The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin by Hafizah Augustus Geter

Author:Hafizah Augustus Geter [Geter, Hafizah Augustus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

After a summer in Florence, I backpacked to Germany, France, Poland, the Netherlands, and Spain. A childhood in Catholic churches had reinforced in me my father’s love of frescoes. From Rome to Paris to Versailles to Berlin to Munich to Amsterdam to the Vatican, I rode trains from cathedral to cathedral. I saw the finger of Michelangelo’s white god reach out to touch Adam’s hand. Up until that moment I hadn’t known that art and history could collide to make you feel so giddy. History was a physical space you could stand in. And, too, there was the astonishment of being surrounded by countries that decorated themselves in art and cathedrals.

As structures, cathedrals generally have extremely high ceilings, and extremely hard floors of stone, concrete, or wood. The resulting combination of high room volumes and hard surfaces is why most cathedrals have very long reverberation times, and why when sound happens inside a cathedral it’s like an echo that’s changed its mind. By way of hundreds and thousands of small reflections that enter the ear, reverberation is the persistence of sound after that sound is first produced. Or to put it another way, it’s how long our stories last.

To me, the way cathedrals hold sound has always felt like breath. On the one hand there’s the voice that’s making the music, and on the other, the whole room that holds you is breathing out. A cathedral did to music what I had, growing up, only ever heard come from B. B. King and his guitar. When I was a kid, my father played Live in Cook County Jail and Guess Who on vinyl. Later, he played “The Thrill Is Gone” and “Lucille” on CD.

B. B. King wasn’t a breathy singer, no. But he opened his mouth, and inside him a whole cathedral fell out. Even his guitar, Lucille, had an exhale. He sang like a man who didn’t take breathing lightly, which is not to say breathing weighed him down. In the way B. B. King could make even baby me rock my shoulders, as a kid, I loved the way the architecture of cathedrals turned sound so otherworldly it made the priest’s voice sound like a breathy guitar. As children, cathedrals negotiated a reverence from us that turned our shouts into voluntary whispers. The Blues, like cathedrals, held history in every breath, every exhale, until time itself felt like something that had no meaningful borders.

The Blues is first documented as coming on the scene post-emancipation. Standing in those cathedrals across Europe, I had yet to connect that, while places like St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican were being built, Africans like my mother were being enslaved and forcibly kidnapped to work stolen land that was drenched in genocide. I hadn’t yet understood that, in white America, you could draw a straight line between their white god, destruction, and Black skin. In white cosmology, the three were born together.

While enslavement was turning Africans Black, Europe was getting rich on the other side.

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