WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 26, 2023

On August 1, Graywolf will publish Roger Reeves’ Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. This is a gift of a book written by a poet with searing intelligence, whose escape into language—OutKast and Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, and Richard Wright—center his thinking about America’s troubled history.  Reeves celebrate the playfulness of Black speech while also examining its silences. There is the silencing that comes through erasure, but also the sacred silence of the ”hush harbor” where enslaved people came together to worship in secret. When Reeves agrees to give a reading at the McLeod Plantation in South Carolina, he finds himself drawn to a ginhouse where enslaved children, too young to work the fields, were charged with pulling hot bricks out of a kiln. He finds tiny fingerprints in the bricks that alert him to the fact that these children had to pull out bricks with their bare hands, certainly having burned them.  The tenderness with which Reeves tries to resist putting his own fingertips in the brick’s prints is worth the whole book—a metaphor for empathy and the limitations and terror we feel going back in history.  Dark Days builds with essays that are astonishing in their revelations as well as their forms. In an epistolary essay “Letters to Michael Brown,” Reeves gives us a series of correspondence from 2015 to 2022.  In the last such letter, he writes:

Michael, I thought of you when my daughter confessed her fear of being shot. Did you have that fear? Had you sensed your death as a boy, worried that you wouldn’t make it past twenty. As a boy, I had no expectation of living past twenty….

“Instructions for the Underground” is a list of imperatives that gains its power though simple variation that compound into complexities.  Here are just a few examples:

            IN THE UNDERGROUND, EAT WELL….

            LOVE WHAT YOU COULDN’T LOVE OUT THERE….

            BE AS ANCIENT AS YOU WANT TO BE…

Reeves’ appreciation for the necessity of the hush/the underground makes his readers rethink all our chatter, our speaking up. Silence is no longer prized in our age of outrage. He writes that “silence gets mischaracterized as passive, as noninvolvement, as capitulating to subjugation.” And later, “I wonder if our loquaciousness isn’t sinking us further into exploitation, a further fashioning of our bodies and pain as commodity…” In Dark Days Reeves contemplates the silence, the introspection necessary for eloquent responses to our increasingly frightening world. 

Congratulations, Roger!

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