By Randall Horton
We begin with and/or make a case that bodies, or, more specifically, the black body, is intrinsically tied to the social condition which creates or renders erased bodies visible.
At the conclusion of a baby’s conceptualized journey through its mother’s womb, the external world, with those once illegible voices and inaudible mumblings, are finally brought to fruition; however, in this particular incidence, there are no cigars or floating helium balloons with IT’S A BOY! because the 4lb. 11oz. body in question, is still in question—struggling not to be dead on arrival, mainly because it arrived prematurely. Nature attempts to fulfill its obligatory promise of a robust life while nurture is being put to task, as in—there is nothing to facilitate this baby’s “nurturing” except an incubator on the top floor of South Highland Infirmary in Birmingham, Alabama. Quite an arduous voyage for the newbie to humankind, all of seven months, shepherded from the hospital basement where colored babies were delivered in 1961. The little boy became the only dark spot in a row of wrinkly premature newborns, standing out as society’s marked construct—as the other among, well, everyone else. An odd occurrence if the photo of this event had been sequestered and freeze-framed. Layered within the polaroid negative of the photo taken in 1961 would exist a textbook case of post-colonial theory, presenting the narrative of blackness as the marked construct among privileged invisibility—underscoring what it means to be other on plastic film. We see the image of an unhealed racial wound refusing to recede into the annals of historical record. The wound is deepened by all the white babies permitted to have their mothers pick them up, hold and cradle them by the butt, stare into their curious eyes, do the goochey-goo or whatever it is that makes babies giggle and slobber on their mother’s cheeks. The exception is the little spot/scab on the top floor. His mother is prohibited from walking up from the basement to participate in this bonding ritual because of Jim Crow Segregation Ordinances that prevented color-constructed-people from mixing in public or private, so she cannot dote on her little spot or whisper Mommy loves you.
The two did briefly meet upon completion of the birthing ritual, the placenta arriving first, making him a placenta previa baby, which created a paradoxical dilemma—as in little spot almost hung by an umbilical cord before the journey began. Never mind that in Alabama’s horrid memory there are a litany of bodies strung up from structures that, before their necks snapped, wished they had died at birth. After the placenta previa came a baby with the mother oblivious of the delivering doctor’s attempt to breathe life into her baby’s mouth for fifteen minutes. For fifteen minutes a white man who believed and endorsed segregation placed his mouth over the baby’s mouth, as if color was the last thing in the world to matter, and gave the baby the life in his body so that it might live. Fifteen minutes is an eternity of temporal space in an ever evolving world—it is a wide ass gaping caesura. You can write a short speech to your enemies declaring independence from the haters, damn near change a flat tire on the Sprain Brook Parkway in the Bronx, ride the #4 Cottage Grove, also known as Garbage Grove, from Hyde Park to Bronzeville in time for Gwendolyn Brooks Day. You can water a bed of multihued roses, cook maple sausage, eggs and wheat toast, cuss out and make up with your best friend from high school in three different languages and evidently, you can breathe life into a little black baby’s mouth until it catches the spirit of civilization. As the baby caught the spirit, he was taken, or like so many black bodies before him, stolen away, if only for a minute, from his mother through an ordinance that prevented them from bonding for eleven days. The act hypocritical, contradictory, and plain ignant as Graveyard Pimp from across the railroad tracks in Titusville (pronounced Titties-Ville by the indigenous) would say before turning up a fifth of Red Dagger from the state liquor store after some revelation that didn’t make any sense. If Graveyard had heard this history about a white man on the Southside breathing into a premature Black baby for fifteen minutes to jumpstart life, then segregating him by the laws of ignorance from his mother for an eleven days, Graveyard would’ve reflected before turning the bottle bottom up, then offered, Mane, how you gone sit there and tell me some bullshit like that. The way you talkin is just plain ignant before slugging the 21 percent wine down his throat again.
In 1961 the normalcy of a photograph capturing this event would not be considered problematic, on the contrary, it would be deemed normal. How did the baby come to be the only dark spot in Whiteville? The explanation goes as such: on October 15th at the Catholic Church Bingo Game, a cousin, Sherry, all of one year old, being held by the soon to be mother, wriggling and kicking—trying to break free from authority like all babies do—inadvertently kicked the seven month pregnant mother in the stomach, who thought nothing of it at the time. Later at soon-to-be-grandmother Rosie Lee Davis’ bootleg house in Smithfield, the lady who lived behind Rosie Lee facing the alley, tobacco chewing Mrs. Two-Bit, also known as Stewart Press because didn’t an ounce of gossip escape her ears, walked all of twenty yards from her viridian shotgun house to Rosie Lee’s clapboard, entered through the back screen door, walked past the spades game in the corner, past the kitchen where they were selling pig ear sandwiches drenched in tobacco sauce and drinking fifty cent shots of red whiskey, past the room where couples paid 3 bucks for fifteen minutes of infidelity, right to Rosie Lee’s big room and made the declaration you betta watch that gal, it’s a full moon out tonight. Evidently the moon cutup and did a bowlegged jig, howled, and at midnight the pregnant mother found herself being rushed to South Highland, a month ahead of schedule. Although it was commonly known through stated law that South Highland Infirmary offered surgical procedures and long-term care with separate sections for white and non-white patients and for children with disabilities, there would be no time to set up an incubator in the Black ward, and so the journey upstairs, minus the mother, began.
