In Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman (1964), protagonists Lula and Clay trade words as inviting traps. Clay is Black and Lula, white. Innuendo mixes with manifesto ; flirtation slips into interrogation. The conversation takes place across a simple New York City subway seat, but Baraka’s train is in motion. The racial substrate beneath their exchange offers no firm ground for Clay to stand for himself or understand Lula. The play’s violent end is punctuated midpoint by Lula’ s cry, “Move!” The train moves on, leaving Clay’s lifeless body in its wake. Here, Baraka plumbs the depths of the American city for the consequences of everything forgotten in facile assumptions about race.
The work of Chicago poet Sterling Plumpp similarly engages movement and displacement to complicate the geographies of race. His train runs from Mississippi to Chicago, but Plumpp poses a more expansive space for the city than that of the usual urban dichotomy of north and south sides. He extends narratives of memory and continued frustration to reinterpret the “understood” histories of African American migration from the American South throughout the twentieth century as well as mythologies of racial progress. His song emerges as a distinct “blues” played across time and American space, in the terms of Charles Olson, “large, and without mercy .” Rooting his blues lyric in a mix of musical influences, Plumpp extends the map of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), drawing that space more deeply into the personal journeys sung through the forms of blues and gospel. His music also engages with the complexity of Chicago’s West Side—the expansive exurb of the great American Hustlertown—where he has taught, worked, and lived.
As historical space, Chicago’s West Side refocuses the racial divisions that continue to mark the city. The city’s South Side is a readily mapped and sung space—known in the words hummed through a blues amp or denigrated in the branded phrase “Chicago politics.” The South Side cradled the origins of a community organizer named Barack Obama as well as the atom bomb. But what about the West Side, site of lots vacant since the city’s 1960s riots and scene of the city’s sustained gun violence? How does one understand the distinct geographies of Chicago’s West Side? Martin Luther King Jr. rented an apartment there to give evidence to the city’s segregated housing. The West Side was the site of the fire hydrant riots of 1966 and the violence that followed King’s assassination in 1968. On the near West Side in 1969, Chicago police gunned down Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, sparking marches and protests. Where does one begin the history of these unresolved antagonisms of race and economic frustration?
To read the full essay, purchase a copy of CR 62.4/63.1/2.
Sterling Plumpp
Poet
for Jo Baldwin
Every day, every day I rise.
The morning, a testifying brilliance.
Open eyes of history I sing
to existence.
Every day, every day, I pass
into eternal silence and I resurrect
as songs.
Echoes from memory’s denials
hold.
Every day, every day I sing
my days and my father’s. I sing
history as memoir, as dance.
I sing the blues.
If you see eye of lost nights
you survive.
You are me, my history bequeathed
in hands and
tortured longings to be. I never forget
I sing.
My purpose jumps
jumps between
borders of silence and hallelujahs,
I sing epics from dust
as rising tides of affirmation.
I bleed inside, welts on my spirit
fermented with punctures.
Every day I rise, “Good morning blues,”
and lower
I utter a sound.
I live nearly eighty long years
and my history extracted
from distance and the long long
journey to possibility.
Every day, every day I
sing the blues.
To read more poetry by Sterling Plumpp, purchase a copy of CR 62.4/63.1/2.
“Sweet Home Chicago,” Billy Branch and Sterling Plumpp (1987).
Jimmie Lee Robinson and Sterling Plumpp on Maxwell Street (undated).
Sterling Plumpp talk at “The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement,” Northwestern University, 2007.