Sitting with the Matter of Black Life

Abstract

collective portrait Willis assembles can call attention to both visual patterns, without losing the reader’s access to the idiosyncrasies of any particular image or historical actor pictured within. The structure of Willis’s book invites synthetic observation—looking across and between texts and images—but at the same time, the inclusion of such a wealth of primary sources invites readers to bring their own interpretive skills to the work of observation. The uncannily fine grain produced by nineteenth-century wet-plate photographic processes makes soldiers portrayed in these pictures feel radically present to contemporary viewers, highlighting any particular soldier’s distinctive individuality in the direction of his gaze, the angle of his posture, or the placement of his hands. Both as documents of intimate experience and as symbolic representations, these photographs exhibit a representational tension, one that becomes evident as viewers engage with the collective portrait and the distinctive texts and images that comprise that portrait. Even when readers are instructed to see how lines connect across the primary sources included in the book, readers may find themselves in unexpected moments of intimate engagement with a particular object or document. The methodological interventions of this book, and in particular the way that Willis invites readers to engage with the historical record, invite the interpretation of this book as a pedagogical project. As she guides readers through the text, Willis invites us into a particular way of seeing, a practice of noticing when the subjects of photographs gesture beyond the edges of their frames. Both Willis’s and Clifton’s books are framed around failures of memory, not just the problem of remembering the names of enslaved people and their descendants, but a bigger loss of awareness—or in some cases refusal to recognize—the ways that Black Americans asserted their sel­ood in the face of significant resistance, thus propelling dramatic social transformations. In each of these texts, the response to such losses is the assembly of a narrative from words and texts, just kept, a process that reminds us that losses of memory can result from the absence of documentation, but also from a lack of narrative structure that helps the flood of historical documents make sense. As Clifton assembled her raw materials into prose, poetry kept creeping in, resulting in a memoir in which readers must be part of the process of assembly. Unlike a historical monograph, she does not o„er clear transitions or conclusions or a summary of argument, and instead readers are left to make the imaginative leaps for themselves. As she reminds us in the book’s first pages, these leaps have consequences and may reflect our own subject positions or backgrounds: “She is puzzled. I don’t remember that name, she says.” Who and how we remember is political work. Reading Willis alongside Clifton makes the poetry of The Black Civil War Soldier more evident. Though Willis utilizes an apparatus drawn from historical scholarship, the body of her work more closely resembles an assemblage. The author’s curatorial perspective is visible in the particular order and assembly of documents and “photographs that [hold] old and new stories” (212), but still, it is hard not to notice the frames of the discrete images, the edges of the page on which these documents were printed. There are many gaps between the texts and pictures that Willis has arranged, and rather than easing our way across those junctures, she leaves them there as a reminder that memory is work. The gaps, the edges, the points where the subject of a photo gestures beyond the frame are reminders that readers must see the lines of connection—even those that lead through violence and pain—and take responsibility for the collective labor of making and holding memory.