told she won’t survive. Furthermore, we’ve seen her undergo obscene abuse at the hands of white adults, and her dreams or hallucinations indicate to a close reader that she is already—at minimum—a victim of psychological trauma as well.

As we discussed the circumstances of the work, my students tended to stress the historical context. “What it was like back then” was a phrase used frequently during the week we spent on the volume. Still, I stretched. “Why would Love write this in the 2000s?” “It was published in 2009. What was happening during this period that might make this relevant?” There were only 20 minutes left in class when someone bit. She brought up Ferguson, and referenced Beavercreek as well. The room was suddenly evacuated of sound, except for my “very good,” turning to scratch out another tick in the “Contemporary Contexts” on the board. I turned back to the classroom, and I could feel the white students receding. Not all, but many. There was shifting. There was uncomfortable fidgeting. And worst of all, eyes glazed.

They didn’t want this to be another lesson in how whitey was bad, but it was exactly the kinds of reactions I was seeing that I was hoping to critique. I drew attention to my own whiteness by way of tacitly acknowledging the discomfort. I asked—rhetorically—what it meant to have such conversations about race in the contemporary age.

Students of color and a few white students were energized, and we gabbed on about how Bayou could enrich our reactions to these current discussions for 10 minutes. The remainder of the class was lively, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of that moment of out-of-hand rejection of a text that was trying to teach us more productive ways to respond to discussions of race in contemporary America, and by the end of class, I felt deflated.

Perhaps I was more deflated more than usual after a rough class, because I’m currently working on a presentation for MLA on the science of memory, recent neuroscientific findings, and Bayou. I was invested in the text, and contexts, in ways I could only gloss in class. Tentatively entitled “My Children Will Remember All of the Things I Tried to Forget,” I ask us to imagine a mouse alone in a cage whose feet are exposed to electric shocks. Alongside of the shocks, the scent of cherry blossoms is piped into the cage. This is repeated until the mouse demonstrates an aversion to the aroma, and then the mouse has children. The pinkies are isolated from the parents and are never exposed to similar conditions, but nonetheless show a similar antipathy; the scent of cherry blossoms inspires only terror. I recount a study published recently in Nature Neuroscience, in which researchers found that mice do indeed transmit aversion between generations without actual social contact. Somehow, traumatic experience is genetically encoded, etched into the make-up of these animals. I ask if it is not too far of a stretch to believe that, perhaps, humans function in the same way.

Such a finding has fascinating repercussions for the study of intergenerational trauma, long the province of literature scholars, dwelling on the outskirts of “proper” psychological and neuroscientific literature. The finding suggest in part that slavery is not over, and that the subsequent abuses have been writ small on our genetic codes. There are ample studies (some ongoing) demonstrating lingering prejudice in even the most devoted progressives, yet popular thought still turns away.

I spent the weekend trying to shake off the lingering feeling of profound failure, as well as worrying about the grand jury convening on Monday in Xenia, just up the road from my home. What had I said? What had I failed to say? On Monday, I drove into campus a bit before 6am, hoping to plan myself into a less agitated state. And I arrived to find the illustration below on a poster I made at the beginning of the semester, with a cartoon of myself asking “What are you most worried about? What are you most excited about?”
 

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Clearly, someone was listening. Or at least, they were hearing between the lines.

Sound and Silence in the Jim Crow South

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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Early in Jeremy Love’s comic series, Bayou, the murder of a black child named Billy Glass awakens the supernatural southern landscape that surrounds the story’s young female protagonist, Lee Wagstaff. Lee is forced to swim into the bayou to retrieve Billy’s body and afterwards she describes the experience to her white friend, Lily. Stunned by Lee’s description of the bloated corpse, Lily blurts out, “My mama said Billy Glass deserved what he got. She said a n***** boy got no business whistlin’ at no white woman.” In the wordless panel that follows, Lee’s hands drop as a dismayed expression crosses her face. Beside her, Lily’s eyes lower, her shoulders slouch back, and she lets out a small whistle of her own.

