Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers

FOREWORD: How Do We Comply?: Answering the Call of Medgar Evers

xiii Foreword H ow D o We C o m ply? Answering the Call of Medgar Evers Kentucky assumes a prominent place in Frank X Walker’s five previous poetry collections. Affrilachia (2000) was his first collection and serves as the defining text of black life and experience in the Bluegrass State. Black Box: Poems (2006) extends Walker’s voice and vision of the overlooked lives of black people in Kentucky through a consideration of his own Affrilachian life. Walker’s persona poems keenly focus the issues of racial subjectivity and place through the embodied narratives of black subjects with deep Kentucky ties. Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004) and When Winter Come: The Ascension of York (2008) imagined what life might have been like for York, the lone black man on the Lewis and Clark expedition. York had been enslaved in Louisville, Kentucky, and served as William Clark’s body servant. Walker also eloquently lays to rest Kentucky native Isaac Murphy through a graceful imagining of his inner life and a careful crafting of the lives of his dear ones in Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride (2010). Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, Walker’s most recent collection, turns toward a deeper South, but not away from the subject of the overlooked lives of black people who make up life there. By most accounts, Medgar Evers’s contributions to the modern day civil rights movement have been overlooked if not forgotten in chronicles of the movement and so from modern memory.¹ These xiv poems masterfully confront this erasure through an engagement with Evers’s prominence in the inner workings of white supremacist identity and its manifestation as violence in both formal and informal practices of segregation. This collection underscores the startling incongruity of this contemporary elision given the prominence Evers held as a contestant to the order of white supremacy. To this end, Evers was all but invisible and marginal to assassin Byron De La Beckwith or to the White Citizens Council, the Ku Klux Klan, Governor Ross Barnett, and the Mississippi police. This meant that Evers was also all but invisible as a figure for every black person who dared to challenge formal Jim Crow laws and “Dixie decorum,” which Walker ’s poems identify as those unwritten rules wherein black people publicly acknowledged their inferiority before whites. Walker beautifully sets in relief the ways that Medgar Evers’s singular life symbolizes black life in Mississippi. These poems create an intimate portrait of what it must have been like for people to live amid state-sanctioned loathing; the effort that must have been required to recover dignity from relentless efforts to infuse indignity into the meaningfulness of blackness, from constantly deflecting racist blows. Walker’s consideration of the life and cold-blooded assassination of Evers dramatizes the daily horror of dehumanization that thoroughly sought out every corner of southern existence in an effort to degrade the quality of black life and reduce its quantity to prove this point. Indeed, the specter of Evers proves seriousness of purpose in maintaining white supremacy in the segregated South, especially in Mississippi. Mississippi could create Halloween in August, memorably making a monstrous mask of young Emmett Till’s face eight years before Alabama made ghouls of four little Sunday school girls in September . Mississippi muted the voices of its black majority by denying whole counties of black citizens the right to vote, at the same time amplifying the cry of one black woman whose “Mississippi appendectomy ” gave involuntary sterilization its name. Mississippi ampli- fied the voice of a governor whose ardent love for segregation ignited the passions of a crowd sympathetic to blocking one black student’s xv admittance into law school at Ole Miss and set the symbolic bar for an Alabama governor’s stand in another schoolhouse door.² Walker’s poems paint a vivid picture of Mississippi macabre but also of the elegance that black people made of life there. Such elegance gets imagined just as I remember observing it in my own Affrilachian life. I knew and saw black people who could be quiet together ; who when alone could think sweetly or soberly about the other; who enjoyed one another with careful measure; who nurtured one another; who not only slept together but rested together. I believe the persona that Walker ascribes to Myrlie Evers, who conjures sweet...