When a friend sent me a New York Times column by Caroline Randall Williams, a poet from Nashville, I responded that it was written in the voice of an angel and a prophet.
I praise many pieces of writing, but not many move me to play the angel/prophet card. “Angel” is earned by the beauty and moral purpose of the prose; a “prophet” is someone who challenges us to reform and repent. Or else.
I am about to share this June 26 column with you in its parts. If you prefer, you can read the entire column first. You can also read the author’s comments on the responses from thousands of readers.
Between the parts of the column, I will express my opinion on “why” the column deserves attention, and “how” the author works her magic. I call this method X-ray reading, looking beneath the surface of a text to discover that the magic is created by a specific set of strategies working together.
Now and then, I feel as if my analysis is unworthy of the work, like I’m performing an autopsy on the Mona Lisa. I get over it, as I will here, in the interest of trying to learn something new about the craft every day and to pass that learning along to other writers. Hey, I’ve done this with the works of Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison.
And I will do it now with Caroline Randall Williams, a 32-year-old Black poet and writer in residence at Vanderbilt University. As you will see, to use the word Black in the context of this column — well, let’s just say it’s complicated. What does it mean to be Black when your genetic makeup turns out to be mostly white? But that’s not the most challenging question.
Let’s begin: Before the byline, the column carries a headline and a blurb
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them?
Since the headline and blurb are written in the first person, most readers would assume they were written by the author, but that is not necessarily the case. While I always submit a headline with my stories, the final decision on the title goes to the editor, with or without my approval. In this case, it turns out that headline and blurb are formed from language that appears in the text.
What matters is that every element of this story attaches itself to a governing metaphor: the body of the author as a monument to the Confederacy. The great writing teacher Donald Murray argued that “focus” is the central act of the writing process. If a column lacks focus, the reader can go astray. A column with a sharp focus like this one — expressed in a literary metaphor written by a poet — works like an Olympic dive off a high board: There will be several parts, twists and turns aplenty, but when the diver hits the water without a splash, the result looks like a singular moment of athletic beauty.
The passive voice carries the reputation of making the writer wordy and evasive. But when you want to place full attention on the victim of action, it can’t be beat: “The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from.” Notice the rhetorical balance in the repetition of the phrase “I come from.”
NASHVILLE — I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
Each spring I analyze Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, looking for the best lead sentences and paragraphs. My annual complaint is that journalists have lost the art of the short lead. It has taken a Nashville poet to remind us of its power. “I have rape-colored skin.” Those five words stand as one of the best leads in memory.
So much is at work here. Begin with the shock of the phrase “rape-colored (reminding us of the power of a little hyphen); the connotations of race in the word “colored;” the way the word “skin” manages to both refer to the author, but also to the history of racial injustice.
There’s another strategy at work here. Writers often save their most important language for the shortest sentence. Short sentences deliver a sense of the gospel truth.
I remind my students that three is the largest number in journalism and literature. The power of three is that it sends a secret message to the reader: These three examples encompass the world; they are all you need to know. As in “My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.”
This effect of three is magnified in the repetitions of the word “monument.” It occurs three times in 13 words. Redundancy is a false echo, but repetition is a drum beat. “Monument” derives from the Latin word for memory, linking the words “monument” and “memorial.” The Lincoln Memorial looks up the mall to the Washington Monument. It’s about what we remember and how we remember it.
And, of course, it derives from the news peg that inspired the column. It refers to iconoclasm designed to desecrate the images and names of those who went to war to preserve slavery and the torture that came with it. But it also invokes the sentimental attachment to the Confederacy and other symbolism of the Old South, folks who want to keep Robert E. Lee sitting up high on his noble steed.
Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
A good column, even one as lyrical and provocative as this one, benefits from a good nut paragraph. And here it is, an efficient survey of the issues of the day.
Will Strunk Jr., the original author of “The Elements of Style” argues that, for emphasis, your best word should come at the end of a sentence, and your best sentence should come at the end of a paragraph. It happens here in the author’s sharp distinction between “airbrushing history” and “adding a new perspective.”
I am looking forward to what happens next. And I wonder when she will return to her personal history. And here it is.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.
This is an astonishing passage in that it travels from the genetic makeup of a single person to a sweep of history that covers centuries and continents. In a conference speech — but not in this column — the author shares an inventory of what she has learned from genetic testing: that she can trace her existence to several European and several African countries. All were immigrants. The white ones came to America voluntarily. The Black ones came in chains.
However interesting in her speech, those details are not necessary here to make her point. Miles Davis, the jazz master, would often talk about the power of learning which notes to leave out.
I found one move of particular interest. “No. Voluntary. Whiteness.” As opposed to “No voluntary whiteness.” Writers emphasize things in different ways. “NO VOLUNTARY WHITENESS” requires screaming at the audience, like a big NO TRESPASSING sign. The quiet signal here is: “Pay. Attention. To this.”
Sometimes a key phrase can get lost in the middle of a paragraph. To prevent that from happening, Williams gives us three periods — each one a stop sign — slowing us down, directing us to pay attention.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
The author returns to her central metaphor, her focus. Her body is a monument, now enhanced by the sacramental language of “body and blood.” It’s a cliché of chastity to describe the human body as a “temple.” Here it has rich connotations: that the myths of the Confederacy are the result of a kind of milk of amnesia, a collective forgetting of what really happened back then. Like a Holocaust witness, the poet makes us stare at her whiteness and relearn how she got that way.
You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
Here the author makes her lineage specific, not just to the Confederacy as a movement, but to a specific and notorious figure: Edmund Pettus. I visited Selma once and walked across the bridge named after him, the one that is now a marker of the civil rights movement from attacks on voting rights marchers. Poets, more than other writers, understand the power of naming, and she shows it here.
And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.
This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.
But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.
Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.
An influential book on academic writing is titled “They Say/I Say.” It’s a good title because it instructs the young writer on the importance of reading and learning what others have to say before you offer your own opinions. This position in the column, more than half-way down, is the best place to raise counter-arguments, in preparation for the author’s climactic conclusions.
To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.
The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.
I admire the repetition of “I am proof” at the end of one sentence in italics and at the beginning of the next.
When I coach writers, I often look at the white spaces in their stories, the places in the text that mark the ends of paragraphs. Some writers do it by instinct, others by intent. They place important words or phrases near that white space, where they stand out, where readers can see them. Over thousands of years, that attention to word order remains one of the great devices of emphasis. Notice how Williams ends these paragraphs: “exploitation of black life,” “re-examine your position,” “legacy of hate,” and “strip them of their laurels.”
That final word “laurels” rings with a special connotation coming from a poet, an echo of a tradition in which the best poet is crowned with a ring of laurels, the origin of the honor “poet laureate.”
One final thought. This column is one of the best manifestations of a writing move I’ve seen before, but have no name for. Lacking something better, I’ll call it the “embodiment trope.” I may have first seen it in the poetry of Walt Whitman, where he could identify in his own body the contradictions of America.
There is a special power of looking inward — deep inside, genes and generations inside — before we can look out and be moved to write like an angel and a prophet.
Roy Peter Clark teaches writing at Poynter. He can be reached via email at roypc@poynter.org or on Twitter at @RoyPeterClark.
