In which I read How the Word is Passed
I bought Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America almost as soon as it came out in 2021 after repeatedly hearing what an amazing book it was. But as I mentioned in post earlier this month, I was deep in the world of Nazis and couldn’t face adding America’s history of slavery to the stew in my head. So I put it on the high-priority T0-Be-Read piles that live on my office window sill,* with a promise that I would get to it soon. (Soon is relative in TBR time.)
How the Word is Passed is indeed amazing. Beginning with his home town of New Orleans and ending with discussions with his grandparents, Smith leads the reader on a tour of sites related to the history of slavery and how those sites have been used to tell that story. He does not simply consider the obvious sites.** For instance he looks at historical sites related to the slave trade in New York City—an incisive demonstration of the point that slavery and the slave trade played critical roles in the country as a whole, not just in the south. At each site, he considers not only how the story is told, but who is telling it, who is listening to it, and what stories are being left out. He shares his own reaction to each site, sometimes in physical terms. He makes it clear that slavery, and the long emancipation that followed, have a long tail in this country, emotional as well as economic.
As I read How the Word is Passed, I found myself thinking of Dolly Chugh’s A More Just Future. Chugh discusses how to deal with the discomfort of coming to terms with the disjunction between the history we were taught and the history we we weren’t taught. Smith gives us a personal demonstration of that discomfort. In a discussion of the project as the end of the book, he tells the reader that not only is the book not a definitive account of sites related to slavery, but it is not a definitive account of the sites he chose to visit. Instead, it is “a reflection of my own experience, concerns, and questions at each place at a specific period of time.” Smith’s writing is beautiful, thoughtful and powerful. He kept me turning the pages even when the reading was painful. My heart ached as I read.
If you chose to read one book about Black history this year, How the Word is Passed would be an excellent choice.***
*As opposed to the TBR piles that sit on my office floor waiting for room to open up on the TBR bookshelf, where some books have waited for a long, long time. I will point out that all of the books I am reading for Black History Month are from the high-priority stacks. (I occasionally bemoan the sheer volume of books waiting for me to read them someday, but as I discovered while writing The Dragon From Chicago, books find their time. More than once I discovered I already owned just the book I needed.)
**Monticello, I’m looking at you.
***Personally, I intend to read more over the coming year, though not in such a concentrated way. I will share a list of books from my shelves, read and unread, in my newsletter on February 27. (A good reason to sign up for the newsletter if you don’t get it already. Here’s the link: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b )
History on Display: Martin, a Ballet Film by Gordon Parks
©David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC
One of the later chapters of The Swans of Harlem discussed a ballet film by 20th century Renaissance man Gordon Park. Parks is best known for his photojournalism, in which he documented poverty and the civil rights movement from the 1940s through the 1970s, and his groundbreaking blockbuster film, Shaft (1971). He brings those two talents together in the documentary ballet film Martin (1990), a ballet about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As a card-carrying ballet fan and history buff, I felt compelled to learn more.
Martin is a ballet with a prologue and five acts corresponding to significant moments in Dr. King’s life: the bus boycott (one of the five Swans of Harlem danced the part of Rosa Parks*), the march on Selma, his time in a Birmingham jail, his assassination, and his funeral. Gordon Parks not only directed and produced the film, but he composed the music.
To my disappointment, I was not able to watch the entire ballet. One full-length copy is available on YouTube, but the copy was so degraded that it was painful to watch. Instead I was able to see three segments: the prologue, Act III and Act V.
In the prologue, Gordon Parks narrates an introduction that deals primarily with the days before and after King’s assassination, played against a powerful montage of Parks’ photographs from the period. Occasionally a very young dancer moves across the screen and then freezes in a pose that resolves into one of the photographs—an enormously powerful technique and one that makes it clear that this ballet was designed for the screen, not the stage. Parks ends with a statement of his intent for the production: “As Martin was committed to a vision, this ballet is committed to the memory of that vision”
I did not find the choreography for Act III, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which includes a voice over of the text of the letter, and Act V, Mourning Place, which overtly references the resurrection of Christ from the tomb, particularly compelling, though the dancing itself was excellent. Martin is ultimately interesting as a historical statement, and a historical artifact.
I’m glad I took the time to watch it.
*I’m sure I’m not the only person who wondered whether Gordon Parks was related to Rosa Parks. The answer is no.
The Swans of Harlem
As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been fascinated by ballet and its history for most of my life. So when I began to see notices for a book about the forgotten Black ballerinas who danced for the Dance Theatre of Harlem I was eager to get my hands on it. It lived up to my hopes.
Karen Valby’s The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood and the Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History is more than simple dance history. As its subtitle openly declares, it about how Black women’s stories are doubly erased from history and about the efforts of a group of women “to write themselves back into history.”
The Swans of Harlem begins in 2015, when Misty Copeland became the first Black woman to be promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater. Stories about her undoubted accomplishment ignored those of Black ballerinas before her. Five of those women formed the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, named after the home of the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) where they danced fifty years before Copeland,. Their goal was to bring their story back to light; they succeeded with the help of Karen Valby. The extent to which the book is a collaboration between dancers and author is demonstrated by the fact that there are two acknowledgement pages, one for Valby and one for the Swans.
It would have been easy to tell the history of DTH as the creation of one heroic (male) figure, its founder Arthur Mitchell, who was determined to make art in general and ballet in particular accessible to black children—an impulse born from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. And, indeed, Mitchell strides across the pages of the book just as he strode through the lives of the dancers who worked for him—brilliant, beautiful, imperious, obsessed, generous, difficult, and angry. But he is the background against which Valby shares the stories of five important dancers, the paths they took to DTH, their experiences as dancers, their lives after DTH, and the legacies they have created. Their names: Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells, and Karlya Shelton.
The Swans of Harlem is alternatively instructive, heartbreaking, and inspiring. It demonstrates how easily groups of women and people of color are removed from history in favor of stories of individual exceptionalism. Not just for ballet fans. Honest.