In the Language of My Captor
Page 3
The cemetery looked like it hadn’t been visited or maintained in years. Most of the 20 or so stones were dark, almost black, almost illegible, and stood only a few feet tall—there were no monuments, and no statutes. But nearest to the gate, to the left of the gate if one were facing the gate, sweaty from pedaling, but chilly, also, already, shivering in the unusually strong wind that day, lay a large, flat stone, which at first I thought had fallen. I had walked in a counterclockwise circle around the perimeter of the cemetery, just inside the fence, and so I had seen this stone last, and when I stopped and stared down at it, I realized it hadn’t fallen—it seemed, instead, to be covering a grave. I can’t remember the inscription exactly, but I do remember I had to bend close to the stone to read it. The stone memorialized 18 children who had died when a nearby orphanage burned to the ground 70 years before. It didn’t seem possible to me even then, when I was a small child and most things seemed possible, that the stone marked a mass grave, that the children had all been buried in the same spot, but I couldn’t imagine they were anywhere else. What families would have claimed them? And I felt sure that if I moved the stone and peered into the hole, I would see the orphans in the fire still, motionless, some prone, some on all fours, some kneeling, hunched, and blackened, and the orphanage intact still, burning, and the whole world of wrecked, and burned, and abandoned things, each trapped in the moment of its destruction, each thing preserved, both dead and outside of death, not in Hell, but in the one fire everywhere, after which there is no suffering, and so from which there is no relief.
3
Banjo Yes Receives a Lifetime Achievement Award
I ain’t no never had to never done
No acting not like some of these white boys / Nothing
you’ll find in books
y’all listen close / Now and I’ll tell you how I got my name
I worked on as a young man on a lot
What do you think I did I cleaned I fetched
Shit and more shit shit both ways shit and took
And kept it too yes and whenever I thought
A white boy might be calling me hell yes / I answered
one morning and I’m just cross-
ing from one thing to the next I hear a shout
Banjo and so I lift my head but not
Too high that ain’t my name and I say Yes
Back loud but real polite and this white boy
I never seen before and he’s away
Over the other side of the lot but each
Of the white boys there he had a different
Important way of standing and no I
Ain’t seen this boy before he had his fists
Jammed in his hips like all of them but he
Leaned heavy on his left leg like he was
Limping standing still I run quick o-
ver to him I say Yes sir tells me to
Bend down and wipe this is the truth it was
A spot of bird shit from his shoe
this ain’t / No kind of story where the nigger says
No I bent down and cleaned his shoe
I can’t / From down there see the look on the man’s face
From down there at his feet but just as I
Get started and I think he must have been
Smiling he says Is your name Banjo I
Say No sir my name’s Bill and he says Ban-
jo suits you better Banjo Yes and when
I talk to you that’s who you’re gonna be
And I say Yes sir sir your shoe is clean
Now listen that boy he was nobody
In fact I never saw that boy again
But that name stuck to me
and when you see / A white boy talking on the screen that’s him
And when you see me smiling back that’s me
Banjo Yes Recalls His First Movies
Most of the time I spent
In the beginning most of the time between
Scenes I spent chasing after their
filth in my mind / They had me playing
Servants and when the cameras stopped I kept on cleaning
What was it like
The thing about white folks back then was / They was what was
What it was what they white folks did was you was like
A mind in something in a body but
that body wasn’t yours
I’ll tell you what it was like it was
That body was
A second mind / Talking
your body was a voice like you was talking to yourself
Telling you do like you supposed to do white
folks the way they talk about
Their cars their houses niggers they talk like
Owning a thing a man is something they / Do with their hands
and niggers we’re
we got to be / Free if we ain’t in chains
Well back when I was starting out
the only talking I could do on screen was talking
chains around myself / And who
was it who / Paid me to talk
White folks stay clean
’cause how they own you is they own your options
You can be free
Or you can live
Banjo Yes Talks About His First White Wife
Thing is she hated her
Father her mother and her brothers loved
Her cousin but he stopped
Coming around / After she married me no letters said
He didn’t have a phone
So every Christmas every birthday every
Goddamn / Armistice Day I sent that boy a phone
She didn’t know I did that but I made sure he knew it was me
I sent / The same note every time Don’t
Worry I got a white boy here he answers our
Calls see he wanted that and didn’t want it
A nigger can surround himself with whiteness
But it becomes a wall between him / And whiteness
and he wants and doesn’t want it
Banjo Yes Plucks an Apple from a Tree in a Park
FOR TAMIR RICE
I hold an apple in my hand on set
It is or ain’t an apple ain’t a real
Apple depending on am I in the shot
Or am I watching with the crew a real
Apple don’t taste no sweeter than a movie
Apple it ain’t crisper but it’s some better
A nigger eats an apple in a movie
It ain’t no apple it’s a big fat water-
melon man it’s fried chicken it’s all that
Bullshit a nigger eats but he ain’t eating
No nigger in no movie ever got
Hungry and ate and it was just him eating
No nigger tells the story of himself
Man even if I hate a nigger what-
ever he does I do I ask myself
Before I do anything it don’t mat-
ter what it is Who’s watching me and What
They gonna think they see I waste my mind
Trying to read white folks’ minds I’ll tell you what
An apple is it’s death it’s my child dead
Banjo Yes Talks About Motivation
The difference was they had names like a name
a boy / Might think a grown man wants / The white boys
did the actors names like Rex and Duke / We niggers
had names like a name a boy might get for
Some stupid shit
He did once when he wasn’t thinking when he did it
Like they would call a nigger Hambone Jones
