She said to herself,”In a hurry. Gate open. Oh well!” She was really tired. Nevertheless she was determined  to drive the hour to Newark. As she drove down the street, she pretended not to look at the neighbors’ car that was exactly the same as her own. On the highway Suzanne wondered if the other drivers could see her car’  momentary drifting between lanes as she struggled to control her fatigue.  Divine intervention enabled her to find parking. She gathered her belongings, taking a quick inventory of neck and back, and hustled through the maze of streets that would lead to the PATH train. Now, she was really running late for class. A dirty Chinese man with luggage sat beside her on the train . She thought this unusual, and of all mornings, she just  couldn’t stand the possibility of smelling him, so she instinctively moved one seat over. Lots of people coming out of Home Depot. I need to stop there, she thought. She saw a man in a pink man bag and asked herself the question, “Gay?” She then noticed another man with a worn brown leather man bag and commented to herself, “Possibly not gay.” As she walked along 23rd Street she wondered which store to eat lunch at today. Two street crossings and the vertical campus loomed ahead.

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“Sheena Wagstaff, Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum , added: “This extraordinary gift greatly enriches the Museum’s narrative of 20th-century American art. It is a work of immense scale and significance, and represents a uniquely American brand of modernism that condenses the spirit of the Jazz Age, anticipates Regionalism, and holds a fascinating and deeply ambivalent relationship to avant-garde European movements as well as to the Mexican mural movement. In addition to presaging subsequent Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, its full blown presentation of American culture includes remarkable allusions to industrialization, race relations, and social values.”
The comment above applies to a huge mural that filled the four walls of a New York boardroom, painted by American artist Thomas Hart Benton. A mural is a large work of art made to occupy an entire wall or ceiling. Started in 1930, it was completed in 1931. Notably, this was the period of the Great Depression (1928 to 1932), and Prohibition (1920 to 1933). He received no cash for this commissioned piece, but received as many eggs as needed to mix his paint colors. The quote at the beginning indicates that the mural was being donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I looked at the panel called “City Activities With Dancehall”.

This piece challenges me and tells me a story about America in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Sorry if it’s not part of the collection you wanted me to view, but it was near closing so I selected the first piece that caught my attention. The color is vibrant with a dusky blue background. There is red, white, and blues with black and brown woven in. It is like a collection of snapshots. For me this picture could answer the question “It’s Friday, what am I going to today?” The options presented are mostly gay and full of life. The most dour image was that of the stockbroker looking at the ticker tape with two intent, maybe anxious onlookers. It was after all, a time of the Great Depression. Things to do include go to the circus and fly high above all your cares with the trapeze artist, go take in Shakespearian classics of the performing arts, enjoy the bold and brassy big band sound popular at the time, tear up the rug with a sexy young girl in a slinky red dress, or on the more sedate side you could watch a widely popular ‘talkie’ movie at the cinema, or spend time at home with the family. Please don’t be fooled, take a closer look with me.

There is a bit of social commentary going on here on a few different levels. Yes it is a rather large painting, but it has words relating to voting and to smoking hanging above the heads of two ‘snapshots ‘ containing women. In the lower foreground is Benton’s wife and son with the reformist educator, Caroline Pratt. Women had got the vote due to suffragette activity in 1920. The fact ‘snapshot’ in the mid ground shows women at the bar? The sign above says “Your health demands it SMOKE. Women, highly featured in this work, were coming into their own. For many years smoking among women was frowned upon. Times had changed, women were targeted by cigarette companies to smoke so they could keep their weight down. This was a highly successful strategy and smoking among women took off. At the cinema the ‘snapshot’shows only women as the paying patrons. I think I could say that Benton again wanted to show that times had changed to have liberated women. In the dancehall we see the bald headed patron finding support on the dancers’ breast. We know in the late 1920’s you would pay a “John” 10 cents to take a whirl with his girls. She would add your name to her dance card till her card was full.

This was the time of Prohibition. Drinking alcohol was illegal. Yet alcohol is featured in four of the ‘snapshots’. Benton painted himself in the bottom forefront celebrating glass in hand, with the gentleman who had commissioned the mural. I see Benton as wanting to add his opinion that Prohibition was failed social policy.

This assignment has been tough to do, because it concerns race, slavery, and their very real modern day after-effects. Philip published her poem around 2011.Douglass published his work in 1845. Their discourse and narrative pick at the limitations of the english language. Language and the tongue are fundamental to our human essence. yet english comes out stuttered and foreign in the poem. This is symbolic of the imposition of a foreign language on an enslaved people. There is languish and anguish in their experience, and because they can’t fully express this experience after being robbed of home and freedom, and taken to a foreign land to be slaves, there is languish and anguish in the language. Douglass echoes this many times in his narrative. He describes the men on the way to the Great House Farm. They were singing, but it wasn’t the words they sang that expressed the dehumanization of slavery, it was the emotion in the sound. In fact they didn’t know that they were expressing their degradation and deep emotion. These travelling men experienced a linguistic confusion. Their souls languished in anguish, yet they communicated better than any narrative or poem. I can apply something from my own experience to sort of understand this. A lady I know had just buried her husband of many years. All of a sudden, she uttered a moan or wail that I had never heard before or since. The sound struck me in my gut and I felt the love and loss let loose in that sound.
Philip describes a mother’s tongue being used to bring a child into relationship with its mother. At first the child protests, but the tongue blows in relationship/ancestry/security/connection. Douglass recounts how he did not speak much at all to his mother in the few times he saw her alive. Relationship is broken. Language is broken.
Douglass says, “I have no language to express the high excitement and deep anxiety which was felt among us. We had no voice…A single word from the white man was enough…to sunder forever the dearest friends, kindred and strongest ties known to human beings.” Slavery gave the white man the voice and thus the power. Broca et al continued the legacy.
Truth is suppressed. The tongue is suppressed. The tongue can tell its truth, but at great cost. “To all complaints no matter how unjust, the slave must never answer a word” (page 10 quote). We are told of the slave who was chained, handcuffed and carted away from friends and family for truthfully answering questions about his master’s treatment. Douglass quotes the maxim “a still tongue makes a wise head.” This also ties in with the poem where it says, in the intuitive sense, that the tongue is dumb. This is really a contradiction. Even Philip’s use of multiple choice points to the dichotomy of language. Did she describe a tongue or a penis? Is it all of the above or none of the above? Interestingly, both tongues and penises were cut off during slavery.

Suzanne Brown

A Journey Through

New York City,

And other places.

Me-  September 9, 2015

Introduction

These pinned locations represent just some of the great distances I have covered since I left my birthplace, Jamaica. As you are well aware, time came alongside me as I journeyed toward new beginnings. I find this quote from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to be apt. “What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children?” In my early days time was my friend, now he’s an unrelenting taskmaster who punishes my folly. UNABLE TO POST PICTURES.

The  pins from left to right are NJ, where I work per diem and part time, so I have an opportunity to complete my degree. From “Heart Sutra” I like these lines “[t]here is no ignorance, and no end to ignorance.”

Brooklyn,where I lived worked and gave birth.  According to “Heart Sutra”,  “The body is exactly empty”. I am still struggling with this concept.

The last pin is a doozie. Manhattan specifically Baruch college, where I attended college,met my love, got pregnant and dropped out of school…Whitman’s poem  provides a peephole of knowledge.  “The smallest sprout  shows there is really no death”.