After Reading Just Us

The spiraling back, the turn of the screw to take it out, to look at what happened, to break apart the cover, to disclose in reverse, recalibrate and recapitulate, to find points of composure and recognition—to view the news as what happened already but left the stain of reportage and evidence of fraud and failure. . . . The time we live in and the way we make use of our “screws” to construct a new stage to play on.

All this is wobbly and dangerous because now we look at a group of kids as a throwback to another weather and drama. Five Black guys on a corner are spotted as fugitive slaves. Runaways from history, no matter what they are doing today. We have seen them. Same for women, parading around cities and beaches, with their butts swinging and under-the-breath conversations and laughter: they too are optic throwbacks or salvage from days of chattel and prostitution.

You can talk all you want about progress and liberation, but a free slave is only a “slave who is free” and a single female is still open. I think a hyper-awareness of this condition is one of the ones that turn children towards art as they develop, to seek something underlying culture that is a secret truth about who they were before now. There is fear and trepidation behind this uncovering. The hesitation in language, an attention to each word’s vibrations, can come to a form of suspicion.

Just Us addresses these issues.

Dear Claudia Rankine, thank you for taking the time to make public as a living thing the history we are hiding. You are a poet in your thinking and so the double-entendre and coding come naturally to you and the line “don’t let me be lonely” is all you need to say after saying everything else.