“Know it and go on out the yard”

I found myself at the end of last week somewhat depressed. America, U.S.A. had gotten the best of me. Donald Trump had been declared Time magazine’s Man of the Year and, along with a gaggle of his wealthy white friends, he rang the opening bell on Wall Street. I watched. And thought: no matter Trump’s sins or the ugliness that comes in tow with who he is, he has been forgiven and embraced. And that slick smile, as he soaked in the fawning, sickened me.

It felt, although I know it is not universally true, that the country had made, once again, a Faustian bargain that would secure its innocence, and we would have to bear the costs, once again, of white America’s fears and terrors. Dangerous times are here and ahead. I froze. Afraid to step off the edge of the world.

But then I remembered a line from Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved. “Know it, and go on out the yard.” It is a sentence that I have spent much of my scholarly career trying to unpack. And now it comes to me not in the context of some abstract academic exercise, but as a life lesson amid the fever dreams of white folk.

I returned to a passage in my latest book, WE ARE THE LEADERS WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR, where I take up the meaning and importance of that sentence. Here’s some of what I wrote:

***

I have always found Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, illustrative of the view I am commending. Set in Cincinnati during Reconstruction, the story confronts us with characters like Sethe, Baby Suggs, and Paul D, who are shaped by the horrors of slavery and desperate to hold back memories of experiences at the Sweet Home plantation, which inform who they take themselves to be and ominously shadow who they imagine themselves becoming. Denver, a child who was never enslaved, but whose life has been shaped by that experience and the hard choices it exacted from her mother (who murdered her sister, Beloved, to prevent her return to slavery), strains to imagine herself on her own terms as history distorts and consumes. Haunted by history embodied in the ghost Beloved, all the characters at 124 Bluestone Road struggle to reach for better selves.

Morrison offers a relentlessly honest picture of the brutal context in which this desire for a better future is expressed and doubted. No one is left untouched. The psychical and physical toll of slavery cannot be left aside; its effects intrude upon and infect new experiences, even the experience of love.

Moreover, what white people have said and done frames any effort on the part of those tainted by slavery and its afterlife to believe they can be otherwise. But, for Morrison, that foul stench covers all involved.

In a moment of dizzying doubt and clarity, the character Stamp Paid, who works on the Underground Railroad and helped Sethe to freedom, says, “White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.” And, for him, “[t]he more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside.”

But Stamp Paid turns the tables and his insight, among others in the novel, sets the stage for revolutionary possibility. It opens space for a different kind of imagining and a different way of acting in the world.

But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.

The jungle of their making that entangles us all becomes the backdrop for the arduous task of self-creation. Stamp Paid says that the problem is not us, even if it is in us. The problem is them. And that is Revelation….

Another critical moment in the novel involves an exchange between Baby Suggs and Denver. Denver has realized that the ghost is literally consuming her mother – that “neither Beloved nor Sethe seemed to care what the next day might bring.” She has decided to risk herself and to “step off the edge of the world” if Sethe is to be saved. For much of her life, Denver’s self-imagining has been bound up and warped by the cruel realities of slavery and her mother’s act of infanticide. She has lived retrospectively, obsessed with the epic story of her birth: her mother’s escape from slavery and the actions of a poor white woman, her namesake, who desired velvet in Boston and who helped bring life, her life, into the world. She has been comforted by the illusion that caring for the ghost, Beloved – that serving as a caretaker and protector of the wounds of the past – amounted to a meaningful life. Only to see the memories of the past swallow everything whole like a sweet piece of saltwater taffy. Denver decides to wake from her slumber and seek help for her mother and, by extension, herself.

But she hesitates. The dangers of the world and of the people in it seize her imagination and feet. She cannot move. “Out there where there were places in which things so bad had happened that when you went near them it would happen again. Like Sweet Home where time didn’t pass and where, like her mother said, the bad was waiting for her as well.” Denver remembers a conversation between Baby Suggs and Sethe, where her grandmother dismisses anything redemptive about white people and the world they have created. “Don’t box with me,” Baby Suggs tells Sethe. “There’s more of us they drowned than there is all of them ever lived from the start of time. Lay down your sword. This ain’t a battle; it is a rout.” With those words ringing in her head, Denver cannot leave the porch. The nastiness of the world had grabbed hold of her heart. But then she hears the words of Baby Suggs, the grandmother who died pondering colors:

“You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy? You don’t remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother’s feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can’t walk down the steps? My Jesus My”

But you said there was no defense.

“There ain’t.”

Then what do I do?

“Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on.”

Here the past does not consume or occupy the imagination like a jealous maiden. Instead, Baby Suggs offers a realistic description of the world and its evils. Not to elicit resignation or a pessimistic outlook, but to inform Denver’s decision to act in such a world. “Know it, and go on out the yard.” Know that “the wild beasts” continue to rampage. Know of the pain and suffering of Black people – the soldered bones – that undergird much of our way of life. Feel it in the marrow and act anyway.

After hearing Baby Suggs’ words, Denver says to herself, “It came back. A dozen years had passed, and the way came back.” Those memories would then inform her choices as she set out to save her mother. She would begin to live her life prospectively, with a future in mind. But it is important to note that the call to act is not overburdened with an abstract idea of resistance or subsumed into a grand narrative of freedom and liberation. The injunction to act here is closer to ground; it is bound up in the effort to respond to those problems that gum up life as it is lived. It emanates from the power of love that has survived the ugliness of slavery and blossomed in the heart of a child who dared to imagine otherwise.

***

In this moment when madness soaks everything, we must assume the nastiness of life in our fight for a more just America. Resist the illusions of safety and comfort. Cast aside our “elegant despair.” Know that the wild beasts, as Frederick Douglass called them, still roam. Mouths frothing and chomping at the bit. Some with slick smiles. No matter. “Know it [the evil that white folk have done and can do], and go on out the yard.” And do so, with a full understanding that we are not reducible to the madness of America, U.S.A. Ours has been and is more than ruin and rubble. And with that treasured memory and insight, we can step off the edge of the world.