"Kara Walker Draws the Blues."
I'm not a huge fan of Kara Walker,
but she had these series of drawings that were
just amazing a few years ago.
And one of them were of Black entertainers
and somewhere in the '20s and they
were doing all kinds of interesting things.
There are big lips and fellatio, that old black and white, lynch
robes and a music stand, guitar and feets
do your stuff, radiating gestures of chalk and dread,
one humpback whale's song of dismemberment.
Resilience as trace and consequences.
Pedestals crumbling, hellhounds around the bend.
Yellow gals rolling across the whorehouse floor,
a gallery of dead artist bobbleheads mute.
Cunnilingus as afterthought, virgin's blood,
sought and sold, soil dark and dying,
cotton's soft center plucked from its cutting bowl.
Blood's drumbeat, deviators, Jim Crow howling,
make away, make away, make away, Dixieland.
Some joy.
Banjo, guitar, colored voice, swamp creatures, divination,
crack shuffle, mocking the white man's brand of smoking rope
empty.
I love that one.