Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  In Ceddo, in the re-creation of seventeenth-century Wolof society, we don’t get any tight shots because we are very much concerned here with the whole history of the appropriation of space. The king and the spokesman have their space, the imam on the blanket has his space, his people around him have their space. The princess and the ceddo are in a particular space, and he even throws a rope on the ground and says, “You stay on that side of the space or I will cut your throat.” The Christian missionary is in his space. And then there is the space of future time: the fast-forward space. Further, there’s the space when people are being hemmed up, shaved, renamed, and are about to undergo this traumatic experience. Just in front of the hemmed-up folks is a space that Sembene leaves vacant. In a non-African film, that space would be taken up with pictures and actions, namely the affixing of shackles and chains, the building of fires, and the use of branding irons to explain what is going to happen. Sembene leaves that space vacant and moves to the soundtrack. And on the soundtrack we get African-American music; we get spirituals to tell that story that will take place in another space. It’s not Wolof music; it’s not African music—that’s from that other space. Rather, it’s African-American music—a moment of diasporic hookup.

  DEEP SIGHT AND RESCUE MISSIONS

  I

  It’s one of those weird winter-weather days in Philly. I’m leaning against the wall of a bus kiosk in Center City brooding about this article that won’t write itself. Shoppers unselfconsciously divest themselves of outer garments, dumping woolly items into shopping bags. I’m scarfed to the eyes a la Jesse James, having just been paroled from the dentist. And I’m eager to get back to the ’hood where I’ve been conducting an informal survey on assimilation. The term doesn’t have the resonance it once had for me. I’m curious as to why that is.

  At the moment, gums aching, I’m sure of only four things: ambivalence still hallmarks the integrationist-vs.-nationalist pull in Amero-African political life; social and art critics still disrespect, generally, actual differences in the pluralistic United States and tend to collapse constructed ones instead into a difference-with-preference sameness, with Whites as major and people of color (POCs) minor; media indoctrination and other strategies of coercive assimilation are endemic, ubiquitous, and relentless as ever; and the necessity of countering propaganda and deprogramming the indoctrinated as imperative as ever. I’m sure also that I am not as linguistically nimble as I used to be when interviewing various sectors/strata of the community, for I’ve just blown a gabfest on identity, belonging, and integration at the dentist’s through an inability to bridge the gap between the receptionist, a working-class sister from the projects, who came of age in the sixties and speaks in nation-time argot, and the new dental assistant, a more privileged sister currently taking a break from Bryn Mawr, who speaks the lingo of postmodern theory.

  Across from the bus stop is a new luxury high-rise, a colossus of steel and glass with signs announcing business suites for lease. I wonder who’s got bank these days to occupy such digs. Philly is facing economic collapse. Paychecks for municipal workers are often weeks late. The hijacking of neighborhoods by developers, who in turn are being leaned on by the banks, which in turn are being scuttied by the robber barons, who in turn are being cornered by IRS investigators working for the Federal Reserve, whose covers have been pulled off by Black and Latino task forces, who in turn are harassed by Hoover’s heirs. And while many citizens are angry about the S & L bailout being placed on the backs of workers one paycheck away from poverty and obscurity, they are even more distressed by cuts in social services that have pushed homelessness beyond the crisis point. I roam my eyes over the building, wondering if the homeless union would deem it media-worthy for a takeover.

  In the lobby of the high-rise is a sister about my age, early fifties, salt-‘n’-pepper ’fro, African brass jewelry, a woolly capelike coat of an Andean pattern. She’s standing by a potted fern, watchful. She seems to be casing the joint. I get it in my head that she’s a “checker,” a member of a community group that keeps an eye on HUD and other properties suitable for housing the homeless. A brisk-walking young sister emerges from the bank of elevators. Briefcase tucked smartly under one elbow, coat draped over the left Joan Crawford shoulder pad, hair straight out of a Vidal Sassoon commercial, the sister strides past the visitors-must-sign-in information counter, and the older woman approaches her. I search for a word, rejecting “accosts,” “buttonholes,” “pounces,” and “confronts,” but can’t find a suitable verb for the decisiveness and intensity of the older woman’s maneuver. Obviously strangers, they nonetheless make short shrift of amenities and seem to hunker down to a heavy discussion forthwith, the older sister doing most of the talking. She’s not panhandling. She’s not dispensing literature of any kind. She doesn’t reach over to pin a campaign button on the Armani lapel. But she’s clearly on a mission. What kind of scam, then, could it be? And if not a scam, what?

