Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe

Heath’s recollection reveals the way that the lessons that an institution imagines it is imparting—or the ones that we imagine the institution imagining it is imparting—like racism is bad or look how far we’ve come—is not the only, or even, perhaps, the primary, lesson or note to take hold. The imagination of whiteness is also at work, undoing the lesson, restructuring, and constantly renewing antiblack racism.

Of course, I didn’t know her fear. I knew my own. My fear was next to hers.

I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations, over centuries.18 I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.

They crowded around the sculptures of the children in order to have their pictures taken with them. Who will stand in the midst of those children, and not denounce slavery? But what of its afterlives, its wake? This is, I think, what Michel-Rolph Trouillot points to as the inauthentic relation to The Past, when he writes: “What is obscene [here] is not a relation to The Past, but the dishonesty of that relation as it would happen in our present. The trivialization of slavery—and of the suffering it caused—inheres in that present. The ‘past’ fails to stay in the past.20 This is a past that is sectioned off from the present in which to “condemn slavery alone is the easy way out.” He continues, “What needs to be denounced here to restore authenticity is much less slavery than the racist present within which representations of slavery are produced.”21 The “past” fails to stay in the past.

The architecture of the memorial stages encounter. Spectacle is not repair.

Where are the responses to the “political arithmetic”24 in the present by which Black children around the globe continue to be subjected to every form of violence? This arithmetic takes various forms and is reflective of what K’eguro Macharia calls geo-histories—it knows no national boundaries.

It is the calculus by which a Black six-year-old girl in Mississauga, Ontario, is handcuffed by police; a twelve-year-old Tamir Rice playing by himself with a toy gun in a Cleveland, Ohio, playground is shot dead by police within twelve seconds of their arriving; Ella Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old Black girl who lived in London off the South Circular Road becomes, through her mother’s fight, the first person to have air pollution listed as cause of death on her death certificate; and Shukri Abdi, a twelve-year-old girl recently arrived in London from Somalia, is bullied for a month and found drowned in a river.

Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.

My God my bright abyss into which all my longing will not go once more I come to the edge of all I know and believing nothing believe in this most of us seek a just containment some pillars some strictures amid the freedom to guide us and in the end some ash scattered or a pine casket most of us seek a just containment who can blame us … we wanted to be alive long enough to bear witness26 Asiya Wadud

I write “visibly Black” here because former NAACP head Walter White, among others, passed into the category of white in order to witness and report on those awful scenes.

It is rare, I think, to find a living Black person photographed in the crowds of these awful spectacles. In the all-too-numerous lynching photographs that I have seen, I can think of only one instance. In that photograph, I am startled to see a Black woman who, but for her arm and a sliver of her side, is mostly out of the frame. Her clothing looks like a uniform—maybe she has been brought to this lynching in order to take care of some of the white children in the crowd? I cannot fathom her terror in the face of the crowd’s “murderous appetite”29 and I don’t have the desire or the stomach to search for this photograph in order to fill in more detail.

The separation of families was intrinsic to chattel slavery in the United States, and so the narratives of the woman looking for her children and the children looking for their mother may be related—that is, the woman may be their mother and they may be her children, but they also may not be.

“Have you seen our mother?” over/underlays every narrative, punctuates every other experience.

There’s a children’s book with this title that I’m reminded of. Thinking of it in a new light.

he tells me that he doesn’t work there but that he has come there every day since the museum opened in April 2018, to stand across from his video, and to watch people watching him. He tells me that he thought people didn’t care but that standing there he sees many people who are moved by his story. This, he says, is his therapy.

I think to say, but do not, that to look into other people’s faces for your therapy is a dangerous proposition. NOTE 31 I should have told him. I should have tried to unburden him.

Mr. Caston spent more than forty-five years in Angola. His case was one of the first in which juveniles who had been sentenced to life in prison were released after the US Supreme Court’s 2010 decision making life in prison illegal for children convicted of non-homicide crimes.

Only in 2010.

The language of the whistle at Angola echoes the language of the whip in chattel slavery, echoes in the language of the rifle in Alfred, Georgia, in Morrison’s Beloved. “All forty-six men woke to rifle shot. All forty-six.”33