Blue Front (review)

"Think of her as a juggler," Pamela Alexander advises on the back cover of Martha Collins's fourth collection of poetry, Some Things Words Can Do (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1998). "Each time she catches an object and releases it, it becomes something different. This is exciting, you think, and then you see (or rather you don't) that the juggler has disappeared, and the objects are doing it all on their own." In Blue Front, Martha Collins's fifth volume, the poet-juggler takes up a personal subject-her five-year-old father's presence at the scene of a lynching-and by the time she releases it onto the page its implications have become deeply relevant to our lives and to our national history. However, the juggler of Blue Front seems uninterested in conventional stunts that showcase the performer's dexterity and appease the crowd. Rather than entertain, her juggling means to perturb and challenge the gaze of the thrilled onlookers gathered in 1909 to witness and delight in the lynching of a black man named Will James, accused of raping and strangling a white woman. First hanged from an illuminated arch downtown, James was then dragged through the streets, shot, burned, and dismembered, his body parts turned into souvenirs. The event took place in Cairo, Illinois, a town whose racist history forms the core of the poem's narrative, and whose legacy is recounted in a diction that seems unsettled by its task.

More than the hatred-a fear-fueled hatred, at least in part-motivating the lynching, it's the ten thousand people's desire for spectacle that the poem renders most disturbing. The spectacle represents a clearly marked, community-sanctioned way of asserting white supremacy and punishing transgression of racial boundaries. The violence delivered under the guise of righteous civic actions serves as a means of ensuring social control and protecting whiteness but also as a means of indulging in erotic and often homoerotic gratification:

They cut off other parts to cut them off.Once they made the victim eat those parts.Made him take them eat them made him chew.Tell us you like it they said as they watched him eat.Once they used giant corkscrews to bore the flesh.Thus they raped the belly the chest the thigh. Thus they made the infamous parts their own.Thus like an X-rated movie they enjoyed.And why this X-rated writing should it be read.Children were often there they were being taught.

One of those children mentioned in the last line was the speaker's father, and what he would have seen, how he would have seen it, and what he would have understood and learned are concerns the speaker weaves into the fabric of the narrative, often in the form of obsessive motifs. The questions are only partially answered, and the answers are only partially accurate-factual, yes, but also equivocal in their claim to truthfulness. Fourteen years after the lynching, her nineteen-year-old father "rode around town / dressed in a white sheet just / made noise he said made noise." Later, when he was forty, he lived in an all-white neighborhood and owned a pharmacy frequented only by white customers; later still, however, "he would teach his daughter to say / may I help you please." The ambiguity is perhaps best captured by the phrase most closely associated with the father: "he made change." Though referring literally to the boy's making money by selling fruit and working in a drugstore, the sentence also implies positive agency. "And the last day," the penultimate piece of the poem concludes,

he said You knowthis world could be

a better place justpromise me that youwill help he waited

he made change mayI help you pleasemake change.

Collins approaches her subject matter with an authority grounded both in extensive research and in an intimate knowledge of the language's ability to resuscitate and cathect the past. One of the most impressive and innovative features is the book's daring attempt to take on various...