Music in the Blood

Though the myth of the absent Black father has deep historical roots in the United States, its most notorious proponent may be the sociologist (and later Democratic senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. As assistant secretary of labor during the Johnson Administration, Moynihan helped write The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, a 1965 report in which he and his coauthors argued that US racism destabilizes Black families. “Since many slaveowners neither fostered Christian marriage among their slave couples nor hesitated to separate them on the auction block,” the report claimed, “the slave household often developed a fatherless matrifocal (mother-centered) pattern.” The report also suggested that after emancipation, racist employment practices made Black men despair of ever providing for their families, so they abandoned their partners and children. Consequently, Black mothers became breadwinners who struggled to care for their families while also working. According to Moynihan and his coauthors, the resulting familial dysfunction led to Black children’s becoming jobless—or even criminal—adults.

The myth, of course, is not true. Recent quantitative studies suggest that Black fathers live with and care for their children at rates similar to those of white fathers. In the decades since the report, Black feminists pointed out that its argument depended on racist and sexist caricatures of Black families, especially of Black women. One of the most incisive critiques came from the scholar Hortense Spillers, whose 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” argues that the Moynihan report reproduces the very (mis)understandings of race, gender, and kinship produced under slavery. Spillers suggests that understanding Black people, Black families, and particularly Black women living in slavery’s afterlife requires a new conceptual frame and a new language. Contemporaneous and subsequent Black feminist critics and writers expanded Spillers’ project, developing new ways of thinking and writing about Black people’s relationship to gender that better captured their experience.

More recently, contemporary Black poets such as Terrance Hayes, Gregory Pardlo, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and others have countered the myth of the absent Black father by describing their own experiences of fatherhood, both as parents and as sons. Their poetry also further develops a language to describe Black kinship. Two new collections join this growing body of work: Amaud Jamaul Johnson’s Imperial Liquor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s Living Weapon (FSG, 2020). The books are quite different stylistically. Johnson is colloquial in diction and concrete in description, like the great Black R&B singers he frequently references. Phillips invokes (and distances) himself from literary greats, including Yeats and Eliot. Many of Phillips’s poems are one long, winding sentence; Johnson’s lines tend to be shorter. Both collections are books of illuminating thought from middle age (Johnson is 48, Phillips is 46) in which the poets reflect on their childhoods, their parents’ attempts to protect them, and their early love of music. Now fathers themselves, both poets grapple with their parents’ lingering impact.

They are also books of the moment, concerned especially with the precarity Black children face. Police violence is everywhere in these poems, as is anxiety over the explicit rightward shift in the United States and what it portends for Black people. These omnipresent threats lead both poets to question why they write at all. Both contemplate other careers—music, in particular—and neither poet insists his work is necessarily meaningful, yet neither can stop writing. Because of this uncertainty and occasional pessimism, poetry is represented as an art of failure in these books. To paraphrase Johnson, poetry hammers “the hitch in my giddy-up into some broken cool” but cannot mend the break.

***

Imperial Liquor is partly an ode to Johnson’s childhood in Compton, California, in the 1980s. Throughout the book, he describes parents raising children amid personal and social upheaval. In “Other Women’s Children,” the speaker recalls a group of boys chasing him home to Lonnie, a father-figure with whom he and his mother lived. Lonnie “stood / with his shotgun out front” and occasionally walked “into the house with his shirt bloody.” Johnson never mentions that Lonnie hurt anyone in the family, but when they leave him abruptly, one can’t help but suspect some physical or emotional harm. The specter of domestic violence recurs in “poem in which i attempt to explain to my sons …” Johnson writes of a relative who “woke up some nights / to him [her husband] at her throat.” After she leaves him, she loses her hair, aged prematurely. Whether hinted at directly or heard of secondhand, domestic violence prevents homes from being sanctuaries.

The actual and potential violence Johnson witnessed during his youth leads him to consider danger a kind of birthright. In “As in ... Afro-Pessimism?” he fears “elderly / white citizens” and idling cars. “My nervousness is my father’s nervousness,” he continues; it “lurks mercurial in the blood.” In other words, he inherits his father’s anxiety about violence as though it were a genetic condition. In the book’s final poem, “Affirmative Action Babies,” he writes

Of course, our parents say,
we’re living our own reward,
as if earning is earning
and our education, a hand-stamp,
an entry onto this bright island.

