by Ed Simon
Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected].
Enjambment is often an invitation to surprise. The line following a deftly deployed line break can serve as an answer to a question; it can, when done well, have an oracular quality, the feeling of a koan. Take for example Cameron Barnett’s powerful poem “Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS” published in his 2017 collection The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water. Written in the voice of Till, the fourteen-year-old Black child from Chicago lynched in Mississippi in 1955 whose murder drew attention to anti-Black violence in the United States, Barnett’s poem uses line breaks as a means to defer meaning between stanzas, and thus to generate a heightened sense of awareness. Taking as its conceit the otherworldly haunting of the Money, Mississippi library, a liminal, bardo-like space where Till’s consciousness is able to narrate even after death, the narrator’s individual thoughts are often divided across stanzas, a line break functioning as a type of psychic pause before the thought is completed. For example, in the final line of the first stanza in a three-stanza poem, Barnett writes “Mamie always preached,” completing that thought at the first line of the second stanza with “good posture, so I sit straight at least.”
That divided line – “Mamie always preached” – could syntactically and grammatically be a complete sentence, and theoretically a complete thought, even while it raises the brief question in the reader of “What did Mammie always preach?” The same effect is used in the final line of the second stanza, wherein Till says “You can’t judge,” another theoretically complete thought, which is finished in the first line of the final stanza with “a book by its facts or flaps or back cover.” That line is itself interesting in that Barnett amends the cliché about books and their covers by anatomizing the structure of the book, which he then goes on to contrast with Till’s own state, for even if books are not to be judged, a “black boy/is the title and illustration staring you in the face.” The poem from The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water is able to masterfully toggle between its social and political concerns – which themselves are, remember, about a horrific crime – while imbuing the lyric with a supernatural sense. Integral to this feeling is Barnett’s treatment of those final lines in each stanza, for it gives Till’s thoughts – from the afterlife and presumably mediated through whatever gauzy filament defines the experience of haunting – a slightly delayed, almost staccato rhythm, as if in a dream state.
Indeed, that’s the operative mood throughout the poem, as Barnett imagines the experience of death as both more familiar and yet somehow stranger than could be expected. He opens the poem with Till saying “What I can’t let you know is that death, too, is a snore,/a sooty shelf of unmoving paper with some gasbag/lady at the front dash.” The language conveys just how young Till was at the time of his murder, such as in describing death as a “snore,” the librarian as a “gasbag/lady.” Then there is the arresting incongruity of the first line, wherein Till informs us that he can’t let us know that death is a snore while then informing us precisely of the thing he couldn’t let us know. It’s an invitation, a friendliness, wherein somebody informs us that they can’t tell us something, but they’ll do so in this case. That word “too,” between its appositional commas, is also telling, for if death is a snore “too,” then the implication is that life wasn’t so different. There is a surrealism in that, the dashed expectation that death will unveil some great and final truths deferred, like a line break that is never reconciled.
Lest there be a sense that this is only a playful poem – and there is a playfulness in the conceit – the actual circumstances of Till’s lynching mean that Barnett never averts from the implications and tragedy of its subject. Before the first stanza is completed, we’re informed by the revenant that he can “sneak past heaven’s gate… to nap against the silent stacks, feel the blood in my head/drip into the young adult fiction.” What these sentences inform the reader of, is that Till’s haunting of the library is a choice. He’s not condemned to be in the Money, Mississippi library, it’s an occasional decision which he makes, for his primary residence is heaven, but occasionally he comes to this place. There are also the implications behind the word “sneak,” for it appears that Till’s leaving of heaven for the library is not necessarily sanctioned by whatever celestial authority holds sovereignty in the afterlife, that he must in some sense cover his tracks. The invocation of his blooded head – and it’s important to remember that historically there was a profound social, cultural, and political impact in Till’s mother insisting on an open casket funeral with the photographs reproduced in JET Magazine so as to force readers to bear witness – underscores the nature of his death, while the reference to “young adult fiction” underscores Till’s youth. That Till has chosen to dwell amidst the people who have murdered him, at least occasionally, is an accusation, an act not dissimilar to his mother’s decision to have JET reproduce those images.
There is a gothic element to “Emmett Till Haunts the Library in Money, MS,” clear from the very title of the poem itself, of course. But the spectral element is hardly incidental, for by the second stanza, Barnett teases out the full metaphorical implications of having rendered Till a ghost. He writes that “When I was black/I grew used to the shuffle of visibility, to the Move boy! And/the thousand yard stare over my head.” The phrase “shuffle of visibility,” with that verb’s long and troubling racialized associations in American culture, also calls to mind the famous opening lines of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man (published three years before Till’s murder) where he writes “I am an invisible man,” while making clear that he is “not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.” Ellison’s ambiguous use of a term used to describe ghosts, but which has also historically been a racial slur, especially in relation to the antebellum racist writer Poe, was intended to underscore the sense of invisibility which he felt as a Black man, something conveyed in Till’s language here as well, as he recalls the stares experienced “over my head.” In fact he concludes that far from being radically different, “Being ghost/isn’t all new or scary – no one to ask me what came out/of my lips sixty years ago,” a confirmation that this haunting is in our present day, but also a troubling ambiguity over what exactly has escaped his lips, whether the supposed and non-existent wolf-whistle that led to his murder, or to the blood that attended his killing.
By the end of the second stanza Barnett has subtly shifted the conceit of Till-as-ghost to Till-as-book (or perhaps of books, with their uncomfortable histories therein, as a variety of ghost). We’re told that “I might as well be ink/on closed pages, lost somewhere in the archives,” while in the third stanza Barnett writes about the aforementioned manner in which society deigns us not to judge a book by its cover, while often doing precisely that. Till describes how, as a type of book, he may ask “to be seen or sampled but not smothered between the other/black boys,/forgotten, dog-eared and ditched.” This is the fear of any ghost or book, the ways in which they can be misplaced or discarded, but this is an especially potent fear of Till, whose murder – brutal and meaningless – can be subsumed in the general horror of American violence. The narrator says “I don’t love death/but I don’t mind reading the periodicals for faces like mine,/putting names to the ones I’ll welcome through the gate soon.” It’s a devastating conclusion, the allusion to the JET cover as Till monitors what other murdered children might soon join him in the afterlife. A reminder that while this is a gothic poem about hauntings, the crimes which precipitated that haunting are ongoing in the horror story that is American history.
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.
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