White Bull
 

Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Conner was the commissioner of public safety of Birmingham, Alabama, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. An ardent segregationist, his brutal crackdown on protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. put Birmingham in the national spotlight. Elizabeth Hughey’s White Bull repurposes Conner’s words—drawn from letters and public statements—in an effort to seize control of their power: “I will try to kiss the history / out of your words.” 

Conner’s legacy is felt as an atmospheric weight. Heat, humidity, and torrential rain evoke a lingering violence:

it is the time in spring when the white trees snow, 
an overflowing manhole in the street heaves and spits
red clay water, carrying little flat brides
into the sewer […]

Hughey’s speaker addresses the reader from her position as a woman and mother (“I've tried mothering things / that can't be nursed”), and the “little flat brides” in the lines above conjure a Southern image of white feminine purity, in this case, in a march to oblivion. But it’s hard not see the Ku Klux Klan in this image as well.

Hughey examines a history of whiteness along multiple lines: gender and race, public history and one woman’s personal reckoning with the past. Conspicuously absent from this project is King or any Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, Hughey’s experimental strictures confine the poems to abstract engagements with race through literal black and white statements such as: “whites collect / this black eye.” I’m not convinced this approach always works. As with the “little flat brides,” this image is open to multiple interpretations—the black eye may be a wound, but these lines also suggest appropriation, or, perhaps, transformation toward a more empathetic perspective, a way of seeing the world through blackness. Such open-endedness is interesting, but it critically risks obfuscating complex and painful racial power dynamics.

As the book closes, however, the poems become more direct in their interrogation of whiteness, and we observe the speaker’s growing recognition of “the white heaven that’s been hanging / over someone else’s memories.”