Safe Harbor

Are things really this bad? Of course, but define your terms. The pandemic-defying protests of 2020 over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor culminated in moderate jail sentences for a handful of perpetrators, Juneteenth as a national holiday, and the phrase Black Lives Matter painted on the concrete of a major street in Washington, DC. They did not incite the wholesale reconfiguration of policing and the carceral system, as many activists had imagined. Corporate America might have permanently enshrined diversity, equity, and inclusion in the C-suite, but Black people have always considered themselves a template for other social movements, and the blunting of systemic change bled into violations of other groups’ civil rights thanks to egregious overreaches by state and local governments. Meanwhile, the list of Black people killed under dubious circumstances keeps getting longer. If anything, the conditions that created this groundswell of pushback from the citizenry are just as bad now as they were then. Or worse.

On the opposite side of this dejection is a world view that sees the protests as riots that destroyed livelihoods and lives, which the media supposedly soft-pedaled because of Covid lockdowns. In this formulation, the events that created “the great awokening” were not a reaction but a cause—of spikes in crime from municipalities afraid to be called racist, of the subtle racism of lowered expectations of a punditry class that shrugs away every pathology as institutional racism, of the ludicrous backlashes against anything pro-Black, which now apparently promotes an agenda. The reassertion of law-and-order politics is a natural response to a populace terrified of a scenario in which there is no one to defend them against bad actors and nowhere to keep those offenders once they’re apprehended. Black people who live in cities have a huge stake in this, though it could plausibly encompass the entire BIPOC spectrum.

Red state, blue state—at this point, the paradigm rings as antiquatedly as “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” You’ll learn more about people’s identities based on whether they consider the summer of three years ago a missed opportunity or a scourge.

A genre of writing has risen in tandem with this state of affairs that might as well be called “discomfit autopsy.” The phrase gestures toward the deep sense of shame at having failed, yet again, to make society just, or, alternatively, at having failed to hold the line against social disorder. But the trouble with a felled society is that everything becomes an elegy—or at the very least a dead end. So authors survey our expired civilization, poking and prodding at its viscera while working toward a cause of death. The uneasiness lends their books the authority of having discovered foul play; the finality of their pronouncements lowers the stakes and allows a frankness in tone. The writing is impassioned but clinical in thesis and methodical in breadth: in other words, the province of nonfiction.

Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020) qualifies, as does Elizabeth Alexander’s The Trayvon Generation (2022) and Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism (2020), but so do counternarratives such as Woke Racism (2021), by John McWhorter, or even the memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White (2019), by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Resting for a beat on this latter case confirms the self-fulfilling prophecy of the category. Williams began his career as a hip-hop naysayer with the scars to prove it, having come of age during the culture’s golden era, and his logging of successes is meant to damn the environment over which he triumphed. One doesn’t need an advance copy of his forthcoming book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, to know what it’s about.

Roger Reeves’s Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf Press, 2023) can now be added to that list. In both unruliness and self-awareness at deflated prospects, the poet’s inaugural essay collection may prove the most canonical of the bunch. “There is no safety here in America,” Reeves writes in “Singing into the Silence of the State,” “and to pretend as such would be akin to offering a false hope—a fairy tale when the country in which we reside is something like King Solomon’s court and what has been brought before us is a dilemma—one baby and two mothers laying claim to the child.”

Reeves’s retelling of this parable—a “mother” willing to cause injury to a child rather than admit fault tried against a mother willing to protect and separate from a child to save its life—is a clear description of the battlefield that discomfit autopsy has inadvertently staked out. “[W]hat I’m giving away is not flesh necessarily but the illusion of safety,” Reeves continues, “that a Black childhood can exist outside of the knowledge of its annihilation.” Whether this knowledge comes from feelings of abandonment or a failure of acknowledgement does nothing to rewind time past the point of the coroner’s report.

