Whistling Past the Graveyard

The “Wild and Haunting Silence” of the Dead

“The Comet” is littered with the corpses of the dead. The story speculates about a post-apocalyptic New York City destroyed by a comet, with two surviving characters at the center—Jim (Black, a mail courier) and Julia (white, daughter of a white businessman). Jim and Julia find themselves grieving the others they left behind and reckoning with their own identities shaped by the social structures of a present (and past) ruptured by cataclysmic disaster. Saidiya Hartman has recently suggested that “The Comet” is a “satire of failed democracy,” an allegory for what would need to happen for the United States to rid itself of its phantasmagoric obsession with racial domination. ¹⁵ But might we also read “The Comet” as a story containing lessons for how freedom might be practiced? Might the story be interpreted as an effort to both acknowledge the failures of U.S. democracy but also point to possibilities for beginning again by subjunctively reflecting on mourning’s democratic potential?

Jim encounters the newly destroyed world first in nauseating shock, as it becomes increasingly apparent that he walks among the dead as a lone survivor. The initial shock itself emerges from his confronting the fact that the social hierarchy propping up anti-Black racism has died before him, or so he thinks. Initially, he greets this reality with suspicion. The narrator recounts, “Then a new thought seized him: If they found him here alone—with all this money and all these dead men—what would his life be worth?” ¹⁶ The workings of the Jim Crow racial order—now without people to enforce it—remains for Jim as the memory of a past too fresh to simply forget. He had learned how to navigate a world that looked upon him with suspicion and judged him worthless. His very sense of self was configured, and distorted, by the racist world around him. His hypothetical question is thus a question about how he will reckon with those parts of his identity he experiences as wounds, even as the weapons that produced them have been disarmed. Faced with the death of social hierarchy as he knows it, Jim’s first eulogistic act is directed at his former self: the self of the Jim Crow racial order now blown to pieces. His first mourning act is therefore at the metaphorical graveyard of his prior subjectivity.

This death of subjectivity may also be understood as the death of double consciousness—the experience of “second sight” wherein the racially subordinated see themselves through the eyes of others. In Du Bois’s analysis of double consciousness, the task for Blacks is to merge the double selves, which is to say, to dismantle the conditions that produce the need for such a doubling. “The Comet” might be understood as a speculative rendering of what this merging might mean. In effect, and by way of metaphor, “The Comet” stipulates that the merging of one’s selves follows from the death of the white world. Jim stands as a lone survivor, reckoning with the white world that codified his every movement as criminal. In Jim’s incredulousness, he mourns the loss of his criminal status, and we may surmise that in doing so, he reflects on what is at stake in its overturning. Double consciousness persists so long as the conditions of subjugation persist. When those conditions are unraveled, as they do for Jim, the people governed by the violence it reproduces may set about seeing themselves in the light of an affirmative and self-regarding freedom. Accordingly, one is bound to recall one’s past self—the self that is configured by the racial order—and yet the task is to begin again, to challenge a kind of stasis where one’s former subjectivity continues to shape the meaning of their lives, even where the conditions of domination are no longer attained. This all must happen precisely in the space where Jim’s sense of self had been distorted by general dishonor and powerlessness imposed on him in this prior world.

In one of the other early encounters following the fatal event, as Jim pries food from the hands of a corpse on his way down Fifth Avenue, he reflects again on the social hierarchy that has died before his eyes: “Yesterday, they would not have served me.” ¹⁷ What has dissipated with the death of his former subjugated self was a kind of general dishonor that gave him and other Black people a badge of inferiority. He certainly mourns this loss but not as a nostalgic desire to return to this state of affairs. He mourns his psychic woundedness, which is paradoxically the very thing that can entrap him into stasis as well as the thing on which he must reflect in order to begin again. That is, he mourns as a way of supporting his newfound, forward-looking freedom. For in order to conceive of himself as free, and indeed in order to remain so, he reflects on the conditions under which he was not.

