In the Face of Black Pain, Elizabeth Alexander Turns to Art
THE TRAYVON GENERATION
By Elizabeth Alexander
Dressed in an indelible red coat, Elizabeth Alexander stood aloft the National Mall and faced a sea of expectant faces. Behind her, a platform seated rows upon rows of eminences, including President Barack Obama. In her inaugural poem Alexander likened love to light and closed with lines that bespoke the optimism of the occasion: “On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,/praise song for walking forward in that light.”
What a moment in American possibility: the ephemeral days of strangers zip-a-dee-doo-dahing past one another. The kumbaya, “yes we can” talk of bipartisan progress. The radical white liberals galling that America’d reached the impossibility of “post-race.” It’s common to note Jan. 20, 2009, as the dawn of the Obama era; but an era maketh not a generation — defined by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim as a cohort of people who feel the impact of a powerful historical event and develop a shared consciousness about it.
Though she doesn’t cite Mannheim in her new book, “The Trayvon Generation” — a profound and lyrical meditation on race, class, justice and their intersections with art — Alexander echoes Mannheim’s logic: “I call the young people who grew up in the past 25 years the Trayvon Generation,” the ones who grew up hearing the words, “Two seconds, I can’t breathe, traffic stop, dashboard cam, 16 times.” She writes: “These stories formed their worldview. … The stories were primers in fear and futility. The stories were the ground soil of their rage. The stories instructed them that anti-Black hatred and violence were never far.”
And just what are Black folk to do in the face of that perennial hate? One answer is to turn toward what Alexander has described as her “religion,” i.e., art. “The Trayvon Generation” engages with prose, music and dance, though her focus is predominantly visual. Most of the 20 or so extraordinary visual artists in the book are people of color. Their works set the tenors for various chapters or foster enlightening close reads, and always inspire further discourse on an aspect of “race work.”
Part I begins with a detail from Lorna Simpson’s “Thin Bands” (2019), a melancholic blue abstract work whose mood Alexander extends in the book’s declarative start. “The problem of the 21st century remains the color line,” she writes, in a resonant echo of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk.” Another of Alexander’s forebears, the great Toni Morrison, was known for refusing to write for the white gaze. Alexander assumes a different approach, disabusing white readers of their innocence. She explores the “didactic violence” of monuments; degraded, divisive language; and the other insidious harms of white supremacy. In the chapter “Shock of Delayed Comprehension,” she recalls attending one of many meetings in the “Corporation Room” at Yale, where she was a professor and department chair for 15 years. One day she noticed something she never had before: In the painting at the head of the room of the school’s namesake, Elihu Yale, there was a brown-skinned servant, his neck cuffed, at the white man’s feet.
Alexander, a scholar of Black history, draws from her extensive knowledge to explain the roots of censorship in school textbooks, as well as to stress the importance of memorializing Black ancestors and caretaking Black culture: “The scholars, teachers, artists, meaning-makers, family storytellers, work against forgetting.”
Never forget — on Feb. 26, 2012, a hella overzealous volunteer neighborhood watch captain named George Zimmerman stalked and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Never forget — on July 13, 2013, a jury acquitted Zimmerman, an egregious verdict that fomented the Black Lives Matter movement into being.
Alexander doesn’t dwell on the details of Trayvon’s death or the founding of B.L.M., letting their rough sketches call to the reader’s mind a slew of other associated images: Trayvon’s hoodie, a fraught skirmish line in Ferguson, Mo., a multitude lying on a bridge in Portland, Ore.
The title chapter, which constitutes Part II, first appeared as an essay in The New Yorker in the summer of 2020 and went on to win a National Magazine Award. Here it is preceded by the photographer Dawoud Bey’s “Martina and Rhonda” (1993), six large-format Polaroids that together depict two young Black women side by side, arms folded. The portrait suggests the precarity of Black youth, as does Alexander’s remarkable opening paragraph: “This one was shot in his grandmother’s yard. This one was carrying a bag of Skittles. This one was playing with a toy gun in front of a gazebo. Black girl in bright bikini. Black boy holding cellphone. This one danced like a marionette as he was shot down in a Chicago intersection. The words, the names: Trayvon, Laquan, bikini, gazebo, loosies, Skittles. … His dead body lay in the street in the August heat for four hours.” The anaphoric litany, the artful repetition, the sonorousness all remind us we are in the hands of a gifted poet.
The dynamic essay also turns Alexander’s prodigious powers of explication on three music videos — Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes” and “Never Catch Me,” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” — using each to cast light on particular struggles and salves of Trayvon’s generation.
In her 2015 memoir, “The Light of the World,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Alexander drew a beautiful portrait of grief — for her husband, who died in 2012 — and of motherhood. In the new book, her sons are 22 and 23, and one of its most intimate and moving passages expresses her fear for their safety, as members of the generation she has christened. “Let’s be clear about what motherhood is,” she writes. “A being comes onto this earth and you are charged with keeping it alive. It dies if you do not tend it. It is as simple as that.”
That she is now the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (the largest art-funding organization in the country); that she was the third Black woman ever to receive tenure in arts and sciences at Yale and chaired its African American studies department; that she has held distinguished professorships at Columbia and Smith; that as special counsel to President Lyndon Johnson, her father brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders to the White House: Alexander’s awareness that no accomplishment or prestige or lineage nor even the greatest parental love can secure her sons’ or any other Black lives from the perils of white supremacy works as the vital pulse of the last half of the book.
Part III opens with a black-and-white portrait by the photographer Chandra McCormick, titled “Daddy’O, the Oldest Inmate in Angola State Penitentiary” (2004). Alexander’s trenchant analysis segues from the 75-year-old man’s “knitted brow, his hand on his heart, the experiences on his face,” into the subject of mass incarceration. “Angola houses the largest population of lifers on planet Earth,” she writes, and, in a flagrant preservation of its plantation history, still forces Black men to pick cotton while white guards on horseback work as overseers. She also shares the damn near unfathomable saga of the Angola Three: Black men held in solitary confinement for more than four decades, the longest anyone has been held in solitary in the history of American prisons.
The next chapter deftly examines white attempts to negate Black humanity by referencing the little-known story of a white researcher who in 1905 asked W.E.B. Du Bois, sans irony, if Black people shed tears. The book’s hopeful final chapter, “There Are Black People in the Future,” deconstructs the idea of Black freedom, insists on Black futurity and offers parting wisdom to members of the Trayvon Generation. “Perhaps the greatest triumph is to live to tell and bear witness to the struggles of others,” she writes.
In another essay for The New Yorker, in 2017, Alexander looked back on the experience of presenting her inaugural poem. She was allowed one guest on the platform and she chose her father, who wore a button he’d saved from the 1963 March on Washington, “to which he and my mother took me, in a baby stroller, because sometimes marching is what you are supposed to do.”
Can you imagine?
When Dr. King gazed upon the same National Mall, transformed into a sea of radical hope, in the crowd was a baby being nurtured to witness and one day testify on behalf of the struggle for Black equality and self-determination.
As much as this magnificent book is anything else, it’s a commitment to that generous and crucial life’s work.
Mitchell S. Jackson is the author, most recently, of “Survival Math.”
THE TRAYVON GENERATION
By Elizabeth Alexander
Illustrated. 146 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $22.