“Severing Black children from the American dreaming tradition might be one of the fundamental, foundational jobs of Black parents in America,” Reeves writes in the same essay, the crux of which is that letting go of owning a piece of the country frees up space in which to value one’s self—a task that America makes impossible. Of his daughter, Naima, Reeves writes that “[s]he must become less American if she is to survive America.” The only way to survive is to give up everything Black people have built in the hopes that a jury, which is not disinterested, will bestow wisdom. But the other choice is to give a piece of one’s self to a society that has not earned it. Regional Black cuisine going mainstream, white people unabashedly singing along to rap lyrics, n-word included: if you aren’t willing to watch your creations grow, then you are consigned to someone unscrupulous making use of their bits and pieces.

There is a third option. Rather than walk away incomplete or proudly watch one’s contributions grow intact from afar, you can decline to participate in the trial altogether. What one loses in catharsis one gains in dignity. Dark Days careens toward this conclusion in essays that rehearse forms before settling, for the most part, on lyrical exposition. (An occasional tendency of discomfit autopsy is formal restlessness.) Like a forensics kit laid out in front of a gurney, these rhetorical tools are there for the author to use as needed. In Reeves’s book, we get an on-site reckoning with America’s antebellum past (“Through the Smoke, Through the Veil, Through the Wind”); an epistolary address emanating from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (“Letters to Michael Brown”); and a compressed prose poem wresting sense from a world that no longer makes sense, if it ever did (“Instructions for the Underground”).

Rather than homage, these techniques forge a series of best practices among Black intellectuals across generations and disciplines—their adjacency to groupthink the likely explanation for why Black conservatives reject them. Reeves is not a reactionary, but these pieces feel wobbly in comparison to the essays that play it straight. There is a gravity that feels forced and reads precisely like the “pulse and circus” the author wants to avoid.

“Peace Be Still,” the book’s centerpiece, draws a parallel between contemporary Black life and “hush harbors,” those secret rendezvous spots where the enslaved could reestablish their humanity while building community through religious practices. Far from a historical exercise, Reeves points to these sites for their nobility. He relays the descriptions of Peter Randolph, a formerly enslaved man in Prince George County, Virginia, as an example of communication by withholding. Randolph tells of the meetings but not where they are. He tells of “understanding” when the meetings were supposed to take place but not the time itself. Readers are even made aware of the signal—“breaking boughs from trees, and bending them in the direction of the selected spot”—but not which direction or what spot.

The punishment for leaving the plantation, to say nothing of praying and singing, justified the secrecy, but Reeves is interested in the communication without communication, “a way of knowing and transmitting knowledge through improvisation and opacity.” Contemporaneity, in which nearly everyone feels an obligation to weigh in on the national conversation, has no use for obfuscation, yet consistently speaking up is laborious to the point of being exploitative, its returns measly at worse and piecemeal at best, as Reeves suggests:

The violence experienced by you and your people in the streets, violence legislated on senate floors continues, and all you got was a commercial and some promises. Senators taking a knee in a capitol rotunda with kente cloth draped over their shoulders while outside the rotunda the police continue to gun down and kill your people. Police officers on the steps of the mayor’s office kneeling in a show of solidarity against police violence and a few hours later tasing and tear-gassing the protestors they just kneeled with. Irony of ironies.

A month after the January 6 attacks, another catastrophic event whose status as a protest or a riot remains, alas, disputed, Reeves found himself in Austin, Texas, with his daughter, in the forest to avoid the chaos of another suspected coup at the statehouse. Watching Naima rubbing icicles on bushes and running through frozen underbrush, he wondered whether he should tell her what hush harbors are, but speaking his truth (or its doppelgänger action of politicizing the event) would have defeated the purpose. His knowledge was confounded by his daughter’s intuitive assembly in the woods.

“I was mistaken in the belief that I needed to give her context,” Reeves concluded, “a history of the harbor in order to convene one with her. … The making of the harbor was in the coming down into the trees, standing in the water, and listening for what your body knows, listening for what it wants to remember.” Only by refusing to give any part of one’s self to an impossibly corrupt system, whether it be attention, aesthetics, or direction with a moral compass, can Black people expect to achieve anything resembling inner sanctity.

