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Killing John Cabot and publishing black: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot
African American Review, Winter, 2002 by James D. Sullivan
On the back cover, the author's photo shows her in a natural hairstyle. Her gaze is direct, the composition more that of a snapshot than a portrait. The photographic style and the plain cotton shirt she wears indicate together that the hairstyle is not a fashion statement but a political statement. The photo indicates that the artifact emerges from a black nationalist cultural context, and the back cover blurb specifies the historical and political context for reading the poem: "It arises from the disturbances in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968."
The front cover is black: The names of the poet and the press as well as the price are small white spaces in a black field. That is, the field of discourse here, rather than the typical white (i.e., white page interrupted by black ink; the space of public discourse intruded upon by a black voice) is here black. The intrusion upon the black space is, here, white. (5) A roughly torn white circle, a wound in the blackness, holds the jumbled red capitals of the title RIOT in contrast with the stately typography of the poet's name. Open the cover, and the book further emphasizes the establishment of a black context by, paradoxically, quoting a white writer (Henry Miller, writing in the 1940s) in the epigraph. Here, too, the design is white on black. Typographically, the design once again emphasizes that these are little white words in a big black space:
It would be a terrible thing for Chicago if this black fountain of life should suddenly erupt. My friend assures me there's no danger of that. I don't feel so sure about it.
Maybe he's right. Maybe the Negro will always be our friend, no matter what we do to him. (3)
The quotation emphasizes three points: white misunderstanding of black attitudes, white fear of black power, and a dawning awareness in this one white writer that blacks may have interests and desires contrary to those of the white majority.
Turn the page again, and one sees, overleaf from the Miller quotation and opposite the title-page, a reproduction of a painting, Allah Shango, by Chicago artist Jeff Donaldson: two young men behind a sheet of glass, stenciled "GLASS," "SHEET," and, most pointedly though smaller, "Made in USA." Each touches the glass with one hand; one holds a long African statuette by its base. He holds it low, like a club next to the glass--not threatening, just ready. Miller could be describing these young men. One cannot say what they are thinking, though they clearly feel self-assured, but one knows that the club-like artifact of African culture can smash the invisible barrier. Any moment now, a pane may shatter. The Miller quotation and the Donaldson painting represent the liminal moment before all changes violently. A terrible beauty is about to be born. The book is therefore designed so as to complicate and unsettle any white presence (Miller feels uneasy; the perspective in Donaldson's painting is from the vulnerable side of the glass) while it suggests a context of black cultural authority. Even the dedication--"For Dudley Randall,/a giant in our time" (7)--makes perfect sense within the small world of black publishing, where he was enormously influential, but not within the larger, white-controlled world of commercial publishing. The material qualities of the artifact, therefore, are designed to establish an African American context for both interpreting and judging the poem. A reading that presumes a white universal perspective must appear irrelevant or absurd.
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