There is a profound tragedy to this endeavor, for Jim must literally step over the dead as he reflects on subservience as a bygone condition of the now obliterated social world of Jim Crow. In this latter regard, Jim’s self-reflective act of mourning is not just about himself and the loss of his subjectivity; it is also about the death of the world around him. The graveyard that his world had become incites sorrowful reflection, channeled through initial disbelief and then reflection on the human costs of destruction. From his funereal gaze, he moves about the rubble, taking notice of the ordinariness of stolen life. The women and children crushed while seeking cover. The frozen wonder on a businessman’s dead face. A woman leaning “wearily” with her “head bowed” as if to have resigned just prior to her eminent demise. It seems noteworthy that Du Bois resists narrating Jim as resentful and in a way that might lead him to simply disappear the graveyard around him without remark or with enmity. Why comment at all on the world in which he was so deeply wounded? Why not relegate the dead to the status of unmournability that was assigned to Jim and Black life as a whole in the prior Jim Crow world? It may be because Du Bois is here cautioning against reproducing the very resentment that was the source of his woundedness. To highlight the humanity of the dead, then, is to suggest the frivolity of racial distinctions, not least in the face of an emergency in which all human life is vulnerable to premature death.

Jim’s discovery that Julia has also survived the event reframes his self-reflection as not simply an act of personal remembrance of an identity he must refashion, but also as the basis of a sociality he must now share and cultivate with another. Jim’s remembrance of his former Jim Crow self can be thusly understood as part of the cognitive inventory he draws on in building a social life that guards against repeating the past. As he stares at Julia, soon after encountering her for the first time, he is again struck by the sudden change in his predicament: “Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet.” ¹⁸ It is through a shared dialogue about their sudden change in fortune that their respective memory of the worlds they have left behind becomes educative in a democratic manner. They cannot simply forget about the past world because the existence of it is too fresh in the mind, and because simply forgetting about it risks leaving unchecked the psychic modes of power that were necessary for preserving both sides of the color line. And so, they mourn.

For Julia’s part, she finds herself from the moment in which she first appears in the story confronting the implications of equality. For while, like Jim, she bears witness to the end of the world, she inhabited the world before the apocalyptic event as rich and bound by the rituals of white supremacy—rituals that compelled her to not notice the likes of Jim, treat Black men as sexually deviant, and/or subject them to general dishonor. No less than Jim, Julia reckons with the loss of a former self that must deal with those parts of her identity that she once understood to need, if not crave, a blackened antithesis. “For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger—with a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable.” ¹⁹ But this notion of estrangement remains in the graveyard by way of the recent memory of the lifeworld that died before them. In this ruptured world, however, she must deal with the “leveling” of humanity and social status that the apocalyptic event has caused. But she can only deal with this leveling in relationship to Jim—that is, by virtue of the deathliness they encounter together both in themselves and around them. Jim, by virtue of his “second-sight,” knows something about what equality demands because it had been withheld from him his entire life. Julia, however, has known the privileges of white supremacy bundled into patriarchal subjection. In this regard, their memory is vital to the practice of freedom they now share for, without it, how can they guard against reproducing domination, violence, and general disregard? The fruits of this shared practice come through later as “memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind,” and he rises from “the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste.” Notwithstanding the masculine glory through which Du Bois depicts Jim’s enlightenment, Jim’s epiphany suggests a kind of liberating recognition where the desperation of having no other world to turn to leads them both to find regard in each other.

