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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
courtship:
to use an assumed name.
passion:
she takes a step back and can see herself fully in a darkened pane of glass in the kitchen window.
passion:
he thought sentences had only two sides to them, bottom and top: now love multiplies possible positions. (17)
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Passion, "he" implies, blurs identities, positions, and verbal possibilities, while passion makes "her" watch herself. The dance of love continues in the poem's third section, but just two paragraphs after their awkward greeting at the door, "he" assesses her not as a lover, but as a political ally in an unspecified war: "He wants to ask her whose side she is on in the total war-the one without a name-which side protects her-in the exchange of bullets. . . . He wants out of the line of fire, he wants back into the ground taken from him in a chain of mistaken events: / a thief mistakes him for a thief or a neighbor mistakes him for a housebreaker. A cop with the power of a gun mistakes him for a perp out of line. He wants out of the extreme" (19). The courtship, in which gendered roles were analyzed as texts, closes with this question of politics and race: where does she stand in the war? Gender identity and love, in other words, are deeply connected to politics.
That literacy is a foundational element of socially recognized identity is of course a key theme in the African American literary tradition. In Hunt's poetry, illiterate characters are not designated by race, and Hunt makes no explicit reference to that tradition. But in examining the role of illiteracy in contemporary social status, she analyzes problems of urban poverty and marginality in isolation from race. In the poem, "In the Corner of the Eye," Hunt describes an indigent woman, scavenging food from a restaurant and pages from a Penthouse:
She must be someone's missing person, the unread portion . . .
She is a victim of a conspiracy of her teeth that keeps her away from the food she loves, raw carrots, corn, apples, raisins. She is forced to order omelettes and french toast. Sometimes she offers to sweep the floors, rinse the windows of their daily ashes and to defer to the empty plate that poverty and the times demand. . . .
She's wearing a skirt and pants and it's cold and she's between sexes just now. She's wearing shoes that don't fit her feet, like old felt hats at the ends of her legs.
One of the definitions of being a person is that another person is talking to you. The person is particular, unlike that diffuse group of people you don't spend time with who are all pronouns. This person is the source of certain facts but not the facts that she ever speaks out loud. This person you become accustomed to; her buckle, our buckle, her pins, our pins, her ankles, our ankles, her limp, our limp. Your person or her person, it doesn't matter in the dwindling middle ground. (12)
In this and other poems, the lack of speech between the "you" and the disenfranchised street people is part of "local history." This woman may be seen by passersby as a nonperson, already perhaps listed as "someone's missing person" (dead), in part because no one talks to her, in part because she is poor and anonymous, and in part because of her actions and dress. The sheer population density of New York may cause urbanites to abstract others into pronouns. Elsewhere, Hunt writes, "acting as if you don't see what's in front of you is a matter of taking a walk backwards, mentally, from the person who confronts you," and "the population, no matter how anonymous, was slowly dividing into a them and an us" (27-28). However, Hunt renders this woman visible through details such as "her pins" and implies a past in "her limp." Indeed, once she focuses on the woman as a distinct character, the "middle ground" between observer and stranger begins to shrink, and the pronouns that separate them melt into the collective "our." The poem does not completely cross that middle ground, though, for the woman never speaks, nor does the observer speak to her.
