1.

      The Violence and the Music, April–December 1899

      The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are—until the poem—nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

      —Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (36)

      Improvisation must be understood, then, as a matter of sight and a matter of time, the time of a look ahead whether that looking is the shape of a progressivist line or rounded, turned. The time, shape, and space of improvisation is constructed by and figured as a set of determinations in and as light, by and through the illuminative event. And there is no event, just as there is no action, without music.

      —Fred Moten, In the Break (64)

      a false start

      The story with which I begin you’ll have heard before, familiar in form even if its content appears as new. It’s an old-fashioned story of modernity, an abortive tale about coming of age, a parable of racial meaning as a product of world-belting mass migrations mapped onto the scale of a single body, on a walk down a city street. Well-worn by countless retellings, the story is autobiographical, if admittedly less the way something actually happened than a way to make what happened move in the eyes of those who might gather to hear it. It’s the story of a false start.

      James Weldon Johnson spun a version in his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, and Ralph Ellison recorded a cover in Invisible Man; Carlos Bulosan never stops telling it in America Is in the Heart, repeating it with such frequency and dizzying speed that, by the end, you can’t tell if it’s finished or just beginning. But the book I open now is by W. E. B. Du Bois, his polygeneric 1940 volume with the teetering, ambiguous title, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept. My text is found in a chapter recounting Du Bois’s early academic career, his rivalry with Booker T. Washington, and his departure from Atlanta University for the editorship of The Crisis, as processes exemplifying the world-historical forces of the chapter’s title, “Science and Empire.” The plot of the chapter is captured, in miniature, in an anecdote of a walk down Atlanta’s Mitchell Street in April 1899—a journey much shorter than anticipated, a detour whose duration would extend beyond his long and eventful life:

      At the very time when my studies were most successful, there cut across this plan which I had as a scientist, a red ray which could not be ignored. I remember when it first, as it were, startled me to my feet: a poor Negro in central Georgia, Sam Hose, had killed his landlord’s wife. I wrote out a careful and reasoned statement concerning the evident facts and started down to the Atlanta Constitution office, carrying in my pocket a letter of introduction to Joel Chandler Harris. I did not get there. On the way news met me: Sam Hose had been lynched, and they said that his knuckles were on exhibition at a grocery store farther down on Mitchell Street, along which I was walking. I turned back to the University. I did not meet Joel Chandler Harris nor the editor of the Constitution.

      Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort that I was doing, as I had confidently assumed would be easily forthcoming. I regarded it as axiomatic that the world wanted to learn the truth and if the truth was sought with even approximate accuracy and painstaking devotion, the world would gladly support the effort. This was, of course, but a young man’s idealism, not by any means false, but also never universally true. (Writings 602–3)

      Du Bois’s memory is not entirely reliable in this case. A consultation of “the evident facts,” heroically compiled by Ida B. Wells, reveals that Hose did not kill his landlord’s wife; in fact, while he admitted killing his employer, Alfred Cranford, in self-defense during a dispute over payment, he denied widespread rumors that he’d assaulted Cranford’s wife (Wells 14).1 But in this brief passage, autobiography takes the form of a fable or parable—not the science of history but the higher art of propaganda, in Du Bois’s terms.2 As the rest of Dusk makes clear, this anecdote both exaggerates the naïveté of his ambitions and telescopes his long transformation, that eventual disruption of his work, to provide his readers with the narrative kernel of an example—not quite I once was blind, but now I see, but rather: I thought I could see, but I was blind. Or, more expansively: in the arrogance of my youth, thrilled by the dawn of a modern age, I thought enlightenment would suffice to dispel racism, and that if I served the light, others would be glad to see—but they preferred to see differently.

      This red ray was cast much farther than Mitchell Street. Wells, for one, made certain of it, catching and projecting it through the global circuits of modern mass media, compiling an account from Atlanta’s white newspapers and commissioning a report from a white Chicago detective for her pamphlet Lynch Law in Georgia, to spread to the world the news of the migrant laborer known as Sam Hose or Samuel Wilkes.