NYU Black Renaissance Noire NYU Black Renaissance Noire Vol 17.1: Winter 2017 | Page 16

They understood that as black people they were “ soldiers of the cross ” and had to strive for excellence in all things . Her maternal grandfather , himself a physician , often said to his daughter and her siblings , “ Be chaste in your speech ,” a middle-class American Victorian imperative that had come down through the generations . I am eight years old and counting ( 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 ) as my siblings and I stand in our pajamas monitoring our parents ’ scrimmage — “ whose up and whose down , I tell ya ,” 2 — and in the midst of it , I wonder how indecorous is my mother ’ s lapse in speech , and if it means she ’ s is no longer a “ lady ,” and what does God think , and would his punishment be worse than what she was going through now .
Aware of seemliness and the propriety of Christian faith , our mother taught us that it is blasphemy to say , “ Oh Lord !” or “ Liar , liar , pants on fire !” Certainly , such a word is not meant for the living room but understandable in the context of the assault , and in my mother ’ s case , an inadvertent concession , a recognition that she has somehow made a wrong move in this dance . Our father gets past the infelicity of the epithet , completes the arc of his aim , and with the fine articulation of his fist succeeds in silencing dissent . Unlike Robert Browning ’ s resourceful Duke — “ This grew . I gave commands . Then all smiles ceased together ” — my father does not delegate in these situations .

II .

Generations do not cease to be born , and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have .
James Baldwin , The Fire Next Time
I recreate the foregoing domestic scrimmage , not as ugly and disturbing in the telling as it was for those present to experience it for reasons I understand and reasons I don ’ t , but here are two primary ones : I want to explore the peculiar but often fruitful sources of individual perspective and sensibility . And to that end , I ’ m trying to explain why what I saw one day in William H . Johnson ’ s Jitterbugs V print and what was actually there were two different things , or maybe three or four different things , if you take into account the millions of people who have seen this very same print . My interpretation here is not so much an elucidation of the print as it is an effort to capture some of its emitted spirit and energy . As a writer I am compelled to do so in the spirit of what James Baldwin would call “ witnessing ,” because of my desire and my conflicting needs to control and assimilate the memory and make meaning of it . And so , the ekphrastic analogy of Enid and Bobby ’ s war dance to Johnson ’ s Jitterbugs V , one in a series of paintings of dancing couples created between 1939 and 1942 .
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