There are several responses to this—the least interesting being the paradox of Reeves preaching quietude while transmitting his message via 232 pages of text. William H. Gass’s 1988 essay “Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde” called for a similar refusal of the market, albeit within the confines of cultural production as opposed to Reeves’s marketplace of ideas. Blacks can be proud of several contributions to American identity that would conceivably fit into Gass’s categories of conservative, liberal, or permanent ranklings of the established order, yet according to Reeves in “Intimate Freedoms, Intimate Futures,” their “art, literature, culture, [and] style” are not standard-bearers but plundered goods: “To give jazz, the blues, hip-hop over to America is akin to giving Frederick Douglass’s master partial credit for writing Douglass’s slave narratives and autobiographies.”

Centering enslaved voices for the sake of recuperating Black humanity is fair, yet in the same essay, Reeves downplays the 1619 Project—not because of historical inaccuracy and not, to paraphrase the historian Annette Gordon-Reed, because it presupposes the US as a historical certainty 157 years before the Declaration of Independence but because it makes Black people feel too invested in the American founding, which for Reeves is corrupt beyond repair:

I pause when I see the word ownership in such close proximity to discussions of slavery and no one batting an eye or calling into question what is meant when someone says that when encountering the 1619 Project they felt what white Americans feel about this country—a sense of ownership, of influence.

Readers’ memories may catch here on “Beyond the Report of Beauty,” a stunning essay about a YouTube video in which the late actor Michael K. Williams dances in a park in Brooklyn during the pandemic. A woman off camera can be heard chanting “Still Brooklyn, still Brooklyn, still Brooklyn” to Williams, a Brooklyn native. In the essay, Reeves describes the intractable forces of gentrification, which in 2019 almost took down Ode to Babel, a Bed-Stuy haunt owned by twin sisters whose clientele are members of the Black Diaspora. (The owners closed that iteration of the bar this year; it has since reopened as a new concept called Babel Loft.)

Loud music and late-night revelry caused a group of newer, presumably white, neighbors to lobby the community board to block the renewal of the bar’s liquor license. Babel patrons flooded the board with so many letters of support and bombarded the liquor license meeting so vehemently that the board reversed its decision. “Nobody’s walking into your house and turning down your little funky stereo or telling you how to make your French-pressed latte,” Reeves sneers. It is a wonderfully galvanizing example, a rare victory against Black life being disrupted by the highest bidder. But the story and its housing metaphor are worthless if Black people consider owning a piece of America worthless.

In “Vicissitudes,” Gass further notes the curiosity of aspiring avant-gardists aligning themselves so closely with high Modernism. “[T]hese artists are, in fact, among the avant-garde’s few friends, and its only equal,” he muses ruefully. So Reeves’s reassessment of Baldwin and his co-opting of the jeremiad—warning white America of the consequences of not taking the subjugation of its people seriously—was welcome with the caveat that it’s not Baldwin’s fault he has become shorthand for representational justice. Baldwin’s critiques of Blackness never devolved into an apology for whiteness (an inconvenient flaw of discomfit autopsy’s conservative vein) which makes him the Black intellectual’s truest friend in many respects.

Fiercely and with discernment, Reeves has earned a comparison to this most permanent of Black writers, so it’s jarring to read him accuse Baldwin of “a blind arrogance based upon the superiority of our alleged wit and muscle. A superiority that eschews reality, history, and experience.” In Baldwin’s declaration from The Fire Next Time that “great men have done great things here,” Reeves sees not only the false hope of Black excellence—“the living history of black folks enduring and succeeding within the chaos and destruction of white supremacy”—but also the MAGA boorishness of the Populist right. The sadness this conjures completely offends one’s pride in being Black. Baldwin’s assertion that heads forcefully held high have made Black people “the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced” is simply too small for Reeves to value.

Exasperated, the author stands in front of the lectern to explain that the subject of his examination was not a flesh-and-blood person who died suspiciously but a cadaver all along. Is it any wonder he would prefer to use his hard-earned resilience accomplishing a different task? Dark Days is exhaustive, and Reeves deserves whatever shelter he can find from the carnage he is telegraphing. Even now, this sentence lands with the fear that it won’t matter outside the boundaries of “labor or entertainment” that Reeves laments in “Singing.” Assessment is different from insight, though, just as shutting off one’s lights to save energy is different from nightfall.