Jena Six

If you depend on television for your sense of what is hot in the news, you may be forgiven for not knowing about the Jena 6. But there is something happening around these six teenagers from Jena, Louisiana. It is all over Black talk radio. And this is no small thing. These quite popular radio hosts are devoting their entire shows—three and four hours—to exploring issues around this story. Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and anyone who is anyone in the African American world are weighing in. There is going to be a protest demonstration in Jena and busloads of people are planning to head down there to protest the injustice of what is going. The boys are facing massive jail sentences for being involved in what can be safely called a “school-yard fight”. Tellingly, all the elements of a railroad trial seem to mark this case: peculiarly incestuous juries, small town anxieties and the persistence of long-standing race problems. Jena is, apparently, eighty percent white, thirteen percent of the population is black. The blacks of Jena are coming on the radio talk shows to say that racism has been a way of life in that part of the country for as long as they have lived there. So people are outraged. People want to see justice done. People see this as a case not unlike several recent cases in which African American youths have been meted out absurdly weighty sentences for activities that would normally get a reprimand. And the most damning thing about Jena is that the white kids who carried out their own set of troubling acts, seem to have gotten off lightly.

While all of this is happening, I am returning to the interviews I conducted with African women in Sumter some twelve years ago in which these women, who lived through Jim Crow, trusted me with their deepest and most painful feelings about what they experienced with racism in the South. Many of them would say quietly that they had never talked about these things. They would apologize for still feeling angry about incidents that happened when they were children. These women had not only survived, they had even found the strength to live with dignity and to never act against the very white folks who put them through a system that constantly sought to demean them and fill them with shame. This was what their faith, unassailable as a fortress, had taught them to do. They forgave, even when no one asked them for their forgiveness. But in those interviews, they confessed that their silence had left them with stories still caught up inside them, stories that needed to be told and that may not have been told unless someone asked.
Reading those transcripts again, I have been struck by the restraint, the deliberateness of their statements, and the dignity of their admissions. Here is the truth: what these women lived through was inhumane. But they endured it, mostly with silence and a resolve to just keep going. Many died from despondency, many left the South to live lives of disconnection and loss in the North. For years before the civil rights movement became part of national headlines, only a handful of people would say anything publicly about the incidents. Lynchings, of course, would attract interest, much media and quite brave protest for African American men and women, and a cluster of black lawyers, from the late nineteenth century until the late forties, would come in and try to see what they could do for justice. More often than not, these lawyers would have to find a white counterpart who was sympathetic to their cause to argue the cases, because they were either not allowed to speak before white juries or they knew it would be detrimental to the case if they did. But the little girl who could not sit in the library to read the book she had borrowed, or the one who knew not to even think about going to the swimming pool where white children frolicked, or the child who with her fellow classmates arrived at school muddied by the splash from the white school bus because the government would not provide transportation for blacks, or the families that stayed in doors while Klu Klux Klan men rode around the compound of their homes screaming and hooting once a month, or the sharecroppers who were held in penury all their lives through the calculated control of white planters—none of these people saw court cases. The young men who were picked up for loitering and summarily placed in chain gangs to labor for the white planters, the soldiers who returned from war and were still called boy and insulted, the domestic workers who were used as the sexual rites of passage of young white boys because that is how the world was organized, none of these had trials, none of these became the subject for protest demonstrations. For decades, no one would even think to go marching in the South against these matters. This is how the world was organized and this was how people were expected to engage the world.