Readers familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South know that this two-toned whistle once belonged to Emmett Till – the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.* What we hear, then, in Love’s visual rendering of Lily’s whistle interests me greatly, for those tiny eighth notes generate a tremendous sound. We hear echoes of anti-miscegenation panic, a fear that reverberates unease even as the conversation hastily resumes. We hear the sense of white privilege that attends Lily’s ability to whistle freely, carelessly one could argue, in spite of her naïveté as a child repeating her mother’s words. But I believe that what Love also wants us to hear in this sequence is the “wolf whistle” of a murdered black child, along with the memory of just how much that sound costs. Perhaps what resonates most deeply in the white girl’s whistle are the sounds that Billy (and Emmett) are no longer able to make, were never free to make at all.

Bayou is a blues comic through and through, filled with songs that shake juke joints and others that keep time on a prison chain gang. It may not be all that surprising to find that narrative drawings such as comics draw upon blues, jazz, soul, and other traditionally African American forms to picture racial trauma, given that these genres are already so well known for chronicling social struggle. Still it is worth noting that when it comes to the historical portrayal of racial discrimination and violence in comics, music often serves as a means through which characters process (and repudiate) the senseless and the unspeakable. The brief exchange between Lee and Lily is a powerful reminder that trauma creates its own kind of music in the visual convergence of sound and silence.

The interplay generates another compelling moment in Paolo Parisi’s comic biography, Coltrane. (Originally published in Italian, the English translation appears to only be available in the UK.) This scene focuses on the song that the jazz saxophonist created in memory of the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, simply titled “Alabama.” The stirring eulogy that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered for the four girls killed in the bombing may have even inspired the song’s melody. Words transformed through song, now mediated once more through image:

coltrane_alabama

I read this two-page grid horizontally in rows of three. The first row acts as prelude with four tight shots of the musicians. Coltrane has not yet lifted the mouthpiece to his lips and the eyes of Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison, and McCoy Tyner are hidden or closed in a hush before they begin to play. The second sequence portrays school photographs of the four girls that were murdered. Above their still and smiling faces, the only printed text in each panel is a name and date to remind us how few years Cynthia, Carole, Denise, and Addie Mae lived before that Sunday morning in September. The date stamps cycle around to the year of each girl’s death while above them, it is as if the pictured musicians are keeping a steady beat: 1963. 1963. 1963. 1963. The children’s faces are further juxtaposed against panels that overflow with crowds of people in the third row — the Klansmen with Confederate flags, a photographed lynching, and Civil Rights demonstrators holding signs of protest.

Whether or not the reader has actually heard “Alabama,” the soundtrack to the Birmingham church bombing is here on Parisi’s page. Coltrane’s saxophone glides over the piano’s opening rumble and plunges into the percussive crescendo at the close. The scene facilitates an elegy of a different sort through stillness and motion, and in the pacing and symmetry of iconic images from the era. Its composition brings to mind a passage from the collection, Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs:

Anyone familiar with the musical characteristics of Negro folk style in spiritual and gospel singing, in blues and rock n’ roll, will know that these transcriptions represent only a bare skeleton of what is actually being sung. Good singers will subtly vary the tune – bending notes, delaying or anticipating the beat, and adding their own vocal decorations. (6)

Graphic narratives take an analogous approach with some comics choosing not to venture too far beyond transcription, while others vary, decorate, and bend. Indeed, Bayou and Coltrane are not the only texts that improvise among the sounds of the Jim Crow South. Examples appear throughout The Silence of Our Friends, written by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos, and illustrated by Nate Powell. The music of Otis Redding and Sam & Dave unfurl like plumes of smoke amid the racial turmoil of a segregated Texas town. The lyrics to “Soul Man,” in particular, acquire a rich significance as they are repeated at pivotal moments in the narrative. I’m very interested to see the sounds that will shape Powell’s art in March — a forthcoming comics trilogy co-written by Congressman John Lewis.

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Harold Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby has an abundance of freedom songs and the story’s protagonist, Toland Polk, idolizes the story’s retired jazz vocalist, Anna Dellyne. Although Cruse’s depiction of music is somewhat less evocative that the previous examples, the subtext of haunting songs like Anna’s “Secret in the Air” resonate with Toland’s decision to break his silence about his homosexuality during the 1960s. Likewise, most of the music that appears in Ho Che Anderson’s King is used basically to establish tone and setting, but the song “Sweet Lorraine” from The Nat King Cole Trio stands apart, appearing at the start and finish of the comic to elicit deeper reflection of Martin Luther King’s prophetic role in the Movement.