From Johnson’s perspective, his parents are incorrect. The lifelong impact of early racism, his parents’ anxieties about those threats, and the many stories of violence against Black people about which he writes ultimately ensure that he sees the world as dangerous. In this darkly ironic turn, parents provide not freedom from harm but a constant fear of it.

As a result, Johnson often depicts fatherhood as fearing for children. He worries especially about police violence. In “The Authority,” he alludes to the 1992 Los Angeles riots that occurred after a jury acquitted the four LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. He then moves to an after-dinner conversation in the present:

We were talking about West Baltimore
after dinner, about the boy who, at the behest
of his mother for breaking some windshield,
turned himself in.

Though Johnson and his partner tried to teach their son that arrest exposes Black people to violence, his son naively thinks, “here’s a story about obedience / and redemption.” For Johnson, this notion suggests he failed to raise his son correctly, an anxiety that continues throughout the collection. In “How often I’ve turned to Latasha Harlins, who would have been 43 this July,” Johnson alludes to another cause of the LA riots: the murder of Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager, by a convenience store clerk less than two weeks after the police assault on King. Johnson laments that his sons carry their allowance with them to the corner store and continues

One of the many ways I’ve failed them, we haven’t
had that talk about their bodies, about the alarming rate
of illiteracy surrounding their bodies.

Given that other people will misread his sons as thieves or would-be criminals, he worries that police officers or private citizens may hurt them. The threat to his sons’ well-being could come from anywhere because racism, to paraphrase famed prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, produces exposure to premature death. Because Johnson suspects he failed to keep his children safe, he educates them through poetry. In “Don’t Forget You(r) Lunch,” he writes,

my dear son: it won’t matter
how friendly you are, or honest
or which ivy league school
you’ve attended.

It doesn’t matter, he continues, if his sons are polite, if they follow every rule while driving, or if they place their hands on the dashboard during a traffic stop. The police may still kill them. Johnson worries that nothing he says, no amount of hypervigilance, can protect them. “Every / decade now I grow more quiet,” he continues. In the face of so many assaults, Johnson gives up speaking altogether.

The end of speech, however, is the beginning of poetry. His poems cannot teach his children how to protect themselves—there are too many aggressors. Instead, his poems catalogue the many dangers they face and the impossibility of predicting what could assail them. Johnson’s poems are also a testament to a father’s longing to protect his children even while suspecting he will fail to do so.

***

Although parenting is less prevalent in Living Weapon, Phillips nonetheless represents it as a contract of protection. In his most sustained description of motherhood, he alludes to the “Shield of Achilles” from The Iliad, in which Thetis asks Hephaestus for armor to protect her son. In “Even Homer Nods,” Phillips writes,

You can be a mother who knows a god.
And you can ask him for magic armor,
A shield the width of Saturn’s widest rings,
Some helmet in the new or ancient style,
Fill your arms with defenses for your child […]

Though this is the best-case scenario, Achilles still dies. Phillips implies that even capable parents cannot always protect their children, a futility that moves him to reflect on his mother:

As when my mother passed me the soft shield,
The breastplate like rice paper, the helmet
Bright as pyrite can be, we already
Knew this was part of the old cycle,
That I would die soon, without a weapon,
And she’d live on, and we’d do this again

His mother knows she cannot defend her son as surely as she knows “rice paper” armor is flimsy. Black parenting, in this poem, is again defined by the failure to protect.

In the same poem, Phillips offers the parent another weapon: the pen. A mother can preserve her child in verse. This notion recurs in the book’s penultimate poem, “Dark Matter Ode,” in which Phillips addresses his child asleep in the crib:

I see you as free. I sing of the wood.
And I sing of the bars. I am the dunce
Of the stars who sings of the bars.

He then dreams of the life his child will lead when free from the crib’s literal bars and adulthood’s figurative ones. As he wonders about his child’s later reaction to this poem, he imagines a far-off future:

And then a million years from now someone
Will discover that something like this one
Moment could have happened, could have mattered.
That you asleep in your crib were a god
In the machine and that poem your father
Wrote you was a fucking living weapon.

