Losing the Way, 1930: Oil on burnt-wood by Horace Pippin

Abstract

Losing the Way, 1930Oil on burnt-wood by Horace Pippin Janice N. Harrington (bio) 21 lynchings Black Muslims 40,000 White Women against Lynching Marian Anderson at Carnegie Hall What cripples—the wound or the scar? The can’t or the can’t no more? At his kitchen table, a man once scorched a story into a table leaf with a heated poker, the story of a man trudging with horse and wagon through a bleak and weary snow. The story started with a line. The tip of the poker pushed in and slid forward. Vision—when you’re ready to burn and be burned in return. Huddie Leadbetter arrested for killing a white man As I Lay Dying Civilization and Its Discontents Ellington’s “Dreamy Blues” A man travels before a dark wood. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita. Lost, he makes his own path with broken flesh, with time, with violence (a heated poker). In your own winters, how far did you travel? Find the road? Russian Farms collectivized Lorraine Hansberry born Julius Rosenwald Syphilis studies in Tuskegee Paul Robeson as Othello at the Savoy A portrait of a man with snow and loneliness—too far away to see his face, to see if he is you, to see if he sees you. Loneliness is snow and sleet and ice. In his notebooks, Pippin described his first winter in France. So cold, he said, he didn’t know what to do. On cots in canvas tents, boys dying from influenza, a drowning death, lungs turned into melted snow. Teribell grond of sarro, he wrote, meaning their dead bodies, meaning the snow, meaning lonely never leaves. Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes Gandhi’s Salt March The Fiske Murals What does a man carry when he’s lost? If he sets aside all that he carries, will he travel faster? Cold hands, cold feet, the breath of the animal beside you, the muffled turn of wagon wheels. Just a little further, he thought, a little ways ahead. I get there. Janice N. Harrington Janice N. Harrington, Illinois Poet Laureate, is author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011), Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a number of books for children. She teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press