The African American Experience, Vicariously Absorbed

After reading a healthy chunk of The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson, I realized it should be added to the few sparkling events that make up my own constellation of insight into the African-American experience, a constellation I freely admit has only been seen somewhat like a little boy and his first gaze through a telescope. The other three events are: summer employment as a teenager working along-side African American men  and women in motels, assembly lines, and warehouses; reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; and witnessing Kara Walker’s art exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York sometime in 2007-2008 (and buying and studying the book capturing the exhibit, Kara Walker: My complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love).

I could write a dissertation connecting these four experiences, not suitable for a blog. Isabel Wilkerson’s book subtitle says it all, “The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” We’ve all been exposed to the American immigrant experience in its many ethnic flavors, the American migrant experience, the calamitous exodus of the Native Americans from their lands, but this migration/exodus of Southern blacks to the Northern Cities has been less explored. It involved six million people and changed the south and north in ways that become obvious after you read! While I could never do this book justice in this space, I will say it is beautifully written narrative non-fiction. Ellison’s book made me understand not only the oppression of the African American by white communities north and south but black on black oppression and violence as well. I’m not sure how I’d describe Kara Walker’s art, other than to say you will come face to face and become intimate with the brutality of the southern slave culture, the co-dependence of masters and slaves, the underbelly of the relationships between owners and their slaves, and the particular violence and trauma against women – all this delivered in ways you never expect, such as through the perspective of pornography.

I only mention my summer employment because it was the only period in my life I’ve ever had any direct and sustained interaction with African Americans (this was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, not the deep South but bordering on it), working side by side with other men loading boxcars, drilling screws into Modern Maid Stoves, working machines in a metal fabrication plant, and pulling dirty linens from motel room cleaning carts all pushed by black women. Yet I can’t say I learned anything really meaningful from those experiences because the interaction was expressly to get labor done, and after it was done, no interaction. That in itself, however, says a great deal, I suppose.

So any insights were vicariously absorbed. I suppose I could add seeing the 1997 movie, Amistad, by Stephen Spielberg, but that was not about the African American experience per se (in their “freed” state) as it was the depravity of mankind and its institutions in buying, selling, and transporting human property.

Well, one day I would love to write an essay on this subject. But Kara Walker, Ralph Ellison (I know, he’s gotten lots of attention but still), and Isabel Wilkerson deserve far more attention and respect from far more people in this country, beyond the borders of art exhibits, literary fiction, and scholarly research.