Miss Chloe by A. J. Verdelle

Author:A. J. Verdelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

BLIND TRUST

Morrison’s works both celebrated and assailed the language we live with and labor under; her work helped me to understand that the ways language assaulted me were not a misperception. We had this in common, both of us hyperattentive to the way language shakes and ricochets. How words confine and condemn. How expressions elevate you or grind you down. How, without armor or defense or keen understanding, language can limit without your even knowing it. People don’t see or interrogate language; we accept language the same way we accept history—as presented.

Morrison maintained a wild, relentless, and sweeping fascination with the unexamined facts of the past. Through all four of our American centuries. Morrison chose to mine the times on which the door had closed. Morrison was not a futurist, although she definitely tagged echoes in the present to their origins in the past. Morrison did not hesitate to reimagine any event, any crisis, any original scream.

THE ARGUS COMPANY, IN THE business of classroom wall décor, produced a poster that used no capital letters and listed words and phrases that showed what I refer to as “cast Black.” The poster was called “white lies.” Under the guise of motivation, most Argus posters reminded or admonished: readers are leaders; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you learn; winners don’t whine. I had a fondness for Argus posters as a young student because the messages were broader than my life and also because the messages often played on words. These are the considerations of language I ruminated on while my classmates finished their work.

I know the “white lies” poster was not posted at my own school. I imagine I encountered it at a library. Perhaps the brand-spanking-new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial central branch of the DC Public Library, on Ninth and G Streets NW, in Washington, DC. Ma Howell dragged us to all the major civic and municipal openings in Washington and nearby: the new King Library, the big white Mormon Temple, the Kennedy Center, premieres at the Tivoli Theatre. The King Library was a whole big new world for me. My first rare books room. Floors of stacks much grander and more curated than at the little community corner library I visited weekly while my mother shopped for groceries.

The “white lies” poster presented “white lies” in large type, accompanied by a hefty list of words that positioned Black as problematic: blacklist, blackball, black sheep, black eye, black mark, black magic. There were probably forty or so cast-Black phrases listed.

Sometimes I think I dreamed that poster, as I have not been able to find a version. But it was not a dream. The poster was cut square; the background was a neutral gray. The “white lies” letters were white and placed right of center, above the vertical midpoint. The cast-Black words were different sizes, all around. That poster—not fantasy—changed my life and disabused me of the blind trust we are conditioned to place in our language.

A whole list of black words that fit the cast-Black criteria await us in the dictionary.

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