a gesture both damning and profoundly generous, the eponymous cycle of poems in Cornelius Eady’s Brutal Imagination responds to the case of Susan Smith, a white South Carolina woman who drowned her two young sons in 1994, by recovering a voice for the imaginary black male kidnapper Smith invented to take the blame. Like the infamous speakers who observe him in several intervening poems, including “Uncle Tom” and “Uncle Ben,” this “black man pour[ed] from a / White woman’s head” (27) is granted an autonomous consciousness without agency in the material world. The opening poem, “How I Got Born,” establishes that autonomy as a kind of limbo existence from which Smith summons him—“an insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion,” to recite the Nathaniel Mackey epigraph to Fred Moten’s In the Break. This fabricated black man is confined to Smith’s body, though he shares neither her face nor her skin, making him both “a black man” and “a mother” (16), a fantasy with real effects, materialized by her fear and desire: “Everything she says about me is true” (6).
The empirical fixity of this truth does not protect Smith as her story unravels, so the cycle tracks his inexorable reabsorption into the body of her character, as it is inscribed in law and public scandal. The final poem, “Birthing,” intersperses his voice among fragments of her actual confession, concluding with his incarnation into their body in the moment she reenters the world after watching the car bearing her children disappear into the lake. In an astonishing act of witness, Eady’s poem keeps faith with all of Smith’s victims—the drowned children, the African American community onto which she mustered the full force of the police power—even as he finds the only possible way to empathize with the murderer herself. For the black man she has invented to take the blame, who is no one if not Smith herself, is the only one who can stand with her as she stares out from the shore.
What the poem is proposing may be as simple as this: it is the task given to a certain line of poetry to stand on the shore, to be the only one standing with this woman, even as she murders her children, even as she surrenders herself to the movement of an overwhelming violence that bursts from her solitary act out into the long-remembered floodways of the civilized world. The poem neither redeems nor excuses; it does not ask if Smith was herself a victim, nor comment on the intimate violence and sexual abuse known to have marked her upbringing. Whatever it is in Smith that has been formed by the violence, in this poem, is that which she surrenders to the violence to place herself on its lee side, the side of mastery, and with it she surrenders her status as a mother and her agency and responsibility as the murderer of her children. It is this surrendered self that her imagination identifies as black. And so what the poem is also proposing is as simple as this: here too is a way blackness is birthed into the world.
To imagine you can properly segregate the blackness that poured from Smith’s head from that of the people who bore the violence she unleashed—justice’s extension across the darkness, the long arm of the law—is to disavow the everyday lived experience of blackness. But if the truth did come out, for once, why concern yourself with this white woman’s racist fantasies? Can’t you draw a line between this criminal and the community she so recklessly slandered and endangered? You may, the poem replies, but what would that line say if he could speak?
The truth came out, and the criminal was identified as a white woman named Susan Smith, but the poem also witnesses the moment when antiracism is once again seized by the ongoing hatred of blackness. Under a post–civil rights racial order, hegemonic antiracism requires figures such as Smith, who justify the reproduction of whiteness, and lesser forms of racial privilege, by embodying everything the enlightened and civilized love to hate: that bred-in, inbred intellectual and moral deficiency, pitiable but requiring correction unto death, that agency of violence calling an overwhelming violence onto itself as justice. We know it when we see it, goes the protocol. We don’t call its name in polite company. We just call the police. What the poem allows you to see is that the blackness that poured from Smith’s head—in the act of explanation, subsequent to the murder, as the only possible figure to bear the blame—is still entering the world, and the desire to pretend you can reverse this birth and lock it back up from whence it came, in the name of racial justice, is what secrets and secures the ongoing hatred of blackness beyond the realm of perception.
So the exercise of Eady’s imagination, recovering a voice for the fabricated black man, is less about producing a speaking subject than about the task of listening to what is constituted as inaudible, reading as learning how to read, asking how to perceive freedom from his perspective. Eady’s unyielding generosity, and the line in which it follows—say, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison; Toshio Mori and Hisaye Yamamoto; Gwendolyn Brooks and Edward P. Jones—serve as the horizon of my clumsy efforts, in this overture, to listen and learn from Kong.
Is there no way out for him? You may look to the book of Billie Holiday, the wisdom of her sound as textualized by black women auditors. Griffin’s title, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, cites Rita Dove’s poem “Canary,” which observes that “women under siege” learn “to sharpen love in the service of myth.” Because a question as to anyone’s freedom pertains to all, this truth may be gendered but is not only for women.21 The point is that Holiday could not be free because the world was not. Her “burned voice” (Dove) is lure and lament, alarm and alternative.
What alternative? Freedom is fugitive in an unfree world; it must be denied to her because it is denied anywhere and everywhere short of unfreedom’s general abolition, but Holiday did what she could in a world not yet free, like your own, taking her freedom when and where she could, could not. The way out of no way, as Fred Moten riffs in a recent poem, may also be “a way into no way” (“test” 96), or, as he puts it in an interview: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that” (Harney and Moten 118). This is the love sounded in Holiday’s music as a freedom from love, slipping from one embrace to a larger one that cannot be seen because it is everywhere all around, a love that does not turn away from the world it shows to be broken but sounds and resounds it.
So Kong, the old trouper, may be released here. Rewind the film to the moment he slips from the skyscraper’s pinnacle, and switch it off as he begins to fall.
(Let him take the “black Pacific” with him! Please remember that the term functions, in this book, only in absence, as a prop removed, which never actually existed except as a fantasy of violence. This book holds no brief for a “black Pacific studies,” and whatever histories may emerge from this space will refuse this name,22 eluding its claim of paternity to reach back to a previousness beyond its imagining. In the pages to come, whatever partial recuperations this book offers will concern only what has moved in and through its absence.)
Leave him in the air. Let him surrender to it, as Toni Morrison suggests in Song of Solomon, in it all the way to the end of it and to what is there, slipping imperialism’s embrace to give himself over to everything you cannot imagine when you say justice. For to long for justice without mercy is to surrender the world to a love for empire.
1.
The Violence and the Music, April–December 1899
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (36)
Improvisation must be understood, then, as a matter of sight and a matter of time, the time of a look ahead whether that looking is the shape of a progressivist line or rounded, turned. The time, shape, and space of improvisation is constructed by and figured
