No significant body of water separates it from the rest of the country, and yet, entering the South, you feel as though you have left what you know behind, including your sense of self. Comprising fourteen states with such meretricious names as Alabama, Kentucky, and Georgia, which recall spectacularly sad events-whipped Negroes, horse-rustling, and cotillions-the South, he thought, is like a landlocked island. Removing his pen and notebook from his little satchel-the clasp was hard to grab hold of, it was a hot day-he started to write about where he was just then: sitting smack in the “question” or “problem” of the American South, which D.C.
#Black gay snapchat guys how to#
Mama washed and taught him how to iron that shirt-he may be a target but the world would know he lived right, and had a Mama. So many thoughts about the South troubled him, made his heart beat faster under his light-colored shirt sometimes. What did he desire, looking at Bey’s photographs of a lady in her church hat, and a boy who resembled himself? Reading had taught him that he belonged to the world but the world would only see him in a limited way to those prying eyes he was just another black boy, the product of a troubled South. In his masterful 2003 story “ A Rich Man,” Jones’s protagonist’s need to believe in his own invincibility leads him into a world of tricksters and thwarted desire. In Jones’s work, chance encounters, changes in the weather, a little local fame, and sometimes love, can lead to momentous events. He loved looking at Bey’s photographs, and reading Jones, sometimes simultaneously. Looking at a Dawoud Bey photograph reminded him of a Jones story, too. He would describe his life: the tent shows, the singing, his body in an atmosphere of blackness, religion, belief, humanity. Jones had made so much of with words, he knew that he would grow up to make something of his own world with words, too. Sitting in the beautiful old library in Washington, D.C., his home town, a city a black writer named Edward P. He loved history-vapors of the past, in words. He would never get to all that knowledge, all those words, but that thought didn’t overwhelm him, either: not knowing was part of who he was, and liked being, because it meant there was so much left to discover in this life, including all those things he would never know completely, like himself. (He was attracted to French literature but could enjoy it only in translation.) There, in the world of books, he found the world: Europe, Asia, Africa. But instead of feeling overwhelmed by these literary ghosts he was comforted by them, even when he didn’t speak their language. Though he didn’t know how, the books altered his bones. His body was not divisible from the aura of books. Sometimes he would go to the library and dream. This piece was drawn from “ Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply,” which is out in September from University of Texas Press.