Most of the songs from this era in American history are celebrated for their capacity to uplift, restore, and persuade on collective registers, but I believe that the comics featured here are most effective in highlighting the introspective qualities of music. The artists and writers go beyond the sounds of “We Shall Overcome,” to transform something as small as the tones of a whistle and as quiet as a photograph into critical instruments of contemplation and mourning.
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* The appendix to volume 1 of Bayou notes that Billy’s original name was “Emmet,” but the circumstances of Billy’s death differ slightly from Till’s in the comic which takes place in 1933, not during the 1950s.

The New Negro As Comic Book Artist

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African American Classics is the twenty-second volume of Graphic Classics, an independently-published series that has previously featured comics adaptations of works by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and O. Henry. The earlier selections indicate a predilection for suspense, fantasy, and adventure – genres that traditionally have had a strained relationship with the high literary establishment, but whose vivid narratives are particularly well suited for the comics form.

Nevertheless, the series takes part in a different kind of conversation when the term “classics” is applied to the poetry and prose of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other African American writers. Too often dismissed outright as provincial and derivative, African American literature has struggled with questions of legitimacy since Phillis Wheatley published her book of poems in 1773. “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry,” Thomas Jefferson wrote eight years later. “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately but it could not produce a poet.”

The Harlem Renaissance coalesced around a determination to prove Jefferson wrong through the shrewd circulation and celebration of black cultural production (not only in Harlem, but Washington, DC and Chicago too). Anthologies like Alain Locke’s seminal 1925 collection, The New Negro, as well as awards, collaborative journals, and art exhibitions brought together the most promising African American talent, with black writers like James Weldon Johnson making explicit the stakes of their work: “The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”

The creative appeals of this late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century racial uplift ideology are widely reflected in the literature chosen for African American Classics. A representative selection is Florence Lewis Bentley’s story, “Two Americans” (1921), illustrated by Trevor Von Eeden and adapted by Alex Simmons, in which a black WWI soldier in France rescues an injured white soldier who led the lynch mob that killed his brother, Joe, back in Georgia. Initially the outraged black soldier leaves the white man on the battlefield to die, but then Joe’s spirit appears: “He made me know that all men are brothers, black, white, yellow and brown… and that if I killed in hatred, I would be killing Joe again… just as that white mob did” (21). The comics anthology draws heavily upon stories like these, finely-crafted works aimed at educating readers about the far-reaching costs of racial injustice, often against a backdrop of African American moral exceptionalism, class consciousness, and a deep engagement with the past that is at turns admiring and uncertain.

One might suspect that these parables of racial uplift would not signify in the same way that they did in the 1890s or 1920s. That racial injustice persists is without question, but the way we talk about, evaluate, and respond to race and racism has changed. With the most egregious forms of discrimination now criminalized, our society is more attentive to the systemic effects of institutional inequalities, more attuned to the stings of racial micro-aggressions. But African American Classics remains deeply invested in the canonizing demonstration of intellectual parity, not only in terms of content but also in its presentation and marketing. Six decades after Orrin C. Evans opened the first (and last!) issue of All-Negro Comics with the claim that “every brush stroke and pen line in the drawings on these pages are by Negro artists,” African American Classics makes a similar rhetorical appeal, showcasing contemporary African American artists such as volume co-editor Lance Tooks (Narcissa), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), Jeremy Love (Bayou), Afua Richardson (Genius), John Jennings (The Hole), and writers Christopher Priest (Black Panther, 1998-2003), Mat Johnson (Incognegro), and Alex Simmons (Blackjack). This is not a group of artists and writers that needs to prove their collective self worth. And if we are living in an era that is becoming increasingly more receptive to the “dynamic hyper-creative beauty of modern individualistic Blackness,” should they have to?

What makes African American Classics valuable for me is how the artists and writers adapt the material; the collection’s most provocative selections make formal and aesthetic choices that deepen and complicate my understanding of each work’s potential. Ironically enough, these “graphic” adaptations elevate the visual field of representation in ways that should remind us that literary expressions of African American experience have always been deeply entrenched in the realm of social perception, spectacle, and visibility. The works were originally written to counter claims that the entire character of a people could be arbitrarily determined by what is seen, from skin color to physiognomy to a so-called drop of Negro-stained blood. African American Classics, then, returns the counter-argument of its featured stories to their visual origins and exposes the absurdity of race prejudice in a way that only a comic can.