America likes to believe that the bloodletting of the civil rights movement, that upheaval in which America finally faced its ugly sore of discrimination, was the catharsis, the expiation that was the once and for all ugliness necessary to start the process of healing. The truth is that something did shift in those thirty years of the intense civil rights movement, and so what we face today is a peculiar thing that must be a good thing: Jena is shocking. But oddly enough, the noise about Jena is seen by others as over-the-top, an attempt by people to make more of a situation than is really warranted. Others have no language for it, no frame of reference. Calling it a civil rights struggle seems passé. That the victims are African American youth who have now become effectively characterized as potential criminals (delinquents who will need a good hearted teacher, a daring inner city saint, or an amazingly sacrificial coach to rescue—but they are always in need of rescue) by a relentless media, and this makes them strangely unsympathetic. In Jamaica we have a tough saying, “Wha nuh go soh, nearly go soh.” The meaning might be clear. It may be true that all the facts are not in on the matter, and that the accusation being leveled at someone may not be exactly as they are being leveled, but chances are, the truth is at least close to what has been offered. It is so damning because it amounts to a suspicion that even the most convincing cases have an underbelly that will somehow change how we view the case. Thus, the Jena 6 may have been treated unfairly, the argument goes, but they were probably typical African American youth—criminals in their early stage of development. Thus, they say, if we heard the whole truth we will know that it is closer to the story that has been offered by the prosecutors and legal system in Louisiana than we can imagine.
Cynicism leads people to avoid the issue, to ignore it, to try as much as possible to know anything about it, because knowing to much will be too taxing on the brain. A simle gogle search will reveal most of the facts of the case, and would, I am convinced, fill most people with deep concern about the injustice of the case. But too many embrace the cynical position.
It is this same cynical position that allows two boys to carry out the same act, one a white boy and the other a black boy, and the school system treats them in quite different ways. The white boy is seen as a boy being a boy, a teenager doing exactly what teenaged boys will do—they will experiment with sex, drugs, violence, but at their core, they are good kids, they come from good families, they will come through and be good citizens. The black boy, on the other hand, is marking time, he is merely holding off the inevitable march towards criminality. As soon as he carries out his first act (“bagging and sagging” after being warned, cursing a teacher, scowling in protest against a teacher’s reprimand), it becomes criminal, and he becomes a man, not a boy. I have seen this again and again in my years in these parts. It is a complex web of prejudice that has been shaped by media and a culture that never really resolved its biases around the issue of race. The guidance counselor goes to church with the parents of the delinquent white boy, so he or she will not file a report on the boy’s record, but will make that call: “Tommy is really not pulling it together, you need to talk to him.” Nobody knows the black kid’s parents. The mother works full time and so does the father so they are not always able to come to the school. Many of them have come to accept the myth that the system will educate and protect their children. No one will call that father. La Shawn will be written up. His criminal life begins.
The Jena 6 incident happens repeatedly in some shape or form around this country. The difference is that the kids are not facing fifteen-year jail sentences in most cases—not yet, anyway. But the fundamental biases are there, the way that the young black male is perceived persists. The tragedy is that these views are being held by African Americans themselves. Tragic because it is simply true that our capacity to imagine begins with familiarity. It is the basic premise of the simple and the metaphor. A well-wrought metaphor will offer us something familiar and then stretch us in a manner that will allow us to see beyond what we already know. Even if not always the case, there is validity in the assumption that minorities will more quickly grasp and empathize with the struggles of other minorities because of familiarity. When that capacity to imagine and to empathize has been taken away or eroded in some way, a tragedy has taken place.
I am learning new metaphors, a rich array of metaphors as I live in America and as I understand both the present and the past of America. The exercise of social involvement for a poet is, ultimately, an exercise in the use of language and an appreciation of the system of metaphors that help to humanize us through empathy. This is why poets cannot be anything but political. It is not a matter of polemics. This is not where the politics rests. Politics reside, for the poet, in the currency of empathy and the capacity to articulate that empathy.:
STONO’S GHOSTS
for the Jena Six
Here they come, floating in the mist;
floating because their last breaths
were taken, feet dangling, bound wrists
pulled at their backs, kicking ugly deaths.
But here they come, dancing through the trees,
ninety-two of them with eyes on fire,
wondering whether that old humming of bees
in their heads saying, “Freedom!” dried
to silence; or whether we made it home
to Spanish Florida before the crossing
to Africa. How to tell them the dumb
gods stayed silent, all of them sleeping?
How to say the auction block is still warm
with the feet of new slaves facing old storms?