I find especially suggestive Du Bois’s choice to make Harlem a site of their shared practice of mourning. Harlem is the center of Jim’s world and a key exemplar of interwar Black sociality. Though Du Bois does not quite spell it out here, one might imagine Harlem as a space of polyphonic noisiness in which poets, messengers, soapbox orators, preachers, teachers, hustlers, and wayward women converge in spite of the conditions that see to their destruction. Jim describes being unsettled by “the wild and haunting” silence of the dead in Harlem, as Julia listens. What else can she do, really? The experience of this sociality had not been her own and consequently, she is limited in what she might be able to say about it given the logics of power that produced this world of which she was never a part. Nevertheless, it seems to me that Jim mourns not just the literal loss of life—"the brown, still faces, the knotted hands, the homely garments, and the silence”—but also the dinning social world that provided a defense from the predations of the Jim Crow racial order and that held him in a dignity and worth that was denied to him by the outside world. Jim is deeply disoriented by the loss of this sociality. His despair regarding this loss is so arresting that he contemplates suicide by sinking beneath “the dark and restless waters” but is discouraged from doing so by Julia’s insistence on building “the dream of some vast romance” from the ruins of loss. In their shared practice of mourning, the prospects of an otherwise kinship are tethered to the tragic choice of giving up the sources of their respective identities. For Jim, Black Harlem and his family. For Julia, her whitened sense of security and comfort.

What might be said subjunctively about the now-dead social life of Harlem at the end of the world? Might it be the case that the refusal to be reduced to the status of abjection helps us to see that the valuation of Black life as scrap or totally worthless is not complete and therefore could be the opening to another way of ordering social life? Consider what Du Bois says of Harlem in “Of Beauty and Death,” the essay immediately preceding “The Comet”:

A dark city of fifty thousand rises like magic from the earth. Gone is the white world, the pale lips, the lank hair; gone is the West and North—the East and South is here triumphant. The street is crowd and leisure and laughter. Everywhere black eyes, black and brown, and frizzled hair curled and sleek, and skins that riot with luscious color and deep, burning blood. Humanity is packed dense in high piles of close-knit homes that lie in layers above gray shops of food and clothes and drink, with here and there a moving-picture show. Orators declaim on the corners, lovers lark in the streets, gamblers glide by the saloons, workers lounge wearily home. Children scream and run and frolic, and all is good and human and beautiful and ugly and evil, even as Life is elsewhere. ²⁰

To mourn the Black ghosts of Harlem as Jim does is to mourn the affirmative and otherwise experience of joy, care, beauty, and ugliness of Black social life. The polyphonic, “riot[ous]” character of these sensibilities elucidates the complexities of human life—complexities that Jim contemplates in the face of the world’s literal destruction. The “deep, burning blood” of humanity in Harlem is nothing less than the energy that lights the world, and with its loss, Jim is left in a profound despair. This is because the Black life that has been lost cannot be reduced to the status of nothingness imposed on them by the white world. In other words, the something Jim mourns as they make their way through Harlem is human life shot through with its own virtues and vices, animated by lovers and tricksters alike. While Du Bois’s Harlem is a product of the Jim Crow racial order, it is not reducible to it, and consequently, elements of the affirmative attachments therein might remain as part of the inventory for remaking the world in the wake of destruction. In this way, remembrance for Jim functions in Toni Morrison’s epigraphic words as a practice of creation. Jim and Julia are in the position of choosing wisely from the fragmented remains and memories. The invitation here is to read Harlem subjunctively as a resource for thinking life, desire, kinship, and comradery at the end of the world. The Black ghosts are remembered here as reason enough to begin again, and in a way that acknowledges the ugly history that subjected Black life and that sees their longings for flourishing as the same longings as “Life elsewhere.”

“The Comet’s” ending limns the failure of shared mourning to do the work it ultimately promises, but this is not because of the failures of the two main characters to sufficiently regard one another as equals in the wake of the apocalyptic event. By the hand of the divine, they surmise, rich and poor have been made one and “human distinctions” have been rendered foolish. The project fails, then, because the remnants of white sociality have not been finally eradicated. Du Bois ends the story by revealing that some of Julia’s kin, including her father Fred, were in fact spared by the comet. When her kin finally find the two together, they threaten to lynch Jim because of his proximity to her, thus finally returning Jim to the ugly and not unwarranted suspicions he held at the story’s beginning. Her kin had not experienced the threshold of another way of conceiving social life in the way that she had; they had not been forced to reorient themselves toward one another in an act of desperation as Jim and Julia had. If the practice of mourning had enabled Jim and Julia to stand to each other “eye to eye,” the failure to do so on the part of Julia’s kin—that is, their embrace of white freedom—signals how distorted they are by the logic of race. Her surviving kin had failed to allow that ugly and demeaning part of themselves to die.