The medium allows Kyle Baker to explore multiple forms of signification in W.E.B. DuBois’s 1907 story “On Being Crazy” in which an upper-class African American man, in a tailored suit and top hat, looks with wry exasperation upon the white people who refuse his business and scramble out of his way. In each instance, empirical logic (and common sense) undermine racial constructs of the period. When a clerk points out, “this is a white hotel,” the main character looks around and responds, “Such a color scheme requires a great deal of cleaning, but I don’t know that I object.” Baker underscores the visual and verbal contradictions that are critical to DuBois’s anti-racist agenda by illustrating how the main character’s unwanted racial presence intrudes again and again into prohibited spaces, even as his body and speech reflect the more palatable codes of education and privilege.

Writer Mat Johnson and artist Randy DuBurke’s adaptation of Jean Toomer’s short story, “Becky” deftly conveys the haunting refrains of his 1922 collection, Cane. The draining light and decay in the long, repetitious panels mark the passage of time in the title character’s life as an outcast in the South. Milton Knight makes very perceptive stylistic choices in Zora Neale Hurston’s play, “Filling Station” (1930), adapted by co-editor Tom Pomplun, by crowding each panel with vibrant hues, elastic bodies, and fierce expressions to make visible Hurston’s outrageous wordplay and folk humor. Also worthy of note is a little-known mystery by Robert W. Bagnall called “Lex Talionis” (1922), adapted by Christopher Priest and illustrate by Jim Webb, in which the design and storyline about an angry white racist injected with a skin-darkening chemical unfold like an issue of Al Feldstein’s Weird Science from 1950.

Most surprising, though, is the adaptation of Charles Chesnutt’s story, “The Goophered Grapevine” in which writer Alex Simmons and artist Shepherd Hendrix make a seemingly minor modification that results in a significant reinterpretation. The 1899 collection from which the post-Emancipation tale is drawn, The Conjure Woman, features an elderly black man named Uncle Julius McAdoo who lives on a former plantation in North Carolina where he once worked as a slave. He narrates each tale for the benefit of the land’s new owners, only recently arrived from the North: a white physician named John, and his wife, Ann. While Chesnutt worked within the popular local color format of Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus Tales,” the stories Uncle Julius shares emphasize the cruelties enslaved blacks suffered and their desperate attempts to improve their situation. John and Ann are often so moved by the story’s telling that the clever Uncle Julius ultimately ends up enjoying a number of surprising benefits: a new job as their coachman, unrestricted use of the land’s vineyard, and ownership of a nearby church.

But in Hendrix’s illustration, John and Ann appear to be an African American couple. The dress, diction, and demeanor of the doctor and his wife remain in tact, but their position in Chesnutt’s story as gullible listeners shifts across race, class, and regional lines. What are the implications of Uncle Julius’s role as a trickster figure when the wealthy carpetbaggers are black? Certainly there were African Americans who owned property in the South during Reconstruction, but how to describe the looks of pleasure of the black laborers in the vineyard when overseen by the comforting embrace of these new landowners? What is at stake in this utopian reimagining and its potentially troubling subtext of mutual exploitation? Whether purposeful or in error, the visual modification has produced an altogether new and fascinating version of “The Goophered Grapevine.”

In 1963, James Baldwin observed that, “when the country speaks of a ‘new’ Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease.” A collection like African American Classics may not be able to do for black comics what the New Negro did for black literature. But I do hope, at the very least, that readers who come across these comics on a bookstore display, a classroom syllabus, or a Black History Month reading list will seek out more than classic reassurances on its pages.

Qiana Whitted is co-editor of the book, Comics and the U.S. South. She also blogs at Pencil, Panel, Page.

Bayou Vol 1, Jeremy Love

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This is a beautiful and haunting comic. It’s kind of what I had hoped and expected to feel after reading Swamp Thing, to be honest. Not the parts about racism, but the parts about the feeling of the swamp as a powerful life force that cannot be controlled and that contains far more life in far stranger ways than we can admit to ourselves. A life that can tell us odd stories and take us on strange journeys.

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