Because a white boy spotted him sucking on a ham bone
Probably thinking about his woman
and he’s hungry and he’s poor
They named you for a thing
your hunger made
you do
And what could you say back
You’re not a man and you’re a poor man
What won’t you do
Banjo Yes Asks a Journalist
I didn’t marry none of them white women
Because I was a / What did you say a free black man
Shit man if I had been a free black man
I would have married a girl from back home
That’s what you think it is
Freedom you don’t you you think it’s
Making decisions other folks won’t like
Listen I do a thing to piss a white man off
I’m bound to that man’s will hell
I’m bound to that man’s pleasure
He got me on a level where he doesn’t even have to think
And all I do is think about him
tell me when have I been free
Boy write this down I’m asking
when have you not had to say / Something about white folks to say
Something about me
4
(hope)(lessness)
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
—RUDYARD KIPLING
The keeper keeps me / He tells me
Because he has no hope
I have become an
Expression of his hopelessness // My kind
out-breeds his kind
he says / And I have lived
With the keeper long enough to know
He thinks that means // Eventually
my kind
Will murder him and everyone he loves
and live in / His house
And eat his bread
He fears he can’t defend
His house his bread he
Has put his faith in things
That can’t be loyal in return
And also all his hope is gone
Because he tells me
he has kept me for so long
How could he / Free me
And not fear I / Would seek revenge / He says
he keeps me here
because he would if he were
Me seek revenge
He is a strange
Man he will not acknowledge
my humanity in-
sofar as it is mine / But will
Ascribe his traits to me
in all / Their human / Complexity
it even
pleases him to do so
I tell him // He is hopeful / He doesn’t fear me
Because I’m different from him
but because he hopes
I will become him
Sunlight
I’ve been in a white man’s
Skin in my body
and I have returned to tell you
Never in my life I
Ever felt more afraid
Nor ever in my life
So capable so strong
Until I wasn’t I had been a colored
woman all my life
as pale
As any colored woman
Born from a white man’s property
And I felt pale inside
But never white inside or / Inside
I felt / Colored inside but colored white
Like I was truly white
The color white and
The master and his family
Were clear as glass / The clear
bright white not white of
Sunlight on glass
That’s what they meant when they said white
I / Didn’t feel white like that
Inside
I worked in the house the mistress
wasn’t bad or good to me
I spent my childhood with her children
but / About when I turned thirteen
Her sons one
thirteen and the other ten
Began to look too long at me
The older for himself the younger for the older
The mistress noticed
and soon I was sent
into the fields / Not I don’t think
To keep us separate
but to keep the boys from doing
In the house what they wanted
To do to me in the house
I think it’s white folks what they want
It isn’t really or it isn’t just
to / Not see the wrong
They want to not see
It and they want to know
It’s happening where it belongs
I spent four years in the fields
It was worse than you might care to think it was
But then one day it was a / Hot day I saw the strangest
thing I caught a glimpse of my / Face
in still water in a bowl I saw the
Older boy’s face I almost jumped
Right then I knew / I could be free
Three weeks / Later I took some of the older boy’s
clothes and some money from the house and
I walked away
In the night I walked away and in the morning
I bought a ticket north
and / Nobody looked at me except to nod
I rode the train with slaves and their
Masters the slaves looked
Down at their feet
I caught myself
Looking down once or twice their masters I
Don’t know what they were looking at
Except I think I saw
It in a sunbeam as the sunbeam
lit the window by my head
The dust in the air
the lint
I know it was lint
but it looked like worms
flying in the light
Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Visits His Adoptive Parents After the War
The man said I could see them if I wanted
He said America would never be
A place where we could love each other not at
Least in my lifetime but the dead don’t see
No important differences between the Ne-
gro and the White the dead don’t see no bad
In folks if what bad they done they ain’t free-
ly chose to do the dead don’t see no good
In folks if what good they done they ain’t hoped
To do and the man he said part of momma
Varina part of daddy Jeff alread-
y was burning in Hell I ought to join them
He said we might see good from seeing each other
Tortured we might finally see each other
Asked About The Banjo Man and Its Sequels Banjo Yes Tells a Journalist Something About Himself
My aunt my momma’s sister
She had a real good
piano had it right
in her front room there
She lived just up the street I
used to when I was a boy / I used to
hide in her
Bushes when she was giving lessons just
To hear her play
I don’t know why I hid
She loved Chopin and all of them
She and my momma had some differences between them
well / One afternoon I walk
over to her house
Because I know she has a lesson coming
But when I get there her front door it’s wide
Open and I don’t hear no music just a few
Bad notes but not
like how a child plays bad
I sit in the bushes anyway just wait-
ing for a while but / After a while
the house gets quiet so
I peek through the window
And then I see it her front room it’s all tore up / Some
fool I guess
> Robbed her busted her / Things up busted her
piano too / Just to be mean I guess my
Aunt she’s just sitting on the bench just
staring
but she must have heard me / Because she
turns and smiles and she
starts to stand up she
leans forward she takes her / Hands they was resting
on the keyboard from the keyboard
And grips the front edge of the bench
I watch her hands but at the same time I see
every part of her and every part of her
Looks bigger like I’m focused on it
Like if you made a picture of a woman / From cut up pictures
from a magazine
And nothing fits together
but it’s her but I don’t recognize her
And shit man I don’t know
what it was but I never will forget it shit my heart
Starts pounding and
I / All of a sudden I can’t breathe and I