As for Jim, his wife is spared by the comet as well, and when she appears at the end of the story, she does so with the corpse of their dead child in her arms. Upon seeing her, Jim “whirled, and with a sob of joy, caught her in his arms.” He is faced with the tragic irony that although he had prepared himself to reorient his sense of kinship in the face of believing he had lost everyone he knew, he found comfort once more in the familial ties that sustained him under the Jim Crow racial order. That is, he was prepared again to lean on those forms of sociality that, prior to what he believed was the end of the world, held him in a tight embrace. Jim and his wife, finally, are left with the task of mourning the loss of their child. Perhaps this will have saddled Jim with additional burdens: What if he and Julia’s families had not been spared? What if he had jumped into the water after believing he had lost everything and had no future? What if his child had lived? What will he say to his wife about this horizon with which he had come to terms? However Jim might respond to these questions, what can be said concretely is that he was left with the bittersweet joy of embrace that confirmed he and his wife remained within the Veil and, still, were more than the subjugation that defined their entire lives even at the end of the world.

“Whistling Softly”

In 2019, Eve Ewing marked the centenary of the Chicago race riot—one of more than one hundred instances officially designated as such in 1919—by writing a collection of poems reflecting on the meaning of the event. The issue of meaning and narrative cannot be taken for granted here: much of what is known about the riots has been filtered through a 1922 report titled The Negro in Chicago: A Study on Race Relations and a Race Riot by a 6-6 commission of Black and white citizens. But as Ewing asks in her introduction to the collection, “How could someone claim to tell the story of Black people in this city? The whole story?” Almost all of the poems in the collection correspond with an excerpt from the report, so as to challenge both the official and authoritative forms of narration through which experience is rendered and, in my view, to mourn the lives flattened by these official narratives. As for the practice of mourning, the poems’ political force is driven by an imperative to limn a past that continues to be felt as oppressive now. More than one hundred years after the report, African Americans continue to face state-sanctioned and extra-legal violence aimed at their regulation. This all raises the question of what a subjunctive reckoning with stolen life could mean with respect to the ongoing struggle for racial justice.

Ewing’s poem “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” is about her speculative encounter with his ghost in Chicago. She encounters him not as a child but as a 75-year-old man who has lived to enjoy the mundanities of life. She writes,

looking over the plums, one by one

lifting each to his eyes and

turning it slowly, a little earth,

checking the smooth skin for pockmarks

and rot, or signs of unkind days or people,

then sliding them gently into the plastic.

This figural Till haunts by way of the symbolism of the act he performs. The plums themselves symbolize the delicateness and innocence of children, and Till handles them slowly and with care. The “innocence” of this strange fruit is robbed by the imperfection of pockmarks, rot, or “signs of unkind days or people.” By depicting Till as performing a regard he was denied by virtue of his gruesome murder, Ewing mourns by projecting the denial of his innocence into the present as something that continues to stay in the mind. There is also the literal image of rot that readers will know by virtue of his mother’s, Mamie Till’s, decision to have an open-casket funeral for Emmett in 1955. This ghostly play on the circumstances of his death places Black mourning on a kind of time continuum. Ewing mourns Till because the conditions of racial disregard have not ceased to exist. His ghost continues to stay in the mind because of the ongoing premature death of Black people in the present. To invoke his ghostliness is to suggest that the “past” in which Black, premature death occurred is not an artifact of “unkind days or people” in a bygone past but is an unfolding matter where racial injustice and the ongoing disposability of Black life are concerned. In this respect, the figural Till may be understood as a refusal to leave the living alone so long as racial domination remains an ongoing social fact.

