What we find all too often in Coates’s narrative universe are bodies without life and a racism without people. But Coates wields metaphor to obscure rather than illuminate the reality of racism. In a wry, tragic innuendo, rape was referred to in Black communities as “nighttime integration.” The use of metaphor is not in itself an obfuscation. Lynching became “strange fruit” in Abel Meerpool’s song, made famous by Billie Holiday. Metaphor has long been used to capture racism’s almost unimaginable brutality. They act as a kind of ontological pivot, mystifying racism even as it is anchored in its physical effects. Yet Coates’s descriptive language and haunting narrative are not mere metaphors. It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights or whatever might be handy to break the black body. It had to be the thrashing of a kitchen maid for the crime of churning the butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be nails driven through a tongue and ears pruned away. “In America,” he writes, “it is traditional to destroy the black body.” Another brooding passage dwells on the inevitability of this violence. In a widely replicated gesture, Coates locates the experience of racism in the body, in a racism that “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” In the slim volume, fewer than two hundred pages, the word “body” or “bodies” appears more than three hundred times. “The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed,” says Coates.
When a cop kills a black man, the police officer is “a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.” Society is equally helpless against the natural order. Coates describes racism as galactic, a physical law of the universe, “a tenacious gravity” and a “cosmic injustice.” “I do not believe that we can stop them … because they must ultimately stop themselves,” Ta-Nehisi Coates says of white racists in the final paragraph of his bestseller Between the World and Me, written as an open letter to his son. “If you step down off that horse, I’ll go to Hell and back with you before Hell can scorch a feather.” “You don’t have no black children and you’re not going to beat no black children,” she told the intruder. He had come to abduct a young black girl.Įlla, carrying her pistol in a lunch pail, intervened. One day, a white man on horseback rode into the fields. As an adult, she carried a pistol with her in the fields, determined to protect herself and the surrounding children. One of Liza’s daughters, Ella Townsend, was born after emancipation, but remained in the bondage of sharecropping in rural Mississippi. In the end, Liza gave birth to twenty-three children, twenty of whom were conceived by rape. They traded her body amongst themselves in exchange for calves and piglets. White men raped her repeatedly throughout her life. She lived on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta during the nineteenth century.
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