Nella Larsen’s Passing ushers you into the world of an affluent, upper middle class, African American family that enjoys the luxuries of servants and elegant, fancy dress parties. Yet danger and threats of violence lurk even in this comfortable setting. The 1929 ad for the novel (left) highlights the threat of violent reprisals for light-skinned African Americans who dared to pass as white: “There are thousands of Clare Kendrys and every woman who ‘passes’ is a possible storm center.” The ad describes passing as a “sensational question,” suggesting that racial transgression and violence was a titillating topic for readers of the day—a form of entertainment.
But the violence and danger for African Americans was very real, and the cultural advances of the Harlem Renaissance did not derail the powerful, persistent mechanisms of racism in America. Witness this photograph from the 1960s, which Teju Cole discusses in the “On Photography” column of this week’s New York Times Magazine (3/19/17):
This photograph of “Cotton Pickers, Ferguson Unit, Texas,” was one of a series that Danny Lyon, a civil rights activist and official photographer of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), took at Texas prisons in 1967-8. Teju Cole offers this analysis of the aesthetics of the composition and the cognitive dissonance it generates:
“The Cotton Pickers” was taken on a prison farm. The long curve of each man’s back is continuous with the line of the sack slung from his shoulder and set down behind him on the ground. This gives each man a strange profile, as though he were some long-bodied, giant-tailed marsupial. The photograph has such high contrast that it looks more like an engraving or a painting. Set against the field’s darkness, the cotton crop is floral in effect, or astral. Or, as the escaped slave Solomon Northup wrote in a surprising passage in his 1853 memoir, “Twelve Years a Slave”: “There are few sights more pleasant to the eye, than a wide cotton field when it is in the bloom. It presents an appearance of purity, like an immaculate expanse of light, new-fallen snow.”
Does the striking photograph, like Nella Larsen’s brilliant novella Passing, aestheticize racial violence and discrimination, allowing viewers and readers to experience pleasure at the expense of other people’s pain? Or do these works of art use aesthetics to arrest our attention and draw us into deeper reflection on problems and questions we might otherwise overlook or oversimplify?
Such questions may require us to consider the contexts in which the images and texts are disseminated. The 1929 ad for Passing in the New York Herald Tribune encourages salacious consumption, whereas the 2017 New York Times magazine frames the “Cotton Pickers” photograph in an essay that provides historical context, aesthetic analysis, and ethical reflection. The print version of the magazine also juxtaposes the photo essay to a poem by contemporary poet Shane McCrae called “We’ll Go No More a Roving,” which reflects on the ongoing legacy of slavery and violence on the black body:
We’ll Go No More a Roving
This poem takes its title from a poem by Lord George Byron, the most notorious of the 19th-century English Romantic poets. Byron wrote his poem — at age 29 — to lament his weariness and loss of energy for youthful misbehavior. McCrae’s poem adapts the poem’s basic structure to explore a different sort of weariness: His seems to be a song of postelection despair, an exhausted giving up on the possibility of ever escaping the legacy of slavery.
We’ll Go No More a Roving
— George Gordon, Lord Byron, although I first encountered it in a setting by George Walker, the first black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music
We’ll go no more a roving from
Our bodies love who once had roamed
So far as almost to have been
The owners of our bodies thenAnd not their property we’ll go
No more from the master’s fields and no
More love we’ll will we lay no more
The master’s yoke and gaze we bearDown in the grass that is grass green
The grass will borrow from our skin
Its color and become us love our
Skin will be all the Earth’s wild colorsWe’ll go no more a roving now
Except as the mule roves with the plow
The white stars make the endless black
A night the master calls us back
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