What might be said of the fact that the ghostly Till “whistles softly” in the store? This essay is titled “Whistling Past the Graveyard”—an idiomatic expression that means to stay cheerful in a dangerous situation or to proceed toward an upcoming hazard while remaining optimistic. By invoking this idiom, I have meant to say something about a tendency in the contemporary moment to speak of progressive horizons without reckoning with the ongoing and even intensifying realities of the graveyard. As more and more people become disposable, it seems vital, in my view, to be honest about what memory requires to right the wrongs of the present and chart the future differently. The more familiar connotation of the figural Till’s whistling is that it invokes the dangers of Black men being perceived as sexually deviant; but in my view, Ewing may also be projecting his whistling as a mundane activity in order to mourn a humanity stolen from him. In a world where Black lives are routinely killed while doing ordinary things—listening to loud music, walking home from the convenience store, sleeping in bed—whistling metaphorizes the humanness that is robbed by the ongoing social fact of racial disregard and disposability. Till’s whistling ghost thus continues to haunt precisely because ordinary Black life remains, in his world and in our own, codified as deviant and threatening.

For the first two-thirds of the poem, Ewing has kept her distance from Till as if to be withholding something from him, or perhaps she is afraid to interrupt him from his quotidian enjoyment. But when she finally musters the courage to approach him, he spins and dances in front of her. Again, I cannot help but read this as yet another mournful encounter where joy is juxtaposed with the sadness of knowing what he was denied in death. This juxtaposition is part of the subjunctive work of mourning that aids us in speaking about the disappeared as if their lives had meaning and depth. The point of the exercise is to refuse the flattening of the dead as both distant lives in the past and unworthy of narration. Ewing’s depiction of the figural Till as dancing and smiling performs the work of producing a series of counter-images to those that are serviceable to regimes of violence and disposability. That the figural Till enjoys the mundanities of life emplots him in a social horizon in which Black people flourish. However, much like Du Bois at the end of “The Comet,” we are returned to a kind of sober recognition that while vital for worldmaking, the subjunctive narrative is nevertheless fictive. Till is a ghost, and there is nothing we can do to change this, except act toward a more democratic horizon.

by the time I caught up with him. I called out his name

and he spun like a dancer, candy bar in hand,

looked at me quizzically for a moment before

remembering my face. he smiled. well

hello young lady

hello, so chilly today

should have worn my warm coat like you

yes so cool for August in Chicago

how are things going for you

oh he sighed and put the candy on the belt

it goes, it goes.

The figural Till, in the end, only knows the unfortunate event of his demise. He is left only with the melancholic sadness of knowing he cannot experience any form of life other than the one in which he died. The same cannot be said for us: Ewing and the reader in general encounter Till’s ghost as something of an invitation to practice mourning (and therefore, freedom) in such a way that we are faced with the constant possibility of becoming unburdened by the very world that held us down. We are faced with this possibility because we live on. Of course, memory alone will prove to be insufficient, and this is because ongoing disposability is not just about our failure to remember. It is also about the systematic and impersonal reproduction of loss under racial capitalism. Therefore, mourning must work to create different forms of life and attachment that are not sustained by loss. Memory in the form of mourning is key because it helps us cut against the narrative distortions and disappearances that are central to reproducing the graveyard.

Conclusion

I have named in this essay a tendency in contemporary and historical practices of racial memory (whistling past the graveyard). I have named a practice that might counter it (mourning as a radical democratic project). I have named a particular object of this radical democratic mourning practice (the Black ghost). I have sought to show how, when conceived as a hermeneutic device, mourning the black ghost can be discerned as vital to the practice of beginning again. Reckoning with the dead is one part of an attempt to reverse the death clock of necropolitics—which consists not just in the material depreciation in value of Black and Indigenous life but also in narrative disappearance. How do we renarrativize those lives meant to vanish as part of the dead and deadening inventory of racial capital? Is this nothing more than a fool’s errand? If the worry among an increasing number in Black critical thought is that the future merely entails the restructuring of racial logics, might mourning be a generative intervention to help break the pattern of disappearance we are compelled to reproduce?