POETICS OF CARE

Harvard Yard

As though I weren’t alive the end came sawing tch. kr. tch. kr. A limb severed from my trunk, the bleak crack, reverberated through the dense foliage. To mourn, the leaves blew in unison sending prayers to my arm’s hopeful resting place: a graceful descent into decomposition, being fed on by the microbes, the mycelium, and the mites. How sorrowful the use instead. How mournful the symbol of what was once life. My life.

The haunting pulse of a saw splits and dismembers my limb into useful parts. The precise measurement and volume insinuate an intended use. 5 ft x 2 ft x 3ft, 60 inches, by 24 inches, by 36 inches. Orthogonal planes collide to render a “t.” A plus sign: “+.” One plank connected to the other. A reordering of the discontinuous, unfixed, jagged skin that once informed my silhouette presents another vision of monumentality. A statement taken from its natural context, labored, and performed into a useful symbol for an intolerable end. So much work imbued into a labor of erasure, of alienation, and death. The pain that had first initiated the severance of my arm, had been replaced by a fracturing of my limb into splintered planks, tools for a new life of hate. I cast into my consciousness and felt the terror of each touch. The transfer of energy from the hand to the exposed flesh of my limb, I could see the final form. A ritual of death repeated from its start until its end.

Once finished, I was meticulously planned and prepared for transport. Displaced completely from any sense of rootedness, of any remembrance of life, or place. Assembled into place I faced a corner. Foreign to me but encircled in iron fencing painted black as day. I saw trees familiar to my own. They attempted to speak but the stillness of the air suspended them in silence. Everything hung awaiting, speculating what might be next. The intuition of natural momentum had suggested that the people had embarked on defining a task, something full of choice, of constructed meaning, and we were there to pay witness. No, I was there to be the spectacle. I had been cast into the role of monument, or sacrificial symbol. So swiftly the play had begun, and the warmth of the sun engulfed my dismembered limb, and I burned. The sparkle of light illuminated before an audience of unwanted patrons.

From the glass windows, I was drawn to their focus. Dark faces, blue in hue consumed the reflection of the fire’s light and aghast they were animated into striking horror. A clamoring began around me. Indistinguishable voices remarked in spectral ways: “let it burn,” “take it down,” “get them out of here.” I was unaware of all this meaning. But the fire raged. Taking more and more of my dismembered self, the audience careened about their tiny theaters. Each relegated to their own pavilions, stacked upon each other, and encased in brick, the dark faces contorted as if they had been too familiar with this play, as though they had not been invited. In fact, they sought the gaze of their eyes elsewhere as the flames licked and spit themselves around me.

8 mins.

I had begun to count the time, as to make sense of what pain drew my dismembered self closer to dust. This was a return to matter but in ash, in charcoal, in compressed, violent death. A crowd began and the audience disappeared from site. Or maybe I had chosen to avoid those heavenly dark faces who I could no longer engage.

12 mins.

I was now surrounded, and the roar of the crowd was unmatched by the rolling screams of the fire creeping further from the ground to the center of monuments’ perpendicular planes. As though to honor the drama, a combustion began, and the center of the monument finished its final pursuit, and I had become consumed.

15 mins.

The internal layers of my limb had surrendered to resisting the heat and merely accepted fate. A splash of water preserved what was left of my limb in a frozen moment of violent middle death. I was caught in time. The play ended before the final scene and yet, I still wondered what would have been the closing words. The dark faces had returned and to much of a surprise looked further from peace then they had been before.

That night as I held on to what life might be left in my strata, I felt a hand too familiar to call strange, or peculiar, or even surprising, grazed my side. It was instant. The sorrow, the hate, the replay of endless lives before, of endless limbs cut to amass these crosses, some left intact to hold their black bodies like fruit from our limbs. I felt the rush of a thousand ancestors, mine and theirs embraced in a spiraling bend towards time. While both at our end, the life that had followed could not be passionately saved by memories and kind reflections, but instead by the persistent image of our roots and limbs outstretched continuously in time.

Archive

“Fiery Cross” Crimson Article, 1953

Kenneth, one of Black Sudents who witnessed burning cross, 1953

Max Bond Jr, one of Black Sudents who witnessed burning cross, 1953

NAACP Letter on KKK presence at Harvard, 1923

Harvard KKK Club, Class Day, 1924

“Lowell Tells Jews Limit at Colleges Might Help Them,” New York Times, 1922

“Secret Court of 1924” Crimson Article, 2002

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