Because no mother came to comb the baby’s hair the nurses molded the baby in their image, little pompadour and all. None had ever nurtured a premature black baby, so the only compass became memory through an alternative lens with colonial rhetoric dictating belief and ideology. The nurses actions unwittingly reinforced the idea of color construction, and with each stroke of the brush, the baby built resentment that festered between good and evil, a resentment soon to be manifested. With every indoctrination into whiteness, the nurses gave license to the baby’s soon to be Blackness. An eleven day separation of mother and baby is criminal, but the collective memory of African-American reveals a much harsher tale—the Black body as disposable commodity or good. At 4lbs and 11 ounces the disposable black body had to get to 5lbs before the mother could pick him up and let him know that he had not been erased from memory. For eleven days straight a painstaking telephone call came from 127th 8th Avenue North in the Smithfield area in Birmingham—a stone’s throw from Dynamite Hill where houses once exploded into wooden splinters upon detonation because they were being occupied by black people—inquiring about the baby’s weight. Each day the 24-year-old clutched the rotary phone, placing her index finger in the corresponding numerical holes, then dialed clockwise and waited for a nurse to pick up. She then strained above vulgar whiskey talking men and women to hear the magical word: come. Each not yet brought tears of sorrow; yet, the fact the little spot lived was reason for hope. She had moved back home to have the baby—had long ago left the lineage of bootlegging women to attend college and get a bachelor’s degree in education from Alabama A&M. All of that, and back home until the husband can find a job closer to Birmingham. Husband and wife had a baby, but they didn’t, but she calls and calls until 5lbs ends the legal separation and the hospital says: come. During those eleven days Westside Story would premiere at New York City's Rivoli Theatre, Thurgood Marshall would be sworn in as a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Chubby Checker would perform his 1960s hit "Do The Twist" on the Ed Sullivan Show. The mother could have cared less about these events, or Checker’s year-old hit—the only twist she was interested in came on the eleventh day.
When my mother and father brought me to 127th 8th Avenue North as a newborn, having survived an eleven day stretch of touch and go, the tininess of my infant body frightened people, especially children—I was too small to be human. Bip—the man I would come to know for lighting a firecracker, but throwing his unlit cigar on the ground and, consequently, putting the firecracker in his mouth, thought the baby was dead, as in me, the little spot that once resided in Whiteville, dead. Bip didn’t die from the firecracker but thought I died at birth and told my mother so when she brought me through the back screen door. I didn’t die nor did anyone think about how distance and temporal space within an incubator would come to define my existence in the world. Catbird, a rail thin man who never appeared without a fedora titled back on his forehead, who would be a frequent fixture in Rosie Lee Davis’ bootleg house throughout my formative years, took one look at the little spot, and said, Eunice Pearl, that baby aint big as a muskeeeta. From that day forward, my nickname would be Skeeter.
I didn’t know it then, during the sepia age of the 60s, but I was being conditioned early to confront and overcome situations based on skin color, and to accept that, contrary to popular belief, color would define my life-long existence. I could not enter that world and say I didn’t see color when my birth had been defined and nurtured by colorism. This conditioning was preparing me for the days, weeks, months of isolation, tucked away in a cell, segregated and deemed unfit for society. The poet Lucille Clifton would eventually write the poem, “Come Celebrate With Me,” with her own woman struggles in mind, but I would come to identify with the last three lines, which prophetically sing come celebrate/with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed. Placed in a controlled environment for days perhaps hinted at a future to be realized in adult prison 37 years later, a parallelism between child and adult that would later define who I would become. The second time of a forced encasing I was in lockdown 23 hours a day at Baltimore Receiving Unit, a place where they send prisoners to be assigned and classified. The second isolation is compounded by the future of the unknown, where will I go, where will I be classified, will I have to fight, to throw hands to save my life, will someone try to rape me, will I get shanked, and then the walls shrink until they are two inches from my face, the effect long lasting after the release. While everyone was happy to see that the baby lived, no one thought to ask about the ramifications—mainly, what that eleven-day separation would mean going forward in the life of the little baby boy.
Randall Horton is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Haven. His past honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir (2015), published by Augury Books/Brooklyn Art Press. His previous work include poetry collections: The Definition of Place (2006), The Lingua France of Ninth Street (2009), both with Main Street Rag and Pitch Dark Anarchy (Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2013). Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, he now resides in East Harlem.