An Honest Witness: An Exclusive Guest post from Robert Jones, Jr., Author of The Prophets and Contributor to Four Hundred Souls

There is always danger in chancing an artistic rendering of Black people’s pain; of mining what has been centuries of torture and degradation to find not just wisdom, but beauty. The risk is that those outside of Black communities might mistake one’s attempt to make poetry out of turmoil (or, as Black Americans might say, “make a dollar out of fifteen cents”) for entertainment rather than the testimony, the call for witnesses rather than spectators, that it is.
That interpretation of Black suffering and trauma as amusement has one purpose and one purpose alone: to justify the suffering and trauma and absolve those who cause it. This is made clear by how viral videos of Black people being murdered by police officers at first shock and outrage, but eventually, titillate and soothe. Titillate and soothe whom? Those who need to be reassured that the state endeavors to keep those deemed “inferior” under control and that a status quo that serves mainly the few remains unchallenged and unchanged.
The sad fact is that it is 2020, but some of us wish that it was 1820 again. It’s incredibly simple to see why. There is a strange longing for a time when acting upon our worst impulses was not only unquestioned but was legal. 2020 hasn’t prevented us from perpetrating similar acts of violence, but the law isn’t as clearly permissive as it once was. Once, mass murder was rewarded with monuments, with images forever stamped on currency. Now, we at least claim to know better. Doing better, however, requires confronting the truth we have exerted so much energy attempting to avoid.

This enduring pathology and its accompanying gaslighting is part of why I was drawn to reexamine this alleged golden age of American understanding. Both my novel, The Prophets, and my entry in Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, “Denmark Vesey,” takes place during this period in history, one in which the preeminent culture narrative is that enslaved Black people were docile and happy, that slavery was a civilizing enterprise, and that slave owners were moral and pious captains of industry who were only bringing to pass a heavenly agenda. A closer examination reveals each and every one of those things to be well-worn deceits meant to invest a certain segment of the population with a false sense of identity, purpose and pride.
To discover those fundament facts, to encounter those irrefutable truths, to be an honest witness for those against whom the jury was stacked, to remove a brick from the castle wall, to make sense of the 21st century, and to use the very art that would have made my ancestors outlaws had they indulged — these are the reasons I write about our collective pain and risk my efforts being subjected to fetishization. The idea that truth can free is too seductive a promise to pass by. Toni Morrison once said that was our obligation: If we get free, we have to free somebody else. And I’m just trying to square my debt.