Though Phillips concedes this poem may not matter, he nonetheless thinks it might provide his child a life in words that’s different, and longer, than the life his child will have out in the world. Given that the book’s title bears the poem’s last words, all poems may be weapons meant to prolong—to preserve—his child’s life.

But poetry’s defenses are imperfect. Phillips suggests as much in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The title refers to T.S. Eliot’s 1919 essay, but the first line alludes to William Blake’s 1794 poem “London.” In it, Blake contemplates chimney sweeps, harlots, and others suffering as he walks around the city. Against Blake’s voyeuristic descriptions of the poor, Phillips writes his own poem using the same first line:

I wandered through each chartered street
Till I was shot by the police.

Where Blake’s poem swells to 16 lines, Phillips can write only 16 syllables of such a walk. The very luxury that enabled Blake’s poetry—a walk without fear of police assault, for instance—endangers Phillips because he is Black.

By chronicling poetry’s limitations and capabilities, Phillips lays the groundwork for a kind of ars poetica in “The Peacock.”

Music for when the music is over
Is what a poem is. There’s no music
In a poem, just the imaginary
Composer breathing beneath the deep wreck […]

“There’s something to it,” he continues, “How poems pretend to sing.” Poetry is not a failed song so much as success in failing to sing. It may not protect his child or him, but poetry does gesture to a faux-sonic beauty that survives beneath the sunken shipwreck of letters. This beauty is all that Phillips is certain he can leave to his children.

Depicting poetry as failed music unites both Phillips and Johnson. In “The Köln Concert,” Phillips recalls playing piano, a pursuit he perhaps took up at his parents’ urging. Then he imagines what would have happened if he had never quit playing, addressing that alternate-reality self:

The Good Rowan; wake good Rowan up—
And tell him that the poet he hears trapped
In the ivory made it out, and lives.

The sound the young Phillips thought lay dormant in the piano, he implies, is the sound of Living Weapon. Just as Phillips became a poet after leaving piano, Johnson’s writing career depended upon a failed musical one—that of his father. In “DeBarge,” titled after the underappreciated family of R&B artists, he recalls

my father
had a record that went nowhere.
my mother, some nights, would
stand in my doorway, saying:
boy, I sure wish you could sing.

Though he could not succeed his father as a vocalist, he litters his poems with references to great Black singers, such as the Delfonics and Candi Staton, turning his poetry into an homage to his father’s musical career.

By their own accounts, Johnson’s and Phillips’ careers sprang from failures defined in part by inheritances from their parents, which they then passed on to their children. Unable to fully secure their children from harm, Phillips and Johnson instead offer poems that provide them an alternative life in verse. Should that fail, their poems at least leave them a legacy of beauty.

***

Both Johnson and Phillips reject the terms of the debate represented in Moynihan’s influential report and instead develop more productive ways of representing Black families. They complement their explorations of Black fatherhood with critiques of stereotypes about Black women. In “LA Police Chief Daryl Gates Dead at 83,” Johnson ridicules those preachers who called Black women lascivious in the wake of the LA riot, as though the violence were Black women’s fault. In “History,” Phillips represents History as a woman whom a man misunderstands because he thinks he possesses her. Alongside these critiques of sexism, both authors provide portraits of Black women that do more than just reject stereotypes. Johnson, for instance, imagines Latasha Harlins’s afterlife, depicting her as more than the murder for which she’s remembered. And in “Étude on Man,” Phillips writes that he might think the universal person referred to by “man” is his mother, thus representing Black mothers as the exemplar and representative of humanity. For both poets, a nuanced understanding of Black fatherhood requires a more complicated understanding of Black women and Black mothers.

Johnson and Phillips join a growing body of poets rewriting the scripts of Black parenting and kinship. Their efforts here are not Utopian. Rather, they take seriously the violence Black people face and offer portraits of Black parenting as prolonged exposure to the possibility that some will outlive their children. And many such parents work to exceed this violence. In Johnson’s and Phillips’s turn to music, the poets remind us that Black people inherit from their parents—and then leave for their kids—a heritage conditioned by, but not reduceable to, vulnerability. They receive and pass on musical aspirations, the culture from which the music sprang, and the sonic beauty of the poems themselves. By doing so, these poets rethink the legacies they leave their children, their readers, and other poets. They consider, ultimately, what they must leave for the next generation to take one step toward a world in which, as Phillips writes, their poems could have mattered.