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  • Remembering the Ancestor’s ImageEmmett Till and Predicaments of Witnessing
  • Steve Edwin (bio)

I couldn’t but help think of the first time I laid eyeson my son. I remembered my reaction to hisdistorted little face and how I made him cry. Iwould have given anything to take back that look.That face seemed so adorable now. My first lookand my last look at Emmett would be forever fusedin my mind.

Mamie Till-Mobley, Death of Innocence

A 1981 poem by the African American writer and activist Audre Lorde begins by evoking the persistent presence of a forceful and depriving vision:

However the image entersits force remains withinmy eyes rockstrewn caveswhere dragonfish evolvewild for life relentless and acquisitivelearning to survivewhere there is no foodmy eyes are always hungryand rememberinghowever the image entersits force remains.

(Undersong 186)

Entitled “Afterimages,” Lorde’s poem charts the intrusive and insistent impact of this nameless, painful image. It is by putting this visually experienced force into words that Lorde comes to understand the source of her hunger and her pain. Two scenes emerge: “A white woman stands bereft and empty / a black boy hacked into a murderous lesson.” This latter image, Lorde writes, is “recalled in me forever / a lurch of earth on the edge of sleep / etched into my vision.” The boy whose image is engraved upon the writer’s psyche is Emmett Till, who was lynched by white men when he was fourteen years old. His is one of the “fused images beneath my pain” (186). Lorde goes on to recall that in 1955 she saw images of Till’s body on “each corner’s photography” and averted her eyes (188). [End Page 710] In the years following she did not see the images distinctly but rather felt their impact in the form of inexplicable psychic pain.

Lorde talks about carrying the painful visual traces of Till’s body silently inside her for twenty-four years, until she saw another seemingly unrelated scene that spurred her to write. Watching a television news report on the flooding of the Pearl River in Mississippi in 1979, Lorde sees a white woman survivor of the flood surrounded by her frightened children, talking to a reporter about the losses she and her family had just experienced. The woman’s husband suddenly breaks into the frame, grabbing her away from the camera and snarling, “She ain’t got nothing more to say!” The televised scene of a “tearless” mother holding “a tattered baby’s blanket in her arms” takes Lorde back to her own memories of Emmett Till (187). In the rest of her poem, Lorde examines the historical continuities of white male dominance that link the two events.

For Lorde, vision is both an active faculty and a site where violence is done to the viewer. Often the viewer cannot avoid seeing the public spectacle of racist violence. In Lorde’s case the spectacle does violence to her as well. Lorde writes of Emmett Till:

His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st yearwhen I walked through a northern summereyes averted from each corner’s photographynewspapers protest posters magazinesPolice Story Confidential Truethe avid insistence of detail pretendinginsight or informationthe length of gash across the dead boy’s loinshis grieving mother’s lamentationall overthe veiled warning the secret relishof a Black child’s mutilated bodyfingered by street-corner eyesbruise upon livid bruise.

(Undersong 188)

Writing is one way of transforming the viewer’s relationship to the spectacle and the violence it enacts. In “Afterimages” Lorde intends not only to articulate her rage and pain but to critique a dominant visual economy that amplifies the terrorizing effects of racist and sexist violation. The media’s pretense of “insight or information” could hardly mask the “the secret relish” with which a mass public of viewers consumed photographs of Till’s body along with narratives about his murder. The journalistic cliché merely sanitized and disavowed the ways the narratives were sexualized and the images “fingered by street-corner eyes.” By contrast...

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