In the Face of Black Pain, Elizabeth Alexander Turns to Art

Alexander doesn’t dwell on the main points of Trayvon’s loss of life or the founding of B.L.M., letting their tough sketches name to the reader’s thoughts a slew of different related photos: Trayvon’s hoodie, a fraught skirmish line in Ferguson, Mo., a large number mendacity on a bridge in Portland, Ore.

The title chapter, which constitutes Half II, first appeared as an essay in The New Yorker in the summertime of 2020 and went on to win a Nationwide Journal Award. Right here it’s preceded by the photographer Dawoud Bey’s “Martina and Rhonda” (1993), six large-format Polaroids that collectively depict two younger Black ladies facet by facet, arms folded. The portrait suggests the precarity of Black youth, as does Alexander’s outstanding opening paragraph: “This one was shot in his grandmother’s yard. This one was carrying a bag of Skittles. This one was enjoying with a toy gun in entrance of a gazebo. Black lady in vivid bikini. Black boy holding cellphone. This one danced like a marionette as he was shot down in a Chicago intersection. The phrases, the names: Trayvon, Laquan, bikini, gazebo, loosies, Skittles. … His useless physique lay on the street within the August warmth for 4 hours.” The anaphoric litany, the clever repetition, the sonorousness all remind us we’re within the arms of a gifted poet.

The dynamic essay additionally turns Alexander’s prodigious powers of explication on three music movies — Flying Lotus’s “Till the Quiet Comes” and “By no means Catch Me,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” — utilizing every to forged mild on specific struggles and salves of Trayvon’s technology.

In her 2015 memoir, “The Gentle of the World,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Alexander drew a ravishing portrait of grief — for her husband, who died in 2012 — and of motherhood. Within the new e-book, her sons are 22 and 23, and one in every of its most intimate and shifting passages expresses her worry for his or her security, as members of the technology she has christened. “Let’s be clear about what motherhood is,” she writes. “A being comes onto this earth and you might be charged with protecting it alive. It dies if you don’t have a tendency it. It is so simple as that.”

That she is now the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Basis (the most important art-funding group within the nation); that she was the third Black lady ever to obtain tenure in arts and sciences at Yale and chaired its African American research division; that she has held distinguished professorships at Columbia and Smith; that as particular counsel to President Lyndon Johnson, her father introduced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and different civil rights leaders to the White Home: Alexander’s consciousness that no accomplishment or status or lineage nor even the best parental love can safe her sons’ or another Black lives from the perils of white supremacy works because the very important pulse of the final half of the e-book.

Half III opens with a black-and-white portrait by the photographer Chandra McCormick, titled “Daddy’O, the Oldest Inmate in Angola State Penitentiary” (2004). Alexander’s trenchant evaluation segues from the 75-year-old man’s “knitted forehead, his hand on his coronary heart, the experiences on his face,” into the topic of mass incarceration. “Angola homes the most important inhabitants of lifers on planet Earth,” she writes, and, in a flagrant preservation of its plantation historical past, nonetheless forces Black males to choose cotton whereas white guards on horseback work as overseers. She additionally shares the rattling close to unfathomable saga of the Angola Three: Black males held in solitary confinement for greater than 4 a long time, the longest anybody has been held in solitary within the historical past of American prisons.

The subsequent chapter deftly examines white makes an attempt to negate Black humanity by referencing the little-known story of a white researcher who in 1905 requested W.E.B. Du Bois, sans irony, if Black individuals shed tears. The e-book’s hopeful closing chapter, “There Are Black Folks within the Future,” deconstructs the concept of Black freedom, insists on Black futurity and provides parting knowledge to members of the Trayvon Technology. “Maybe the best triumph is to reside to inform and bear witness to the struggles of others,” she writes.