  I now get it in my head that the older sister is Avey Johnson, sprung from the pages of Paule Marshall’s 1983 novel Praisesong for the Widow. Avey, having rejected her deracinated life of bleached-out respectability in White Plains, New York, fashions a new life’s work, taking up a post in buildings such as the high-rise to warn bloods of the danger of eccentricity and to urge them to (re)center themselves and work for the liberation of the people. I’m so certain it’s Avey, I move away from the wall to go get in it. My daughter’s voice chimes in my ear: “Mother, mind your own business.” I head for the curb, muttering my habitual retort: “Black people are my business, sugar.” A youngblood on a skateboard zooms by. His bulky down jacket, tied around his hips by the sleeves, brushes against my coat and stops me. The No. 23 bus is approaching. So is rush hour. And who knows how swiftly and mean the weather will turn any second. I board.

  From my seat, I watch the briefcase sister spin out the revolving doors onto the sidewalk. She seems preoccupied, unsure, but not about whether to put on her coat. She walks to the corner. Her gait is no longer brisk. Her suit has lost its crispness. She swivels around, though, like a runway model and looks through the glass of the lobby. The older woman has a brother backed up against the newspaper rack. She’s taken a wide-legged stance, coat swept back from her hips, fists planted on the rise of the bones, neck working, mouth going. He holds his attaché case in front of him with both hands as though to fend her off. The light changes and the bus moves on.

  In Praisesong, it’s the power of a handed-down tale that rescues Avey from an inauthentic life, from the bad bargain she made early on, surrendering up cultural authenticity in exchange for separate-peace acceptability. Through the tale’s laying-on-of-hands potency, Avey undergoes a process of reading the signs and codes, a refamiliarization with blackness that releases the power of nommo and grounds her, so that she can adopt a responsible life. The tale is still told today in the Georgia and Carolina Sea Islands. The self-same tale informs too Julie Dash’s 1991 screen masterpiece Daughters of the Dust.

  In the opening of the independent black feature film, a boat glides into view. The terrain looks tropical. Dragonflies hover over the green-thick water. At the prow of the boat stands a woman in a large, veiled, creamy white hat. She wears a long, heavy, creamy white dress. This image is straight out of a million colonialism-as-fun movies. But this woman is standing hipshot, one arm akimbo, cocked chin, all attitude. These ebonies signal the spectator that Sister Dash has appropriated the iconography from imperialist entertainment for an emancipatory purpose. The boat pulls into the shallows, where a carving of an African, a figure once attached to the prow of a slaver ship, bobs close to shore. The boat docks. A legend appears on screen: “Ibo Landing, 1902.” Thereafter, the handed-down tale of the Ibos unfolds as part of the film’s complex narrative.

  When the boat brought the Ibos from the slaver ship, the story goes, the Africans stepped out onto the sand in their chains, took one look around, and with deep-sight vision saw what the Europeans further had i
n store for them, whereupon they turned right around and walked all the way home on the water to the motherland. In Daughters, various members of the Peazant family, gathered on a Carolina island for a final reunion picnic before migration splits them up, react to the tale in different ways. Several characters, urged by Nana, the family head, to remember, to resist amnesia, to take with them on their journey away from the ancestral place the faculty for deep-sight vision, draw strength from the story, as does Avey Johnson in the novel. “My body may be here,” Avey’s great-great-grandmother had said, passing along the tale, “but my mind’s long gone with the Ibos.” Daughters, like Praisesong, invites the viewer, the reader, to undergo a process to liberate the imperialized eye.

  The No. 23 bus, heading for Chinatown, first cuts through a district that community workers call the Zone of Diminishing Options. In the three-block area around Race and Ninth streets are pawnshops that also sell used clothes, labor-pool agencies advertising dishwashing jobs in the Atlantic City casinos, a very busy blood bank, a drop-in shelter, the Greyhound terminal, an army recruiting office, and a hospice center. While draft counseling in the Zone, I’d often think of opening a gun shop, if only to disrupt the perverse visual gag. And while in the Zone, I caught a third of a provocative independent black film called Drop Squad. A community worker, cassette in hand, persuaded a pawnshop owner to play it on a set in the window.

