Blues Note for Joseph in the West End
by Stephane Dunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
How come you college muthafuckas think ya’ll run everything? You come to our town year after year and take over. We was born here, gon’ be here, gon die here . . . We may not have your education but we ain’t dirt neither. You mission punks always talking down to us.—Samuel Jackson, School Daze
I glance out of the window of a house on Lowery. It sits across from Parsons street in the West End. My Morehouse College colleague and I are packing up after a day of shooting scenes for a short film project. I’ve put the cast, a new high school graduate, a ten-year old, and my toddler son in the car while we make sure nothing has been left behind and the house is locked up. My maternal antenna is way up hence the anxious glances towards the car. Earlier, as we gathered outside discussing the particulars of a shot, my colleague is squeezed – literally – on the butt by a Grace Jones looking sister who is just passing by. "Chubbs," a toothless elderly man to whom I give some change, grabs me in a bear hug. My son offers a dandelion to a lady passing by speaking in tongues to herself all the way down the street. The newly graduated eighteen year old looks everywhere but at the parade of hard cases, purposefully focusing on texting.
The ten-year old glances at us and shrugs, shaking his head like what’s that about? My son, the soon to be four-year old, looks at everyone passing by and across the street with a studied focus and sometimes runs to me with a question he can’t yet articulate. I glance out the window a last time. A woman in a dingy, torn shirt and short shorts walks toward the car where the children sit with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. Her hands are moving fast, frantically really, and she appears to be talking nonstop. I rush out of the house and towards the car just as she leans towards the window then pulls back and walks away from the car still talking to herself and gesturing.
All day, we’ve been at turns pained and guarded. We’ve shaken our heads and made bad jokes to relieve our tension and discomfort at seeing the ravages of drugs, alcohol, and lack – of resources, opportunity, hope and vision hanging so raw on the people’s faces and in the very set of their shoulders and footsteps. We’ve done it because we don’t want to own that we feel a bit nervous, threatened actually, and we’ve had to fight off the heavy question that we see reflected in each other’s eyes.
Why should a community of people live this way and especially when it is melded into the history and the physical life of a storied HBCU college center? A community encircled by streets bearing the names of great Civil Rights leaders, Lowery, Martin Luther King no less. Students live in the neighborhood. We faculty, at times, walk around on our way to the library or to the gas station, on our way somewhere, or we drive through it on countless days each year. The great scholar, writer, and professor W.E.B DuBois lived several long gone houses away from the one where we’ve been working on our film. Countless other faculty and staff and notable community folk once lived around there too. As we drive off, relieved, we don’t know that sixteen days later, one of our students will be gone, shot to death in a car across the street from where we shook our heads and wandered aloud.
We each had Joe in one of our classes on the way to this, his senior year. He was pleasant, and he was respectful even when you were getting on his case, pushing him to focus in a little bit more because he was bright. He’d have that same pleasant half-smile, and maintain the same sort of low key aura. It was clear he had some home training as we like to say. It was clear too that he had wonderful potential that we didn’t want him to miss realizing. On graduation Sunday, a few weeks before, he walked with his class of 2013 peers through the annual corridor of robed faculty. He nodded to some of the professors in whose classes and offices he’d sat over the years. President Obama spoke. His mother saw this, her only child, make that long prayed for walk across the stage. This Friday is his twenty-fourth birthday. Saturday his mother will bury him.
I’m on campus teaching summer class, talking to more bright faced young men about thesis statements while I cannot get Joe’s face out of my head. I keep thinking of his mother on a too long flight from California coming back here after a graduation trip, to identify her son and take him home for the last time. Many of us are shaking our heads, dismayed, saddened, trying to say what we cannot possibly say in a flurry of emails—glad this terrible thing is being spoken of aloud and acknowledged while we are going about business with a sense of paralysis.
A suspect has been identified. The investigation is ongoing and of course discussions of security, safety for the students, for the campus community, continue. Perhaps it will become a more police patrolled, high security surveillance area. But the campus [the AUC really] no matter how seemingly removed, is within a community, a distressed one. An uneasy us and them mentality permeates. Spike Lee alludes to this dynamic in School Daze when Samuel Jackson’s character, a local, confronts Dap (Laurence Fishburne) and a group of his Mission College peers. That film, of course, was shot here within the boundaries of the campuses and the West End. But in real life the lines are more superficial than they might seem. Some Morehouse students are locals too. Others come here from ravaged communities where their parents and loved ones fear for their lives.
The West End includes folks living there and wandering the streets who have been victims of violence and who are more self-destructive than anything. They too need protection, attention, and care. Dr. King moved briefly into a Chicago ghetto and in those last years engaged in collective struggle against another inhumane oppression – poverty and classicism. He was still striving for a strength to love in action. The young black lives we parent, teach, pass by on the street, try to ignore and fear as well as suspect, are worthy of us engaging actively in love in this struggle not merely for a fragile physical security but for the soul of the whole community and certainly for precious young lives like Joseph's.
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Stephane Dunn, PhD is a writer and Co-Director of the Film, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program at Morehouse College. She is the author of the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas : Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press), which explores the representation of race, gender, and sexuality in the Black Power and feminist influenced explosion of black action films in the early 1970s, including, Sweetback Sweetback’s Baad Assssss Song, Cleopatra Jones, and Foxy Brown. Her writings have appeared in Ms., The Chronicle of Higher Education, TheRoot.com, AJC, CNN.com, and Best African American Essays, among others. Her most recent work includes articles about contemporary black film representation and Tyler Perry films.
Title: Blues Note for Joseph in the West End by Stephane Dunn
Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
7:26 AM
Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
7:26 AM
