Madness

My eyes opened this morning to thoughts of madness. Maybe the fact that I am teaching W.E.B. DuBois’s Darkwater, a book written in the shadow of the racial pogroms in the early 20^th century, haunted my dreams. Included in the book is the prose poem, “A Litany at Atlanta,” penned after the 1906 Atlanta race riot:

Forgive us, good Lord, we know not what we say!
Bewildered we are and passion-tossed, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people…

Maybe it’s the hateful emails and nasty phone messages left by Trump supporters this past week telling me to “f*ck off” or calling me a “disgusting racist liberal POS.” All because I decried the real dangers of Trump’s rhetoric, especially for the babies in Springfield, Ohio.  The messages dripped with venom and seethed with madness.

From Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. DuBois, from Harriet Jacobs to Toni Morrison, African American writers have tried to lay bare the meaning and implication of American madness: that the disorienting and disquieting gap between who we say we are as Americans and what we do casts a disturbing and dark shadow over this place. We are desperately afraid of being exposed, particularly to ourselves. And that fear can lead, has led, to a kind of delirium that erupts repeatedly in unimaginable violence. 

What I am referring to here is more than a battle between our better and lesser angels.  That is a fight we all experience, a consequence of the debacle in the Garden of Eden.  Original sin stains American madness but does not exhaust it. Ours is the effect of refusing, at every turn and across generations, to accept who we are, to prefer illusion and fantasy over responsibility. The white whale makes us all mad. 

In a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose, the late novelist Toni Morrison spoke of this madness.  Rose asked Morrison, “Do you, Pulitzer Prize winner, successful, honored in the halls of academe, et cetera still have that encounter [with racism].”  Morrison looked disappointed in the question, perhaps more so in Rose, as she pursed her lips and said with a smoke-laden softness, “Yes I do, Charlie. But let me tell you that’s the wrong question.”  “Okay, what’s the right question?” Rose asked.

How do you feel? Not you, Charlie Rose, but don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft?  There is something distorted about the psyche. It’s a huge waste and it’s a corruption and a distortion.  It’s like a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is. It feels crazy. It is crazy and…it has just as much of a deleterious effect on white people and possibly equal than it does on black people. 

Here Morrison channels her reading of Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick, its crazed character, captain Ahab, and his obsession with the white whale.  For her, the whale is “more than blind, indifferent Nature”; it represents, perhaps, the consolidation of whiteness as an ideology, as a way of seeing and being, of valuing certain bodies over others, that swallows everything else whole. “[I]f the white whale is the ideology of race,” she writes in 1988, “what Ahab has lost to it is personal dismemberment and family and society and his own place as a human in the world. The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis….”  

This reality demands what Ralph Ellison labeled “tricky or self-deceptive magic,” what James Baldwin called “the price of the ticket”: whether we are referring to the errand in the wilderness of Puritans escaping European persecution or to those who made their way to Ellis Island for something they thought was freedom. That journey required they leave something behind and narrow their understanding of themselves and of the world.  They had to become white. They spun stories to account for it all, and the costs were unimaginable. “This incredibly limited not to say dimwitted ambition,” Baldwin said, “has choked many a human being to death here” and drove a host of others mad.

I was sitting in Union Station, and something didn’t feel quite right.  Madness was angry. One young woman dressed in a tattered blue jogging suit and wearing slides with colorful mismatched socks, her hair matted and locked randomly on one side of her head, screamed at this white man looking at the train schedule.  “There ain’t no food in this damn trash.”  She commandeered the monitor. Stood right in front of it. Everyone had to see her. She stormed away. Shouting. She looked into another trash bin. “Shit. Ain’t nothing in here either.”

Another woman, weathered with crepe skin hanging under her cropped shirt, argued with herself. “I talk to myself all the time,” she said. “This ain’t schizophrenia.” She rummaged through the trash.  A young black man quietly approached me, asked if I could help him get something to eat.  He stood at a distance, scratching his head.  I gave him money. I told him to share. He said he would and left. About ten minutes later he returned, scratched his head, and said quietly, “Thank you.”  

I thought of Ralph Ellison’s essay, “Harlem is Nowhere,” and his description of the madman hurling imaginary bombs in Harlem.  Or the madmen and women who serve as the chorus in August Wilson’s cycle of plays – the characters out of time who seem to know the truth and bear witness.  What might it mean to make a radical, courageous choice when madness abounds? 

Baldwin was broken-hearted in his last days. He saw what the country had become.  In his final interview with Quincy Troupe in November 1987, he said, “I was right. I was right about what was happening in the country. What was about to happen to all of us really, one way or the other. And the choices people would have to make. And watching people make them and denying them at the same time….  I don’t care who says what. I watched it happen.  And all this, because they want to be white. Because it’s the only way to justify the slaughter.”  

The fever-dreams have spiked again and terror spreads.  No matter.  If we are steadfast, we will survive this storm.  And know that the storms are always coming.  Love secures us amid its destructive winds.  We pray with DuBois as he took in the madness of his time, and we struggle with the madness of our own.

Save us, World-Spirit, from our lesser selves!

Grant us that war and hatred cease,

Reveal our souls in every race and hue!

Help us, O Human God, in this Thy Truce,

To make Humanity divine! 

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