  Written by David Taylor, produced by Butch Robinson, and directed by David Johnson, Drop Squad is a satire about hijacking the hijacked. A nationalist organization puts the snatch on an assimilated corporate blood, straps him down in a chair in a red-black-and-green-draped community center, and proceeds to try to deprogram him. “You need to reacquaint yourself with you, brother,” they tell him, assigning him to read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. They take turns chanting a roll-call reveille: Soul Train, Garvey, Eleanor Bumpurs, Revolutionary Action Movement, Biko, Fannie Lou Hamer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sharpeville, Billie Holiday, Frantz Fanon. They argue, threaten, cajole, insist, are determined to wake the brother up. He counters with equal passion for the individual right to be whatever and whomsoever he pleases. Frequently his arguments are sound, momentarily stumping his captors. But they are relentless in their campaign to call the brother home, to reclaim him for the collective mission of race recovery. Privileged as he has become through people’s struggles, they argue that he has a debt both to himself and to his community blasted by drugs, violence, joblessness, homelessness, lack of access, and the politics of despair.

  I reach Germantown. The Hawk, out now and bold, blows me toward the greengrocer on Chelten. Worker Khan Nguyen has been discussing assimilation for me with her customers, especially Vietnamese and African and East Indian Caribbeans new to the U.S. She reports that assimilation is synonymous with citizenship training. It’s her take that while folks know that the intent of the training is to “domesticate” them, the emphasis on democracy and rights makes them “wildly expectant.” Khan winks. She has not been tamed by the process. “It may be naive of me,” she says, warming to the subject, but the fact that “new immigrants take democracy more seriously” than it is generally practiced in a society built on theft and bondage, riddled by a white-supremacist national ideology, motivated by profit and privilege, and informed by fascist relations between classes, races, sexes, and communities of various sexual orientations, cultural heritages, and political persuasions, “means that, in time, they will become unruly.” She leans on the phrase “in time,” because I am frowning. I ask about citizenship as a bribe contract: we’ll grant you citizenship, and in return you drop your cultural baggage and become “American,” meaning defend the status quo despite your collective and individual self-interest. She repeats the phrase “in time,” putting her whole body into it to drown me out. I stumble out of there, hugging a bottle of Jamaican vanilla extract (excellent wash for cleaning/deodorizing the refrigerator, by the by), hopeful.

  I run into a young friend, Anthony (Buffalo Boy) Jackson, graffiti artist and comic-book-maker. I ask for his help, easing into the topic by explaining “assimilation” as I first encountered it in Latin (the changing of letters to make them sound in accord with letters nearby, i.e., adsimilare in Latin becomes assimilare, excentricus in Medieval Latin or ekkentros in Greek becomes eccentric in English) and bio (the process by which the body converts food into absorbable substances for the maintenance of the system). Before I can get to the sociopolitical meaning, Anthony is off and running with “system,” recounting a middle-school field trip to a marsh in the New Jersey Pine Barrens to study ecosystems. He loses me, but I chime in when I hear usable things like “symbiosis” and “parasites,” and finally the ability of the amoeba to give alternate responses to its environment because of its shape-shifting ability.

  “Hold it, Anthony, are you saying amoebas can transform the system? I mean, err-rahh, are they capable of collective action or are they basically loners?”

  My friend is dancing and laughing at me. “The amoeba shall overthrow, right?” Big joke.

  I walk him toward Burger King ’cause now he has an idea—the amoeba as mantua, shape shifter, ninja—and the tables are big enough to spread out on. I bring him back to my needs, and he tells me the issue is rip-off, not assimilation.

  “Everything we do,” he says, meaning breaking, scratching, rapping, dressing, “gets snatched up and we get bumped off.” Which is why, he explains, he admires Spike Lee, because of Lee’s control over the films and especially over the spin-offs that come out of Forty Acres and a Mule—CDs, books, T-shirts, mugs, caps, jackets. He ducks inside and shakes his head about me. I’m old enough to know what the deal is, and the deal is rip-off.

