Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Abstract

Ivy G. Wilson, ed. Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xx + 210 pp.Halfway through Ivy G. Wilson's Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet, Christopher Freeburg writes: Whitman was a racist, and he did subscribe to white supremacist ideas and (90). Freeburg's assessment here intuits, I think, contradiction sometimes complicates this necessary and often thrilling collection of essays. For many, remains democratic poet of America, and so confusion easily abounds when Whitman's racist politics are unearthed. This is a pertinent issue cropped up last year at Northwestern University-where Wilson works-when M.A. music student Timothy McNair protested vaunting of as a democrat by refusing to perform a musical setting of his poetry, which led to a failing course grade. Instead of definitively sorting out Whitman's attitudes toward Afro Americans, Noir productively engages his conflicted inheritance, paying homage to an underappreciated and longstanding tradition of black authors embracing rather than rejecting Whitman's poetry. Natasha Trethewey exemplifies this collection's wide-ranging engagement with on race when she writes, From where I stand, it's easy to feel kinds of contradictions evident in Whitman's work, those things he revealed both intentionally and inadvertently (171). Indeed, Whitman's specters of blackness, and our own haunting by his white supremacy, offer another valence to noir of this collection's title, all more striking for its understatement.Whitman Noir is divided into two parts, first comprised of scholarly essays on relation of to blackness and of subsequent black writers to by-aside from Wilson and Freeburg-Ed Folsom, Amina Gautier, Matt Sandler, and Jacob Wilkenfeld. The second part of book reprints previously published personal and political reflections on by Trethewey and June Jordan, as well as publishes for first time short pieces by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (on Garcia Lorca and Whitman) and George Hutchinson (on visiting Whitman's home and grave in Camden). C. L. R. James, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with many of book's own contributors, provide testament to diverse ways black writers have invoked Whitman. This is a reckoning is consistently laudatory and skeptical, if not downright aghast, of Whitman. One can appreciate, for instance, Jordan's deep alienation from her New Critical schooling while being confounded by her lament over the peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman-which, thankfully, seems dated today (157). It is hard not to love, though, her earnest and playful pronouncement: Listen to this white father; he is so weird (158).The first three essays of this collection-by Folsom, Gautier, and Sandler-are most striking. Folsom shows how Whitman's temporary persona as mash'd in Song of Myself is based upon-both historically and in poet's drafts-a black fireman (unmentioned in published poem) for whom white faces become visible: White and beautiful are faces around me, heads are bared of their fire-caps (5). Whitman, we learn, erases blackness in legible ways, inscribing through development of his corpus formative presence as well as increasing absence of slaves and freedmen. In following essay, Gautier mines Whitman's 1842 temperance novel Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate with dogged singularity, emerging with sterling conclusion Evans' storied self-possession is only won through his ownership of Louis-the brother of creole slave Margaret to whom Evans is briefly married. Whitman shows, writes Gautier, that Evans' own self-mastership is ultimately dependent upon his ownership of Louis (47). thereby unravels intemperance is slavery metaphor animated Washingtonian temperance reformers of time, showing how temperance here literally means mastery over another. …