  Down the block, toward Wayne Avenue, is a produce truck where people frequently gather to talk over the news of the day. Trucker Mr. Teddy, a blood from Minnesota, tells me that only Europeans were invited to become truly assimilated. “And assimilation went out when Roots came in and busted up the whole melting-pot con game.” According to him, nobody’s been melted—not Norwegians, not Germans, not Japanese, and definitely not Africans. He talks about the Swedes in the Midwest who, in reclaiming their heritage, particularly their seventeenth-century socialist tradition, have rejected assimilation. “Hmm,” sez I, and venture to ask if these unmelted Amero-Europeans he speaks of reject as well their race/skin privileges, the socio-eco-political and psychic profits derived from U.S. apartheid. “Now that would be un-Amurrican.” He chuckles and slam-dunks a cabbage into my bag.

  Across the avenue in front of the newsstand where folks are lined up to buy lottery tickets, the daily floor show is in progress. It features an old white guy who shuffles along the strip panhandling from the newsstand, past the wall bordering the Super Fresh, past the Woolworth, to the area near the bank where vendors line the curbs all the way down to Germantown Avenue, where I got off the No. 23. Some black people derive great pleasure from helping a down-and-out white person. The same pleasure, I suspect, that film-buff friends of mine enjoy watching a wrecked Chet Baker fall totally apart on screen in the docu Let’s Get Lost. There are always folks about, fingering the videotapes on the tables—today Highlights of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings is selling for eight dollars—who crack on the generous-minded who give money to panhandling whites. “Christian duty my ass! Let that ole cracker beg in his own neck of the woods.” But the consensus notion is that Old Whiteguy is pretty much in his neck of the woods, that he lives, in fact, in posh quarters on Wis-sahickon Avenue. Should anyone voice that, they are charged with being proracist, at least stereotypic in thinking that all white people are well-off. “Well-off or not,” someone is saying as I reach the performing arena, “he’s getting fat off black people.” That remark triggers a mention of Jim Crow, talking low, and slavery. So a few people make a point of jostling the old man. Should anyone object and call the behavior racist, as in reverse racism, that provokes still another discussion: that some in the race seem to live outside of history and don�
�t appreciate the fact that a race war is going on and that it wasn’t bloods who declared it; whereupon statistics are ticked off about infant mortality, life expectancy, illiteracy, unemployment, and other aspects of the war. Meanwhile, Old Whiteguy is steadily collecting loose change, wending his way toward a sister who vends around our way only occasionally.

  I don’t know her name yet, but I admire her titles: Sam Yette’s The Choice, Chancellor Williams’s The Destruction of Black Civilization, and everything that Angela Davis ever published. Should a youth bedecked in gold try to get past her, she’ll beckon her/him over and give a mini-workshop on black miners in South Africa, apartheid, and the international gold trade. Should a youngblood stroll by in a Malcolm T-shirt (“By Any Means Necessary”) she will get very generous with her wares. Old Whiteguy is another matter.

  “You want a what—a quarter!?!” she says. “I’ll give you a quarter.” Images of Old Whiteguy tied to two horses being lashed in opposite directions flood my dentist-traumatized brain. She looks him up and down and says quite seriously, “Hey, you used to be a young peckerwood, so why ain’t you president?” He grins his drooly grin, hand still stuck out. Book Sister turns to the incense seller in a crocheted cufi at the next table. “Come get this clown before I’m forced to hurt him.”

  Before dark, I reach home, a co-op whose comfy lobby I’d thought would ensure me neighbors enough for a round-table discussion on this article. But the lobby’s empty. I drop in on my neighbor Vera Smith. She takes a hard line on both aggressive assimilationists and seemingly spaced denialists, folks quick to call behavior manifested by Book Sister and jostlers as racist, folks who swear that things are all right, or would be all right if Black people weren’t so touchy, mean, and paranoid. I say something like “consciousness requires a backlog of certain experiences.” Vera ain’t going for it. From day one, she says, there’s enough evidence around to peep the game and resist. “So it’s a decision to be like that,” she says. “And it takes a lot of energy to deny what’s obvious.” Denialists don’t want to see, don’t want to belong, don’t want to struggle, says Vera, putting a pin in it.